Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

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ANOTHER
new content horizon for gaming comes in the
form of wireless devices and cell phones. This
is a very new arena for gaming, where many of the most important economic factors
remain unsettled. Yet, if the progress in building and delivering games made so far is
to be believed, there is a very exciting future looming for wireless gaming. In my opinion,
each and every possible gaming platform should always be viewed as an opportunity
to grow gaming further, and wireless or mobile phone devices are no exception.
Adults who wouldn’t be caught dead in public playing on a colorful chunk of plastic
like a Gameboy Advance (GBA) will happily plunk away at a game on a mobile
phone. Whereas a Gameboy Advance looks like a toy, mobile phones look like
phones, so adults don’t mind being seen using them.
Games built for these devices offer an obvious portability factor and an exciting
new way to grow the gaming player base. Up to this point in the book, we’ve talked
about the design process for game console and PC development. These platforms
continue to be the “bread and butter” content areas for the largest number of game
developers. However, to grow and prosper, independent game developers are constantly
searching for sources of development revenue. The career of many developers
and the ability to continue making games depend on it.
New opportunities to grow gaming should never be considered a blight on the
game industry. Do not forget that, despite the highest-horsepower hardware on
the hottest new game machine, if you can’t deliver a compelling game experience
that speaks to human players in some fundamental way, you have only a pricey
technology demonstration on your hands. It’s a similar story for many other
forms of entertainment media.
Chess doesn’t inspire our predictive abilities, grow us, or challenge us by the measure
of polygons blasted to a screen. In other words, technology doesn’t determine play
value. Many have said it before me, and I couldn’t agree more: if you want to know
how to connect your particular game design with an audience, you must try to understand
how to tap, needle, and play around with basic human desires within the context
of your game—even if you’re hamstrung by technology.
Players all have wants and desires. Your game designs have to satisfy these wants
and desires in some way. Players project these wants into your suspended game
worlds, whether the vehicle is total 3-D immersion or slow 2-D sprites.