The History of Creativity in Game Design | The Evolution of Genres, and Innovation in Video Games

Summary

This enlightening exploration of creativity in game design delves into the historical evolution of genres and innovations in video games. Beginning with simple mechanics like difficulty progression in 'Space Invaders', the narrative journeys through monumental game designs, systems, and influential titles that have shaped the modern gaming landscape. It highlights the cycles of innovation through mistakes, blending of ideas, and cross-genre fusions that continue to define new gaming experiences. The text underscores the necessity for a diverse and collaborative community to foster creativity, tackling the importance of shared knowledge and interdisciplinary approaches in advancing gaming as an artistic and experiential medium.

Highlights

• 'Space Invaders' unknowingly birthed the concept of increased difficulty and pacing due to hardware flaws! 🎮
• A.I. directors in games like 'Alien Isolation' change the difficulty based on player tension levels! 🤖
• 'Pac-Man' introduced power-ups affecting game dynamics, influencing countless games to follow! 🌟
• Modern game design owes much to historical transitions, blending old ideas into new genres! 🔄
• The arcade era gave way to composite and set-piece eras, marking stages of game evolution. 🎰
• Innovative gameplay often reuses past mechanics, crafting new experiences through creative fusions! 🌌
• Impactful games like 'ICO' showed emotional storytelling through game mechanics, influencing design ethos. 📖
• To inspire creativity, we need systems promoting shared knowledge and less restrictive development models. 🔧

Key Takeaways

• Games like 'Space Invaders' accidentally innovated with progressive difficulty due to hardware limits. 🍀
• Modern games like 'Alien Isolation' use AI to dynamically adjust difficulty, creating immersive experiences. 🤖
• Classic games like 'Pac-Man' introduced power-ups, inspiring mechanics in titles like 'Mario' and 'Megaman'. 🎮
• Creativity in game design often stems from repurposing mistakes and blending genres and mechanics. 🌀
• Genres evolve over time, from the arcade era to set-piece complexes observed in modern games. 🎯
• Innovative games like 'ICO' emphasize mechanics-driven storytelling, influencing many modern titles. 📚
• The future of game design could benefit from more open, shared systems for creative development. 🌐

Overview

In this exploration of game design history, the accidental innovations from classics like 'Space Invaders' are highlighted as pivotal moments. The game introduced a sense of increased difficulty and pacing not by design, but due to hardware limitations. These early experiences laid the groundwork for progressive difficulty models seen in modern titles.

As gaming evolved, so did the integration of advanced systems like AI directors in 'Alien Isolation', which adjust gameplay difficulty in response to player behavior, enhancing immersion. Games like 'Pac-Man' introduced dynamic power-ups that drastically changed gameplay, setting templates for future titles.

The narrative also emphasizes the iterative nature of creativity in game design, where past mechanics are frequently repurposed into new genres. This legacy of evolution has highlighted the importance of shared creativity and interdisciplinary approaches, suggesting a future where open development environments could further boost creative output.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction to Innovation in Video Games The chapter explores the concept of innovation in video games, using 'Space Invaders' as a key example. It highlights how the game's escalating difficulty was an accidental innovation resulting from hardware limitations. As players destroyed more aliens, the game speed increased, creating an unintended yet effective dynamic pacing and progression system. This aligns with flow theory, suggesting that engagement is maintained through balancing challenge and skill.
• 01:00 - 02:00: Pioneering Game Mechanics and Their Evolution The chapter discusses the evolution of game mechanics, focusing on the concept of pacing and difficulty progression. It explains how game difficulty rises with player abilities, enhancing game tension and engagement. Examples like Tetris, which increases block speed, and modern games that use difficulty modulation are highlighted. Different methods such as increasing enemy numbers like in Asteroids, altering enemy configurations, and Doom's orthogonal unit differentiation are discussed. The chapter concludes by mentioning advanced systems in modern games like Resident Evil 4, which employ silent dynamic systems for difficulty adjustment.
• 02:00 - 03:00: Modern Dynamic Systems and Storytelling The chapter discusses how modern dynamic systems in video games can enhance storytelling. It highlights the example of AI directors and games like 'Alien Isolation', which adjust difficulty based on the player's tension level. This concept mirrors traditional story structures, such as the hero's journey, by mapping escalating tension. Games are creating intrinsic plots through their difficulty levels, allowing for innovative storytelling that blends play and narrative. Mention is made of the 'Uncharted' series for its excellent pacing and the potential to utilize various emotions like joy and fear in storytelling.
