Difference between revisions of "Chadius: Elements of a good game"

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Elements of a Good Game
By Chad Serrant
12/30/04

There are many good games out there. And there are many great games. But there are a few classic games -- the few games that rise to the top of the gaming food chain.

There are a few elements that a game needs to be classic. If a game has these elements, then it's going to last. Twenty years from now, gamers are gonna pick up these games and play them again. And again. And again. It will remind them that games don't need to have cutting-edge technology.

There are three elements a game needs to become classic. It has to be: 1) Easy to learn, 2) Hard to master, and 3) Be instantly appealing. Of course these terms are a bit fuzzy. But I will list examples of games that possessed two of these qualities. And then I'll list games that did work.

Now, before I continue, I wanna be clear about one thing: these are the ingredients to make a classic game, not a profitable game. I make games, not ads. I'll list a few profitable games in the "not a classic" bin. Also, rule #3 is almost completely a marketing issue, something I'm not good at.

The Rules

Rule #1 - The game needs to be easy to learn.
If a game is too hard to understand, people will simply not be willing to put time and effort into playing the game. The game needs simple enough rules that anyone is willing to pick up and play it.

This is one reason why sports games are so popular. Most people know the basic rules of sports games, so they know what they are getting into with a sports game (not that I'm a fan of sports games, but that's another fight for another day.)

When I write that people need to know about the rules of the game, I only mean the simple rules. Enough rules should be available so that people get the gist of the game. Most people don't remember every single rule in American Football, for example. The referees are doing the Robot for all I know. But I understand the basic points: score touchdowns and sack the ball carrier while preventing the opponents from doing the same.

The point is, I know enough of the rules that I feel comfortable playing the game: the rest of the rules will come to me as I play.

Rule #2 - The game needs to be difficult to fully master.
Now once a gamer understands all of the rules, it needs to be difficult to actually use all of them. By making the game difficult, gamers will repeatedly practice to gain skill. The game needs to reward them for practice by revealing more and more of the game. There needs to be little nooks and crannies for the expert gamers to find stuff.

Fighting games are usually full of nooks and crannies for gamers to find. Take priority for example. When two people attack simultaneously, one attack will override the other's attack. That is, one attack will have priority over the other's.Actually figuring out which attack has how much priority is a matter of trial and error. Even when it's figured out, the player needs to recall these comparisons on the fly. Expert fighting gamers do this type of stuff all the time.

Rule #3 - The game needs to be attractive enough to attract people and keep them interested long after the introduction.
Games need to be attractive, or people won't play the game in the first place. Once they do start playing, the game needs to stay interesting, or people will stop playing it partway through.

What makes a game attractive? Sometimes, the premise of a game is often good enough "kick butt by jumping on everything." Sometimes the genre works, like a Real-Time Strategy game. Other times, marketing manages to spiffy up the game, but that won't last once advertising dries up.

2 out of 3 ain't enough

I think these are three rules that a classic game must posses. If even one of these rules are missing, the game won't gain a huge fan base. Sometimes these games actually will be big, but they are soon forgotten and rotting in a bargain bin somewhere. Here's what happens when a rule in missing.

No Rule #1 - Really hard but attractive games keeps hardcore gamers but prevents newbies from joining.

These types of games are of the hardcore type - no newbs allowed. The game itself is good, but the game is too hard to invite new people to the game. The game has many esoteric rules, or it is difficult to understand, or it does not really point out what happened.

The experts understand the game, but that is because they intensely train with the game in order to understand every part of it. The inexperienced gamer does not understand what is going on, and quickly loses interest in the game.

If the game cannot attract new people, the user base dies very quickly, leaving only the hardcore gamers behind. A tiny user base will make it impossible to remember the game 20 years down the road.

Fighting games are especially guilty of this problem. The game needs to be very hard to learn to be a good fighting game. But sometimes the game is too esoteric to understand. Street Fighter is a prime example. Performing special attacks requires a great amount of finger dexterity; more than the average gamer has. This has scared off many gamers from trying it out, and the user base has dwindled. Despite the Street Fighter revolution that was Street Fighter 3, there are too few fans to really carry it on. Only four out of the nineteen (five if you count Chun-Li, who was in Street Fighter since SF2) characters have made it out of that game.

No Rule #2 - Easy, attractive games will sell like hotcakes...for about a month.

These types of games have a lot of frosting on top, and not much filling. These games have very shallow gaming concepts that don't go very far. Many licensed games use this formula. A very poor game can look attractive if it's based on a movie, or it has video clips from a cartoon in it.

There are many outright poor games, like Charlie's Angels or Bad Boys: Miami Takedown (congrats on winning Gamespot's "worse licensed game" award, guys!) that sell because they are based on a movie, and that's it. But the real example to use is Enter the Matrix, which Atari often boasts sold over 250 million copies worldwide. While a lot of people bought the game, I doubt people played it more than a week after it was released.

