SNODGRASS'S PROFILE

author=Essenceblade
TheoryThe question is; do you add any form of background or history to them?

Good game design always means yes. History is not text as you stated therefore it is a clear case of add as much as you can.

What you don't want to do though is turn everything into an extended tour guide.

I've played many games--commercial games at that--that totally miss the whole concept of what I'm talking about in terms of informal detail. I know that not all games need it, or even want it to be honest, but do you see it as a drag down rather than a helpful hint?

It's in the quality. Good game design never drags down things so badly that it becomes a turn off.

If you have a PSX emulator, I recommend playing Front Mission 3 to get what I mean. The game is an entire drag down but tons of players keep playing simply because the overall game is designed well.

Do you like those seemingly pointless things in RPGs.

...but seemingly pointless things in RPGs are different.

Again look at something like random quest introductions. There's a game where you have to get a bread for a kid in a hard to spot space and it is the only place you can get bread for him and it doesn't add anything but because the game is interestingly designed, you barely notice it.

It's important to remember that no matter how many things you remove, there will be seemingly pointless things in RPGs. Too much pointless walking, too long of a backtracking, too boring of a quest...these all feel seemingly pointless to a player who feels this boredom no matter how valuable you think they are and it doesn't matter how they are part of the main quest.

The reverse just as applies. The great seemingly pointless quests can sometimes be the reason players think the main game is good.

Mini-quests or Optional Fightswhich would otherwise set you offside the story?

You don't have to narrow down to this concept. Just ask yourself: will a player love the game more if the game has more good content? Most of the time, yes.

Crafting systemswhich you have the option to do, and do them--or do you ignore them and only use them conditionally?

Crafting systems are used conditionally because they often suck. Even the better implemented ones can be boring because crafting is supposed to be game world impacting but designers often don't give them enough respect and instead it's closer to "match 3" mini-games.

Pet systemsas another instance, I haven't seen these being used as much as in older games, and that's mainly because they take a drastically long amount of time for players to adjust to and actually reap benefits out of.

On the contrary, all pet systems are essentially expanded teammate systems. Older games do have these but they are often disguised as the PC. When the technology finally came for more avatars, pet systems end up being more implemented because it gives the illusion that there's a relevant mini-game on hand even when there's nothing around the player.

author=slashphoenix
This is actually similar to a well-known literary technique that Hemingway coined "the Iceburg Theory". How it works: you have a fully fleshed-out plot, world, and storyline, but you only present the reader (or in this case, player) with 10% of it - similar to how you can only see the tip of an iceburg. What happens is that your story will naturally hint at but not directly tell the rest of the story for you. It avoids tedious or boring "plot dumps" and leaves a lot up to the player's imagination, which is often more interesting than what you would have written.

Example games that have embraced this: Canabalt, World of Goo, Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac

Note that this works especially well in games, because the story subconsciously develops in the player's mind as he or she plays, saving you from the doldrums of boring and terrible exposition dumps.

Yep that's one general technique of upping the memorability of a game.

I sort of address that with the categories. There are legacies that are oft remembered. Say someone in movies will always bring up Citizen Kane.

Then there are superior legacies where memorability is mixed with details like how Dicaprio and Winslet fit together chemistry wise in Titanic. Inferior memorability but superior details to most of the people who consider the legacy of Titanic compared to Citizen Kane.

It's very sporadic though. For example one will have difficulty establishing the legacy of hate and controversy behind turning Titanic into Romeo and Juliet and then mix it with the positives of Titanic as a great disaster/romance story and still be able to show all aspects of how certain details up the film's legacy without favoring one preferred legacy over the other.

It's why extrapolating from external examples are problematic. Given enough interest, any book can be analyzed from smudge to smudge. You rarely get any headway in game design though other than filling a database with more and more things that amount to sets of general principles rather than getting a glimpse of the process behind the curated and well prepared intentions of the game designer..You rarely figure out if it's a gut instinct turned wrong. A lesser credited cheap marketing ploy. A theme tactic. An emotional link to the designer's current state of mind that actually turns out to be applicable to many general games but just happened to be sealed within the designer's head without even him realizing it...there's alot of these confounding mysteries.

No and generally don't like is semantics. You can easily decipher this by doing an opposite comparison.

There are areas of games with no flaws that people find flaws in.

There are games with no plot hole that people, because they over-interpret that there is a plot hole, find a plot hole and if enough people agree then it becomes official. Even when someone shows them wrong - they prefer to stay in the dark as long as there's no official announcement.

