The Quixotic Engineer

This summer I’ve been casually following Game Design Concepts, Ian Schreiber’s experimental online game design course. The curriculum has covered a number of thought-provoking concepts, but the real light bulb moment for me came in his discussion of the MDA framework¹.

Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc and Robert Zubek defined MDA in 2001 [PDF link]. It stands for mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics, the three layers that define a game. These words are often thrown around casually in game design discussions, but in MDA they have very specific meanings:

• Mechanics are the formal rules of the game. These rules define how the game is prepared, what actions the players can take, the victory conditions, the rule enforcement mechanisms, etc.
• Dynamics describe how the rules act in motion, responding to player input and working in concert with other rules. In programming terms, the “run-time” behaviour of the game.
• Aesthetics describe the player’s experience of the game; their enjoyment, frustration, discovery, fellowship, etc. In simple terms, what makes the game fun?

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This week I’ve been enjoying the “Gaming Made Me” series over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where various journalists and designers¹ are discussing “gaming education and influences: the games that made us the kind of people that we are today.”

What’s interesting about the series is the contrast between how unremarkable many of these games are in a larger sense and how important they are on a personal level. Did the creators of Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe know that they would inspire Jim Rossignol’s lifetime of gaming? Do these influential games have common characteristics, or are they imbued with greatness by the emotion and (later) nostalgia of the player?

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In light of all the indie goodness I’ve been enjoying lately, I decided to expand on my original post and make Indie Gaming Gallery a regular feature on this blog. Here are four independent titles that you should definitely be playing.

Little Wheel [Flash]

Many game bloggers have tackled the subject of adventure games and their unfortunate fall from grace in mainstream gaming. It’s quite possible that the golden age of Lucasarts was the artistic peak for traditional adventures. However, enterprising developers are breathing new life into the genre by switching to a shorter format. While some companies are exploring this new niche by releasing episodically, indie developers such as Vector Park, Amanita Design and OneClickDog are creating short self-contained adventure stories.

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Moving games into the third dimension introduced a new challenge for game designers: player-controlled perspective, and the host of problems associated with it. One of those problems is guiding the player’s eye. How can you direct them toward the next objective? How can you make them notice special events and clues? How can you ensure that they’re facing the right direction at the right time?

Michel McBride-Charpentier explored some of these methods in a post entitled How Designers Turn Heads. The most naive solution is to “simply temporarily remove camera control from the player and send it off somewhere with a script”, a blunt method which sacrifices player immersion and denies the interactive nature of games. A step above this is the Gears of War approach, where “the camera can be focused on a special event at the press of a button.” This offers the player a simple binary choice: look at the event or ignore it. This method is still artificial and inelegant, as it relies on a “giant blinking controller button prompt” to indicate that something is happening.

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Last month, head editor Ben Abraham and his crew of bloggers launched Critical Distance, a game criticism archive and compilation blog. They’ve been doing a terrific job, linking out to fascinating new sites and really expanding the conversation.

With exams over, I recently had a chance to contribute something: a post wherein I attempt to connect my love of indie games with my interest in music history. A quick note about the unusual format: it’s not intended to be an in-depth comparison, just a light exploration of the concept via various game bloggers.

Critical Distance – Punk & Indie Games

If you’re looking for fresh perspectives in video game criticism, then Critical Distance is definitely a website to watch.