Week 7 Notes - Space of Possibility and Pacing in Casual Game Design

• The article focuses on casual games, namely Popcap Games. The main aspects which it focuses on are all to do with 'Pacing'. Popcap Games is a master when it comes to pacing, and this is through experience and very long development and play-testing processes.

• In the past “casual gaming” was rarely used as a genre, terms like “family-friendly” and “accessibility” were practically non-existent in terms of casual gaming.

• This articles aims to not only give a better understanding of casual games, but to express a serious approach to how they are designed.

• Casual games are described by The Casual Games SIG as “games that generally involve less complicated game controls and overall complexity in terms of game-play or investment required to get through the game”. It disagrees with the concepts this article is trying to push forward.

• Casual games are games that offer the possibility of “pick up and play”, they have experiences that can be enjoyed in small bursts and interrupted without frustrating the player.

• Casual games are not necessarily of smaller complexity, their complexity is just presented to the player in a different way.

• It is through a complex interaction of smaller objects in the system that the casual game builds its own kind of “complexity”

• PopCap's success is due not only to superb Pacing, but also to offering fun and polished core mechanics, impeccable interface design, good balancing, great detail in the visual and sound feedback, and an overall process of iterative design. Peggle took nine months of prototyping, followed by one year of full-scaled production

• “Pacing” is a concept related to the overall rhythm of the game

• “Tension” can be described as perceived danger, as it's within the realm of perception using sound and other mediums to make the player feel as if they're in danger when theyr'e not.

• “Threat” is real danger, it's mechanic and generated by the direct conflict between player and system or player and opponenet.

• “Movement Impetus” is the will of a player to move forward through a level. It determines how willing the player is to make “advancement decisions”, thus representing his interest in keep playing.

• “Tempo” is the intensity of play, it's the time taken between each significant decision made by the player. A high temp in a game means the player is taking a long time to make decisions, and a lower tempo represents more frantic decision-making by the player.

• By giving more possibility to the player, it can drastically slow down the tempo of the game.

• “The destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun. Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination. All of this happens because the human mind is goal driven”.

• Our brains are constantly trying to optimize information and simply it, we create patterns throughout our lives to identify writing, speech, expressions, and everything perceived by our senses.

• If all the patterns in games have become figured out, the game becomes uninteresting (such as tic-tac-toe, with its narrow space of possibility).

• When a player is frustrated by a “hard” game, it usually means they can't figure out all of the patterns required by the system to advance the experience.

• In Bejeweled, it would have been easy to add the decision to choose diagonal jewels as well, but by doing so it would add too many possibilities for the player to choose from; he would take too long scanning the board before making a move because we, as humans, like to analyse all of our possibilities before taking a move.

• Because a casual game has to be “pick up and playable”, when designing it one must pace the experience to provide the player with time to learn and time to play. There should be little or no tutorial.

• A simple game will get boring, but a complex game will take too long to learn. This means that there must be a perfect balance or “sweet spot” between small and large spaces of possibility.

• Part of the solution is to switch focus from the lower to the upper arch of Pacing. Most games introduce layering game mechanics and raise the difficulty as they make progress; this is the most common-sense and widely used solution.

• Replacing instead of adding means that instead of gradually adding new elements to the mechanics, the idea is to replace some non-core mechanics – and even the core itself sometimes – in a perceivably constant rhythm.

• Plants Vs. Zombies has a really good system of patterns in the mechanics. Every level you complete, you unlock a new plant to use on the next level, every 5 levels you unlock a whole new game-play area, and there are also instances where the core mechanics are changed completely for mini-games.

My Thoughts

I found this article to be extremely interesting for a number of personal reasons. I have been interested in the concept of casual gaming for a long time now, because the way the games have to be designed is complex yet seemingly simple at the same time. Finding the right balance between a complex game and a "pick up and play" game seems to be a hard feat, but if done correctly, it could make a brilliant game which could keep audiences interested for years like the work of PopCap.