• 03:00 - 04:00: Historical Influence on Game Genres The chapter 'Historical Influence on Game Genres' discusses the impact of historical games on the development of different game genres. It mentions the tension and management within game design, particularly focusing on the influence of early games like Pac-Man. Pac-Man introduced the concept of 'power-ups,' where players could gain temporary advantages or change game dynamics, such as attacking the antagonistic ghosts. This mechanic revolutionized gameplay strategy and influenced subsequent game design.
• 04:00 - 05:00: The Role of Creativity in Game Design This chapter discusses the evolution of state changes in game design, using examples like Mario's suits and Megaman's power-ups as instances of temporary ability boosts. The historian Patrick Holloman's theory is referenced to illustrate how game design has evolved through three eras: the arcade era, the composite era, and the set-piece era. Initially, tension modulation was straightforward, but game design progressed to incorporate state changes through combined actions and genre mixing, thereby mediating tension with novelty and difficulty. This evolution eventually led to the creation of self-enclosed game narratives.
• 05:00 - 06:00: Case Studies of Genre Fusion in Games This chapter explores the evolution and fusion of various game genres, illustrating how foundational elements from classic games like Pac-Man have influenced modern genre development. It highlights how Pac-Man's enemy-avoidance mechanics were precursors to stealth games like Castle Wolfenstein and Metal Gear, and its maze and grid structure inspired elements in first-person shooters like Doom and open-world games like GTA. Today, these game mechanics and structures have not only become genres in themselves but also merged into hybrid genres, reflecting the complex interweaving of game design elements over time.
• 06:00 - 07:00: The Importance of Mechanics in Storytelling The chapter explores the role of mechanics in storytelling through a focus on stealth games and open-world immersive sim games. It references Nels Anderson's speech on systemic design, highlighting how systemic games tend to be immersive and stealth-based. Starting as a stealth game, the world must exist independently of the player, creating a neutral state that fosters immersion. Players must interact with the game world indirectly, making the interaction inherently systematic.
• 07:00 - 08:00: Evolving Game Genres and Patterns The chapter 'Evolving Game Genres and Patterns' explores the evolution and blending of game genres, highlighting the interconnectedness of systemic games, immersive sims, and stealth games. It uses examples like 'Metal Gear Solid 5' transitioning into an open-world stealth game and 'Deus Ex' featuring stealth elements, to illustrate how game design often builds on past innovations and conventions rather than entirely new ideas.
• 08:00 - 09:00: The Future and Creativity in Game Design The chapter explores the evolving nature of design sensibilities and the nascent study of creativity from a psychological perspective. It highlights openness to experience from the Big Five personality model as a crucial element of creativity, where thought categories are fluid. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of creativity involves immersing oneself in diverse ideas, allowing for spontaneous synthesis. The text also references ancient Greek perspectives on creativity.

The History of Creativity in Game Design | The Evolution of Genres, and Innovation in Video Games Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 space invaders was the first game to have an escalating sense of difficulty the more aliens you killed the faster they got creating a dynamic sense of pacing and progression but like many profound innovation this was discovered by mistake due to hardware limitations the speed of the aliens was severely impaired and only by killing enemies did this clear up space both on the screen and processing ones this mistake maps onto something we are all familiar with by now flow theory which states that a sense of engagement can only be preserved if we have a challenge that
• 00:30 - 01:00 rises in proportion to a player's abilities this was the birth of pacing and difficulty progression in games and has seeped into almost every kind of game Tetris has its blocks increase in speed as you progress and all of modern game design manages the tension of a game by using difficulty modulation some games increased the number of enemies like asteroids others clear with enemy configurations and spatial patterns something clearly illustrated by the orthogonal unit differentiation of Doom's enemies but when we step into the modern era we have silent dynamic systems like in Resident Evil 4 and even
• 01:00 - 01:30 a I directors and games like alien isolation that monitored the tension felt by the player and adjust the difficulty accordingly even more fascinating and as Matta haggis argues in this GDC talk is that this sense of escalating tension maps on to how stories have always been told whether three odd structures of the hero's journey so games are charting out an intrinsic plot owing to their difficulty however we can now mix and match between play and story like the brilliantly paced Uncharted series or we can use other somatic emotions like joy fear
• 01:30 - 02:00 love and complicity to manage this tension as well however given that games are an interactive meeting this isn't always easy and this brings us to another one of gaming seminal progenitors pac-man pac-man popularized the power an instance where a certain pickup either gives you a special ability a resource or changes the relationship of the elements at play in pac-man's case the ghosts who all follow different deterministic AI patterns started fleeing from pac-man and he was endowed with the ability to attack them how is this revolutionary well think of