Especially for time travel, plot holes are strengths. It's a whole different thing from keeping audience in the dark.

The latter is an archaic technique that is still used today to show that the world makes sense even if it doesn't by creating a plot hole based on everything having a conclusion or what's commonly dubbed as a happy ending.

The thing with time travel though is that you know already what will happen. What you don't know is how it happened so how do you create a mystery for this? You create plot holes. You create flaws that serve to increase the doubt and curiosity of the player.

Take the transition from Terminator to Terminator 2. Why was Terminator 2 more remembered? Because it accentuated the flaws instead of the strengths of time travel.

Now take Terminator 2 to Terminator 3. Why did people hate T3 more even if it had the same amount of action and nonsense? Why did people see a plot hole in T3 whose ending is actually more logical than T2? Because people love flaws especially in time travel stories. Flaws make them feel like things aren't predetermined. Flaws and inconsistencies make them feel like maybe history just failed to rebuild the accurate events and that the game introduce them to the "actual events".

Of course that's not the only reason but the catch 22 is that the flaws accentuate the strengths. The strengths accentuate the flaws.

Think of it like this. Time travel is full of plot inconsistencies to begin with. The more you stick to limiting this, the more you're telling your audience to pay attention to the mechanics of the time travel rather than the dynamics of the story. Result? Someone is bound to say this is not good enough. Others are bound to say they enjoyed it if it's a decent game but they all look too much into the time travel rather than how time travel allowed them to get the perspective.

On the opposite hand look at Chrono Trigger who just threw you in or look at Memento who simply reverses the events and look at many of the many paradoxes that people often cite like grandfather paradoxes...what do they all have in common in terms of popular and oft spoken citations? They have plot holes and inconsistencies. Yes the ending is still a twist but that's the only consistent part. The road is often confusing because you're meant to be confused, not impressed that someone finally made an accurate theory of time travel. The result? People who don't look for the technicality, praise and forgive the flaws and are in awe of the basic themes and find them deep because of all the confusion and doubts you set in their minds. People who look for the technicality praise the developer even more if they work on limiting the flaws in the time travel while increasing the plot holes in the overall story because they don't care for the story. They are looking for holes but they are looking at it through encyclopedic glasses so the less you touch up on the time travel and the more you direct them to the idea that it's the story that's full of holes, the more they ignore what's wrong with the time travel aspect.

Give me a game who you think is consistent and has no plotholes and if I played it, I'll point out to you where the inconsistencies and plotholes lie. I can't guarantee you will admit to it but it's there.

Everybody hates to admit this fact but everyone knows Lost, Inception, etc. movies hook you in with nonsense and plotholes and then after the movie - only then do you fill that gap.

It's why Hollywood movies sell more than documentaries. It's ingrained in our DNA.

Even the very design of time travel is inconsistent and is a plot hole as it is generally implemented in videogames especially the more you try to fit your narrative into it.

Even if you give leeway to fantasy, many time travel stories forget about paradoxes and conundrums that are textbook aspects of the concept. Some even are so inconsistent at this that you might as well replace time travel with alternate dimensions and few of your players will pick up on it until you spell it out.

To apply this to game design requires unfortunately a "community" of taste testers.

It's not that it can't but unless you have a group of beta testers and those beta testers happen to be able to hand your game to a new player like spaghetti, you can't even start.

Don't get me wrong. It's definitely possible and I get the theme but sometimes you have to discuss how to get a Tipping Point first. After that only then can you work on the spaghetti and then after that, you have to be invested to create a guide for that for future generations of you w/ lesser skills but who are willing to stand on your gigantic shoulders.

It sounds like a lot of excuses but take this guide for example:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8795237/Beginners-Guide-to-RPG-Maker-VX-v04

It's a game guide and not a game design but in order for your game design to have a beginning you have to make your game guide chunky enough that everyone follows it and everyone gets a piece of the Bible.

Without this component, it becomes like this thread. You or I can make the thread but it's just tldr even if it has content. No one is going to say, "You know what? Your ideas make sense so even though you haven't made a game, how about you and I and the entire community work together to create a global internet-based double blind test on a game?"

...so nothing happens. In the end it ends up being in the hands of those who accidentally make these things happen or are professionals to begin with.

Sure maybe one of us is inspired to contribute to more threads but how many of us can create the catalyst to create a guide that people will want us to edit and from that guide - using it as an analogy for the pasta - determine the sauce?

I will say this though just so I don't come off like making a useless post that doesn't contribute to the thread at all:

Unlike spaghetti, game design is not in the sauce. It's in here *points to chest

Create a game that targets the heart but then follow it up with images that fills the brain and people will talk.

