The Developer of Attack of the Paper Zombies Talks About His Process For Innovative Game Design

Alex talks about his process for innovative game design

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Guest Post: Defining the Art of Games

The question of games being an art form has ensued for quite a while, but things really began to boil after movie critic Roger Ebert’s comments on the topic. Since that time, every artist, person who cares about games, and person who despises games has pitched their two cents on the subject. The polarized reaction to the debate shows perfectly the misunderstanding people have on the industry and where it’s going. Some have compared games to comic books, some have compared God of War to the Mona Lisa, and some have dismissed the importance of the debate altogether.

Out of the gate, I want to convey to you just how important this topic is. If we decide (and prove with our games) that video games are an art form, the industry is going to go down a completely different path than if we decide games are to be defined as the childish activity so many people see today (many argue that is what happened to comic books). I am not saying that if games are art, every game twenty years from now is going to be an interactive story like Heavy Rain, and that there will be no room in the market for your Halo or Gears of War. In fact, I don’t even see Heavy Rain as art! Rather, the industry will be very balanced, much like the film industry; both Inception and King’s Speech were nominated for picture of the year, and millions of people both watched and enjoyed both films. But we do not need to copy other art forms’ definitions and label them games’. An art game doesn’t mean a game with lots of metaphors, cutscenes, and no action (or fun). That is not what makes games art.

In many people’s defense of video games as an art, they have cited things such as the beautiful cities of Assassin’s Creed, the brilliant writing of Red Dead: Redemption, and the meaningful stories of Mass Effect 2. They have stated that, yes, it takes only one artist to make a painting, but sometimes tens (if not hundreds) to make a game. They have stated that while a movie usually has under one thousand lines of dialogue, Mass Effect 2 had 130,000. Yes, it takes artists and writers (both artists in their own fields) to make video games, but that doesn’t make video games art! I saw a painting in the museum level of Uncharted 2, and while the painting was a work of art, that didn’t make the game art! These arguments come from people (many of us, by the looks of it) who don’t understand what art is, which is understandable, because the idea of a new art form is so alien to us. The newest form of art (besides comic books, which are not considered art by many) is the film, and that was nearly one hundred years ago. It is time we looked deep into what art is, and what it means.

The main criteria of an art form – it must interact with a person’s deep self, including both senses and emotions, in a way specific to that medium. Paintings and photographs interact through pictures with a person’s emotions, but mostly sight, as one’s eyes move across the varying lines, giving an overall sense of beauty as the colors, shapes, and lines create balance, proportion, rhythm, unity, emphasis, etc. Literature interacts through the written word with a person’s imagery and many emotions. Music, through sound, plays off of our sense of rhythm and beat, along with sometimes telling a story and striking a chord with our emotions. Food interacts through taste and smell, among other things. Film interacts, much like photography, only with moving shots, series of pictures. So what is the point of games?

Video games are not solely what you see, hear, taste, smell, feel, or think – the point of video games is what you do in them – they interact through play. The gameplay, an interaction model between mechanics, your actions, and the game’s response are how games, this new art form, interact with the player. This is hard to visualize at first, as nearly all games are not in any sense of the word art, and many of those that are weakly and minimally match the description.

Recently, the game Heavy Rain was hailed as being the most artistic game to date and the grandest example of what games can be, but for what reason? Yes, the game had a good story, and yes, it looked good, but these things are nonessential as to whether a game is a work of art or not. That is measured by what you do in the game, but what you did was so heavily restricted due to the story that was trying to be told. If anything, you are supposed to base the story off the game (gameplay), not the gameplay off the story! Upon saying this, the game did make some progress to art. The drug problems one of the characters faced required you to succumb to addiction was interesting, and forced you to see something, drug addiction, that can only be truly seen through the eyes of an addict, THROUGH GAMEPLAY. And the game did push the boundaries in terms of stories that games can tell, with themes of child abduction, prostitution, drug use, etc. And I am not eating my words here – the story doesn’t make art. But for games to be an art form, there cannot be limitations placed on them, dictating what they can/can’t cover (Michelangelo did not have the Italian Censorship Board hide certain parts of his creation). At points, I think the game took itself too seriously, and throughout, the game was too focused on story and being artistic. But why am I addressing this game? I do not want doomsayers to point to this game and shout, “Every game will be like this in twenty years!” When I say games can be art, I do not mean they will be boring (in terms of gameplay)! There are some really great examples of games as an art form – some of which you may not have considered before.

