Thursday, July 19, 2007

The Chemistry of Game Design

It has been a bit quiet in the garden this summer as I've been busy working on a set of longer essays. The first, The Chemistry of Game Design, is up on Gamasutra this morning. You can read it here.


A blurb from the article:
'“…it was clear to the alchemists that "something" was generally being conserved in chemical processes, even in the most dramatic changes of physical state and appearance; that is, that substances contained some "principles" that could be hidden under many outer forms, and revealed by proper manipulation.”

I recently happened across a description of alchemy, that delightful pseudo-science of the last millennium that evolved into modern chemistry. For a moment I thought that the authors were instead describing the current state of the art in game design.

Every time I sit down with a finely crafted title such as Tetris or Super Mario Brothers, I catch hints of a concise and clearly defined structure behind the gameplay. It is my belief that a highly mechanical and predictable heart, built on the foundation of basic human psychology, beats at the core of every single successful game.

What would happen if we codified those systems and turned them into a practical technique for designing games?'

The article describes a psychological player model and a system for visually mapping out how skills are mastered throughout a game. There is even a diagram of what Tetris might look like. :-) This essay introduces the basic concepts. In the future, I'd love to explore how these ideas might be used as part of an iterative design process.

I find systems skill atoms and skill chains incredibly exciting since they have the potential to ween us off our over reliance on reuse of existing genres. By understanding the rules behind why games work, we can synthesize new, highly effective game play from the base elements.

Feel free to post any reactions (allergic or otherwise) in the this blog post. :-)

Happy day,
Danc.