How to Design a Balanced Game

A critical component of games design, specifically in multiplayer games is balance. This essentially is a term used to describe when a game is fair for everyone involved, and all the players in the game have the same chance of both succeeding and losing. A well balanced game means that there is lots of variety to be had, and there isn't one main method or strategy to succeed with every other gameplay element being made completely redundant. This also counts against both other players and AI enemies, and a singleplayer game being really easy that you can storm through can be considered imbalanced. A quote to sum up balance would be: "Gameplay is all about making choices and in a poorly-balanced game, many of the choices available to the player are essentially rendered useless. And this, in a nutshell, is why game balance is so important -- it preserves your game elements from irrelevance. In an imbalanced game, one or more "dominant strategies" quickly emerge, limiting other strategies useless except for some un-intended purpose (such as getting used as a handicap mechanism, or comedic reasons)."(Burgun, 2016).

There are three main types of game balance depending on the circumstance: player to player balance, player to gameplay balance and gameplay to gameplay balance. These balances essentially form depending on how those two elements interact with each other. Player to player is mostly in a multiplayer scenario, as different people compete to win the game. Depending on how developers vision their game, they can give experienced players a much higher chance of success, or keep a level playing field no matter what time investment players have. Next is player to gameplay, which focuses predominately in single player games as the user aims to overcome the already programmed game that they purchased. This could include the fact that a game shouldn't be too hard, and there should always be a way to succeed (such as choosing an 'easy' difficulty mode), or else a player may feel cheated out of their money if there's no way they can even finish the game they paid for, since if a game's completely brutal with its challenge with a poor flow channel (researched in an earlier blog post), the player will be too frustrated and will then just give up with the game entirely. Lastly is gameplay to gameplay balance, which revolves around how the game's base mechanics cooperate with each other, and aren't strictly to do with the player's manual input. For example, there could be a specific part of a game which can only be solved through the use of a single item. But if that said item is very well hidden and a player isn't guaranteed to even find it in a normal playthrough, this creates an incredible sense of inbalance as the player must then backtrack to every single area of the game, searching every nook and cranny for a hidden secret. This is a bad form of game design and the player shouldn't be punished for not playing the game in the exact way the developers intended, leave hidden and devious secrets to more optional content like cosmetics. All of these three types will be expanded in more detail inside the examples below, but first I will talk about luck in games.

When luck gets introduced into a game in the form of RNG (random number generator), this is where things in a game can start to get unbalanced, as many skill-based games try to minimise luck and fortune as much as possible over skills. Hardcore players usually feel cheated out of a victory when an opponent won and bested them purely by chance, and it's understandable why, it's a major factor in a game compared to the gameplay and base mechanics that the players do not have direct control over, and thus couldn't have influenced the game anymore than they did and changed their odds of winning the game. Luck still can be used competitively however, to make a game balanced in a different way though with a risk versus reward factor.

So for example: in competitive Pokemon battling tournaments where players take turns using attacks against each other, every move in the game has a certain percentage chance of hitting, however, stronger moves tend to have less accuracy than weaker moves. This is an incredibly clever system that has players weighing up their options and manipulating their odds even by a small amount. Should they use a very strong attack that does 120 damage but only has a 70% chance of hitting? Or go a safer route and use an attack which does 80 damage but with a 95% chance of success? This really does help the game feel balanced, and when the odds are really against you it doesn't feel as unfair as other multiplayer games, since there was something else you could have done to give you a better chance of success (in this case, by using a different attack).

There really is a time and a place for even heavy amounts of chance in games, as heavily discussed by (Grant, 2014), and this luck in place does tend to work better in more solo-orientated games which revolve around that concept and especially casual games designed for families, like Mario Party in this instance. In Mario Party many of the minigames and board games you play rely heavily on luck and chance (like rolling a dice or just hoping for the best), but this is actually more of a design choice than a mistake since it gives everyone a more equal chance to win when playing with a bigger variety of people. It means even an adult who's never played a video game before, or a small child, still have just as a big of a chance to win as a more skilled Mario Party enthusiast. So through this even games with high amounts of luck still have a time and place in games.