• 02:00 - 02:30 the state changes that happen in games mario has suits you can down to temporarily boost your abilities Megaman grants you new powers with every boss you fell but also think to how modern game design is ultimately mediated by state changes the historian Patrick Holloman argues game design has transitioned through three eras the arcade era the composite era and then the set-piece era what started with simple tension modulation gave way to state changes in the form of combined verbs in genre mixing mediating tension through novelty as well as difficulty which finally birthed the self enclosed
• 02:30 - 03:00 sequences and set pieces that characterized gaming today pac-man inspired stealth gameplay open-world design and first-person shooters as well how well pac-man is about avoiding enemies which inspired Castle Wolfenstein and Metal Gear its maze-like level structure can be conceptualized in first-person to give you doom and the top-down grid structure influence the design of GTA each of these has become genres of their own now we not only have these discrete Jean's but hybrid mixes of them all combine
• 03:00 - 03:30 stealth first-person shooters and open-world games and you have open-world immersive Sims which usually have stealth elements the Nels Anderson speech on systemic design he argues systemic games are usually immersive and stealth based for fascinating reasons starting out as a stealth game means the world is in a neutral state which means the world must exist independent of you creating a sense of immersion also because you can't interact with elements directly you have to indirectly interact with the world meaning it is intrinsically system this shows a
• 03:30 - 04:00 continuity between systemic games immersive Sims and stealth games which is why Metal Gear Solid 5 easily transitioned into being an open-world stealth game and why immersive Sims with an incredible sense of place like Deus Ex have stealth elements the history of innovation and creativity in games is one of mistakes repurposing and novel fusions not ex nihilo inspiration from the fates being creative as a designer doesn't mean you have to step outside the conventions of the present and revolutionize the way you think but can equally come from the continuities of innovations from the past and how they
• 04:00 - 04:30 are molded design sensibilities over time the study of creativity from a psychological perspective is still in its infancy but we do have some preliminary frameworks to interface with in the Big Five personality model openness to experience is thought to map onto what creativity is and this temperament is one where the boundaries between categories of thought is viewed as fuzzy in his book creativity Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues creativity involves flooding your mind with an array of disparate ideas and then letting them generate their own synthesis the ancient Greeks thought the
• 04:30 - 05:00 muses inspired artists the Norseman thought it was a mead of magical creative properties that infused the world with beauty and Picasso said we should learn the rules like pros so that we can break them like artists as game designers this story tradition of creativity involves we understand the somewhat bizarre isomorphisms that exists between games in the past as a guide to where we might go in the future in his GDC talk practical creativity Raph Koster echoes the sentence by
• 05:00 - 05:30 suggesting that creativity is ultimately about fusing disparate things together he starts by insisting we look at the substrate of games and how genres evolve over time a game comes then there is a risk in a variant a family then a genre let's take Dark Souls it was risk Indian to Lords of the Fallen then a 2d variant came in the form of salt and sanctuary then we got a family of souls lights with minor mechanical and thematic variation we can do this trace with all kinds of genres Custer himself mapped out the history of shooters in his book a theory of fun and the book level up
• 05:30 - 06:00 traced the lineage of platformers it's fascinating to see how both went from single screen to scrolling to wraparound to 3d now think about this Megaman effectively combined platforming Ferb's the shooting verbs of well shooters to create something new is it a platformer or shooter you tell me devious head dynamic music it inherited from pong and this actually inspired Tetsuya Mizuguchi when he made res res is a non real shooter and music game what do music games have though a constant beat which
• 06:00 - 06:30 means a continuously moving pace rhythm games play like Simon Says which was first popularized by parappa the rapper but we can see a continuity between this and endless runners and the runners use visual cues whereas rhythm games use musical cues then we have games like bit.trip that used both of course the jumping mechanics of these games come from platformers and the constantly moving pace of a screen came from scrolling shooters which are in some strange sense intrinsically musical cluster then recommends we look at
• 06:30 - 07:00 mechanics start seeing systems and develop a library of gameplay and storytelling patterns if we want to bolster our abilities as designers the most practical definition of mechanic I've come across is in the book game mechanics advanced game design it can be the physics of movement animation or action it can be an internal economy album where their lives resources or boost bucks the territorial element or even a progression element with anything from Wednesday its affordances constraints feel States in framing being relevant seeing a game as a system means
