Lecture

Perhaps without previously realising it, I am a big proponent for design by subtraction. Many of the games that I consider to be especially well designed are minimal and elegant, with a highly refined core player experience. This lecture on the addition and subtraction of mechanics has only strengthened this core opinion of mine.

All too often, subtraction occurs towards the end of development, in response to deadline pressures or negative playtesting feedback. In most contexts, it should be our job as designers to make our designs simple and elegant from the outset, so as to realistically scope our projects and ensure that we make the best quality experience possible. This last-minute reshaping can be largely avoided by employing a ‘playcentric’ (Fullerton 2004) approach to development in which playtesters are involved at every stage of the process. By playtesting any mechanical additions or subtractions, developers can ensure that they are on the right track, and pivot as early as possible if they are not.

Looking at case studies such as Ico was beneficial to the understanding of why the phrase ‘less is more’ is so often true when looking at expertly crafted games. While I have not yet played Ico (2001) (though it is high on my to-play list), Shadow of the Colossus (2005) is one of my favourite game experiences. In my opinion, the team’s mastery of simplicity and elegance can be best observed in the ‘open world’ of the title. Standing in stark contrast to modern open world titles, the land that Wander traverses is barren and desolate, clearly taking cues from the sublime painting movement, in which “the sudden transformative view; a sensation that is beyond expression and which impairs the intellectual faculties” (Riding and Llewellyn, undated). Here, the developers stripped back the space that the player moves through to serve purely as a backdrop for quiet, contemplative reflection, all in service of the core player experience of solitude. Such a wide, open game space could easily be filled with distractions and tangential content, but none of it would serve the narrative, or Wander’s motivations, so it was emitted and the game is all the better for it.

GDD work

As we get closer to submission date, I have been making some important additions to the back-end of my game design document this week.

Firstly, I have added a chapter detailing the camera’s functionality and how it will be controlled by the player. There will be two primary modes that the camera moves between: cruise mode, and skate mode. Cruise mode will work similarly to many third-person games, with the camera being positioned over the character’s shoulder, and being able to be controlled by the player using the right stick. Skate camera is slightly different, being entered whenever the player is skating. As tricks are performed with the right stick, the camera in this mode is automated, facing whichever way the player is. It will also pull out, and have a widened field-of-view in order to give the player a greater understanding of their spatial environment. Cameras are one of the most important aspects of a game’s design to get right, so I am glad that I included this in my GDD.

Next, I detailed the UI of the game, including the HUD and menu systems. The HUD was best described using a mock-up diagram, representing the view to the player while in-game. I made sure to detail which elements were permanent (the compass, the stamina bar, etc.) and which were contextual (the disrupt bar, money, combo meter etc.) for better clarity. I am happy with the general layout, employing theories from the Laws of UX (Yablonski 2021) such as The Law of Proximity and Jakob’s Law. I also went over the different menu systems of the game, using flowcharts to visualise how they would be navigated and what could be accessed on each page.

Finally I made a ‘miscellaneous’ chapter documenting areas that, while important, were not extensive enough to require their own chapters. I went over the vital topic of accessibility, underscoring its importance to inclusivity and listing the ways in which Slam City Skates would strive to achieve this. I then wrote a small list of example trophies/achievements that could be obtained when playing through the game. While not essential to the design of the experience, they were enjoyable to write, and help to flesh out the game and make it feel like more of a real product.

Iron designer challenge

Our weekly group challenge saw us being tasked with adding top-down shooter mechanics to The Sims 4 (2014). This proved a challenge but we gave it a go.

We started by looking at some of the core elements of The Sims and trying to find what could transfer over to the new context. One feature we wanted to retain was the ‘indirect’ guidance of the characters. In the games, you tell the NPC’s where to go and what to do, but the outcome is largely derided from outside variables, such as their mood. We felt that this could make for an interesting spin on a top-down shooter, with the inclusion of unexpected, emergent gameplay scenarios. The player would have to maintain their Sim’s mood and well being if they wanted to ensure their survival.

