Rules.of.Play.Game.Design.Fundamentals [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Game Design Exercises

In the pages that follow, we offer a number of practical game design exercises, for students and designers, for use in classrooms and professional workshops, for solo or collaborative efforts, for short-term experiments or long-term theses. There are innumerable possibilities for what a game design exercise might be. Rather than provide an extensive list, we offer a series of examples that you can alter to fit the needs of the context in which you are working. The exercises presented here by no means represent a comprehensive catalog of assignments; they are meant to act as jumping off points for the development of your own game design exercises.

Each exercise listed has a particular design focus, corresponding to a chapter or set of chapters in this book. The design focus serves two crucial roles. First, it guides students as they work, giving them a concrete way to direct their thinking and design method. Second, a design focus gives instructors a way to evaluate a project during and after the design process, offering a conceptual framework for analyzing a game's successes and failures. In each exercise, the design focus helps identify the design problem as well as potential solutions.

The exercises are divided into three categories: game creation, game modification, and game analysis. Note that many of them make use of concepts and terms that are explained in the associated chapters. Of course, it goes without saying that all of these exercises should make use of an iterative design process. Learning how to design iteratively is the single most important skill that a game design student can learn.

The phenomenon of games encompasses more than just computer games, and teaching game design does not have to happen through the creation of games on computers. In our many years of teaching game design, most of our classes have not required students to actually program games. Programming is not the equivalent of game design and as soon as students are tasked with creating games on a computer, programming can quickly become their primary activity.

In our classes, students are asked to focus on core game design issues, issues which are not intrinsic to digital technology. In many cases, the students work off of the computer to create board games, card games, physical games, and social games. Even when the course emphasizes the creation of digital games, game design issues take center stage. This is not to say that it is an either-or situation. For example, a paper-based game design could be later implemented within a digital medium.

There are many ways to incorporate computer technology into game design exercises, such as using a commercial game level editor to design game levels, creating an email-based game in which a human moderator processes the outcome of game actions, or by programming games from scratch. Game design can even be used to teach a conceptual approach to programming, one rooted in iteration, object relationships, actions and outcomes. It goes without saying that the curriculum you create should be based on your own skills and interests-just remember to carefully manage the balance between game design fundamentals and media production skills.

Creation

Game creation exercises involve making a game from scratch. Any of the game creation exercises included here might be designed to take place within a single class, over a weekend, during two or three weeks, or over the course of a single semester.

In each exercise the design focus manifests as a set of parameters given to the students in order to limit and focus their design thinking. For example, a group of students creating a game with a design focus on social interaction might be given parameters specifying the number of players (2, 5, or 20) and the kind of social relationships the game creates (such as camaraderie, animosity, or flirtation). Parameters can also address the medium or format of the game being designed. These parameters can be created before class, written on index cards and randomly distributed to teams of students (teams of 2-4 often work best, depending on the context and the assignment). Alternatively, students might select their own parameters. Typically two or three parameters are sufficient to focus student thinking without suffocating them with too many restrictions.

Information Manipulation

Design Focus: Games as Systems of Information (chapter 17) Description: Students are given design parameters based on the use of public and private information. Examples include: all game information is public, some game information is private, one player in the game has special private knowledge, the game contains information that is hidden from all players at the start of the game, etc. In order to keep the game focused on formal issues, rather than the invention of game media, the materials are limited to traditional game materials such as a deck of cards or a board and game pieces.

The Exquisite Corpse Game Game

Design Focus: Rules on Three Levels (chapter 12) Description: This formal design exercise works best with groups of three. The first person in each group secretly writes down two game rules for a game that could be played in the classroom, each rule on a separate line of a sheet of paper. The top rule is covered up and the second is left visible.The second person looks at the second rule and writes two more, leaving the last rule visible for the third person to write one more rule and a winning condition. The rules are then revealed and the group has to fashion a game out of the total set of rules. The goal of the exercise is to see how rules interact with each other within the system of a game, and to explore the limits of ambiguity and specificity in rules. With more people in each group, students might write only a single rule, to keep the rule-set from becoming too complex.

