Game Design Advance

Japanese RPGs and I have a strange history. For a long time they were the only thing that I played. While I had an NES and played most of the classics, Super Mario Bros, Double Dragon, etc., video games weren’t really a consuming passion until I got a Super NES and in one summer finished Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, and The Secret of Mana. From that point on up until my last couple of years of college I played basically any JRPG I could get my hands on.

Things are very different now. At this point I don’t know if someone could pay me to play through the newest Square-Enix release. I recently started playing through the wonderful fan translation of Mother 3, and while I can appreciate the quirkiness and care with which the game was put together, I find it hard to bear the the long non-interactive sequences and archaic feeling of the battle system (even with a bit of rhythm-action thrown in).

At the heart of the problem is that I feel like while I was growing up, JRPGs decided not to grow up with me. I don’t mean that I wish they were addressing ‘serious topics’ or had characters ‘I can relate to’. The problem with JRPGs is not that their stories haven’t matured (no video game really lives up to that standard); it’s that at the end of the day the game design was, and remains, lazy.

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Dan Golding has an interesting post up on his blog Subject Navigator about Guy Debord and his concept of ‘psychogeography’.

This was a blast from the past for me. I first heard about Debord ideas and their connection to games from Game Design Advance’s founder Frank Lantz. This was back in grad school and when Frank was best known for his work on ‘Big Games’, which were games that sought to layer ludic properties onto the real world.

The connection between psychogeography and level design that Dan draws is a good one. He points out the way that level design is used to subtly manipulate player behavior, such as a directing and pacing them into particularly dramatic moments.

I thought I would also post a couple of videos that some of you may have seen but are a great visual accompaniment to Dan’s post.

The first is called ‘Averaging Gradius’ and is several individual runs by different people of the famous shooter’s first level layered on top of each other:

Averaging Gradius

This is a great demonstration of how level design can influence player behavior while also leaving room for individual styles of play.

The second is also a video of a bunch of different runs layered together, this time the game is a famously difficult hack of Super Mario World:

Many Worlds Mario

Here’s a game where the level design is much more punishing, leaving almost no room for improvisation. Each time the player gets to a tough spot he explodes into different possibilities but only one (well, two actually) survive until to the end. Beautiful in the way only a gamer could appreciate.

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