The game Missile Command, released in 1980, is one of the greatest examples of meaningful gameplay. Escapist’s Extra Credits recently did a show on this topic. You are given three bases, and must defend six cities. You must defend these cities and your bases from the nuclear bombs raining down from above. There comes a point when you must decide how to play – do you focus your efforts on defending one city, on saving humanity? Do you try your hardest to protect everyone, no matter the risk? Do you value a base, needed to defend all of the cities, over one city? The moral dilemma isn’t presented as a good/evil choice to be solved with a selection, rather you play it out, sometimes unaware at first that the game’s strategy is actually how you solve the dilemma. The game has a lot to say about the destruction of war and inevitability of death, all though play, not graphics, sound, or story. Its purpose could not have been conveyed like this through the written word, music, or picture. This is a work which could only have been made as a game.

Text adventure Photopia, released in 1999, emphasizes the innocence of a young girl through play (***SPOILERS***). In one level, you play as the girl’s father, answering her curious questions about life, the universe, and everything. In another level, you play as a character in a story the young girl is telling a child while babysitting, playing through a story only a child could tell – a beach made of gold coins, etc. The first level of the game was played through the POV of a man in the back of a truck being driven by a drunk man, before it crashes. Later, you play as an unknown man in a hospital, after surviving a car accident, learning that a girl also in the car was killed. In the pivotal level, you play as a man driving the girl home after she babysat you young child, and, in my experience, I realized as I was driving that the girl was going to die while I was driving. I did the obvious thing: I entered “brake”. I halted in the middle of an intersection. A car slammed into me, killing the girl while I would survive. The guilt I felt at that point is unrivaled for me today, even in real life. That guilt could only be felt through the art of the game, and the anger I felt toward the drunk driver, who destroyed the young girl whose innocence was built upon the entire game, is only rivaled through actual events. This game is not a story, nor a song, nor a movie – it is a game, and only a game.

A more popular example of art in games is Half Life 2, released in 2004.You begin the game in City 17, just one of the many places dominated by the totalitarian rule. In the beginning, you meet people who have gone insane. You watch as a guard beats a person, and if you interfere, you are next to be beaten. You are defenseless and have no weapon. Walking around a city square, everyone you talk to is afraid, hushing you, glancing behind themselves for cameras. A guard forces you to pick up a can and throw it away. And in the middle of the square: a huge video screen, broadcasting the leader filling minds with propaganda. On your return to the square, after starting a revolution, a group of the very people who were too afraid to speak to you tears down the video screen, cheering as the dust settles, and later joining you. The people under the chains of the rule and their own fear start out on their own and unmotivated, but later group together and help you fight off their suppressors, a team. This is just one of the things in the game that shine through the game through play (I could do a whole article on just this one game as a piece of art).

All of these games are games. They are not stories told as games, or movies gameified. They are games, and they all influence people’s thought/emotion/senses. They are all art, and there are many more (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Silent Hill come to mind first). But what about the games that aren’t art? What about your Call of Duty’s and Super Mario Galaxy’s? These games are not art, but they are still great games and they are still very fun. It is vital that people know that games can be art, but there is no way that all games will be art at any point in the future. Just look at other forms of art. Star Wars is the favorite movie franchise of millions (it’s probably the most loved movie franchise ever), but I do not consider it art. Most movies are not art, but that doesn’t make Star Wars any worse than Schindler’s List! Both kinds of movies can coexist in the same medium, and the same is true for games.

And to game designers, the artists of the video game medium: design your game almost solely with what the player will do in mind. The story, music, graphics, etc. all improve the game, but do not make it. Heavy Rain was obviously designed with the story in mean, leading to boring and meaningless (at times) gameplay. Designers can come up with a great idea for a game system through an idea for a story or setting, but if the gameplay just serves as an excuse to make that story a game and cannot survive on its own, there is no real point to the game, whether the designers are trying to make art or just fun. For this reason, I believe that Heavy Rain should have been a novel or a film (probably a novel), as the gameplay did not really enhance the experience – it is like any other movie-game, only with a higher budget.

