This article originally appeared in Game Developer Magazine, September 2007 issue.

I once heard Peter Molyneux say that during the development of Populous he didn’t want the player to be able to pause the game. His reasoning was that Populous is a world that goes on with or without the player. Luckily, his friends talked him out of it, pointing out that sometimes the doorbell rings, the phone rings, or the baby cries.

Games are not for game designers and their ivory-tower ideals—games are for players. Players have lives outside of our games and we should respect those lives and design our games accordingly, rather than expect our players to design their lives around us. Players should be able to save anytime they want, or more precisely, they should be able to stop playing your game anytime without losing their meaningful progress.

This is an old argument where one side talks about the convenience of saving anytime and the other talks about the need to make games challenging, but this is a false dichotomy. We can allow the player to stop playing without excessive penalty and make a challenging game. It’s just a matter of defining what “saving” actually means.

As an example, Mario 64 doesn’t literally allow the player to save anywhere they want, but it still meets this requirement in spirit. The point of the game is to collect all 120 stars, and every time you collect a star, you “save and continue.” You cannot save your exact position in a level, but such a feature isn’t needed anyway. The geography of the game is designed such that a player can reach the entrance to any level in just a few seconds by navigating Mario’s castle and getting back to any specific goal in a level doesn’t take long either. This preserves the game’s difficulty (players can’t save and load to get the stars more easily) and it also means the player can turn the game off at any time, knowing that the only important progress (collecting stars) has been saved.

Sometimes Miyamoto forgets where all those stars are.

Save Point, Checkpoint

God of War 1 and 2 and Resident Evil 4 all use the same save system, which is also common in many other games. They all have save points and check points. Save points let players save their progress and load it later. Check points are sprinkled invisibly between save points and if they die, they go back to the last checkpoint rather than all the way back to the last save point. This system isn’t too bad, but it doesn’t do a good job of letting the player save and quit at any time, either. It would make more sense if the player could pause the game at any time and save progress up to the last checkpoint. I’m not suggesting that the player should be able to take a step, save, fire a shot, save—just that he or she should be able to stop playing the game and resume from the last checkpoint. After all, that would happen anyway through dying.

Did you find this part in God of War 2?	In America, we can show shooting people in the face, but bare breasts are taboo.

Why separate save points from check points in the first place? I think the answer is for technical reasons rather than design reasons. God of War was designed for the PlayStation 2 and Resident Evil 4 originally appeared on the GameCube (and later on PlayStation 2 and Wii). These consoles take a few seconds to write a save to the memory card, so doing this every time the designers wanted a checkpoint would probably have been too annoying to the player. This lead to spread out save points and the addition of check points for convenience’s sake. In the future, we won’t have these technical restrictions.

Gears of War was designed for the Xbox 360, a system capable of writing a save file quickly. Gears of War’s save system is a definite improvement over God of War’s and Resident Evil’s: The player can play through the entire game without having worry about finding save points, but can also quit playing at any time and automatically start at the most recent checkpoint. Gears of War does this by having many checkpoints, all of which automatically save progress without any action required from the player. This example well-illustrates the false dichotomy I mentioned earlier. The save system is both very convenient and does not interfere with the difficulty of the game. In fact, Gears of War could be tuned to be arbitrarily difficult without sacrificing any convenience in its save system.

Gears of War inspired many great cakes...	...and Etch-A-Sketch scenes.

Multiplayer

Save systems get a little trickier in cooperative multiplayer games. Players expect to be able to join a friend’s game and leave at any time, and to save and continue their progress later without the game’s save system getting in the way. Gears of War does a great job here too, allowing a friend to join an in-progress game at any time (taking over the AI for the character named Dom). The player can get through a couple of chapters alone, then have a friend join who can leave at any time and pick it up again later. Even if the friend is new to the game, they’re still allowed to join someone who’s playing the last level, because Gears of War is trying to be as convenient to the player as possible.

One hitch is that when the friend leaves, the player must briefly quit the game then restart it from the same checkpoint. On this matter, Lego Star Wars has Gears of War beat because it allows a friend to seamlessly join or leave a game without ever quitting out to a menu screen.

