Game design tools and vocabulary: Explained in week 3 readings

This week we were given readings from a Doug Church article about game tools as well as a chapter to read in Challenges for Game Designers by Brenda Braithwaite and Ian Schreiber. This chapter was about advising and showing how all games could be broken down into tiny atoms, hence the title of the chapter being Atoms. They focused on design tools used in the making of games and they both had different methods of selecting these tools. So let’s begin and start the dissecting.

Doug Church really emphasises in his article the lack of technical and precise language used within the game industry, specifically in the design of objects and assets. After explaining the way in which most people analyse work by saying "oh that was fun" or "I don’t know, it wasn't that fun" he expresses his desire for the need of a structured framework for a design vocabulary around the basis of designing games. The fact that many people analyse assets of game design like this doesn’t really give the designer much information about what or how they have done something wrong, sure they get a very basic idea that its wrong, but not a precise enough amount of detail that they can set it straight, hence the need for a specific system.

The framework he has come up with was FADT (Formal Abstract Design Tools.) Here is the broken down phrase explained: 'Formal,' criticise and define items and be able to explain this to somebody else; 'abstract,' to explain an array of new and fresh ideas around the whole subject; 'design,' as well, we're designers after all and 'tools,' as this is the actual framework we will be creating. The first tools he explained in depth with so far was; intention and perceivable consequence. But to break it done into a blog post I have simplified these:

Intention: Giving the player a feeling of intention and progress into the game by letting them act on their own plans as they understand with your game world.

Perceivable consequence: Giving the player the ability to assess the situation of an event easily and so that they can learn from their mistakes and not feel cheated by the game in any way.

After reading this article I really began to appreciate the vocabulary and tools Church suggested. The feeling of being able to see what went wrong when you attempted a move on an enemy and it was unsuccessful really does get the player more involved into the game especially when you can see what went wrong and apply that observation to the rest of the game world. However the chapter from Challenges for Game Designers broke games down into even smaller and easier digestible atoms of information, so let’s have a look at that shall we?

Instead of breaking the games down into tools of what designers use to create a game and to make the player feel absorbed, here they (Brenda Braithwaite and Ian Schreiber) break games in general into simple tools that the designers can use to create the finished product. Here they give all these terms very simple names; however they still define complicated issues. These were the definitions mentioned inside the chapter:

Game state: A collection of all the relevant game data that may change during play. The chapter gives poker for example; the game state would be each players hand and chips, the size of the pot, whose turn is it to bet, who has folded on the current hand, which cards are in the deck and in what order. Basically it is every bit of information the game needs to operate.

Game view: Is the area of the game the player can see and interact with. In a game of draughts, the game view would be the board, the pieces and that’s all. None of the information is hidden from the player, however in battleships; the game view is vastly different.

Game space: This is the whole game area in general.

Avatar: This is the object that represents the player digitally

Game bits: This is the category for all the games pieces such as dice, cards, and counters. All the physical objects that make the game

Game mechanics: To explain this simply, this is the game rules and how the player interacts with the rules to complete the game. E.g. how when you land on a snake on snakes and ladders, you MUST go down to the bottom of the snake. There are no exceptions.

Game dynamics: This explains the pattern of play that occurs after implementing the game mechanics. They explain in this book that a game such as Risk and Civilization are highly involved with territorial acquisition.

Goals: Many games have one ultimate goal, and that is to win. However some games have separate goals that are used to submerge and absorb players into the game world by getting them to slay beasts and receive a reward afterwards.

Theme: This is a general definition for: what’s the game about? Battleships is about you, a captain of a fleet of ships, hunting down enemy ships pretty much blind. Snakes and ladders is about reaching space 100 and avoiding the snakes.

Both the article by Doug Church and the Challenges for Game Designers book describes this vocabulary used to create a more structured game design phrase. However I personally feel that although Doug Church was attempting to make sense and increase the amount of precise accurate vocabulary, his attempt actually made the words more ambiguous to me. However that’s my own opinion. He did however point out tools in Mario 64 on Nintendo 64 that got me really thinking in terms of how games are designed more thoroughly. All in all I actually preferred Braithwaite and Schreiber’s vocabulary of game design. Simple and straight to the point, theres no need to complicate things.