This mode would be accessible from the main game, with the player’s Sim getting drafted to fight at a certain point in their playthrough. If their Sim survived, they would receive a healthy pay-out upon returning to their home.

While this challenge response was slightly comical and certainly not anything that would get greenlit, I am mostly happy with what we were able to come up with. We translated the core features of The Sims into a wildly different game genre and context.

Further reading

This week, I watched a really interesting GDC talk about making and self-publishing a game in twelve months (Viglione 2015). As someone who is particularly interested in the idea of indie development, this lecture had a lot of beneficial information. In particular, the emphasis on social media as a marketing platform was emphasised, with it helping the game developers to gain a dedicated following before release. Coincidentally in line with this week’s lecture, they also talked about the need to be ruthless with your mechanics and cut features that are going to hinder development and incur further cost.

Bibliography

FULLERTON, Tracy. 2004. Game Design Workshop. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Ico. 2001. Team Ico, Sony Computer Entertainment.

RIDING, Christine and Nigel LLEWELLYN. Undated. ‘British Art and the Sublime’. Tate [online Essay]. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/christine-riding-and-nigel-llewellyn-british-art-and-the-sublime-r1109418 [accessed 25 November 2021].

Shadow of the Colossus. 2005. Team Ico, Sony Computer Entertainment.

The Sims 4. 2014. Maxis, Electronic Arts.

VIGLIONE, Matthew. 2015. How to Make and Self-Publish a Game in 12 Months [GDC talk]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tbPbMRcMFQ [accessed 25 November 2021].

YABLONSKI, Jon. 2021. ‘Laws of UX’. Laws of UX [online]. Available at: lawsofux.com/ [accessed 24 November 2021].

Lecture

Particularly within the games industry, I find the classification and emergence of genre fascinating. Unlike other mediums where genres appear to be set in stone, games are constantly evolving and new genres emerge seemingly everyday, as evidenced by hybrids such as Metroidvania, Soulslikes, and roguelikes.

The actual process of game genre emergence was interesting to consider. Regardless of if a game is innovative, fills a market gap and is successful, it alone cannot establish a genre. It is through the subsequent ‘clones’ and iterations on the established formula that a genre arises. It is at this point that the founding game is able to achieve the title of ‘mythic originator’. This can be seen in how Wolfenstein 3D (1992) was the first FPS, while games like Doom (1993) iterated on it and actually established the genre.

I was unaware of how useful the definition of a game’s genre is for marketing and sales forecasting. They help developers and publishers understand their target audiences and create formulas that will innovate while still hopefully ensuring success. They also help audiences to make informed purchases of games, based on play preferences. Because of this, thoughtful use of store tags can be a great asset to developers selling their games on digital storefronts, to ensure that your game gets in front of the right customers.

GDD work

This week I have been focusing on a variety of elements of the GDD, making sure it is fleshed out and well conveyed to readers. In particular, I have added a new chapter which breaks down each mechanic at the players disposal. As the traversal system is intended to be deeply engaging and versatile, I wanted to take some time in the document to detail how it works. I listed each ‘verb’ that the player can enact (cruising, drifting, grinding, etc.) and went on to detail how, and when they would be used, as well as any related mechanics that can be used in conjunction. Initially, I was apprehensive about going in to so much granular detail, but with what we learnt in week two of this module in mind, it is highly beneficial to the whole team if you are as clear and communicative in your design document as possible. In a professional context, this would hopefully prevent any confusion for team members and make sure that everyone is on the same page regarding the game’s design.

Individual challenge

Appropriate to the theme of unfamiliar genres, our individual challenge this week tasked us with writing about one of our least favourite genres. We were to describe what we did not like about the genre, and suggest any improvements to the formula that might cater more to our preferences.

