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Theme and Setting Themes and settings that seem quite acceptable to experienced gamers may seem weird or disgusting to people who aren’t accustomed to computer games. For example, experienced gamers are quite accustomed to excessive graphic violence and may think that more blood and gore make a game more entertaining. However, many others tout this excessive depiction of violence as a reason not to buy computer games. The reputation of computer games overall has been degraded as a result. When you make a computer game for novice gamers, you should avoid all the blood and gore. If you hit someone in a role-playing game, showing the damage as a number is just as good a visual reward as is displaying gouts of blood, and much more acceptable among a wider audience. Experienced gamers are accustomed to stretching their imaginations quite a long way, and it’s generally easier to maintain this audience’s suspension of disbelief. Novice gamers are less inclined to suspend disbelief, so you have to be careful in designing the setting of your game. For example, fantasy is a popular setting in almost any computer game genre, be it adventure, role-playing, strategy, or action. For most people, however, the notion of having lots of humanoid races living side by side with humans, mythical monsters roaming the countryside, and magicians flinging awesome spells… well, it all seems a bit far-fetched. This point is supported by the film industry — very few movies use a fantasy setting, and those that do seldom become hits. On the other hand, playing a role-playing game in a strictly realistic world would probably be pretty boring. Your character can get only so powerful before it becomes completely ridiculous. James Bond is probably the furthest you can stretch a setting and still present it as realistic. However, science fiction movies are more and more a part of the mainstream movie industry. Even if a movie isn’t pure science fiction, many have science fiction elements. Audiences are becoming accustomed to the notion of advanced technology and alien races. Thus, if you design a game that will suffer if it’s restricted to realism, a science fiction setting may be a good alternative. After all, anything that you can do with magic, you can do with advanced technology as well. And novice gamers will feel more at ease in a science fiction setting as opposed to a fantasy setting and will be more familiar with the terms associated with such a setting. The latter argument also relates to the notion of a low entrance barrier. The fewer new terms that a player that has to learn in order to understand what’s going on, the easier it is to get into the game. Casting a fireball spell may be unfamiliar and confusing, but throwing a hand grenade, even if it’s a high-tech plasma grenade, is familiar and easy to understand. |
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Features
