Designing Worlds With Brian Mitsoda
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What are the most important setting elements, what must be done right?
Your setting must support and amplify the goals of your design. Sometimes designers really want to work in a certain setting because they have a design idea in mind that would work really well with it. Sometimes they think a setting is (cool) and then spend three or more years of their lives trying to shoehorn a design into it. Clearly, one of these is the path of least resistance, which is generally favorable.
Usually good designs can work in multiple settings. I think generally you want the design to be helped by the setting, rather than work despite it. For example, if you're emphasizing a serious real world setting and your human character jump kicks a tank to pieces or does battle with a telepath who can only be beaten by plugging your controller into the second slot, your (serious real world) game setting starts to become more unbelievable, and even if the mechanics are fun, you've undermined any authenticity you were going for. However, solid mechanics coupled with the right setting can boost appeal. I mean, Civilization has fantastic mechanics, but the historical trappings give it context and accessibility that games with similar mechanics like Master of Magic and Master of Orion didn't have, and they weren't as successful (but man do I still love them).
As with everything, if you want your setting to be somewhat intriguing, be consistent. If you're doing a realistic cop game and three-thirds through you introduce enemy magic robots and civil war ghosts, you not only impact the fun some of the players derived from taking down criminals, but you totally succeed in destroying the player's feeling that they're Dirty Harry, Jimmy McNulty, or even Abe Vigoda as Detective Fish. Similarly, if you were playing a Madden game and the opposing team summoned Bahamut, it kind of ruins the feeling that you're coaching an NFL football team.
Your setting should enforce a mood and give some logical boundaries for the world, and if possible, some justification for your character's motivations. For example, in System Shock, the mood is isolation, imprisonment, horror. Player's motivation? Everyone's dead, no one's coming any time soon to help you way out on a space station, and the AI will kill you (and human life as we know it) if you sit around and play Wing Commander on your cybernetic interface. Featuring a very novel setting, Bully has a 15-year old kid new to a private school as a protagonist, so of course, you live in a dorm, you form relationships with the various cliques, and the (missions) are structured around classes and classic teenage hijinks as the main character progresses through the school year.
And settings can have different gameplay expectations pick one and go with it. Example ninjas have a reputation for being both unseen and extremely deadly. Both Tenchu (some of them) and Ninja Gaiden both do the ninja setting well, except one takes the path of ninjas should neither be seen nor heard, and the other goes for the ninjas should be seen covered in the viscera of their enemies and foretold by the distant screams of a thousand scrubs. If you're doing giant robots, there's an expectation that it either controls like a simulator (Mechwarrior, Steel Battalion) or an arcade/action game (Virtual On, Shogo) but you're not easily going to marry a control scheme to the setting that appeals to both the action and simulation fan.
So if you have a type of gameplay in mind, weigh the setting carefully. Fit the setting to the gameplay so that it enhances and nurtures it. If setting is to gameplay in a game to what setting is to plot in a movie, then an Old West setting could be anything from the Wild Bunch to Young Guns to the Apple Dumpling Gang that is, it's a broad idea with the potential to go any number of ways. If the setting (or the story) is the game idea or pitch, it's probably not going to turn out well, in the same way that genre has nothing to do with the quality of the gameplay.
Disclaimer Answering these questions is fun but a tad depressing they're good questions, but it's a bit like philosophy in that they are ideals that exist in a vacuum. Like in philosophy, someone might argue that if your society produces widgets and all ten people each produce and share ten widgets, that everyone will have one widget, therefore ensuring equality or something, but in reality there's going to be one person just can't wrap their head around the widget machine and another who's going to knock out one of the other guys, take his widget, and proclaim, (I'm the richest widget motherfucker in the world, bitches!) I guess I don't see this caveat enough in papers on design that is, it's all bullshit until you can play it. If it helps, cool, but design is never a constant. End Disclaimer
