Goals for Games

What is your game trying to do?

1. Recreating Reality

In other words, creating the most realistic simulation of an activity (whether playing golf, playing guitar, or shooting zombies) possible given technological limitations.

2. Telling a Story

Does your game have involving, engaging characters that explore the world, and grow, learn and change as they progress?

3. Challenge the Player

Does it feature puzzles, does it appeal to logic rather than sentiment? Is there a maze, a crossword, a sequence of coloured blocks that must be reassembled?

Some games successfully blend two of the above aims together, to create a realistic simulation that also contains a great story, or a story based game that contains plenty of challenging puzzles. Perhaps a rare few even combine all three. But most will weigh heavily towards one. Most puzzles in RPG’s are limp mimics of their true puzzler brethren. Most realistic simulators contains stories that are at best hackneyed riffs on old cliches.

To me, a great game is one that gives weight to all of those aims, and produces an immersible world, a complex story, and a challenge - or a game that takes one aim and takes it head and shoulders above all the competition. The worst kind of game is one that delivers a mediocre experience of all three - where the graphics are worn and unimaginative, the story dull, and the challenge completely lacking.

How to get a job in Video Games

The most common question I get asked on this blog is: how do I break into the video game industry?

There are, in my (somewhat limited) experience three possible ways to go about this.

The Traditional Route

This involves a degree. Preferably a relevant technical degree; computer programming, computer generated art, animation. Essentially, the more practical skills you can demonstrate, the more useful you are. Having a font of good ideas or half-assed doodles will get you nowhere unless you have the technical expertise to back them.

It should be noted that I have a degree in English & Creative Writing. Although I believe writing is just as much of a technical skill as the above, it is often not seen that way. Mainstream video games often undervalue the writer, preferring to spend the budget on whizz-bang graphics instead. If you want to assure yourself of a job in the industry, stick with computer-based courses.

There are plenty of universities that now offer courses specifically tailored to video games. Do your research and pick wisely.

You’ll enter at the bottom of the food chain, but like most industries you can get promoted, shifted sideways and retrained. The more experience you have, the better chance you’ll have of landing a job with some influence.

Pros: Secure, high chance of success.

Cons: Takes a long time, little creative control.

The Bootstrap Method

Mainstream gaming is alive and well, and will be for quite some time. However, alongside it is the thriving indie game market. With downloadable games eliminating many of the start up costs associated with distribution of media, the indie designer has enormous potential.
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Today I Die

I’d like to point you all towards an excellent browser game, called Today I Die. It’s appealed to both hardcore gamers and those who are casually indifferent to most games. I really like the approach it’s taken, and feel that there’s a lot that could be done with the concept of words in a video game.

In completely seperate news, I was invited to speak on the BoRT’cast for March and April. It was my first podcast, and was very interesting - thanks to both Corvus and Keith for some great conversation.

Taking Games Seriously, Making Games Seriously

This month’s Round Table challenges you to design a game that deals with a social issue that personally troubles you. The recent months have seen controversy sweep through the video game industry. Whether people are objecting to the use of imagery widely considered to evoke racial stereotypes, or to the gameplay based on violent sexual crimes, or to the fact that anyone would complain about either topic–the discussion has been fierce. This month, contributors to the Round Table are invited to design a game that focuses on racism, rape, domestic violence, cruelty to animals, genocide, or any other serious, and potentially hot-button, topic.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this BORT entry. It was very difficult for me to get away from relying on the ’shock’ factor of excessive violence/misery to drive a point home, but my general feeling is that this isn’t the best way to approach grown-up story-telling.

The game idea I came up with is fairly standard in execution. It is set in generic modern city, and you control the stories of two characters as they progress from childhood to adulthood. The game opens with them playing together, and you take over the first character when he returns home for the night.
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Controversy Part II - You Tarzan, Me Jane

Last week, I decided to tackle the way video games deal with ‘controversial’ subject matter. There are many places to start with a topic this wide, but I’m going to begin with one area that never fails to cause immediate backlash. Namely gender.

Different women like different things

There are no ‘boys’ games and ‘girls’ games, except in as far as society dictates. When it comes to gaming the main factors that influence skill are the age at which you start to play, and the number of hours you put in.
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Controversy Part I - Will the Real Frankenstein’s Monster Please Stand Up?

Gender. Race. Religion. Politics.

Video Games have, in many ways, dodged a lot of bullets. Any debate about them tended to fall in two camps: 1. Are they art? and 2. Do they cause violence?

These debates have largely faded, thanks to the mainstream success of various consoles and titles. With that mainstream success, however, comes a new type of critical debate. A more complex type.

Gender. Race. Religion. Politics.

A good narrative deals with fundamental questions about humanity, about the society humans create, about the ideas that humans create to explain themselves and their world. A good narrative explores where humans have come from, who they are now, and wonders at where they are going. Not obviously, not directly. But enter any advanced English Literature class and you will find debates about the meaning of any narrative that goes far beyond what an author may have originally intended.
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