As you can probably imagine, I played plenty of videogames growing up. Luckily, my family not only tolerated the hobby, but even got into gaming a little bit over the years. Mom still plays a mean game of Tetris, and my sister was the first person I knew to beat Super Mario Brothers 2.
With all the downtime around the holidays, it’s only natural that we play a lot of multiplayer games when the whole family gets together. Last year, a still-functional Super Nintendo, Super Mario All-Stars, and a lot of time on our hands made for a holiday filled with some of the most intense Super Mario action this side of The Wizard.
This year, I brought along the Wii for some Mario Galaxy and Wii Sports. The DS Lite came along as well, and we got to take advantage of the superb download-and-share feature in New Super Mario Brothers. Almost as an afterthought, I brought along Settlers of Catan.
You’ve already read the title of this post, so you can probably guess which game we got the most play out of. I was pleasantly surprised to spend so much time with a non-video game over the holidays.
Settlers, like other European designer board games, is exquisitely balanced and relatively easy to learn. Out of the 4 games we played during Christmas, we had 4 different winners, and each one capitalized on a different strategy. The more relaxed, turn-based play of a board game fits well in a family setting, and was a nice break from faster-paced games of Bomberman and Mario 3 on the Wii’s Virtual Console.
There’s a real lesson here for videogame designers, particularly those pushing hard to attract casual gamers (and who isn’t these days?) The RULES in a game like Settlers or Puerto Rico are complex, but that’s not necessarily a deal breaker. A well-designed game, in any format, has plenty of rules that apply just the right amount of pressure on players. To hold our interest, a game needs to be hard enough to remain challenging throughout a new player’s learning curve (so we don’t feel like an adult playing Candy Land with children), but not dauntingly difficult (so we don’t feel like that guy doing the enormous crossword puzzle in the SkyMall catalog, or anyone that ever played Super Ghouls and Ghosts).
Along with those complex rules, however, are very simple CONTROLS. Obviously, that terminology stretches a little when we’re talking about board games vs. video games, but in either case, the range of player inputs shouldn’t feel like you’re learning a second language. Settlers offers a few actions for each player to use on each turn (trade, purchase, roll) and the entire game neatly fits within that framework. By contrast, every second of a game of Halo presents the player with an astounding number of choices, so the barrier for entry is significantly higher for rookie players.
The brilliance of a game like Settlers is it marries the rules and controls that govern the game to a fairly simple storyline, so each player’s role makes sense in the loose “story” that’s unfolding on the board. Further, the story makes all of Settlers’ rules easier to grasp, and easier to see how the individual player decisions affect the game.
As stories in games get more and more sophisticated, control schemes and rules shouldn’t have to. Epic found an elegant compromise with their context-sensitive, all-purpose action button in Gears of War, and it looks like Metal Gear Solid 4 will boast a simplified control scheme that remaps action buttons based on circumstances. Mario Galaxy introduced a ton of new rules, with different gravity on quite a few of the planets in each level, and I never felt like it snuck up on me, or was a cheap way to up the difficulty in some stages.
Hopefully the new generation of game developers hasn’t entirely forgotten gaming’s roots and plays a new board game once in a while. After all, there are only so many original Nintendo and Commodore 64 games that a developer can draw inspiration from.
