FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN

22MCA423
IV SEMESTER
DEPARTMENT OF MCA
MODULE-2 NOTES

MODULE-2
The Major Genres: What Is a Genre?. , The Classic Game Genres. Understanding Your Player.
Vanden Berghe’s Five Domains of Play,Demographic Categories. . Gamer Dedication. The
Dangers of Binary Thinking.
 MODULE 2 NOTES
Genre and the Classic Game Genres:
A genre is a category of games characterized by a particular set of challenges, regardless of
setting or game-world content.
Classic Game Genres:
Action Games:
• Action games include physical challenges.
• They may also incorporate puzzles, races, and a variety of conflict challenges, typically
among a small number of characters.
• Action games often contain simple economic challenges as well, usually involving collecting
objects.
• They include strategic or conceptual challenges.
• Action games may be further subdivided into a variety of sub-genres.
• Two of the best known are shooter games and fighting games.
Strategy Games:
• Strategy games include strategic (naturally), tactical, and sometimes logistical challenges.
• They may also offer economic and exploration challenges to lengthen the game and give it
more variety.
• They also have a physical challenge thrown in for spice, but this often annoys strategically
minded players.
Role-Playing Games:
• Role-playing games involve tactical, logistical, and exploration challenges.
• They also include economic challenges because the games usually involve collecting loot and
trading it in for better weapons.
• They sometimes include puzzles and conceptual challenges, but rarely physical ones.
• Real-world simulations include sports games and vehicle simulations, including military
vehicles.
• They involve mostly physical and tactical challenges but not exploration, economic, or
conceptual ones.
Construction and Management Genres:
• Construction and management games such as RollerCoaster Tycoon primarily offer economic
and conceptual challenges.
• Only rarely do they involve conflict or exploration, and they almost never include physical
challenges.
Adventure Genres:
• Adventure games chiefly provide exploration and puzzle-solving.
• They sometimes contain conceptual challenges as well.
• Adventure games may include a physical challenge also, but only rarely.
Puzzle Games:
• Puzzle games offer logic challenges and conceptual challenges almost exclusively, although
occasionally there’s time pressure or an action element.
The Vanden Berghe’s Five Domains of Play
VandenBerghe’s work is based on a well-known psychological model of human personality
traits called the Five Factor Model.
also known as “The Big Five,”
explains personality traits in terms of five non overlapping domains:
Openness to new experiences
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness and
Neuroticism
Novelty:
• Players who seek novelty like games that include a lot of variety and unexpected elements.
• People who don’t like novelty seek familiarity instead: games that offer them a comforting
sameness.
• These players might prefer Words with Friends to a science fiction extravaganza set in a
strange world with strange rules
Challenge:
• VandenBerghe correlates a desire for challenge—and perhaps more specifically effort and
control—with the trait of conscientiousness.
• High-challenge players prefer games that are difficult and require precision to win.
• Their conscientiousness drives them to act, to accomplish things, and perhaps to try to
complete everything in a game.
• Low-challenge players like sandbox games and others in which the player is free to fool
around without being required to achieve something.
Stimulation:
• Particularly via social engagement, this naturally correlates with extraversion.
• These players enjoy party games and others that involve interacting with other players.
• Those who prefer to avoid stimulation prefer games they can play alone, games that let them
be the only real person in the game world.
Harmony:
• the feeling that all parts of the game belong to a single, coherent whole.
• VandenBerghe is referring to social harmony and correlates this motivation with the
personality trait of agreeableness.
Threat:
• This domain is the most peculiar one because players’ reactions to it are the opposite of what
you might expect.
• The game quality of threat (an element of danger, or frightening content—anything that is
likely to generate unpleasant emotions) is popular with people who have high neuroticism
scores in OCEAN tests.
 Demographic Features:
 Men and women. Men and women are not nearly as different as various works of
pop psychology to believe. A large number of games are made with only male players
in mind, but it doesn’t take much to make them more appealing to women as well.
E.g., Sheri Graner Ray’s Gender
 Children and adults. Children’s gaming preferences and abilities differ much more
sharply from those of adults than men’s differ from women’s. Children have different
motor and cognitive skills, different attention spans, and different linguistic abilities,
and all of this change dramatically as children grows up. Most important, however,
games designed for children must be appealing and acceptable to their parents as well.
There is a vast amount of research on creating entertainment for children.
 Boys and girls. For years, the male-dominated game industry had a preconceived
notion that girls didn’t play video games, so the designers didn’t bother to think about
girls. This idea was wrong, however. Girls were playing video games, in spite of the
industry’s neglect. Still, boys’ and girls’ interests differ more widely than men’s and
women’s do, and making games that appeal to girls requires knowledge that few
designers have.
 Players with disabilities. A number of developers are working to improve the
accessibility of video games to players with disabilities. Although few games are
made specifically for people with special needs, it is easy and inexpensive to make
games more accessible. We can make our game available to the deaf by including
subtitles for spoken dialog and providing visual as well as auditory cues for particular
events; we can allow players with visual impairments to adjust the contrast of the
screen and the font size of any text in the game.
 Players of other cultures. The process of adapting a game for sale in a country other
than the one for which it was made is called localization. The process involves more
than just translating the text to a different language and rerecording the audio; for the
game to be a hit, you must take numerous cultural factors into account. It is far easier
to make a game enjoyable to people in other countries if you plan it that way and
consider them a part of your target audience from the beginning.
Gamer Dedication:
The game industry used to assume that there was a binary distinction between hardcore,
deeply committed gamers and more casual ones. With the arrival of games built around social
networks, it has become clear that this is not a binary distinction but a continuum called
gamer dedication. We can measure gamer dedication by a variety of metrics. Barry Ip and I
proposed a list of these metrics in our article “From Casual to Core: A Statistical Mechanism
for Studying Gamer Dedication” (Ip, 2002). Some of them were borrowed from Scott Kim’s
Game Developers’ Conference presentation “Designing Web Games that Make Business
Sense” (Kim, 2001). Even though these are older articles, their content is fundamental
enough to still be relevant today.
The 15 measurable qualities of dedicated gamers that Ip and I proposed are as follows:
1. Technologically savvy. Highly dedicated gamers are more familiar with the latest releases
and developments and show greater interest in new gaming-related technologies.
2. Have the latest high-end gear. Dedicated gamers will acquire the latest consoles, PC
hardware, and mobile devices to keep up to date with the most recent trends. They are more
likely to own, or have owned, a wide variety of older game platforms.
3. Willingness to pay. Enthusiasts are more inclined to spend money on games and games-
related products. Conversely, casual gamers are more inclined to wait for price discounts and
special offers before committing to a purchase.
4. Prefer violent/action games. Kim suggested that hardcore gamers prefer games that show
comparatively violent and action-intensive content.
5. Prefer games that have depth and complexity. Dedicated gamers prefer games that
deliver greater complexity and that require a longer time to master, regardless of their themes.
6. Play games over many long sessions. Dedicated gamers are likely to devote considerably
more time to playing games in a single session.
7. Hunger for gaming-related information. Devouring everything from the latest news,
previews, and reviews, to interviews with industry experts, the hardcore gamer actively seeks
gaming-related information through the Internet, game magazines, and books, such as
strategy guides.
8. Discuss games with friends online. Dedicated gamers like to discuss gaming with others
and to visit game-related Internet forums or chat rooms regularly.
9. Play for the exhilaration of defeating (or completing) the game. A dedicated gamer will
play persistently for the enjoyment and exhilaration of defeating the game and is likely to be
more forgiving of aesthetic flaws such as poor acting or a trivial plot.
10. Much more tolerant of frustration. Hardcore gamers are much more tolerant of difficult
games or games that might frustrate them in some way. Casual gamers are more likely to
abandon such games.
11. Engaged in competition with himself, the game, and other players. Hardcore gamers
want to feel the satisfaction and reward of competing and improving their skills against other
players and/or computer-controlled opponents. Less dedicated gamers would not, for
example, be inclined to play endlessly to reduce their lap-times in Gran Turismo by a fraction
of a second, or have the patience to learn every combination attack in Street
Fighter, or even to achieve a higher score.
12. Age at which first started playing games. If players started playing at a young age, and
have since been regular gamers, then this would indicate those who are more experienced and
knowledgeable. Gamers who start playing later in life are seldom as dedicated.
13. Comparative knowledge of the industry. Dedicated gamers are likely to show broader
knowledge and awareness of industry activities and trends new technologies, and game
development methods. Less dedicated players may keep track of upcoming releases and game
reviews, but not events such as industry layoffs or mergers.
[Link] adoption. Dedicated gamers are the ones who attend midnight release events or
take extra steps to get hold of games before their official release dates through gray-market
imports.
[Link] to modify or extend games in a creative way. hardcore gamers frequently modify
commercial games in a variety of ways. These can range from simple changes such as giving
characters new skins to change their appearance to programming “aim-bots,” separate pieces
of software that work in concert with an existing game to give the player an unfair advantage
 over others. Casual gamers seldom take the time to make these kinds of modifications; they
tend to play the game as-is out of the box.