The game has movie clips from the second Matrix movie. The game has the slow-motion effect that made the movie famous. It offers martial arts as well as gunplay. What this game does not have is a deep system. For example, kicking is always better than punching, and disarming is always better than throwing, and yet the game gives you all four attacks. Gunplay turns into hide and go seek as you wait for your slow-motion power to regenerate before you pop out from cover and shoot the brain-dead AI. The missions are of the "goto point A and shoot anyone in your way" variety, and the mission goals aren't anywhere obvious. Gamers would be better off playing Max Payne or Oni for 3rd person martial arts and gunplay action. And they were released years before Enter the Matrix.

When a shallow game is popular, gamers play it long enough to see the story and then quit. They don't stay to test out everything. They don't challenge themselves to do all that they can. They play the game just to see the story. Once that's over, they drop the game like a rock and move on to another game.

For more information on the crapitude of Enter the Matrix, see my article in The Tech. Warner Brothers decided to raise fees for licensed games that received poor reviews. Enter the Matrix was one of their examples of crappy games. The president of Atari fiercely defended Enter the Matrix. He claimed that 250 Million sales can't mean it's a bad game. Remember what I said? A game can be bad but still profitable. Shallow games with a movie license on top are still shallow games.

No Rule #3 - Or, the Sleeper Hit.

Sometimes good games don't sell. These games usually suffer because they are not attractive enough to the casual gamer. These games are called sleeper hits. They are good, but not popular. These games gain a cult following, but can't attract any new fans. These games will be played 10 years after their release, but only by a select few.

Sega Soccer Slam is one of those types of games. It's like NBA Jam, but for soccer and a lot wackier. For the uninitiated, that means it's a heavily simplified, in-your-face soccer with turbo. The game is even easier to understand than real soccer, so it's a real pick-up-and-play game that makes it easy for anyone to play. The strategies that need to be used are very subtle and work in localized situations. This makes it very deep strategy/action game. But the game simply did not catch on.

There was a clear effort to make the game attractive. Each team is an over-the-top ethnic caricature. Each team member has his or her zany attitude with a theme song. The game has physically impossible poses while shooting. You can activate hot-spot shots that create even crazier poses. The game has a really unique, clean artstyle that lends to its wacky atmosphere. But it's not flying off the shelves anytime soon.

Getting it right

Getting all three rules to work simultaneously is very difficult. Most games are throw-away cash cows that are easy to get into but don't have any staying power. Most of the games that are interesting for experts forget about the beginners and struggle to gain a user base. And sometimes, the games that do work for beginners and experts simply aren't attractive enough to sell.

Here's an example of a game that has all three qualities. It's such a good classic that it's been ported, cloned, and copied onto almost every game console and PC processor I can think of since its release. It is also a very common "first game" that novice computer programmers try.

It's Tetris.

No doubts about that. Tetris is indeed a classic that people will be playing for years to come. The Game Boy version of Tetris was released in 1989, so it has been alive for 15 years. You can find various clones and remakes on the PC (Blox, for example.) THQ has the official publishing license now, and you can find Tetris for all of the major consoles. Tetris is a classic, and it easily follows the three rules for a classic game.

The rules are dirt simple to understand: Fill up the rows by rotating falling blocks into the well. When you fill a row, it flashes and disappears. Just prevent the well from filling up and you can keep getting points. This is dirt easy to understand. The controls are easy to understand, too. The control pad moves the blocks, and the buttons rotate the block. Anyone can start the game, and they don't need a huge amount of dexterity or memorization to start - at least, not in the early game.

Later in the game, the blocks fall faster. But people are comfortable with this, because they know exactly what is happening. So they try again. And again. And the expert game forms. To keep up with the speed, gamers learn little tricks, like creating a field with one column empty so they can clear lines and get space when they really need it. Or how they should never cover holes. Or split-second rotation tricks to squeeze blocks into tight areas. Tetris is not only friendly for beginners, but it also invites experts to test the game engine and squeeze everything out of it.

Now, what made the game popular? One answer is that it was one of the launch titles for the Nintendo Game Boy, so it carry over the already-installed fan base of the NES versions. Nintendo advertised heavily for Tetris. I still remember the airplane passenger watching the world turn into a bunch of Tetris blocks. Advertising got a lot of potential customers interested in Tetris.

Putting marketing aside, I think another reason Tetris worked so well is because it was so abstract. It didn't need a famous TV or movie star's face on it (although Mario and Luigi made cameos for the 2-player versus mode.) Its style was that it was so abstract. It was a bunch of blocks, and there was some Russian music (I guess? It's kinda hard to tell on a Game Boy) in the background. Usually this is perceived as really boring, but it wasn't here. It was seen as inoffensive, and no gamer felt alienated from it as a result. Tetris managed to attract people to it and kept them there with an easy to learn and yet difficult to master system.

Thus a classic game was born. A classic game has easy rules that anyone can understand. But the game must also be difficult to master so people will try everything to squeeze out the gameplay. Finally, the game needs to be appealing so it can attract new gamers.