What Roles Can Video Games Play?

Video games as a means of artistic expression are so incredibly flexible and capable of so many things. To many people, the many forms that video games have adopted in recent years is something kept somewhat in the dark. Hopefully this post will illuminate this for some people. As a wannabe designer, it's important to understand the different roles video games can choose to play, and to be able to identify what role (or roles) my own games should adopt. I break the modern schools of game design down into four categories.

Narrative
As technology advances, more and more becomes possible in video games. But most of all, the use of video games as a means to tell a story has become more and more common. Pick any game at random that's been released in the past decade and you can bet that there's going to be a narrative of some kind involved. Generally, your average video game nowadays is going to be a combination of narrative and skill stimulation (more on that below).

As the visuals get better and human faces become more believable (yet stylized), video game narratives become stronger and stronger. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves pictured above.

But the best examples of games that primarily consist of narrative are RPGs, especially turn-based games. RPGs (that is "Role Playing Games") are games that strive to create a narrative that can be appreciated easier by lowering the manual dexterity required to actually play the game. For example, if you're playing a game with a very interesting story, but get to a point in the game that is too difficult for you to beat, you will never get to see the end of the story. So your average RPG will slow down the pace of the gameplay, sometimes to the point of becoming entirely turn-based like a chess game, in favor of crafting what is hopefully a more rich narrative. Though that's not to say that RPGs are designed to be easy or not challenge the player (in fact, Western style RPGs tend blur the line between RPGs and a typical action game). But usually if you can't pass a section in an RPG, there's a different strategy to consider that will allow you to continue with more ease, as opposed to beating your head against a problem until your skill as a player is good enough for you to clear a challenge.

Skill Stimulation
This is perhaps the first form that video games ever took on. It's what a lot of people think of as "games that are just for fun." People often tend to think that "fun" should be a priority in game design, but believe it or not, this is actually a highly constrictive way of thinking. As a counter-example, take the two most common forms of drama: comedy and tragedy. One might argue that the primary purpose of drama (be it a play, movie, TV show, or whatever) should be to "entertain." But that would leave us with only comedies, wouldn't it? Tragedy is an extremely important part of drama, but most people probably wouldn't consider having a good cry at a heart-rending movie to be "fun" or "entertaining." It's an experience we crave, yes, but that doesn't automatically mean that it's something that should be delightful. That said, in the case of game design, even if "fun" isn't going to be the primary goal of your game, your design should of course never be so bad that it makes people want to stop playing. Rather than using the word "fun," a better word might be "cohesive" or "functional." Another reason why this line of thinking can be damaging to game design is that art direction can oftentimes be compromised by the thought that "fun comes before everything else," and there isn't a game in the world that couldn't benefit from strong art direction.

Arcade games best demonstrate the far extremes of this school of game design, especially very old arcade games. Consider the classic arcade hit, Pacman. This game does not provide you with a story or a narrative. It provides you only with a set of rules and a goal: to get a high score. To help players understand what was going on, simple archetypal images were displayed on screen. Ghosts are bad and scary, so the player will automatically understand that these are the enemies. And Pacman himself is basically just a face, which humans are naturally inclined to identify with. Using simple images like this, the player can immediately know what they are supposed to do, without requiring the game to generate a backstory to explain the situation to them.

Imagine you know nothing about Pacman. Could you identify who the main character is and who the enemies are just by looking at this picture?

Social

This is a concept that's been around for a long time, but has really exploded with the advent of online gaming. These days you can play pretty much any multiplayer game with anyone in the world, right in your living room. It's common for games in arcades to allow you to pop in an extra quarter for some sort of multiplayer functionality, be it cooperative like in the original Mario Bros., or competitive like in the many arcade fighting games that exist. But now that games can be played online, it's evolved into something else entirely, even a profession for some people.

Professional gaming is a concept that isn't huge in America, but has been around for a long time in the East. Presently in Korea, there is a monthly tournament for a game called StarCraft II in which the grand prize is the equivalent of about $87,000. This is a tournament that happens every single month. Professional gaming teams hire players and pay them regular rates to allow for players to train and compete as a full-time job and try to win prize money for the team. Hundreds and hundreds of fans will show up in stadiums to watch the players compete live and in person.

A player known as The Fruit Dealer wins $87,000 and a phat trophy.

Social style games, be they cooperative or competitive, are generally not mixed with narrative style games, however, some exceptions do exist. In Valve's game Left 4 Dead, four players can experience the zombie apocalypse together as told through horror movie cliches, and many other games allow you to experience a story mode either alone or with a friend or two. Generally though, when social style games are mixed with narrative style games, the narrative is downplayed significantly in order to keep things simple. The most ambitious mixing of these two styles that I can think of is BioWare's upcoming online game Star Wars: The Old Republic, the first MMO (massively multiplayer online, wherein thousands of players interact in a single persistent world) to be fully voiced, allowing many players to experience unique narratives simultaneously.

Other

The above three categories are sort of the holy trinity for game design. You're almost definitely going to have some combination of two of them, and sometimes even all three. This last category is a bit different, and it encompasses the newer directions that video games are taking, stretching the definition of the term "video game" to its limits and beyond.

With games designed specifically to challenge and stimulate one's intellect such as Brain Age, and all kinds of games designed to give you a workout, starting most notably with Nintendo's Wii Fit, games are becoming less and less traditional and are serving many purposes. One day, I expect video games could even be used as a tool for cognitive therapy, with games being designed by doctors and psychologists specifically for the purpose of helping patients. Who knows how far off that is, though.

Generally though, the first three categories are the ones that describe most games that come out nowadays. There are some outliers that are trying to do innovative new things using new hardware, but I personally believe that there's plenty of innovation left to be done without adding new ways to interact with the game. Hardware innovations tend to come and go, but when someone does something new and exciting using the format that video games have existed in since they first came out, that's when the industry starts to change in a lasting and valuable way.