• 07:00 - 07:30 looking at the abstraction which transforms a game like gone home into a game of turning the right object around however we also need to understand the versatility context and meaning of mechanics if we want to be creative if we think to 3d mario we can combine our jump with movements do wall jumps triple jumps and vary the height of the jump all by adding modifiers to a single verb in Devil May Cry 3 you could hit a button to strike or combine it in sequence to create combos delay them
• 07:30 - 08:00 switch weapons on the fly and this is all pushed by a context being the style system that incentivizes novelty an enemy variation and level design that require strategic thinking combos themselves came from a bug in Street Fighter 2 that allowed linking moves together and juggling came from a bug in Onimusha that was then implemented in Devil May Cry which kept enemies afloat in the air what do I mean by a mechanical context though well think about Tekken 7 it is effectively a game of rock-paper-scissors played on multiple dimensions of approach and the context of the mechanics is the Yomi
• 08:00 - 08:30 mediated play space the player is in in Mario the levels need to be calibrated perfectly to Mario's toolset otherwise it won't create interesting gameplay interesting gameplay involves what Sid Meier called interesting decisions with everything from risk and reward decisions in a game of tetris to short-term and long-term decisions and civilisation exhibiting this the meaning of a mechanic is either what it means in terms of the game system or in terms of its fiction I did a whole video on this but the example that illustrates this best is always eco you are a
• 08:30 - 09:00 disempowered kid so you're hard to control forcing us to hold on a button to guide you order around simulates intimacy and stripping away a health bar and tying our well-being to hers is a brilliant way to get us to act selfless a library of meaningful contextual and versatile mechanics all pull together to draw inspiration from can only be good for creativity with single player game structures we have the famous 4 step level design process of Mario where a new ability is introduced then presented in a safe context before it is ramped up incrementally across a level we see this
• 09:00 - 09:30 pattern in almost all modern platformers and shooters whether it be Rain Man or Mega Man now think about Metroidvania or a game like Zelda and how they gate certain areas off until you acquire a certain ability now think about puzzle games like braid the witness and Steven sausage will that always add periodic conceptual leaves to keep the player invest braid goes from having the ability to reverse time to having your movement correspond to time the witness starts and panels but then slowly incorporates the environment and Steven sausage rule
• 09:30 - 10:00 lets you release your skewer and then forces you to start thinking in more creative ways finally think about the subtle spatial structure of games something highlighted in the GDC Tom death to the three-act structure and how we can break away from the linear format of other genres into forms that harmonize with the unique interactivity of video games here's some other tips that Koster pointed out take a pattern and apply it in another context the cow a die can be thought of a probability
• 10:00 - 10:30 device a hit point designated a timer or even an actual physical building block at a dimension like how every genre jump to 3d forced a constraint like how endless-runners took away a player controlled movement from the platformer or add a verb an example being how burnout added the action verbs of Mario to the driving verbs of poor position to create its dynamic play space you can also change a topology meaning the shape of the field of play or most commonly why not fuse genres and verbs together in ways you might not have previously considered I can run through a quick
• 10:30 - 11:00 list of some incredible fusions you may not have thought about Mario combined action games and platformers Megaman platformers and shooters Mario Kart driving games and shooting games and Zelda RPGs and action games rezzing and music games Mirror's Edge platformers and first-person games portal first-person and puzzle games System Shock RPGs and first-person shooters and league of legends and RTS and an RPG all these can then be recombined even further crypt of the necrodancer took the roguelike formula and added music to it just like spelunky added platforming
• 11:00 - 11:30 dead cells combined the metroidvania with the souls light and a roguelike showing how we don't need to limit mash ups to simply - we don't even have to be limited to our own medium when it comes to being created games have borrowed from everywhere including cinema when it comes to cutscenes and dynamic camera angles television in the episodic format of The Walking Dead and even spatial poetry for a game like flower alone in the dark is credited as the first horror game and what it did was use cuts and majority and disempowerment to invoke
• 11:30 - 12:00 fear in the player the tools of film and theater to create a sense of place if that was a proof-of-concept Resident Evil refined the formula invoking dread and despair with exacting precision what if the first narrative based games was Zork and we could trace its lineage to understand the story structures of games it used text to create its world in a powerful sense of place this influenced games like adventure as well as games like mist which has an incredible sets of history in place that had raptured millions of players when it first