This extreme focus on the DO in games, on the definition of games, opens the doors wide open for new kinds of games that we have yet to discover past the clichés of many recent games and of works of other media. Before making a game, ask yourself whether the game would be bettered by the fact that it is a game, that the game is a game, and could not exist as any other form of entertainment.

So yes, games can be art, but no, not all games are, and we have just begun our course of discovering just how PLAY can be utilized to do things that no other media can, to express ideas that have never been so clearly presented, to make us feel and think things that we have not even imagined yet. The future is bright for the medium with the interaction of the highest potential – not words, not sounds, not movement, not taste, not visuals, but PLAY. Now excuse me, I’ve got some Bulletstorm to play.

Dylan Woodbury lives with his family in Southern California. He runs http://dtwgames.com, a game design website that posts intriguing new articles every week, both beginner’s tutorials and theoretical ideas. He also has an interest in writing, and is planning his first novel. His primary goal is to change the world through video games.

Guest Post: Design in Games – Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 is an online, multiplayer, team-based, first-person shooter made by Valve. It has sold very well, and is still played obsessively by people around the globe. If you haven’t played it, you can buy it off steam for $20.00 (trust me, it’s worth it by far).

From first glance, the game looks pretty normal. On the most popular mode, capture the flag, the users are split into two teams of players, and the players can choose what class they want. The goal is to get the intelligence (the flag) from deep within the opposite base, and to bring it back. First person to do this three times wins. But there’s more than what meets the eye.

First, let me go over the classes. A scout is really fast, but weak. A soldier is really slow, does not have a large blast radius, but shoots deadly missiles. A pyro is quick and shoots wide-spread Team Fortress 2fire, which stays on player. A heavy is very slow, but has rapid fire (powerful with time). A demoman shoots bombs and can lay booby traps with sticky bombs, but has no real gun. A sniper… snipes, but has low health and has no weapon for close range. The medic can heal others and can give the team a power up after enough healing. Finally, the spy can become invisible, back-stab for an instant kill, disguise self as part of other team, and can take out sentries. Sentries, automatic weapons, are made by the engineer, who can also make health dispensers and teleporters, but isn’t powerful by himself.

The aspect which made the design innovative and addicting is the teamwork involved. Each class has very strong and very weak points, which forces players to not become the same thing, as death would follow. That’s the first layer of the teamwork.

The strategies which come out of this, all of which require teamwork, make the game very fun. For example, many times, an engineer will set up a powerful automatic gun, a sentry, in theMedic and Soldier Working Together sewers (basement) of the enemy base. With him, a powerful gunner (a heavy) will defend the engineer until the gun, health dispenser, and teleportation system are in place, which is when the whole team can teleport over and attack in a wave from below.

Often times, a sniper and demoman work together (whether they know it or not). A demoman can lay sticky bombs on the bridge between the two bases and blow them up when people cross to their side. From above, a sniper picks off enemies while the demoman is resetting his/her bombs. That is one way into the base which has been pretty much shut down.

Sentry guns play a vital role in the game, as they are pretty tough to destroy and impossible to get around. Many times, a medic will heal people until the bar is full. At that point, he/she will find a powerful gunner (soldiers are good, as they can shoot accurate and very powerful shots) and make him/her invincible long enough to take out the sentry.

All this teamwork and setting up can take place in the chat, but it is usually understood what needs to be done, which really makes you feel as though you are a single team, not a bunch of guys going on killing sprees who happen to be wearing the same color.

I am surprised that this kind of teamwork hasn’t been used more in video games after this game. Most co-op games have two characters who have the same (or near the same) abilities, and while they may rely on the other for healing, real teamwork is multiple people working together, as Team Fortress 2 does.

The beautiful thing about Team Fortress 2 is that teamwork isn’t mandatory. Double DashAnything mandatory in games is better left out, as it detracts from the players’ freedom and overall experience. They could have made a rule that if someone doesn’t work with someone else every minute, the entire team is stunned for 30 seconds, but the teamwork isn’t organic! The organic teamwork is created because it is necessary, not mandatory. Players will realize them not sticking together and not coordinating their moves will result in losing. They make the choice to work together, and the teamwork becomes a strategy and a choice, not a problem. Choices, as seen where there is no teamwork rule, are more fun and interesting than problems, as seen where working together is mandatory, as a general rule, but that’s a discussion for another day.

