COMP50: Game Designweek 1: Introductionjason Wiser

COMP50: Game DesignWEEK 1: IntroductionJason Wiser

1. Introduction to Instructor

My name is Jason Wiser. I am a college instructor of design and animation for games and film at these four schools. I have worked in animation in television (Disney ABC Family’s “Greek”) and for university research projects (Stamford, Northwestern, MIT Huggable project)and I get to make games.

1. Introduction to Course

The purpose of this course is like any other course, whether it is Mathematics, Literary Critical Theory, Gender Studies, History – the best reason to take on a new discipline is to learn a new way to think, or to deepen our understanding of a way of thinking.

Games are fun. Game design is often even more fun, and it is often frustrating and sometimes even maddening, but with it we can feel like Dorothy pulling the curtain and seeing the gears behind reality. Games are one of the best ways to explore how humanity functions, and making better games often results in giving people a chance to be better themselves.

There are two books for this course: The Art of Game Design, a Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell and Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal. I chose these books for this course because they are the most inspiring texts I know in this field. Schell’s book offers a series of what he calls “lenses” through which you can view your game ideas, offering ways to improve your thinking on every page. It is actually a real problem trying to read it—I can’t go three pages without stopping and writing down new ideas for games. Schell will give you a close look at how game design operates as a thought process—the machinery of design and playing with other people.

Dr. McGonigal’s book is less about pure game design and more aboutsocial design. She alerts us to the increasing reality that enormous amounts of productive human hours—billions a year—are being spent solving game problems which have known solutions. A lot of people already know how to finish just about any video game you could want to play. Your finishing it does not add to the sum total of human knowledge and achievement.

BUT, she says, games fulfill a lot of real needs in our lives for more fulfilling work, what she calls “flow,” and feelings of extraordinary achievement against impossible odds, what she calls Fiero--among many other human needs for awe and belonging and sense of purpose -- which reality typically fails to provide us on a day to day basis. So if reality is “broken” compared to games – less fulfilling, less supportive of our best selves – what games can we design to change the way we live our lives, to bring that sense of achievement and joyous productivity to our daily existence and to the tasks that actually need solving in the world?

2. Project Expectations.

We will get to those ideas of fixing reality in later classes. This first month is about game design methodologies; to help you get to the point where you can design something strange and marvelous and new and ideally with purpose. This first monthis to play with different ways of approaching what a game can be, to help you come up with ideas and then meaningfully evaluate those ideas to arrive at more impactful solutions for the problems of your games.

To do this, you will form a new team each week this month to try the exercises in class and then continue the game for homework, using the reading that week and the opportunity to bounce ideas off each other to enhance your thinking. We will create non-digital games this first month— board games, card games, games that utilize humans and real spaces.

Week four we will decide our final game concepts and final teams for the semester, and then we will spend two months making your digital games.

This course is in the Computer Science department at Tufts so that you all can experience a software development cycle. Many of you are programmers, some of you are artists and audio designers, many of you are interested in more than one of those pillars of production. You will all participate in design, but when it comes to production you can specialize or multitask as much as you desire, as long as the work is evenly distributed among team members each week.

3. AUDIENCE:

We will talk more about the software development cycle in later weeks, including such key ideas as marketing, scope management, production scheduling, asset organization and lots and lots of communication.

You will notice that marketing is the first item I listed here, and that is because games like any art form function better if an intended audience is part of their construction.

From a corporate point of view, for a company to make a game and devote the enormous amount of resources into its production, it better have a very good idea who is meant to enjoy and buy it and how that audience will be made aware of it, or the game will most likely fail to make a profit regardless of its quality.

From the perspective of pure love of the medium of Game Design, we want our games to be played, so we need to imagine the player.

The audience is an important constraint in any game design; who do you picture playing your game?

I used to work in console games, where the audience are typically very experienced players in their 20s or 30s. When my daughter was about one-years-old I switched to game development for pre-schoolers or early elementary school aged kids, and have learned a lot about how completely different my games have to be for that audience.

For example: little kids don’t typically touch buttons. They touch below buttons,so when we made the hit box on a target only the size of the graphic, little kids would get frustrated or bored, thinking they were tapping the thing and not getting a result.

