Academic Reading: Fundamentals of Game Design, Part 1

Good... morning, readers! (Good lord, is that the time?)

There is one element of my dissertation proposal that I've been putting off for a considerable amount of time: the academic reading. This is largely due to the fact that I had a great deal of difficulty thinking what I should (or could) read for the subject of my dissertation.

With the deadline fast approaching, however, I certainly couldn't put it off any longer, so I picked up some books and got to it.

In the end, I decided to use this portion of the dissertation to refresh and reinforce my knowledge of the fundamental elements of game design and creation.

Hence, one of the books I picked up from the library to go through was Ernest Adams' Fundamentals of Game Design. I will continue to read and refer to this book over the course of my dissertation, hopefully enabling me to produce better-realised games in at least the final project of each semester.

Going through it, I searched for areas that I would find helpful when conceptualising small or simple games, and how to boil a video game down to its essential elements.



The first section I read was entitled How Video Games Entertain.

Adams first emphasises here that, while a game is typically created to entertain, no one game will please every person. A good games designer should be able to produce games which entertain the player in a variety of ways, allowing them to target a specified audience every time they create a game.

Next, he highlights that the core entertainment value of a game lies in its gameplay, which hinges on the challenge the game lays out before the player. The player must have a reasonable expectation of being able to overcome this challenge, or else the game may seem unfair; if a powerful opponent is presented to the player, they should be able to believe that they in turn are suitably powerful enough to defeat it.

Gameplay, being at the centre of a game and the experience it offers, should be the first thing the designer considers when making a game.



Next, I delved into the factors that make a well-conceived video game, starting with The Key Components of Video Games.

Adams split this into Core Mechanics and User Interface: Core Mechanics generate the gameplay, defining the challenges of the game and the actions the player may take to overcome them, while the User Interface acts as a translator between the Core Mechanics and the player, converting input and output into something each can understand.

The example Adams offers is a player pressing a button to apply brakes in a driving game; the User Interface reads the button press, and tells the Core Mechanics to slow the car. The car slows, and the User Interface gives the player the appropriate animations and other visual and audio outputs to tell them that the braking has taken effect.

The User Interface can be broken down into two main elements: the interaction model and the camera model. The interaction model converts player input into actions within the game's Core Mechanics, while the camera model takes the events and challenges of the Core Mechanics and translates them for the player in the forms of images, sound, and/or other forms of output.



In the same chapter was a section entitled The Structure of a Video Game:

Adams explains that most games (except for the very simple) only present a subset of their complete gameplay at any one time. For example, a driving game could be split between driving the car and managing upgrades; two elements of the same game which offer starkly different challenges and actions available to the player (the player should not be allowed to purchase upgrades while driving, or to accelerate the vehicle while they're adding a better engine).

These different parts of a game are called gameplay modes.

Each gameplay mode should have a different User Interface from the others, necessary to give the player the appropriate feedback and input options.

Another element of a game's structure is shell menus. Shell menus typically exist before, in-between, and after segments of gameplay, during times when the player is unable to affect the game world. Examples of this are loading and saving the game, options menus, and often pause menus. If the pause menu allows the player to affect the game world in some way, though, such as purchasing upgrades, then it should be considered a gameplay mode rather than a shell menu.

Title screens, credit screens, and loading screens can be similarly termed shell screens, as they offer the player no interaction or feedback from the game's Core Mechanics.



This should do for the first post; after some further reading, I'll be back with my notes from the next chapter of Adams' Fundamentals of Game Design: Game Concepts.

Until then, stay well, readers.



Adams, Ernest. Fundamentals of Game Design, Second Edition. New Riders, Berkeley, CA, 2010.