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Hunting games are a difficult genre for me. As an animal lover, I feel morally objected to the realistic simulation of shooting them as a primary gameplay mechanic. However, I do enjoy the feeling that they aim to give – being out in the wilderness on your own using nothing but the equipment you brought and environmental clues to guide you.

For me, the prefect ‘hunting’ game would retain the core pillars and experiences of traditional style titles, but in a different context. Perhaps on an alien planet, having to track and capture hostile aliens. Or maybe being in a distant future wasteland, tracking and shutting down rogue AI through precarious environments. 

However it is not just aesthetic qualities that I would change to better tune these games to my taste; I would also look to adding more chances for emergent gameplay and stories. Some ideas I have for this include:

• You are predator and prey. While you are out hunting your target, there is something also tracking you. This would add an element of survival horror and alleviate potential boredom from long tracking sessions. Be careful to cover your tracks and fight back if the need emerges.
• Environmental hazards. Rockfalls, unstable ground, lighting storms etc. These would add a layer of unpredictability to the game space with it being shaped by random events.
• Looting and foraging. Use objects picked up and foraged in the environment to craft new tools and lures. This would add some nice micro-goals as well as risk vs. reward – do you enter a dangerous area to forage for powerful bait at the risk of being attacked by a predator?
• Story elements. A campaign mode in which each hunting space and target fits into an overarching storyline.

There are lots of ways that I would personally tweak and improve hunting games to match my preferences. However, I am aware that many of my additions stray away from the simulator aspects that make the game genre so appealing to audiences in the first place. Perhaps these additions could help to fill a gap in the market for people who like the gameplay structure of a hunting game, without the simulated moral implications.

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This task helped me to consider what it is about particular genres that I dislike. It made me spend time asking which mechanics were inherent to a genre and which weren’t. Which mechanics could be removed or altered and still retain the genre’s identity and which would completely change the genre in their absence?

Iron designer challenge

Our weekly team challenge tasked us with making a popular game with no card elements into a collectable card game. Our team got assigned the seemingly insurmountable task of doing so with Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017). Ironically this process seemed more difficult than the game itself, but we gave it a good attempt.

We started by outlining what the core pillars of the game are, so that we could best distill it into a card game, while still retaining its core essence. We unanimously decided that frustration was the core tenet that we had to retain. This meant that statistically, dice rolls would never be skewed in your favour, and getting over the proverbial mountain would be an unlikely outcome.

Each time that a player attempts progress, they roll a die to determine their success. Focus points can be spent to play action cards, which attempt to level the odds more in your favour, for instance adding to your roll.

The mountain itself is where we incorporated the collectable elements of the game. Players would be building the mountain as they go, placing cards to form its structure. These would have different themes to encourage collection as players may be driven to collect a whole set. Themes ranged from medieval to space.

What started as a big headache eventually became a fun exercise in distillation and translation. Our whole team got involved with the process, coming up with inventive ways to break the game down into its core systems and apply that to a card game context. I think that the finished concept – while not perfect – is a solid attempt at this.

Further reading

As he was once again referenced in this week’s lecture, I decided to watch GMTK’s video on genre emergence and classification (2017). It was very insightful and I found much overlap with the ideas found in Nick’s lecture. I particularly resonated with the posited question of whether genre helps or hinders game innovation. It is plausible that the existence of genre conventions limits games from truly innovating and breaking new ground as often as they could. Because of this, I think it is crucial to see genre features as starting points to ideating, rather than rigid absolutes.

Following on from the iron designer challenge, I was still thinking about the process of translating games into different genres. I did some research on industry examples of this and came across a fascinating GDC talk about from Antoine Routon (2016). In it, he described their design process behind Lara Croft GO (2015), detailing how they retained the core feeling of the Tomb Raider franchise in a mobile strategy game. Similarly to our group task, their team started with distillation, eventually landing on what they called “the essence of adventure” (Routon 2016), which then went on to inform every design decision throughout development.

References

Doom. 1993. id Software.

