Theory of Fun for Game Design (23 page)

Laser Blast
: Designed by David Crane, this simple shooter from Activision features a flying saucer with a gun that can shoot at any one of five downward angles. On the terrain below are three tanks per screen. Shots are almost instantaneous, so this is a game of lining up the correct angle and firing before the tanks do.

Quantized
: Quantizing is the act of taking continuous values in data and forcing it to fit to a pattern; for example, turning a picture with infinite shades of gray into an image with 256 levels of gray, or taking music that isn’t quite on the beat and forcing it to fit perfect mathematical rhythm.

Combos
: Many games reward players for executing a series of moves correctly. Often they give a bonus for doing so, such as extra damage when attacking.

Shmup
: Slang for “shoot ‘em up.” This term typically refers to a subgenre of shooter games, ones that embrace the limitations of 2-D graphics.

Space Invaders
: The original shmup,
Space Invaders
by Taito featured a tank that moved along the bottom edge of the screen, some barriers that protected the tank but eroded as they were fired upon, and an army of aliens marching inexorably down the screen while firing. As you reduced the number of enemies approaching, the speed of their approach grew faster.

Galaxian
: An elaboration of
Space Invaders
that featured some of the aliens leaving the formation and dive-bombing the player rather than the formation moving down the screen.

Gyruss
: A spin-off from
Galaxian
that distorted the playfield into a circle. The player moved along the outer rim, and enemies emerged in spirals from the center.

Tempest
: An arcade game by Atari in which the player moved along the edge of various shapes, all of which effectively distorted the view of the playfield in what was a fairly standard shooter. Some of the playfields were topologically circular, and others were lines.

Galaga
: This sequel to
Galaxian
introduced various key concepts such as bonus levels and power-ups (your ship could be captured and then recaptured so that you earned double firepower).

Gorf
: A whimsical arcade shooter that featured notably different opponents on different levels, including a mothership as a final enemy for stages.

Zaxxon
: Isometric scrolling shooters are not unheard of, but they are usually merely visual tricks to spice up a shooter that is truly a 2-D experience.
Zaxxon
, however, permitted movement along the vertical axis and had obstacles and targets at different heights. The perspective made it tricky to align the ship, but the graphics were amazing for its time. Very few other games made use of this style of gameplay, with the notable exception of
Blue Max
and its sequel, which set the gameplay in World War I and included the ability to bomb targets.

Centipede
: One of the most charming shoot-‘em-ups ever made,
Centipede
was notable for its extension of several key concepts from earlier games. It permitted full planar movement within a restricted area at the bottom of the screen, allowing enemies to inhabit the space
behind
the player. It made use of the same sort of barriers that
Space Invaders
had, only it characterized them as mushrooms and spread them across the entire screen. It had a wide assortment of enemies, some of which marched down the screen and some of which were dive-bombers. Finally, the control mechanism was a trackball, which gave players control over acceleration rather than just linear movement speed as joystick-controlled shooters did.

Asteroids
: A shooter played on a toroidal field. The torus was never displayed to the user as such, of course; they were presented with a stark black screen with asteroids drifting on it. The top and bottom edges wrapped around, as did the left and right edges. Every time you shot an asteroid, it broke into smaller pieces. Only the smaller pieces could be removed from play. You controlled your ship using a reasonable 2-D simulation of inertial physics. Most people chose not to move very much and instead played the game as a turret, as it was difficult to control your ship.

Robotron
: One of several classic games developed by Williams during a very fertile period for game innovation there. In
Robotron
, control requires two joysticks, one for movement and another to fire in any of eight directions. The field is a simple rectangle filled with enemy robots and with humans you must try to save. Should a robot contact a human, the human is killed. Collecting the humans gave extra points, but advancing to the next level was based on slaying all the robots.

Defender
: Another Williams game featuring rescue,
Defender
made the importance of protecting your humans even more critical. The gameplay field was a long wrapping ribbon, and players were able to move freely all the way around the surface of the ribbon. At the bottom of the ribbon were humans, and from the top descended a variety of aliens. Some sorts of aliens would attack you directly, but others would locate humans and carry them to the top of the screen. Once captured in this way, the humans became extremely dangerous enemies that hunted you down.
Defender
was famous for an extremely difficult control interface as well.

Choplifter
: An 8-bit computer game developed by Broderbund. In
Choplifter
, you played a helicopter pilot on a long oblong field that scrolled in both directions. An enemy convoy marched from one end of the field to the other. In its path were buildings full of humans you had to fly out to, rescue, and return to your base at the other end. Although you could spend your time shooting the enemy, your score was based on your success at the humanitarian goal rather than the destructive one.

Bosses
: A generic term for any enemy that is notably larger and more powerful than those that came before, typically placed at the end of a series of thematically linked levels.

Tetris
: An abstract puzzle game designed by Alexei Pajitnov. Played on a grid that is taller than it is wide, this game features pieces each composed of four smaller squares falling from the top of the field. The player is allowed to move the pieces from side to side as they fall and to rotate them in place. Should the pieces pile up to the top of the field, the game is over. When a full horizontal row is created, all the squares on that row are deleted and the pieces above fall down to take their place.

