Games and the art of dynamic interaction

We look into the process of creating a game, and the important role of art and solid storytelling in modern games.

When videogames were about nothing but 'pew!bang!zing!wakka!' the idea of play was motivation enough. Saving a princess or cleansing demon hordes on Mars was nice for the imagination, but games were games, and fun was its own reward.

Now games aspire to be more than just games. They want to move you emotionally, to make you think, or to make you laugh. Games can be just games, but games can also be art. But whatever the motivation, videogames must live within the parameters of what a computer will let them deliver. Through the evolution of more pixels, more colours, and more polygons, games are arriving at an age where the technology is truly ready to serve artists and storytellers who want to show the world why videogames are set to become the 21st century's medium of choice.

The limits of I/O
In his seminal 1984 book on game design, 'The Art of Computer Game Design', Chris Crawford outlined what made computers such a powerful games medium while kids of the day were content to stare at Asteroids until their eyes fell out. It was an important question to ask, and still isn't widely appreciated. Why is a computer game better than a boardgame? Or a card game? What are the strengths, and limits, of making a game on a computer compared to other game design options?

For Crawford, the key features of computer games are dynamic. They are real-time experiences that respond to the player quickly, and can be designed to change the rules even in the course of a single game. The computer also acts as game referee and intelligent opponent, saving us from the procedural delays other game mediums demand when rules must be administered by sluggish human brains (and we all know how often fights break out over bad rule interpretations around a Monopoly board).

But for all this Crawford saw some fundamental weakness in computer games, with input-output the greatest problem of all.

"The computer itself may be supremely responsive, but if the human player can't tell it what he wants, or fails to understand the computer's response, the computer's effective response is nil... The computer must communicate its responsiveness to humans; it does so through I/O."

Whatever a game designer wants to deliver, it can only be delivered to the player via programming, graphics and sound.

Escape from CGA
"Four colours ought to be enough for anyone." - Nobody.

From where we began, there's little question that more pixels, more colours, and more polygons have greatly extended the output limitations Crawford was worried about. Sometimes limits are a good thing, and debate still rages over whether Pac-Man and friends are still inherently better games than much of what is served up today. But for those who want computer games to become more than simple games, limits have been a genuine enemy.

From pulling you deeper into the game world, to creating more options for visual feedback cues like HUDs, to shifting away from iconic representations to graphics that actually looked like real things, moving from monochrome to CGA, to EGA, and into VGA and beyond wasn't just eye candy. It offered designers more options.

Experiments in full-motion video games look awful today (okay, they looked pretty awful at the time) but these were also important steps in an evolutionary process. When you want to extend your limits you need to try out many ideas before you work out where you should be heading.

Somewhere between the days of VGA rasterised graphics and the shaders and effects of today the race to make graphics better lost its way. 'Better' became focused on 'more realistic' and games have suffered along the way.

Like Myst. In the early 1990s, we'd had some amazing adventure games featuring good friends like Guybrush Threepwood and Roger Wilco, exploring static graphic spaces that formed backdrops to spritely little friends who walked and interacted with what we could see. Input was stilted by the limits of the day, but these games were utterly engaging and filled with warmth. Myst, on the other hand, pushed graphics ahead of gameplay. It sold squillions thanks largely to great box art, but in terms of true gameplay the slideshow exploration system was ultimately another bad experiment. If you disagree, go take another look at Myst and see how it holds up. You could even argue Myst was party to the death of the adventure genre in the 1990s.