Justin Achilli

I just wanted to play with the blocks! Now I feel like I'm not doing what I'm supposed to be doing if I don't make some use of everything.Don't.

I'm serious, don't.

Rare is the game to which the solution is "put more stuff in it."

Your game may need better design, you may need to spend more time on your designs, but you definitely don't need more stuff in your game (particularly if you need better design or more time spent on your designs...).

Scope is precious in games design. Indeed, most games — if not all, I'll go ahead and say it — should have reined in their scope before they went to press or shipped gold.

For most designers, this is antithetical thinking. Whether hubris, inexperience, or unmitigated love of the genre, they want to make one enormous game that is all things to everyone, with a feature set that keeps players coming back year after year, level after level, to plumb another facet of their grail-game, to master another aspect of their unending mine of entertainment.

It's no coincidence that the solitary resource that a game can demand of its audience — time — is a precious commodity for designers, too. All of your ideas simply won't fit into your design by your launch or print time. Those ideas may or may not even have any place in the greater game you're designing, so taking time away from the features that do fit is doing them a disservice. (Brenda Brathwaite has an article about the time constraints of design, while we're talking about it.)

A simpler feature is easier to understand and easier to use. The fewer restrictions you place on a function, the broader its application it is and the more creatively players will find a way to use it.

The Bejeweled minigame in Lineage II both breaks immersion and distracts players from each other.In video games, overdesign sometimes results in feature bloat. The extraneous feature feels tacked on, or it's hard to find a thematic fit for the feature in the game in question. The Bejeweled-type minigame in Lineage II, for example — what's it doing there? It's a time waster, sure, and a great casual game... but time I'm spending playing the minigame is time I'm not spending forming and exploring relationships with other people, which is the entire point of MMOs. TetraMaster, likewise, feels out of place in the Final Fantasy games, because it's something outside the world. It's a fine side game, and putting Final Fantasy flourishes on it adds a bit of recognition and fun, but the idea of killing monsters and having them drop cards of themselves is boggling.

In tabletop games, overdesign sometimes manifests as "supplement-itis." It's a bit more of a problem at the tabletop, too, because every user doesn't just patch his client to ensure version compatibility with the other players. If I'm playing D&D and I don't have the book that defines swift actions, I might not be playing with rules that work the same way yours do. If we're playing Vampire: The Requiem and I have the rules for a bloodline that you've never seen before, we're going to have a game experience that loses something in the disparity. The benefit of tabletop games is that they have a living, creatively thinking arbiter running things, but what if she doesn't have all the supplements herself? And of course, these are gross examples, and wholly subjective. As well, they're games published by publishing companies whose business is selling books, not making sure your game is consistent.

Ultimately, when you're making a game for play on a computer or around a tabletop, you need to ask yourself, "Does my game need this?" If your answer is no or, worse, you find yourself trying to convince yourself that, yes, your game does need this, it's best to leave it on the cutting room floor.

As a coda to the merit of leaving things out, remember the beauty of broad strokes. If you leave something out or undetailed, the thing that occupies that space in your players' imagination is always going to be richer and more evocative than what you ultimately show them. Remember the man behind the curtain in Oz? As well, something that's not predetermined can be used in a creative new way, meaning you'll have the joy of seeing emergent gameplay happen and seeing the way playing your game lets the players synthesize their experiences into something of their own communal creation.

So, to follow up from the last blog entry, I want a solution to the problem of not wanting to read text dumps that break me out of the immersive game experience. But first, some caveats:

• Not everyone cares, as evidenced by some of the comments in the previous entry. Ethan, for example, doesn't mind the text method of communicating information.
• Not every game needs to worry about this. Games that don't rely heavily on the world don't have to bend over backward to convey that minimal world, and would indeed be worse off of they did. You don't need a cutscene in Tetris.

Look at that beautiful, subdued color palette. Why are you fighting the colossi? You never learn whether your actions are "white" or "black" — your motivation is similarly murky.With those two points in mind, how do you convey a world without a wall of text assaulting the player for 9999 damage? Before we get into specific techniques or game devices, let's talk about what we're trying to accomplish in a game. The enjoyment of a game is an emotional response. Specifically, in a "dense" game environment like an RPG, we're probably talking about having fun with other people (in a tabletop RPG or MMO environment) or triumph over adversity (in a single-player CRPG as well as tabletop and MMO RPGs). That is, the goal is the feel of playing the game, not the volume of information conveyed. (You can find more information on this particular theory of fun at XEODesign.)

With that in mind, two of my favorite adages become useful. Oh, hello, my darling soapboxes.

Work In Broad Strokes

Detail is the enemy. "Presenting information" doesn't have to mean "presenting a shitload of information." Building a world intended to provoke an emotional response is more like impressionism than classicism. We don't need every detail to let us feel — we only need to understand what you as a designer want us to feel. "The armor and architecture of this region allude to a rising trend toward empire" is enough to go on, provided you support us with cool art and evocative content. You don't need to break into an aside with 750 words about the accomplishments of the past four imperialistic kings whose actions have no bearing on the events of the game. Unless the goal of your game is completist world creation — which isn't eminently playable, so maybe a game isn't the best vehicle for such an undertaking — the aside runs the risk of pulling the player away.

The details exist to communicate the game experience, not usurp it.

Paragons of the broad-strokes method include Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Bioshock. D&D 4e rediscovered the joys of broad-strokes content, too. Sure, they have a ton of written support, but all of that support is very granular. I remember working on 3e projects that jumped through hoops to pack in masses of content, and 4e's efforts to fit core ideas on, at most, a two-page spread is refreshing. It gives me the room to create the emotional response I want without having to contradict something written somewhere that has thus created a certain player expectation.

Let the Player Do It

An amazingly powerful playable history sequence that epitomized the key moral story in Final Fantasy VII's world.In a game, I want to be playing. I don't necessarily have to save the world or have my character be a unique snowflake, but I do want my experience to be the core of the game. That is, all your world-built background information is meaningless if it doesn't have any relevance to what I'm doing and then let me do it. Games exist to be played, and the choices made in their context are the heart of the medium. So if history is important, let me play through a flashback sequence or pull me into a instance that lets me be a part of that history. Even if the end is a foregone conclusion, I will have at least played the history, as opposed to have been historied at. The player is an active participant, not a passive consumer.

Some of Dragon Age's content does this very well. The DLC that includes the recapture of Soldier's Peak has ghosts of the past replaying their doomed last stand, which communicates the world's history while allowing the player to participate in game activity. The flashbacks in Final Fantasy VII did this as well. For Vampire, the Transylvania Chronicles allow players to be present at key Kindred events, but the implementation was a bit heavy-handed and railroaded the players, so beware the pitfalls of having the players do it. Players need to be able to make meaningful decisions, which should have been emphasized more in the Transylvania Chronicles, for example.

Next time: Specific techniques.