The Game Design Canvas: Aesthetic Layout

Photo: Creativity+Timothy K Hamilton

Who cares if the main character is wearing silver armor or an orange cloak?  Does it really matter if your military troop is fighting in Europe or Asia?  There can’t be any difference between a game about saving the world, and one your one true love, right?

It does matter.  In fact it matters a great deal.  The sights and sounds and feeling contribute to the Core Experience of a game like no other part of the game can.  They are what make games a true art form instead of pure science, they are what make games closer to theater than arithmetic, painting than to geometry.  These artistic strokes are the skin that the world will see view the game, its face, its exterior.

Welcome to the fifth and final component of the Game Design Canvas: the Aesthetic Layout.

The Bells and Whistles

Hardcore gamers, and even some game developers, often tend to think of games exclusively as mechanical systems.  This is expected, because these types of people have typically played so many games that they’ve become experts.  Trained to analyze and dissect, they see through the smoke and boil the game down from bells and whistles to gears and oil.  All of the other systems we’ve talked about within the Game Design Canvas, the Base Mechanics, the Punishment and Reward Systems, and the Long Term Incentive, are all of these gears.  And once they see under the hood, they manipulate the gears as much as possible to get what they want.

This process is called “min-maxing” by game developers.  Min-maxing is exerting the minimal amount of effort to get the maximum benefit in a game.  Gamers and game developers are experts at this; they quickly understand the game and then find and implement the optimal path to win.  It’s an old-school mentality that dates back to coin-op games, when the Core Experience of a game was to master the challenge and get the highest score.  There’s nothing wrong with min-maxing, or viewing game design as systems that create interesting min-maxing situations.

However, there are some aspects of games that are more than mechanics and systems.  This final component of the Canvas is what gives the finesse, the real style, the elegance to a game.  What the characters look like, how they sound when the jump or run, the backdrop in oil painting or in gritty photorealism.  The pixel art of the items, or the solemn music as the player approaches the temple.  The cutscenes and movie sequences, the story and plotline, the cover of the game’s box.  Well executed Aesthetics are extra bang that gets a great title noticed and remembered.  Poor executed Aesthetics are the downfall of otherwise incredible experiences.

A game’s Aesthetic Layout is made up of several key subsections.  The first three subsections are found in almost all traditional video games: Visual Design, Audio Design, and Content. The fourth subsection also appears in all games, but most traditional console and PC titles don’t think too much about it: Interaction Design.

Visual Design

The Visual Design of a game is easy to understand and difficult to master.  It is how the game looks: the graphics, the sights, the colors, and pixels on the screen or on the cards in the player’s hand.  Since humans rely on sight more than any other sense, the visual design of a game is vitally important.  It is the most prominent aspect of the game that will appear on posters, advertisements, and the back of the retail box.  The details of the captain’s face and wind-blown hair, the sparkles on the water, or the shine of a solar flare, these are the parts of a game’s visual design.  Little extras that don’t affect the gameplay at all, such as airplanes flying overhead in Call of Duty, add to the player’s gameplay in an important yet indirect way.

Nowadays, this aspect of games is much more open ended than in the past, fueled by advances in technology as well as pioneering art directors through the past three decades.  During the 90’s, the age of Super Nintendo and the first Playstation, developers sought after the holy grail of perfect realism in games: the goal was to make a game that would be indistinguishable from real life.  In the most recent decade, since that goal is nearly achieved on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, developers have been able to branch out a bit more and flex their own style.

Online web games such as Farmville often specialize in high-resolution cartoony images that feel comfortable and easy to understand.  Independent games like Spelunky stick to modified versions of 90’s pixel art in order to give the experience of childhood nostalgia for those who grew up on Nintendo.  Artistic titles such as Okami or Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker focus on highly stylized effects to give the player a sense of wonder.  All of these Visual Designs support the Core Experience of their corresponding games, and maintain a high quality bar for other developers to match or exceed.

The Visual Design of a game says a lot about who will be playing it and what they will expect.  Web games are easy to understand and have simple rules, but they won’t interest someone who is seeking a game of gritty realism like Gears of War.  Thus, it would be a waste of effort to make its art style photorealistic; it’s important to know who will be playing a game when deciding on its Visual Design.  The level of quality of this subsection is important to many players and obvious from the first glance.  Even if the rest of the game is quite solid, players will be reluctant to try out a game if it doesn’t pass their minimum standard of visual design quality.  Visual design is the fastest way that games become dated.

