I play many games on a regular basis, but the most important of these games is the creation of
new games. I could explain the reason thusly: in other games I am only finding and preserving opportunities for myself, and in creating games I am finding and preserving opportunities for other gamists. Given that attitude, it's only right to resolve that in every
full day I have I need to at least do some token amount of work on new games. (I'm throwing out the Thursday policy, though it served me well, because it no longer suits my personality.)
I have many ideas for games I could make, but there are
five in particular which are more important than the others. Most of my ideas, I won't be too broken up about if I don't get to them. But these five are absolute necessities. Whatever happens in my life, I
am going to make these five games in some form. The reason I consider them more important than the other ideas is, as you'd expect, that these are the five ideas I have which have the
most potential to create new opportunities in gamism. I'm going to back up that sentence by explaining exactly what I hope to achieve with these five games.
Now, what I'm
not going to do is name the five games. If I did, you'd know exactly what I intended to do with each one because I've already partially described each one on this blog somewhere. And I don't think these ideas should be set in stone just yet. While each game is a necessary component of the rest of my life, until I make them I want to be open to developing these ideas. Just two days ago, while focusing all my energies for the day onto the fantastic rhythm platformer
Bit.Trip Runner (That excess of focus was out-of-character, and I won't do anything like it again.), the entire structure for my first major game reassembled itself in my mind. I might as well tell you that the game I'm talking about here is
Through the Wind, because I've already
said in no uncertain terms that I'm going to make it. Anyway, playing this hyper-focused $8 independent game made me realize that my ideas for the structure of
Through the Wind were derived from the messy approaches of the mainstream game industry, and that a different attitude about structure would not only turn my idea into something I could conceivably make on my own, but also serve the purposes of the game more effectively.
But let's get to what the purpose of these games
is. Each of the five games is a pure example of a different Form: platformer, adventure, exploration, role-playing and metalude. (Perhaps the word "pure" is a bit meaningless when applied to RPGs and metaludes, but you get my idea.) Each of these art forms has problems. The goal of making the five games is to fix those problems, and take the Forms to a healthier and creatively more sustainable place.
To do this, it's not enough to just present the vision. I also need to really
sell it to the mainstream. To that end, there are three goals each game needs to achieve in its own way:
- They need to be really good. They need to give good experiences, which are rich and long and could only be possible in the Forms I'm using. If the game is memorable and interesting and leaves the player wanting more it'll inspire other gamists to imitate what I'm doing, which is the whole point of making these games in the first place.
- They need to be appealing and accessible to people who have never played videogames before, and even to some people who have never wanted to play videogames before. Currently most games are being sold to one particular kind of gamer whose meager demands are already being met. To create demand for different approaches, different audiences need to be engaged.
- The experience needs to start out with elements that every existing fan of the Form is going to recognize and be comfortable with, so that by the time they figure out it's not like the games they know they'll already be hooked. It would be a bit evil to go too far, which would get people on both sides of the audience frustrated. But used sparingly, this approach would ease the old gamers into the new games. I don't want to alienate all the old gamers if I can help it.
The five Forms I need to work with fit into two categories.
- Platformers, adventures and role-playing games have been clearly estalished according to certain formulas. Those formulas started out being perfectly sensible methods of establishing the primary content of the Forms, but as time has gone on we've run into the upper limits of these approaches. They're too rigid- they can only provide a limited range of the experiences the Forms ought to allow for. So we've gotten to the point where in order to keep moving, gamists simply add on more and more complexities to the rules, getting farther and farther away from the reason these games were worth playing in the first place. They bury the primary content under mountains of irrelevant crap, because they don't see where else they can go.
- Exploration games and metaludes have not been widely recognized as existing kinds of games -the exploration game because it's so simple that it's taken for granted and the metalude because it's so complicated that only brilliant gamists tend to understand it at all. A few gamists have the intuition to make these games anyway, whether or not they have a word for what they're making. But because no one else (gamists included) understands what they're doing, they assume that these are one-off concepts with no possibility of valid artistic imitation.
All these Forms can be fixed. Here's how.