• 12:00 - 12:30 released it can even be seen as the progenitor of dynamically interactive software like facade and Detroit and role-playing games like Ultima because story and gameplay were intertwined into one structure it shows how the structure and tension of a game can be thought of in the context of gameplay or story I don't want to get too into the weeds of where specific innovations came from but it's worth noting which games through history have influenced the most creators and that gives us a sense of the lineage of creative inspiration in the medium space invaders pac-man Zork
• 12:30 - 13:00 and Super Mario are some of the most cited inspirations and have already gone through their influences Dhoom inspired shooters as varied as quake 2 half-life in halo and halo itself transformed how he thought about shooters what did these games present as new though halo made console shooters viable using things like increased auto aim but also introduced subtle things like an epic story regenerating health and matchmaking in turn halo borrowed the orthogonal you know differentiation of doom as well as pioneering behavior tree
• 13:00 - 13:30 scripts that were influenced by the finite state machines of pac-man what's strange is how Halo and Call of Duty are pitted against doom as being representative of a more shallow design philosophy when it comes to shooter they have much more linear levels and lots of designers today comment on this disconnect however as Matthias wort asserts in his GDC talk what's actually relevant is meaningful choice in a play space which is mostly retained in newer shooters even dead space has the same enemy
• 13:30 - 14:00 variation as doom but creates its interesting decisions in its weapon design and selective limb dismemberment understanding the context under which certain mechanics make sense is seemingly very important and is something PlatinumGames spoke about in a GDC talk of theirs they emphasized the importance of tuition all design overages functional design which means crafting tools and mechanics that make sense in a certain systemic context for example Devil May Cry 2 is a much maligned sequel because it haphazardly threw in wide open levels hurting the game's pacing and flow and
• 14:00 - 14:30 the overpowered guns made it a perverse dominant strategy halo 2 his decision to restrict the player to two weapons might seem constraining on the surface but it actually forced the player to make interesting tactical decisions before they entered a particular battle other games after Halo seemingly just replicated the system without understanding the context this was created under the design of the game was such that battles were a series of self-enclosed playgrounds with a particular possibility space and so regenerating health and limiting the
• 14:30 - 15:00 weapons repertoire made it so that they could design without having to worry about continuity and resource management across the game situational design extends to many other areas of game design - in his GDC talk holistic level design Chris Lee speaks about the importance of creating intentionality or enabling the player with a set of tools that allows them to plan and anticipate the effects of their action and to respond accordingly as well immersive sim systemic games and stealth games all create this in the context of their systems think of how Zelda breath of the wild
• 15:00 - 15:30 allows you to combine its climbing mechanic with stasis to propel you over large distances games of this ilk enable player creativity by letting them fuse elements of their own volition bringing the idea of creativity full circle however all this does not mean functional design is unequivocally bad it all depends on the aesthetic of play you are trying to deliver on overwatch has discrete champions that create interesting decisions synergies and counter play the Call of Duty's multiplayer allows you to customize your loadout in intricate detail because
• 15:30 - 16:00 enabling player expression seems to be their primary design goal Resident Evil 4 is another game that is cited as seminal and game design circles with its over-the-shoulder camera being pervasive in third person games to this day it can be seen as the progenitor to games like the Last of Us and Gears of War with it being used for different purposes in each of those games The Last of Us combines stealth gameplay with horror elements years of war combined the camera with kill switches cover system to create the revolution
• 16:00 - 16:30 that is cover shooting mechanics of course to find the real origin of cover shooting we really should go back to space invaders but we'll leave it at that Gears of fours cover system created an immersive feel and had a battlefield that emphasized moving from cover to cover however lots of games have emulated it didn't seem to understand this context and so many a cover shooter turned into stop and pop affairs with very little in the way of interesting decisions in the GDC TOC design and detail the speaker argues the reason cover shooters became popular is because
• 16:30 - 17:00 it allows players to just worry about one analog stick as opposed to two making it much more accessible to new players regardless of the cause others arguing at being the rise of hitscan weapons and linear level design it's important to understand the context and purpose of the mechanics to begin with vanquish had a creative take on the cover system with it being there as a way for you to recover if you take too much damage in its high octane booster filled gameplay making it a punishment of sorts as opposed to a primary feature a game that was extremely important to