Game Makers Toolkit. 2017. Do We Need a Soulslike Genre? [YouTube essay]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx7BWayWu08 [accessed 18 November 2021].

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. 2017. Bennett Foddy.

Lara Croft GO. 2015. Square Enix Montreal, Square Enix.

ROUTON, Antoine. 2016. Distilling A Franchise: The Lara Croft GO Postmortem [GDC talk]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn4MzuvliDs [accessed 19 November 2021].

Wolfenstein 3D. 1992. id Software, Apogee Software.

 

Lecture

Targeting demographics is a key aspect of designing games, and as such I am glad to have a weekly lecture dedicated solely to that field of development. As always, I wrote lots of notes to refer back to in the future.

It was sobering to see how every stage of game development, from designers, through to publishers and audiences, is impacted by the targeting of particular audiences. For us designers in particular, we must use what we know about our target audience to make our games from an informed perspective that will satisfy them with a quality product, and therefore achieve sales targets. For these reasons, it is vital that we learn as much as we can about our audiences.

GDD work

While the knowledge gained from this week’s topic was still fresh in my mind, I decided to expand on the ‘market viability’ chapter of my design document. Now that I know how crucial the understanding of a target market is to success, I felt that it needed more discussion.

I started by fleshing out my key selling points as these are elements that can make or break a game concept for publishers. By clearly outlining these unique aspects of the game, I was also able to better understand the niche that my game will be creating in the market. It has been a long time since the era of open world extreme sports titles such as the Skate 3 (2010), and Tony Hawk’s Underground (2003) series and demand in online communities is ever increasing. Slam City Skates aims to recapture that magic, being appealing to old fans while modernising the formula enough to appeal to newer generations. The focus on roller skating rather than skateboarding adds a further unique spin on the idea.

Next, I broke my demographic down to be far more specific. Starting by stating their typical age and platform of choice, I went on to define their player types in reference to Bartle’s taxonomy. Following that, in an attempt to be even more specific, I wrote up some player personas. When used correctly, tools such as this help developers to better understand who exactly it is that they are developing their product for. It is recommended to frequently evaluate your player experience against these personas so that projects are kept on track.

Individual challenge

This week’s individual challenge was deceptively difficult, requiring us to apply the DDR (1998) mat to five new contexts unrelated to dancing. Initially this seemed like an easy task, but once considering the awkward arrangement of the pads and the limit of only four inputs, I quickly got stumped. It wasn’t until I considered gamification of non-gaming tasks that I was able to come up with my ideas.

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1. Fitness Tetris

A regular game of Tetris where the pieces are moved side-to-side with the left and right arrows. They can be rotated with the up and down arrows. This would be great for gamers who are wanting to improve their fitness.

2. Accessibility controller for platformers

A controller which gives players with limited or no movement in their hands and arms the ability to interact with platformers. The left and right buttons would move the character in their corresponding direction, while the up button would make them jump, and the down button would make them attack.

3. Immersive hiking

With an accompanying VR headset, users would be able to go on immersive walks through tranquil, awe-inspiring scenery, using the directional buttons to move. This would be particularly appealing to people in built-up areas or busy workers who don’t have much time to explore nature. It could also be a tool fitted in offices to combat the stress workers may be experiencing.

4. Dance-Dance Recall!

Similar to the Brain Academy games and Bop-It, this would be used to improve memory and concentration skills. A speaker will sound out a sequence of inputs, for instance “Left, left, up, right, down, up”, and the player would then have to recall the inputs and carry them out. Each turn the sequence get more complex and difficult to remember. A high-score system could also be implemented. This could be useful for older people in their 60s/70s who are looking to keep their brain sharp.

5. Dance-Dance Reaction!

Similar to the above, but testing reaction times rather than memory and concentration. Players will wait for a randomised amount of time for the speaker to sound out a single input, after which they have to press the button as quickly as possible. This is repeated a number of times until you are given your average reaction speed. This could be a fun way for people who’s jobs are centered around quick responses (such as driving or the military) to improve their reaction times.

