Game Design: Theory & Practice- P15 pps

While prudence may prevent the player from pursuing a career as a criminal or Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims 399... Whenthe player wants to have a sim perform an action on a particu

but for many players it would seem to make the playing experience all the morecompelling.

Familiar Subject Matter

Of course, The Sims is not the original software toy, nor is it even Will Wright’s first His first success with the software toy genre came with SimCity It too simu-

lated a sophisticated system and allowed the player to truly control her city’s

destiny Though SimCity is an excellent, entertaining title, The Sims is more ling still A lot of this has to do with the fact that the player of The Sims is

compel-controlling humans instead of a city In other words, it follows Chris Crawford’sinsistence that games should focus on “people not things.” In general, most playerswill find people to be much more interesting than things, and players will be able toform an emotional bond with a simulated person much easier than with a simulated

city After playing The Sims for a while, players will feel sad when their sim’s

amorous advances are rebuffed or when their house burns to the ground Though

certainly not as smart or interesting as actual humans, the simulated people in The

Sims are close enough to being plausible that players will want to believe in their

sims’ virtual existences and will fill in the simulation’s deficiencies for themselves

Furthermore, almost all the players who play The Sims will have an intimate

knowledge of the subject being simulated before they start playing They will feelthat they are something of an expert on this “suburban life” subject and think theywill be able to play the game better as a result For instance, players know byinstinct that they should set up a bathroom with a shower, a toilet, and a sink If thejob were to simulate an alien life-form’s daily life on another planet, players wouldhave much less of an idea how to proceed and would need to figure out the life-form’s culture before they could expect to succeed at the game Because players

already know so much about the subject matter of The Sims, they are that much

more drawn into the game From the moment she starts up the game, the playerfeels good because she is putting her real-world knowledge to use in creating these

simulated lives When Will Wright made SimEarth, he created a game involving

systems that players knew very little about, and this may explain why so many

peo-ple found the game to be quite difficult For SimCity, players had a better sense of

what was going on; while they may not have been experts on urban planning anddynamics, players at least thought they knew how a city should be laid out and

were familiar with problems such as traffic, pollution, and crime With The Sims,

most players know infinitely more about the topic than they do about city planning.Hence, the game is that much more compelling to play Its very familiarity drawsthe player in like nothing else can

Of course, simulating a subject many of the players will be familiar with can be

a challenge as well; if the designer gets it wrong, players will know instantly In the

398 Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims

Team-Fly®

alien-life simulator, who is to say what is accurate since the world and creatures aremade up to begin with? This grants the designer more artistic license for how the

world is constructed However, in a reality simulation like The Sims, if the designer

makes the wrong choice about what will provoke a sim to do what action, playerswill see the error and their suspension of disbelief will be shattered instantly.Working with a subject that players are intimate with may serve to draw them in,but if it is not done correctly it may drive them away as well

Safe Experimentation

On first inspection, one might not think that what The Sims simulates is actually all

that interesting Indeed, for the suburbanites who are likely to own a computer toplay the game and have the disposable income to purchase it, how different is the

game-world of The Sims from real life? It would seem that the escapist and wish-fulfillment qualities many games possess are totally lacking in The Sims Fur- thermore, The Sims does not even present “life with all the dull bits cut out.” The

player’s sims still have to engage in the more mundane aspects of modern life, such

as going to the bathroom, going to work, paying bills, and taking out the trash Isthis fun? Strangely, it is, since these more tedious chores lend an air of “realism” tothe proceedings, which makes the player’s successes or failures all the moremeaningful

What The Sims really provides to the player is a test-bed for safe

experimenta-tion While prudence may prevent the player from pursuing a career as a criminal or

Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims 399

professional athlete in real life, the game will allow the player to take her sims inthat direction with little risk to the player While building a house is a major under-

taking involving great financial risk for the purchaser, in The Sims, players can

build lavish houses, spend money on frivolous trinkets for their sims, throw wildhot tub parties, or pursue homosexual relationships just to get a sense of what lifemight be like if they lived it differently If these experimental lifestyles turn out tonot work as well as the players had hoped, the only loss is for their sims, an effectconsiderably less serious than real-world bankruptcy or social ostracizing Indeed,

if the player avoids saving her game after a catastrophic event or decision, the loss

is easily undone entirely The life the player controls in The Sims may be one quite

close to her own, but the ability to try new things without fear of serious sions makes the experience compelling and exciting

repercus-Depth and Focus

A big part of what makes The Sims work is the range of choices the player is

pre-sented with for what he can do with his sims Abdicating authorship is all well andgood, but if the designer fails to provide the player enough meaningful choices, theplayer will find himself only able to author a very narrow range of stories Indeed, it

is the designer’s responsibility in creating a software toy to design that toy with abroad enough range of possibilities that the appeal of playing with it is not quickly

exhausted And Wright did that expertly with The Sims, leaving the player with a

constant feeling that there is so much more to do and see in the game-world, thatone could never hope to do it all

A player can concentrate on building her house, starting either with some of thepre-built houses or constructing one from the ground up A robust set of house-construction and landscaping tools allows the player to create a very large variety

of houses, with probably no two built-from-scratch houses ever being the same,even with hundreds of thousands of people playing the game Once a house is built

or purchased, players can concentrate on filling it up with all manner of interestingpossessions which have a variety of effects on the inhabitants of the house Ofcourse, the player gets to construct the inhabitants as well, picking from a largerange of personalities, body types, ages, ethnicities, and even hairstyles, with theoption to make children or adults as well as males or females Once the sims moveinto the house, the player is able to determine what they eat, what they study, whatcareer they pursue, how they have their fun, and with whom they socialize

Whether it be house building, property acquisition and placement, character ation, or life control, any one of these components includes far more choices thanmost games provide When all of these different systems are combined, the range ofchoices available to the player increases exponentially, creating a game with trulyunprecedented depth

cre-400 Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims

Of course, what the sims cannot do in the game is significant as well The simscannot leave their homes except to go to work, and when they do the player cannotfollow them Being able to go to other places would be nice, but consider howmuch more complex the game would need to be to simulate the rest of the world Amassive amount of additional work would have been required, and had that sensiblelimitation not been made early on in the title’s development it might never havebeen completed By focusing on the home life, the game is able to “get it right” in a

way it could not have had the game-world of The Sims been larger In short, what

would have been gained in breadth would have been lost in depth If a designerspends all her time adding an unreasonable range of possibilities to the game, it islikely that any one of the features the game includes will be far shallower than ifthe designer knows how to focus her efforts

The Sims also expertly captures the “just one more thing” style of gameplay.

This type of gameplay is perhaps best exemplified by Civilization, where the player

is constantly looking forward to the next technology to be discovered, the next unit

to be built, or the next discovery of new territory Similarly in The Sims, the player

may be working on having his sims meet new people, trying to advance theircareers, hoping to put an addition on the house, and thinking of someday havingthem raise a child, all at the same time Because of these constant aspirations, there

is never a good place to stop playing the game; there is constantly something on thehorizon to look forward to Hence the game is fabulously addictive, with captivatedplayers devoting hour upon hour, day after day, and week after week of their lives

to the game

Interface

The best a game’s interface can hope to do is to not ruin the player’s experience.The interface’s job is to communicate to the player the state of the world and toreceive input from the player as to what he wants to change in that game-world Theact of using this input/output interface is not meant to be fun in and of itself; it is theplayer’s interaction with the world that should be the compelling experience Butsince the interface determines how the player interacts with the world, if that inter-face is not up to the task then at best the player will become frustrated and at worstthe player will be unable to perform the action he wants

The Sims’ user interface is a beautiful example of how to do an interface

cor-rectly It provides the player with a staggering amount of information about thegame-world, while allowing the player to easily and intuitively make whateverchanges she wants Unlike many modern action games, the tutorial primarilyprovides the player with information about how to play the game, not how tomanipulate the interface The interface is so simple and intuitive that players pick it

up with very little difficulty, no doubt the result of rigorous playtesting The fact

Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims 401

that help is embedded throughout the interface is key, allowing the player to click

on any text item for an explanation of how it is important and why it is relevant