Also, little kids have no concept of breakout menus. The early version of my iPad game DinoTrucks was designed to have one truck per yard, and you had to go to a completely separate menu to switch to another truck. We came to realize that kids had no idea what to do with this. And it wasn’t just because they couldn’t read it – duh – the very concept of leaving the game space to get something and go back to the game space did not make sense to them. So we switched to a single “Yard” playscreen with a shmorgasborg of items that the player digs out of the ground, with an inventory that opens and overlays the play area, with great success.

How might your game be different if it was designed for your grandparents to play?

Or for people who don’t speak the same language as each other to play together?

Or for people who just started dating each other? Or for players who are different species? Or for politicians, or wallstreet, or schoolteachers to play?

For this week, I encourage you to think of yourselves as the audience. Design a game that you and your teammates want to play. Once you get better at that, at listening to yourself and your teammates and what you find fun, it will be easier to start thinking in terms of other audiences.

4. WHAT IS A GAME?:Schell vs McGonigal

Schell talks about the creation of play experiences—a game is meaningless without players, and understanding how players react to our game—always a surprise—is the process that allows us to revise our game until it is something that will truly excite and inspire our audience.

Game design is decision making. You will have a lot of ideas. Be kind to your ideas—write them down! But then choose one set and play it. Make decisions so you can move forward.

Games need to be fun. What is fun? According to Schell, fun is pleasurable action + surprises. If your game does not offer chances to be surprised, it will get boring—cake every day gets old. It is a lot of work to constantly surprise the player. It works better if you can create a system for players to surprise each other.

• Fun is pleasure + surprises
• Play is manipulation to satisfy curiosity
• A toy is an object you play with
• A good to is fun to play with.
• A game is a problem-solving activity, approached with a playful attitude

McGonigal thinks of that playful attitude as a voluntary engagement with unnecessary obstacles. She writes that pleasure requires the task be optional, and for the task to have specific constraints--artificial, imposed obstacles that focus our attention and problem solving abilities.

Here is an optional game for this course. You can choose to play it or not. If you do play, it will help you to do better in this class.

“SIGGY SEARCH” is a game for the first three weeks of class

TO PLAY: Get the initials of every student in this course, under their names. The first five students to get all 32 signatures by the start of the fourth week of class will be crowned Rulers of Shmooze.

TO GET A SIGNATURE:Outside of classtime, ask a classmate one of the following four questions, and receive an answer of about 2-3 minutes in length. There are no wrong answers, as long as they are thoughtful.

1. What was one of your best game experiences? Tell the story!
2. For whom in your life do you most want to make a game? Why? What kind of interactivity do you think they would enjoy?
3. What is a problem/source of misery in your schools, your homes, your communities, the United States, or the larger world that you wish could be improved with a game? What would it be like if it was improved?
4. What is one of the most interesting things you have learned at Tufts, in a class or out, prior to this semester?

What are the unnecessary obstacles? How might playing help you in this course?
5. METHOD 1: Brainstorming Mechanics With Toys

SO: today’s exercise. Today is a brainstorming method of playing with toys and coming up with mechanics.

This is a lesson for talking about the differences between mechanic-driven design and story-driven design. Story driven design is a game which starts with a theme. Like when Disney hires a game studio to make a new game based on one of their films. They made a lot of these in the nineties, and they were mostly what we call shovelware—crappy, derivative, boring experiences that old very well because the parents who bought them just saw the bran and did not know better. Now that most parents are people who grew up playing games, even Disney has had to make their games quality. And there have good themed games for a long time, including Chronicles of Riddick and Batman Arkham’s Asylum – games made by studios who had a license and built a game around them but did so very well.

Most game design starts mechanic based-- an interesting set of constraints on how we move, collect assets and solve problems that can afterward be "themed" with an appealing engaging story/art.

The mechanic is how you play: how you move, collect assets, and achieve a goal.

The theme appeals to the storytellers in all of us: it immerses us and provides flavor to the play.

For example: Portal. What is the story of Portal?

Now, what is the mechanic?