Sensations of Play

Design Focus: Games as the Play of Experience (chapter 23) Description: In this play-based exercise, students are given experiential parameters to limit and focus their game design, including the senses (design a game that emphasizes the experience of touch, taste, or smell), emotions (cause the players to experience anger, fear, or laughter), or one of the typologies of play experience from chapter 23 (design a game around Caillois'concepts of ilinx, alea, agôn, or mimicry). The medium of the game is wide open and could serve as a parameter as well.

Engendering the Metagame

Design Focus: Games as Social Play (chapter 28) Description: Students create a game that is specifically designed to foster emergent metagames. For example, the parameters for this exercise might be that the game must last for no more than 60 seconds and is designed to be played in rapid succession. Students would report on and analyze the resulting metagame as part of the overall exercise.

Site-Specific Resistance

Design Focus: Games as Cultural Resistance (chapter 32) Description: Players create a game designed for a particular physical context, such as a landmark, subway car, Starbucks café, etc. The game should both reflect and transform the cultural ideology of the chosen context through the play of the game. Students might be limited to games that they can actually implement or they might complete games that are too large in scope to be playtested, such as a game that involves the population of an entire city. If students cannot play their entire game, they should still isolate some aspect of the game play to prototype and test.

Open Source Game Systems

Design Focus: Games as Open Culture (chapter 31) Description: Each student or group creates a set of game materials (or game system) that could be used as the basis for a variety of games. They then design the rules of a single game using the game system. Each group is then given the game system of another group and asked to design a game using the new system. Groups then take the game systems they originally created, along with the two sets of game rules, and create a third game that is a synthesis of the two. The focus of this exercise is on designing an open source set of game materials that lend themselves to a diversity of game designs.

In all game creation problems, it is particularly important to emphasize the iterative design process. It is often difficult for students to shift from brainstorming game ideas to imple menting their concepts within an actual game prototype. This is one reason why it is important to choose design parameters wisely. The parameters will provide students with limitations that help them focus, allowing them to arrive at a coherent design idea. Make sure that the parameters you do assign embody the design focus of the exercise as a whole. This will help students understand the objective of the assignment and assess their designs as they are creating them.

One common game creation scenario is that a student is placed in a situation where he or she is creating a game from scratch with few or no parameters to guide the work. This happens most often in semester-long or year-long thesis or studio projects. Students tend to be grossly over-ambitious and under-organized in these situations; sometimes a design focus and the inclusion of specific design parameters can help them maintain a more directed design process. Also, unless students are working in a team or want to spend most of their time programming or creating audio and visual assets, they should be designing a non-digital game, or an extremely simplified digital one.

Modification

Modification exercises represent another category of game design problems. Instead of coming up with a game using only a set of parameters, the starting point of a modification exercise is an existing game that is altered through an act of design. The same points made earlier about the importance of a design focus, careful selection of design parameters, and the use of iterative design apply equally here.

Change the Rules

Design Focus: Defining Rules, and Rules on Three Levels (chapters 11, 12) Description: I

n this straightforward exercise, players take a game and change someof the rules to see how the changes affect game play. The rule changes should begiven a conceptual focus. For example, students might be given simplistic, somewhat unsatisfying games like Tic-Tac-Toe or the card game War with the idea thatthe rule changes must result in more meaningful play. This exercise can also beused as an opportunity to understand the importance of crafting clear operationalrules: each group must write the complete rules for its game variant and watchother groups try to play their games with only the written instructions as a guide.

Destabilization

Design Focus: Games as Cybernetic Systems (chapter 18)

Description: The starting point for this exercise is a well-balanced game. Usingprinciples of feedback loops, students must change the rules to introduce a positive or negative feedback loop that either keeps the game state overly static ormakes it swing wildly out of control. Each group then hands its "broken" game to another group, who must fix the design problem but keep the first group's rule alteration as part of the game.

A Shift in Scale

Design Focus: Games as the Play of Experience (chapter 23)

Description: In this game modification exercise, students take an existing game and alter it by changing the game materials. The scale or some other physical attribute of the game should be radically transformed. Because the rules of the game remain the same, the difference between the two versions will lie in the experiential play of each.

