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 Features
How
Long Until You Die?
Welcome
to the first Rules of the Game. What we're going to do here, every other
week from now until my digital death, is to explore a different element
of basic game design. We're going to pull it apart, think about it, and
figure out all its implications, so that the texture mapping out there
is actually being wrapped around something fun. What a concept, huh?
So let's
kick it off with a really fun topic: death. One of the first decisions
we need to make is how quickly we bump players off for the first time.
Do we let them play for a while, slowly building up the pace and challenge,
or do we throw them into a world of heart-thumping danger and get the
adrenaline charge pumped up quick? When you strip away the specifics of
the game, you're really doing two things with that first decision: teaching
and motivation.
The Hard Lessons of Life and Death
Usually the thing you're doing the first time you knock off your player
is teaching them the rules of the game. "Don't jump far enough and pfft."
In the old arcade game Jungle King, you sat on a branch and watched a
vine swing toward you. If you pushed your only button at the wrong time,
you fell with a thump and were finished. A quick and painful lesson. Of
course the other way to teach that same lesson is to force the player
to do a long, dull climb back up the tree. This is teaching with frustration,
and tends to work better when you are designing games for kids or consultants.
(For both groups time is a coin they don't mind wasting.)
The "Oh Yeah!" School of Hard Knocks
The other thing you're doing when you use the quick death is setting the
challenge. You're trying to elicit the "Oh yeah? We'll see about that."
response in the player. Interestingly enough, this works better with hard
core game playing boys, (which, let's face it, most of the people reading
this are), than it does with mass market players or women in general.
Mass market players, people who haven't grown up playing games, tend to
get overwhelmed and discouraged much more quickly. They also represent
the biggest growing segment of people who might buy your games, so it's
better not to piss 'em off.
Women, in general, also react badly to the quick and early death. They
tend to throw up their hands, look at the boy who's trying to show them
how cool this game is, say "This is stupid" and never play the game again.
The Solutions: Success Time and Infinite Time
If you think about it, a game is like a novel. If you can get people to
read a few pages, you can usually get them sucked in. So how do you invite
people in for that first bit? The games that have been most successful
with women over the years have been games like Tetris and Centipede, both
games that taught for their first couple of minutes with success and an
increasing pace. You can screw up the first four to six rows of Tetris
and still recover, and things go slow enough in the beginning that you
get a chance to figure out what's going on. It's increasing the pace as
the game goes on that provides the challenge. This is a trick found in
the first couple of generations of games that seems to have disappeared
from our current design vocabulary. It's probably a lesson worth learning
again.
The other old trick that is a great solution to the initial success problem
goes back to the pinball days and a game called Black Knight. It's the
concept of infinite regeneration for a few minutes in the beginning of
a game. In Black Knight, the first couple of minutes every ball that would
get drained would pop back up. It prevented the painful frustration of
putting in a quarter and having bad luck suck your ball in the first bounce.
It also helped people get the rhythm of the game before it "cost" them
anything.
Take Away Time
The bottom line is that the best way to hook a large market into your
game is with a little bribe called success. If you make those first few
moments filled with why to live, rather than how to die, you're much more
likely to suck people into your game.
Unemployed with a Theater Degree from Brandeis back in 1984, Ben Calica
has been making a living in the computer and gaming business in various
incarnations since then, Including: Founding Editor of New Media Magazine,
First Toys Editor for Wired, one of the few single boys to write for Parents
Magazine. Product Manager for the multimedia authoring system, SuperCard
Director of Production for CyberFlix; (design credits on Lunicus, Creepy
Castle, and conceptual design for Skull Cracker) Product Manger for the
ill-fated modem for the Sega Genesis, the Edge, for AT&T [which, by
the way, we decided stood for All Tiny Testi---maybe I'd better tell that
another time]; Worked for NeXT long enough to get into real good argument
with Steve Jobs; And recently was the guy behind Apple Game Sprockets...
He did a bunch of work on interactive drama (wrote script for MacWorld
CD-ROM game of the year in 1993), before he decided it just didn't work.
Spends a lot of free time now lecturing on multi-player/virtual world
stuff. For a day job he works as Director of Product Development for ThinkFish,
an artistic rendering company that recently merged with Viewpoint Datalabs.
He could show you the secret desktop software he's working on, but then
he'd have to kill you.
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