Monday, May 20, 2013

The Illusion of Danger

One of the lectures I went to for my first GDC was "Everything I Learned About Game Design, I Learned From Disneyland", by Scott Rogers.  It was filled with all sorts of wonderful ideas and lessons, but one of the ones that has really stuck with me was the illusion of danger.  A couple examples of this from Disneyland would be the "darts" in the Indiana Jones ride (before they lowered the air pressure) that actually felt like real darts or the splashes of water from the cannonballs in Pirates of the Caribbean.  Neither of these dangers are real and everyone knows this, but it still adds to the thrill of these rides.

This false sense of danger is even more important in video games to give a similar thrill to the players.  Uncharted seemingly does a great job of this because Nathan Drake is almost always seemingly just about to fall to his death or barely escape from a runaway train.  However, this sense of danger is only if the player keeps moving.  If you stand still on that pipe that will obviously break when you jump off of it, it will (usually) stay in place indefinitely until you move.  So the obvious solution to this would be to have the pipe actually break if you stay on it after say 5 seconds or so.  Another good example is if enemies in the background are shooting at you, they should all miss you unless you stand still for a little bit.  This will give the illusion that you have to skillfully dodge the enemy fire, but without having players frustrated trying to focus on both the foreground action and background action at the same time.

This sense of tension and imminent danger can sort of be mimicked in board games by having the game balanced such that the line between winning and losing is very fine.  If it's a cooperative game, then the ideal ending would be the players barely making it through the harrowing adventure or possibly losing someone on the way (bonus points if you can mimic the stereotypical blaze of glory or grand sacrifice seen in action movies).  If it's competitive, then making all players a threat to the current winner will keep that feeling of danger going.  This is definitely the aspect of the illusion of danger I'd like to work on some more in my future games.

4 comments:

  1. Is this what Tyler was referring to when he mentioned something about not having to face the consequences of a game if there's save points?

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    1. No, he was talking about how I would reload my saved game whenever someone died in a game we have all been playing through, so I never had to deal with the consequence of any dead characters.

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  2. What are the pros and cons of that?

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    1. Pro: I have fun with the game.
      Con: It's kind of cheating. Like a white lie version of cheating.

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