MODULE 4

Game Worlds,What Is a Game World?. ,The Purposes of a Game World.

The Dimensions of a Game World. Realism. Creative and Expressive
Play,Self-Defining Play. Creative Play. Other Forms of Expression Game
Modifications. Character Development. . The Goals of Character Design.
The Relationship Between Player and Avatar
Game World:
A game world is an artificial universe, an imaginary place in which the events of the
game occur. When the player enters the magic circle and pretends to be somewhere
else, the game world is the place she pretends to be.
The Purposes of a Game World
Games entertain by several means: gameplay, novelty, social interaction (if it is a
multiplayer game), and so on. In a game such as chess, almost all the entertainment
value is in the gameplay; few people think of chess as a game about medieval warfare.
In atmospheric games such as the Silent Hill series, the world is essential to the
fantasy. Without the world, the game would not exist, and if it had a different
world, it would be a different game. One of the purposes of a game world is simply to
entertain in its own right: to offer the player a place to explore and an environment to
interact with.
The other purpose of a game’s world is to sell the game in the first place. It’s not the
game’s mechanics that make a customer pick up a box in a store, but the fantasy it
offers: who she’ll be, where she’ll be, and what she’ll be doing there if she plays that
game.
The dimensions of a Game World:
physical dimension of a Game world
Video game worlds are almost always implemented as some sort of simulated
physical space. The player moves his avatar in and around this space or manipulates
other pieces or characters in it. The physical properties of this space determine a great
deal about the gameplay. Three of these properties are spatial dimensionality, scale,
and boundaries.
Spatial Dimensionality:
It is essential to understand that the dimensionality of the game’s physical space is not
the same as how the game displays that space (the camera model) or how it
implements the space in the software.
These are the typical dimensionalities found in video games
2D. Thanks to the explosion in casual and mobile gaming, most of the video games in the
world still have only two dimensions. This design is especially noticeable in 2D side-scrolling
games such as Prince of Persia Classic, a remake of the original Prince of [Link] two
dimensions of the world directly correspond to the two dimensions of the monitor screen, so
you don’t have to worry about conveying a sense of depth to the player. Some games with 2D
game worlds still use 3D engines to display the world so that objects appear three-
dimensional even though the gameplay does not use the third dimension.
2.5D, typically pronounced “two-and-a-half D.” This refers to game worlds that appear to be
threedimensional spaces, but in reality, consist of a series of 2D layers, one above the other.
StarCraft, a war game, shows plateaus and lowlands, as well as aircraft that pass over
obstacles and ground units. The player can place objects and move them horizontally within a
layer with a fine degree of precision, but vertically an object must be in one plane or another;
there is no in-between. Flying objects can’t move up and down in the air
3D. Three true dimensions. Thanks to 3D hardware accelerators and middleware engines like
Unity, 3D spaces are now easy to implement on hardware that supports them. They give the
player a much greater sense of being inside a space (building, cave, spacecraft, or whatever)
than 2D spaces ever can. With a 2D world, the player feels as if he is looking at it; with a 3D
world, he feels as if he is in it. 3D worlds are great for games with exploration challenges or
vehicle simulations such as Need for Speed
4D. If you want to include a fourth dimension for some reason (not counting time), implement
it as an alternate version of the 3D game world rather than an actual four-dimensional space.
In other words, create two (or more) three-dimensional spaces that look similar but offer
different experiences as the avatar moves among them. For example, the Legacy of Kain
series presents two versions of the same 3D world, the spectral realm and the material realm,
with different gameplay modes for each.
Scale
○ Scale refers to both the absolute size of the physical space represented, as measured in units
meaningful in the game world (meters, miles, or light-years, for instance), and the relative
sizes of objects in the game. If a game doesn’t correspond to anything in the real world, the
sizes of objects in its game world don’t really matter. You can adjust them to suit the game’s
needs any way you like. Some distortion is necessary for gameplay as long as it doesn’t harm
the suspension of belief.
In Realistic scale for example in sports game it should be the vehicle simulator and first
person view and in Aerial or isometric perspective we need to distort the scale of things. In
SimCity Characters may need to walk at different speeds when they walk indoors and
outdoors.
In war games, you have to adjust the speed and range of the weapon Some distortion is
necessary. Airplanes, missiles, and rockets may need to be slowed down. In Air Land Battle
Wargame: Red Dragon we need Distort the relative height of people and buildings: In Age of
Empires we may want to slightly exaggerate the size of the key objects so it’s more visible.
BoundariesIn board games, the edge of the board is the edge of the game world. With
procedural rendering, we can create unlimited game worlds, but normally we establish
artificial boundaries to avoid overwhelming the player or letting her go into regions where no
gameplay has been [Link] games are usually more immersive than board
games, and they often try to disguise or explain away the fact that the world is limited to help
maintain the player’s immersion.
In some cases, the boundaries of a game world arise naturally, and we don’t have to disguise
or explain them. Sports games take place only in a stadium or an arena, and no one expects or
wants them to include the larger world. In most driving games, the car is restricted to a track
or a road, and this, too, is reasonable enough

