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An
Introduction to Game Design courtesy of Walt Disney
“Being The One is just like being in
love…no one can tell you you’re in love, you just know
it…through and through, balls to bones.”—The Oracle from the
film The Matrix
Being a game designer is very much the same
way. In fact, being a painter, a sculptor, a filmmaker, an actor, or
any host of other professions is also very much the same way. The
actual moment of becoming any of these things doesn’t happen
through external factors like getting a particular job; the moment
occurs within. Being a game designer, for instance, is a conscious
choice one makes. It’s a way of thinking and approaching the
world. It’s the constant analysis of all types of experiences in
order to understand their structure and to understand why their
elements come together to form the kind of experiences they do. This
brings us to my Fist Law of Game Design:
A game is an experience.
I can’t emphasize that enough. In fact, I
believe it so strongly that I’m not even going to mention a single
game in this introduction because I don’t want to confuse the
matter. A film is an experience. A play is an experience. A book is
an experience. Life is an experience. A game is an
experience.
Many games create an entire world for the
player to explore and experience. To learn how to do this, I turn to
one of the most carefully crafted worlds on Earth: DisneyLand. Some
people see DisneyLand as a collection of rides in a park. I suppose
many games could be viewed as a collection of levels on a map, but
as always, the devil is in the details.
DisneyLand’s goal is to create an
experience for the guest. First off, they’re a “guest,” not a
visitor or a customer. DisneyLand’s design surely didn’t start
with rides, just as a level-based game shouldn’t start with level
design. DisneyLand’s design, I’m sure, started with
“experience design.”
The first thing a guest encounters in
DisneyLand is Main Street. Symbolically, it’s a large, clearly
marked path pointing straight at the Magic Kingdom itself. Main
Street is unimaginably clean. It’s nothing like an actual street
in this respect, since it’s a perfect, idealized version of a
street. Next, Main Street is bright, colorful, and marked with
blooming flowers. These flowers are elaborately arranged and grown
in amazing patterns, and they seem to be there all year round. Main
Street smells like pop corn. Do you think Disney cares if they sell
one bag of popcorn? The answer is no. The popcorn is there because
an experience should use all the five senses and Disney decided that
main street should smell like freshly popped pop corn.
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| The ever-spotless Main
Street, USA at DisneyLand. |
Try asking for gum in DisneyLand. I bet
you’ll get the same friendly, canned response from any Disney
employee: “I’m sorry, there is no gum in DisneyLand.” And
friendly you can be assured the employee will be, because DisneyLand
is a happy place. Now, those employees may be pissed off on the
inside, oppressed and underpaid or who knows what. They’re
probably cussing and playing poker in the dark bowels of
DisneyLand’s underground tunnels on their breaks, but as far as
the guest’s experience is concerned, DisneyLand is a happy place.
Have you ever seen a delivery truck at
DisneyLand? That’s because happy, magical places can’t be
bothered with such things. All deliveries take place through
underground tunnels. Have you ever seen a security camera at
DisneyLand? Probably not, but you wouldn’t get 15 feet if you
tried to steal something. You’re constantly under surveillance
from the hidden cameras, the security officer with binoculars on the
5th floor of that building, and from the guy next to you
in the store looking at hats. He looks like a tourist, but he’s
works for Disney. After all, security is necessary, but being
watched at every step is not part of the Disney Experience.
Let’s look at the experience of standing in
line for a ride. There’s no designing around this one: standing in
line is a technical constraint, so to speak. Disney’s solution is
the make the line just as much a part of the experience as the ride.
The texture of the handrails for the line for Big Thunder Mountain
Railroad was chosen to be smooth wood. Most of the people working at
Big Thunder Mountain Railroad look like they belong there: usually
old burly men with scraggly, salt-and-pepper beards.
There’s a guy at the Haunted Mansion whose
job it is to stand out front and stare at you eerily as you enter.
The people who work there tend to look a little eerie to begin with
anyway.
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| The gaunt, scary guy
with the piercing stare in front of the Haunted Mansion was
sick this day. |
Some rides have entire stories that take
place just in line! Splash Mountain tells the story of the bear and
his “laughin’ place.” Star Tours’s line has C3PO and R2D2
trying to repair a shuttlecraft in a busy spaceport. The point is
that every opportunity to create an experience has been seized. The
employees, the handrails, the lighting, the ambient sounds and
smells all contribute to the experience.
The point is that the experience was decided
on first, and the ride itself is treated as just another detail to
bring that experience to life.
Game design is the same way. If you want to
make a game that creates the over-the-top, action-packed experience
of being a super hero, then everything else follows from this. The
gameplay can’t be based on slow paced exploration. You’ve got to
get as much craziness on the screen as possible. The music has to be
high energy. The menu’s have to feel like super hero menus,
whatever that means. Would Wolverine want to sit through a long
cinematic sequence at the beginning of the game? No way. Wolverine
wants to rip though all that crap and beat someone up as soon as
possible, preferably within 5 seconds of turning the game on.
Whether your game is a subtle, high class
mystery set in a gothic mansion, or Quake 3, or a WWII flight
simulator, the experience comes first and guides you to make all
other decisions. Make every possible detail contribute to that
experience and you’ll make Walt Disney proud.
And this brings us to what I consider the
primary skill of the game designer: the ability to structure a set
of details in such a way that—say it with me—creates an
experience.
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