Can you name this game from this description?

“A puzzle game where several different types of colored blocks continuously fall from above and you must arrange them to make horizontal rows of blocks. Completing any row causes those blocks to move downwards. The blocks above gradually fall faster and the game is over when the screen fills up and blocks can no longer fall from the top.”

Well, of course you can. The game is obviously Tetris.  However, this description is quite wordy, and while it is accurate, it doesn’t quite capture the experience of playing the game.

There are quite a number of ways that we can describe a game to someone else, each conveying a substantial aspect of the game in only a few words.

For example, we could describe the game’s core mechanic: rotate shapes to fill rows. Rotating shapes is the action we perform hundreds, if not thousands, of times while playing Tetris, and filling a row is a perpetual short-range goal of the game.

We could also describe the game by its genre: puzzle.  The genre tells us whether the skills required to succeed in the game are more based on dexterity or strategy (puzzle games are focused on strategy), and whether the game objectives are more about exploration or overcoming challenges (and in this puzzle game, the challenge is to fill rows and eliminate them before they fill up the screen).

Another way to describe a game is by its theme, if it has one.  A theme is the setting. story or even just a character that provides a narrative or aesthetic context for the game mechanics.  In the case of Tetris, the theme is Russian — the game has a Russian name and is often implemented with Russian graphics and music.

An important way to describe a game is by what makes it fun to play.  Any game fun (hopefully!), but the type of fun varies from game to game.  Ubisoft Creative Director VandenBerghe devised these “5 Domains of Play” to describe the different ways in which a game can be fun:

• Novelty: Surprises vs. Predictability
• Challenge: Hard vs. Easy
• Stimulation: Exciting vs. Calm
• Harmony: Building vs. Destroying
• Threat: Dangerous vs. Cheerful

A game like Tetris has a high degree of Challenge, Stimulation and Threat, although it doesn’t have a high degree of Novelty (the only surprise is which shape will appear next) or Harmony (the player builds rows, which then immediately get destroyed).

Of course, we must not neglect our players!  For whom we design our game is another way to describe it.  No one game is truly made for everyone (any attempt to do so would only result in a game that no one wants to play), and so we can describe the target players for our game by such demographic factors as age, gender, favorite genre, skill level, preferred game session length, or even income level (not everyone can afford to buy the latest AAA game.)  Tetris does appeal to many type of players, but I would say that it mostly appeals to those who prefer casual types of games: ones that have a smooth learning curve and can be played for short sessions.

With so many games coming out each year, it is also important to describe what makes our game stand out from the competition.  In marketing terms, this description is called the product’s Unique Selling Proposition.  What differentiates Tetris from other puzzle games, other than its Russian theme, is its unusually high degree of addictiveness.

That’s a lot of different ways to describe a game.  However, we can wrap up all those definitions into one nice, neat package called an Elevator Pitch.  This is a short (spoken in about the length of an elevator ride, hence its name) description of a product or service that contains all its essential information.  With a game, the general format might be:

Game Title is a game genre set in theme for target player.  It features core game mechanics that bring play value.  Unlike competition, this game unique differentiation.

Wrapping it all up, we might describe Tetris as “a Russian puzzle game for casual players, who are challenged by rotating falling pieces to fill lines before they fill the screen.  Unlike many other puzzle games, Tetris is extremely addictive.”

We can whittle this down further by removing some unnecessary words and make the remaining ones a little more exciting:

“Race against the clock to match and arrange vertically falling colored blocks before they stack too high and fill the screen!”

Not only is this description shorter, you probably found it more interesting, because rather than precisely describing the gameplay, the second version focuses on the excitement of playing the game.  In fact, the description with the fewer words arguably does a better job of conveying the essence of the game experience, which is often far more important than describing the details of the game.

I spent a few days between Christmas and New Year’s Day engage in a different type of gaming than I normally do — gambling! I spent most of my time playing Poker (the machines, that is; I didn’t bring enough gambling money for the tables), and I observed as I was playing that I had settling into this betting system: each time I won, I would increase my next bet, but I would decrease it with each loss. Why was I doing this?, I wondered.

At first, I thought it was because I was willing to risk more with “the House’s money” — that is, my winnings.  But that wasn’t strictly true, since I would follow this system even when I had less money overall than when I started playing.  I then realized that I would risk more money on a bet if I were on a winning streak.  But if that streak was broken, then I would decrease my bet to put less of my money at risk.

The problem with such a system is that there is no such thing as being on a streak, at least as far as predicting future events goes.  You can win several hands, or dice rolls, or slot machine pulls in a row and say that you were on a streak, but unless the game is rigged somehow, you are no more likely to win or lose the next round.  There is no magical luck aura that surrounds you, making you more likely to win than other players.

Yet the illusion of luck is a very powerful motivator in gambling games.  Most gamblers will look back at their past few rounds and pick out perceived patterns in random events to determine if they are lucky or unlucky.  If they perceive they currently on a winning streak, they are motivated to keep playing in the mistaken belief that these random but favorable occurrences are not random but part of a trend.  Yet even if players believe they are on a losing streak, well, they might still keep on playing in the hope of getting into a winning streak. Either way, luck keeps players very engaged in the game.

Is there any way that designers of non-gambling games can take advantage of such a powerful motivator as luck?  Well, the only way to truly design luck into a game is to have the game system cheat by not being truly random but instead purposely present the player with a series of favorable circumstances. However, many players will eventually notice such cheating and may become disengaged from the game, feeling that their choices don’t really matter.

Of course, we do want players to experience success early on in a game so that they feel confident they have the skill to potentially win the game.  The best way to do this is not by messing with the random numbers so that they are guaranteed favorable results, but by giving them challenges that do not take much skill to achieve.  We can also present them with positive feedback so that they feel like they are lucky or special, so long as such feedback does not come off as patronizing.

Another way to make players feel lucky is to allow them to have an influence over the random elements of a game.  In board games, we allow players to roll the dice or spin the spinner, and in digital games we can simulate this through the game controls.  For example, in one early role-playing game I designed, when the player was generating character stats, a series of random numbers would flash on the screen.  When the player pressed the space bar, the stat assigned to his or her character would be the very next number generated.  This prevented the player from choosing the number by seeing a favorable one and then pressing quickly enough before it changed, but still allowed the player to feel that he or she had influence over the random number chosen, even without knowing what it would be.

Still another way to make players feel lucky is dramatize the disastrous consequences that did not happen.  In the movies, we often see scenes of the hero stopping just before going off the edge of a cliff, and we feel relieved for the character.  But if a rock or vehicle goes over the edge to dramatize the danger avoided, we feel that the character was lucky.  In games, we can do this with near-miss messages to let the player know how close they came to being injured in combat or suffering some other unfavorable circumstance.

Again, luck is not a real thing, except when looking at past events.  The trick is not giving the player true influence over what will happen in the future, but looking at the past and making the player feel good about the decisions made.