• 17:00 - 17:30 fighting games with Street Fighter 2 as it introduced multiple characters asymmetrical play and combos into the fall everything from Mortal Kombat to Virtua Fighter and then Tekken took these lessons and then applied them differently in their own context Raph Koster argues that there are only five fighting games but if we look at each of these games Yami mediated decision tree very different strategic dynamics emerge from them when we turn to open world design well Scott Rigby argues as situationally relevant in its design is not having an infinite array of things
• 17:30 - 18:00 to do but creating activities that meet a player's core psychological needs for autonomy competence and relatedness GTA has a superficial sense of engagement Skyrim a more pronounced one because we can choose what we want to be but Mass Effect the most powerful version owing to his professed ability to change the world however the ending of three broke that illusion which actually ruined the experience from instead of thinking about sheer size for open world design perhaps we should be thinking of the breadth of activities we can craft but actually fulfill the needs
• 18:00 - 18:30 a player has Dark Souls has been something of a revolution making difficulty fun again and emphasizing the power of environmental storytelling ambiguous meta-narrative and meaningful mechanics journey propelled the games is art discussion back into the spotlight showing how we could use theming to govern design decisions and inspiring indie games like Abzu and grease walking simulators put themes and environmental storytelling above all other considerations and share a lineage with
• 18:30 - 19:00 Zork and missed the last of us grounded the cinematic aspirations of Naughty Dog in mechanics that made sense in the world it was crafted for and games like limbo little nightmares and inside all share the idea of having a child in a universe that cares little for their presence in it what do all these games cite is inspiration for their design well it's for me - where does game Iko Iko showed the power of meaningful mechanics environmental storytelling the utility of escort characters the importance of designing for a theme above all other considerations and
• 19:00 - 19:30 emphasizing ambiguity and disempowerment in its fiction lower end design it truly leveraged the power and strength of an interactive medium and transformed the way hit otaku Miyazaki Neil druckmann and even Hideo Kojima have viewed games eco was doubly brilliant because it still managed to have engaging puzzle design and tense combat sequences while still keeping it grounded in its fiction and themes eco broke the gates open when it came to thinking about themes as the core design philosophy in games for me - waiter himself citing a philosophy he
• 19:30 - 20:00 cause design by subtraction it involves stripping away anything that does not reinforce the core themes of a game something most thematically driven indie developers now follow another interesting thing this highlights is why we still don't seem to have a place for certain genres be it Souls likes roguelikes walking simulators are even character action games we still define our genres by mechanics be it first person shooters role-playing games and platforms as opposed to the core emotions they convey the aesthetics of clay model asks us to look at games from
• 20:00 - 20:30 the perspective of the reasons people play them whether Challenge competition escapism cooperation or fantasy Aron Huffman argues for a broader array of thematic emotions from love Hope Sofia challenge and complicity and the book game invaders argues for a scientific method of measuring the core mechanical base of a game and determining what their meaning is in the context of a system these are all interesting solutions and point out why we seem to be stuck as a medium at least creatively when it comes to assigning a game to a category we are stuck with walking simulator because we don't
• 20:30 - 21:00 recognize that God home is about fear regret and reconnection the Stanley parable the relationship between freedom and control and either Finch about wander and hope in the face of tragedy souls like share a core suite of mechanics being deliberate combat and macabre world and punishing difficulty but is this really what the games are about or is it a sense of tragedy and hope in the face of hardship in conjunction with a quasi Metroidvania feel I'm not saying I know what the answer is here but it's clear that we have reached the limits of a restrictive mechanics intensive paradigm looking
• 21:00 - 21:30 past the surface characterization of games reveals patterns that repeat across genres SimCity set the template for systemic playgrounds civilization established the framework for turn-based strategy games and dune to set the benchmark for realtime strategy games however if we look to these games systems very similar dynamics emerge in Michael sellers book advanced game design he argues the systems of a game
• 21:30 - 22:00 come in three flavors engines economies and ecosystems engines are systems that require you to decide between keeping a resource or using it the economies allow you to trade and convert between resources and ecosystems are self sustaining feedback loops generated by the elements of a game all the genres these games inspired draw from the same lineage of design they are all about balancing resources building bases and in the vein of Sid Meier's claims about the importance of interesting decisions making trade-offs in the short-term and
• 22:00 - 22:30 long-term whether it be by maintaining your city's integrity or outlasting your enemies in a war of attrition on top of this interesting meanings pop out of these systemic structures like how SimCity models the inevitability of urban decay and how civilization promotes a specific rhetoric about how history unfolds games like rim world and Dwarf Fortress lean on these aspects creating dynamic platforms for player created stories there are still important differences between all these genres of games but again we may need to examine where