Mario Party, a chance-based game that's designed to be accessible to a huge target audience (Levy, 2015)

As explained in this Extra Credits video (linked below), game balance doesn't always have to be perfect, and instead a game (especially a single-player experience) that isn't can still work. As the player plays through an RPG for example, when they 'level up' their stats increase, which means that the developers must also gradually increase the difficulty of the enemy stats too, so that it scales with the player's progression meaning no enemy in the game is ever too strong to fight, but aren't exactly a pushover either. If an RPG is designed to be tough though the game can contain elements imbalance, and the RPG series Fire Emblem for example utilises this incredibly well. Whenever a character runs out of health and dies in that game, they're dead for good, and any contribution to the story they give from that point on gets completely cut as other characters mourn over their loss. This makes you really care about the characters as you play, and because there are so many tough enemies on the battlefield at once, it really forces the player to think and strategise every move they make (should their send out one of their strongest healers to one point of the map, and risk them getting surrounded by enemies). This game series proves that in one regard, having a tough and unbalanced game can actually enhance the player's enjoyment as they plan a route to get everyone through the game unscathed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e31OSVZF77w

There are a multitude of other different aspects in games that the developers must think of when 'balancing' it, right down to map layouts and different weapons in shooter games. For example, if there is a certain map in a game with too many open areas and not much cover to seek refuge from, there may not be many places for close-range melee classes to hide from the untouchable snipers. Likewise weapons in shooter games must be kept in sync and not have one weapon so good it renders another completely worthless, because the first gun is better in every way. Variety is the spice of life and having as many players with their own unique playstyles is healthy for the community as a whole.

A situation happened in the online shooter game Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare, where a new fan-made character, the Berry Shooter (pictured below), was officially released into the game and given to everyone instantly for free. But this character was incredibly overpowered, as it had a very fast rate of fire, did a high amount of attack power and it included a very large amount of splash damage around the area where their bullets landed. This meant that many players could use this new character instantly when theys tarted the game, and just shoot in the general direction of their enemies, while still hurting them tremendously due to it having such a large area of effect. For a few weeks this pretty much broke the online component of the game, as most players online were single-handedly using this one character and no other could counter it efficiently, and until the developers issued a patch which heavily nerfed it, this became a very frustrating experience for anybody who didn't want to use that one character. This is a good example of imbalance in a game, and how it can have catastrophic consequences, especially in an online multiplayer environment, when not properly balanced and playtested.

The Berry Shooter, an imbalanced menace, which is also a prime example of a character that caused an online shooter's entire ecosystem to be completely disrupted for a few weeks, simply due to being too versatile, fast and strong. (Metz, 2014)

What Makes a Good Game Proposal

For our assignment we were tasked with creating a game proposal for our game idea, and with recently receiving the feedback and responses about this proposal today from both our peers and tutor I will discuss what makes a proposal good! Considering a proposal's main purpose is to sell the idea of a game to a developer or publisher, where a much more detailed games design document is later produced once funding is acquired, it's important to try to 'wow' them in the very early stages of the game's concept so you can get everyone on board with the idea..

The most critical thing about a proposal is that it must be eye-catching and have a clever idea which stands out from the rest of the competition, this is why we include the short 'hook' near the top of the document as well, in order to draw in the reader and encourage them to want to see more of your great idea on offer. To follow on from this as information received in my feedback from Tom and Sue, with this task a proposal shouldn't be too long or wordy and just cut to the point, a mistake which I made with my own original draft version: making it 11 pages long. A good proposal length is anywhere between 2-5 pages as you don't want to just bore the reader with too much information as they may just stop reading and completely discard your idea completely, but you want to have a core concept in place that can really impress them in that relatively small amount of text.

There are other important pieces of information needed in a proposal too, as talked about by Forbe writer and editor (Turak, 2013), it has to be well planned and prepared. To quote them: "Every great plan or proposal must have teeth, and putting teeth into your plan or proposal means making projections. Projections that put you squarely on the proverbial hook for achieving bottom line results." (Turak, 2013). This essentially means you have to find a way to stand out from the competition and show you have a firm grip on your idea, and this very much applies within the games industry too with confidence that it will succeed in such a crowded marketplace.

I feel my proposal followed a lot of these guidelines well, since my game concept has a very clear-cut target audience with a well discovered niche in the games industry- a shooter game that can be enjoyed by younger children. It shows everything it wants to be and what the game ultimately wants to achieve, while still acknowledging any issues or limitations that may occur. However, a final thing to note as published by (James, 2014), is to research the customer, developer or publisher that you're pitching to! It's no good presenting a cute and cuddly game for kids to a big company known for gritty 18+ rated violent games, so it's critical you also know what type of company would want to publish your type of game and whether or not they'd be on board with the idea, as you avoid major disappointment later on down the line.