Temporal dimension
The temporal dimension of a game world defines the way that time is treated in that world
and the ways in which it differs from time in the real world. In many turn-based and action
games, the world doesn’t include a concept of time passing: days and nights or seasons and
years. Everything in the world idles or runs in a continuous loop until the player interacts with
the game in some way.
In some games, time is implemented as part of the game world but not part of the
[Link] is a good example of a game in which time is meaningful. Many of the
enemies in Minecraft are inactive during the daytime. It’s also darker and hard to see at night.
In the underground portions of the game, day and night have less meaning, as you would
expect.
Variable Time: Game time usually runs faster than real time, and jumps or changes rate ■
War games often don’t implement nighttime or rest. For example In “The Sims” a game about
managing a householdTime speeds up when everyone goes to sleep, then slows down when
 characters wake up Time management is one of the most important challenges. The clock in
the game is about 48 times as fast as in real life. But the motion is not that different from real
life. Characters seem to do things slowly. Creates time pressure to complete tasks quickly.
Anomalous time—time can move at different speeds simultaneously in different parts of the
game InThe Settlers: Rise of an Empire game Time moves at different speed in different parts
of the game. A tree can grow very fast. But overall they are well balanced. In Age of Empires
2, in which tasks that should take less than a day in real time (gathering berries from a bush,
for example) seem to take years in game time according to the game clock. Age of Empires
does have a time scale, visible on the game clock, but not everything in the world makes
sense on that time scale.