A big part of the success of The Sims’ input/output scheme is its similarity to

systems the player is likely to understand before he ever starts playing the game.For instance, the buttons that determine the game’s simulation speed look like thoseone would find on a tape player, something with which almost all players will befamiliar A large amount of the interface is reminiscent of Microsoft Windows, withthe pointing and clicking the player does mirroring that OS wherever appropriate.Item manipulation is reminiscent of Windows as well; the player can use drag anddrop to place objects, or simply click and click The standard Windows “X” appears

in the upper right-hand corner of dialog boxes to indicate that they can be closed,and the regular OK/Cancel button combinations are used wherever appropriate.While the functionality mirrors Windows in many ways, it is important to note thatthe appearance of the interface does not look exactly like Windows All of the but-tons are nicely drawn in a friendly art style that is a far cry from Windows’ cold,utilitarian sterility If the game used the actual dialog box art that Windows pro-vides, the player would instantly be reminded of working with the file picker orsome other Windows interface, not an experience he is likely to remember fondly,certainly not as a “fun” activity However, by putting a new visual style on thebehavior of Windows, the interface is intuitive and familiar to the player withoutactually reminding him of file management

Another example of this is the “head” menu used throughout the game Whenthe player wants to have a sim perform an action on a particular object, the player

402 Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims

The Sims has an

simply clicks on the object in question From there a floating head of her currentsim appears, with a range of different actions the sim can perform surrounding it in

a circle The player then simply moves the mouse over to the action he wants andclicks on it While moving the pointer around, the sim’s head actually tracks thecursor, watching it wherever it goes This menu functions identically to a pop-upmenu in Windows, but with several distinct advantages The first is that it does notlook like a pop-up menu, and thereby the player does not associate it with boringWindows functionality Second, the menu only lists the options that are availablefor the current object at that time A normal pop-up menu would list all of theobjects possible, with currently unavailable options grayed out Third, by havingthe sim’s head in the center, the menu brings the player closer to the core of what he

is doing; he is directing the sim to perform a certain action The directive he is ing to his beloved sim is more intimate than it would have been through a moresterile, bland, and standard pop-up menu

giv-Controlled Versus Autonomous Behavior

In the game, the player is able to direct his sims to perform certain actions: take outthe trash, call up a friend, take a shower, and so forth The sims will also, however,function on their own without the player’s direction The sims contain enough inter-nal logic to tend to their most pressing needs, whether it is to eat, to go to thebathroom, to play a pinball game, or to read today’s paper As the player makesadditions to the house or purchases further possessions, the sims will walk over tonew objects and either applaud or complain about them, their reaction dependent onhow much they like each particular object This communicates to the player whetherthe sim is generally going to be happy with the new possession or if the sim wouldrather it were not there Since the way the house is set up is a big component of thesim’s total happiness, this provides crucial information to the player about how tobest set up the house

The autonomous behavior of the sims also allows the player to set up the houseand then sit back and watch how the sims live in it This makes the game more like

SimCity, in which the player could only set up the framework of the city—its

streets, its zones, its key buildings—and then see how the inhabitants of the city

live in it A player of The Sims can build a pleasant house that he thinks would be

good to live in and then sit back and watch the sims inhabit it, using their defaultbehavior This provides yet another avenue for interesting gameplay

Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims 403

The sims generally do not have the foresight of a player, however, and as aresult will perform better, be more productive, and be happier if the player smartlydirects their every move For instance, the sims will not try to improve theircareer-boosting skills of their own volition, such as improving their creativity bylearning how to paint So it is often in the player’s best interest to override the sims’internal choices for what action to perform next, if he wants the sim to attain herfull potential However, the autonomous behavior avoids the player having tomicro-manage every little decision Sure, being able to tell the sims exactly what to

do is a key part of the game, but if the player is controlling a number of sims atonce, planning something for every one of them to do at a given moment can bequite a task The sims’ internal behavior helps to off-load this responsibility fromthe player when the player does not want to worry about it

A Lesson to Be Learned

The Sims is perhaps the most original commercial game design released in recent

years The game does not take as a starting point any other published game, butinstead seems to have emerged entirely from Will Wright’s brain To look at thegame is to marvel at its creativity and innovation There is so much that is done

right in The Sims, an entire book could be devoted to an analysis of its design The

game is truly like a computerized dollhouse, providing us the ability to play-act realhuman scenarios in order to better understand them The description of the

dollhouse found in the game is quite illuminating:

404 Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims

The sims have

Will Lloyd Wright Doll House

This marvel of doll house design is meant for everyone, allowing

children as well as adults to act out fantasies of controlling little

fami-lies This incredible replica comes complete with amazingly realistic

furniture and decorative items Don’t be surprised if hours upon hours

are spent enjoying this little world

What is perhaps most interesting and compelling about The Sims is the

poten-tial it has to teach us about our own lives What is the relationship we have with thepossessions we own? How does the space we live in affect our lives? How doesjealousy start in a relationship?

