Game design distinguishes between mechanics — the rules of the game — and content — the stuff in the game, like art, music and story. Good mechanics tend to be fairly simple, so that players can understand them, but provide enough flexibility for expressive play (consider chess and go). This often makes them cheap to implement: a clear, simple set of rules is a programmer’s dream. Good content, on the other hand, tends towards the elaborate and expensive: if you want your game to contain a city teeming with life, you’d ideally want every one of its thousands of citizens to look different, and possibly even behave uniquely. Big budget titles like content, because if you have money, it’s the safer bet: it’s hard to come up with good new mechanics, and even if you do, gamers may reject them. Content allows you to distinguish yourselves from the competition without that risk, and you can produce it pretty reliably (of course, there are brilliant and incompetent digital artists and authors, but for an average team, more time & money => cooler content). On the other hand, Indie games tend to emphasize clever mechanics because that’s all they can afford. Also, games intended for brief play sessions, like arcade or casual games, simply don’t have enough time to show off much content, so they can and do skimp.
But there’s the rub: people associate content-light with short! If someone sends you a link to a browser game with little content, then you will almost certainly play it for only a few minutes, regardless of how brilliant its mechanic may be. If it were boxed for retail sale, you wouldn’t play it at all. There are too many games available to expect people to have the patience to let a mechanic unfold unless they are seduced by content. If chess were invented today, it would fail. A few people would play it, sure, but if only a few people played chess, it would never have reached the depth it has; the scholar’s mate might still be state of the art (unless it got nerfed in a patch).
We here at Rough Sea are making a game that is not short. It’s intended to be played in brief daily sessions, but the world and characters are persistent, so each session contributes towards larger goals. Therefore, we need content. But how will we keep up with the consuming hunger of our hoped-for hordes of fans? That’s a subject for another post.
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Empirate says:
November 9, 2008 at 1:17 pm (UTC 1 )
How indeed? From what I’ve seen of the graphics department (which, admittedly, sums up to almost nothing at all), you have content [i]quality[/i] pretty much nailed. And isn’t content [i]quantity[/i] something that can be added bit by bit in an online game?
Rafael says:
November 9, 2008 at 1:43 pm (UTC 1 )
It can be added bit by bit (and will be!) — that’s one of the big advantages to an online game — but the question is “how fast can it be added”? Many a massively multiplayer game designer has discovered to his dismay that fanatical players can burn through new content faster than the developers can create it, since budget constraints dictate that there will always be fewer developers than players.
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