Environmental dimension and its properties

It Describes the world’s appearance and its atmosphere. This includes art and audio. The two
particular properties include the cultural context of the world and the physical surroundings.
Cultural Context The cultural context of a game refers to its culture in the anthropological
sense: the beliefs, attitudes, and values that the people in the game world hold, as well as their
political and religious institutions, social organization, and so on—in short, the way those
people live. These characteristics are reflected in the manufactured items that appear in the
game: clothing, furniture, architecture, landscaping, and every other man-made object in the
world. The culture influences not only what appears and what doesn’t appear (a game set in a
realistic ancient Egypt obviously shouldn’t include firearms), but also how everything
looks—including the user interface. Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile is an excellent example of a
game’s culture harmonizing with its user interface.
The cultural context also includes the game’s backstory. The backstory of a game is the
imaginary history, either large-scale (nations, wars, natural disasters) or small-scale (personal
events and interactions), that preceded the time when the game takes place.
For most game worlds, it’s not necessary to define the culture or cultures in great detail. A
game set in your own culture can simply use the things that you see around you. The SimCity
series, for example, is clearly set in present-day America (few European cities are so
rectilinear), and it looks like it. But when your game’s culture does not resemble your own,
you need to think about how it is different, and how you will convey that to the player.
Physical surroundingsThe physical aspects of the game world—its environment and
contents—define what the game actually looks and sounds like. This is a part of game design
in which it’s most helpful to be an artist or to work closely with one. In the early stages of
design, you don’t need to make drawings of every single thing that can appear in the game
world. It includes every man made object, natural object, and sound in the game world. It Sets
the tone and mood. The physical world includes sounds as well as sights: music; ambient
environmental sounds; the particular noises made by people, animals, machinery, and
vehicles
The environmental dimension also include Visual style, Color, Lighting , Texture , Level of
detail ,Photo realistic or more abstract. We must have single vision throughout the the game,
especially when the game is designed by a team.
It should address How much detailing is needed? We can include as much detail as possible
to improve immersiveness until it hurts gameplay. The Style includes both: Content of the
world itself and How that content is presented to the player. The content includes Futuristic
robot, Medieval town and content presentation includes Realistic rendering ,slightly abstract
and Hand painted .The drawing style imposes its own atmosphere over the content.
Overused settings: All too often, games borrow settings from one another or from common
settings found in the movies, books, or television. A huge number of games are set in science
 fiction and fantasy worlds, especially the quasi-medieval, sword-and-sorcery fantasy inspired
by J. R. R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons, popular with the young people who used to be
the primary indeed, almost the only market for computer games. But a more diverse audience
plays games nowadays, and they want new worlds to play in. You should look beyond these
hoary old staples of gaming

Emotion dimension in game world

● Casual games generally don’t arouse strong emotions. ● Emotions can be caused in several
ways ○ Gameplay ○ Story ○ Interacting with NPC ○ Interacting with the game world ○
Interacting with other players
A game can evoke different emotions in a player:
○ They can create “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” as the old ABC Wide World
of Sports introduction used to say. Use the elements of risk and reward—a price for failure
and a prize for success—to further heighten these emotions.
○ Games can also produce frustration as a by-product of their challenges, but this isn’t a good
thing; some players tolerate frustration poorly and stop playing if it gets too high. To reduce
frustration, build games with player-settable difficulty levels and make sure the easy level is
genuinely easy.
○ If you can devise a close contest or a series of stimulating challenges, you will generate
these kinds of emotions. Construction and management simulations, whose challenges are
usually financial, arouse the player’s feelings of ambition, greed, and desire for power or
control. They also offer the emotional rewards of creative play
○ The SimCity and various Tycoon games (RollerCoaster Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon, and so
on), do this well. Artificial life games and god games such as Spore or The Sims let the player
control the lives of autonomous people and creatures for better or worse, satisfying a desire to
be omnipotent over a world of beings subject to the player’s will.
○To create suspense, surprise, and fear, use the time-honored techniques of horror films:
darkness, sudden noises, disgusting imagery, and things that jump out at the player
unexpectedly.
Interaction with NPC
○ A player can identify with a game character.
○ Create characters that the players care about. Then threatening the character and
putting obstacle in the way of thecharacter. It creates drama tension. Example Final
Fantasy VII: Aeris’ death It gives players different moral choices to make, with
varyingconsequences.
○ BioShock’s different endings.
The Comedy works best in adventure games, which tend to have more detail
characters.
○ RPG occasionally include funny moments.
○ Need to be careful.
● Balance fun (light entertainment) with more serious and complex
○ Make sure the players have a good time.
○ This is an issue with many educational games.