It's easier said then done especially for rpg maker games because there are so many sub-niches and the common niche for people looking for this simply is not in the design of the databases for rpg maker games.

If something like Minecraft hits the scene, people don't think Minecraft. They don't think games. They just go ooohhh... after giving it enough time and then it leads to videos where other people go oooohhh... and then other people go ooooohhhh....let's make a satirical article for this.

If something like high quality rpg maker scenes, the devs are pressured to take "buzz/votes/viral interest, etc." and that type of cutthroat competitive marketing wrapped around in the concept of greater advertising range is both it's strength and the spaghetti's downfall. Yes, it's kewl and legit that people love your games but then how can you work on heart strings and addiction when you also want people to initially hype it? You're bound to "pander" and suffer for the common goods.

You're bound to add sex scenes if that's your niche. You're bound to add flashy effects and pretty boy melodramas if that's your niche. You're bound to create more Narutos the better you get. I mean just look at the other entertainment mediums.

Mcdonalds sacrifice taste for a certain blandness in their burgers mixed with attractive looking pictures.

Starbucks are not generally considered great coffees but they have tons of whipped cream.

Harry Potter is horrible for a children's book compared to what has come before it but it's that flaw that allows people to treat it like a basic fable like children's version of the Three Musketeers, Disney versions of Beauty and the Beast or even TV versions of Tarzan.

...it's also a regular desk job. Look at how Square constantly go back to Final Fantasy. Once it clicked, you can't let it go or else you will lose your audience. This is the flaw in the video too.

Gladwell sells the story as if it's an outlier having discovered something that wasn't when in the end it's just food in the can. Interesting...but you're not exactly giving everyone five star in a can. With games it's even worse because sometimes it's not the game design that's wrong but the game expectations.

You all know this from TV series and movies. There are smarter and better movies that get rated a 3 even by intellectuals simply because there's a detail that they can't get past on. Lois & Clark was a far better (in an enriching manner) Superman TV series than Smallville but Smallville got all the hype for example where as L&C is consider episodic and light hearted. Joker in Dark Knight Returns is considered dark and great acting even though it ruined the mythos of the character and was just a projection of what people felt Obama type terrorists were mixed with Clown make up.

At a certain point in a game developer's life (even though I'm not one) they get the same difficulties as website owners deciding whether to sell or keep their product or great actors deciding to become Hollywood statues or unknown actor that finally struck it big.

It's very rare to get to that Meryl Streep level. Lindsay Lohan could have done it. She failed. Deborah Kerr could have gotten the same prestige. People barely knew here. Even Meryl Streep could have become more Meryl Streep but she takes up roles like Mama Mia too.

With videogames you eventually have to contend with graphical expectations. Everyone will tell you how much horrible and bland and unoriginal 3d models are for example in rpgs but when you see mainstream 3d games sell, do you fight them or do you join them? Even those who don't join them make the mistake of attacking them rather than seeing what made it work and transposing it to RPG Maker games. Just entering that observation alone requires a certain jerk-faceness to the approach. Where fans and indy devs work on say combat systems, you work on game design. Where you used to be able to just experiment, you now have to be confident that you are pandering to something that will get you fans BUT you know they don't know yet that this is something they will be addicted on.

Then there's your actual support. Are you a cook or are you not a cook? Have your tongue been ruined by cigarettes and coffee or do you still have it? Are you simply avant garde who will sometimes make something like Portal or will you be Cronenberg with a better vision even if it can mean obscurity forever if you fail? ESPECIALLY when you finally strike thunder. Will you have the cutthroat ability to be more of a business man/pioneer or will you be that idiot savant that knows some basic business but your work gets chewed up alive by poorer smaller and mediocre companies while the mainstream rags on your less appealing but richer and more meaningful themes?

Even the ones who say they will always remain the same, they never do once the stakes are high and the stakes ARE high. Give enough fun to your community and they would demand more from you and you until those who are the loudest aren't even your original feedback that gave you the inspiration to make even better and greater games. Friends will become enemies. Enemies will become fanboys. Fanboys will become fat and spoiled and entitled people. Game design articles simply cannot take those into account and address them without a tipping point because game design articles are not game design. Even game design does not gain the respect of the coders "until you prove them wrong" -and then they will copy you en-masse and the thing that strikes lightning will not be televised. It will be hijacked by mainstream games and sold as your innovation + a budget + a heritage title and you just have to trudge on and make those same cross road decisions over and over again the better and better you get.