Playing Gears of War with a friend is easier than playing alone (there are no AI adjustments between coop and single player), but it could have been incredibly difficult had the designers wanted it to be. The save system’s flexibility doesn’t prohibit difficulty. That said, if you were really serious as a designer about creating a meaningful leaderboard for single player and co-op play (Gears of War doesn’t do this), then you’d need a single player mode where no one can ever join in, and a co-op mode where the two players are set from the start and can never switch out. This would be highly annoying, so it should only be used as a hardcore leaderboard mode inside a game that also offers a more forgiving system.

Massive Saves

In massively multiplayer online games things get even trickier still. On the plus side, players can log out at almost any moment they want in these games, and their character’s progress (such as items or experience points) will be saved. In World of Warcraft, players can’t log out while “in combat,” and must wait 20 seconds when they do want to log out, but it’s pretty player-friendly overall. There’s even a hearthstone that lets players teleport back a city (once per hour) so they can end their play session at almost any time with character progress saved. What’s much harder to save is progress on a quest or in a dungeon. If a group of four friends is halfway through a three-hour dungeon, one could log out, but it’s socially unacceptable, and that player won’t be able to continue their progress in that dungeon later. This is a worse problem during raids, where 25 people must coordinate their real-life schedules, and the ability to log off at any time is basically gone.

This is a very powerful warlock from another world.

Blizzard has taken some steps to simulate the kind of save points seen in offline games, though. The Scarlet Monastery dungeon starts in an ante-room with four separate portals leading to four different wings. This allows players to play just one fourth of the total experience, stop, and come back later. Also, the Mauradon dungeon gives players an item half way through that allows them to teleport back to the half way point, so they can continue their journey later.

Blizzard added even more winged dungeons and pseudo-save points half way through dungeons in the recent Burning Crusade expansion. Players welcomed these changes as they make the game much more convenient, though they still fall somewhat short. A single player game with save points more than an hour apart would be considered lacking, but at least Blizzard is moving in the right direction here. There is opportunity in the MMO genre to be even more friendly to players’ real life schedules.

Outliers

Let’s return to single player games and look at two unusual examples: Dead Rising (Xbox 360) and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (Nintendo DS). Dead Rising has save points, but no check points. The open-ended nature of the game makes it very easy to forget to save at all, especially considering that the save points are off the beaten path inside the various bathrooms of the shopping mall where the game takes place.

A game's bathroom imitating real life.	A real life bathroom imitating a game.

When players die in Dead Rising, they are given a confusing choice: they can restart from their last save point, losing all character progress since they last saved, or keep their character’s progress, but lose all save points. Yes, you read that right. If a player wants to keep their character’s progress since the last save (such as experience points gained and moves learned) then they must restart the entire game from the opening cut-scene. Even stranger, Dead Rising only allows a single save slot per Xbox 360 profile, per storage device.

That means the game is trying its hardest to restrict people into playing the game only the way the designer wants, while still remaining easily defeatable if one makes a new profile or uses another memory card. By “defeatable,” I mean this grants users the ability to create two save files, a feature common to almost all games.

The reasoning behind these decisions in Dead Rising was probably to create a very specific experience for the player. They are supposed to care about finding those save points, and care that they are in constant danger from zombies and that if they die, the last save point was a really long time ago so it’s going to be a big deal. The world is against the player—as it almost always is in the horror genre—and so the game’s difficulty is intentionally very hard. If the player keeps playing through the game and dying and starting over, they’ll start each time with a stronger character and with more knowledge of how to navigate the game correctly and save the various victims from the zombies. Incidentally, this same save system was used in the game Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, which was also by Capcom and is rumored to share some team members with Dead Rising.