Transporting the Core Mechanic

Design Focus: Games as the Play of Pleasure (chapter 24)

Description: Students begin by analyzing an existing game and identifying its core mechanic. They then extract the concept of the core mechanic and use it to modify a second existing game. A variant on this exercise is to turn it into a game creation problem in which students design a game around the core mechanic they initially identified. In either case, the point of the exercise is to understand the central role of a core mechanic and to see whether or not core mechanics can be successfully transplanted from one game context to another.

New Depictions

Design Focus: Games as the Play of Simulation (chapter 27)

Description: In this exercise, players take a game that depicts one form of conflict or activity and modify the game so that it depicts another form. The design parameters might be a shuffling of the territory / economy / knowledge distinction (make Chess a conflict over knowledge or Trivial Pursuit a territorial conflict). Another possibility is to modify the games to depict subject matter not normally found in games, such as social or psychological conflict. The games should use techniques of procedural representation to depict their subject matter.

The Rhetoric of the Lottery

chapters 30, 32) Description: Each student or group is given an existing lottery scratch-off game ticket as a starting point.Through an analysis of the ideological rhetorics implicit in the game, students redesign the graphical and formal elements of the ticket in order to subvert the rhetoric. As part of the design exercise,students might also reconceive the architectural or social context in which the game is played. A third variant asks the students to select a cultural rhetoric that is at odds with a lottery's existing rhetoric (such as selecting Progress in opposition to Fate). The students then redesign the game's system of information to create friction between the two competing ideologies.

Analysis

In addition to creating and modifying games, it is incredibly important that game design students play games, lots and lots of them. Students should play every possible kind of game, digital and non-digital, contemporary and historical, masterpiece and stinker. Game design students play these games in order to cultivate a historical awareness and critical sensibility about the kinds of games that have already been designed, to learn how games function to create experiences, and to discover what does and doesn't work about particular design choices.

Every time students play a game, they should analyze it. The analysis might take the form of an informal discussion, or it might be a formal written essay. Written analyses can range from short, three-page papers to major research theses. Written analyses are particularly useful in sharpening a student's critical thinking, but they must be assigned with a clear conceptual focus or they run the risk of becoming a largely descriptive "movie review" of a student's favorite game. Each schema in this book provides a highly specific framework to direct a student analysis.

Cybernetic Analysis

Design Focus: Games as Cybernetic Systems (chapter 18)

Description: The emphasis of this analysis is on identifying cybernetic feedback loops within the formal structure of a game. Students must select a game and find at least one feedback loop that contributes to the overall system of the game. Students also should identify the sensor, comparator, and actuator in the loop and whether it is a positive or negative feedback loop. Further questions for analysis include: How does the feedback loop affect the overall game play experience? What would happen if it were taken out of the game? How could the rules be changed to exaggerate the effects of the feedback loop? What is a different feedback loop that might further improve the game?

Narrative Analysis

Design Focus: Games as Narrative Play (chapter 26)

Description: Students choose a game and study it as a system of narrative representation. They must identify elements of embedded and emergent narrative, as well as discuss the different forms of narrative descriptors used by the game. For example, what role do setting, plot, and character play? What about the visual design, the title of the game, the spatial construction of the game world?

Social Interaction Analysis

Design Focus: Games as Social Play (chapter 28)

Description: Using concepts from the schema on social play, students analyze a game.They must identify at least two of the following social play phenomena in their paper and describe how these elements contribute to meaningful play: player roles,player community, core social mechanics, metagaming, forbidden play.

Cultural Environment Analysis

Design Focus: Games as Cultural Environment (chapter 33)

Description: For this exercise, students select a game that blurs the boundaries of the magic circle to operate as a cultural environment. The analysis should address the following kinds of questions: What social, architectural, narrative, or other aspects of the game overlap with the world outside the magic circle? How does the blurring of the boundary support meaningful play? In what ways does the formal structure of the game keep the game contained? What cultural rhetorics are reflected or transformed by the play of the game?