“No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine, particularly Jerusalem. To some, the disappointment is heart-sickening. Is the desolation of the land the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity? Hapless are the favourites of heaven” - Herman Melville, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land
Herman Melville knew a thing or two about searches and bitter disappointments. He is better known as the author of Moby Dick, a subject just crying out for a mini-game in one of the re-launched (sic) glossy magazines that grace WH Smith’s shelves. Having tackled Verne’s octopod in Kraken (available free from here), I should perhaps give it a go. How would I go about doing this? Well, first of all, I’d read the book. Ok, maybe not the whole book. A quick visit to the library whilst writing this paragraph has revealed that the actual story is 544 pages long (Wordsworth Classic Edition). Not that I’m put off by big books, but I’m in the middle of another 500+ page epic (on Generalship in the Great War) and I have a stack of unread books on my bedside table of giant redwood proportions (assuming the popular 25/28mm scale). So no reading the whole book then. Two choices remain; deploy my Googlefu to find the action sequences on the net, or buy a DVD. The Gregory Peck version (110 minutes) of Moby Dick can be had from Amazon for a mere £4.98, or the Patrick Stewart version (178 minutes) for a tantalising £0.01 plus P&P. For the time-poor game designer both look an appealing prospect. However the whole point of research (for this is what it is) is to capture the essence of the original piece. So Google it is: http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/Mel2Mob.html Thank you, University of Virginia. It’s nice to see our former colony do something useful with its freedom. We could (almost) forgive you that unpleasant business with the tea. Ok, so now we have the key elements for our game. A scene – for each game we play is just that, a scene, like in a play or film – and the protagonists. So sea, sailors in boats and a great big whale it is then. We also have a narrative for them to follow; the moving of the boats, the attempts at hitting the whale with harpoons, the reactions of the whale. The key elements of a game are here in the narrative - movement and violence. So how would I turn this into a game? I reread Kraken. It is a good little game that is fun to play and had some neat mechanisms in it. Game design is NEVER about reinventing the wheel. Thousands of man hours of effort - much of it, thankfully, someone else’s effort - have gone into providing the game designer with a toolkit of functional and familiar mechanisms for handling the key parts of a game. If games seem similar in their structure it’s because they all draw, consciously or unconsciously, from a common tool kit of devices. For example, units move either a fixed distance each turn or a variable distance. If they move a variable distance, there are only so many ways of creating that variation, and you can bet that they have all been used before. Don’t misunderstand me, we aren’t plagiarists. Like musicians, we riff on a theme, use a set of notes and just arrange them in different ways. Next step is to look at the mechanisms and work out what tweaks are needed to make the mechanisms fit the narrative. This “chrome” is vital to give character and uniqueness to the game. Then comes playtesting. You can never, ever, playtest too much. Be assured that situations you had never imagined WILL crop up. It is a good test of the flexibility and simplicity of your rules if you can “bolt on” a patch to cover the gaps. Go on, give it a go. But, back to Melville, don’t be heart-sickened if your first effort disappoints. Continue your search. Matthew Hartley
May 2009 Webmaster's Note As shown above you can read the full version of 'Moby Dick' on theUniversity of Virginia's website here. |
