The Underlying Psychology of Battle Royale Games

Originally written Sep 2020, published recently.

It’s the latest craze in video games. Last Man Standing games in larger open-world environments. From DayZ, to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, to Fortnite and Fall Guys. Battle Royale games pit a large amount of unknown players in a single competition, to see who can become the ultimate competitor. In this blog, I’d like to take a deep dive into how this trend came to be, and if maybe parallel observations can lead to discovering the next ‘hit’ genre.

Minecraft is one of the reasons why BR exists.

Let’s firstly look at breaking down what the genre is. Battle Royale games are not unknown to old school gamers, many have undoubtedly described it as ‘big last man standing game’. Indeed, the ‘Last Man Standing’ genre was featured in games like Quake, Halo, and TimeSplitters. This was during a pre-loadout based shooter era of first-person games, when having to find weapons in the map was a key element of the game’s flow. The recent trend of starting loadouts was a reaction to the popularity of class based shooters like Team Fortress. This retro idea of finding equipment was rebranded as ‘looting’ because of the ‘survival games’ trend that had just come to pass, mostly instigated by Minecraft. But let’s also not forget that this started in the 2010’s, coming off the cuff of the 2000’s grimy shooter era and back towards a romanticized first person shooter experience. The stars were aligned for a ‘gamier’ interpretation of multiplayer shooter.

Getting to the format.

That period is when DayZ came to be. And that was my first foray into the genre. I played the Arma 2 Mod for DayZ back in 2009-10. There wasn’t a strict winner at this time, we were still satisfied with the prospect of existing as a ‘winner’ in this wasteland until someone took us down. And then we’d start all over and get revenge. The question is, how did we come to the format that would shine a glorious light on a winner?

March 23rd 2012, the release of The Hunger Games (movie), would enlighten a new spark of fantasy in people. Not many people like the franchise, but what most people will agree on is that the first was the best one. Its gritty portrayal of teens ruthlessly pit against each other in an arena would awaken a lumbering desire in people. The survival demands of Katniss was a perfect self-insert for the daydreamers we are.

This desire was also a proven thing.

I was quite good at Halo back in the day. I played 2 and 3 religiously and wanted to go competitive during my teens. As a throwback, I went to the Microsoft Booth at PAX Australia in 2017, and played a round of Slayer in Halo 5. I was on my way to doing a flawless 25-0 against 7 randoms. The thrills of being at the top, and the stakes of the one life I had were irreplaceable. But it’s a feeling that the 7 others didn’t have. Victory for them wasn’t staked on their current life, but for me it evolved into wanting this flawless victory. Battle Royale games would democratize this feeling to all of its participants, and that is the exhilaration you’re feeling as you scrounge for supplies in your BR game of choice.

The BR Boom.

Now that we understand the historical background of BR games and relevant genres that morphed into it, we can look at its recent executions to see how developers and publishers attempt to stand out.

Most are familiar with the story of PUBG, and the modification of Fornite to become a BR game, and its later evolutions. PUBG is most definitely a product of the post-gritty era of shooters. The FPS gameplay maintains the semblance of realism, but the constructing rules of the competition are romantically defined.

You’re using realistic ballistic weapons, but everyone is parachuting onto this island and having a 100-man fight.

Fornite on the other hand, is completely stylized and always was in the beginning. The big twist there was the leveraging of its existing building mechanics to bring about the ‘survival sandbox’ genre into play. This strikes a cord with the Minecraft generation, whom grew up understanding crafting and grid-building, and most likely had ventured into Minecraft’s modded competitive games. Combine that with the Free-to-Play business model, which is very popular with young teens, and the game was bound for success. F2P models are proven by the immense mobile games industry, and the bits of celebrity endorsement didn’t hurt the brand either.

Between PUBG’s success and Fornite’s immense success, everyone else in the industry was ready to jump on the BR boom. All of this to varying levels of success, from Radical Heights to Apex Legends. These have had their issues with maintaining a sticky audience against what is now a highly competitive market, but then comes the arrival of Fall Guys.

Fall Guys is a TV-show themed, elimination round mini-game anthology. 60 players join together and partake in obstacle courses, memory games, team-based competitions to survive. This game taps into the same feeling of victory as other BR games.

