Dopass.com

I've been a game designer for a bit now and I've noticed something over the course of several projects. The way I work stands out as curious to some fellow designers. To some, it appears as if I work by instinct, or perhaps even whim, as I change or ignore rules I helped create "whenever it suits me." In reality, this couldn't be further from the truth; I do the things I do based on what I'm seeing in the game and how the game feels when you play it; getting a feel for the shape of the game and adjusting or removing elements where needed to keep the experience feeling the way it was intended. None the less, when the topic of changing or ignoring rules comes up it sparks an interesting debate. When designing a game, do you lean more towards an intangible and unquantifiable "feel" where you change or ignore rules as needed to support that feel or do you stick with more tangible concrete rules and templates and follow them?

I've always taken the stand that the overall feel, or experience, of the game is far more important than consistently adhering to predefined rules or templates. I'm not saying that rules don't have their uses, of course. Making rules that players and our little worlds follow is the foundation upon which our games are made, but as with any medium, the real memorable experiences come from breaking those rules.

I can support this claim with several examples, but no medium illustrates what I'm talking about better than television/film. In recent years we've seen a revitalization of nighttime drama on American television that is due, in no small part, to breaking "the rules" of shows. Alias, and other shows, use a tool - "starting at the end" - to immediately build tension and suspense into their stories, completely breaking the rule of linear progression in the process. Similarly, surprise guests and strange rules exceptions have been a mainstay of reality television, making each episode "interesting" and "unique" - breaking their own rules in the process.

You see, the rules we create for the player define the decision space within which they can act, but they can also create a sort of prison of the mind where the player or viewer gets complacent, or bored because of a lack of new experience. What makes a game like Tomb Raider interesting isn't that you can climb, jump, shoot and otherwise act like an action-movie star so much as it is the moments where the unexpected happens - forcing you to climb, run and the like in ways you didn't think were possible, or necessary. The first time a floor gives way beneath you, revealing a pit of spikes, is memorable partly because the world didn't seem to allow it before then. By the same token, the 40th pit trap is boring because you already know how they work - the rules and behavior associated with them are no longer new or challenging. So to me, breaking the rules - whether they be genre expectations or self-imposed rules within the game's mechanics - is an important tool in making the experience memorable and exciting.

However, I can't say that everyone agrees with this approach. In fact, it's probably split 50/50 across the industry, right now. On the last project I worked on, we had a 12 person design team, 13 counting the design director. We had an incredible mix of personalities and approaches, but they always seemed to fall on one side of a line or another. On the one had we had a group of designers who were constantly pushing the envelope and developing new ways to use the tools at our disposal and the actions available to players. On the other side of the line we had a group of designers who kept pushing for conventions to be strictly adhered to, even programmatically enforced, if possible. Debate on the issue seemed almost religious.

Some went so far as to literally not do a single thing in the game without first finding a convention, or creating a new one, to adhere to. This might seem laudable, but doesn't it lead to a homogeneous game experience? At the very least, it seems to limit the space within which you can innovate, doesn't it?

It's important to have a plan and it's important to prepare before you act -- especially on multi-million dollar, multi-person projects like video games. However, isn't it equally important to be able to adapt and change, even breaking your own rules, in order to bring players the best, most exciting experience possible?

For me, it's more important to maintain the overall game "experience" than it is to maintain a rigid adherence to the rules that define that experience. I believe that rigid adherence to the rules and conventions can lead to game stagnation, where the game gets more "challenging" by becoming more difficult instead of presenting new & unique challenges or situations to the player. I can't deny that it makes our jobs as designers more difficult -- When we break our own rules we bear a greater responsibility to stay on top of our work and police our efforts to prevent a feeling of chaos in our experience, but I think it's worth this extra effort. I believe it's our responsibility as entertainers of our players, in fact.

- Snipehunter