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Individual Preferences and Market Targeting Some gamers value substance, others value style. Many competitive FPS gamers buy the most tricked-out and overclocked computers on the market, and then turn all of their graphics settings down to the minimum. This means that their games run at hundreds of frames per second, but are horrifically ugly. The game often ends up looking like little more than moving polygonal lumps. This is fine because competitive FPS gamers are not interested in playing a role, making a story or feeling any emotion besides triumph over a defeated opponent. They want to play the game as it is and learn the substance of it down to the most minute detail. These people play the game for the game, not for the story. This is the audience of Go, Chess, Quake 3 and Counter-Strike.
The Sims has a feature which allows players to take captioned photos of their virtual characters and upload these photos to the web. This is a great example of style elements being placed such that game will generate stories that the gamers can relate to. Those who play The Sims are not particularly interested in perfectly optimizing their performance. These players play the game, to make and experience stories that they can relate to. Syberia, Baldur's Gate or even ultra-realistic games like Lock On: Modern Air Combat appeal to similar audiences. Designers should understand who they are targeting with their game and focus their design efforts accordingly. Substance gamers tend to be young men, the large part of the current games market. Style-preference gamers tend to be more female, and appear along a wider age bracket. An action game marketed towards young men needs to have a phenomenal substance design in order to be popular. A game targeted towards less hardcore gamers has a greater need for style, story, recognizable subject matter, and story-generating opportunities. Style as a Marketing Tool Game design for a commercial product has one goal: to sell games. This is a two-part task: we must first make gamers purchase the game, and then we must make them continue playing the game so that they will encourage their friends to play as well, and are more likely to buy the sequel. In general, style accomplishes the first goal, substance the second. While substance is the most important thing from a pure game-design perspective, well-done substance is ineffective as a basis for a marketing campaign because it is impossible to perceive without playing the game for a good amount of time. Well-done style is immediately obvious to anyone who sees a screenshot. This is a major part of the reason that many games continue to have so much effort allocated into style development and graphics, even though these areas are ultimately less important than the underlying substance. Style sells the game to publisher and public, substance keeps people playing and puts you in the hall of fame. Intensity of Experience Versus Ease of Relation The more intense a simulated experience becomes, the more difficult it is to relate to. These two effects work against each other. The Sims is also a good example for demonstrating this. The subject matter of The Sims is so familiar and pedestrian that, before it went into production, it was thought by many to be a failure in the making. From one point of view, this seems logical. The game is about mundane tasks which we all deal with daily. Why would anyone want to play a game about something so boring?
The game ultimately became a huge hit for many reasons, but one of them is that the familiar nature of the subject matter makes it incredibly easy for us to subconsciously and effortlessly develop our own stories while playing the game, without even trying. This is such a powerful effect that, even though the subject matter of The Sims is generally quite pedestrian compared to most other games, gamers find it attractive because it's just so damn easy to relate to. The game is close to real life, which means it is about something more boring, but is more familiar, which makes it more powerful. The two effects, one towards intensity of experience, the other towards ease of relation, counterbalance each other. Design Methods Using Style and Substance An understanding of style and substance allows us to use some new methods of design analysis and creation. The first is style-stripped gameplay analysis. A great method to search for holes in a gameplay system is to mentally strip it of style. If you're making a shooter, imagine your characters as cylinders and gunfire as line traces. When you can do that, examine the gameplay system, determine where it is not generating good decisions, and fix the problem. This is a good method of analysis because it leaves the gameplay naked and deprives it of any crutch that our feelings towards the style might bring. The second method is substance-first design. Even though substance is more important, most games are designed style-first. The style act not just as a wrapper for the final product, but as a wrapper for the designer's thought process. Inspiration comes not in terms of abstract game elements, but of new story elements, new real-life things to place into the simulation, for which a substance system is then built. This is not necessarily a good or bad thing. Designing a game as a simulation can provide an excellent source of inspiration for new mechanisms and ideas, as arbitrary restrictions often do. Designers at Valve, during the development of the first Half-Life, found that artificial constraints placed on a level designer (such as a requirement to use a certain type of environmental effect) often spurred creativity and inspired new ideas. So it is with style and game design in general. The major problem with style-first design is that after some time, the designs all become too similar each other because they're all simulations of the same things. The style is decided upon and a simulation built before the substance gets tweaked. This means that the fundamentals of the games are all the same; they are just variations on one another. It is an interesting exercise to attempt to design a game, at least on paper, in a purely abstract way while avoiding all references to what the substance of the game represents in real life. Should one desire, one could find a style for the substance elements at the end of the design process, ultimately producing a complete game. My own paper experiments with substance-first design have revealed that it's a method of game design which is difficult to get used to, but can produce unique results. Designing substance-first removes all constraints and leaves us free to explore totally original gameplay mechanics. This is an extremely powerful method. Good, original gameplay systems are pure gold in today's game market. One could even go so far as to program an entire game free of style, using simple placeholder icons for art, in order to test substance game design ideas before deciding what the game will ultimately be about. Closing Thoughts An understanding of style and substance allows us to more systematically analyze our games from many perspectives, including decision-making, marketing, intended target demographics, immersion, emergent story creation, predefined story, familiarity versus intensity of experience, and methods of inciting emotions. This article clarifies the relationship between style and substance, it does not attempt to present methods of developing these elements. Actually creating good style and substance elements is an infinitely larger field of study, and is the subject of innumerable other articles. Understanding the relationship between style and substance, however, will help any game designer analyze and create games that much more effectively. ______________________________________________________ |
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