Beware: The Casual Games Industry is alive! And it grows larger with each passing day! Customers are now exposed to hundreds of casual games per year in a business seemingly modeled on viral infections. The exposure happens initially with no more than a game title and one or two innocuous screenshots. If the customers are intrigued, then they download the product, bringing it into their homes to play with. If all goes well, then they turn into paying customers. Bwahahahah!
The Necessary Evil
Only a tiny percentage of casual games rely upon known branding and licensed properties for their hook. And while the keepers of the portals profit from every sale, the chances of a particular game getting beyond a first impression grow slimmer with each sunrise. Customers cannot be expected to download and play a new game every day. Given a flood of options, most customers will stick with the familiar and with what they like.
For games to have a chance at success, developers embrace a necessary evil: Books must be judged by their covers. The title and screenshots—and not the game-play—are frequently all that customers will use to decide whether or not to try a casual game. Consequently, developers focus a lot of energy on creating an appealing theme to hook the customers.
“My God, What Is It!?”
In general, a theme is the subject of an artistic work, or an implicit or recurrent idea . In a computer game, the theme is the unifying factor for the design of all components perceived by the game’s audience, with particular attention paid to the environment in which the game appears to take place.
Theming a game is the act of setting the stage, creating a new world for the audience to play in. By establishing a theme, designers enter an agreement with their audience, an agreement in which both parties do their part to create a satisfying reality. The designers are responsible for creating sufficient detail to allow the audience to understand what it is observing. Designers must also maintain internal consistency for the world: Nothing should happen in this world that would jar the audience’s expectations or break whatever suspension of disbelief is required to remain immersed in the world.
“They Just Keep Coming! There’s Too Many!!”
Imagine this grim scenario. Jane creates a well-themed game with environments that she hopes will appeal to the game’s audience. Several other developers follow suit. On the next game, Jane raises the production values and polishes the art style, but so do the other developers. She sells her soul to develop a great game and—28 days later—someone releases a game that is nearly identical in every way, but with a different theme. What’s worse, although she did nothing wrong, the game comes out after the clone on some major portal, and Jane is seen as the shameless imitator.
What should Jane do? She could respond in kind, re-skinning her own game with a new theme (and theoretically becoming her own competitor). Such superficial theming would be relatively inexpensive compared to coming up with an entirely new game. It’s a tempting response inasmuch as casual gamers often seem to clamor for “more of the same.” The inherent danger in this strategy should be obvious, however. Such a step could easily end up alienating Jane’s existing customers, who might see this re-skinned game as an attempt to sell them the same game twice!
Fortunately, there is a better way.
Taking Your Themes Down to the Bone
Let’s make a distinction. Superficial theming refers to designing game-play independently of the design of the assets. It is asset agnostic: The actual choice of theme is independent of any game-play design choices, and can be switched out without any engineering changes. In contrast, Jane’s better alternative is to employ integrated theming, which means closely tying game-play to the theme. The information presented to the player, the actions that the player can take, and the outcomes of those actions all closely relate back to the theme.
Feel the Power
Integrated theming has many advantages because it deepens the aforementioned agreement between designer and audience. In addition to observing the environment, the audience now has expectations about the internal logic of the world and acts on those expectations to learn more about the world and affect it.
Deep theming also paves the way for internal consistency, which in turn makes immersion and the suspension of disbelief much easier for your audience. Doing these things creates escapism and encourages players to spend time with—and make repeat “visits” to—your game. Such “replay value” is the key to converting a potential customer into a paying customer. The actions associated with working on a computer—thinking, clicking, dragging, and typing—become playing.
A deeply themed concept can also provide long-term benefit to designers because it will suggest more subject matter and content than a designer can reasonably expect to fit in. The audience will be aware of this, and ideally will want to continue exploring and inhabiting that world. This opens the door to licensing and franchising—and opportunities to explore other aspects of the world in different genres and different media. (Not to overstate things here, but a complete world with internal consistency allows other content creators to grasp your intentions and aid in the creation of additional content for that world. Look at the richness of the Star Wars or X-Men universes, to which thousands of enthusiastic individuals have contributed to the experience over the decades.)
Finally, on the business side, integrated theming makes it very difficult for would-be imitators to create viable knock-offs, effectively limiting your competition. Take that, clones.