If I am alive, I’m winning.

In this example, we see a twist on the genre. It’s not a first person shooter, it’s not truly competitive, and it’s been broken down into a round-by-round basis. This almost targets players who don’t like the BR games that came before it. You don’t have to wait fifty years to play again, and you’re always in the action.

Mediatonic and Devolver Digital were almost certainly aware of the impending success of the game as the meta progression aspect was in place quite early with a proven model. The hap-hazard, player-body clamoring aspect of this game hearkens me back to Gmod game modes. In particular the obstacle courses in which a mass of players attempt to platform across the level, and very few make it to the finish line.

Gumbo games are the future.

We’re seeing a trend here of combining underground cult-hit game genres, formalizing them into an approachable package for guaranteed hits. DayZ combined shooters and survival. PubG combined that with ‘Hunger Games’/’Battle Royale’ media, Fornite combined that with base building, and Fall Guys combined the format with clumsy platforming.

Gumbo games are a melange of genres that work well together to make a more interesting dynamic. I think without a doubt that the next big hits in video games will be borrowing elements from all sorts of genres. Similarly to how RPG-elements are added to most games, deciphering which existing genre can blend into your game to elevate the bar is a key to success.

Interestingly enough, the trend of blending genres is something that gained popularity from indie games. It’s often considered false praise to give certain games credit for the existence of others, but it’s interesting (maybe not important) to recognize the catalyst for these movements in the video games industry.

The Witcher 3: Playthrough Post-Mortem

I recently finished playing through The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

For a long time, whenever I was looking for an RPG game to play, Steam and many other sources kept pointing me to The Witcher.

At the time, I didn’t play many story-heavy games, I much preferred the soft story-telling of games like Dark Souls. But, I keep an open-mind and decided to play it. (With the intent of writing this blog at the end of it.)

This isn’t a review, but will instead be an analysis of what I’ve learnt playing it, primarily from a PX point of view, and how that might tie into tangible, production outlines.

Learning the Game

Starting out the game, it didn’t take long to get into the hang of playing it. I had tried in the past many times to start playing it, and begin a playthrough, but I always stopped quite quickly.

In all of those times, I think it’s safe to say I didn’t have the game figured out. Sure, I knew the controls, and the basic crafting systems, but I didn’t technically know when the game started. For example, playing through Nier: Automata, your first playthrough doesn’t even scratch what the game is. In The Witcher, you actually start playing what the game is immediately, but it takes some time to figure out what that experience actually is. And even more so, how it plays out for the rest of the game.

The crux of The Witcher, is that you need to prepare for the climax of each questline. This isn’t true for everything, but mostly true. Sometimes this will happen via story and character decisions, other times it will be about you preparing for a fight.

That above, sums up The Witcher. What it asks, is for you to love the world of the game, and to get personally biased into the characters. These systems get intertwined deeply, and many quests aren’t one or the other, but it is instead a vast multitude.

Gameplay

The game primarily hinges on making decisions during dialogue sequences. The outcome opens up in one or two directions, you either fight, or you change what the rest of the dialogue goes to. This is it. The moment you spot this, the game is mostly ruined until you rebuild the veil of illusion.

The game’s combat system is fine, it’s not the best, and not the worst, but it’s fine. And perhaps fine wasn’t always enough for me, as I’ve found myself dropping the game constantly throughout my playthrough. This is what actually confirms my initial distaste for the game. If the story falls through at any point, and it definitely does, the game will return to a combat game that isn’t really fun. I disliked almost all of my fighting sequences, and felt little wit was involved. All of that was used up before the fight, in making sure I had my oils and potions ready. Once the battle begins, the ‘B’ button is your ‘God’ button. Geralt will stop damn near everything to dodge on that button press.

This is perhaps a question all games must ask themselves. Is there a ‘God’ button or action, that the player can trivialize the experience? I know A Township Tale (0.0.17.0) currently has tons, and most games have buttons that do that. The Witcher 3 also has the Quen sign, which puts a shield around the user that will at least absorb one attack. Some games, however, are built nicely around it. Super Mario Odyssey, there is no real way to avoid your encounter, none that aren’t in the nature of the game. If you want to skip this giant section, than platform your way around it, which is inhibited by the level design. Dark Souls invincibility rolls, all take stamina, can be hard to control and doesn’t cancel attacks.