I understand why a designer might create a save system like this that reinforces the concepts of the horror genre, but games are not meant to satisfy game designer ideals, they are for players. I was personally annoyed by this system to the point of quitting, because I could not play it the way I wanted. Dead Rising is an amazing technological showcase and combines the design concepts of a sandbox game (go wherever you want, do whatever you want) with the horror theme of a mall overrun by zombies. And yet, I’m not allowed even two save slots, I’m bullied into playing the same parts over and over because I feel obligated to restart all the time, and the save points require me to actively seek them out, which means it’s very easy to play for an hour or so and forget to save, then die. That type of save system may work for hardcore players (who border on sadomasochism anyway), but the fictional Little Jimmy from Idaho (the person I often design for) is just going to quit playing out of frustration. I know I did.

On the other hand, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow has an unusual save feature that is intended specifically for the player’s convenience, rather than for the designer’s vision. This game has standard fixed-location save points (with no check points) and it also has a second method of saving called a save marker.

Not all Nintendo DS games have dramatic anime hand poses on the box, but these two do.

Players can pause the game at any time and create a save marker, and then the game quits to the title screen. When they want to play again, they can either load a game that was saved at a save point or they can resume from their last save marker. The tricky part is that if they resume play through either method, then the save marker is destroyed. That means if the player is in the middle of a boss fight, they can save, stop playing, play something else, then later resume from the exact moment they saved. But players cannot reduce the game’s difficulty with this feature because it does not give them a second chance of any kind. This is another example where the game can remain very challenging, and yet still allow the player to save and quit at any time. This same save system was also used by Fire Emblem (Game Boy Advance) except you didn’t even need to pause and create a save marker. It was automatically created for you any time you turned the Game Boy off during gameplay.

New Mario, Old Trick

One of the most surprisingly bad save systems of recent times comes from an otherwise wonderful game: New Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo DS). It would have been very natural in this game to allow the player to save at any time on the map screen between levels. Instead, the player must beat either the castle at the end of a world or the tower halfway through the world in order to save. For example, in World 2 this means beating a minimum of five levels before reaching a save point. Players can also spend their hard-earned star coins to buy a powerup from various mushroom houses which also lets them save, but they very well might not want to spend their coins.

The need to keep the player at arm’s length from the ability to save is conspicuous here given the traditions of the genre (Mario 64 did much better) and doubly-so considering this is a handheld game. Surely the concern wasn’t about keeping the game challenging, because NSMB lavishes the player with extra lives the whole way through. My girlfriend once asked if she could play Nintendogs on our DS, and I had to explain to her that no, she couldn’t, because I just spent almost an hour collecting nine star coins and didn’t reach a save point yet so I had to leave the DS in sleep mode until I could save. I’m not sure which game designer sensibility this restriction on saving serves, or why it would ever be more important than allowing my girlfriend to play with her virtual dog.

Everyone loves being the huge Mario. This is actually a wonderfully designed game aside from the save system.

NSMB really stands alone here. The most incredible part is that when you beat the game, you unlock the ability to save anytime you want on the map screen! This proves that no technical limitation made the save system the way it was. The convenience of saving anytime was deliberately withheld from the player, and given as a reward at the end. As designers, we can’t do this, and must instead put the real lives of our players ahead of our game designery ideals.

Saving For The Player

A save system should allow the player to stop playing at any time, allow the player to pick up where he or she left off with as close to zero replaying as possible, and save as automatically and seamlessly as possible, so the player will not forget to do it.

Saving should be treated as one of the player’s natural rights, not an earned privilege or a game mechanic around which to make strategic decisions. The design space we have to create new games is so unthinkably large that we lose virtually nothing by restricting ourselves to designs with friendly save game systems that don’t presume to override the real-life needs of players. As I have shown, this does not even require a tradeoff with game difficulty; even difficult games can have convenient save systems.

We should always try to design a save system that simply serves its purpose and fades into the background, otherwise we might end up like New Super Mario Bros.—a game with sales of over 10 million units worldwide, and with ten million girlfriends unable to play Nintendogs.

--Sirlin

Games are, at their core, collections of rules. Behind the pretty artwork and beneath the adept programming, we find the soul of the game: the rule design.

