Blog - On Constraints:
Sunday, April 13, 2008Another thought that popped into my head during a lecture at GDX is on the subject of constraints.
Although, in retrospect, I think Brenda might have mentioned this observation I'm about to make in class before, and at the very least it is suggested in her article: "The Game Design Game".
The observation is this: game designers create mechanics, which are rules. These rules constrain the player, but it is those constraints which inspire creative, spontaneous play. They play within the rules and in reaction to them, exploring.
But the same is true of game development: all games have some kind of constraints on them during development: deadlines, budget, platform, etc.
As a game development student you are given even further constraints in order to experiment, and you begin to learn that the more constraints on you, the easier it becomes to design.
The constraints demand creativity and inspire.
If you look at some of the design challenges designers give themselves in order to stay sharp or experiment or learn, they often give themselves bizarre and arbitrary constraints, like randomly generating the subject matter for a game and giving themselves only 30 minutes to punch out a design. In Brenda's Game Criticism class we were given tons of these little design challenges, with all kinds of constraints:
-Make a game using 100 cards.
-Make a game with a random selection of items from a box of junk.
(Our group got a stopwatch, a toy train, a doll and a pen, and had 10 minutes to invent a game with them...)
-Make a game based on a randomly selected topic.
(Our group got Canada! We made a game about the lumber industry there...)
-Make a game that makes a player feel a specific emotion.
(How Rats came to be...)
etc.
It's telling that my weakest game project from that class (besides maybe Lumber Wars, our Canada game, only because it never actually got finished...)
was our final game project which had no constraints on it other than the deadline (and well, student projects inherently have a pretty restrictive budget as well.)
We were invited to create our own restraints.
And because I'm in my kick of analyzing improvisational games for theater in my game design studies, I can note a recent observation a member of my improv club made. He said our group was the strongest at the games that challenged us the most.
It was at those moments where we were most spontaneous and therefore the most funny.
Again, the constraints inspired creative, spontaneous play.
Some improv games have some real doozies when it comes to constraints:
-in "Two Line Vocabulary" some of the actors can only speak using a choice of one of two lines, forced to make those lines make sense in any given context.
-in "Number of Words" the actors are each assigned a number, and all of their lines must contain only that number of words. Again, you have to try to follow that while still making sense in context.
And perhaps the most insidious:
-"Three Rules", where the audience comes up with three rules the actors have to follow at all times during the scene. The audience is malicious, however, and occasionally comes up with some pretty diabolical rules...
not being able to use certain letters or the word "the" is pretty popular and particularly evil, for example.
Labels: constraints, design, improv
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 12:06 PM
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