The iradescent fun mine

Things were awfully bright and glowing in the old fun mine this week.  I largely spent the week working on levels for our port of LEGO Fever to the iPhone from the PC.

On Wednesday I realized I hadn’t actually done level design in over a year.  That’s kind of a strange realization when you consider game design your profession and level design part and parcel with that notion.  The games I’ve worked on of late have largely been systemic procedural systems.  The design all happened at the global level.

Diving back into actual level design has been great, if very laborious. You really feel like you’re making a game when you’re constantly tweeking variables and checking how they impact the game.  Plus laying out the general level flow for LEGO Fever has given me the chance to explore some ideas about pacing that I’ve lately found of interest.  Namely, I’m trying to switch up the gameplay style and feel every four or five levels. I want the experience of playing to constantly shift and evolve.

None of this is revolutionary, I know, but its nice to have some time to put some ideas into practice. The frustrating thing about professional game development is how rarely you actually get to make new games.

Post-mortem on The Duel

We managed to get in about two hours of The Duel at Come Out & Play SF last weekend before the rain set in and Catherine’s The One started up.  Roughly 30 players ran through the game in that time, each taking on the role of both the Shepherd and the Wolf. Players really seemed to take to the game enjoying both the gameplay and narrative components I was so worried would saddle the game with undeserved weight.

Players cocked their ears to hear the story whispered to each player.  Then at the ringing of the chime dove into the game with abandon.  The game is a lopsided affair: the shepherd is blindfolded and vulnerable.  The wolf, still able to see, can play as the aggressor, though the bells they hold give away their position as they try to grab flags from the shepherd’s waist. The shepherd meanwhile defends himself by trying to grab the wolf with both hands.

Here are the full rules:

In the Woods
Two foes come upon each other in the dead of night.
In the darkness the Shepherd cannot see.
The Wolf sees through the darkness but his sound can give him away.
The duel is quick lasting only two minutes, the beginning and end marked by a chime.
For each flag the Wolf collects from the Shepherd, the Wolf scores one point.
Each time the Shepherd grabs the Wolf with two hands the Shepherd scores two points.
In a tie the Shepherd wins.

The simple point balancing gives the game a nice arc over the two minutes.  The shepherd starts out in a defensive stance, but after the loss of a flag or two must go on the offensive, leading to frantic play.  Conversely a tag by the shepherd forces the wolf into a more aggressive and risky mode.

People seemed to really have fun playing.  And quite excitedly for me, a number reported feeling the sense of fear and dread I wanted the game to engender.  I wanted it to feel like a fairy-tale horror game and I think it did.

The masks and narrative definitely helped push it in this direction.  I don’t know that it’s ready for a gallery, but for me the game and narrative marriage displays promise.  Nick Fortugno and I even discussed how we might create a series of games based around a similar folklore for a gallery like setting.  That could prove interesting.

If you played, many thanks and I’d love to hear your feedback.

Narrative vs. Mechanics in physical games

I’ve been struggling a lot lately with the value of focusing a game around narrative content, versus just letting the mechanics of the game speak for themselves.  This sounds ridiculous, but the internal debate has largely been spurred by thinking about what sort of game would work best as an art piece in a gallery exhibition.  The idea of a physical game exisiting as an installation is fraught with issues of feasibility.  Gallery goers don’t typically engage with a piece in the sort of deep repetitive way that a game demands. And without people playing, a game really isn’t much to look at.

But I still think the design challenge is interesting in that it makes me think about what signifiers of significance a game is missing that prevents it from being taken seriously. Does it need a narrative that frames and gives context to the experience of interacting with the mechanics? We can experience the anger or frustration or fear that a game may induce, but to be a piece that would garner critical praise from a crowd devoted to contemporary art, would it also need a frame that tells you how to understand those emotions? Because I can envision a time when a gallery might present an exhibition of physical games, but I have a hard time seeing them including something as abstract and shorn of content as a pure sport.

Galleries like Babycastles (http://www.babycastles.com/) are already beginning to grapple with games in gallery settings, though they have dealt primarily with screen based and therefore contextualized work.

The game I’m running this weekend at Come Out & Play in San Francisco has really been the catalyst for this line of thought.  The game pits a blindfolded player against an aggressor who can see, but is burdened by bells. In play it evokes a sense of horror and dread in the blindfolded player. Its a fun and compelling game even in the abstract, but I was interested in what a little narrative might do to it.  So the players are cast as the wolf and the shepherd. We’ll see this weekend how players react to the layer of story and whether that element should be exhumed from the game.

Pictures and a report to follow after the game runs.

Casual Game Design out in February (I hope).

My book, Casual Game Design: Designing Play for the Gamer in All of Us is due out in February.  Quite a mouthful, I know.  The book lays out some basic frameworks for thinking about game design, then delves into the specific mechanics of a number of different casual games.  While I was writing it, I had E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel in mind.  I’ve always admired the way he offered tools for thinking about the writing fiction by looking at specific choices and elements from novels good and bad.  It’s all about reading and appreciating.

When I sat down to write this book, I wanted to do something similar with games.  I won’t claim to match Forster’s wit or insight, but hopefully the book provides thought provoking analysis of game mechanics.  It’s all about playing games and then thinking about them–why they work, why they don’t.  Hopefully people will find it useful.  I know I found writing it enlightening–I got to spend months playing games and thinking about them, talking with other designers about games.  And really, there’s no better practice for a game designer than playing games and thinking about them.