Some of you might have noticed that I’ve been posted less these last few weeks. Well, I started a new job. New challenges, new workspace, new game style to design… all fun stuff. I’m really enjoying my new job but of course that means that I have to review my schedule quite a bit to fit my blog writing in it. As mentioned in my earlier posts, it is quite impossible to play every game out there and know everything that’s been done in the industry. So what do I do when I start a new project? I do what I call “game cramming”.
Game cramming is the action of playing many games of a particular style in order to study them quickly and spot the essence of what makes them fun. Theorists wrote many definitions of video game fun and elaborated different theories on what makes a general game experience entertaining. However, when it’s time to get down to business and shove your hands in it, theories don’t mean much aside giving you a hint of what to look for when playing. Yes, a good old fashion Japanese plateformer and an American RPG both offer a series of interesting choices within a set of rules with goals and ways to achieve them but, in the end, you need to look at them closely to really decipher what makes that particular style so fun. What works in one, doesn’t necessarily works in the other. The nature of the rules and the choices the player must take are very different. Game cramming is a good way to either brush up on your knowledge of a style or get acquainted with a new one. We all know that there are different ways of playing a game when you are a game designer. Some games you play for entertainment and some games you play for analysis. Game cramming helps you get the “big picture” of a particular style in order to help you go through a more thorough and precise analysis play of a game. I find game cramming to be a valuable tool when looking back on a game style that I particularly appreciate. Let’s take for example fighting games. I love them. Since I played through many fighters for my personal entertainment, I can’t say that I’ve studied them all. In fact, I assimilated a lot of the information the games gave me but didn’t analyze them while playing. This leads my subconscious to know what is fun but my conscience isn’t aware of the details of why I find it fun. This makes me know instinctively if one thing will work or not but I’m not able to back my opinion aside from saying that it’s a gut feeling. And of course this kind of explanation doesn’t have much credential in a meeting, especialy when speaking to non-designers. Game cramming helps you focus on the general traits of a genre. If you play ten or twenty fighting games in a row, you’ll end up discovering similarities between the titles. Some are obvious, others a lot more subtle, but in the end you’ll have a better idea of what gives that extra thing, that secret spice, that makes you love that genre so much. Game cramming is also a good way to focus on game mechanics and general game structure from a genre. Since you don’t have time to think about the theme that much (unless you’re cramming to discover themes), a lot of your focus ends up on how you learn to play the game, the game’s difficulty as well as its pacing. To me, game cramming is not only a good method to help me understand a genre, it’s also a fun way to discover new titles and play old ones in a brand new way.
Game cramming is not without its flaws. Since you are zooming through games, you can easily skip over a lot of a title’s flavor. What makes a game fun is the game as a whole and not simply a few of its layers. It’s a good way to get a general feeling of a genre but you won’t know everything about it. In fact, game cramming is a tool to get the big picture but the job’s not over once you’ve done a cramming session. I’ve seen some designers play a few hours, sometimes minutes, of several games of a genre and expect to know right away what made it so popular. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy and following this direction usually ends up with a clone or a bland addition to the sea of games in that style. Once you’ve done some game cramming, it’s important to focus your analysis on cannon games of that genre in order to deepen your research. Game cramming also have its physical limits. Sure you have to be able to access those games somehow but, hey, we’re all designers here and let’s face it: we know how to have access to games. Personal collections, friends, rentals, shops, ebay, demos… and dare I say emulators? We know how to get the games we want. The physical constraint is rather a question of time. Even if you have fifty games lined up for your cramming session, you need to have the time to play them all. Sometimes you’ll play them for a few minutes sometimes a few hours. Even if we go with the hypothetical thirty minutes time limit per games, playing fifty games require you to be playing for twenty-five hours. I don’t know about you but I don’t usually have twenty-five hours of free time laying around. Game cramming becomes even more tedious when you play genres like adventure games or RPGs since those games usually require the player to play for at least two hours in order to start the core experience. So, even if game cramming is a great way to prepare yourself for more thorough research and helps you get in the right vibe to design in a genre, it’s not bullet proof: You still have to do more research on it to have a better understanding of different design philosophy within that genre.
Since this is already a long post, I will continue tomorrow on that topic.
Tags: cramming, Development, game design