That's not important - leave it alone.


28 Dec 1995 00:48:29 GMT

A friend of mine was playtesting my game today, and made an interesting
comment that helped me articulate a problem in game design that I'm
having.

Basically it comes down to the way in which you're going to model the
world. How do you deal with irrelevant items?

The world is a pretty complex and rich place, and so you obviously
can't model every conceivable object that you might reasonably expect to
find. In early games, set in caves, it was pretty easy, since you could
just omit unimportant objects altogether. But games like mine, set in a
city, pose a problem. Particularly since my game is a bit more of a
simulation than some traditional pure puzzle games.

Some common approaches include:

1) Don't implement unimportant objects mentioned in descriptions. I
really don't like this. Reading "I don't know the word 'kumquat.'" or
"You don't need the word 'turnip' to solve this game." over and over
gets pretty tiresome.

2) Tell the player outright to ignore the object - implement it as a
basic decoration. "That's not important; leave it alone." I don't like
this either - it's rather rude and shatters any illusion of reality for
me.

3) Don't implement any objects at all. So you go into a grocery store
and it's totally empty - there isn't anything there. Likewise the
church, the fire station, etc. This I also don't like - it seems phoney
and empty, again wrecking any illusions.

3) Make things inaccessible. That's the approach my game has taken -
there are lots of buildings in the street, each with its own locked
door. Since they're just there for ambiance you can't go inside them.
Part of the puzzle, then, is figuring out what doors are important and
what aren't.

The problem is that my friend told me he got pretty fed up and
discouraged dealing with legions of locked doors until I produced a
spoiler-laden map for his benefit. Which is a pretty legitimate
complaint, of course.

So how to deal with this? How do you build up a convincing simulation
without bogging the player down in frustrating detail? Any ideas? I've
been toying with an optional spoiler mechanism for those players that
find my approach frustrating. eg:

>IS THE TIN OF BOILED YAMS A RED HERRING?

That would be telling.

>SPOILER

Spoiler mode on. From now on irrelevant decoration items will be
identified as such.

>IS THE TIN OF BOILED YAMS A RED HERRING?

Yes.

>OPEN THE PURPLE DOOR.

You pull at the locked door. Somehow you get the feeling it's not that
important, really, and give up.

Or is that too unspeakably clumsy for words?

- Neil K.

--
    Neil K. Guy  *  neilg@sfu.ca  *  tela@tela.bc.ca
        49N 16' 123W 7'  *  Vancouver, BC, Canada