Let's now discuss the design side of the game world. To do this, we'll break the game world into the following dimensions, including the physical dimension, the temporal dimension, the environmental dimension, the emotional dimension, and the ethical dimension. As I discuss these dimensions as a thought activity, I want you to pick a game that exists, that you know very well. Pick something that's a little deeper, don't just pick a simple arcade game or a simple puzzle game, but pick something like an adventure game, a role-playing games, or real-time strategy game, something that you know very well once again. Then think about the dimensions of your game in particular, to ground the concepts that I'm discussing. Go ahead and pick that game now. Let's start with the physical dimension. The physical dimension defines the area the player plays within. You can think of this as the game board, the game level, or the game map. The physical dimension is further defined by the games dimensionality, scale, and boundaries. Let's talk about each of these. When I think about the dimensionality of the game world, I immediately think is the games graphics 2D or 3D? This is a very important decision that often has more to do with the technology you're using and the team skill set than anything else. But from a game design perspective is probably more important to think about the conceptual dimensions of the game. For example, in a game like SimCity, there are the dimensions of the zoning of the land as residential, industry, or commercial. There's the road system dimension, there's the electrical system dimension, and so on. These conceptual dimensions all enhance the game world, but they do not directly relate to the game being 2D or 3D. For example, the first few versions of SimCity were built entirely on 2D engines, even though they were multidimensional games. Another important aspect of the physical dimension is the scale of the game world. One way to think about scale is to think about the size of the physical game world. For example, many classic arcade games were single screen games. That is, the player can see the entire game world they are playing within at one time. This is still a popular approach for many puzzle games today. Beyond single screen games, there are scrolling screen games, where the world is bigger than a single screen the player can see, and as the player moves, the world scrolls to the left, to the right, up and/or down. Of course, there are 3D world games where the player can move in x, y, and z directions. As the scale of the world expands, it may require you to create multiple views on the world, such as a minimap to see the overall world and a zoomed in view on specific objects to control them or offer direct commands to those objects. I've been talking about the overall scale of the game world, but there are also the scale of the objects in the world and the relationship between those objects. For example, look at the screenshot from this 1985 game called Ultima IV. You can see how primitive the graphics were at this time. The player character is represented in the middle. You can see grasslands around him, forest, water, as well as a town and a city. What is strange about the scale of the objects in this screenshot? Why do you think they implemented the scale of the objects in this way? There are many reasons to distort GameObjects. In the example of Ultima IV, certainly there were technological limitations. For example, there were not enough pixels to represent the characters, so they scaled them up, so you can tell he was a humanoid character. But size distortions are used by designers even in modern games when there are no such technological limitations. This is done to emphasize critical objects such as keys over non-critical objects, or to make the game more functional. On a small touchscreen, for example, you may need to make an element larger so they're more tappable. There are also numerous other gameplay reasons to distort sizes. Okay, we've talked about the dimensionality and scale of the physical dimension. Let's finish up talking about the physical dimension by discussing boundaries. I spoke about boundaries earlier, but let's now look at it from a game world design perspective. It's often not practical or even desirable to make your game world infinite. Therefore, you need to create boundaries for the player. The question is, how do you define these boundaries? Let's look at the classic board game, Risk, as an example. How are boundaries defined in Risk? Well, we have the boundaries between countries, the ocean creates a natural boundary between the continents, and the designers added artificial crossing points to enable gameplay, like, for example, between Brazil and West Africa. Of course, the world is a sphere and not a flat surface, despite what some people think. This is signified through a wraparound connection between Alaska and Eastern Russia on the game board. This demonstrates many of the types of boundaries we see in games today. We have natural boundaries like mountains and water that the player can not cross, we have unnatural boundaries, such as walls of buildings or maybe edges of roads that the player can not deviate from. We have wrap around worlds where the world is treated as a sphere like we saw in Risk. We have the concept of out-of-bounds. This is used often in sports games where there is a defined field or defined course that you're playing upon. Then we also just have the edge of the world where the player is literally stopped from proceeding in a direction, often by an invisible barrier. This is the least desired, as it could break the players lusory attitude if they'd run into an invisible wall. As a thought activity, take a few minutes to think about, discuss, and document the physical dimensions of your chosen game. Think in particularly, about the dimensions of the game, the scale of the game and the objects within that game, and the boundary conditions of the game. Of course, you could describe these things through maps and diagrams or descriptive text.