Of course, no one would argue that The Sims is a completely accurate

simula-tion of human motivasimula-tions and activities, but does it need to be completely accurate

to cause us to think about our lives in new and interesting ways? As we move oursims around and watch them interact, we may disagree with how the simulationmodels their behavior But in that disagreement, we think about what we reallywould expect them to do, with that reflection shedding new light on the relation-ships we maintain in our real lives This, it seems, is the potential of computergames—not to allow us to escape from real life or to even replace it, but to open upnew areas of thought, to be able to see the world through a different set of eyes andcome back to our own lives equipped with that priceless information

Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims 405

Chapter 21

Level Design

“We’ve always striven for ‘immersion’ in the gameplay, but as we’vegrown (well, changed at least) as designers, our sense of that haschanged While the details of this attempt vary from game to game, thecore goal has been to provide a range of player capability in the world.With this breadth of capability, the player hopefully feels more involved in

their decisions An Underworld player can open a door with the key, by

picking the lock, by breaking it down, or by casting a spell If the playercan choose their own goals, and their own approaches to an obstacle,then when they reach the goal it is far more satisfying Flexible simulation

of game elements is a powerful way to enable the player to make theirown way in the world.”

— Doug Church, talking about his game Ultima Underworld

406

As computer games have grown in size and scope, the tasks that in the past

were performed by one person are now performed by multiple people Thisdivision of labor is necessary for the timely completion of the sophisticatedand massive games the publishers demand and the marketplace has come to expect.One of the unique roles that was created through this division of labor was that ofthe level designer Once the core gameplay for a game is established, it is the leveldesigner’s job to create the game-world in which that gameplay takes place, to buildspaces that are fun for the player

The number of level designers required for a project is directly proportional tothe complexity of the levels to be used in that project For a 3D game with

extremely detailed architecture which all must be built by the level designer, it isnot unreasonable to have two levels per designer, perhaps only one Sometimes thegame’s primary designer also serves as a level designer, and sometimes she merelyoversees the team of level designers working on the project For a 2D game, it isnot out of the question for the game’s lead designer to craft all of the game’s levels.Level design is where all the different components of a game come together Insome ways creating a level is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle; to build his lev-els, the level designer must make use of the game’s engine, art, and core gameplay.Often level design is where a game’s problems become most apparent If the engine

is not up to snuff, the levels will start behaving erratically in certain situations, orthe frame rate will not be able to support the planned effects If the art is made tothe wrong scale or has rendering problems of any kind, these difficulties come out

as the level designer starts placing the art in the world If the title’s gameplay is notable to support a wide enough variety of levels to fill out an entire game, or, evenworse, if the gameplay just is not any fun, this problem will become apparent dur-ing the level design process It is the level designer’s responsibility to bring theseproblems to the attention of the team, and to see that the difficulties are resolvedproperly Often this can result in the level designer being one of the least liked teammembers, since he must always be pestering people to fix problems, but if heinstead tries to ignore the problems he encounters, the game will be worse as aresult The job of the level designer is one that comes with great responsibility.With all the different aspects of the game’s content to worry about, the leveldesigner’s job is certainly not an easy one Beyond making sure all of the game’scomponents are up to snuff, if the level designer’s own work is not of the highestquality, then the game is likely to fail miserably If the levels do not bring out thebest aspects of the engine, the art, and the gameplay, it does not matter how goodthose component parts may be Without good levels to pull it all together, the gamewill fail to live up to its potential

Chapter 21: Level Design 407

Levels in Different Games

The definition of a “level” varies greatly from game to game It most commonlyrefers to the game-world of side-scrollers, first-person shooters, adventures, flightsimulators, and role-playing games These games tend to have distinct areas whichare referred to as “levels.” These areas may be constrained by geographical area(lava world versus ice world), by the amount of content that can be kept in memory

at once, or by the amount of gameplay that “feels right” before the player is granted

a short reprieve preceding the beginning of the next level Though many classic

arcade games such as Centipede or Space Invaders took place entirely on one level, others such as Pac-Man or Joust offered simple variations on the game-world to prolong their gameplay Thus, the different mazes in Pac-Man constitute its levels.

