Author Archive for Juha Kangas

04
Feb
10

Being The Guy

By Juha Kangas Leave a Comment
Categories: 7. Reward and Punishment

I recently listened to well known indie developer (if you’re into that stuff) cactus talking about abusing the player. One game that he took as an example is I Wanna Be The Guy. If you haven’t heard about this game before, it’s a game considered to be one of the hardest game ever made. Seriously, try it. Now.

Done? Now, why would anyone in their right mind want to play this game, that pretty much only punishes and abuses you? As far as I know you never get any power-ups and the game never congratulates you in any way for beating an area (well, I haven’t finished it so I don’t know about the ending). In fact, it mocks you if you play on easy.

I think the answer simply lies in the title: you wanna be THE guy. Not just in the game, but in real life. You can tell your friends that you managed to beat this game.

I think this is very interesting, as it is an out of game reward which you must collect yourself in a way. You need to go tell your friends or internet buddies how awesome you are and they will be in awe. You do probably have a sense of instant gratification when you manage to beat the game, but I think this simply come out of the bragging rights that you know possess.

Personally, I found this game quite humorous in the way that it killed me in surprising ways but in the end my patience just couldn’t take it. However, I really can’t blame it on bad game design as it’s obvious what this game is going for…

Making you want to be The Guy.

03
Dec
09

Creative iteration

By Juha Kangas 1 Comment
Categories: 4. Iterative Design

I was going to write about how to iterate effectively, but then I realized how boring my post actually was. So I started thinking “how can I be creative about this subject” and boom there it was; How to iterate on creativity. Now this might be somewhat “out there”, but just let go for a while!

Let’s say I’m working on an action game and start designing a combat system for it. But I need it to be something new and different! How do I go about it? Could iteration be applied?

I personally find it very hard to just come up with something unique out of thin air; I usually need a basic design to start from. So before this first design for something “creative” I try to look at other games, or possibly other media, to see what they are doing and then I try to do it differently. However, I also need to make sure that what I end up doing really is creative.

So once I have my design, I take a step back and compare it with other games. Was I really being creative or just ripping something off? I find that I quite often apply designs from games that I like unconsciously, and there’s nothing wrong with that except if the design that I “stole” is the bread and butter of my own supposedly unique design. But most important, I ask for feedback from other people on how creative and unique they find my design to be.

So I take another swing at it and go through the same process again. I think one important point to make here is that you should iterate on the creativity first and then the actual design. What I mean is that you should separate the process of trying to make something unique from trying to make something that works. Making something that works should take priority in the end and therefore should be able to override creative decision in later iterations. Going the other way around doesn’t really make sense and you could end up with a broken game.

Regardless of that last point, this is iterating on creativity wouldn’t you agree? What kind of process do you use?

07
Nov
09

The positive

By Juha Kangas 2 Comments
Categories: 2. Social responsibility of Game Designers

positive-thinking

Instead of talking about what games should not do with regards to social responsibility, I thought I’d talk about positive social responsibility. In other words, what should games teach the players rather than what they shouldn’t.

Coming up with this new  angle was somewhat anti-climatic as I started thinking about it, because my initial thought was that games simply don’t have that kind of responsibility. They’re “just” entertainment.

But let’s then step into the realm of “serious games” and teaching games.  There are sexual education games that are designed to teach young people about relationships, myths about sex etcetera. There are  games (the one I found was a board-game, but still) that are in-fact about teaching social responsibility. I’m aware that these examples are more about society using games as a way of exercising it’s responsibility rather than the game itself having some sort of responsibility but I still find it quite interesting.

Going back to entertainment games, I actually think that there are quite a few games exercising positive social responsibility even though they might not have to. In Metal Gear Solid for example it is talked quite a lot about the horrors of nuclear weapons and I’ve read interviews with Hideo Kojima that he wants to educate his players about this. There are probably quite a lot of subjective values  built into his story but I would certainly count the desire to educate younger generations as being socially responsible.

Now this was quite short, but hopefully it got you thinking about the positive sides.

20
Oct
09

The passion factor

By Juha Kangas 13 Comments
Categories: 1. Can a good game designer design any type of game?
Tags: ,

Yes.

But will all of the designs be good? In fact, you don’t need to have ever even though about game design before and you can still give any game a shot.

Perhaps I’m being a smart-ass here but let me modify this topic somewhat so I make clear what I’m writing about in this piece; can a designer design any game that will also be great?

This brings me into the terms competence and passion. I know quite a few people in creative positions who have a lot of experience and are very competent at what they do, producing solid stuff over and over again, but that lack any passion or joy in what they are doing.

I’m sure most people have met or worked with someone like this and I’m quite certain that these types of people exist among game designers as well. The reason for the lack of passion can be a lot of things, but one that is relevant for my rambling is that the designer is working on something that he doesn’t like.

I’m still not answering the topic, but bear with me.

So image yourself being a designer for a game based on the most awful TV-show you can come up with. “Days of our Lives” comes to mind for me for example. Do you think you would make great designs for it?

So the answer to my modified topic is no. I don’t think a designer can stay passionate doing ANY game and make it great, not talking about good, but great. Admittedly, I’m a bit torn about whether my “Days of our Lives” example is too extreme but when I think about it I’m sure that if everyone at Blizzard loved it they would make an awesome game for fans of the show.

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