Chess and Go Let us begin by considering some of the oldest games: Go and Chess. The ancient Chinese game of Go looks simple. Players alternate turns placing black and white stones on a 19 by 19 grid, trying to surround enemy stones and enclose territory. The rules are simple, but the resulting gameplay is extremely complicated. Each play of a stone can affect the safety or strength of the stones near it. These effects ripple across space (the board) and time (over many plays). Go exhibits what biologists call "emergent properties" of complexity that are much greater than the sum of its simple rules.

Chess has similar properties, but they stem from an entirely separate set of rules. In Chess, one's pieces start in a very cramped position, all in each other's way. Players must "develop" their pieces, that is, get them out from behind each other so they can exert maximum control of the board. The catch is that the board is extremely small. Once each player develops his pieces even moderately, they are now in direct conflict with enemy pieces simply because there is no where to hide on the tiny Chess board. The overlapping influence of many pieces is only one source of Chess's complexity (though that description hardly does the game justice!).

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 As for more modern games, allow me to yet again reference the fighting game Marvel vs. Capcom 2. In this game, players pick three characters, only one of which can be active at any time. The inactive characters can be called onto the screen to do a preset "assist" move, which allows the player to attack in parallel (simultaneously with his active character and with an assist move). This obvious advantage is offset by the assist character's extreme vulnerability. He cannot block, and he must perform his entire move (which often includes somewhat slow recovery) before leaving the screen back to safety. The more a player's assist character is damaged, the less energy that character will have when the player switches the assist character to be the active character.

It's a neat set of rules that all work together. The ability to attack in parallel creates lots of opportunity for creative gameplay, and the mechanic has built-in checks and balances. What's interesting is that when the game first came out, a friend of mine asked me if it's any good. I was unable to answer. I told him, "The rule design seems to make a lot of sense, so it has the potential to be good. But it's impossible to tell until we all play it more." Good rule design can ruined by poor balance, slipshod implementation, bugs, and myriad other factors.

What struck me most about my friend's question was that purely by the rule design, I knew the game had the potential to be good. It also struck me that although I had seen all the art in the game, seen all the characters, understood pretty much all the moves...the entirely of whether the game would actually be good rested on the shoulders of the implementation, the balance, the tweaking. The programming was good enough to express the rule design, and the art was good enough to "look cool." A great illustration of the importance (an limits) of design.

Counterstrike The Counterstrike mod for Half-life is an even more amazing illustration of rule design. I've been told that this game is currently the most popular first person shooter, and that at one time (perhaps still) it was more played online than all other first person shooters combined! And remember, Counterstrike is a mod of a game, not even a full game! Here's another case of programming and art playing only minor roles in the quality of a game. There are 10 zillion other mods of Half-life with basically the same programming quality (they all use the same engine from Half-life of course) and with no worse art.

Counterstrike's incredible popularity is due to its clever rule design, not its realism.

Further consider that I am not a fan of realism in games, and that despite Counterstrike being one of the most realistic first person shooters available, I find it by far the most fun. Why? Rule design. In Counterstrike, you play a 5 minute game round, then the game resets. If you die, you're out until the next round, but you can freely observe everywhere and everyone in the level as an invisible ghost. There is even somewhat of a metagame since money (used to buy weapons at the beginning of each round) carries over between rounds. Counterstrike also features interesting win conditions asymmetric across the two teams. Rather than just rack up frags, one team must try to compete an objective (such as plant a bomb or rescue hostages) while the other team must prevent the first team from succeeding.

These rules create great pacing. Since the fear of death is much greater than in Quake (one shot kills, you'll have to wait until the next round to play again), every corner and doorway becomes frightening (see my article on suspense). Tension builds, climaxes are reached during fast firefights. When you die, you have a minute of downtime before starting the next round which can be used as mental rest or as strategic reconnaissance in ghost mode.

Magic: the Gathering The trading card game Magic the Gathering goes the extra mile by being a game almost entirely about rules. Magic is a (mostly two player) game where each player tries to reduce the other's life points from 20 to 0. Each player has a deck of 60 cards chosen from a set of over 1,000 legal cards. Decks contain one-time-use spells, continuously active spells (called enchantments), creatures that can attack the enemy over and over, and land cards that are the resources needed to play all the other cards.

