Playing like a Designer

I've been watching a lot of Penny Arcade's Extra Credits recently, which are a fantastic resource for anyone interested in design, development, or just musings on the general direction of gaming.

One episode suggests that to become a great designer you must learn to play like a designer. You must participate in the experience while simultaneously examining how the game manipulates you. Examine how the combination of mechanics, aesthetics, or anything else caused some emotional reaction. This is really hard to do because the act of observation often taints your enjoyment.

In practice it's much easier to do this for bad games, or at least obviously flawed ones. When something feels off it pulls you out of the moment. It's relatively simple then to write a list of all the problems which made the experience run aground. No matter how polished, most games will have these moments.



For example, when I played the redesigned Twisted Treeline in League of Legends I was at first very impressed with how much it improved on the last incarnation. But still I found fault: it's hard to notice when a shrine is being capped since there are no audio or visual warnings, it's difficult to impossible for you alone to stop a champion capping your shrine if they are a better duelist (since, unlike Dominion, there is no advantage to fighting on point and damaging them from a distance doesn't affect capture speed), and late game respawn timers are long enough that many games are entirely decided by a single teamfight. These are all fixable problems, but it's important first to ask where the underlying problems are rather than throwing up solutions to what you think is the problem.

It's much harder play a game you love and ask why it's so good. But I've been practicing (not only with games but with films and other media) and noticing a lot of really cool things.

Take Portal for example. Everyone knows Portal is fantastic, no arguments here. Mechanics and setting blend perfectly to allow for a feeling of freedom and self expression while experiencing the well written story.

Remember the Companion Cube? Of course you do. The first time I played the game the Cube was my friend. I was so happy to find someone else in this desolate testing center. When at the end of the chamber I was forced to euthanize the Cube in order to proceed...I delayed for a long time. I felt bad. This was an act of betrayal.

It's just a damn box! Why did I feel so strongly for the Cube? If you look around the internet you'll find that a lot of people empathized with the Cube. But...it's just a cube with hearts painted on it! Why do we care? There were a bunch of cubes earlier and we didn't care about them at all. The very first chamber even uses a cube & button puzzle.

Let's examine the chamber. You're given the cube and told that it will "accompany you through the test chamber". GLaDOS tells you to "take care of it". Already this is different. Most cubes are grabbed and dropped in the chamber, solving one puzzle but not many. Most cubes can be accidentally destroyed, only to have an identical copy be delivered.

Immediately after grabbing the cube you must ascend some stairs, but they're too tall and there are no portalable surfaces nearby. So, of course, you use the cube as a boost, then lift it up to repeat.

The very first thing you do with the cube is team up to accomplish a task which neither of you could achieve alone. This is huge. Already we associate the cube as an equal rather than just an object. It didn't just weigh down some button, it gave me a boost and I helped it up in return. You know who else does this? The US Army. One of the earliest parts of basic training (at least, as I understand it from films and television) involves getting over a wall together. Because when you accomplish something as a team, you begin to identify as a team rather than a group of individuals.

Next, we have to proceed down a hallway with an energy sphere bouncing up and down. Normally this would be impossible, but with a cube we can shield ourselves to deflect the deadly energy ball.

The cube just saved your life. You couldn't get through that hallway alone, but the cube took a bullet for you. It's no longer a cube, now it's the Cube. Meanwhile, GLaDOS is saying something about how the Cube will never threaten to stab you because the cube cannot speak. Personifying it even more.

Wow.

These are all subtle, but huge psychologically. You work together as a team, then it saves your life. The first two events you experience together, one immediately after the other. You're no longer just using a tool, you're cooperating with an ally. You feel you can accomplish anything together. Over the course of the test chamber the Cube is needed to help you solve two out of three of the puzzles.

You are eventually forced to murder the Cube to proceed. Even the wording GLaDOS uses matters here: "euthanize" rather than "dispose of". You might not have consciously realized how much you cared about the Cube, but this part bothered you. It nagged at you a little bit. Soon after you'd forget it to complete the next test chamber, but that feeling stuck with you. Something was wrong here.


Moments like that take a good game and turn it into a great experience.