Game Design Theory

In today’s technological enlightenment, it’s often incredibly difficult to remember a day when our lives weren’t completely pinned and immersed into this telephonic-based society. Not even a little over a decade ago, I still remember as a child walking over to my next door neighbor’s house and ask the parents of my friend if we could go run around the neighborhood, and today entire engagements can be arranged by simply twiddling your thumbs on a reactive glass screen and waiting for the other person to do the same with theirs.This mentality, this rise in communal technology is even more prevalent in video games and other visual related media today. But what exactly was it that contributed to the rise of AAA studios and breathtaking three-dimensional rendering? Moreover, why are these changes in design and process important as well as their impact on today’s society. Today, I would like to set the foundation for both the topic of this week’s blog entry, as well as for a clear definition of what a quote/unquote “game” is; at least in terms of visual media.

Ask anyone what they think the first game to have been created was, and more often than not the general consensus would probably be chess or Pong. In terms of both electronic and traditional/tabletop media, both answers would be incorrect. For the sake of coherence, I’ll first address the common misconception of chess.

While chess has always been wildly glamorized in big-budget, “ancient-times” Hollywood movies and romanticized in mysterious/detective fiction, the first recorded game known to man was called Senet. It was played by those that lived in Prehistoric Egypt all the way back in 3100 BC. The concept and goal of the game was relatively simple–to move each of your five pieces (or “houses”) across each tile and off the Senet board in a snake-like fashion before the other player does. The Senet board itself was arranged in a grid–ten tiles wide by three tiles tall–and movement of each piece was determined by the outcome of how you threw the four Senet sticks. Due to the extreme span of time between its creation and the modern day, the exact rules of the game have been lost, but two historians, Timothy Kendall and R. C. Bell managed to build their own recreations of the game based on fragments and mentions throughout several ancient texts. Since the outcome of this game was determined mostly by luck, how the players threw the Senet sticks, those that won were often said to have been blessed with the favor of the gods; and to think less than a millennia later their descendants would unleash unholy hellfire for losing a kill to very similar RNG (Random Number Generator)-based luck. It really puts things into perspective when you think of it that way, I suppose.

While it’s true that Pong is widely considered one of, if not the first commercially available video game, the very first visually/graphically-displayable game created to be filed under “electronic media” was the oscilloscope-based “Tennis For Two”. I plan to talk about this in more detail on Thursday, but for now I’ll give you a short summary. Tennis For Two was designed by William Higinbotham in 1958 to be run off an oscilloscope, an instrument used to display electronic signals in the form of a graph. The physical display for the game was actually nothing more than two lines and a dot; one line for the court, one for the net, and the dot for the tennis ball. It was the brilliance of human ingenuity and creativity that brought about the rise of video games and visual media. To put it into perspective, the most common oscilloscope-deviant that’s used today is an electrocardiogram; you know, the things that beep to let you know the person’s heart is still beating. Someone looked at that and thought, “yeah, that could be a tennis ball bouncing back and forth across the screen,” had the knowledge and resources to build the machine, and started an optically technological revolution in home entertainment. While Tennis For Two never got the chance to see the light of the public eye for quite some time, it walked so games like Pong and Space Invaders could run.

Knowing what we know now about the earliest mechanisms of video games and visual media, we can begin to answer the question I began to address at the start of this entry: What exactly constitutes a quote/unquote “game?” In my experience, a game could be anything: kick the can, tag, stealing every wooden plate I find in an RPG, counting the amount of yellow cars that drive by in an hour, the possibilities truly are endless. A game is nothing more than an activity with a captive and engaging audience. So in that sense in order to be a game, the specific activity must have a set and achievable goal in place for its players to reach. In a symbolic sense, games are an experience, and those can either be shared with a group, or personalized to the individual. That’s why there’s such a diversity between the types of games available to the public; from solitaire to monopoly, there’s something for everyone. But the most important component to the apparatus of a game is the educational roadblocks each player is bound to face. In its very nature, a game is confrontational; it looks to the player wanting to progress, and says, “No, but here’s an over-leveled creature and its swarms of minions to trap you in a death maze. Good luck.” But within every conflict, a silver lining can be found, a lesson can be learned. And its quite often these lessons that carry through to more important aspects in life. Like for example saving in-game currency to exchange for a unique but expensive mount you’ve had your eye on for months to help you put aside portions of your real paycheck for financial bills and the like. So at the end of the day, a game must have three things: An engaging audience, a clear and achievable goal, and some form of reward or moral lesson at the end of the journey.

I hope you all enjoyed today’s entry in the Examination of the History of Game Design. This Thursday we’ll take a closer look at the aforementioned Tennis For Two, and how its graphical applications helped lay a secure foundation for the technological behemoth that video games and visual media stands as today.

Until then, Cheers.

-Ethan