Wagner James Au, a 35-year-old journalist from San Francisco, has been playing video games since he was 9, when Space Invaders and Battlezone were about as cutting-edge as games got. These days, though, Au's tastes are more discerning: Instead of playing first-person shooter games, in which winning is only about getting the highest score, he finds himself gravitating toward more complex games like Grand Theft Auto and Planescape: Torment.
"What I get excited about is games that evoke artistic or literary qualities," he said. "Games where you have to put a lot of thought into them -- you get rewarded not just for accomplishing the objectives, but by coming up with your own original way of solving the problems."
In the 1980s, when arcades were the main venue for video game entertainment, successful game design was measured in quarters: Could you convince a young person to keep plugging change into the machine every few minutes, or would he just give up and walk away?
But in 2002, the average game player is 28 years old, and thanks to the advet of online gaming, games that used to last only a few minutes now take 20 or 40 hours to finish -- if a potential end even exists.
As a result, the video game industry's game design strategies are rapidly evolving: What keeps a 13-year-old engaged is often quite different from what an adult might demand. Over the last few years, designers have begun to develop new game theories and more complex strategies of "payoff," the artifice that compels a player to keep playing a game for hours, weeks or days. The game company Electronic Arts has even sought help from academia, putting its designers together with people like Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the hope of understanding the demands of a maturing population of gamers.
"Most arcade games were a short, intense experience, and now we create games that are for the long haul," Jenkins said. "As you move to an experience that you extend for 20 hours, a different set of principles comes into play which have more to do with community-building."
Rewards ...
For arcade games -- much like pinball games before them -- designers knew that good timing was the way to keep young customers playing. "You wanted to have something that the player can feel is successful in the first three minutes of the game, and something suspenseful a few minutes after that," Jenkins said. "Arcade games are five-minute games, and the players have to be in the middle of something when the machine kicks down so that they'll put in another quarter."
This rudimentary formula is still visible in today's dizzying array of console games, computer games and online role-playing games. Within the first few minutes of a game, you will typically achieve a minor "success," whether that means finding a mysterious key or slaying a rat or stealing a car. If you don't, you will probably give up right away.
"You work in cycles of time," said Steve Gray, director of game development at Electronic Arts. "The MTV generation has a three-to-five minute cycle that is important. There's 30 minutes for the TV cycle, and 90 minutes is the film. In games, you don't want three to five minutes to go by without giving them something."
But such a simple formula does not satisfy the more discerning adult gamers who now dominate gaming and who lean toward immersive games. "The more complicated games get, the less compulsive they are," Gray said.
Will Wright, the designer of The Sims series of games, said that his games often set no specific goals for players. "Instead, we give them a rich environment with goals embedded in it," he said. "I'm interested in rewarding imagination: letting them leverage creativity to build an interesting external artifact of their imagination."
Traditionally, the best way to get a young player to keep playing was simply the score. But this kind of motivation can become stale quickly with more experienced players, said Bob Stevenson, one of the creators of the game Giants, a traditional action shooter that uses unconventional humor as a payoff system. "Scores are the most fundamental motivator," he said. "Our reward system is comedy within the game. It makes you laugh and motivates you to move forward in the narrative."
Neil Young, a game designer and vice president at Electronic Arts, said that payoff systems for today's more complex games also require more patience and foresight. "These days," he said, "we think about ways of primally connecting with the player, rewarding them when they hit key milestones and motivating them with objects of promise that they can't use but move you forward," like a spell or a sword or a clue that works only in later levels of the game.
Perhaps one of the best examples of the complex payoff systems that appeal to adults is that of Grand Theft Auto, which lets players act out the part of a Mafia car thief. Most avid fans say they are drawn to both the multilayered quality of the game's goals and the immersive nature of the world it offers.
"It's the complexity of it -- it's abstract in its goals," said Brooks Wiley, 29, a mortgage broker from San Francisco. "There's always an ultimate goal in mind -- to move your way up the Mafia ladder -- but within that there are so many other things that keep your attention, little side tasks to do."
... and punishments
Game designers also have to defeat their customers in interesting ways. "You need interesting, diverse ways of failure," Wright said. "Gamers have to believe that the next time they won't fail, because they now know about the monster hiding behind the door, or that you need to feed your Sim before it dies. You have this physiological urge to go and finish the problem: Your brain knows what to do now, and it wants to go back."
Despite these insights into maturing gamers, game designers are still scrambling to understand the tricks of the trade. Although video games have quickly evolved into one of the most popular forms of American entertainment, game development theory is still relatively new. There are no game schools that educate game designers in psychology and storytelling in the way that film schools educate budding directors and screenwriters.
Game companies like Electronic Arts and Nintendo are trying to fill this void with their own training programs for game designers. Electronic Arts hired Jenkins to organize a series of roundtables in which academics and game designers brainstormed new ideas in game development. The goal is a more formal understanding of what players respond to. "I can't tell anyone how to make a better game," Jenkins said, "but we can look at games that are good and figure out what they do."
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