The story section of The Witcher, will be the main reason you play. For the characters you meet, you will attribute your perspective on what they mean to your game experience. Some of them, you will want them to like you, and others you will detest. I had personal disdain for anything Dandelion related, and enjoyed Djikstra and the Bloody Baron. But again, the prime issue is that it is difficult to visualize what having played this portion well means. This is because you can see what opportunities you’ve gained, but rarely what you’ve lost. This type of story contrivance makes talking about the game to others fun, but doesn’t push me to play more games like it.

Detroit: Become Human has a saving grace feature with its timeline visualization. This lets you see how your actions connect together, and thereby also showing what could have been, or that there could have been. Mass Effect and Fallout franchises also did this, with dialogue options locked. Obviously, it’s more difficult to do for a game where the variance is so tied into other character behaviors, and aren’t immediately exposed after the event has occurred. But it is perhaps also a good thing to think about. How does the value of a decision get measured?

Story

Now, the actual story of the game is fine. The dialogue is usually written decently, but I must say the accents get old on me quick. When are we going to stop having the accents of the UK be our go-to medieval accent. But I digress, the story is about Geralt following Ciri’s trail through the kingdoms. The urgency of the task falls through, and the Wild Hunt, is actually scarier before you ever fight it properly. This is perhaps, an area where the story and gameplay don’t mesh very well. The Wild Hunt are pegged as being terrifying forces of nature, yet they are no stronger than a troll. Why can’t we just get a couple of trolls and drop them near those portals the Wild Hunt come out of. All kidding aside, the game’s traditional scaling difficulty simply doesn’t help instigate fear.

The game’s story is mostly split into four acts. Velen, Novigrad, Skellige and then the stretch to the end. Many events unfold across the game, but it reaches its peak twice, thereby dulling what the game could have been. I feel like we should’ve been able to cut the entire segment defending Kaer Moerhen out of there. I know an important thing happens, but how come that’s not a constant problem after the battle? If they can teleport anywhere, why does the Wild Hunt ever need to chase someone down? I have a lot of problems with them, and maybe that’s where story falls. The more serious and elevated in intensity you build something out to be, how do you justify them not using their entire arsenal to accomplish their goal? For example, the biggest villain of any dungeon-crawler game, would be a character that breaks important keys. Or if a Sudowoodo decided to block a path before you got the Cut HM. Or that if any characters grappled rather than dueled in a fight, they would win. Maybe the thing to learn here is that stories can fall through if the rules aren’t clear. The enemy can read like a simple, mystical threat writing device, but truly good villains would operate with more clarity.

Super Mario Odyssey, for example, the story isn’t just about finding Bowser and rescuing Peach. Bowser’s actions continuously ruin the places he visits, and so Mario helps out. And he needs to steal fuel for his probably unlicensed vehicle. There is actually no real threat to the game beyond that. Bowser gets all of the pieces he needs, and what does him getting married to Peach really mean? In the world of Mario, we can believe that her getting married to Bowser is a terrible thing, even though it’s probably not binding. It’s built out of the youthful concept of marriage tying people together by some abstract force of law. This is coupled by an amazing end segment to the game. And the end of the Witcher 3 isn’t fantastic, primarily because it feels like the combat system doesn’t offer much for designers to play with. Breath of the Wild, on the other hand, has an amazing end segment with a castle that can use most of its mechanics.

All in all, the game is quite good if you invest yourself into the characters, and play a character as well. I wanted to see how much of a scrooge I could make Geralt, and perhaps there needs to be more flexibility there. Most video game characters are too heroic in my opinion, even the nastier things you can say are always dulled by the fact that the story MUST proceed. This is why I enjoyed games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim. You could lie, cheat and deceive people in so many ways because your character had no voice. Whether we will see this freedom in Cyberpunk 2077, probably not. But hey, there’s a new Elder Scrolls rolling out soon.