In a campaign-based strategy game such as StarCraft, the levels or scenarios are

defined by maps accompanied by objectives the player must accomplish, such asdefend the Terrans against the Protoss forces in this amount of time In a racinggame, a level would be one of the tracks available in the game In a sports game,say baseball, the levels would be the different stadiums featured in the game Herethe difference between the various levels is completely aesthetic, since in terms ofplay mechanics, a baseball game played in Wrigley Field is only subtly differentfrom one played in Yankee Stadium

Games such as Civilization and SimCity do have levels, but one key difference

from the games described above is that the entirety of a player’s game takes place

on a single level The base level is also often randomly generated, and from there it

is largely the user’s responsibility to construct the level as he plays This is why

408 Chapter 21: Level Design

these titles are often referred to as “builder” games For these titles, the authorship

of the level is almost entirely abdicated to the player

This chapter deals primarily with games that use pre-built levels which have amajor impact on the gameplay Though sports titles and “builder” games may havelevels, their construction is left up to the artists and players respectively, and there-

fore is not generally of concern to designers For games like Doom, Tomb Raider,

Super Mario 64, Maniac Mansion, Pac-Man, StarCraft, and Fallout, however, the

design of the levels has everything to do with gameplay and therefore the designermust be intimately involved with their creation

Level Separation

How a game is broken down into its component levels has a huge impact on theflow of the game Players often play a game a level at a time If a parent announcesdinner while a child is playing a game, that child is likely to beg to be allowed to

“just finish this level.” In console games, frequently the player can only save hergame between levels, which places further importance on the end of a level as thecompletion of a unit of gameplay A level can function like an act in a play, a chap-ter in a book, or a movement in a symphony It gives the audience a chance to see adiscrete unit within a larger work, to understand what portion of the work has beencompleted and how much awaits ahead Well-designed levels are set up such thatdifficulty and tension ramp upward toward the end of a level where some sort of amini-resolution finally occurs This may be through a boss monster to defeat or aspecial quest object to obtain When the player finally sees that the level has ended,she knows that she has accomplished a significant amount of gameplay and shouldfeel proud of herself

Technical limitations often dictate where the end of a level must occur Only somany textures, sounds, and level data can fit in memory at once, and when thoseresources are used up, the gameplay has to stop long enough for different level data

to be loaded in New technologies present the opportunity for more seamless ronments Even on the technically limited PlayStation, the developer Insomniac

envi-was able to avoid loading screens entirely in Spyro the Dragon, instead just having

Spyro fly into the air for a second while the necessary data is swapped in, then

fly-ing back to earth in the new level To the casual player watchfly-ing Spyro, the break is much less jarring than seeing a “loading” screen come up The Spyro the Dragon

levels still have to be divided into sections between these non-loading screens,however, meaning that the gameplay in those levels is still limited to a certainamount of space A good designer, of course, can take the memory constraints anduse them properly to create levels that are fun and challenging to play while alsofitting in the space available Again, the designer must take the limitations of thehardware and embrace them

Chapter 21: Level Design 409

Half-Life is another interesting example of level division Here the team at

Valve wanted to create a more seamless experience for the player, but were still

using the limited Quake technology Quake had featured thirty or so levels, each of which took a significant amount of time to load In Quake the levels existed in sep-

arate universes from each other; never would a monster chase the player from onelevel to another, never would a player return to a previous level The programmers

at Valve came up with a system where, if the levels were small enough, they could

be loaded in under five seconds They also made modifications so that monsterscould track the player across the boundaries between maps The level designers atValve were able to make their levels very small, much smaller than a standard