• 22:30 - 23:00 we generate the dividing line between them take the controversial divide between Western RPGs and Japanese RPGs the Western tradition established an early template with games like Ultima and wizardry whereas the Japanese aesthetic was set by games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy Western RPGs tend to be more about in the ending players to create their own character fitting the fantasy component in the aesthetics of play model whereas JRPGs usually have an established cast of distinct characters the themes of these respective games are also very different with medieval fantasy and sci-fi being
• 23:00 - 23:30 pervasive in the Western Canon and themes inspired by anime of visual novels and manga being more popular among Japanese devs at a gameplay level each genre has switched between real-time and turn-based battles perhaps suggesting a divide based on reactive or intentional play that divides turn-based and real-time strategy games too conversely they both feature engines and ecosystems in the systemic sense and are ultimately about enabling clear expression and choice you tell me how we actually classify these games especially
• 23:30 - 24:00 when something like Dark Souls has decidedly western role-playing sensibilities but being developed by a Japanese developer who played western role-playing games as a youth that he didn't understand perhaps it is here at the edges of precise classification where new genres are born looking at the abstraction aesthetics and mechanics underlying role-playing games and systemic games allows us to see the presence of similar patterns in MOBAs battle Royales card games tactics games and MMOs in Tainan Sylvester's book designing
• 24:00 - 24:30 games he reduces multiplayer games to a few non Nash equilibrium systems including rock-paper-scissors matching pennies or the psychological dynamics of Yomi uniting competitive games across genre lines in any case assembling these patterns so that we might repurpose them in different contexts is something the book patterns and game design attempted to do other books like game invaders have tried to fully map out the family tree of all games by their systems and Kosta himself stressed the importance of compiling a vocabulary of mechanics
• 24:30 - 25:00 systems and aesthetics these are all important avenues of exploration for the future of creativity in our medium however we still have a lot of work to do to establish a robust language for games so how can we assimilate the strange twists and turns in the history of creativity and game design when it comes to guiding us in the future let me tentatively propose a framework that consolidates the ideas we have come across I call it the smite framework which stands for story mechanic idea
• 25:00 - 25:30 theme and emotion when designing a game we can start from any one of these tent poles and then see where it might take us on the mechanics front we have flow tension structure new verbs combining genres changing topologies and adding constraints however it also involves new technology in his talk the future of storytelling Jesse Schell outlines what he calls head verbs as the new frontier for games this involves text recognition like in zorb speech recognition like in alexa and facial recognition like in
• 25:30 - 26:00 kinect Jonathan Blow talks about a technique called dynamical meaning which involves examining what is being said by the rules of your game and then expressing it in the game's fiction for example braid has time manipulation mechanics at the core of its design so his themes are about regret change and redemption when we turn to design by theming we have a whole suite of developers who explicitly abide by those the meter reader has designed by subtraction that game company starts with a theme like the hero's journey and journey and then Bill's mechanics to
• 26:00 - 26:30 reinforce it and giant spiral the developers of Edith Finch started with the theme of wander and magic and then built a game around it when designing with a theme in mind making sure it permeates every level of your game can maximize its effectiveness something Hideo Kojima did with Metal Gear Solid 2 it was generally anti-war so it encouraged a non-lethal playstyle but the real theme of the game was about subversion and deception everything in the game is a life from the fact that we had to play as right most of the time to
• 26:30 - 27:00 write ins identity itself the whole existence of the big show the purpose of the s3 plan and so on nothing was as it seems in all levels of the game asserting the core theme of NIEM the idea that we are awash in a sea of false information and thus need to define our own purpose therein it may strike you as strange I have divided emotions ideas and stories from theme and to be clear lines between these is infinitely permeable hearkening back to our definition of creativity however where we start can influence the direction of design emotions refer to a
• 27:00 - 27:30 more intangible sense you want to elicit in the player or a core psychological drive you want to fulfill whether autonomy competence or relatedness horror games start with fear and then create a sense of disempowerment by making you flee use stealth or limiting a player's resources if you think about an emotion the mechanics you use to elicit that might fundamentally change as opposed to if you start from a mechanic two frameworks to keep in mind here are Nikola Zara's four keys framework and Jack panksepp research and affective neuroscience which should give
