What is a Game?

If you want to build games, it's helpful to understand what a game is. A number of exceptions can be given, but generally, a game is an activity that involves a test. It could be a test of skill, of strength of cunning, of knowledge, or of anything else. Implied in such a test is that the player can win or lose. You can shoot hoops in your driveway and be playing and testing your skill, but it won't be the same thing as playing a game of basketball. Also implied in saying that a game is a test is the notion that there is a goal to be achieved that determines if a "win" has been gained.

• Rules/Boundaries
• Win/Lose Test
  • Win — Reward
  • Lose — Punishment

Why do we play games?

Look at the quote above attributed to Lord Wellington, the victorious English general who defeated Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo. Eton is the oldest and most famous of England's private schools, and a great number of Wellington's officers attended it. He is saying that the physical conditioning, team work, sportsmanship and strategy learned in games were essential preparation for what was needed to lead an army into battle. For the boys of Eton, the games they played modelled behavior that would be useful in real life. Games sharpen the mind, body and reflexes. The fiction of games prepares a person for the realities of life. Yes, even video games. Recent reseach suggests that video gamers were better, not worse, in their ability to assess reality.

Games are fun, of course, and that's reason enough to play them. But what makes them fun is that they highlight and test real abilities: physical ability and coordination in basketball, cognitive skills in Scrabble, strategy in chess, memory in Trivial Pursuits. In one sense games are trivial, but looked at in the light Wellington looked at them, they are also in dead earnest. It's like the old saying more truth in jest — a joke can be as serious as essay.

So what makes a good game?

• World: a strong "play" environment
• Drama: emotional & intellectual involvement in a game's "world"

Computer Games: User, Runtime, Codetime

Computer games aren't built of pasteboard and plastic like a Monopoly set, they're built with computer images and code. Someone — you for example — sits down and manipulates these "objects" (objects are usable chunks of code) into a game; the time spent working on the design and code of an application is roughly known as "codetime." When the code is compiled and the game finished, it can run on a computer; this is known as "runtime." If you did a good job, someone is going to play the game; we call this person the "user." As a "user" plays a game, it's in "runtime." It's useful to think of these three terms as being stages of a game. Here are these three stages with their attendant properties:

The User: the Whole Point of Interactive Design

A game is designed for the user — if it can't seduce a player to play it, or it can't be understood, a game is bad. Simple as that. Game over — try again. Understanding and creating for the user is the whole point of interactive authoring and design:It's the user who's doing the interacting! The skill, the work of creating a game is first to attract a user, then keep her interest. A good game is emotionally and intellectually involving. It's hard to keep a user's interest in a game if they can't figure out how it's played: the ease of game-play is what we call "usability." And last but not least, a computer game must speak to devices that input commands from the user and display results of the game: usually this means a monitor to view and some combination of keyboard, joystick or mouse to play.

Runtime: Building Drama in Real Time

Look at the list of properties of a good runtime: it reads like a course on filmmaking. And with good reason. What's the difference between a movie that's dramatic and one that's not? Millions of dollars.The craft of a film crew is to build drama, to create a work that involves the viewer. The actors do their parts by creating characters that are believable, characters that we care about. The director and writer do their parts by presenting a compelling story, one that clearly introduces us to a situation, then builds tension as it goes along, and finally "pays off" with a satisfying conclusion. To succeed, a story must have obstacles to overcome, that is, challenge or peril. The designers help the director to create a "world" for the movie, giving the film a self-satisfying sense of being someplace special with its own rules by using sights and sounds. A film editor cuts the film so that it has effective transitions and flows well: what we call "pacing."

A good game does most if not all the things on this list, but do them in partnership with the user. A movie does not generally respond to the viewer, it has a predetermined outcome and it either works or it doesn't; a game must provide compelling choices and a variety of outcomes as it is used, in real time.

One area we will not explore much is "physics": this is the perception on the user's part that sprites have weight and substance. For example, does the "ball" sprite that hits the "wall" sprite rebound then slow, as a real ball would?

Codetime: the Magic Behind the Curtain

So how do you do all the things necessary to make your game's runtime swing? This course sets out for you the basic tools you can use to build a successful game. In the course we will:

1. create a user interface that manipulates user input.
2. design a game environment.
3. learn some basics about creating images for use in a game.
4. make game elements or "sprites."
5. code sprites to interact with other sprites.
6. create variables in our code that accept "scoring" input, store it as the numbers change, and determine a win or a loss.
7. measure the time of play and factor this into a win or loss
8. build an interface that will "talk back" to the user, letting her know how she is doing in the game as it is played.
9. write rules and create boundaries that determine how easy or hard it is to win.
10. use sound to enhance the experience of game play.

As time allows, we will also add music to our games and gain an understanding of how to create mood in a game. We may be able to touch on building characters, but that mostly that is for a more advanced class.

What Studies Make This Course Easier?

If you're reading this, it may be too late, but there are courses of study that make BIT 168 more fun and more effective:

• Raster image (bitmap) creation: Photoshop
• Vector image creation: Illustrator and FreeHand
• Design
• Game theory
• Basic computer classes

Where Can You Take This Course of Study?

What's next after this course? Where could you take what you'll learn?

Flash/ActionScript: Studying game creation in Flash makes you able to take a variety of authoring jobs in interactive media, everything from advertising to Web development.

Game Design: With courses in graphic design or audio design, your work with Flash could lead to work as a game designer, especially building Casual Games.

C or C++: Lingo scripting is simple and effective, but you could choose to learn the real thing for games: how to code them in a lower-level (meaning more basic and powerful) language as part of a dev team (development team). ActionScript and Flash are a great intro to coding and creating games for commercial release.

Project Management: Learning to build games in Flash puts you in touch with all the disciplines needed for game development — on a basic level, at least. This overall understanding would put you in good position to run a dev team for games. If you can make games in Flash, it's a good bet you know how to talk to artists, designers, engineers and coders.