Self-defining play and the forms of personality

expression
 Self-Defining play let players project their personality into a [Link] a player
selects a token to represent herself in Monopoly, she chooses an avatar and so engages in an
act of self-definition. Many games allow the player to choose an avatar from a number of
different ones available and to customize the avatar in various ways. Because the avatar
represents the player in the game world, these activities are called self-defining play. Players
greatly enjoy defining themselves, choosing an avatar that either resembles them physically
(if it’s a human character) or that is a fantasy figure with whom they identify.
Forms of Personality Expression
Self-defining play gives the player an opportunity to project his personality into the
game world, and explore alternate identities, by means other than gameplay choices.
It takes several forms:
Avatar selection allows the player to choose from a number of predefined avatars,
usually at the beginning of the game. These avatars are most often humanoid
characters, but in driving and flying games, they’re vehicles. Many driving games
start the player with a small selection of cars, motorcycles, or whatever vehicles are
involved and make new choices available as the player’s performance improves. You
can let the player purchase a new car with winnings earned in previous races, for
example. The right to choose a new and more powerful avatar serves as a reward to
some players.
Avatar customization allows the player to modify the appearance or abilities of an
avatar that the game supplies by modifying its features. In role-playing games
(RPGs), this often takes the form of giving the avatar new skills, clothing, weapons,
and armor. In driving games, the customizable features may include the paint color of
the car and its engine, transmission, tires, and brakes. Customization can occur
both at the beginning of the game and through upgrades awarded or purchased as the
game goes on. In this way, a player creates a unique character of her own design.
Customization can be purely cosmetic or visual, as with the Nintendo Mii characters,
or it can include choices about the character’s attributes that may have an effect on
gameplay. Younger children pay more attention to visuals than to attributes, as they
are not yet used to thinking about games as systems.
Avatar construction gives the player the greatest freedom of all; he can construct his
avatar from the ground up, choosing every detail from a set of available options.
Usually offered in RPGs, avatar construction allows the player to choose such
features as the sex, body type, skin color, and clothing ofthe avatar, as well as the
avatar’s strength, intelligence, dexterity, and other functional qualities. The online
RPG Lord of the Rings Online offers a particularly extensive avatar construction
feature, as does the single-player RPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for the PC.
Some, such as Second Life and Minecraft, even let the player import his own graphics
for avatars or clothing.

Differentiate between functional and cosmetic attributes

Functional Attributes Cosmetic Attributes
Interacts with core mechanics No interaction with core mechanics
Focus on the fundamental aspects of a Focus on appearance of a character
character
Can be sub divided into characterization No other categories
and status attributes
 Need to test No need to test for every change
These attributes contribute to achieve These attributes will not contribute to
goals and rules achieve goals and rules
These attributes define the properties These attributes define the properties
which changes frequently and slowly which changes frequently and slowly
Example: airspeed of an aircraft Example: color of an aircraft

Compare and contrast between Constrained creative play

and freeform creative play.
Constrained Creative Play Freeform Creative Play
Creates Artificial constraints No Constraints are applied
Incorporate Rules of the game Will not have any rules of the game
Provides a structure for players Cannot see any possibility of players
creativity creativity
Players are offered with additional Players need not be offered with
resources or tools with restrictions additional resources or tools without any
restrictions
Difficult to test aesthetic standards Easy to test aesthetic standards
These games usually have an end goal These games usually don’t have an end
goal

Other Forms of Expression

Two of the major forms of expression commonly found as gameplay are role-playing and
storytelling.
Role-Playing
Role-playing means controlling an avatar character in such a way that it exhibits some of the
behaviors or personality characteristics of real people.
To offer a player opportunities to act as a character, you have to first design the avatar that
she will play with and decide to what extent the player can modify it.
Actors portray characters through their voice, movements, and facial expressions. In
presentational entertainment, these details are normally worked out in advance with a
director, but in video games they are improvised, and of course everything has to be mediated
through the game’s user interface.
Here are some features you might consider implementing:
Mood indicators. At the moment most games don’t give the player any way to change the
facial expression of an avatar. A mood indicator is an icon that the player can select that
allows her to indicate her avatar’s state of mind in a crude sort of way. The game engine can
detect the mood and have NPCs react appropriately; in a multiplayer game, other players can
see it.
Emotes. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) usually offer
emotes, special animations the player can trigger to indicate an emotional state, but of course
these don’t have the subtlety of real body language. The dances available in World of
Warcraft are one example. Emotes are usually used to entertain other players rather than to
influence the game engine.
Dialogue choices. One of the most common ways of letting players enact a character is to
offer them several different ways to say the same thing in a conversation with an NPC. You
can give the player aggressive, courteous, or humorous ways of replying to another character.
The player’s choice affects the character’s attitude and may open up, or close off, different
lines of conversation; it may also influence the game engine by changing the NPC’s attitude
toward the player.
These are just a few suggestions for ways to let the player express herself beyond choosing
physical actions in the game. Role-playing allows the player to feel like she is someone else,
a powerful kind of entertainment and personal self-expression.