The Dangers of Binary Thinking:

A game can’t be developed for everyone, so your target audience is necessarily a subset of all
possible players, a subset determined by your answers to the questions “Who will enjoy this game?”
and “What kinds of challenges do they like?”
This is binary thinking: We assume that if group A likes a thing, everyone outside that group won’t
like it. It’s unsound reasoning and may actually cause you to lose part of your potential customer
base
Reasoning Statistically about Player Groups Suppose you ask a group of players to rate their level
of interest in a particular game on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 representing no interest at all and 10
being fanatical enthusiasm. A few people will be at the extremes and the majority somewhere in the
middle. If you graph the responses of men and women separately, you may find for a given game that
the two groups have different arithmetic means; that is, the centers of their bell-shaped curves fall at
different places on the graph.

Men have a higher level of interest in this game than women do,” in fact, a large area of
overlap indicates that a significant portion of the women surveyed are interested in the game
as well. Furthermore, the number of women reporting an interest level of 6 is about two-
thirds that of the number of men reporting the same interest level. two-fifths of all the people
reporting an interest level of 6 are women—far too many to simply ignore.

Strive for Inclusiveness, Not Universality We cannot make a game that appeals to
everyone by throwing in a hodgepodge of features because group A likes some of them and
group B likes others. If you do, you will produce a game that has too many features and no
harmony. For instance, you can’t make a game that appeals to action fans, to strategy fans,
and to fans of management simulations by combining kung fu, chess, and Monopoly—the
result would be a mess that appeals to none of them. On the other hand, you can include a
story line in a fighting game so long as the story line doesn’t interfere with the gameplay. The
story line adds depth to the game without driving away its key market of fighting-game
enthusiasts, and it might attract the interest of people who otherwise wouldn’t pay any
attention to a fighting game. Heavenly Sword and God of War are good examples.