Reflections on Gaming Presentation

The two things that we didn’t do a good job of explaining was the storyline that we had fleshed out for our particular video game, Gestalt Principle. (If we were making an actual game, we obviously wouldn’t go with this title, we were contemplating Tabula Rasa and something else)

Here’s a quick refresher on what our game proposal was. It would be a survival horror game that appears to take place in a jungle that has all these monsters. Your only defense against the monsters would be this lantern that you would constantly have to find oil to refill. The more your character is in the dark, the more damage is done to his sanity meter. The player would try and figure out what is going on while trying to remain alive.

We actually spent a good deal of time discussing what we wanted the story of the game to be. The other major thing that we didn’t cover well in our presentation, which goes along with the story, is the character design and development. Did we ever say anything about how we wanted the player to discover clues along the way that would narrate about the history of the place he woke up in? I don’t believe we did. We also wanted to include a part where we trick the player into drinking contaminated water. (You can raise sanity meter by performing actions such as eating and sleeping) This water would have made the character hallucinate, and perpetuate the idea that there’s a larger force at work against the player here, not just nature. The reason we never really included a part to explain the story was because I guess we never really decided what we were going to do with the story exactly since the presentation didn’t call for any plot summation. So I guess I can’t even decisively say “This is the story we planned.” But I can tell you some of the great ideas we came up with.

Christina had a really good idea that went somewhat along the lines of once the character reached the edge of the jungle, he just found a wall, with a door. When he opens the door he finds himself in a completely different setting with different obstacles. (And he goes through a series of “rooms” which could be constituted as levels) And then Eric had a really good idea as well where, after all the hard work of fighting off death and insanity, when you find yourself at the end of the jungle, there’s this huge sheet of glass that blocks his escape. He starts running alongside the glass to try and find a door or hole or anything, but he just finds that he goes in a complete circle. He’s trapped indefinitely. Since these ideas conflict with each other, it was kind of easier not to decide on one since we didn’t have to. (although it would have been very beneficial to our pitch if we did)

We also discussed what kind of character we would want to have in our game. Since our character is completely disoriented and doesn’t know what’s going on at the beginning, doesn’t even know who he is, we wouldn’t give the player any information either. We contemplated whether we should just leave him as an ambiguous character to allow the player to better insert themselves into the game.

These two points were obviously very weak in our presentation because they were virtually non-existent. Even though it wasn’t a requirement, we should have included them because they could have been the strong point of our game.

Now I apologize if anything I said above conflicts with something one of my groupmates say. Although old school games didn’t have much more of a story other than “Save the princess”, it’s important for most next gen games to at least attempt a story line. (Unfortunately a lot of games seem to have stories that seem like afterthoughts after creating half the game already)

I would say that video game mechanics would be the hardest to describe orally. This  is simply because the easiest way to understand game mechanics would be to experience them.  And considering the ambiguous “others” of this question, they might very likely be people who haven’t played a wide array of games, so you wouldn’t be able to effectively give examples. If you were the person who designed Katamari Damarcy, I imagine it would be hard for a person to understand how fun the game is from a description of the game mechanics: “you roll a ball around and pick up stuff. As the ball gets bigger, you can pick up larger stuff.”  It’s simply easier to hand the controller to the person and say “go for it”. The video game medium is an interactive one, and since game mechanics dictate the interaction that the player experiences, it’s more difficult to describe.