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FUTURE GAME DESIGN CHALLENGES

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 Future Game Design Challenges

Chapter 10

FUTURE GAME DESIGN CHALLENGES
Ibrahim Ahmad

10.1 INTRODUCTION
This chapter’s main intent is to delineate on future game design challenges.
Before getting further, we need to grasp what is a game design. Video game
industries have been growing at an absurd rate in the past years and leading
up to the number of careers pertaining to the creation of video games
increasing exponentially. Making an amplifying number of educational
institutes offering courses of game design to the students who pronounced
to take their passion for playing video games and turning it into a career
in game design. After all, designing video games as a living is like a dream
come true for most gamers, because obviously who will pass up on the
opportunity to immerse themselves into an enjoyable, fun work environment
and a high starting salary? Students who study game design will be on their
way to a career that thrives on creativity and imagination (Anonymous).
As to resolve the question: what is game design? Game design is an
important subset of the field of video games development that shapes how
the game is going to be like. It starts with ideas that will be further refined
into complex details on the transforming the said ideas into a working video
game. Game design is a large field; drawing from the fields of computer
science, computer programming, creative writing, and graphic design. As a
game designer, they take the creative lead in imagining and breathe life to
video game stories, characters, gameplay, rules, interfaces, dialogues, and
environment. Therefore, making game designers a cross between a writer,
artist, and programmer.

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Although game design can be done purely on paper, it cannot be

considered as a total art project. A pure art project needs to be translated
into a working game using suitable tools and technology. You may find
some books that cover game design focusing on algorithms, programming,
and technology, but the finished game still requires proper designs of
characters, asset, and gameplay. After all, the quality of game design relies
on user perception and satisfaction.

10.2 FUTURE GAME DESIGN CHALLENGES

Now that we have clarified what is game design, we will discuss the future
game design challenges. Nowadays, game developing industry has grown so
much to the point that games are developed by almost everyone. Although
this can be seen as a positive thing for the industry, most of the games
created are mediocre and not very good. This is because the society and
community that engage themselves with games are constantly evolving and
requires more improvement on the games developed to be purely satisfied.
Therefore, game developers have to tackle a variety of challenges of game
design in the aspects of gameplay, user interface, story writing, and game
purpose to further improve future games.

10.2.1 Gameplay
In game design, gameplay can be considered as one of the necessary
components required to make a game, mainly because without gameplay,
there would barely be any content for the players to dive into and explore.
As of today, many games produced have evolved so much over the years in
terms of the gameplay that they offer to players. Gaming industries all over
the world strive to improve the overall quality of their games on a regular
basis. Quality in gameplay is arguably crucial for a game to be considered
as good. These are a few aspects of gameplay that are considered to be the
future challenge of game design.

• Depth
Depth is one of the important aspects of gameplay that developers
need to take special care of. The reason being is because depth allows
players to explore what they can do in the game by using creativity

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and imagination while following the rules of the game. However, it also
comes with complexity, forcing players to memorize and experiment
with the moves to really bring out the depth that the game offers. This
is also a downside as depth depends on how far the players can go to
create different outcomes with limited rulesets. If the player is incapable
of utilizing it, then simply put, there is less depth in a game than it was
originally intended to be. This does not apply to the game itself, only
certain groups of players.

• Complexity
Complexity is more or less similar to tools. The more tools you have,
the more time you will need to learn how to use each of them. It is
a procedure in which a player has to go through where they have to
understand ‘how to play the game’ and work through it to proceed
further. A game is complex when a lot of tutorials and information have
to be read and played through over the course of the game. This does
not mean that it will affect the players negatively. If the guide given is
easily comprehensible and easy to catch on, then it will actually benefit
the players and reduce their mental burden. However, if a game ends
up in a stage where their majority of players have difficulty in learning
the basics, then it most likely too complex.

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Game artificial intelligence become more challenges to implement
in a game as we entering a new era where gamers expect more from
the game industry to create more realistic games. These approach to
the implementation of emotion has the main objective to increase the
gamer's immersion into the game. One of the challenges is to make the
NPCs have an advanced level of perceptions as they must react to every
event that happens around them which could affect their emotional
state. Developers need to come up with new AI functions. One of the
necessary goals of AI innovation must be to enhance gameplay while
maintaining or improving game efficiency. Another challenge for
AI is to create intelligent agents that change their behavior based on
interactions with the environment, becoming more proficient in their
tasks over time, and adapting to new situations as they occur.

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• Multiplayer
Multiplayer compatibility is one of the game designs that is loved by
society but very difficult to be implemented in a game by the developers.
“From the network protocols through to the storage and representation
of game artifacts on remote servers, the approach to implementation
taken by a game developer will inevitably influence the rules of a game
and dictate the type of games possible. The enabling technologies
responsible for managing game state across multiple-player consoles
dictate what a player can and cannot do in an online virtual world.
Considering that some online games may take many teams of developers
covering many skill sets (e.g., networking, graphics, databases, clustered
computing) a number of years to produce, realizing the ramifications
on game rules even the smallest change to implementation may cause
is difficult to judge” (Morgan, 2009).

