Unfold Your Game I - Progression

#GameDesign #Persona5

How to effectively extend the gameplay of my game? This is almost a common issue for many game makers (and perhaps film people and music composers, too) who have less understanding of the fact that games are a form of time art, or temporal art.

What is temporal art? Music, novel, film, game, or those who need a certain period to unfold itself over the time axis. By doing this, a piece of temporal art, like a song, a film, and a game, takes an irrevocable period off the audience's life. Therefore, the audience tends to have much less tolerance to boring temporal art pieces than spatial art pieces: you can accept a mediocre painting on the wall of your living room forever, but you are very unlikely to accept spending 4 hours watching a very bad movie--that's why we need IMDB.

Having understood this, we'll be able to conclude that, the mission of a temporal artist is to provide high-quality time segments. And because games are a form of temporal art, that is also game designers' true job. Failing to do so leads to the issue I am talking about in this article: maliciously extending the play time of a game.

This phrase was initially from my friend Eadmond, who's now a gameplay engineer at Roblox.com. He was referring to the behavior that many online / AAA games just crammed repetitive game content into one game, disregarding the quality and fitness of such content. In order to get all trophies (AAA games) or beat rivals (online games), the player has to play through similar tasks, kill similar enemies, fight similar battles over and over again. It is really torturing. That's why it is called "maliciously extending play time".

Now I will put two examples here: Persona 5, and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This is to demonstrate how to avoid such issue in future game design.

Persona 5 - Using Proper Systematic Progression (very slight spoiling)

The first way to avoid such issue is by using proper and systematic progression. Persona 5 shows us there are so many ways of game progression, not only the player's numeric abilities or special skills which have been so abused in almost every RPG. In Persona 5, every game element (including game rules such as "you can not tame a

Persona whose level is higher than you) could evolve in a systematic way to give a game extra depth.

As the game goes on, here is the list of important elements that change accordingly:

• Game rules

• Game narrative

• Teammates

• Game characters' roles

The first item, game rules, is worth elaborating. Normally a game's rules do not change with progression. However, in Persona 5, it does. In the beginning, you feel the game rules are stiff: for instance, you can not tame a Persona of a higher level, you can not use your gun to hit enemy down if it resists gun attack, you can not directly kill a shadow merely by touching it, etc. But as you go further into the game, all the rules are breakable. How? By enhancing the social link to your teammates or confidants. This is exactly the narrative theme "be together to rebel against social injustice", too. That's why I said previously in this article, this is a "systematic way": because the change of the game system is closely expressed around the core idea "be together to rebel against social injustice".

So the construction of Persona 5 can be concluded as below:

Everything goes around the core idea "be together to rebel against social injustice", including its game system design/evolving pattern, game music (acid jazz, very radical in many aspects compared to traditional game music), game character costume, game story, even game UI.

To wrap up: Persona 5 solved this issue by proper systematic progression. "Proper" means the changes were carefully designed to keep the player in the flow state. "Systematic" means the changes are closely connected to each other, or going around a core idea.

In the next section, I will discuss the recent release of Zelda.

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