Ready Player One : Style over Substance (Book Afterthoughts)

Prelude

At this point in time, I've only just finished Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. A story depicting a VR-oriented world, where the creator of the virtual worlds sets his fortune as the prize of a global easter egg hunt.

I originally picked up the book well over a year ago, but stopped reading a bit less than halfway through. I personally don't like drawing such direct inspiration from things so closely related to what I do professionally. With the movie that's now out, I stayed away from trailers and reading news about it, wanting to take Ernest Cline's vision without visual bias. Here are my thoughts on the topic of the book's Style Over Substance dilemma.

Style Over Substance

Ready Player One's 80s era outlook on video games and entertainment is a look back at a key decade for entertainment, but juxtaposed into a dystopian, VR-encompassing future. Whilst Ernest Cline bounces between the vision of the OASIS, the book's VR metaverse, and the 80s themed contents of this virtual world, perhaps the substance of the text as a book suffers from a reader's perspective. In this analysis, we look at the merits of the story as a book, from its vision of the world down to the development of characters. There may be some spoilers.

Ready Player One takes place in the near-future of our own timeline, where the pool of all entertainment history has taken place. The book doesn't shy from reminding the reader about all the hit, pop culture TV shows, movies and games of the past, being the basis for much of the OASIS' content. But arguably, the most interesting part is actually the start of the book. Where the bubble of 80s content is primarily contained in the OASIS's creator, James Halliday's final challenge. The main character, Parvizal instead goes on to talk about the history of entertainment since the OASIS, its role in education, the real world, and how it has completely changed how humans interact in general. Everybody has their own vice in this world, and you'll find it in VR. This I believe is what actually hooks readers in, it's an imaginative description of content that doesn't exist, but we can envision. 

The book goes into a downward spiral of pop culture references, as Parvizal's story really begins. Short-cutting much-needed exposition to the new settings by making simile with the eras they are based off of. This can easily alienate anybody who isn't familiar with the appearance of a particular movie set, but is obviously catering to a nice audience. Although, it does often feel like the reader is treated like a non-intelligent being.

Flat out saying, "It was the x from y. Mister Person was a huge fan of the show, so much so that this place is exactly like that."

New settings would be much more interesting if there was some suspense and guesswork about new locations. Even if it took some time of describing a location before Parvizal revealed where it was from. This issue perpetrates throughout the whole book, and in my opinion makes the book much worse than it needed to be.

Taking this in stride, the OASIS as a concept, and all of its contents would be fascinating to experience, which is why I believe people can enjoy the concept so much. But what I don't hear people talk about much, is the actual characters of the book. This pertains to the style over substance debate, whereby the world is far more interesting than its characters. As a book-reader, I observe the characters as I would any other novel.

Parvizal is the product of this world, his character is 'vanilla', and a template in which to imprint your own, self-proclaimed affinity with entertainment. Yet, this isn't even the character's biggest flaw. A lack of development against other characters, and a deus ex machina style approach to all challenges makes you infinitely bored at the complications of the story. In every situation, his internet level knowledge of entertainment gets him through anything that tests his knowledge or gaming skills, he literally pulls out magical items out of nowhere to deal with obstacles. The book glazes over these very quickly, and made my speed-read new obstacles he came across because I knew how it was going to get resolved. Yep. There it goes. Parvizal happened to have watched that movie a superjillion times in his early days. Literally 'luckily'.

The other characters in Ready Player One have the unfortunate of being perceived through Parvizal's perspective. The book is written in first-person, which means that we have to read through his outlook on what could've been much more interesting characters. A core dynamic point of the relationship between characters are the expectations of meeting in real life. Here we see some interesting challenges that side characters have overcome thanks to the anonymity of VR. Yet despite the strength they've built over this struggle, these characters bear an insecurity about their real life selves that isn't shared with the main character. Parvizal at no point shows any real qualms about meeting people in real life. Parvizal somehow finds a way to enforce a weird sense of pity towards side characters that have shown they stand on equal or superior grounds in the OASIS. A clear example is Art3mis, the book's female lead, and romantic interest. She's described as being a pro-active, go-getter, starting her own brand, finding fame on her own merit, and being really good at games. She frequently surpasses Parvizal in many of the challenges, yet when she returns after Parvizal's own character arc, has a real life physical insecurity that acts as a transparent tool for Parvizal to show he doesn't care. Essentially turning these characters into a "You're fine as you are." "Really?!" type relationship.

