Substance and Style in Game Design

Gamasutra has a piece on the elements of substance and style within videogames, and what should be considered when designing with these elements in mind. From the article: "An easy way to understand the difference between style and substance is by example. Many shooter games have traditionally calculated world collision and bullet impacts by modeling bullets as instantaneous line traces and characters as moving collision cylinders. In this case, the line-projecting cylinder is the fundamental nature of the character - the character's substance. The image of a fighter, the sounds he makes and the way he animates is the character's style."

Comments

Strange game physics

[vertinox]

Many shooter games have traditionally calculated world collision and bullet impacts by modeling bullets as instantaneous line traces and characters as moving collision cylinders.

That always irked me in FPS games. In the real world, bullets aren't instantaneous and travel in an arc. Red Orchestra (a UT2k4 mod) does a pretty good job of simulating bullet drop and real life physics.

Re:Strange game physics

[masterzora]

This is where the question of "how realistic is too far?" comes in. I mean, there are plenty of people who would love no more than to have bullets take a bit of time and arc a bit, to be sniping and have to adjust for distance and wind.

On the other hand, this will just serve to confuse a lot of people, or make it difficult. In an effort to find a happy medium between the super-realistic people and the just-make-it-easy-to-pick-up crowds, I think modern FPSs aren't too horrible.

(Though, I would love a more realistic system, personally, but I don't think hyper-realism is for the masses.)

I'm rather disappointed.

[SharpFang]

The article tries to draw a clear line between substance (mechanics/rules) and style (look/feel/story) of a game - but the story itself has very little of either.
In terms of style it sounds a bit like a lecture for a school of game developers. Readable but boring. The examples are dull or oversimplified. FPS gamers concentrating on Substance, The Sims concentrating on Style? I wouldn't be so sure players of Half-Life 2 are all about substance...
In terms of substance... actually I'm not really sure what the article tries to achieve at all, because it first defines a sharp border between the two and then methodically expresses that the border isn't really important at all, because both are just as important, and by emphacising one or the other you change the style of the game, not whether it's good or if it sells well. I don't think I've learned a thing from the article, because all the info it presents seems pretty much as completely useless analysis. Like analysing structure of a sentence in a poem won't help you writing better poetry, analising whether your game has enough substance or better style won't make better games. And the article doesn't write neither how to improve the style nor how to create better substance...

Re:I'm rather disappointed.

[Idealius]

Methodical analysis is all well and good but some things beyond human analysis are better handled organically.

His conclusion is organic. Despite /.'s dreamworld, one doesn't have to react analytically to every stimuli.

In true /. form I wrote the above before reading TFA. It's sad because the FIRST paragraph is this:

"Nobody can completely understand the entire field of game design. There are too many interacting elements, too much information, for the human mind to perceive and consider simultaneously. Thus nobody can hope to think about all of game design at once. The only solution available to the designer is to conceptually split the field up into manageable chunks, each of which can then be considered separately." ..which basically drives my point home. Don't blame the author for a confusing dyanmic that exists in video games. He's not making it up, he's describing it. So what if the subject is boring, say that, don't say the article is style-less and devoid of mechanics. You're disappointed because this wasn't the article you expected, critique the article based on it's merits please!!