Chalmers University of Technology | sus.lundgren@chalmers.se
[ 1] As in the game Dragon’s Gold, designed by Bruno Faidutti, published by Descartes Editeur in 2001.
Six different players negotiate the distribution of 11 jewels of nine different colors—in 60 seconds [ 1]. Teams of children are competing to get the right set of keys to open a treasure chest; is it morally right to encourage violent robbery of a wanted key? An old-fashioned dogfight game requires programmers to implement death—how does that feel? Designing a Myst-like adventure game in real life encourages the use of… grass. What is going on?
The examples above all come from my life as an interaction/ gameplay designer or teacher of these subjects, and to me it just proves that gameplay design is in fact interaction design. Why? Because gameplay design is design of the core game, i.e., the rules of the game. And the rules in turn affect not only how the game is played, but also how players interact with each other via the game and thus in turn how they experience it. For instance a game like Yahtzee, with its luck-based and non-interactive gameplay, will result in a totally different game experience than a negotiation-intense game, where you have to actively interact with others in order to succeed. Hence, every single design decision matters when writing the rules. Imagine for instance a poker game where all cards are open; this simple decision reduces the game to an
exercise in counting the odds. This, the immediate impact of a design change, is what makes gameplay design so interesting and so instructive.
In addition, the freer realm of games opens up for interesting challenges when it comes to interaction design. Let’s take the first example above, with negotiation: How often do you get to design that in a normal GUI? How would you go about transforming such an immediate, body-language-dependent process to an online environment? I’ve given this task to 180 students in 39 groups, and there seems to be at least three and a half solutions—can you figure them out?
Games are full of these unusual interaction issues, never before solved. In addition, they often provide moral or ethical issues, as in the examples above. In the children’s game, the solution was to introduce stun guns into the game; the children could shoot and stun each other, and whoever was stunned had to give up his or her key and stand still for a minute. As for the dogfight game, the students programming it wrote this in their report: “On the other hand it was interesting to face one’s feelings when one implements status = STATUS DEAD. It is not uncomplicated at all, and
maybe it does not just numb but also starts thoughts on why?” Another group of students set out to make a live version of an old-fashioned computer game in the adventure genre, but as they couldn’t make the entire game, they designed a small room in what should have appeared as a cottage. To create the feeling of a mystery, they worked hard with effects like a filmed face projected upon a dummy, saying mysterious things, secret writings on the wall that appeared only in ultraviolet light, a buzzing radio that was in fact controlling interior sounds, a diary, etc. The room was part of an exhibition, and despite the fact that it was dark and the outer sounds were muffled, the room did not really get its own character until the students bravely rolled out a piece of real lawn in what was to be “outside.” The musty smell of grass changed the experience completely, and it exemplifies how games open up new aesthetic dimensions and questions. Actually, any non-abstract game is full of aesthetic issues, the most important ones being how the theme should “carry” the rules and make them logical: “No, you can’t move across that square, because that’s water and you don’t have a boat.” And so on.
So, that’s why you should try gameplay design if you have
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