Design/Philosophy: Plant a Garden, Build a Church

A little change of pace this week, Dracula's Castle will return next week, with what I hope to be a huge installment that will hopefully finish it off. This week I'm going to start to talk a little about my own design philosophy and start talking about how I might start to specialize within my field.

This week I attended the weekly IMGD Speaker Series at WPI, this installment being a video conference with Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn from Tale of Tales Games. They do great stuff like The Graveyard and The Path, which you can get on their site and heartily recommend. In the talk they did a re-evaluation of their ground-breaking Realtime Art Manifesto which I must admit is the first I'd ever heard of it. Aside from a few quibbles on their opinions of modern art, the entire talk was enlightening and one thing in particular stood out to me.

4. Embed the user in the environment.

This is something I'd long been thinking about, but was unable to put so elegantly into words until I heard them say it. All too often in games it feels like you are outside of your character, going through the actions of the game and the environments are just shifting scenery that just adds a perfunctory back drop to the actions in game. In most first person shooters you could easily switch out any given military base, or warehouse complex for any other and the player wouldn't notice or even have incentive to care. This has got to stop if video-games are going to become a respectable medium.

The one advantage video-games have over other forms of media is that the viewer, or rather user, is allowed to interact with the environment constructed by the author. In films or prose the audience can only see as much of the environment as the author can afford to share with the audience before the balance becomes between detail and plot is lost and the narrative grinds to a halt. In games players control the pace of the narrative, and can look at the little details for as long as they wish, just like in the real world you can examine a particular area for as long as it holds your interest, and depending on how interesting the area you can spend quite a long time in one place if it offers something interesting to do or see. Video-game levels should be like this, interesting places with interesting things to do and see in each one, inviting the player to spend as long as they like there.

However as things stand today levels are not the environment in which the game takes place, merely a container for the game. If you eat some canned fruit, the can itself is not the important part of the experience, it's the fruit inside, the can is merely the container for the experience. Likewise if a game has you shooting some goons in a warehouse, the warehouse is not the experience, it's the container. Why are the goons in the warehouse? For you to shoot them of course!

A good level should be like a kitchen, a place that stores and gives you the means to interact with all the canned experiences, it should be much bigger than the events that take place with in it. The level should be the place where all the experiences originate from, given context and afforded the tools to interact with the experience of gameplay.

Or to use the metaphor of the people who have obviously spent much more time thinking about this than I have, "Game-spaces should be like Cathedrals, not movies. The game experience should surround them and not merely be presented to them." We as game designers have got to realize that players do a lot more in video-games than just overcome the challenge presented to them by the designer. They explore the world and poke at it's edges, and if they find that the facade is only cardboard thick they will loose interest in the environment they are put in.

If at the end of the level, they are just going to be transported somewhere else, by a generic military helicopter, or worse jump cut to another location via cut-scene, why should they care about what happens in one particular place. Why save the hostages in this mission, if they will cease to exist after we defeat the criminal leader? Why is beating the bad guys in that particular warehouse such an accomplishment? If that same fight could have happened anywhere else besides the place it occurred, then the level was not worth making.

Game levels should flow one into the next, with no interruption. The first tutorial should take place within a days ride of the final boss. The townsfolk you saved from drowning should throw you a surprise party at your in game safe-house, after making a climactic escape from the police by jumping off the roof of an office building, you should be able to follow the workers from the office home and ask to come in.

I've got a lot more to say about how game environments should interact with the player, but I think that will come out in future design documents and posts. Suffice it to say I'm thinking of focusing in on level design, and am now committed to studying architecture.