The Rhetoric Of Games Explored

Thanks to the IGDA for their 'Ivory Tower' academic-related games column discussing how games communicate information to players. The author uses Ico as an example, highlighting the "...gameplay mechanic of enabling players to save their game. Often with consoles, players access this option with the pressing of the Start/Select button... In Ico, you can only save when you find a glowing white couch... clashing with the rest of the design of game world and drawing rhetorical attention to this mechanic that enables you to save your progress." But should developers "work to create gameplay mechanics that are better incorporated within the overall game design, making them less explicitly rhetorical", as The Getaway does by getting rid of HUD information, or does there need to be an explicit and obvious way to save, regain health, check an onscreen map, and so on?

Comments

This article made the same mistake B&W did.

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is not to eliminate the existence of external maps/information/HUD devices from a game to make it more organic or natural.

Black & White attempted to 'do away with' all those complicated trees, menus, progressions, and 'false' structures on a game. The result? A totally unplayable mess where you spend more time trying to get the game to do what you want than you do actually playing it.

Because your sensorum in a gaming environment is extremely limited to controller & video screen, attempting to use 'natural' methods of seamlessly integrating information into the game world guarantees you that players now have to check every last inch of screen real estate to make sure they didn't miss anything. And that they study the game and the language/shorthand used by the developers so that they can interpret things appropriately.

Where, if you have a Simple Menu Button, you get a number of those features right at your fingertips. Sure it breaks the illusion of a world, but it Gets The Job Done(tm) and lets you get on with playing.

I don't want a 'big white couch' to sit down on and save my game. I want to hit start/select, choose 'save game', pick a slot, save the game, and then get back to playing.

while a bad menuing system can make gameplay less fun and immersive, a no-menu system (as games like Black & White demonstrated) makes a game that could be enjoyable an utter waste of time, and a popular item on the $5 'used' shelf.

The ivory tower folks should try looking at games from a more utilitarian, rather than academia based view.