There's a concrete set of rules governing the game Magic, but the most interesting rule is the Golden Rule of Magic: any rule

This card lets you prevent the opponent from playing any card you name!

printed on a card supercedes the base rules of Magic. It's a game about overriding the rules. One rule is that each player draws one card per turn. One spell lets a player draw 4 cards that turn. One rule says that a creature who attacks this turn cannot block an incoming attack on the next turn. Not only are there creature cards that allow this, but there are even cards that allow all your creatures to break that rule forever! Playing Magic--or more specifically, building a deck designed to abuse the rules in a certain way--is more like designing a game than playing one. I recommend that every game designer check it out.

Magic has no programming, and completely superficial art. It's a true example of a game being purely rule design. Or perhaps of rule design completely stealing the show.

There's another, less known card game called Flux, which is also a game about changing the rules. It has a variety of cards that change the win conditions of the game. Whichever player plays the Pyramid card and the Sphinx card wins...until I play the card that says whoever plays both the Milk card and the Cookies card wins! Is the game a satire of games about rules? Or a satire of itself? I'm not really sure.

Nomic If you think a game can't be any more oriented towards rule design than Magic (or Flux), then I have some news for you. The game of Nomic is a game explicitly about changing the rules of Nomic. It's a game about itself, orders of magnitude more so than Flux. Nomic has no programming at all, not art, not even any cards. It's just a set of "initial rules" which mostly explain how to change the these rules. The rules are divided into two sets: mutable and immutable. One rule says that immutable rules cannot be changed. Another rule says that mutable rules can be changed. Another says that it's possible to change a rule from being immutable to mutable, and vice versa. (So you could demote an immutable rule to mutable, then change it, then promote it again.) Another rule states that players take turns and that a turn consists of proposing a rule change and voting on it in a specific way. A player wins if his rule change somehow entraps the game so deeply in paradox that play cannot continue. A player can also win by reaching a certain point total first, but that rule is mutable and would surely be one of the first to go!

Don't forget that all these rules can be changed. Players could implement rules that each turn also consists of making a move in another game such as a Chess, and that winning that game is an alternate win condition for Nomic. Players could create new classes of rules besides mutable and immutable, or even modify the rules to make Nomic into another game, perhaps Monopoly or Tiddly-winks. It's quite a trick to alter the rules so radically that no more rule changes are possible, though.

Nomic isn't quite as addictive as, say, Tetris, but it's sure interesting to contemplate playing! It's the furthest example of rule design gone completely crazy, overshadowing the entire game with rules about the game's own rules. Let it serve as a reminder that rule design is an important component of game design...but should not be the only component unless your goal is to make a game so unusual and out of the main stream that it's mentioned only in articles about rule design. ;)

The crusade against violence in video games is truly the witch hunt of modern times. You may not know it, but the actual witch trials have already begun in the form of senate hearings initiated by Senator Joseph Lieberman. (Here's Lieberman's testimony.)

Senator Joseph Lieberman (bad guy)

Video games caused that school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, didn't you know? While Lieberman is arguably the game industry's biggest opponent, its best advocate is largely unknown. His name is Professor Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. In an odd footnote of history, Jenkins was actually my professor in a few classes when I was at MIT, and I assure you that any media industry---or indeed any one---would do well to have Jenkins as an advocate. I think much of his persuasive power stems from him not really being a

Professor Henry Jenkins (good guy)

supporter of any industry or company---he is a defender of popular culture for principle's sake, and argues from solid academic grounding. It just happens that his principle's are currently aligned with the interests of the video game industry. It's daunting for me to even write this article, since Jenkins's arguments in this senate hearing were so strong. You can also read about his experience testifying.

I'll begin by examining the violent nature of all competitive games, and then comment on the separate issue of the depiction in violence in those games. I'll then discuss the use of violence as a theme in film, games, or any other media. Finally, I'll invoke some of Jenkins's arguments to explain the role of violent play in youth culture throughout history.