The book is littered with more character-driven moments, or should I say Parvizal driven moments, that are outrageous in concept. He is fabled and forgiven for his poor social trepidation after pulling off the 'impossible'. There's a whole page of hype compliments to him, where he acts humble and analytical to be the cool guy. He pulls of a single man heist against one of the world's largest organizations. When facing a new problem that seems near impossible to solve, the characters are saved by a near literal 'god' moment of deus ex machina.

All in all, the world is worth exploring, this book seems like it was written to be a movie. Whether or not the book deserves praise is up to your own opinion. To me, it seems almost insulting to other writers, in an already flawed rating system. Can all the world's products be saturated within a 0-10 star rating system? I'm watching the movie next week with the team at Alta. Them not having read the book, being VR developers, and generally less critical than I am of these things, will be interesting to see their thoughts.

My fear is that now when I say I'm a VR developer, I'll get asked if I've seen or heard of Ready Player One. Thankfully I can point them to this. Let's hope I don't have to write one about Sword Art Online.

Thanks for reading.

3. Design Lesson #2: "Fulfilling Emergence"

Emergent gameplay is a hot topic for game designers. It is the dream-like concept of every mechanic compounding on the next, in new ways that we don't intend. At least that's one of the definitions of it.

One of the reasons this topic is borderline controversial, is because people have various interpretations of what makes emergent gameplay. Some believe it's a way to use mechanics that you didn't intend of, others see it as mechanics compounding on each other, and others just see it as general creativity within the sandbox of video games.

To simplify this blog, we're going to be looking at numerous types of emergent gameplay in video games, and then we'll discuss how to design for it.

MINECRAFT

Minecraft's emergent gameplay has it's own caveats. It's technically a sandbox game, and players are always placing and removing blocks. It could be argued that since the shapes players construct is simply one additional dimension to the mechanic, it doesn't add anything too unexpected. The game thrived as a creative medium in which players could design games within it. This is something I enjoyed doing too, and you can see it within the content of thousands of YouTube Minecraft players. Things like Skybox, Hunger Games maps and the plethora of modded communities means Minecraft has a range of fabricated context. 

If you're looking to create a game with the scaling potential of Minecraft, you need to ask what the evolution of this potential is. What would it take for players to get so infinitely engrossed. Alas, that question has spawned many voxel-based survival games in various settings, but I don't think changing the context is the answer. Players are now looking for a different type of freedom.

Minecraft has it's visually creative cubes. But it also has redstone. And alas, here is where you can easily create an element of emergence. Once Minecraft's cube logic was established, adding a programmatic language like redstone meant that with just a few sets of rules, players can create contraptions that play on the core mechanic. This is why we see people building basic computers and calculators and all that. I almost wouldn't count this as emergent, personally. If you wanted to make something like that, you're creating an interface for basic computing logic. There's not really a genre-defining innovation going on here.

SUPER SMASH BROS. MELEE

Nintendo at one point I'm sure hated the Melee fan base. An entire culture of gamers who clung to their game because glitches gave the game a competitive edge. Melee is a fighting game, where the objective is to knock opponents out of the level. What was meant to be a casual family game, became a twitch-reflex, hardware and game region specific entanglement of fingers around the Gamecube controller.

This fits into the category of game mechanics that the developers didn't anticipate, but their system allowed for it. It rose from a glitch, but I count it because of its mythos. Players figured out if you jumped, air-dodged back into the ground immediately and flicked the joystick you could slide backwards and forwards (wave-dashing). AND, during this sliding motion you could still input attacks. This completely changed the play-style of the game. It's like watching Muhammad Ali turned up to 11, characters were sliding, doing frame-perfect attacks and made the game look like it was playing at 2x speed.

How do you design for this? You don't really. But you get the choice of whether to embrace it when it happens, or to fight it. Nintendo had an intended audience and made their choice with future titles.

ABSOLVER

Open-world martial arts fighting game by Slocap. The game has you enter a world with other players, and you fight enemies, complete quests, learn moves by fighting others who know the move, and go on with your experience.

