Eek, a post!
I haven't been posting here since GDC because I have a lot of things on my plate right now, but it is still my intention to recap most of the sessions I attended.
Scott Rogers posted over on his blog that he wanted to see my review of his talk, so I'll go over his first. Most of my GDC posts will be recap-heavy, but I'll avoid summarizing this time because the slides are available on Scott's web site and Cory Doctorow took detailed notes and posted them on his site. I'll mainly interject my thoughts on the concepts and ideas that stood out to me.
Scott's talk was entitled "Everything I Learned About Level Design I Learned from Disneyland." Before I begin, I should state that I used to be an absolute theme park nut. While I was mostly addicted to roller coasters, I also loved the concept of having "theme lands" which tell a story. When I was younger, I spent many hours studying over guides and old maps obtained during my visits to these parks to try and recreate trip experiences in my head. Back in my high school years, I spent far too many hours playing RollerCoaster Tycoon. In fact, his talk inspired me to dig up the parks I created in the game and see which techniques I was subconsciously using to lay them out. That might be a fun subject for another post.
That's enough nostalgia and self-admitted nerdiness… let's talk about the talk. The techniques Walt used that I found particularly interesting were:
Using Light
My single favorite moment of the talk came when Scott discussed the park at night. If one stands at the end of Main Street farthest away from the entrance and looks around the various areas of the park, it is very dark. Turn around and one can see Main Street all lit up, inviting the visitor to check it out. It's also a way for Disney to say, "you know what's really interesting? You heading toward the front gate and going home." Using lighting to draw attention is a fairly obvious technique, but I found this to be an interesting application.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is an old technique, but people still use it because it works. In particular, Walt used posters throughout the park to indicate what kind of major experiences guests would encounter in different theme lands and attractions.
Foreshadowing is also effective in games. Scott didn't mention it, but my favorite example of foreshadowing in a game is probably the intro to BioShock. If you haven't played the game, go watch that intro (if you are short of time, skip the plane crash and head directly to the three minute mark). Observant players will recognize the use of the song "Beyond the Sea," a clue as to the upcoming underwater destination. Players see several brief ads for telekinesis and incinerate plasmids, most notably at the start of the descent. The tubes and neon signs also show some of the areas that the player is going to be exploring. It makes for an intro that's not only interesting the first time around, but one that plays even better after completing the game.
Weenies
I've heard of this concept before, but Scott gave it so much well-deserved attention that I would be loathe to omit it from my post. A Weenie is the proverbial dangling carrot (note to self: call my next fictional Rock Band group The Dangling Carrots). For Disneyland, Sleeping Beauty Castle is a Weenie that serves as a central landmark to aid park navigation. Big name attractions like Space Mountain tell the visitor, "hey, come over here and check me out." The path to the Weenie can be altered in length, direction, and altitude to evoke different emotions as the visitor heads toward the goal.
While the most obvious video game application comes when creating a world for a character to explore, I got to thinking that Weenies can be figurative as well. A Weenie could be a certain score, rank, or state that must be achieved. As long as a player generally knows how to arrive at a certain state, the designer can play around with the path to that state. It could involve inserting an unexpected obstacle along the way or surprising a player with a special bonus. Whether literal or figurative, a Weenie is a clever way to entice a player to perform an action.
Morality Tales
The Pirates of the Caribbean (the ride, not the movie), is a morality tale. By showing what happens to a group of men who live the life of pirates, the rider sees that "dead men tell no tales."
That's pretty awesome.
Like lighting on Main Street, it's another example of how a commonplace design technique in video games correlates to the way Disneyland was put together.
Conveying Feeling Spatially
Scott explained how that the layouts of theme lands can convey a certain feeling. Frontierland has lots of empty space and room to move through to make the guest feel like being in the sparsely-settled old west. Adventureland is crowded to simulate the feel of a dense jungle while New Orleans Square contains alternate paths that invite the guest to participate in a relaxing distraction.