Quake level, but then created a great quantity of them The areas between two

lev-els contain identical architecture, such that the player can run across the borderbetween two of these levels and, aside from the brief loading message, not evenknow he had crossed a level boundary The result is a much more seamless experi-ence for the player Evidently the team still felt the need for story arcs in the game,since text “chapter titles” appear briefly on the screen at key points during thegame But since the programming and design teams were able to create a near-seamless level loading system, the design team was able to separate the game intothese storytelling units wherever it felt best, instead of where the technology dic-

tated The ideal for an immersive game like Half-Life, of course, would be to

eliminate these load times entirely Someday the technology will exist to cache innew level data as the player gets close to needing it Until then, designers trying tocreate seamless environments must strive to keep the loading as short and unobtru-sive as possible

Level Order

The order in which the levels occur is also important to the overall flow of thegame Perhaps big shoot-out levels should be alternated with more strategic or puz-zle-oriented levels If a game places all of its strategic levels early in the game andthen crowds the end with more action-oriented episodes, the game may seem unbal-anced At the very least, the designer should know how the order of the levels willaffect the flow of gameplay, and should be aware of how moving different levelsaround will affect it For example, if a game has thirty levels and six boss monsters,one logical way to place these adversaries in the game would be at the end of thefifth, tenth, fifteenth, twentieth, twenty-fifth, and thirtieth levels The bosses cer-tainly do not have to be on those precise levels, and each can be shifted slightlyforward or backward in the level order without causing any serious problems If thebosses were placed one each on the last six levels of the game, this would be obvi-ously unbalanced It would seem strange to the player that after twenty-four levels

of no-boss-monster gameplay, suddenly he has to fight one every level

410 Chapter 21: Level Design

The way the game is broken up into its different levels and the order in which

those levels must occur differs from game to game For a game like Unreal, as with the Doom and Quake series before it, the designers were only instructed to make

some cool levels, with little concern for story (since none of these games really hadone) or which events should happen before which other events Some thought wasput into at what point certain adversaries would first appear in the game, and hencethe earlier levels were more restricted in which creatures they could use Similarly,

of course, the earlier levels had to be easier and the later ones had to be harder Butfor the most part, the level designers just tried to make the coolest levels possible,almost working in a vacuum from the other designers Certainly they would seeeach other’s work and this might inspire them to make their own levels better, butnone of the levels really had to match up thematically with the levels that camebefore or after it, and the lack of a story meant that this did not adversely affect thegame

In a game such as Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, however, the story

plays a much larger role In order for that story to work, the levels need to support

it Hence, for a more story-centric game, a great deal of preplanning is done by thegame’s design and story teams as to which story events need to happen in whichlevels In what sort of environments should those levels take place? What types ofadversaries will the player fight there? The order in which the levels appear in the

game cannot be changed as easily as in Doom, since that would radically change

the story as well In order for the entire game to flow and escalate in difficultyappropriately, the type of gameplay found in each level must be planned ahead oftime The levels do not need to be planned down to minute detail, however, as this

Chapter 21: Level Design 411

The goal of the

is best left to the level designer, who can place the individual encounters, objects,

or minor puzzles as they best fit the level A mini design document explaining whatthe level has to accomplish in order to function within the game’s story will allowthe level designer to know exactly what she must include in the level; from thereshe can fill in the details

The Components of a Level

Once the levels a game needs have been decided on, possibly with some idea ofhow those levels must support the story, the next task is to actually create those lev-els Regardless of its location in the game as a whole, the goal of every level is toprovide an engaging gameplay experience for the player When working on the lev-els for a game, it is important to constantly keep in mind the focus of the game.What is this game trying to accomplish? How important are the different aspects ofthe game? What will the level need to do to support the type of gameplay this gamehas? In addition, depending on the amount of pre-production design done on thelevels, one may need to consider how this level may play differently than others Is

it a “thinking” level after an action-intensive one? Is this level more about tion and discovery than building up the strength of the player character or

explora-characters?

Before level design begins, the design team should convene and break down thedifferent gameplay components of the game, since each member must completelyunderstand how the gameplay functions Each level designer must understand how

412 Chapter 21: Level Design

A level for the

sophisticated

Quake III Arena

engine requires

significantly

more work than

one for a simpler