We know they started with the mechanic first. Kim Swift and her team of seniors at Digipen made Narbacular Drop to use this mechanic, and it was only when they got hired as a team by valve to develop the game, and they were given a top industry writer to write all of the amazing dialogue, that we got this story of the evil Ai playing with human test subjects.

So we are going to deal with mechanics. Let’s talk about some games and their mechanics, to get our juices flowing.

Example: MONOPOLY:

The mechanic is to have a square board with a big rectangular path of boxes. Each player start with tokens and rolls the dice and moves their player piece the number of squares around the board. When they land on a square, if it has not been claimed, they have the option of losing tokens to claim the space. If they do claim the space, and someone else lands in that space, that second player must tithe tokens to the first player. There are cards and spaces that will hinder or accelerate progress around the board.

The theme is you are a real estate developer buying land and transportation, developing properties, and trying to stay out of jail.

If they started with the theme, how did they come up with this game? Well, it was the 1930s, the great depression, when the economy of this country was in shambles including the crash in value of the stock market, and perhaps it was wish fulfillment--playing at making money at a time when it was very hard to do so. With stocks and bonds a losing scenario in the 30s, this game is about buying and developing land and transportation.

If they started with the mechanic they may have started with the idea of the square. What does a square playing board afford us? Continuous path for movement. As opposed to candyland or other games that have a physical start and end and a line between them. If you are going around again and again, what makes it interesting? Well, what if the players could change the board with every turn, buy buying and developing properties, so that landing on them is different in turn #2 than turn #1, and very different on turn #10? What other games could we make with this basic mechanic?

So now, the exercise:We have for you today a bunch of board designs and packets of potential game pieces. You will work in teams of three, with three boards and 1 packet, and work together to design a game. You can start with mechanics or stories.

I want each team to brainstorm at least five ideas for games with those boards and pieces, and then choose one to develop further. The one you decide to develop will need a goal or goals for players to achieve, rules for how players can move around the board to achieve those goals, and ways to interact with the other players, weather helpfully or in competition. You can have assets to collect or manage or move or trade in the game. You can start purely from these constraints, starting with the mechanic, and add a theme afterwards.

Or you could start with the theme. You could say, I have crocodiles and airplanes in my bag and I want to make a game where the crocodiles all try to take a vacation. And then figure out the mechanics based on how that theme can interact with one of your boards.

To be clear, I expect the idea you decide to develop further today to use only one of the three boards chosen by your team, and I do NOTY expect you to use everything in your packet. You will likely only use a fraction of the playable objects, and if you have stuff in your pockets like coins that you want to use as well, go for it.

The packets are roughly equivalent but there are some differences. I expect your team to borrow the packet over the week to further develop your ideas, but please return them to me next week.

BOARD GAME CREATION Team Exercise:

• INTRO (10 minutes): Everyone gets into teams of 3-4 people. Introduce yourselves. Where are you from? What are some of your favorite games? This can be board games, video games, sports--any kind of game.

• CHOOSE BOARD (5 minutes): As a team, choose one of the boards. Do not worry about the choice. Just choose one.

• MECHANIC DESIGN (40 minutes): Open your bag of pieces, and start thinking about how those pieces could be used on your board. Do you want player pieces? If so, how will they move on the board? What assets will you collect, and what do they do for the player when the player gets them? How might the player interact with other players? What is the goal of the game, and what are different ways of achieving it?

• INITIAL RULES: As a team experiment with ideas until you have a starting system of player movement, asset collection, and goals. Practice “Yes, And” with your team—do not dismiss any ideas—write them down, and discuss which set of ideas you want to try and test first!

• TESTING (20 minutes): PLAY THE GAME. Discuss what is fun and what could be more fun. Adjust the parameters (rules) of the game. PLAY AGAIN. Discuss and adjust again. PLAY AGAIN.

• THEME (15 minutes): Come up with a theme for the game: a story to immerse your players and encourage

20 minutes before the end of class, stop/pause teamwork to discuss homework example and assignments:

HOMEWORK: As a team, revise the design from class or create a new board game that is playable in 10-15 minutes. Play the game multiple times to find ways to tweak the rules for more “Flow” and “Fiero.” Type up the final rules, clean up the board/token materials, and bring the game to class ready to play.