This game features an amazing potential to bank in on what we'll call viral emergence. Since you can't just learn a move, and the developers control how rare a move begins, you can create some really interesting social structures. As an example, the game had a degrading slap you could perform. To begin with, only a rare NPC could teach it to players, but since you can learn moves from other players, the move could spread. This spawned a school of martial arts experts who would perma-slap, or finish you off disgracefully. The key part of this is the social interaction that happened. Those who know rare moves are sought after. Naturally this wanes when everybody learns it, but it's a fascinating example of a social structure spreading virally throughout a game's community.

This example fits perfectly within the realm of the game, and I'm sure was the developer's intention with having players organically interact with each other. As a developer, you can control supply, gauge demand and let players do the rest in these multiplayer scenarios. This is something you CAN design for.

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD

One of this year's hottest titles for Nintendo Switch, the game takes our hero of time into an open-world. Much can be said about this game and it's approach to design, but we're only going to focus on how it treats emergence. Mechanics, features and properties that affect each other. BotW builds its world with various elements, including weather, temperature, wind, fire, water, ice and many more.

These mechanics are very hard-coded into the game. And when as a player you create a fire, that you then use to lift your glider into the sky, it's debatable as to whether or not that was an emergent feature. I like to believe that it is, because if we keep saying things aren't emergent there's never a point in talking about it. Again, as with many other features it's all about the player's experience. As designers, when players encounter compounding mechanics like this, we should make them feel smart. Because you've essentially presented the player with a puzzle, they've figured out what ultimately needs to be done to solve it, but then they build the answer themselves. That's a huge feat. That's something we should always celebrate, because it's almost like a free win for us as developers.

Nintendo does this with Breath of the Wild, though they treat it a bit more casually than the dream scenario would have. For example, the game gives you obvious clues about using large fires to lift yourself. The dream emergent design would have the game's stasis ability, freeze an area, you use a Korok leaf to build up massive wind power in that stasis zone. Then you dash into the zone whilst pulling your glider out, and getting ejected forward through the air.

If I described this to the team on BotW, it'd probably be a fair bit of work, because their system may not work quite so conveniently. If you're designing for this type of emergence, though, that's something you may need to think about when creating these foundation features.

A TOWNSHIP TALE

This is the quick self-plug moment. I'm not going to go into all of it, but I'll describe the nature of my design on the game and emergence. Simply put, as we build a persistent, physical world, the natural emergent thinking of players comes straight through. Kids in a play-ground will find things to do, give them enough time, and they might decide on a larger goal. So on and so forth. I'm currently exploring emergent development, where essentially I push the bounds on our game's systems to see if I can create fun outcomes.

At some point we'll do an actual blog post on the game's emergent features an approach to design, but I get the feeling the team will want to save that for the website.

HOW TO DESIGN FOR IT

Hopefully you can figure out what I think are some of the more distinct ways games try to be emergent. When you're laying out your feature set, mash them together to see if that can work. And then make it work, it'll take a combination of the types shown by the examples above because different features accommodate different forms. Being able to classify which type you want to target, means you can better know when you've succeeded. Although all of this brings about the question of balance, if I can combine everything, does that make it OP? Like all balance things, test and keep testing. Don't get bogged down thinking about how it's going to get balanced, just make it, and then solve the balance problem later.

2. Design Lessons #1: "World Design Themes"

One of many reasons I wanted to start a blog was to talk about specific video games, and what drew me inspired to make them in the first place. From Software through Demon Souls an Dark Souls has spawned a huge foray of "Souls-like" games from other developers. But they often never quite hit the nail on the head for the Souls fans. As one myself, I fundamentally believe World Design holds the answer to all of it.

World Design is a broad field of video games. I like to think of it as both the world of the video game, and how the player feels throughout it. It'd be easy to describe it entirely as what the player can see, do and listen to, but there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than that.

We design for the senses and then get some emotion coming out from players. When you defeat a boss in Dark Souls, you see its life bar is gone, the game's dead enemy sound plays, loud non diegetic shimmer of magic nothing sparks to life. You see a dying animation play, and in big bold worlds "VICTORY ACHIEVED". All of those moments, I would call as part of the world design. The world makes a big deal out of the boss you just defeated, because that's your one goal in the game. Find an enemy, fight it, maybe die, and move on to the next big enemy.

