Game Design Workshop Notes & Thoughts: Chapter 2

The Structure of Games

Louis Chan

I believe all people who want to become game designers, including me, love playing video games and dream to make our own games in the future and publish them. Before starting to make a game, we have to know what are the elements that construct them and the corresponding utility.

The structure of games can be varied from one genre to another to make them different forms of entertainment. However, there are elements that almost every game shares in common that allow us to recognize them as games. Now, I am going to share the teardown analysis of the structure of games to reveal working definitions on the elements that make up the essence of games.

Players

How players might join or start the game (single, multi-player).

Objectives

The specific goal for the players.

Procedures

The actions or methods of play allowed by the rules (linear, non-linear approach, sandbox, etc.).

Rules

What objects the game consists of and what the players can and cannot do; clarify what happens in various situations that might arise (if … happens, then …).

Resources

These objects made valuable because they can help the players achieve their goals, but they are scarce in the system meanwhile, so players need to find or fight for them and manage them.

Conflict

The relationship creates between the objectives of the players and the rules and procedures limiting and guiding behavior, which the players work to resolve in their own favor.

Boundaries

Rules that apply to a temporary world rather than the ordinary world, bound players in the game’s verisimilitude emotionally (or physically too with VR equipment).

Outcome

The key motivator for the players. If they can anticipate the outcome completely, it will result in stopping playing. Because games depend on uncertainty of measurable outcome in every play for their dramatic tension, and players invest their emotions in that uncertainty.

It can also differ from the physical objects, such as the moral and sensation rewards: what will happen if fewer enemies the player killed, the emotional reward, etc.

Undertale

Every game is a closed formal system, all the elements are interrelated and integrated to engage players in structured conflicts.

Engage the Players

The learning process of players is from the challenges that fit the learning curve that players will find challenging in the beginning, learn from it, master what was acquired, and overcome it. Then, a new challenge that requires a new learning curve appears. This repeats till the end of the game to keep the player in a pleasurably challenging state of flow so that players will not be frustrated or think it is too easy and then move on.

Conflicts also challenge the players, creating tension as they work to resolve problems, as well as creating varying levels of achievement or frustration, which requires a balance of emotional responses to the amount of challenge.

Play

Play is the amount of movement that is allowed for the players to make by sticking with the core experience, procedures and rules

The Premise of the Game

Before players start playing the game, some formal elements to create engagement (i.e. in Monopoly, players are each landlords, buying, selling, and developing valuable pieces of real estate in an effort to become the richest player in the game).

Character

The agents for the players to empathize and engage with the situation and live vicariously through their efforts, or vessels for their own participation, entry points to experience situations and conflicts.

Story

Story differs from premise in its narrative qualities, a premise doesn't need to go anywhere from where it begins, when stories unfold from the premise with the game. Also, stories need to be integrated into gameplay to create powerful emotional results, and dramatic elements in stories can create scenes that increase player engagement and even meaningful gameplay experience.

Above are the formal elements that play an essential structural function in traditional game systems, however, to seek innovation, it requires going beyond these basic elements and exploring new forms of interactivity that lie at the edge of games.

Tron: Legacy (2010)

End Note

The entire purpose of games is to engage players, without players, they have no reason to exist. To achieve that, games need to involve players in a conflict that is structured by their formal and dramatic elements.

Games challenge players to accomplish their objectives while following rules and procedures that make it difficult to do so. In single-player, this challenge can come from the system itself, while in multiplayer games it can come from the system, from their players, or from both.

There are still areas that are left in shadow to be discovered which might lead to the next generation of games, and knowing these can be a launchpad for the expedition into the world of designing games to push the envelope and transport players beyond their imagination.