Innovation in Game Design – IGIC
November 3, 2011, International Games Innovation Conference, Orange, CA–Brian Winn from Michigan State University talked about the process of innovation in game design. Just as other software, game design benefits from a structured methodology.
A practical design flow goes from design and coding, to play, to perceived beneficial experience, and then cycles back to design for revisions. The design specifications must address the player, as a social person, as a game player, and whose cognitive experiences affect the play itself. It is best to prototype and play test to make successful games.
Storytelling is another critical aspect of game play. The designer must become a storyteller, and through the story, affect the player. Play involves mechanics, dynamics, and effects to make the experience interactive and engaging. All of these assets are based on some technology and most affect the user experience in some way.
Catan is a board game that has been ported to a digital implementation on Xbox live and iPad. Although the versions differ leading to changes in the user experience, the game play and story are still the same. This shows that innovation, which is something new and useful, and desirable, is not the same as inventions. Innovations change the story and the play to create a completely different experience.
Technology as a catalyst for game changes. Standards help people move to new titles, because they understand how the game works. Standard interfaces also help to reduce risk in developing a new game. Most games are built on the success of other successful games. Good designs propagate for word all bad designs die with their titles.
Innovation leads to new experience and comes from technical advances. Innovation also drives the technology and creates change in the marketplace. The hardware will continue to follow Moore’s law with increasing performance and realism. Storage has changed from ROM, to discs, to CDs and DVDs, and LAN networks, and now the cloud. All of these evolutionary changes influenced and improve the game experience making them more pervasive.
Software started out as machine language, moved to assembly plus machine language for optimization of critical paths, and now into higher-level languages. The value of the higher-level languages is that they abstract the hardware out and allow the designer to focus on the game itself. The game logic is a collection of middleware APIs to talk to the OS. Middleware includes a game engine, which increases the layer of abstraction even more, and authoring tools to generate the code. Some of these tools are now built into games to permit player generated content.
Although games started out as text, no all beings have some types of graphics. In the ’80s, the best graphics were on arcade games. These moved into consoles and in the ’90s, we saw 3-D acceleration in video cards and the release of DirectX, which provided another layer of middleware to remove hardware dependencies. By ’00, we saw cinematic images on consoles and PCs, and these capabilities are now available on mobile devices and through browsers. True stereoscopic images are now available on many platforms. 3-D images may be the killer app for games. Just as video has changed, audio has changed over time.
However, to date most of the other senses have been ignored. Force feedback is available in some controllers but that’s the only other sense being addressed. Inputs range from joysticks and trackballs, to controllers on consoles, and the keyboard and mouse on a PC. The PC inputs enabled the early role-playing games. Now inputs are adding custom controllers that detect motion and touch. When these are added to a GPS, you can augment the reality with localization features.
Indications capabilities and games also changed dramatically over time. The first games were disconnected, but soon people connected modems, which led to LAN parties as people found that they enjoyed playing games with others. The LAN parties evolved into client/server systems and MMOGs. Now, games are part of social networks, even though many of the games are throwbacks to earlier gaming styles.
Dean distribution was easy when all games were on arcade machines. As consoles emerged, games went to a pre-publisher distribution model which changed over time to a publisher and retailer. At this point, the goal of a game developer wants to get shelf space. Now game distribution is moving to the web and people are self-publishing. Device stores and app stores now enable publishing combined with social networking.
Business models are also changing, evolving from play for each game play, to buying the game.
This lead to annual purchases or sequels for the major franchises like Madden Football. Publishers change the annual subscriptions to monthly when they could get away with it. As games move to the web and to mobile platforms, almost free and free to play business models are rapidly emerging. Outside of the developed countries, people are buying $10 computers based on old Apple II or NES designs. These new low-cost platforms still need content, so developers need to continue innovation.
