level design lesson: to the right, hold on tight
much of the following is informed by friend and comrade jeremy penner’s breakdown of design trends in super mario bros. for further reading, see his “breaking the law of miyamoto” in the gamer’s quarter issue seven. i’m also indebted to eric-jon rossel waugh for the metaphor of verbs.
games (digital or otherwise) are composed of rules. certain rules give the player liberty to change the state of the game (the “game state”) in specific ways: i like to call these “verbs,” as in the part of speech. if mario is the subject of most of the sentences in super mario bros.’s story, then “jump” is the verb that most often follows - jumping is so crucial that it gets its own button on the control pad.[1] the idea of jumping into a box to open it or onto an opponent to defeat it makes little sense out of context, but since the player’s foremost means of interacting with the game is through the verb JUMP, all of the game’s elements have been designed as potential objects of that verb.
[via auntie pixelante]
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