There are plenty of other examples to other degrees. You get similar feedback when defeating enemies, some tougher ones make a more distinct sound, you unlock big heavy doors, you step into boss arenas through a daunting fog gate, music kicks in and then you feel the size of your next venture.

THE ROLE OF THEMES IN WORLD DESIGN

So why does From Soft's games do this so well? We see an early version of it in Demon Souls, and a crap ton of it in Bloodborne. This is all part of the world design. 

What kind of world you're in exactly, gets shown to you the whole game. It's almost like a recurring theme that the game hammers you over the head with. Let's take one theme from Dark Souls. Dire/Dread. You're a corpse in a prison cell. Dire. You run past people that look like you, but have clearly lost their mind. Shit's dire. First thing that interacts with you is a boss. Shit's really dire. Unless you've played it a whole bunch, you probably won't fight it, you'll have to run. The game literally makes you feel like this is a dire situation, and you need to bounce. The first NPC you meet is crestfallen. The first other parallel you meet to what you act like, has given up on the mission you're about to go on. Second boss you fight, literally walls you from the path forward. The game's telling you this is your life now. After you manage to kill it, instead of rewarding you with an immediate checkpoint, it gives you the uncertainty of having to go look for a safe spot. If you mess that up, it's likely you got toasted by a dragon around the corner. I can go on forever, but this is a core part of the game's world design that incites this feeling of dread in you. You're always on your toes, and that's the way the world is. You're meeting characters that suffered the same fate, people that betray and monsters that borderline cheat you. You will never meet a Souls player who doesn't examine every chest before opening it.

For a game to successfully rope you in, you need people to live and bask in this emotion. It can't be fake, or shallow like putting skulls on everything. It's the result of careful level design, and laser sharp focus. The game never strays from this theme, and as a result you get a super concrete experience from players. 

The next question is, how do you design a world like that? There are a couple of games that come to mind, Hyper Light Drifter and Super Meat Boy. The latter will make sense when we get to it.

HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER

Here is a game that nailed down it's emotion. It tells you almost nothing outright, it tells you exactly what's up with your character, and never lets go. Your character is sick, they get some kind of vision, and then they go back to fighting. The world's levels pose a challenge of dashing mastery, combat proficiency, and the game's reload mechanics encourage you to act like a badass. And badass is what the game wants you to know about it. The dashing ability is cool, attacking takes timing and reflexes, shooting takes mild precision, and movement is key. The game has you doing magic with your hands to play well.

But the game paces itself, because you're entirely in control of the pace. Your objective is self-driven, the game gives you clues on the map to go to the four corners of it, and deal with what you see there. That's about it. You find out what is a collectible on your own, you find out what those mean for your progress, and each side of the world has a little story to tell. Through the setting, the giants' corpses and the actual enemies you're fighting. Desperate things happened here.

None of the game's world design would work if things were blandly explained. There's intrigue in the quietness of the game. The ambient-style musical scores drive that into your brain with their unique character. Your character only coughs, NPCs speak in foreign symbols, the whole game speaks through them. The music is slow paced, loud, descriptive singular notes. Much like the game's symbols. All pointing to the calmly serene contemplation about this game's story that you're making.

Basically, the game's choice of gameplay, music, storytelling and level design all point at the same theme of Bladerunner-esque intrigue. That idea is clear from the start, it's got character and style, and the whole game reinforces that. That's the feeling of lonely mystery you're getting when playing this game. This desperate journey will end on a bitter sweet note.

SUPER MEAT BOY

I wanted to use a rather drastically different game style to describe this concept of world design. It shares similar tones of futility as Dark Souls and Hyper Light Drifter, but we can focus on another theme. And that theme is GO.

You've gotta go, go, go! Cutscenes are short and sharp, you enter each level, you run at the wall, fall and die, splat back to life and go again. The game wants you to be fast, and you can feel it. You feel bad at the game when you go slowly. Even if you complete the level. Every time you complete a level, you can watch the replay. Here's where you can see all the times you go'ed. And if you go'ed slowly, you can cringe as your last, living meat boy edges to the cliff and does the saddest hop you've ever seen.