Prototyping Options

There are various different methods I could use to showcase my game's prototype for this assignment, however today I will try to find the best type for the job relating to the type of game I'm planning by researching different methods, and afterwards deciding which I do and don't approve of to apply to my own game concept idea. There's a good reason for somebody to start prototyping, as it can be used to advertise or promote your game idea, and it brings hover you show it to one step closer to getting a good grasp of what the final product will actually be like.

Their are various considerations to keep in mind before and after the production of making a prototype starts. A big factor in this are time constraints, depending on how much time you've been allocated to work on a project will affect the size and scope of the prototype you'll be making, so good time management skills are key. Likewise, depending on what type of prototype you want to make, you must ensure you have the correct tools for the job (such as having 3ds Max installed if you're making prototype character models). As a final note it's important to consider why you're even making a prototype in the first place: is it to kick-start a game idea by pitching it to a publisher? Testing an idea to see if it's practical to make a game out of it while being a feasible game idea? Or even to just gage a general response to gather some feedback. This is all very important to consider, as you don't want to lose track of your focus or end-goal throughout development.

Now for different types of prototyping options! First off is paper prototyping, this involves physically having your idea written down by hand. As talked about by (Norman, 2016), paper prototyping can be used to test various aspects of a game early on during its development cycle, and various concepts of the game can be drafted on paper, like concept art or a layout for the user-interface (UI) for the game's menu. Using a set of flow-charts and diagrams, the designer can show the entire layout and structure of the game's main menu system by hand. Quickly drafting a game's base layout in a style similar to a flowchart (connecting all of the various options showing what happens when you click each button on every screen), can work very well as a piece of reference that is used later to be transferred digitally into the real game. Here's an example of drafting out different scenes of a game's UI on paper below:

Drafting the different screen for a mobile game, next to an actual phone to compare how it would look on screen, which is perfect for testing the functionality before the real menu gets implemented into the app. (Board of Innovation, 2016)

Compared to digital working there are a few limitations to creating a prototype on paper to be aware of, such as not having tools and software to freely edit the prototype and make changes/ adjustments on the fly as you could using a computer. Unless you scan in the paper prototype to your computer for editing in software like Photoshop, once something's physically written down it can be hard to amend any mistakes (aside from using an eraser to physically rub it out, which is prone to smudging your work and leaving the end-product looking somewhat tacky as a result).

If you want to create your UI in a bit more of an in-depth or visually pleasing manner compared to on paper, it would instead be a good idea to create it using PC software digitally instead. There are various options, and a good one is Microsoft Powerpoint. Even though it's mainly designed as a presentation tool, the way all of the 'slides' are set up and connect with each other on the software allow for a surprisingly accurate prototype for what the real menu structure would be like in a game (although, without any of the assets and animations found in a real game). Powerpoint is also very useful for perhaps applying your original draft paper designs digitally for the first time to see how they look, as talked about by (Board of Innovation, 2016) in their step-by-step guide. This is fantastic for the developer to get a first taste of how their UI looks on a computer screen. Past then adjustments can be made before this design then gets ported into the game engine for the final product.

As another method you could use, you can even make physical pieces of a game for a prototype, which serve as a great demonstration tool since people can get hands-on with your creation and actually hold and touch it. You could make cards and a board for a version of Monopoly for example as an early version of the game, make some draft characters and props from the game using pieces of stationary (like paperclips and pins), or even recreate a small section of a level/scene in your game from lego bricks which you can later use as a point of reference when creating the level in a game engine (like Unreal 4). There's a lot of potential with this method and it's a very effective tool for people who are more artistically minded and love arts and crafts.

Many pieces of lego bricks, which can be stacked up to create an early design for how a finish game's level might look. It can work almost like a plan showing all of the rooms and corridors. (Groom, 2014)

One final option for the prototype could be to create a demo for the game, which could exhibits the basic mechanics, characters or story. There are various game engines which this prototype could be made in, such as Unreal 4 or Unity 5, and each offer different experiences depending on your needs, Unity is more geared towards 2d games development, whereas Unreal 4 focuses on the more realistic 3d aspects. Since my game is a 3d third-person shooter, right off the bat I may want to consider Unreal 4 if I were to develop a functional prototype of my game idea. However I'll definitely be drafting my UI both on paper and in Powerpoint, and plan to make it very user-friend and accessible to match my own game's wide target audience.

