The Focus of a Game

If you want to design your own game you must determine where to put the focus of your game. Traditionally, in game design literature the focus of a game was represented by a triangle with at the corners the words Game Play, Simulation, and Story. Due to recent developments though I think it is good to change the triangle into a diamond and add Social Interaction as the fourth corner, as follows:



You can place games at positions inside the diamond depending on how much of each of the four elements is important in the game. The four corners of the diamonds form the extremes and no games really lie at those extremes. But some games definitely lie close to those. Let us look at some examples. A game like Tetris is almost completely in the Play corner. There is no story, there is no simulated world and there are not really any social elements, unless you play the two-player versions of the game but then the social element is more outside than inside the game. Microsoft Flight Simulator is almost completely in the Simulation corner. Some interactive movies lie close to the Story corner and a “game” like Second Life is close to the Social corner, although there is also a simulated world there.

Many games combine the four main ingredients but you have to be careful when you design such a game. Players tend to have preferences and these preferences normally pull them towards one of the corners. People in Second Life are there because they like to chat with people and make friends. If you ask them to do some puzzle solving before they can talk to others they are not going to like your game. And players that like the fast-pacing action games get frustrated if they must watch long cut-scene movies that try to tell some complicated story. People that like to play with simulated worlds want to have full freedom rather than being hampered by game play elements. For example, quite some people play The Sims because they want to create nice houses. They want to have infinite funds for that rather than having to spend a lot of time in the game working to get enough income. (Fortunately there is a cheat for that but that is not a very good solution from the game design perspective; more about that later.)

Note that I put the corners at the particular places for a reason. Play can in particular be in conflict with Simulation. Simulation often tries to model reality while Play requires a setting that is challenging, which normally does not fit with a realistic simulation. Compare for example the realistic flight simulators and the arcade types. They are completely different. Also I put Story and Social in opposite corners. A story requires carefully designed characters that follow very particular paths in their lives to create the right dramatic tension. But a social environment should allow everybody to decide on their own character and decide themselves the paths they want to follow. (Of course in social environments the participants can still play out stories, as e.g. happens in World of Warcraft, but this is not a story that is enforced by the game.)

So if your going to create a new game, start picking the prime corner for your game. Add some elements of the other corners but keep a clear focus. That gives you a good chance of making a game that appeals to a large audience.