Becoming a Video Game Designer by Daniel Noah Halpern

Author:Daniel Noah Halpern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

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So: “a game has rules” is pretty simple. But how about Huizinga’s third rule, that play is not ordinary life, but an unreal space? Here is Huizinga’s description: “The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e., forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.” Zimmerman has written extensively about this space, this temporary, special space that exists apart from our normal reality; he named it, using it as a general principle, “the magic circle.” The magic circle, he told me, “is a finite space with infinite possibility.” But what does that mean, infinite possibility? What, exactly, is an unreal space? And how do you make one?

Stone Librande, who is a lead designer at Riot, boiled down the problem for me. Librande lives in the Bay Area (“Riot North”), and also teaches a game design workshop for students in Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. Riot’s URF Academy curriculum is based on his college course. Students start with pen and paper, no other technology. This is in part because Librande believes the game mechanics are the core of the creation—he sees the overlay of technology as floors built over the foundation. Among the basic concepts in his course, he said, is the idea that “If you really think about playing a video game, brutally honestly, you’re saying, ‘I’m going to go home and I’m going to hold on to a piece of plastic and tap my thumb against the plastic while I look at colored lights change on a piece of glass.’ ” So the trick of the game is to convince you you’re not just tapping plastic buttons on your couch: you’re fighting aliens, you’re shooting Nazis, you’re building a farm, you’re throwing a pass, you’re shooting blue fire out of your butt. “That’s the main video game design trick,” Librande said. “How do you map aesthetics and feelings and emotions onto mechanical risk-reward, Pavlovian behavioral systems?”

That’s part of the magic circle: you’re a cowboy on a horse. For a time. For those moments, those hours, you’re there: you’re not sitting on a couch. You’re in a saddle, in a magic space. The normal rules of life—the normal chaos of life—do not apply. Surely some of this is achieved with art and technology: extraordinary vistas, evocative music, angles of perspective, photo-realism, even virtual realities. But its foundation is in the mechanics of the game. Almost all the designers I met agreed that for all the story and art and technology, the simple core of what makes games games was providing the player with the act of making choices. Without that act, without the chance to make engaged decisions that affect how the experience proceeds, you have a movie or a book or a painting that you are external to. You are not making decisions about where the book or movie will go.

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