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Hard to be original and identify any niches

Looking through the lens of gamified fitness – fitness tetris.

Iron designer challenge

The group challenge required us to conceptualise an educational MMO aimed at children with no violence.

We started by looking at examples of other social games aimed at children, namely Club Penguin (2005), and Moshi Monsters (2008). It was evident that both titles utilised a cartoon styling with colourful visuals. They were also centred largely around minigames and home decorating. Finally, and most importantly, we noted that they employ a limited form of communication between players, so as to safeguard children. These were all elements we ended up incorporating into our final design.

Our game concept, titled ‘Science Odyssey’, was to be a science-focused educational MMO. Players make expeditions to various habitats in order to retrieve samples and photographs to be taken back to their home base – the lab. This lab can be customised in a large variety of ways, with players being able to choose theming, decorations, and pets.

Quests would be given by a variety of famous scientists from throughout history, each teaching children something about influential players in scientific fields. These quests would see taking part in mini-games that teach players fundamentals of science, e.g. circuit puzzles, test tube combinations, focusing microscopes, etc.

Players can choose to go on expeditions with others and help fellow scientists further their scientific studies. Communication will be made through emotes, with many of these being references to famous scientists (Edison’s lightbulb idea, Newton’s falling apple, etc.)

As children have typically short attention spans, we made effort to make sure that our core loop was very brief. We wanted something new and exciting to happen at least every thirty seconds. This could be a new emote, a puzzle, a social interaction, or obtaining new decorations for your lab.

Further reading

I read through the recommended article on GameIndustry.biz about how to market games (Staff 2020). I found the recommendation of choosing your marketing methods in alignment with your game useful. If the game looks great as a GIF then sharing it to Twitter would be a great idea as it will catch people’s attention and hopefully be shared around quickly. On the other hand, if you are making a niche simulation game, it might be more wise to take the marketing to specialist forums such as a Subreddit, in which you can get much needed exposure to people who are enthusiastic about what you are making. The article also emphasised the importance of targeting to a specific audience and not deviating or spreading your marketing efforts too thinly.

References

Club Penguin. 2005. Rocketsnail Games, Disney Canada Inc.

Dance Dance Revolution. 1998. Konami, Konami.

GamesIndustry Staff. 2020. ‘How to market your video game and find your target audience’. Gamesindustry.biz [online]. Available at: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-03-01-how-to-market-your-game [accessed 13 November 2021].

Moshi Monsters. 2008. Mind Candy, Activision.

Skate 3. 2010. EA Black Box, Electronic Arts.

Tony Hawk’s Underground. 2003. Neversoft, Activision.

Lecture

As I am someone with a heavy interest in story-focused games, and dream to work in the field of narrative design, this week’s lecture covered everything I love about games.

It was helpful to revisit Huizinga’s Magic Circle (Huizinga 1938), a theory we had touched on briefly in our GAM120 theory module last year. That perfect sweet spot where our players enter the hermetic seal of a game and fully suspend their disbelief is what we should always strive for when designing game worlds and stories. Personally, I can think of a number of games – BioShock (2006) comes to mind – where I have become so absorbed in my actions that I stop questioning the legitimacy of the experience. I think that much of this verisimilitude comes from the presence of consistency. In BioShock every gameplay mechanic is contextualised within the world of the game. Nothing stands out as contradictory from the world or Rapture at large; even respawning is explained through the use of ‘Vita-Chambers’ – machines that hold your genetic blueprint and recreate your corporeal form at a cost.

The points covering worldbuilding built nicely on top of what we learnt during GAM140 last year. It was helpful to break down the core components of what makes a well-crafted fictional world, including: immersion, simplicity, identity, idealism, research, passion, scale and connectivity. I can imagine the framework  working in tandem with Mark J. P. Wolf’s idea of world superstructures and infrastructures (Wolf 2012).