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
Commitment to designing a game with integrated theming will demand more upfront costs. With the tighter coupling of game-play and content, allow for a greater volume of communication between the design side and the asset creation side of your game. Spend more time on research into the theme, digging deeper for interesting elements that will deepen the experience or offer interesting game-play elements. Prepare to spend more time iterating and discovering what theming and game-play works, and also allow time for inspiration to hit.
At the back end of the project development cycle, there will be much less design work to do, but the game will be much more closely tied to the theme. The risk is that a game with a niche theme may not have broad appeal—and it will be much more difficult to repackage if it fails. Those game-play elements tied to the theme will need to be redesigned, which will send shockwaves through the entire production process.
Brains! (How It's Done)
You may eventually approach deeply integrated theming in a way that works best for you, but here are some concepts and steps that will get you looking at your design with the right perspective.
- Lay Your Foundation
The foundation of a solid game is formed by a set of Big Ideas. Don’t worry about connections at first, but instead gather thoughts around each Big Idea and connections will start to form. Your thoughts and notes will be your connecting points, and the more you have, the more interesting connections you will eventually form—and the stronger will be the foundation of the game.
Remember that you can have multiple themes and multiple types of game-play within a single game.
- Do Your Homework
Once you know what the big pieces and little pieces are, take a look at what others have done with those pieces. If other games have touched on your ideas, it would be wise to take a good look at those games and be familiar with their strong points and weaknesses.
Look beyond games for most of your inspiration. See how your ideas have been tackled in film, television, books, art and architecture. Dig deeper with Google, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Wikipedia, and even bookstores and libraries. You never know what interesting kernels of information will inspire you or become the seeds of new ideas.
- Assemble Your Materials.
Identify information that establishes the theme. You may start with brainstorms that will lead you to eventually do deeper research here. Then identify characteristics, actions and events that take place around the theme.
Identify information that establishes the game-play. Identify possible game objects, characteristics, and actions that take place around your game-play ideas.
- Establish a Design Feedback Loop Between Game-Play and the Theme
The game loop, mentioned earlier, is a dialogue between player and game that goes as follows:
- The game updates all information about the state of the game objects.
- The game provides the player with any relevant information about the state.
- The player observes and analyzes the data. This includes checking his expectations about the results against the actual results.
- The player chooses a new desired outcome, and formulates a method for realizing that outcome.
- The player puts the method into action by interacting with the game.
- The game receives the player’s information and repeats this loop.
The structure of this loop dictates the kinds of information that you should look for as you establish a two-way dialogue between what constitutes your theme and what constitutes your game-play. Start with either one and find information that influences the other.
From the information about the theme:
- Find static elements that establish setting, tone, and play boundaries. See if some of them can become background elements. In the classic game Diner Dash, the setting is the interior of contemporary dining establishments. Elements include a large, open dining area viewed at an angle from above and a collection of interesting dining facilities and food preparation equipment (such as coffee machines and a short-order cook). Virtual Villagers required a larger outdoor area with natural physical boundaries. Elements included tropical vegetation, bodies of water, crude engineering and construction, and privacy-granting homes.
- Find objects, both tangible and intangible, that can be altered through the course of a game. See if some of them can be turned into in-game objects. In Cake Mania, the main objects are the player character, the customers whose orders she must take, the machinery that she operates to fulfill the orders, and the cakes themselves.
- Find characteristics of these objects that a player might find interesting or entertaining to observe and affect. Bring some over as object data, and try to imagine the player enjoying the manipulation of this data. In Master of Defense, the enemies have just a few properties that players care about: health, what defenses they are vulnerable to, speed, distance to the player’s home base, and how much damage they can do when they arrive. The player affects these stats through defensive emplacements that can target nearby enemies and reduce their health and speed.
- Find events that force the characteristics of the objects—and the objects themselves—to change. Events may be caused by the player, or may be caused by the game in order to force the player to react. Bring some over to the game and see if they add any interest or engagement when they change. The word game Bookworm Deluxe notes when players are making easy, short words. In response, the game triggers “burning letter” events that force the player to create longer words as well as words that use the burning letters before the library burns down.
- Find actions that the player might enjoy performing. Actions can be purely for fun, but the majority should be events that affect the objects. In hidden object games such as Agatha Christie™ Death on the Nile, the simple act of flushing a specific object out of hiding by clicking on it can be immensely satisfying.
