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Designing with a Twist

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Innovation in game design is good. Too much innovation, however, can leave your audience scratching its collective head, shrugging its collective shoulders, and wandering away to find something less confusing to do.

Climbing the Learning Curve

I love me some innovative games. Show me something I’ve never seen before, and I’m a happy gamer. The problem is, you show me something I’ve never seen before, and I might not know what it is. We’ll be here all day with you trying to describe it.

“So it’s a shooter?”

Sort of, but there’s lot of resource management too. Lots of harvesting.

“Oh, like an RTS?”

Kinda, yeah. But you only have one squad, instead of a whole army. And they harvest illegal thoughts from the minds of the population.

“So it’s like — what?”

Yeah. They harvest thoughts. And fear. Because they’re actually ghosts.

And suddenly I feel like one of those folks whose experience with boardgames begins with Monopoly and ends with Trivial Pursuit, faced with Arkham Horror. I know what games are, but this? This is too far outside my expectations. I have no frame of reference. I don’t get it.

Oh, I’ll learn to get it. Because I’m into games and learning new ones. (According to Tadhg Kelly’s definitions, I’m a total Magical for games, though a total Muggle when it comes to football, cars, and wine.) But what about a more casual player (i.e., 95% of the game-buying audience)?

He’s walking away slowly while the closing theme to The Incredible Hulk plays in the background.

And Now the Food Metaphor

Am I saying to avoid innovation? Of course not. Just… be careful with it.

Games are like food. You’ve got your sandwiches, your cake, your burritos — you know, food. When I hand you two slices of ham, with cheese and a touch of mayo, between two slides of bread, you know what it is: a sandwich.

If I add a jar of jalapenos, blend the thing into a smoothie, and offer it to you in glass, you won’t believe me when I tell you it’s a sandwich.

But if I add one or two jalapenos, placed in such a way that their flavor accentuates, but does not overpower the ham and cheese, it’s still definitely a sandwich — but a sandwich with a twist.

How about a PB&J sandwich with a banana? Or cake with peanut butter for frosting? Or a burrito with mozzarella cheese and Italian sausage?

No one will be confused by these things. They’re all foods we know — with a twist. Not everyone will like them (the jalapeno ham sandwich sounds kind of nasty), but many more people will at least try them.

It’s the same way with innovation. You’re better off adding a tasty twist to existing gameplay than creating a whole new gameplay experience that may confuse, rather than delight your audience.

Tuning the Twist

The main benefit of this “but with a twist” philosophy is that it allows the game to both innovate (in one area) and sell a decent number of copies.

But there’s a second benefit. By focusing on a single innovative element, you can polish that element to a high sheen.

Yes, it’s a ham sandwich with jalapenos. But since we already know how to make a ham sandwich, we can focus on those jalapenos. How spicy do we want them? How sweet? How many are we adding? Are they sliced, ground, dried, or mixed into the mayo?

Or it’s a first-person action game with parkour-style running and jumping. How far can the player jump? How does she land? How does she know what she can jump onto?

Or it’s a trading card game that uses abstract symbols, rather than numbers, to resolve conflicts. How many different symbols are there? Where do they come from? How else are they used?

If every element in the game is a brand new innovation, you won’t have time (unless you’re Blizzard or unemployed) to polish everything – which increases the odds of creating a ham-and-jalapeno smoothie, which nobody wants.

Accessible – with a Twist

In the end, it’s about accessibility. Innovation is good, but too much of it can make a game inaccessible. It doesn’t matter how brilliant or fun you game is if no one is playing it.

At that point, it’s time to leave the kitchen, and cue the sad walking-away music.

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