Violent Underpinnings

Competition is violent. People win, people lose. Competition occurs in video games, soccer games, the business world, and---I would remind Senator Lieberman---political elections. Competition can be academically interesting, and it can also teach valuable life lessons about winning and losing. It's ok for little Jimmy to learn those lessons in soccer practice, but many parents have the mysterious notion that it's not ok to learn the exact same lessons in a competitive video game.

Let's take an example of a violent video game: Street Fighter. In this game, two players engage in a fight and try to kill each other! We have to shield our youth from such abominations, blah, blah. Ok, let me tell you what Street Fighter is really about. Two players compete...to win. It's a battle for position, for initiative, for momentum, and for resources. Players develop creative combinations of moves, traps, and tricks. It is a game of attack and defense, risk and reward. Players take chances, they reduce their risk of exposure to attack, and they learn to never give up until the end, because comebacks are definitely possible. They learn the lessons of winning and losing, since not everyone can be the best, but everyone can improve with discipline, analysis, and practice. Players form communities, meet friends, and even sometimes make enemies. Would I want my children to play such a game? You bet. It's preparation for life.

What's on the screen during a game of Street Fighter is a bunch of rectangles. The object of the game is to make your attack rectangles collide with the opponent's defense rectangles while keeping your own defense rectangles safe. All of this happens to be covered up by a bunch of pretty graphics. The rectangles are disguised as cartoon characters who do punches and kicks, throw fireballs, and engage in various wrestling maneuvers. Disguising this intricate game of colliding rectangles as a fight between two characters is an obvious, efficient way of handling things. The characters include men and women of many races from around the world, and appeal to players. Players can relate to characters, but they can't relate to colored rectangles. So...is this a violent game? In some sense it has to be since it involves competition, but it certainly isn't anything we need to keep away from children.

Here we see some attack rectangles overlapping some defense rectangles. It's all dressed up with fancy anime graphics of Sagat (right) and Sodom (left).

Violence as a Theme

The fighting game is just one special type "violent game," though. Other games, such as Resident Evil, are much more based on violence, and even use violence as a theme. What of them? To understand violence as a theme, let's look at some films: Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, and Reservoir Dogs. I don't think anyone is going to say anything bad about Schindler's List. It chronicles intense violence and persecution of Jews, and turns our stomachs. Films like that could prevent another holocaust.

Saving Private Ryan begins with 20 minutes of the most realistic depiction of war violence I have ever seen captured on film. I felt like I was a solder on that beach, and it scared the hell out of me. This film exposed war for the atrocity that it is, and it's films like this one that could help us prevent another war.

Reservoir Dogs is called a particularly violent movie, yet it's body count is much lower than most action films. There are only about 5 times that weapons are fired, yet this film is criticized as being "more violent" than other films with much more shocking statistics. The reason is that Reservoir Dogs, more than many movies, is actually about violence. It's a characters study of a small group of people who are incredibly violent. There's a reality to it that, say, Lethal Weapon certainly doesn't have. The torture scene is unnerving and difficult to watch, even though the violent imagery is very scant (we're left to imagine most of it). The emotional power of violence is brought to bear. So sure, the criminals in this film look cool, they wear cool suits, they walk in slow motion at the beginning, they fire two pistols at once John Woo-style. They're glorified. But I don't think anyone comes away from Reservoir Dogs wanting to be a criminal. At least not anyone sees that in the end, they all die except the one guy who used his brain the most. It's films like this one that could stop young people from being criminals.

In an interview, writer/director Quentin Tarantino was asked about his use of violence in Reservoir Dogs. His answer was that he used it as a literary device, just like any other. He considers it no different from using tap dancing as a device. If you don't like tap dancing, he says, don't see movies about it. In fact, I think he's too modest, as he created a work which asks the audience to examine violence, to see it, to feel it, to realize its true horror and its inevitable, tragic conclusion.