Analysis of the Current Games Market

The games market is a huge place in 2016, and bigger than ever. With such a huge number of potential target audience members with such a variety of different tastes in games with different opinions, it can be very strenuous trying to figure out what the most popular genres of games are, and what each game's target demographic may be. For a game to maximize as many profits as it can it's a good idea to reach out to a large number of potential buyers, as very niche games with a much smaller fanbase just may not be large enough in size to sustain an income big enough for all of the costs and expenses used during game development, and could cause the games company to make an overall loss, and worst case scenario, go out of business.

Because of this analysing the current games market is key before development of a game starts, so you can be sure it's being pitched to the right people. So for my own analysis of the games market today I will be using statistical data with my researched sourced from the companies (The Entertainment Software Association, 2016) and (Interactive Software Federation of Europe, 2016), which are analytical companies who collect information and statistics from all around the games industry and make it publicly available.

First off are age and gender, and as evident by both sources, the gender ratio of gamers is pretty equal (44% are female at the ESA and 45% for the ISFE), and the average age range of gamers are in their early thirties. These are overall very balanced statistics at first glance, with a much more balanced gender ratio than anticipated; however females are shown to be into casual PC games and mobile apps much more than a male market, and because women who just play games like Candy Crush and Scrabble for twenty minutes on the train to work technically count as gamers, the figures actually point to males playing more 'hardcore' and in-depth games compared to women.

More older woman play games than younger children, due to the rise in popularity of mobile gaming. (Casti, 2014)

Likewise mobile apps are actually the most popular type of games at the moment (with 21% of all games that are played being mobile games), whereas only 11% are online multiplayer games. This is a worrying statistic for anyone who wants to make a wholesome console-based gaming experience, as app based games (as posted by games journalist (Rigney, 2014)) are much cheaper to make, require less time to make and get played by more people. It entices more people to get into app development and in turn makes more people buy the new mobile games, it's a vicious cycle. As mobile games continue to get more widespread, people are going to continue wanting smaller and more digestible games, and may end up rejecting a full PC and console experience entirely. To sum it up in a quote below, why both creating a triple A experience when you can just make some easy money instead? This is a slippery slope for the future games market, and a concern that people may continue to want slow-quality titles.

"YOU DON’T NEED to be a programmer to break into the App Store’s top charts. All you need is 100 bucks and a free afternoon." (Rigney, 2014)

As posted by (Fahey, 2011), writer for games journalism site Kotaku, there are 27 different 'types' of people who play games, each with different traits, which is something else to consider when developing a game for a target audience. These include 'Hater', 'Loner', 'Politician' and 'Snob'. Haters for example are incredibly agitated and arrogant, often out to cause trouble. Politicians on the other hand will play anything that seems interesting, and are very open to change, while keeping up to date with the latest news and information about games. Fitting all of these 27 different kinds of gamers can be very useful when creating a game, since if you have a shooter game for example you can tweak many of its elements to be more action packed and violent to appeal to the Hater crowd.

This is all valuable information to consider for my own game's proposal, which is why I feel my game being a third-person shooter, but with a funny and colourful visual style will have such a huge potential target audience. Since it will have the popular shooting mechanics and gameplay for teen/adult males, and the easy-on-the-eyes quirky visuals of the game will entice under 18s and adult females to give the game a go too, due to the more appealing nature of the game as it defies set third-person shooter conventions to reach out to such a large target demographic of people. I feel having the best of both worlds in the game also can help ease people how normally wouldn't play many games into trying it out, simply because of the iconic characters and cute locations, which in turn could even help boost the 11% statistic for how many games that are played are online multiplayer based.

How Game Concepts are Generated

There are some really crazy and creative games out there, some of which seem so ingenious or imaginative you can't help but wonder what was going on inside the developer's head at the time of the game's creation. Turns out that there are various methods of coming up with new or unique game ideas, and I will be analysing and reflecting on various methods developers can use in today's blog post. As posted by (Daum, 2013), plenty of things throughout life can inspire you for obtaining new ideas. From playing another company's games, watching films and reading books, you can analyse what they do well and then maybe apply them into your own ideas for you to expand upon them further. Likewise there are plenty of experiences in life that can inspire someone, from having conversations with a variety of people and also conducting surveys with them to collect ideas (to get a large sample size of feedback), noting down every idea you think of during the day (so a month later you have a huge comprehensive list of notes that you can use to extract ideas from; this is called an idea fountain) or even just living through life trying new things to broaden your experiences (so for example if you've never been skiing before, why not go to a local ski centre to try on artificial snow, such a new experience could influence your future games design concepts). All of these methods are very natural to do, as you can live your life relatively normally for the most part, only with the intent to absorb as many ideas as possible to craft your own gameplay experience.

