Art me some gamespeak (video game grammar)

[Image: picasso]I’ve kept an eye on Corvus Elrod’s Round Table discussions for some time, and about once a month I decide I’m finally going to participate in one. Looks like this time I’m getting past the draft table. This is going to be fun.

First and foremost, I’d like to point out that this months topic, the grammar of game design, correctly presumes that games are an art form. I like the idea of talking about Will Wright, Pablo Picasso, and Shakespeare in the same sentence.

But I digress.

Video game “grammar” is not a genre-specific phenomenon. In fact it’s not really defined by software at all—I think it’s tied more fundamentally to the “gaming equipment,” since game grammar is largely defined by how the player and the gamer interact with each other. The design, in other words, is determined largely by how exactly the gamer is going to go about their gaming.

This is one of the reasons I think that ported games never play as well as the original, and why I think it’s a terrible idea to develop for the console and the computer at the same time (Deus Ex 2, anyone?) - because you end up with game conventions and interfaces that are ideally suited to neither grammar and poorly suited to both. The end product might be a great game, but if the connection with the user is missing, there’s nothing that can be done.

It’s also one of the reasons I’m so excited about the Nintendo Wii - it’s not just a creative new control scheme, it is fundamentally redefining the grammar of console gaming. Frankly, I have no idea where it’s going to take us. Dance Dance Revolution brought us Guitar Hero (you see the connection? Change the grammar so that the gamer is expected to dance to music, and suddenly giving the player a guitar doesn’t seem so far fetched).

The advent of the DS has completely changed the way I expect to play handheld games - anyone who’s played even New Super Mario Bros can see the way the control scheme (the interface between the game and the player) defines the grammar for the interaction.

In other words: of course video games have a grammar. Why do you think nobody bothers to read a manual anymore? There’s an expectation as to how the player should enter the world of the game, and the most defining feature of that grammar is the physical interface between the gamer and their equipment.

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