Hexagons
: The
Tetris
variant with hexagons was, naturally enough, called
Hextris
. However, it did not make use of pieces with six hexagons and therefore didn’t have the clever pun in the title of the original
Tetris
.

3-D Tetris
: Many variants were created, from Pajitnov’s own
Welltris
, which was really four separate games of Tetris played on a cross-shaped field, to true 3-D variants that proved to be extraordinarily difficult to play and never garnered much acceptance.

“King me”
: The phrase spoken when you move a checkers piece to the last row on the board. There’s an interesting political undertone to checkers, in that it is assumed that common soldiers must only charge forward, whereas kings have more freedom of movement (and may retreat)—and yet, it is also assumed that any soldier may become a king.

Abstract games
: In the gamer community, religious wars occur over whether or not a game should include fictional dressing or not. There is an entire genre of abstract strategy games that is arguably not enhanced by the inclusion of back story or art treatments.

Deathrace
: This was also the first instance of a movie being adapted to a game.

Deathrace 2000
: Movie released in 1975, starring David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone. It is about cross-country racing in the future; running over pedestrians scores points in the race, and some fans are crazed enough to throw themselves under the wheels of their favorite drivers to help them win.

Effects of media on violence
: An ongoing debate among academics. Most of the evidence is limited to demonstrating a rise in aggressive behavior for a few minutes—hardly advanced mind control. Others feel that vicarious exploration of violence is natural and even a necessary part of development. For a representative look at this position, try Gerard Jones’s
Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy
,
Super Heroes
,
and
Make-Believe Violence
, published by Basic Books in 2003. In addition, the American Academy of Family Physicians determined that there was insufficient evidence to make a link between video games and violence,
www.aafp.org/afp/20020401/tips/1.html
.

School shootings
: Several school shootings have been blamed on the effects of video games. There have also been cases of criminals claiming inspiration from acts of crime in video games. The industry’s position is that games are an art form and worthy of protection under the First Amendment and that the responsibility for keeping violent media out of the hands of children rests with parents. In addition, several statistics can be cited to buttress the opinion that video games do not have a significant effect on violent crime; for example, the incidence of violent crime has fallen dramatically just as the popularity of video games has risen. Were there a causal link, one would expect the two to rise in tandem.

Murder simulators
: The most outspoken advocate of the point of view that media and video games cause violent behavior is Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, the author of
Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence
, published by Crown Books in 1999. The term “murder simulators” is his.

Cumbia
: A Colombian folk dance style in 4/4 with a distinctive “heartbeat” rhythm. It has become popular worldwide and is one of the commonest Latin music rhythms heard.

Marinera
: A Peruvian folk dance with a distinctive rat-a-tat beat. It is a highly dramatized courtship dance.

Story written by an actual writer
: Two good books on the subject are Lee Sheldon’s
Character Development and Storytelling for Games
and David Freeman’s
Creating Emotions in Games
.

Planetfall
: Designed by Steve Mereztky,
Planetfall
was a very funny text adventure game published by Infocom in 1983.

Marc LeBlanc
: A noted designer, LeBlanc is also the co-developer of the MDA framework, a system for assessing games in terms of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. His game design writings can be found at
http://algorithmancy.8kindsoffun.com/
.

Paul Ekman
: A pioneering researcher on facial expressions and emotions. You can read a good introduction to his research in his book
Emotions Revealed
, published by Times Books in 2003.

Nicole Lazzaro
: Lazzaro’s studies were done by her company XEODesign and were presented at the 2004 Game Developers Conference as well as several other conferences. You can read an overview of the research at
www.xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames/
.

Runner’s high and cognitive puzzles
: I’m doing a disservice here to long-distance running, for the sake of the argument. I ran track briefly as a kid, and in fact there are a lot of tough cognitive puzzles to solve when running, such as managing your breathing, the strategy of when to sprint and when to jog, judging stride length and how you plant your feet, and so on. Cognitive puzzles lurk in all sorts of places. My main point, however, stands: putting one foot after another to exhaustion isn’t fun.

Schadenfreude, fiero, naches, kvell
: I am indebted to Nicole Lazzaro for introducing me to many of these wonderful words.

Sensawunda
: A term from science fiction criticism. It means, of course, “sense of wonder.”

Flow
: A term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe the frame of mind characterized by intense attention and maximum performance on a task. The sensation of flow appears to be linked to increased release of dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter that apparently increases attention ability in the frontal cortex. Evidence seems to be mounting that dopamine is not, in itself, the chemical that provides positive feedback. For an introduction to the concept, try
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
, published in 1991 by Perennial.

Bell curve distribution of IQ
: The standard IQ (intelligence quotient) tests are normalized around an average score of 100. The tests need to be renormalized every few years because we’re all apparently getting smarter. IQ is not accepted by everyone as a valid measure of all sorts of intelligence. There is a concept called “emotional intelligence” as well, which argues that how well we understand and cope with emotions is at least as important, if not more so.

Howard Gardner
: In his book
Frames of Mind
, Gardner defined seven types of intelligence, arguing that IQ tests only measured the first two. More recently, he has argued that there are two more types of intelligence: naturalist intelligence and existentialist intelligence.