A group of people skiing. Trying new and interesting activities can broaden your knowledge of the world, and in turn possibly give you inspiration for developing a game idea! (Chillfactor, 2016)

However many of these I mentioned are quite time-consuming processes, and many game studios, especially bigger companies who are always producing new content, don't have so much time to waste with these long-term projects to generate ideas. First is brainstorming, which is a very commonly used technique in industry, where one 'group leader' takes down all suggestions by the group, usually in a big list. So if a developer were to get a group of people to shout out various things that make a good game, absolutely everything suggested would go on the list, even if it doesn't seem relevant at the time (even if someone suggested a random word like 'saxophones'). This is done because later on during the creation process the development team could find a great way to incorporate saxophones into the game with lots of the other suggestions, and in the end the game could be great because of the brainstorming session, as everyone gave away pretty much every idea they thought of in the session to compile as many concepts as possible. Brainstorming has proven to be a very effective method of creation, which is talked about by (SmartStorming, 2011), due to its wacky and off the wall nature which is perfect for game innovation. There are a few issues however, firstly there's not really much thought put into a brainstorm and there's also not much of a stimulus for inspiration, especially considering most brainstorms are done in a boardroom type of area. This means there can be quite a lot of quality response that may be hard to fit into a game concept, but if executed correctly then it could be a great process of creativity for a game, but I feel brainstorming is a very good technique when used correctly.

Instead of brainstorming there are other methods of generating an idea aside from just a normal brainstorming session, as researched by (Greenfield, 2014), each with their own pros and cons. One method is a mind-map, which is essentially a much more focused brainstorm that collects more thought-out concepts that are relevant to usually a more established game (so a company may already know they're making a platformer game, and will brainstorm for ideas about different gameplay mechanics instead). You could also use a moodboard, which is more of a visually-based mind map where you collect a large variety of images into a page which fit a certain theme. So if your game is going to be a party game with a cell-shaded visual style, then you'd collect various brightly coloured and cartoony images of various party equipment like balloons, cakes and banners and bunch them all together, which exhibits a very strong vibe for a children's game. Overall thought I feel every method for generating ideas listed here is viable in its own way, and they all have their own purpose, so a brainstorm for coming up with concepts and a moodboard for finalising a visual style, all of these methods can actually be used together to create a great gaming experience, and a developer isn't just restricted to using one and one only.

An example moodboard for a child-friendly game with lots of fun colours, locations and characters (from ICT Tutor (Reid, 2013))

Beyond these there are even other methods of generating an idea for a game, which are surprisingly much more effecting than you'd think. Both daydreaming and actually dreaming whilst asleep are effective methods of producing an idea. The former is good as you can daydream anywhere, such as on public transport or in the shower, meaning you can always be thinking about a great new product idea or how to fix and/or improve a current issue. In fact, according to official DailyMail journalist (Prigg, 2015), daydreaming is actually good for you and has various health benefits like increased productivity, because we're draining it of 'clutter' to process information more effectively. Because of this it's a good thing to sit back and think about your next big game idea from time to time. And likewise for dreaming, because your mind is unconsciously making decisions to create a dream, there are actually various wacky, odd and original scenarios that can be dreamt up which simply wouldn't be thought of in any other situation as you live your daily life.

Semiotics in Games

To sum up semiotics in a nutshell, it's essentially a symbol used for representation of something else in a game, usually in the form of an icon or image. This can be in a huge range of different instances, such as the shape of a speaker icon that's used to represent sound settings in various games and software (screenshot of it from my PC below), a gear being used to configure options in a menu and an envelope shape being used to represent an message or email. As discussed by (Williams, 2013), these semiotics can catch on and become the standard picture used throughout most applications (like the examples I listed above), however when a game breaks these established conventions (like changing the sound button with a kite for example), then this can confused and even intimidate the end-user as it requires them to learn an entirely new control scheme and recognise an entirely new set of symbols.

The small button used in windows to change the volume of a PC, it's very iconic as a universally recognised symbol throughout various games and pieces of media to change sound settings.

