Follow the Fun

In Idle Thumbs, Alex Ashby muses about a presentation by Jonathan Smith, development director at Giant Interactive Entertainment. He quotes:

"...The moment of genius for Giant was to realize that they didn't have to be restricted by either Star Wars or Lego, but could keep the iconic ingredients of both. The chronology of the films would be followed, but elements would be mixed. You could play through episode one as General Grievous if you wanted or episode two as Qui-Gon Jinn. Why? Because it's Lego and that's what you do when you play with Lego, you mix things around, take bits from one set and put them in another. But, conversely, the rules of Lego wouldn't always be adhered to either. Characters can bend and twist and have their capes billow dramatically around them, and dismantling and reassembling objects in the game will be simple one-step procedures. Why? Because that's more fun!"

Yup, that's it in a nutshell. That's what I've been teaching ever since I started teaching games. The wisdom of games, in three words: follow the fun. Lego is a tool used to pretend with. The fun of Lego isn't in being able to do it right, it's in being able to do it your way. And the fun of Star Wars: believing the characters, the stories, the vividly imagined possibilities. And between them, between those two kinds of fun, lies the game.

But how do you play with Legos on the computer? How do you play, Lego-like or watching Star Wars-like? As our friends Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Muska Mosston will tell you, it's got to be as easy as you need it to be and as hard as you want to make it be.

Ashby continues

"...Giant discovered that a game which was more appealing to the children was also more appealing to everyone else. This is precisely the point that Smith has been pushing throughout his entire speech: making this game has been all about giving the player fun on top of more fun. No tortuous dialogue to read though, no exasperating punishments for mistakes made. Simple gameplay for those who want simplicity and deeper challenging gameplay for those who want to be challenged. Lego Star Wars is, by experienced gamer standards, an admittedly easy game, but that doesn't detract from how successfully it has embraced a love of freedom, exploration and generally playing around while maintaining a linear direction."