story telling play

Some players enjoy creating stories of their own, using features provided by a game, which they can
then distribute online for others to read. For Example “The Movies by Lionhead Studios” provides
players with actors, sets and camera control which they can use to create movies. It lets players export
their creation as a video file so they can edit it using softwares like Adobe Premier. It requires a lot of
time and [Link] you want to make a game with similar features, you will have to work with the
programmers to design a system that allows players to set up cameras in the game world, record the
images and sounds generated by the game engine, and edit them.
The independent designer Jason Rohrer used another approach in his game Sleep Is Death. This game
is designed for two players, the storyteller and the story-player. The teller creates a story-like
experience in real time for the player and has to react to the player’s actions. It has something in
common with tabletop role-playing in that respect, but it avoids all the number crunching and the
emphasis on quests and magical items
But we don’t have to build a complex storytelling mechanism for someone to play with. The Sims
proved to be a huge success with a much simpler system: Players can create characters and construct
houses for them to live in, and then initiate events by giving commands to the characters. The Sims
also lets players capture screen shots from the game, put captions under them, organize them into
storyboards, and upload them to a website for others to see. Telling stories this way requires much
less complex software than The Movies uses, and the players don’t have to know how to edit video
An even easier solution involves generating a log of the player’s activities in text form. She can then
edit this log any way she likes, turning her raw game actions and dialogue into narrative form.

Game Modifications
To give your players the utmost creative freedom with your game, we can permit them to
modify the game itself—to redesign it themselves. Game modifications, or mods, are
extremely popular with the dedicated gamer community and almost an obligatory feature of
any large multiplayer networked game
Providing the player with mod-building tools also makes good business sense. Our game’s
original content can keep people interested for only a certain amount of time, but if people
can build mods that use your game engine (as they can with the Unreal and Half-Life 2
engines), people will continue to buy our game just to be able to play the mods.
Level Editors and Bots
Level Editors A level editor allows players to construct their own levels for a game. Some
level editors permit players to define only a new landscape; others allow them to define new
characters as well; and a few go so far as to permit rebuilding the entire game. Generally,
however, a good level editor lets the player construct a completely new landscape, place
challenges in it, and write scripts that the game engine can operate. If you work on a large
game for commercial sale, your team will almost certainly include tools programmers who
will build a level editor for the level designers to use. To make the level editor available to
the players, rather than useful only as an in-house tool, you must make sure it is as robust and
well-designed as the game software itself.
Two superb level editors are the 2D StarCraft Campaign Editor, which is included with
StarCraft, and the Hammer 3D editor that comes with Half-Life 2.
Bots A bot is an artificially intelligent opponent that the player can program for himself. (Bot
also has a secondary meaning: a program that help players cheat at multiplayer networked
games. This section is about the other kind.) By building bots, players can create tougher and
smarter opponents than those that normally ship with the game (usually a first-person
shooter). Some players use bots as sparring partners for practice before playing against real
people in online tournaments

