Theory of Fun for Game Design (22 page)

RBI
: “Runs batted in” in baseball. This statistic is tracked per player and is incremented by one each time a run is scored as a result of their turn at bat, no matter who actually scores the run.

University programs for game designers
: To investigate this more, I urge you to look at the website for the International Game Developers Association and its academic out-reach page:
www.igda.org/academia/
.

Pinochle
: A game of cards. You play with a slightly different deck than the standard 52-card deck used for poker or bridge. Points are scored based on the number of particular combinations of cards (called “melds”) that you hold in your hand, which is similar to poker, but you also bid for “trumps” (naming a suit higher ranking than all other suits), similar to bridge.

1 Corinthians
: The citation is 1 Corinthians 13:11. The following is from the King James version of the Bible:

Games with informal rule sets
: Many theorists have established a spectrum from “game” to “play.” Bruno Bettelheim, the child psychologist, defined forms of play as make-believe (solo or cooperative), joint storytelling, community building, and play with toys. He saw games as team-based or individual competitions against other people or against self-imposed marker thresholds. Of course, joint storytelling or social tie-building proceed by concrete if unspoken rules. I’d argue that what we tend to think of as “play” or “informal” games may have
more
rules than the classic definition of game.

Hierarchical and strongly tribal primates
: For marvelous insight into the tribal and animalistic nature of human societies, I highly recommend the work of Jared Diamond, particularly
The Third Chimpanzee
and
Guns, Germs, and Steel
.

Examining the space around us
: A lot of games can be treated as problems in graph theory—and this is where those guys saying that the game was all vertices were right. These were people who had essentially “leveled up” in how they viewed space—they were practiced enough in territory problems that they were able to abstract any given territory game into a graph and discern patterns that I, stuck in my perception of it, was unable to see.

Games where things fit together physically
: My favorites include
Tetris
,
Blokus
, and
Rumis
.

Games where things fit together conceptually
: Poker is probably the most obvious example, but many card games work this way, as do many tile-laying games such as
Carcasonne
.

Games of classification or taxonomy
: Card games such as
Uno
and
Go Fish!
and even memory games rely on classifying things into sets.

Cartesian coordinate space
: This is the classic method developed by René Descartes of locating a point in 2-D space on a grid defined by two orthogonal axes. It serves as the basis of much of algebra (as well as most of computer graphics). This tends to be our default assumption for how space is “shaped,” but within graph theory many other types of spaces are possible.

Directed graph
: A directed graph is one where you have points connected by lines (vertices and edges, if you like) but the lines have
direction
. Think of the classic children’s board game
Chutes and Ladders
; the chutes and ladders on the board are directed links between points on the board. It is a game that does not use Cartesian space; the shortest distances between points have nothing to do with the physical distances on the board, but rather with the number of moves it takes to get to a given spot. All of the “track” games such as
Monopoly
are in effect directed graphs.

You didn’t learn the lesson (games of chance)
: Some wags have called gambling “a tax on the math-impaired.” Probability is one of those areas where the human mind just seems to have trouble. The classic example is the repeated coin toss—there are only two possibilities, heads or tails. If you throw a coin and it lands on heads seven times in a row, what are the odds that it will land on tails next? The answer is still 50 percent because of how the question is phrased. If you ask, “What are the odds that eight consecutive throws will land on heads?” the answer is very different (1 in 2
⁸
). Playing on this weakness has been a classic tool of marketers and con men.

Blackjack card counting
: Card counting is based on rough statistical analysis to determine what the odds are of receiving a card of the right value next. This is possible because the game is played with a finite deck of known configuration. A detailed explanation of card counting methods can be found at
www.allaboutblackjack.com/cardcounting.html
.

Dominoes
: Because a line of dominoes can only fork when a “double” is played (a domino with the same value on both squares), you can count how many times a given value has been played, and how many are likely to be in players’ hands, in order to determine whether it will be possible to play a given number in the future. Assuming the other players are playing optimally to remove the highest-value dominoes from their hand, you can determine which particular dominoes they are likely to have in their hands based on what play choices they make.

Girls as status driven
: An excellent glimpse into this world can be found in
Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence
by Rosalind Wiseman.

Shooters
: A class of video games where you fire projectiles at targets in order to score points. Usually divided into first-person shooters and 2-D shooters.

Fighting games
: A specific genre of video game wherein players take control of a martial artist. Typically, these games involve pressing particular button combinations in order to execute a particular kick or blow or to dodge or deflect attacks. These games usually mimic one-on-one battles.

CounterStrike
: A team-based first-person shooter where players play one of two teams: terrorists or counterinsurgents. Each team has a slightly different goal, and the game is fought within a time limit. A very high degree of team coordination is required in order to be successful.
CounterStrike
is the most popular online action game in the world.