As a game developer you should be aware various semiotics represent different things to different people and cultures, and it's important to note that something that may have a meaning in one may, could mean something radically different in another. For example (information researched from (Schwertly, 2014)) hand gestures like the well recognised thumbs-up actually have different meanings depending on where you are. In many English-speaking places like the UK and USA, giving the 'thumbs up gesture' (shown below) is a positive thing, it can be used to praise someone, greet them or can be shown as a sign of respect. However in other countries like Russia, Greece and the middle east, it's the equivalent to us putting up our middle fingers at each other, which is a very strong form of disrespect to us. Because of this we may think that we're being friendly giving a thumbs-up to someone of a different ethnicity, however we could actually be incredibly insulting towards them without prior knowledge or warning. Because of this even having your characters thumbs up in games (like Super Mario does in the image below) is a risky move. If a game is to be published in various places worldwide, then acts of censorship will need to be undergone in order to ensure that the game meets the suitable requirements for every country and culture your game is releasing in, and to not offend any group of people, especially in a family friendly game series like Super Mario while are well-known for having a very wide mass-market appeal with its target audience.

Mario giving a thumbs-up, he may seem quite happy and friendly to us, however a middle eastern person could feel incredibly disrespected by this image! (Chaney, 2014)

Semiotics can also be used in a game franchise to be iconic, such as a company's logo or trademark. As talked about by (Ang, 2015), on a government website, a registered trademark is a creative/ iconic sign, logo or symbol used by a developer or games company for a consumer to recognise that the product came from that specific games developer/ company. A trademark is often marked by a ™ symbol next to the trademark itself, which is shown on various brands including games. It’s a type of intellectual property, and can include a name, word, phrase, logo, symbol, design, image, or even a mix of these components. Most games and companies have trademarks of some sort, for example, here’s the trademarked logo for the Super Mario games (note the registered trademark symbol):

The 'Super Mario' logo used across various games (Funkhouser, 2015)

Many times games publishers, companies and developers will have registered their name, logo or even catchy theme tune/ jingle as registered trademarks. Alongside symbols and logos, certain iconic characters, locations and objects can also be trademarked, (even simple objects like the yellow boxes with question marks inside from Super Mario games or just Mario’s red hat are copyrighted). These semiotics in trademarks serve a good purpose to any company, and give a brand recognition as it grows andgains popularity. Customers will eventually end up buying their products because of brand loyalty, such as seeing the 'Pokemon' logo on a game's box and wanting to buy it, because they recognise the semiotic imagery as a positive thing, being a good game they've enjoyed in the past and they want to buy another one. So in that sense semiotics can also be used in advertising as well as helping users when playing games.

The Importance of Rules in Games

Pretty much every every game has rules of some kind, like Mario being able to jump on enemies to kill them but not being able to jump into lava, players dying in an online multiplayer game which face a respawn timer before they can continue playing, getting experience points to level up as you defeat enemies in role-playing games, etc. As discussed here (Fun.familyeducation, 2013), rules may not be very popular, and some people don't even want them around. But rules are critically important, and essentially are the way a game is designed to be played. They help give the game structure and meaning while also trying to make the game fun (if the rule is designed that way). Such as the bonus house rule in the board game Monopoly, as officially listed by (Hasbro, 2006), where if someone doesn't buy a property when they land on it, the property will then be auctioned off to the highest bidder. It makes the game more fun and frantic to play, while also adding another layer of skill and strategy, which is a good implementation of a rule being fun. This rule isn't necessary to play the game, but it's listed in the instructions if experienced players want to take the gameplay further to get a deeper experience from their product.

Rule are really not designed to be broken, in games and society in general. Doing so could have massive consequences on the game and possibly cause it to be a practically unplayable mess. For example, we broke the rules when playing the card game Bartok in class (as explained in my gameplay journal), where everyone had one chance to completely mix up the game's established formula. This quickly caused the game to become very chaotic, unfair and overall just not very fun to play as people kept messing you up by chance rather than skill. Rules can help enforce balance in a game and are there for a reason, and the fact we unanimously had a better time playing the more basic, but functional version of Bartok is evidence of that.

Rules in games like this also should be established to everyone before the game begins, as discussed by (Get On With The Game Kids, 2016), they can be discussed before the game begins or explained to the group playing the game. Or else if somebody is out of the loop with how to play the game, mistakes could be made. Which will both waste time re-establishing the game's mechanics, but also fixing any mistakes that happened. Likewise, the player who isn't confident on how to play the game will be at an unfair disadvantage the whole way through, and the entire point of rules in the first place is to make games fair and less frustrating.

Realism in Games

In today's blog post I will be evaluating different types of realism in games, and how it also fits into the Super Mario and Pokemon franchises. These are two series of games which are very-much known for not using many realistic elements, but they do include realism in less obvious places. I will be evaluating this starting with what realism is, with supporting evidence from (Siong Low, 2001).

