But Mum, it's Educational!

The more games I play, the more I come across titles that leave me scratching my head and wondering why on Earth they’re PC games. It’s not that they’re bad games, and shoddily made. It’s just that I get a growing conviction as I play them, that they would be better served by being in another medium.

In such instances, I get the feeling that a few basic questions haven’t really been considered: why should this game be a video game? What does it do or require which needs, or takes advantage of, what can be done with a computer?

As video games are generally complex, time consuming and expensive to produce, these are far from trivial design questions. Indeed, for precisely the same reasons, in Writing for Animation (a book by Emmy Award winning writers Lara Beaumont and Paul Larson, with more than 500 screen credits between them) one of the first questions they pose to the reader – and one of the first questions they expect any producer to consider, is why should this be an animation? What does it do or require which animation is best suited to efficiently provide, and justifies the cost?


In fact, if you have a look at games which have been hailed as absolute classics such as Space Invaders, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Doom or similar, they all take advantage of the medium. Which, arguably, is why these styles of games did not exist prior to the computer’s invention. Board games, card games, and roleplaying games all existed prior to the computer. Games where you shot alien invaders out of the sky whilst dodging their attacks in real time, simply did not. In fact, with any of these video games, its nearly impossible to imagine them being ported into another medium without either severely damaging the gameplay, or making the cost prohibitive.

That’s not to say that games from other mediums have not, cannot, or should not be made into video games. There are, however, some questions which it would be wise to answer before doing so. For example, what does the game gain, and lose, by being turned into a computer game? And do the advantages outweigh the drawbacks?

Chess is a good example of this. What it loses in terms of being able to pick up and handle nicely made chess pieces, it gains in terms of animation. While it may lose human interaction, it may gain the advantages of being able to simulate a vast range of skill levels, and even teach (so having the advantages of a chess book and club rolled into one). And, vitally, the move to computer does not negatively impact the speed of the game.

Another example are RPGs. What they gain, thanks to the computer’s ability to render the game world and simulate combat (or in some cases, massively speed up dice rolls) are decided boons. And while a digital RPG may be able to trace its lineage back to tabletop and dice, the chances are that it’s been massively modified for the new medium.

Digitized pinball machines are another example. While no digital table can replicate the experience of a real life pinball machine, the ability to have, on my computer, a collection which would otherwise require a small warehouse, more than compensates. And again, the basic gameplay suffers very little.

Not everything is as clear cut, however. Some games, such as straight digitizations of existing board or card games, are, in my opinion, fairly neutral experiences, and I’ve found their main advantage to be letting me try a $70 board game for $3 to see whether I would want to purchase the real-world item.


Others games are not so lucky. Invariably, I’ve found these to be the ones which are basically board or card games, with a computer ‘skin’ draped over the top of them. What they bring to the computer in terms of gameplay has not been modified for the medium nor takes advantage of it, and what the computer adds invariably ends up detracting (often as it slows down, or gets in the way of actual gameplay). Even if what they add does not detract, the games will inevitably compare poorly to other games which take full advantage of the medium.

Taking advice from someone outside the industry, when it came to transcribing pieces for the violin (in PC terms, ‘porting’ a piece of music from one instrument to another – say piano to violin), the rule of virtuoso violinist Nathan Milstein was to only transcribe those pieces he felt could work better in the new medium. I feel that a similar principle could be expounded for video games: if the game being designed would work quite happily in the real world, that’s probably a compelling argument against it being made into a video game. All of which is another way of saying that when it comes to video games, it’s not good enough to simply design games. One has to design video games. ■