Opinion: Layers Of Depth, Layers Of Fun

[In this reprinted #altdevblogaday-opinion piece, Broken Rules' (And Yet It Moves) Martin Pichlmair considers the many layers one must keep in mind and test for when prototyping their game design.] Next week I'm going to teach a course on Game Prototyping at a university in Salzburg. It will be a practical introduction of all things you can prototype when making a game – from user interaction to social features, from rulesets to art. I am a huge fan of prototyping out of two reasons. Firstly, I'm responsible for the production timeline and to a certain degree also for the production budget here at Broken Rules. Prototyping takes the edge off a lot of tasks and generally makes production cheaper simply by making mistakes cheaper. Secondly, I've been teaching various kinds of design* – from interactive art to interaction design because students need to be taught in ways that enable them to get to action instead of building dream castles. Prototyping is a lot about removing unnecessary complexities and getting to the heart of the matter at hand. The question is what features to distill to a prototype. In our current game, Chasing Aurora, we've prototyped different gameplay elements, game modes, ways of control your character, graphic styles, level designs, game rules, enemies and timing rules. We will soon also prototype different social interaction methods, asynchronous multiplayer, settings and more enemies. Both of these lists are far from complete. When setting up the design principles for the single player mode, we isolated four layers of challenge that we are basing our game design upon:

Of course, all of these layers are intertwined and connected and each level has to challenge the skill, progress the story, work in the setting, and have a metaphorically interesting proposition, even if it is a simple one. The settings and skill layers lend themselves the most to prototyping. You can model a challenging level in an hour and have it tested out by players. You can model a feature of the setting, e.g. waterfalls or rock slides, in a few hours. Developing a block of story is also fairly simple once the background story is in place. Yet testing it out proves to be a bit more complicated because parts of stories live from the associations and connections to the whole. The metaphoric level is even harder to test because it is closest to the player. Different cultural contexts might make a situation getting read completely different by the player. Ethics is not universal, and neither is body language. Story, metaphor, skill, and setting might form the starting points for our level design, yet the overall game design needs to incorporate even more layers. Every layer has his own depth and the ability to pull the player deeper into the game world. It is this depth – along all four axes – that makes the player continue playing. Succeeding to deliver on all of them makes a great game. I could drop hundreds of examples here, but Zelda might be the easiest to prove my point. Most dungeons in Zelda are modeled to teach you the use of a newly acquired ability that manifests as a new weapon or tool in most cases. There are different settings, and how to beat one of them is a question of using the right tool in combination with the settings affordances. The story layer in Zelda is quite linear and yet another interpretation of the famous Hero's Journey which is in itself packed with witty metaphors. A slightly different view on these layers of depth is presented in Hunicke et al.'s seminal MDA Framework. The authors of the paper list eight kinds of aesthetics that create the player experience of a game:

While prototyping can not be used to directly test for one of these, and neither are they suited as generators for good game design, a game designer might still be able to probe for a specific aesthetic by creating a prototype. Our game is strong at challenge and discovery. Most of our prototypes so far have focussed on the challenge aspect of the game because we did not have the assets to support discovery. The single-player campaign will lean heavily towards exploration and thus we need to build prototypes focus on the narrow space of risk/reward systems in spatial movement. We need to build environments that feature spatial challenges and rewards. If you read discovery less literal, exploring the main character's capabilities is an act of discovery and can be prototyped by focussing on skill-based prototypes. I think Hunicke's list needs an update. The paper even states that the list is incomplete. Limiting social elements of games to fellowship and challenge is complicated in the age of FarmVille and Demon's Souls. At the same time, social factors are a strong reason for submitting to a game. Nowadays – or maybe it was always the case – compulsion is the most important kind of "fun" in games, and the one most talked about. At the same time, the demise of music games can be read as a games-as-expression bubble. If players want to express themselves, they fire up Twitter or Facebook. Most games are ill-suited to help you discovering anything about yourself but some physical abilities. Shadow of the Colossus stands as the exception to this rule. Narrative as story (the game's story) builds on make-believe. Narrative as experience (telling other players about your personal journey) is in the discovery/expression corner. Thus I propose a new list of layers of depth in game design:

Our own starting points for level design – story, metaphor, skill and setting – can be integrated into this broader set of aesthetics. Skill becomes challenge, story becomes drama, and the setting is what allows for exploration. Only metaphor stays as it is. Now it is up to us to effectively start implementing mechanics that foster dynamics that trigger aesthetics. And if we design for enough depth on all these axes, we will be able to pull off the game we set out to make. Do the same. Make a good game. * The late Steve Jobs served this marvelous quote about his definition of design: "Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service" † I'm not happy with that choice of word [This piece was reprinted from #AltDevBlogADay, a shared blog initiative started by @mike_acton devoted to giving game developers of all disciplines a place to motivate each other to write regularly about their personal game development passions.]