First off, the formulas need to be
broken. In each of my five ideas, I've planned how I can cut away most of the rules which the Forms have developed so far, in order to get closer to their
spirit. So some people will look at these games and not recognize them as their Forms, but those who really
like these kinds of games will play through them and realize that they're giving them what they want in a more pure form than the games they know, just in a totally different way.
And speaking of "pure", that's really important too. The best-case scenario with these games is that I make them and they're good and they're imitated. If that's not how the story goes, then the story's flawed. But there's a risk that in being imitated, the details of what I've done will become a
new formula every bit as bad as the old one. So I need to make sure that there are as few extraneous elements as possible, to decrease the likelihood of being misunderstood. If every element of these games is single-mindedly focused on the primary content, then everyone who plays these games will understand what the game is
about. So the adventure, role-playing game and metalude all need to be obsessively focused on storytelling, the exploration game needs to be obsessively focused on world design, and the platformer needs to be obsessively focused on controls. Any design element which is not directly responsible for holding up the primary content has no place in these games.
But within those limits, I ought to play around a lot. Each game needs to present its Form from many different angles, where different people can go through the game different ways and get different things out of it. Let me explain why this is necessary. If I had all the time in the world, or I guess if I were choosing to devote all the time in my life to games, then I could make multiple games in each of the five Forms, with each game in a different
genre and style. That way, there would be no confusion of which aspects of my games are to be imitated and which are just suggestions, because in looking at
all the diverse games of one Form I would have made, between them other gamists would see a large range of possibility. But for all I know (since it's all I'm dictating here) I might just be making one game in each Form, so each one needs to do the work of several in suggesting possibilities.
Now, to leave the rationally justifiable for a moment, there are certain things I would like to do in each of the three stories. They will be more driven by
character than
plot, focusing on protagonists who aren't exactly heroes and have complicated motivations. There will be as much symbolism as I can possibly cram in, with common themes between the games including: the limits of what humanity can and should try to achieve, misplaced loyalty to authority figures (including some of the main characters), trying to find an identity through conflict with oneself, etc. Some of these themes may find their way into the platformer and exploration game as well, though in much more abstract form. Another thing I'd like to do in all the stories is to subvert clichés: to set up really obvious situations where every player will think they know exactly where the story is going, when actually I'm going in a completely different direction. Similarly, all the stories will start out light and fluffy, dealing with kids and innocence and simple ideas, and get progressively more twisted and complicated (and possibly dark) as the stories go on.
Incidentally, these aren't just random ideas I'm throwing out there. I do know what the three stories are going to be, in broad strokes, and in each of these stories there are specific ways I do all these things. Again, I'm not being too specific in this post because I want to leave some room for me to change my mind about the details in the years to come.
If I make these five games, and each of them is good, and each of them ends up being (to some extent) influential, then my life will have been a good one. Though there will be plenty of games to play in my life, all of them tie in with these five games, in that the experiences will either teach me valuable lessons I can apply toward the games, or build up a reputation which I can use to sell the games with, or get me into a place emotionally where I can work on these games without being distracted by the feeling that I'm missing something. (That third one may be an excuse, but I'm sticking with it.) If any things I do outright prevent me from making every last one of these games before I die, then those activities are mistakes. I might need to figure out which activities those are. I wish I knew exactly how much time I have left!
Ultimately what this will do for
me is give me some sort of place in the world, so that when there's no time left I can feel like I've left the world a little bit different than I found it. I guess I could do basically the same sort of thing by getting married and having a family. But hey, I have to be
realistic.
Little Social Games was a pleasure to play through. Though it didn't feel to much like a game that had a distinct goal. It felt more like I was exploring your thoughts.
The difference is that I wasn't searching for the best outcome, though I was making note of which outcomes were preferred. I was exploring in the sense that I was driven to go through every single outcome and see it. I was going to go through every path to see what was there, just like exploring a level of Riven, or StarShip Titanic.
I guess if there was a means for me to keep track of which options I thought were the best, and to keep track of things that I was thinking about, I would also be exploring my thought processes and how they compare to yours.
I actually feel like all the different stories that played out, actually did play out in the story, none of them feel like the one true outcome.
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