Making Games More Meaningful

Games writer Sande Chen (The Witcher) has a great piece up at Gamasutra about the importance of adopting a multidisciplinary approach to game design. In particular, Chen looks at a relatively new member of development teams, the narrative designer:

Chen also offers a great review of visual structure in games, a discipline defined by cinematographers and which was elegantly expressed in Ken Levine's Bioshock. The fundamental insight behind visual structure is an emphasis on how color tone, shape, line, angles, lighting and camera movement all constitute creative choices that have the capacity to create deeply emotional experiences. The power of visual structure in games can be found in the striking, blown-out highlights of Fumito Ueda's Ico, which produce a strong tension between light and dark in the game and reinforce its themes of discovery and liberation.

Chen also supplies illustrations of how game designers actually make plots of emotional intensity to guide their visual choices. For example, narrative designer Stephen E. Dinehart used an intensity plot to generate a color script for Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts. Periods of peak intensity in the game were skewed more toward a red palette, while for valleys a green shift was used.

Indie game designers also use such scripts. For example, Jenova Chen, creator of Fl0w, not only plots emotional intensity but also the 'acts' of his games in similar fashion. Such plots are particularly interesting because they reflect the uniquely quantitative nature of game design, as opposed to traditional arts like cinema.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Chen's piece is the reaction to it by the game design community. While much of what Chen points out would seem to be common sense and obvious, her readers lament that, alas, this is far too often not the case.

Writer Lee Sheldon, who's worked in both TV and games, thinks that, until recently, game designers have been learning precisely the wrong lessons from film and relegating their insights to cutscenes. Now that the design of gameplay is increasingly seen as an inherently multidisicplinary endeavor, Chen hopes that gamers can expect much more meaningful experiences in the years to come.

[via Gamasutra]