So, play the game, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. There are more modes which also organically create teamwork, such as freeze tag (you must stick together so you can unfreeze teammates) and capture points (in which you must split up into waves to conquer completely different areas on the map. There a few more that I won’t mention as well.

In conclusion, not requiring teamwork, but making teamwork the optimal strategy is what makes teamwork in games fun, and gives you a sense of freedom and payoffs after your strategy justTeam Fortress 2 Teamwork put your team ahead. One way to make teamwork the optimal strategy is to vary the abilities, strengths, and weaknesses of the different players, and to create these abilities together with the goal of making each one important in one way or another. Also, make sure there is no optimal strategy (other than to work together). For example, if doctors couldn’t make their people invincible and spies couldn’t zap sentries, it would be pretty much impossible to destroy sentries. The balance of the game tips to the side of the engineers who make the sentries, and suddenly almost everyone is an engineer, as that is the optimal strategy. At that point, teamwork and coordinating attacks are thrown overboard, and everyone will focus on building sentries. Then you lose the teamwork, the fun, of the game.

I could have gone deeper into this, but I’ll leave the other aspects of the teamwork inside Team Fortress 2 for you to analyze and discover for yourself (the only real way to learn). After you’ve played it (if you can; not necessary), try coming up with your own game in which teamwork is necessary, not mandatory. If you send me your idea under Contact and Submission, I’ll read it over and give you some feedback. Good luck! I’m gonna go eat a sandvich now.

Dylan Woodbury lives with his family in Southern California. He runs http://dtwgames.com, a game design website that posts intriguing new articles every week, both beginner’s tutorials and theoretical ideas. He also has an interest in writing, and is planning his first novel. His primary goal is to change the world through video games.

Guest Post: Backtracking and Non-Essential Areas

For a very long time, backtracking has been seen as a cheap way to lengthen games. If you are out of time, money, or story, you have a twitching desire to send the player back to places they have already visited to find something you couldn’t get to or do the first time around(Retro did this with missile expansions in the Metroid Prime series).

This type of backtracking really crushes the freedom the player is supposed to have – if he/she wants to explore, he/she will. Forcing theplayer to do things not essential to the main path down the middle of the game will make the experience less enjoyable. However forceful backtracking can be a good thing if used correctly.

The weak kind of backtracking ruins games. In Metroid Prime: Corruption, near the end, you come to a door that requires six or so missile expansions to open. You have to go to old areas you have already visited and devour them for missile expansions and doors that were locked the first time you walked by them.

You even have to defeat some enemies and puzzles you beat the first time. This is terrible design. The weak explanation as to why you need to backtrack (you need six missiles to open this door, the five you have won’t cut it) ruins the player’s suspension of disbelief.

Not only is the suspension of disbelief hurt, but so is the eagerness of the player. When forcing a backtracking segment, no new challenges are thrown at the player! The learning curve and pacing that has carried the player throughout the game is suddenly cut and halted until you find these missile expansions.

In addition to that, frustration consumes the player, who has no clear objective and path to the objective, an important rule in game design. This point in Metroid Prime: Corruption is where I stopped playing for months.

The truth is: if the player wanted to explore, he/she would have! If you allow the player to either charge through the level or check every nook and cranny, the players who just want to advance

the story do so, and those who want to explore the world do so.

And not everyone feels the same way throughout the game! By leaving the option open for the player to choose, everyone has a lot more fun.

When I played Fallout 3, there were times where I scoured areas for little things to do, and there were times I put the blinders up and went straight forward, depending on how I felt (self-adjusted pacing). The game allowed me to do what I wanted to do, what would be the most fun for me during that playing session.

Games like Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 2 take the opposite approach of Metroid Prime: Corruption(although, Corruption didn’t have THAT many extra places to explore). By exploring the worlds ofMass Effect 2 or meeting all the deranged survivors of Fallout 3, the player can nearly DOUBLE his/her playtime! That is a whole lot of extra content.

But another important detail – Fallout 3and Mass Effect 2 didn’t really need to force you to backtrack anyways to see all there was to see: the worlds were so interesting that I actually WANTED to see what there was to do.

And honestly, if these two games forced me to explore and find hidden collectables in far reach corners of levels, I wouldn’t have wanted to explore! At that point, it is not really exploration – the best kind of exploration in games doesn’t force you to do so (but I’ll save that for another article).

