Game Guts

But whenever and wherever you start the story, the end is still far, far away. Video games have developed a level of sophistication in conception, execution, and analysis to rival any other popular art form. And they have developed a complicated set of elemental genres, mechanics, and constraints — a set of ideas that have become the DNA of contemporary video games — that are worth exploring. 

And in every major era and at every significant turning point in the history of video games, there have been LSA alumni, students, and faculty making, selling, writing, and thinking about games, finding sucess by paying close attention to what it feels like to play a game and by taking the people who play games — and the games themselves — seriously.

MEET LUSIA!

Our video game avatar comes in many forms and styles over the course of this story—and that variety can be seen vividly below—but her main costume is that of a hoplite, a member of a heavy infantry unit from ancient Greece. The hoplite armor is a nod to the Hellenic origins of the liberal arts. (Also, the name “Lusia” includes the letters L, S, and A…but you probably already noticed that!)

The Sandbox

It’s 1987. Three Men and a Baby is blowing up the box office. “Walk Like an Egyptian” is on your radio. And if you’re at all into video games, Sid Meier’s Pirates! is on your computer.

By the mid-1980s, legendary game designer Sid Meier (B.S. 1975) had transitioned from tinkerer to part-time game builder to hugely successful full-time game developer. He and his longtime business partner, “Wild” Bill Stealey, produced a series of fun games throughout the era that had sold increasingly well: Spitfire Ace, Floyd of the Jungle, F-15 Strike Eagle, and more. Silent Service, a submarine game released for the personal computer in 1985, sold more than 400,000 copies. 

Meier’s company brought on specialized staff, and they gradually expanded the time they spent on each game. Sid Meier’s Pirates! took a whopping nine months to make, which was a lot for Meier’s company MicroProse at the time, and the result — a sprawling, open-world game of intrigue, trading, buccaneering, and exploration — was one of the must-play games of 1987.

One of the ways that Pirates! differentiated itself from its predecessors and competitors was in the scope of the world and what players could do in it. Players could ask themselves: What kind of pirate do I want to be? What do I, as a pirate, care about? You could maximize your gold, letting greed guide you as you stuffed your pockets. Or you could be an explorer, sailing to the edges of the map and landing at every port you could find. Or you could embrace your role as swashbuckler, chasing down buried treasure and engaging in all manner of saber fights and naval battles. This open-world sandbox lets players invent some of their own story within the larger constraints of the game, and pursue that narrative vigorously.

Meier and his team followed Pirates! with the similarly epic Railroad Tycoon, and followed that with th even more ambitious Civilization. That initial entry spawned a number of sequels and spinoffs, most recently 2016's Civilization VI, which sold millions of copies around the world and continues to set the standard for the eon-spanning, globe exploring, socity-building strategy game.

PANDORA'S BOX

Open-world or “sandbox” games encourage exploration and discovery by allowing players the freedom to choose how and when and where they go in a massive game world with minimal constraints. This means that players determine the sequence in which most events happen in a way that’s largely independent of any larger story that’s going on—and sometimes there isn’t any story at all.

It is often described as both a genre and a mechanic that includes sword-and-sorcery titles such as Ultima and Skyrim, action games such as Shenmue, retrofuturistic apocalyptic role-playing games such as Fallout, and more.

Of course, we should note that there is legitimate disagreement over what fundamental elements constitute an open-world game—How nonlinear does the ‘plot’ have to be? How big does the world have to be, seem, or feel?—and that means that any list of examples—even this one—is going to be controversial.

The Loop

For even a simple video game, the variety of challenges and the pleasure of succeeding — the joy of making a series of perfectly timed leaps over open-mouthed alligators, say, or of an exploding turtle shell missile delivered just ahead of the finish line — can keep players interested from level to level and for years after the first time they play. 

These games — in fact, all of the games ever made — are built around something called the core game loop. A core game loop is a set of tasks that players do over and over and over again in the course of a game. In a platformer, for example, the core loop likely involves running, jumping, and smashing blocks or shooting at enemies. 

The challenges usually start out small and get progressively harder as the levels continue. For a platformer, an early level might include springs to bounce on and slow-moving elevators. Later levels might include more complicated and fast-moving challenges, such as disappearing blocks, frictionless platforms, narrow landing areas, and swarms of tough-to-kill bad guys. As players proceed, they are hopefully mastering the actions and sequences of actions in the core game loop, meaning that as they face harder and harder challenges, they have already developed the required skills to eventually overcome those obstacles. 

And LSA alumni have had plenty of global hits built on strong, compelling fundamentals. In Crash Bandicoot, directed by Jason Rubin (A.B. 1993), the core loop involves jumping, doling out smash attacks, and collecting items. In The Sims, whose development was overseen by Lucy Bradshaw (A.B. 1985), the characters' basic actions are quotidian tasks like eating, sleeping, talking, throwing trash in the trash can, and other stuff that you do every day in your real life. For the pulp-and-anime-inspired competitive shooter Overwatch — created by Activision Blizzard, which is run by CEO Bobby Kotick (LSA 1982) — the core game loop relies on a combination of competitive and cooperative actions, which, along with stellar game-play mechanics and over-the-top visuals, combined to make Overwatch a smash hit when it came out in 2016.