Design Tools... A designer's own language?

"most important tools are the ones that empower players to make their own decisions"

...


Pretty much all game creating teams have evolved through the experience of past games and technologies.

Game designer's role is to put together all the required skills to make a game, such as programming, music, art etc... to turn the data into a game.

Doug church argues we, game designers need our own set of technical words, just like other professions.

What he seems to mean, is that we need to be more constructive rather than just saying a game is fun or not fun, and a special vocabulary would help us do this.

Using every tool available (ie: every mechanic) in a single game would cause conflicts to the game, the right tools need to be chosen for each job.

Giving players simple controls is great because players will feel like they understand what they are controlling. And then complexity is added to the things that can be achieved by using the simple controls.

It is important that the player understands what is going on the the game. If the player fails he/she should figure out what went wrong due intuition. 

FADT definition: Formal Abstract Design Tools

A couple of FADTs:
- Intention, motivating and allowing players to build their own plans in order to achieve things in the game.
- Perceivable Consequence, the game reacts to the players' actions to show the result of their attempts.
- Story, can be predefined narrative by the designer or created while the game is played by the player. The point is to motivate the player forward towards the game's completion.

A consequence to a player's action isn't appreciated by the player if they didn't really decide to take that action.

An extreme example would be, picking one of 2 paths, one results in defeat, and the other one, victory. But the player didn't really get to choose where to go beyond a random guess.

While removing control from how the player can affect the game and the story takes some fun away from the game, it can be very helpful to allow the designer to created a much richer story for the game.

A personal view I have on where a clear contrast is seen regarding this is in the generic Japanese RPG, and the generic Western RPG.

J-RPGs tend to cut down on choices and decisions which have perceivable consequences, in order to build a very linear but very rich narrative.

on the other hand, W-RPGs, often lack that level of storytelling, but give the players satisfaction by letting them make their own decisions and experience the consequences for what the players themselves chose.

"SquareSoft games are, essentially, storybooks. But to turn the page, you have to win in combat. "As a fan I really liked this quote, as it is a perfect way to define the game.