• Game Technology
The past few years have brought about 3D technology, motion controls,
and virtual reality. “Decades ago, when games were simply pixels
across a static background, we might not have believed that these
technologies were possible, especially in our lifetimes.” (Brandon,
2017). These technologies will soon be thought to be old and need to be
upgraded in order to maintain user’s interests in games such as what
happened when they upgraded 2D graphics into 3D graphics. Not only
they make the game more vivid and beautiful but also made it more
interesting and enable users to immerse themselves completely into the
game. Therefore, in order to keep the audiences attracted and engaging
themselves in the game industry, developers need to figure out a new
form of technology that can improve the overall game design in the
future.

10.2.2 User Interface

Another challenge of a game design lies in the user interface (UI) aspect.
Before we get into details, a better understanding of a user interface is
first required. To put it in a simple way, the user interface is a means of
communication between the game and the players. In a video game, the user
interface is separated into two parts where the first is where players input
their chosen action or command into the game. The second part is when

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the game displayed the command of the players as an output. Based on the
given definition, we can arrive at the conclusion that user interface is needed
in every game.
The main challenges of the user interface are to prioritize what
is important and what is not. The ease of accessing each item should be
proportional to how often it must be accessed. The statement above explains
how important information should be display first so that the player will
not be confused between a useful information and not so useful information.
Other challenges that can be taken into consideration is the accessibility
of the user interface to the players. A question may arrive whether is the
interface for everyone? Or is it targeted for a specific range of people? The
answer for that is “yes” most game interface is not suitable for all player.
The reason being is because the most user interface designer does not take
players condition into consideration.

10.2.3 Story Writing

Many games produced nowadays lack a great storyline because of a small
number of story writers in the game industry; a challenge that the games
industry needs to overcome. There are not many story writers that will want
to commit their life into writing a script or a story just for the sake of a game.
This is mainly because as a story writer they have a wider field of industries
they could be working on which rewards them a lot better such as a novelist,
a film scriptwriter or comic book writer.
The next challenge here is that without a great storyline, games
created will be boring and less interesting compared to games that have
such impactful and immersive storyline that could pull audiences interest
easily. Therefore, creativity and fresh ideas are needed to be implemented
or else the lifespan of the game will reduce drastically due to the lack of new
contents in a storyline. This also relates to the originality of the storyline in
a game due to recycled ideas with hashing out a few details here and there
just to make profits out of a new game. Nowadays most games, adventure
games, and role-playing games especially, resemble each other so much that
users barely have the chance to tell them apart!

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10.2.4 Game Purpose

“The purpose of any game is first to benefit all those who have opted-in.
Even though the game may seem dysfunctional from the outside, the players
all get something from playing in it. There is thus an underlying ulterior
purpose.” (Anonymous). One of the challenges is about designing games
as a ‘serious game’. Serious games, unlike their entertainment only, uses
pedagogy to infuse instruction into the gameplay experience. Some examples
of the usage of serious games are for educational tools and recruiting tools.
While, research has shown that entertainment games are able to promote
meaningful learning through providing players with an adaptive challenge,
curiosity, self-expression, discovery, immediate feedback, clear goals,
player control, immersion, collaboration, competition, variable rewards,
and low-stakes failure. “All these game design elements align well with
established learning theories such as social constructivism and flow theory.”
(Anderson, 2011). However, designing games for specific purposes present
an interdisciplinary challenge, as it requires a deep understanding of game
design theory, knowledge of the aimed topic, and a foundation in relevant
learning theories.

10.3 CONCLUSION
As presented in earlier sections, future game design challenge may exist in a
variety aspects of game design. We have discussed how current situation in
each aspect serve as a barrier that held the progression of game designing.
It is the duty of game developers to overcome each barrier to advance game
designing into a new generation of consumers. After all, the quality of game
design relies on user perception and satisfaction.

10.4 REFERENCES
Anonymous. What is Game Design. Retrieved from https://www.internationalstudent.
com/study-game-design/what-is-game-design/

Morgan, G. (2009). Challenges of Online Game Development: A Review, Sage. Retrieved

from https://research.ncl.ac.uk/game/research/publications/87445d01.pdf

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Jones, B. (2017, January 19). What Will the Future of Video Games Be Like. Retrieved
from https://www.psafe.com/en/blog/will-future-video-games-like/

Anonymous. Game Purposes. Retrieved from http://changingminds.org/

explanations/behaviors/games/game_purpose.htm

Arsenault, D. (2009). Video game, genre, evolution and innovation, Eludamos.

Journal for Computer Game Culture, 3(2), 149-176. Retrieved from http://
www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/viewArticle/65

Anderson, S. (2011, January). Seductive interaction design: Creating playful fun, and
effective user experiences (voices that matter), New Riders. Retrieved from
http://brunonunes.kinghost.net/ebooks/0321725522.pdf

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