It’s like the things I say in these parentheses: you don’t actually have to read them – they are just asides! But you read them anyways (at least I hope you are, or my point will be severely weakened). If I, however, told you before the article started that I was going to test you afterwards on what was written in the parentheses, the reading would have become a task!The same goes for extra, non-essential areas in videogames.

By not forcing you to talk to the wounded alien leaning against the wall, the designers are actually forcing you to talk to him.

There are more benefits to adding extra content to a game, too. Even though it costs more money, you are making each gamer’s experience that much greater when they find or do something that none of their friends even heard of before.

The player gets a grand sense of accomplishment upon discovering something new that he/she knows (or at least believes) very few people have discovered. All gamers have this strange belief that they are somehow better than any other gamer (we gamers are of an egotistical breed).
Extra content also personalizes the experience of the player. When the game is complete, the player has something he/she can look back on, something different than what any other player experienced. This story is his/her story, and I believe part of Fallout 3’s glory lies in the stories people told after playing the game.

Before I got to play it, I heard accounts of people stealing carrots and facing a wave of enemies, running into a shop, only to have the monster come in after you, only things that players experienced by exploring and experimenting, using their imagination. And these individual experiences motivated the players to explore even more (and it motivated me to play the game, along with many others)!
It is true that cutting non-essential areas and events build up the cost of the game, but think about what it adds to the experience by KEEPING IT NON-ESSENTIAL!

And when the player is done with the game, he/she will know that lots of content went undiscovered, leading to a HUGE replay value. In some of the best video games, the player asks what if questions (What if I had shot the sheriff? What if I went down that other hallway?) – that is a sign of good replay value and a good game, if the player is already having the desire to replay the game after the first level.

Plus you add all the role-playing elements to games likeFallout 3 and Mass Effect 2, and you have a GINORMOUS game, which you could play in many ways, with different goals, with different focuses on the characters and your stats.

So if you want to force exploration on the player to make him/her explore all of the world you created, DON’T! You will make it more special to the players who actually want to explore the world you created (and if it is as good as you believe, they will; forceful exploration is a band aid over faults of a dull story, world, characters, etc.).

You should only use backtracking if it is necessary in giving the player a strong set of emotions or a new, truly unique challenge. Lets say you go through a thriving village on the way to a mountain. On the mountain, you cause a landslide, blocking the river that used to run to the village you went through. If the designer forces you to go back through the village, seeing  the thirsty young children, the fishers out of work, the bakers whose bakeries ran on the power of a waterwheel will make you feel (in this case, guilt, or maybe even regret).
Forcing the player to retrace his steps can be a good thing if the challenge has changed in someway, too. Maybe the street of the woman you just robbed is now crawling with FBI, or you now have a tool that completely flips the whole dynamic of the level on its head.

Simply, something needs to have changed since the last time you were there, something major. Otherwise, it is just a waste of time, and will be regarded as such. Backtracking used correctly can wow the gamer, making him/her see the level (in terms of gameplay or world) in a way he/she didn’t see the first time.

There is a huge difference between games that have too little content, and too much content. Games that force you to go back through levels, looking for things or separate areas you missed the first, are weak, and their designers are lazy.

Games that allow you to go through non-essential areas at your discretion are strong in this aspect, and their designers (and producers) should be hailed for understanding the necessity for spending extra money to make extra content that they don’t really need. If Metroid Prime: Corruption did not force you to go back through areas you already went through, it would have been a better game.

By including a block in the game, it forced the players who were not intrigued enough with the world and story to spend some more time in the same areas, while giving the players who actually cared, the completionists and those who had been sucked into the world of Metroid, the green light to even more content. Logical?

Dylan Woodbury lives with his family in Southern California. He runs http://dtwgames.com, a game design website that posts intriguing new articles every week, both beginner’s tutorials and theoretical ideas. He also has an interest in writing, and is planning his first novel. His primary goal is to change the world through video games.

Vanessa and Her Nightmare, Best Game Design Winner at IndiePub Contest

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The Fun and Challenges of Building a Successful Tank MMO

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MusiGames, The Challenges of Starting a Game Studio in South America

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A Philosophical FPS — Hazard, The Journey Of Life

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Gaia Online VP Talks About The Mix of Marketing and Gaming

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Dust Force, The Sacrifices Needed to Win the $100,000 Indie Prize

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