The point is that using violence as a theme can be thought-provoking, important, even entertaining in film, as it can be in video games. But these examples must be in the vast minority, right? Most uses of violence don't' have such lofty morals. We all know Schindler's List does, but surely something like...Casino doesn't. That was what the Honorable William Bennett, Former Secretary of Education, used as an example, at least. I happen to think Scorsese has some valuable things to say as a filmmaker, and I don't really want the government deciding which works have challenging, valuable depictions of violence and which ones don't.

The General Case of Violence in Games

Surely all violence in games can't be explained away from the few specific examples I've given so far. Critics love to pick on Quake, for example. Even I don't claim the game is very strategically interesting. (Ok, I'm being harsh, oh well.) It's a "first person shooter" game, where the player has a variety of weapons which he fires at everyone he sees. The designers of Quake wanted, more than anything else, to make a game that's 1) fun, 2) fast, and 3) cool. Quake is certainly fast, since you die about once every 5 seconds. About one million gamers will tell you it's fun. Sneaking in that extra "gib" shot to detonate a corpse is "cool." So is the trail that the one-shot-kill rail gun round leaves behind. So is the feel of firing the rocket launcher. I'm not making much of a case for redeeming social value here, am I?

Damn, this guy killed the whole room and gibbed all the corpses...with the rail gun!

To understand the role of Quake (and basically ALL violent games), we'll have to look at what Professor Henry Jenkins has to say. I'll attempt to summarize a few of his points:

• Parents have claimed, throughout history, that whatever point in history they were in was the most corrupt time for children. Books corrupted children, then music did, then movies, then television, then video games and the internet. The arguments we hear today about video games are same ones parents made about movies in earlier times, yet all these forms of entertainment have become mainstream.
• "Boy culture" has not changed throughout history. Boys have always been violent. They have always formed hierarchical communities based on mastery of something (of fighting, baseball, video games, whatever). They have always done so in realms outside the knowledge of parents, especially mothers.
• The physical world has become a much less appropriate play space for children of today, due to urban expansion and crime. In earlier times, "boys would be boys" out in the streets, where they would form their hierarchical communities. Now, they are able to do so in the much, much safer virtual realm.
• The virtual world is mostly a space away from parents, since most parents today are not savvy about such things. Yet media in general is more ubiquitous now, so parents today are, perhaps, more aware of the competitive, violent tendencies of their children today than parents were aware of 200 years ago. The actual nature of children has not changed, of course.

So given all that, do you want your children to play Quake? Maybe in some earlier times, kids all went down to the river and formed hierarchical communities based on who could do the most dangerous dives off the tree branch. Or they met on the street and formed gangs based on who could do the most illegal mischief. When kids of today play Quake, they're doing the exact same thing. They're playing in a space where parents don't go, and they let egos clash. The difficult thing to admit is that this is the nature of teenage boys---that it has always been the nature of teenage boys---and that it has absolutely nothing to do with video games.

So a kid had a frustrating day at school. If he plays a little Quake, I'm happy he had an outlet for his aggressions. I don't even care if he plays Mortal Kombat and rips the heart of out his opponent's chest (you can do that in MK). Those are red pixels on a screen. I'd much rather children play with red pixels than with actual guns. And don't think that if they didn't have access to those red pixels that somehow their nature would change. They'd wrestle with their friends, play in the streets, try dangerous stunts, and any number of far more scary things than sitting at home playing with harmless pixels in a virtual world.

And the best part is that some of those violent games have life's lessons to teach. As I've discussed earlier, some teach that violence---real violence---is a terrifying thing. Others, the kind I play, teach the lessons winning and losing and of strategy.

And what of girls? I've talked as if the video game is a thing only known to teenage boys. While that's by far the largest demographic, girls play games too, of course. As one of the all-girl Quake clans will tell you, they have a forum in which to compete with boys on equal terms, in a virtual world where physical gender differences don't matter. Taken from a quote from Jenkins's senate testimony, a female Quake player explained to him:

"Maybe it's a problem...that little girls DON'T like to play games that slaughter entire planets. Maybe that's why we are still underpaid, still struggling, still fighting for our rights. Maybe if we had the mettle to take on an entire planet, we could fight some of the smaller battles we face everyday."

"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.

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 5^th 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.

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.