GDD work

In line with this week’s topic, I have been focusing on developing the narrative elements surrounding my game concept for the GDD.

I detailed the world of ‘Slam City’ – an oppressed city, sapped of its former glory. Aesthetically, the city will primarily take cues from both New York and Tokyo. I also broke the city up into distinct districts, so as to keep the map fresh and memorable to players.

I have also spent some time considering how the story will be delivered to the player. Similar to other open-world games, I want the main narrative to be conveyed through ‘main missions’, with side content and ‘errands’ being used to flesh out ancillary characters and the city at large. I feel that it is unavoidable that my game will need to rely on some cutscenes to tell its story. However, as the experience is heavily focused on gameplay and flow, I have decided to include a mobile phone for characters to contact the player through. Through this the player will be delivered story beats and exposition while traversing the overworld without having the game wrestle control away from them.

Individual challenge

This week’s individual challenge was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the broad prompt of creating a fleshed out fictional character. While I really wanted to go into fantastical places with my character design and backstory, I decided to keep the premise grounded in reality for an extra challenge. I wanted to see how I could use what we had learnt in this week’s lecture make a ‘regular guy’ compelling to audiences. Below is my attempt at doing such.

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Overview:

Today is the first day of the rest of Seamus Kelly’s life. 

Set up and left to rot in prison by those he used to call family, Seamus spent 15 years in federal prison serving time for a laundry list of crimes committed by his gang, The McCarthy’s. Now his time has come, and finally he is able to re-enter society. Fifteen years is enough time to give anyone pause for reflection, and Seamus has done plenty of that. He’s ready to make something of his life, settle down and maybe even find a wife. But before he gets to that, there’s some unfinished business Seamus has to attend to…

Physical appearance:

Seamus is a 6ft 2″ hulk of a man. Daily courtyard exercises mean that his stature and strength is significantly larger than when he entered prison.

Close cropped red hair and green eyes belie his Irish lineage.

Strengths:

Seamus is physically very strong, able to hold his own well in fist and knife fights.

On the inside, he devoured any book he could get his hands on, even trading his own belongings for more. Due to this, he is deceptively intelligent, with a wealth of knowledge and introspection.

His time running with the McCarthy’s taught him vital street skills such as bribery, intimidation, lockpicking, and hand-to-hand combat.

Weaknesses:

Having been in prison for so long, Seamus is a fish out of water. The world has advanced a lot since he was part of it, and it will take a while for him to adjust again.

The death of his parents took a great mental toll on him, and every day he battles with the trauma inflicted from the event.

His guilt over his former days as a gang member weigh heavily on his conscience. 

Desires:

Seamus wishes for a normal life away from the mafia. He wants what is common to all humans: love, peace, and a family of his own,

Directly conflicting with the above, Seamus is also overcome with an intense desire for revenge against those who wronged him.

Ultimately, it will be up to Seamus to choose what is more important to him: vengeance or peace.

Personal history:

Born in Dublin, 1891 to Irish parents. Fleeing the country due to being out of wedlock and severe lack of work, they emigrated to New York, the land of opportunity. 

When he was nine years old, Seamus’ parents were killed in the cross fire of a hit-and-run by the Italian mafia. Alone and orphaned, Seamus wondered the streets of New York, begging for money and food. This went on until he encountered Finn McCarthy, the leader of a large Irish crime family. Noticing Seamus’ distinct Irish accent and impressed with his clear initiative, Finn adopted Seamus into the McCarthy’s as one of his own.

From then Seamus grew up within the McCarthy’s, and his loyalty never waivered. No job was too far, no hit was too dangerous.

This allegiance persisted for years until the time that Seamus was twenty-four, when, for reasons unknown, the McCarthy’s set him up. Planting all their evidence on him and letting him do the time they were collectively due…

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I am very pleased with how this challenge submission went. Taking into account what we had been taught, I endeavored to make Seamus as flawed and tragic (in the the literary sense) as possible. I also choose to give him desires that audiences would hopefully be able to relate to strongly – revenge and peace. This stemmed from my observation of game narratives tackling either redemption (Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018)), or revenge (The Last of Us: Part Two (2020)), but very rarely weighing up both and asking what the player would rather themselves.