According to (Galloway, 2004), there are various types and levels of realism games can take. Such as: abstract, stylisation, surrealism, hyper-realistic and photo-realistic. These are listed in order, which I will explain one by one. First are abstract graphics which have very few realistic elements, and instead the graphical style being very 'out there' (like a pixel art visual style), however almost every game has a realistic element of some kind, like the ball bouncing physics in the abstract 'Pong'. Stylisation on the other hand can still have many realistic elements (like gravity), however it normally has a very specific theme to it, such as bright and cartoony colours or a palliated black and white look. Stylisation helps give a game a distinct theme to help give itself more of an identity when being spotted by the consumer. Next are surreal graphics, which normally can include elements of realism in an unnatural way. An example of this in action is used in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, where surreal graphics can take a concept (like walking about in the world), and distort it greatly to create something else that's identifiable, but odd to look at (in Skyward Sword's Case the game is set on floating islands above the clouds, everyone knows what the sky and islands are, but it's incredibly strange to see them suspended in mid-air but oddly satisfying to behold).

Skyloft, a surreal land set in the sky that uses elements people are already familiar with. (Micheal, 2013)

Now onto hyper-realism, which is (as discussed by (Lynda D, 2014)) designed for games to have a realistic looking appearance, but using a large amount of hyperbole to cut back on small/unnecessary features and details. This is usually done due to hardware limitations that the game is being played on, to prevent unnecessary strain on the device. This can also be done to not overcrowd the screen real-estate and not have too much going on at once, or else it may become distracting for the player to physically look at. Finally there is photo-realism, not to be confused with hyper-realism, which is the visual style most graphically intensive video games use, photo-realism strives to look as life-like as possible, to the point where it looks like we're viewing the virtual world through our own eyes. This style is most commonly used for TV shows and movies, since these are pre-rendered and set up frame-by-frame before they're printed onto a disc, unlike games, which are rendered in real time by the hardware itself... And as a result performance would be very slow on everything except very high-end computers, since the device just wouldn't be able to process that much information at once, and the framerate would drop consequentially to that.

In my opinion realism in games is nice to have, and can help make the experience feel more immersive but it's not compulsory to craft a great gaming experience. This is something also discussed by Forbes journalist (Kain, 2012), who also stated that realistic graphics in a game are pretty to look at and nice to have, but not needed. To quote him: "When we watch a Pixar film, we aren’t docking points for unrealistic human faces. Mr. Incredible is enjoyable precisely because of his outsize proportions, but none of the characters in The Incredibles is realistically built. Their eyes are too big. Their heads are shaped funny. They’re not realistic, and we don’t care.". For example, in games where character animations start clipping through objects, you see really low-quality textures on walls and floors and when a game is too graphically demanding there are numerous FPS drops with stuttering, it can be quite distracting for me and even sometimes breaks the illusion of a game being a living, breathing world since you're sat there looking at those graphical impurities. I don't think that realism and a hyper-realistic visual style is necessary for a game to be good however, in fact it's the opposite in my opinion.

I very much enjoy games like Okami and Yoshi's Woolly World with a very stylised, unique and a colourful visual style, as different and creative visuals can only been seen in virtual media, whereas I feel if you want photo-realistic graphics all you have to do is look out the window. And I find myself able to immerse myself into games with colourful graphics easily, especially if there are lovable characters with engaging gameplay. So realism is nice to have, but not at all compulsory for a game to be objectively good, since a game's graphics doesn't really affect the core gameplay, story, characters, etc  In my opinion all realism is when boiled down from a visual style perspective is eye-candy to look, at without too much substance to back it up. And even then, I don't think a game can ever become truly 'realistic', as there's always going to be some in-game graphical bug or oddity to make it not a 100% perfect simulation. Even right now we're restricted by both physical computing hardware as well as our displays, since TVs only have so many pixels displayed on the screen at once, and the real world isn't made out of pixels in the first place! Even a hypothetical 8K screen wouldn't produce graphical detail on the level level as reality.

Yoshi's Woolly World, the game where everything is made of yarn (Simpson, 2015) 

Realism in Unrealistic Games:

First is Pokemon, turn-based RPG that involves you travelling around and collecting various types of monsters. The game is generally disregarded as being realistic, since the monsters you catch come in all sorts of shapes and sizes that live in the wild with tremendous amounts of power, and these monsters fit inside tiny capsules for you to carry them around in once caught. The whole concept bares resemblance to different species of wild animals, but if real animals had half of much power as the average wild Pokemon then the entire ecosystem would probably be in ruin. Likewise, technology today is nowhere near the advance level of shrinking living creatures down in size and regrowing them at will. However, interestingly Pokemon does follow some realistic guidelines with it's 'type' system used in battles, where there are essentially 19 different elements in the game that work similarly to rock paper scissors. All 721 Pokemon have their own assigned type (either one single type or two different types at once), and every type of element has their own strengths and weaknesses which follow realistic guidelines similarly to the real world. For example in the game like real-life water extinguishes fire, fire burns plants and plants grow in water.