Chess and queens
: Chess most likely originated in India 1400 years ago. The most mobile piece is the queen, which is allowed to move any distance it likes across the board, be it horizontally, diagonally, or vertically. This mobility only arrived in the game in the fifteenth century, and some argue that it arose as a result of the increasing presence of queens as heads of state in European politics.

Diplomacy
: A classic board game of interpersonal strategy,
Diplomacy
requires that players make deals with one another and then proceed to double-cross each other, all in the context of a board representing a map of the world.

Role-playing
: Generally speaking, role-playing games are ones where the player takes on an alternate identity. Traditional pen-and-paper role-playing is like a special form of collaborative acting, but the computerized versions tend to put a much heavier emphasis on increasing the statistical definition of your character. A game with role-playing elements is typically one where the character you play can become more powerful over time.

Disgust
: A quick online quiz where you can test your own disgust levels with various substances is available at
www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/disgust/
. This quiz is part of a study developed by Dr. Val Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Groups run by outsize personalities
: For more on the many vulnerabilities of the human mind to persuasion, I recommend the wonderful book
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
by Robert Cialdini.

Inbred dislike of groups not our own
: There are many studies in the history of sociology and psychology that demonstrate this, but perhaps the most chilling is the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Jumping puzzles
: A challenge often found in games, jumping puzzles are sequences of jumps that must be performed with precise timing. They are often denigrated as a designer’s failure of imagination.

Tile-based
: A term for computer graphics that are based on drawing discrete squares, or tiles, each with an image on them. Generally, nothing in the game can straddle the boundary between two tiles.

Topology
: The branch of geometry that is interested in the properties of shapes that do not change when you “squish” a shape. In theory, if you had a cube that you could squish all you wanted, you could shape it into a spere. However, to change it into a donut, you have to punch a hole in it. The donut, however, can easily become a teapot.

Platform games
: Any of a broad class of games where you attempt to traverse a landscape collecting objects or touching every space on the map. Platform games originally featured platforms as their setting, hence the name.

Frogger
: A simple space traversal game where you play a frog attempting to reach one of five safe spaces on the other side of a busy road and a river. Both the road and the river present the same obstacle, but clever artwork makes them look like different play experiences.

Donkey Kong
: One of the earliest arcade platformers, this game required you to play Mario, a plumber who wanted to rescue his girlfriend, who was abducted by a giant ape. You had to walk up slanted platforms and jump over rolling barrels in order to reach the top.

Kangaroo
: Another early arcade platformer. In this game, you played a kangaroo mother trying to rescue her baby joey. Monkeys threw apples at you from the side of the screen as you tried to reach the top.

Miner 2049er
: An early platformer available on 8-bit computer systems, this game was actually very similar topologically to
Pac-Man
. You played a miner who had to touch every spot on the map—as you walked over girders, they changed color to indicate that you had been there.

Q*Bert
: Another map traversal game, this game took place on a triangular grid of diamonds rather than in a traditional Cartesian space. It also featured a few spots where there were elements of a directed graph—you could jump onto a little disk that floated beside the map and be taken to the top of the triangle. Once again, the objective was to visit every node on the graph without colliding with an enemy.

Lode Runner and Apple Panic
: Complex platformers for 8-bit computers where you were asked to collect all of a number of objects on the screen while not being caught by the enemies. Unlike other platformers, however, this one let you actually change the map by dropping a substance that temporarily removed a segment of the floor. Enemies could fall in the floor and be trapped—if the floor was restored before they escaped, they would be removed from play. Often, objects you needed to retrieve would be hidden under deep floors that required you to tunnel down using this ability, thus risking death. The best levels were highly difficult puzzles.

3-D on rails
: A term used to refer to games that have a 3-D representation but do not permit you to move freely through the environment.

True 3-D
: A term used to refer to games that use both 3-D rendering and a 3-D space in which the player can move.

Secrets
: A term for hidden objects scattered throughout a level of a game. Many games offer up the collection of secrets as an additional axis for success in order to reward thorough exploration.

Pick-up
: A generic term for a game object that grants new abilities to the player when collected. The classic early examples include the large dots in
Pac-Man
that make the player capable of eating ghosts and the hammer in
Donkey Kong
, which allows the player to destroy barrels.

Jumping times
: An article by Ben Cousins in
Develop Magazine
(August 2002) examined this. The author found that hit games with well-received gameplay had level lengths clustering around 1 minute and 10 seconds, characters that jump have elapsed time in the air clustering around 0.7 seconds, and the elapsed time to perform three combat moves in succession clustered around 2 seconds. He suggests that these should be considered constants for good gameplay.

Time attack
: A common tactic in many games, particularly platform games, is to ask you to do the same tasks you have done before but within tighter and tighter time limits.

Atari 2600
: The first blockbuster success in the console industry, the Atari 2600’s heyday was in the late 70s and early 80s.