From the information about game-play:
- Find data that you want the player to observe and understand. Some of it may be pure decoration, but decoration can establish the tone and the right frame of mind for the player. See if the data maps to any objects or characteristics within the theme.
- Find choices that you want the player to make. See if some of them relate to actions that would take place as part of the theme.
- Find interactions that the player should perform. See if there are any aspects of the player’s actions that map well to the theme’s actions and events.
- Find outcomes that would result from events and player interactions. Look at the characteristics and events that are part of the theme, and see if any could make sense within that theme.
- Be Aware of the Fourth Wall.
In staged performances such as plays, musicals and television shows, the set usually consists of rooms with a floor and three walls, with the audience and cameras located where the fourth wall would normally be. Performers must maintain the fiction of a fourth wall without ever explicitly acknowledging its existence. When this is done well, the audience is transported to the world of the stage as invisible spectators.
Keep players engrossed and immersed in the game’s reality through consistent, logical and seamless choices, interactions and outcomes. If there’s a hiccup—an awkward change or inconsistent behavior—then players may be jolted into awareness that they are sitting in front of a computer, fiddling with controls, watching a screen and playing a game. That’s when they usually stop playing.
We’re Safe . . . for Now
Designers and customers alike benefit from deep, integrated themes. Create games, worlds and interactions that are uniquely your own, and you will frustrate your potential imitators before they get started. With a little more work at the front-end of production, designers can take steps to deliver great, inimitable games that bring customers back again and again, begging for more.
Bwhahahahah!
[SIDEBAR]
Case Study: Zombies and Sporting Goods
We will apply some of the design tools outlined in this article in order to create the preliminary treatment for a casual game with an integrated theme. We know that, for our outcome, we want a fun game that can also feature a catchy theme that comes across easily in screenshots and a title. To get started, we’ll start with three seed ideas: Zombies, Sporting Goods, and the match-three genre. And we will stipulate that we want a strong female protagonist.
Foundation
Figure 1 shows a cluster of ideas about Zombies. Figure 2 shows a cluster of ideas about sporting goods. A cluster of ideas about match-three is left to your imagination, but for this exercise we’ll say that we latched on to one key match-three idea: moving objects around until you have three in a row (or column) is beneficial.
From Theme to Game-play
(Theme) As everybody knows, zombies are relatively stupid—which might suggest, for example, that they are unable to count beyond the number two.
- (Game-play) For a zombie, three objects in a row is the same as MANY objects in a row, and is therefore—to zombie logic—an impassable barrier.
(Theme) Zombies, individually, are not much of a threat. They’re not smart, have no sense of self-preservation, move slowly, and are easy to outrun. But in large groups, they can be very dangerous—even fatal.
- (Game-play) If a defenseless human encounters a zombie, he will get bitten, and eventually become another zombie. However, if the protagonist has a weapon (a baseball bat, a golf club, or some other sporting good), she can fend off a bite. On the other hand, if she becomes trapped (all movement is blocked by zombies), she will become a zombie regardless of her weaponry.
(Theme) Retail stores are criss-crossed with aisles and filled merchandise.
- (Game-play). Since match-three games are played on a 2D grid, an overhead view of a flat retail store provides an intuitive game-play environment in which the player can create escape routes and/or obtain weaponry.
(Theme) The Zombie/Sporting Goods combination strongly hinted at the characters in the cult film Army of Darkness starring Bruce Campbell. A bit of remembered knowledge, combined with some time with Google, Wikipedia and IMDB revealed that protagonist Ash’s full name was actually Ashly “Ash” J. Williams. As a nod to the source material, we create our strong female protagonist as Ashley Campbell, former sporting goods cashier turned Professional Zombie Rekiller.
The new game will be called “Nnnnnngh!” (which is how zombies say “Sporting Goods!”). Imagine how much fun people will have simply telling their friends the name of the game that they just played.
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Andy Megowan is the Creative Director at iWin Division 90, a studio in Seattle. He has been producing and programming games since 1979 at such companies as Interplay, Sega, ION Storm, Monolith and Sandlot Games. You can contact him at amegowan@iwin.com.
“Theme” Def. 2, 3. The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed., 2001