With all of these types it can get pretty intensive and logical, including numerous scientific methods behind type advantages. Such as: ice beating ground due to 'freeze-thaw weathering' on underground rocks (BBC Bitesize, 2013), psychic being strong against fighting (because of the old saying 'brains over brawn') and psychic types being weak to ghost, dark and bug types, since those are the most common irrational human fears. These types are a very clever system, and help make sense for the target audience of children who play Pokemon, as many of these scientific reasonings are taught at schools, and kids are then able to apply their real-world knowledge directly into the Pokemon games, and see if their theories actually work in practise. The game may not look realistic, but some of the fundamental mechanics are alarmingly realistically complicated.

A comprehensive table depicting every single possible combination of type matchups in the game, also showing with their damage multipliers. 1x deals neutral damage (so nothing is stronger or weaker), 0.5x is weak (like fire against water), 2x is strong (such as electricity against water- since water conducts electricity) and 0x deals no damage at all (like ground against flying types, since if you're flying you're not touching the ground to get hurt!) (kebasketball, 2013)

The typing system isn't always accurate in Pokemon though, sometimes the realism just doesn't work and hit the mark as intended. Such as the ghost type being weak to dark type attacks... It doesn't make any sense! Ghosts by nature are supposed to live in dark places, and ghost Pokemon are found in shadowy and spooky locations in the game, the fact that they're weak to the element that they live in is pretty bizarre. Likewise, the fairy type is weak to steel and poison, but completely resists dragons. There doesn't seem to be any logic behind that decision, and I can't imagine a big bad dragon being terrified of a fairy because it's weak to that type, likewise fairly being weak to metal or poinsonous attacks doesn't seem to have any logic behind it either, at least at first. As hypothesised by (Rougeau, 2013), in the old Peter Pan movie Tinkberbell the fairy was trapped inside the villain's metal lantern... and was forced to consume poison to save the hero's life. It's a bit of a push, but this type's inclusion could be a possible reference to the film, but still with no scientific or realistic value whatever way you slice it, making this type a bit of an anomaly.

The Super Mario games are also very famous for being very unrealistic, which was stated by the game's creator Miyamoto during an interview with (BBC Radio 4, 2009), as them wanting to create their own fun style with their games, and even make their own realism conventions (like Mario being able to break blocks from below), which is a returning feature applied into almost every future Mario title. With the proportionally incorrect characters running around a colourful world, collecting goodies and jumping high into the air, it seems to be largely based on a surreal fantasy setting. Since it uses elements everyone is familiar with, like running, jumping and collecting money, but twists them into a game concept that would normally seem incredibly bizarre (in a world before video games having your currency floating in the air would be very weird), but because Mario games have been around for so many years now everyone's largely gotten used to the concept. There are a few realistic elements in the games combined with the surrealism though, Mario is affected by a realistic gravity for a start, and in some games like Super Mario 64 he takes damage after falling from a high place. This is obviously similar to real gravity, where you could injure yourself after falling from a great height. Likewise he can use fire to light torches, and see in the dark with these lit torches. Just like how light reacts in the real world.

The lit torches in Mario 3d World help the player see through a dark jungle (Kyle, 2013)

Realism isn't always needed in a game, and as documented by Cracked gaming journalist (Stevens, 2015), it can actually detract for the experience. Games like Shenmue II forces the player to spend hours traversing the land to get to their destination, favouring realism in travelling through the countryside than actually good game design techniques, omitting quality of life features like a fast-travel system. It even forces the player to do other monotonous tasks like working a day job, and is a prime example of a game which really tried to drill in the feeling of playing as a character in a living, breathing world... at the expense of actually having fun.

All in all though I feel that the many unrealistic features combined with slight realism in these two games is a very good thing to have, it just makes a game so much more enjoyable for me. As you don't just have to learn about the world and its characters like in a typical game focused on realism, you need to analyse the physics of the game and the world's rules too, and from there you will need to master these set rules as you progress through your journey. All the while this is going on the games will introduce even more new mechanics for you to learn, like seeing new types of Pokemon, or discovering different enemies in later Mario levels which pose more of a challenge.