Spatial design helps explain the fondness I have for what I call "big dumb games," action-heavy games that feature large characters or objects moving through limited spaces. Good examples include Gears of War and NFL Blitz. These games give the player a sense of controlling something out of the ordinary. It is designed to make the player feel as though it is difficult to control the large character or object, but it simplifies the gameplay by not requiring overly-precise maneuvering and only allowing a limited number of possibilities as to where the player can go. In other words, this feeling comes from the spatial layout of the game environment.
Another example of using spatial properties to enhance the game experience is in the way interfaces are laid out. Let's say you were creating a business simulation. If the goal is to create a light and fun candy store management simulation aimed at a younger audience, then one approach may involve populating the screen with minimal information and having each piece of data take up a nice chunk of the screen. What about a realistic stock market simulation game? Then pack that sucker with lots of information on the screen to make it feel hectic (but, depending on the target audience, watch out for the learning curve and overwhelming the player).
Asset Reuse Through Context
Scott discussed how the positioning of the same objects can relate different ideas. His example used Peter Pan's Flight. At one point, the rider sees Peter and Captain Hook dueling at the front of the ship. The vehicle eventually ends up on the other side of the boat where the characters reappear. This time, Peter and the gang are safe while Captain Hook is out in the water. When done with thought and foresight, reusing assets to create a different context and tell a different part of the story is an excellent way to save time.
Ride Simulation
One of Walt's design techniques involved creating a prototype of the ride by placing mock-up objects in an office and riding a rolling chair along a path through the ride space. This example (along with an activity on paper prototyping from a workshop I attended) really drove home the point that prototypes are not just useful in communicating ideas and demonstrating the feasibility of a product's creation. For designers, they are a way of simulating the experience of the final product without the massive labor investment.
Top-Down Design
This is actually the only technique Walt used that I'm struggling to accept as a universal best practice. With Disneyland, Walt started with the whole park and worked out the lands, the attractions, and finally the actual experiences that occur during the attractions. The game design equivalent to start with the overall layout of the game, then focus on worlds, then tackle levels, and ultimately design the individual experiences in the levels.
At the workshop I attended during the first two days of GDC, I learned about the very useful MDA framework for design. I'll post a more detailed description of that later, but a quick one line description would be that the rules of a system lead to trends that evoke a certain type of feeling. In a case where the aesthetic goal (the desired feeling) is clearly defined, taking the top-down approach makes a lot of sense. Figure out the theme and what needs to be conveyed and iterate and test designs until the mechanics that support this concept are found. For Walt, he likely had an overall goal that he wanted to communicate with the park.
But what if there is no required goal? What if you have at least a fairly blank slate and can experiment to discover something players will find interesting? I'll sometimes get an idea for making a game that features a certain rules or objects. I'll then play around with them until an interesting trend emerges. Then I ask myself what real-life behavior correlates to this trend. I then have a solid set of mechanics and a goal of what kind of behaviors and feelings I want to emerge from these rules and game objects. I can further refine my game at the lower levels until I get my top-level goal.
I can bring RollerCoaster Tycoon into this as well. The game gives players a limited number of rides that can be built. I could approach it by claiming to want a certain section of the park to have a British theme, but what if I don't have a ride that easily conveys this? If I see that I have a log flume ride, I can come up with the idea for a land with logging or lumberjacks as its central theme. Maybe I then notice that I have a stand that sells Candy Apples. I then decide I can make a tall tale theme land, complete with a Paul Bunyon log flume and Johnny Appleseed candy apple stand.
The point I'm trying to make here is that sometimes it's better to look at the shapes of the pegs you have before trying to put them in the holes.
(Cue a Michael Scott "that's what she said" here.)
There was much more great information in this session, but those are my personal highlights. As I had mentioned on my blog, I chose to go to this talk in spite of the fact that I had the option of going to one on Rock Band, a game I love. Luckily, Scott's talk did not disappoint and gave me some excellent food for thought (and a reason to head back to a theme park soon).