It's almost literally a flash game. The game describes moving fast as being good at the game, and tells you that you will feel good too. Meat Boy leaves a slick trail of blood that you love seeing paint the floor and walls, the jumps are squishy, snappy and satisfying, levels are designed to be solvable if you keep your momentum, and some of the game's obstacles force you to go fast.

The game doesn't only do that through it's gameplay, like I mentioned the story gets told rapidly, animations happen in a blink, the soundtrack is upbeat and gets you in a groove. Having this sense of speed is what makes you believe in the motions, and contraptions of the game. As crazy as Super Meat Boy is, you can believe these things exist within the context of the game. 

CONCLUSION

For a game to succeed in World Design, you need consistency in your game's ideology. What ideas could you train players into thinking so much, that they crave it in every other game they play?

Dark Souls decided to let players drive themselves forward out of sheer will, multiplying the feeling of rewards and making exploring new corners invigorating.

2D Platformers need slick wall jumps and slides because of Super Meat Boy.

When making a video game where world design is your primary driver, what is the consistent emotion you want players to feel?

1. Why Be a Game Designer?

If you're already a game designer, you probably don't need to read this post. If you're looking for a moral boost about why you're a game designer, this might do an alright job at giving you that lift. If you're thinking of becoming a game designer, this may be an interesting read.

Being a Game Designer is one of the most abstract roles to explain to someone. Programmers make things work, artists make things look like something, and designers basically communicate how something works. The issue in describing game design, is what the "something" is, and how far do you need to describe it.

In reality, mostly everybody has been a game designer of some sort. To quote various parts of Jesse Schell's Book of Lenses, game design is about problem solving. As humans, we constantly solve problems and their solutions compound on each other to make into a concrete experience. Humans needed shelter from six directions, so we built walls into a room. We needed to enter and exit this shelter so we built doors, and needed to see beyond so we built windows. The result of this is the basis of modern living, a technology that has scaled over thousands of years. By asking the right questions, we can solve problems with lasting solutions. Do this by not thinking of things as a problem. To quote myself in the past:

"There are no problems. Problems without solutions are merely factors, and you can deal with it."

To the original point of this post, we become game designers because we love video games, and we love describing how they should work.

I loved video games for a long time, but I didn't become a game designer until a little later. And I didn't even realize. The problem I was trying to solve at the time, was "How do I do my homework, and play video games at the same time?". The question could have easily had an idiotic foundation. My adoration for virtual worlds was consuming time I didn't want to spare writing about things I considered easy. My thinking was, I spend 5 days a week learning this stuff. If I need to do it at home, the school isn't good enough. But I would have gotten nowhere if I ridiculed my own idea before I tried it.

I spent over 200 hours playing games like Skyrim, Fallout 3, Minecraft, and Dark Souls. As part of my English class essays, I wrote in-depth studies of the audience's experience of some of these 'medias'. This came to me super-naturally, describing the themes of their writing, to how gameplay features incite behavior from players. What they do to make the journey important. 

After doing this, I realized that thinking about the effects of games on people was thrilling. At long last, some form of mastery over the English language could serve me a fulfilling purpose. It came naturally for me to want to become a Game Designer. Giving feedback on mechanics, balance, and player experience came so easy.

Eventually I had a chance to put it into practice. And I played a role in designing video games in college, then my work, and eventually into my own company.

So, why be a Game Designer? Because it's fucking fun. You solve problems between features, people, balance, and player experience to create a super responsive world.

Be a Game Designer, because you'll literally be smarter for it. Your mind will work like no one else's, you'll hear someone's idea and think of a thousand reasons why and why not, and even have multiple alternatives lined up in your head before they tell you it's Souls-like.

Be a Game Designer, because you're designing games. Transforming creativity, imagination and emotion into logic and damn near tangible coherence.

In the rest of this Game Design Blog, we're gonna explore creative learning from damn near everything I see around me. Drawing some inspiration from my younger self, in finding yet another excuse to spend my time talking about video games.