So you want to be a game designer (part 3 of many)
One of the most common mistakes I see novice designers make is that they don’t focus enough on making the game mechanics and the game narrative mesh well together. It was something that was mostly forgivable twenty or thirty years ago mostly due to technical limitations, but it severely hinders the flow and immersion of the game when it is done. This is the sort of thing that outside observers will typically remark on - pointing out how “video gamey” something is because it doesn’t model certain expectations in some way.
Here’s one example. At one point during development of the more recent Tomb Raider games, the designers needed to figure out how Lara would regain health that she had lost to combat or falling or traps or whatever. They debated whether she should find glowing health pickups (which would detract from the pseudo-realistic presentation and aesthetic), or finding medical kits (which would cause the players to question why there were medical kits buried in ancient tombs). At one point, they had actually decided that Lara would perform a gymnastics floor routine in place to heal from her injuries. Thankfully, that was also left on the cutting room floor. Eventually, they decided on the old standby of regenerating health instead. It still had the problem of hurting believability - why would Lara recover from bullet wounds simply by standing around? Nonetheless, it shipped that way because it was judged to be the solution that introduced the least problems compared to the problem it solved.
The important thing is to reinforce what the game’s narrative is about through the rules. It doesn’t have to be about the big story, but the rules and mechanics of the game should reinforce what is happening. The human brain sees these sorts of reinforcements and makes that ‘a ha!’ connection, even if it is subconscious. As a designer, you always want to leverage the existing knowledge in your player’s brain to your advantage, because it helps create believability and immersion by filling in the little mental gaps with their own knowledge of the topic.
The best place to look at this are games where there isn’t much more than the rules. No fancy graphics, no mini games, using only the rules and mechanics to show what the story is. This is harkens back to what I wrote about in [part 2 of “So You Want to be a Game Designer”] - play a lot of games. And I don’t just mean video games either, but board games and card games alike. Tabletop games especially are all about using mechanics to convey the narrative. Like this card, for example - it makes perfect sense. The demon grants three great benefits, but your doom draws closer with each benefit you take. This card tells its own story through its mechanics, and it feels exactly like an ordeal you would expect a wizard who has made a demonic bargain to go through.
As another example, let’s look at the game Robo Rally. It’s a fairly simple game - you have a map and pieces. Each player controls a robot and they are trying to reach a certain location. So how does it work? Each player puts down a series of instructions for his or her robot to follow - sequentially. But other things can happen during the game. The robots can run into each other, or get knocked out of position. They can fall into hazards, or other things can happen. But their players can’t instantly course-correct, because the robots are simple creatures that only run their commands sequentially. So if something happens to the robot that would put it out of position, it will continue executing its orders to the best of its ability, even if that means trying to run into a wall, or going the wrong way.
This makes a ton of intuitive sense to anyone who’s tried to tell a robot what to do. If you replaced the robots with mice, soldiers, unicorns, or some other creature, it wouldn’t make as much intuitive sense to the player. Why would a vampire run into a wall? Constructing a narrative of robots going haywire and bumping into each other works hand-in-hand with the mechanics of the game. It makes it much more intuitive because it relies on the understanding the player brings regarding robots.
This concept also works against you when mechanics and rules fight against the intuition, which breaks immersion quite easily. If you’ve played Final Fantasy XII, you may have felt it yourself. Over the course of the game, the characters level up and earn experience points which can be spent acquiring “licenses” to use items and equipment. But that breaks all sorts of intuitive sense when your character can’t even wear something like a leather hat, or a cotton shirt without spending license points to obtain the license for it.
Blending the game’s narrative and mechanics is one of the things that separates the armchair designer from a real designer. It’s incredibly easy to be just read about it and be critical about them, but much more difficult coming up with narratively-consistent elegant solutions of your own. How would you go about creating a game mechanic that properly expresses a specific and abstract concept, like speed or heat? How do you make a dragon seem large and dangerous if your game doesn’t have a concept of combat?
As a homework assignment, you should think about trying to come up with game mechanics that can be used in a limited environment (think board or card game) to express narrative concepts like:
Once you come up with something, try playing it. See if you can make it work. Which mechanics worked? Which didn’t? Can they be improved? These are all extremely valuable skills for any game designer to have, no matter what sort of game you’re working on.
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