Iron Designer Challenge

Similarly, the Iron Designer Challenge tasked us with creating an original game narrative in teams. This was an exciting task for me, and I felt relatively well prepared, having had some experience working on a story-focused game for my team project last year.

After tossing around some ideas, we eventually landed on an idea I had been formulating over summer for a personal project. It centres around the decidedly dark events of a deadly car crash, with the player character in a coma and reliving the events leading up to it, only to piece together the fact that they were responsible.

This worked out rather well as many of my teammates were interested in designing mechanics that fit with a narrative rather than vice versa, so having this framework to work with helped them do what they felt best equipped to do. Everyone came up with fantastic ideas for the gameplay, including Steven who designed some perspective-based puzzles that subtly messed with the player’s head and contributed to the overall feeling of confusion and rising dread given by the narrative. When I think of my favourite games, the narrative always supports the gameplay and the gameplay always supports the narrative. Both key components uphold one another and this is what I believe makes The Magic Circle accessible to the player.

Further reading

I spent some time this week looking into various theories of narrative. While these were originally created to relate to traditional literary texts, there is much that we can extract and apply to game narratives in terms of structure and pacing.

Freytag’s Pyramid (Freytag c.a. 19th century) features a five-point graph that can be used to visualize dramatic structure within stories. These five points are: Exposition (ending with an inciting incident), Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Resolution/Denouement. Within the context of a game, the Exposition could be seen as the opening moments of gameplay, when players create their characters, run through tutorials, and learn about the game’s world and their place within it. The majority of gameplay for most games could be seen as falling under Rising Action, as the player are working towards their goal, becoming more powerful, and (following the inciting incident) pursuing an adversary of some sort. Any climactic fight or boss battle would reside within the space of Climax, a point at which the conflict hits its peak and is irreversibly addressed by the player. Falling Action and Resolution are two stages where game narratives tend to rush through, often being delegated to a post-fight cutscene (even the aforementioned BioShock is guilty of this). I imagine that by nature it is hard to make these final two stages of the pyramid compelling to players as the are typically devoid of conflict and purely used to resolve narrative threads and reflect on the change characters have undergone. Still, I would be intrigued to see a game attempt to give each stage a proportionate allocation of time.

I also delved back into Mark J.P. Wolf’s fantastic book, Building Imaginary Worlds (2012), to refamiliarise myself with the theories of worldbuilding in light of this week’s lecture. As stated previously, I particularly resonate with his taxonomy of superstructures and infrastructures, as I feel it gives a concrete and accessible method of crafting worlds.

I watched an interesting GDC talk by Kaitlin Tremblay on the marriage between game narrative and mechanics (Tremblay 2020). She brings light to the fact that the ‘verbs’ of a game (what a player is doing through gameplay) inherently inform the narrative and characterisation of a game, regardless of a developer’s intention. By making sure that a game’s verbs fit with a story, designers have a greater chance at avoiding the dreaded ludonarrative dissonance.

References

BioShock. 2006. Irrational Games, 2K Games.

FREYTAG, Gustav. c.a. 19th century. Freytag’s Pyramid [dramatic structure].

HUIZINGA, Johan. 1938. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Netherlands: Random House.

Red Dead Redemption 2. 2018. Rockstar Studios, Rockstar Games.

The Last of Us: Part Two. 2020. Naughty Dog, Sony Computer Entertainment.

TREMBLAY, Kaitlin. 2020. Storytelling with Verbs: Integrating Gameplay with Narrative [GDC talk]. Available at: Storytelling withttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ontNUxSLhb8h [accessed 29 October 2021].

WOLF, Mark J.P. 2012. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. Oxford: Routledge.