• 27:30 - 28:00 you a wide array of emotions to start with when it comes to crafting games ideas are a fascinating Avenue for creative expression and really should be the most fertile ground when it comes to being creative in Ian's bogus book persuasive games he argues games can use their simulation and rules to convince people about ideas and certain points of view missile command tells us about the liabilities of nuclear proliferation by showing us how it all ends in doom and a game like September 12 advocates against interventionist policy by showing how
• 28:00 - 28:30 killing terrorists actually leads to the creation of even more terrorists however this does not need to have a political bent it can simply be about the abstract representation of an idea jonathan blows game the witness is about metacognition or being aware of the trap of thoughts that can push you in previous directions it reinforces this with its puzzle design and the layers of abstraction you ascend upwards through in the game nothing is explicit everything is intangible but the meaning is there think about representing history and civilization evolution and Spore an
• 28:30 - 29:00 urban design in SimCity and the possibilities for exploring ideas should be endless being creative with regards to storytelling comes in three forms in my estimation archetypical structural and personal archetypical stories include things like the hero's journey and rags to riches tales but also less commonly invoke stories like love stories comedies tragedies and redemption arcs we can draw so much from literature film and myth in this domain and use them as a springboard to then infuse with a unique layer of interactivity structural changes involve
• 29:00 - 29:30 thinking of new story structures whether it be branching systems like in Detroit or even quasi interactive systems like in a game like facade and finally personal tales involves telling the stories of a more diverse array of people whether it be a person dealing with their father's abandonment in Bound or the relationship between two girls in the last of us left behind with that being said the thing to keep in mind here is that all these starting points cannon should fuse into one another games like Bioshock and Nier automata have heavy themes about determinism and
• 29:30 - 30:00 existentialism and convey them using a mix of mechanics emotions and the subversion of meta-narrative tropes Hubley it started with the idea of representing psychosis but they then used mechanics emotions and storytelling structures to realize this in inventive ways new storytelling structures like dynamic procedural systems in a game like rim world require different forms of modular and systemic story design in many senses the evolution of cinema parallels the evolution of games they started with mechanics that be
• 30:00 - 30:30 cinematography cuts and the like then established a core set of emotions the first genres being superficial emotions like horror comedy and love but then progressed a deeper thematic content during and after the Golden Age of cinema games seem to be slowly pushing towards exploring deeper thematic intellectual and personal content and hopefully it's only a matter of time before we become experts at this craft with that being said what has to happen to enable a new Cambrian explosion of creative expression one thing we do now have is a blossoming
• 30:30 - 31:00 indie sector although the triple-a sector seems to be stagnating creatively they play an instrumental role in taking ideas from the indie sector and polishing them for a wider audience to experience another thing that seems to need to happen is that a broader array of experiences from a more diverse and interdisciplinary set of creators could create the expressive cross-pollination we need to usher in a Golden Age of gaming additionally we cannot expect there to be too much innovation when a command of programming is a prerequisite when it comes to designing games this is why
• 31:00 - 31:30 more than anything else it - like the upcoming game dreams excites me more than anything else in the recently released beta people seem to prototype new ideas in robust new worlds within a few weeks because it allows artists to actively sculpt things as they would in the real world I have no idea if it will be successful but this seems to be where we need to move towards in the future dreams also illustrates another principle through its mechanics that being the idea of remix in content as we explored earlier creativity is mixing
• 31:30 - 32:00 together things you didn't consider before and leveraging the distributed knowledge of a community that shares all their skills with one another seems to be a creatives dream it preserves independent authorship being decentralized but also harnesses synergies allowing creative expansion this could extend to the idea of a creative commons generating a culture where we are inclined to share our work with others not be overly possessive about it for creativity to truly flourish though we need to create a social context that allows artists to
• 32:00 - 32:30 fully express their authentic voice without being concerned about other considerations this means things like better working conditions labor unions and better compensation schemes should all be on the table historically artists thrived in eras like the Renaissance where there was sharing of knowledge and techniques pooled wisdom and artists who were sponsored so that they could focus on their craft making games is exceptionally hard and as easy as it is to become cynical about corporate interference in the medium I think it's important to remember that at the end of
• 32:30 - 33:00 the day it sometimes takes thousands of dedicated people to bring video games to life creativity is ultimately about coming together and we need to create systems that enable this if we want to see the medium we all love push towards new frontiers we have yet to envision
• 33:00 - 33:30 you