Character Development
The Goals of Character Design
In many genres, games structure gameplay around characters. Action games (especially the
fighting and platform subgenres), adventure games, action-adventure hybrids, and role-
playing games all use characters extensively to entertain. Players need well-designed
characters to identify with and care about—heroes to cheer and villains to boo. The best
games also include complex characters who aren’t heroes or villains but fall somewhere in
between, characters designed to intrigue the player or make the player think. If characters
aren’t interesting or appealing, the game is less enjoyable.
Many factors combine to determine the degree to which a character appeals to people. A
character need not be attractive in the conventional sense of being pleasant to look at, but he
must be competently constructed—well drawn or well described. His various attributes
should work together harmoniously; his body, clothing, voice, animations, facial expressions,
and other characteristics should all join to express him and his role clearly to the player.
Characters should be distinctive rather than derivative. Even a stereotypical character should
have something that sets him apart from others of the same type.
A good character should also be credible. Players come to know a character through her
appearance and actions, and if that character then does something at odds with her apparent
persona, players won’t believe it. An evil demon from the underworld can’t be seen worrying
about orphans. For that matter, neither can James Bond. Simple characters must be
consistent. Richer characters, with more human frailties, may be more inconsistent, but even
so, players must feel that the character holds certain core values that she will not violate.
Avatar characters have an extra burden: The player must want to step into their shoes, to
identify with them, and to play as them. The next section discusses avatars in more detail.

The relationship between player and avatar

The game industry uses the term avatar to refer to a character in a game who serves as
a protagonist under the player’s control. (The original term is Sanskrit and in the
Hindu religion refers to the bodily incarnation of a god.) Most action and action
adventure games provide exactly one avatar. Many role-playing games allow the
player to manage a party of characters and switch control from one to another, but if
winning a role-playing game is contingent upon the survival of a particular member of
the party, then that character is effectively the player’s avatar (though some games
require that more than one character survive).
The player usually sees the avatar onscreen more than any other character if the game
is presented in the third person. Displaying the avatar requires the largest number of
animations, which must also be the smoothest animations, or you risk annoying the
player. The avatar’s movements must be attractive, not clumsy, unless clumsiness is
part of the avatar’s character Player-Designed Avatar Characters While most games
have an established character as the player’s avatar, role-playing games, especially
multiplayer online ones, almost always give players considerable freedom to design
an avatar to their own specifications. They can choose the avtar’s race, sex, body type,
hair, clothing, and other physical attributes, as well as a large number of other details,
such as strength and dexterity that have a direct effect on the way the avatar performs
in challenging situations.
Specific and Nonspecific Avatars in games in which the player does not get to design
or choose an avatar but must use one supplied by the game, the relationship between
the player and the avatar varies depending on how completely you, the designer,
specified the avatar’s appearance and other qualities. The earliest adventure games,
which were text-based, were written as if the player himself inhabited the game
world. However, because the game didn’t know anything about the player, it couldn’t
depict him or say much about him. Such avatars were nonspecific—that is, the
designer didn’t specify anything about them. Myst is an early example of a graphical
game with a nonspecific avatar.
The nonspecific avatar does not belong entirely to the past, however. Gordon
Freeman, the hero of Half-Life, does not speak and is never even seen in the game
(although he does appear on the box). The designers did this deliberately; Half-Life, a
first-person shooter in a world with no mirrors, offers Gordon as an empty shell for
the player to inhabit. The Effects of Different Control Mechanisms The way a player
feels about an avatar depends somewhat on how the player con trols the avatar in the
game
Lara Croft demonstrated that as long as the character is acting in a role that men are
comfortable with. Lara engages in tradition ally masculine activities, so men are
happy to enter the game as Lara. They might be less comfortable with an avatar who
engaged in more traditionally feminine activities. Women, of course, are expected to
identify with male heroes routinely, a state of affairs predating computer games. Until
recently, few books, movies, TV shows, or video games about adventurous activities
featured female heroes, and they’re still very much in the minority. Women justifiably
get tired of playing male heroes, and they appreciate the opportunity to play as female
characters