So I saw Ironman2 tonight. It was gewd. Let me tell you why…
As I was watching the previews before the movie, I started thinking. These trailers look amazing. Why isn’t it that all movies are as good as their trailers?
The reason for this, in my opinion, is their target audience and the given time frame. They only had to amuse the audience for 1 to 2 minutes. That should be enough time to tell any story from beginning to end. Excluding details and filler scenes, almost any story can be told that quickly, and it should be. So it’s not usually the story that people mess up on, it’s the fillers, details, and explanations of how these events played out that people mess up on. It’s not usually that a movie has a bad ending that people think this is so….it’s because they weren’t happy with how it got to that point. An example of a bad ending would be, for me, any Lord of the Rings film. WHY THE HELL IS IT SO LONG. Before the actual “endings” played out, you were already told through some form what was going to happen to them. Leave those to the extended versions of the DVD for nerds…let it end like an epic should: epically. Anywho…
This can be extended to Game Design.
Motivation
The player needs reasons. Reasons to do everything. Whether you use some sort of monetary system to drive the player to do more quests, an honor system to drive the player to do more for his faction, a leveling system to give the player a sense of power, a psychological system to drive the player to do what’s right (or wrong), or story to drive the player to see what’s next, you have to have some sort of reason to give the player so that he will have a reason to play. To keep a game engaging and give it replay value, it’s best to include as many of these systems as possible. Now when I say players need a reason to do everything, I mean everything. For instance, World of Warcraft implemented it’s achievement system, and this helped many players find a reason to do things they never would have done before, however it’s still not complete. They have not used it to give reason for the player to experience all of their content. I.E. the Lore master Achievement. It does reward the player for doing a metric Ass Ton of quests, however who’s to say any of the players that got this achievement actually read the text or paid any attention to anything besides the rewards and requirements? The players need a reason to pay attention to these, and read them. Maybe they could have some quest that requires riddles to be solved that can only be answered with quotes from lore, or through experiences in other quests. I’m not really sure, all I know is that for players to actually go out and experience this massive amount of content that Blizzard has created, they’ve got to give the players more to make them want to spend the time and money to do it.
Constant and Varied Bursts of Entertainment
Now this is primarily aimed at me, but looking at statistics and just random people I know, America is A.D.D. To keep them happy in the entertainment business, you’ve got to have a consistent system of providing them with bursts of entertainment that are varied enough to keep them playing/watching. They say that most people will either stop paying attention after the first half an hour or so of playing your game, and start paying attention again at the end, thus the beginning and ending of your game being the only thing most remembered. However, that’s just because most games are just so repetitive and boring in the middle, that that is just bound to happen. To solve this, think like the consumer for once, or like a 5 year old kid. How do you keep them entertained? This does not mean constant action, just an overwhelming sense of some sort. It could very well be suspenseful, peaceful, intense, gruesome, romantic, emotional, sad, angry….any emotion. Just make everything emotional. Please. Otherwise no one is going to feel anything and therefore they are not going to remember it. This applies to all areas of game design, music environment character story and gameplay all included.
Rhythm
Flow. Your game has to flow, and make sense. If I’m killing zombies, i do not expect to be making out with a unicorn 5 minutes later. As important as variety is to any form of entertainment, theme and flow are just as important. Everything has to connect. It’s all about the details – the action in between the action – the story between the lines. Every story is generic once you take out the details…it’s the details and the journey of the characters from plot spot to plot spot that makes something interesting and amusing. The way I see it is like this…
Picture a field of grass. Look at a pair of grass blades. These blades can be seen as two things..first, media itself. Each blade could be a movie or book or game, they all tend to be pretty generic when seen from afar. It’s not till you take a closer look that you realize not a single one is exactly alike, the details that make up that individual blade are countless. Now look at these blades as an entertainment “burst”. They are both equally amusing, but they are still very different, and they both somehow match. If you look down at the hundreds of blades of grass, it’s as if they all connect to make a solid carpet of green. That’s the consistent theme and flow of your form of entertainment, and you should have as many 30 second intervals of amusement as a field of grass in any form of entertainment you create. At least…that’s how I wish it was.
