I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about video games — far more than just from concept to completion. Whether making them, playing them, or taking part in community discussions, I’ve realized there are some things I want to share.
Game design is both organic and emotional, and structural and rational. The more I’ve dealt with the process and the results, the more I’ve realized that there are hidden core values in game design, values tightly bound to the six human needs. The more a game aligns with these values/needs, the better a game it is, subjectively speaking.
Level 1: Needle in a Haystack
As you probably know, an enormous number of video games ship across many platforms, and the number grows every day — and every day it gets harder to find a game you’ll love. On Steam, for example, games are sorted by “Featured”, “Popular”, “New Releases” and “Recently Updated”. Dig deeper into the search options and you’ll find genres, user tags, ratings, user ratings, and unique features and categories. That’s all well and good, but it’s absolutely not as good as just telling me which game I’ll love. At best, it’s a careful guess.
It struck me that the things that make me consider a game “good” don’t necessarily make someone else consider it “good” — this is entirely subjective. A popular game doesn’t mean I’ll love it, and a new game isn’t necessarily better than an old one. We’re bombarded with an overload of options and choices and can’t keep up. Steam’s personalized recommendations do point us in the right direction for finding games that might suit us, but I think “space”, “rpg” and “roguelike” are all still too broad — they don’t really tell me about the overall game design and how it reflects my values.
Level 2: Airtight
Before this I’d never really stepped back to examine what I like in a video game, what I look for, why I start, and why I keep playing. So I made a list of the things in games that feel really great — and not very surprisingly, these points are all deeply reflected in the games I love.
Mike’s List — The Things That Feel Really Great in Video Games
In my opinion, the more a game satisfies the following points (a list that is still incomplete), the more fun it is, subjectively speaking.
- Simple, fun core gameplay.
- If the gameplay is complex, then teach me to think, grow and survive within the game’s constraints, rules and domain.
- Hybrid/entirely new experiences — combining styles, genres and ideas that don’t usually appear together to create something completely new.
- If there’s a story, it should do enough to convey the game’s appeal and the fun of playing it; if there isn’t, make it skippable.
- Random elements: each playthrough shouldn’t feel exactly the same.
- Reasonable punishment and failure: nobody wants to be hand-held; the difficulty curve should keep players engaged and constantly building their skills or learning, while offering replayability.
- Short-term: in-game progression — gear, levels and economy, for example.
- Long-term: gradual progression outside the game: unlocks/stats/skill.
- Longevity: ways to keep the people who love your game playing — new game+, hard mode, level editor, late-game rare drops, PVP.
- Community: good games come with their communities, getting players involved in decisions, listening to what players like and dislike, engaging them on a personal level. That includes secrets, easter eggs, puzzles and so on. Multiplayer doubles a game’s “good” score — anything worth experiencing is worth experiencing with other players. 1.5x: multiplayer versus / 2x: multiplayer co-op.
This is why games like Dungeon of the Endless, Risk of Rain, Binding of Isaac and Dungeon Defenders are so great — at least in my opinion.
Even though what I’ve written is far from refined, I think it’s a powerful skeleton for what makes a game “good”, and hopefully it represents some of what other people think too. I was going to stop here, but something I stumbled across brought some deep and clear thinking to it.
Level 3: Search High and Low
While working, I like to watch TED talks. I find them interesting and inspiring, and they don’t distract me. While I was creating the cover art for JumpJet Rex, a Tony Robbins talk came on. In the video he talks about what he considers the “six human needs”, and I immediately started sorting them and mapping them onto the core game design values I’d built earlier. Those needs are:
- Certainty/Comfort
- Uncertainty/Variety
- Significance/Uniqueness
- Connection and Love
- Growth
- Contribution
I ended up making a table to sum it up, matching them together.
Certainty:
(Comfort)
Game rules are established early and hold throughout.
Controls feel responsive.
The UI provides relevant information.
The program is reliable/stable.
Uncertainty:
(Variety)
Random elements.
Entirely new experiences and ideas.
Variation in game difficulty.
Interleaved content.
Level/character design.
Significance:
(Uniqueness)
Actions in the game can affect the game world.
Success or failure depends on the player.
Player choices have an impact on the game.
Connection and Love:
Single-player: meaningful dialogue and story, characters that matter to the player, ideas/themes that connect with the player.
Multiplayer: shared experiences with other players.
Cooperating to reach a common goal.
Competition that showcases your individual skill.
Growth:
Game rewards should give players a sense of progress, whether through in-game system rewards or by making players feel their own skill has improved (or both).
Contribution:
Level editor.
MODs.
Having a community.
More out-of-game knowledge than the other values, which is also why I believe PC gaming is on the rise.
Near the end of that talk, he argues that people have different orientations and preferences among these categories, and that this becomes the “driver” behind your decisions. Applied to game design, it becomes an elegant and simple method — not just for designing better games, but also for more easily categorizing and discovering the games that suit you.
When designing a game, you may not be able to hit all of these points, but the more you align with the values of your end users, the more approachable the game becomes. This is why I believe Minecraft took the world by storm: it hits all the points, and does so really well, meaning there’s at least something for every preference. It’s also why poorly designed games can still succeed — as long as you do at least one of these things well.
If we could summarize games along these dimensions, giving each dimension a rating and characteristics, and then use overviews created by users to figure out where their preferences lie, we’d get much closer to recommending which games a player will like. Not only that — it could also be used to spot gaps in the game market, to influence game design, and to develop better games for players.
本文翻译自http://blog.gskinner.com/archives/2015/07/game-design-and-life.html