Games, Games: Dear Esther

How do you make an interesting game? Or, to pose a better question, how do you make an interesting concept that translates well into a fun and playable game? The answer comes from many places, and according to many designers, from many varying inspirations. However, my professor, Eric Zimmerman, has laid out a general spread of concepts that would be useful to any game designer, outlined in his textbook Rules of Play. In Rules of Play, Eric talks about a variety of topics that relate directly to games, such as rules, play, and culture. Through the various topics, he gives designers a core set of concepts to make designing more of a streamlined creative process rather than a haphazard amalgamation of techniques.

Let's take a look at indie games. Many indie games are based off of experimental ideas, such as Minecraft's sandbox world or Dear Esther's story telling experience. The designers of these games make conscious choices to include or not include specific gameplay norms established by the AAA part of the games industry.

Dear Esther

Rules
Dear Esther abandons combat, platforming, and other forms of interaction with the game environment. The players are not allowed to sprint, to jump, to pick anything up, to swim, to fight, or to interact with the environment in any way except looking and walking. They are limited by these simples rules that cannot be violated in order to enhance the aspects that the designer wants the player to pay more attention to. The rules exist for the players. They exist as systems of emergence, information theory, game theory and more. All of these rules come together in context to help create the experience of.....

Play
As the players explore the deserted island in the only way they can, they listen to anecdotes and vignettes of various people and of your deceased wife, Esther. They find haunting and lonely beaches filled with the wreckage of ships and the bones of long dead animals. While they are moving and experiencing the island at the very deliberate pace set by the game, they find rolling but empty plains filled with strange standing stones. As the players hear the complement of melancholy violins, piano keys, and cello, they find immense, hollow caverns with glowing drawings on the walls. Play is not only an experience, but it is pleasurable and meaningful, it is a narrative, a simulation, and social.The experience is the entire island (read game), while the players take pleasure in seeing the vistas and listening to the music or hearing the anecdotes. Meaning is derived from the narrative and the simulation of exploration, while the players are social in their lives and talk about the game itself.

Culture
All of these design choices and all of the pieces of play come together to form the culture of a game. To quote Rules of Play, “No game is an island.” (503) Games exist to be played by many people, and even solitary games can be social because of the people playing them. Games are also not only a magic circle in which players can play and explore, because they are embedded within culture and society. Dear Esther was created as a mod and due to that, its community was an offshoot of the Half Life community. However, it quickly spiraled into something new and branched off and created its own culture, with people discussing the game’s narrative structure, the meaning of its narrative, and more. The culture of Dear Esther is rooted in the relationship between the game and the larger context of where, how, and when it is played.


Eric Zimmerman is a game designer and former CEO of the now dysfunct Gamelab. He has taught at many schools, including MIT and currently at the NYU Game Center as a founding faculty member. He also founded the Institute of Play, a non-profit organization that creates schools based on games and play as a model for learning. Eric has also written Rules of Play, a game design text book about the fundamentals of game design, and is currently using it in his class, which I am currently taking. I'd like to give a huge thanks to Eric for being so amazing, and inspiring me to take design head on and with a better mindset than what I had previously, and for teaching me a few of the many nuggets of wisdom that he has to share.

Dear Esther is an award winning indie game that is trying to break the boundaries of what a game is. It has polarized critics and players alike in a way that few game can with its abandonment of traditional gameplay elements and although many gamers hate it for the wrong reasons, others love it for the immersive storytelling experience that only a game like Dear Esther can allow. It was created from the culture of gaming and has opened up new doors for designers to explore, expand, and branch off into.