The gamers' game? - research blog
Joe Barnes and Melanie Wider
As a child, I always thought that the future lay in developing human ability within an entertainment context - increasing complexity in our gaming interface to aid in development of mental agility and hand dexterity as well as coordination between eye and hand. The missing link between my vision of the future of gaming and the current paradigm of physical interface is the game I wish to create.
Already there are games which force the players into a state of almost meditation with their complexity and demands placed on the player. A genre of games that typically has this effect is called "shooters". Shooters make a good showing overseas in the Japanese market, and while not extremely strong in America, they do hold their own as a traditional arcade favorite.
Also, there are already controllers which require players to use more than ten input keys (though not all at once, of course). The most common and widely used is the alphabetic keyboard. This controller has been used as an interface by many for productivity, education, entertainment, and device manipulation, since the personal computer has been prominent.
This team's goal is to create a game which allows the gamer to help create what is seen on the screen while requiring the gamer to use a large set of input buttons (probably on a keyboard) to control the flow of the game. This game will require the gamer to develop their skills at managing several tasks at once as well as their ability to respond to each in a timely manner. Games similar to this have been created in the past, and have been mildly successful, but received lukewarm receptions. A part of the reason for this is that any game which has required a gamer to type has been considered an "educational" game.
While researching, the team found that the games upon which this game draws for its central concept and core mechanic have not been overtly successful because they are too much "gamer's" games :
Typing of the Dead required a user to type in order to save the day. The concept may have been one of fun, but many considered the game an "educational game in disguise", perhaps due to the word "typing" in the title. The Typing of the Dead game required the player to be both quick and accurate and did measure statistics on the players performance over the course of a level, but the statistics were secondary and not given much screen time compared to the story via various cut-scenes.
The other game the team is drawing on for inspiration is Rez. This game was designed to be a spectacle such that many people could watch it even if only one was playing. It was also designed to require a player to develop their sense of rhythm and timing in order to "perfectly" play a level. One of the reported "problems" with Rez (from some critics) is that the game itself isnt the shooting, but creating the music, which leaves people who cannot develop themselves at a loss when trying to find the fun in the game. On one hand, as a gamer and a designer, I believe that anybody who cannot develop their play does not deserve to realize how wonderful Rez actually is, but as a marketer, there needs to be a balance of some sort in order to keep the non-gamers having fun on some level.
A pitfall that must be avoided is letting kids think that the game is an educational game, even though we would love parents to realize this. If the game is placed on the "educational" shelf as a shooter it will most certainly fail, and, of course, we would like the game to be fun enough that the fact that a user has to use the keyboard for input is a secondary consideration in anybodys mind. Perhaps seeing a keyboard as an input device would be daunting at first, but once a player can have fun while typing on a keyboard, the game itself may get a bit more attention (rather than the "unorthodox" controller). The game, when marketed, cannot have the words "teaches" (or any variant thereof) or "typing" in the title in order to preserve the illusion that the game is strictly a game and not a game thats fun while making players develop their typing skill.
Further research pending, comments welcome.