Audio Design

The sounds and music of a game are important.  Taking cues from the film industry, games quickly learned that music could be used to great effect to evoke emotion and immersion in a game.  A soundtrack to the valiant hero galloping towards apparent doom is certainly better experienced with epic strings and trumpets.  A more playful game may use a bippity-boppity child-like music, such as Wii Play: Tanks, bringing the player back to their youth.  Other games such as Resident Evil choose to have dynamic music tracks, changing depending on the action on screen.  Nervous, low music when roaming the dark streets, and frenzied, fast music when monsters burst through the walls.  All of these choices support the Core Experience through the Aesthetic Layout’s Audio Design.

In addition to background music, a game’s audio sound effects play a great role on conveying the world.  Again, in Wii Play: Tanks, Nintendo could have made the tiny tanks sound like the hulking juggernauts of first person shooters.  But instead they gave them sound effects akin to wind-up toys.  This seemingly insignificant touch focuses the target audience of the game, taking it away from people who want to drive a real tank and towards those who want to relive their long gone action figures and plastic vehicles.

Games that are meant to be played over long periods of time probably don’t want to have background music, while games that are meant to be told through story often use background music and sounds to great effect.  Additionally, both Visual and Audio Design can aid the other parts of the Game Design Canvas by signifying when events occur, such as a red screen and beeping heart upon receiving damage.  These are the choices that developers or audio artists need to make.

Content

The Content of the game is the actual characters, the story, the setting and level design.  On the development side, the content is usually thought of as the parts of the game actually input into the code not by engineers, but by designers and producers.  A game’s plot line, whether it is about the overthrow of the evil Ganondorf or the pursuit of a long lost treasure, is part of the Aesthetic Layout’s Content.  This Content sometimes don’t affect the game’s Mechanical systems in any way, yet like other aspects of the Aesthetic Layout, help to narrow who is interested in a game title and who is not.  An RPG that is set in medieval times would not appeal to those who may actually play the same game were it set in modern day high school.

The story and character components of game can be inserted into the game however the developer likes.  A game is built on top of rules and actions that the player performs (The Base Mechanics and P&R Systems), but from there they make their way through the game’s content.  Each level provides new content; a situation that the player hasn’t seen before.  Exactly how important the game’s story, characters, and plot are is up the developer.  Some players like to min-max and skip through all of the story.  Or the developer may choose to simply partition the plot to optional text such as in Braid.  Exactly how important the Content is to the player is decided upon by the team.

Interaction Design

The final subsection of the Aesthetic Layout is Interaction Design, which are the methods and technologies that the player actually interacts with the game.  Whether through button, motion, analog stick, a tennis racquet, or some other device that has yet to be invented, how the player actually interacts with the game is arguably the most important aspect not just of the Aesthetic Layout, but of the entire Game Design Canvas.

Most video games are played with a handheld controller on a television, but the Canvas includes all games, not just video games.  The actual instruments and devices that the player uses to interact with the game are part of the game’s Aesthetic Layout.  Exactly what these devices do is up to the Base Mechanics, and exactly what the consequences of those actions are is up to the Punishment and Reward Systems, but the actual devices themselves is decided here.

As we’ve already said, the classic gaming controller, with two joysticks, a directional pad, and buttons, is only one form of Interaction Design for games.  Nintendo’s Wii remote is an example of a different one, where the player is required to point the remote at the television or wave it around.  Further still from traditional video games is the sport of soccer, where the player is actually kicking a ball and making contact on a field.  Another example is Poker, where the player deals and receives cards and has specific hand gestures that correspond to actions such as a call or fold.  These are all situations where the Interaction Design affects the player’s experience of interacting with the game as well as other players.

Each of these devices and systems give the game a different Aesthetic feel.  It’s up to the developer to decide what kind of Interaction Design they want their game to have, and how that choice enhances or detracts from the game’s Core Experience.  It’s not enough to use a device just because it seems “fun” in a vacuum, for example, asking the player to turn the Wii remote every time the player needs to open a door.  The developer needs to think and realize what that Aesthetic choice is actually doing to the player’s experience.

Importance of Aesthetic Layout to Players

The Aesthetic Layout is the most important component of the Game Design Canvas in terms of getting players to just try your game out.  People with extensive experience in game development, especially design and engineering, tend to ignore the importance of graphics and sound in a game.  But they ignore the importance of the Aesthetic Layout at their own risk.  Many independent developers, for example, pour their heart and soul into creating games with incredibly complex and innovative Base Mechanics.  However, they neglect to consider, research, or even think about the game’s graphics, music, or sound style.  It’s an afterthought, an area not deemed worthy of much innovation, and just copying everyone else is good enough.  Unbeknownst to the developer, this ends up limiting the reception of the game to a small subset of the possible players who would truly find the game appealing.

If you’ll be willing to take a detour from games, one analogy that is applicable here can be found in the music recording industry.  Country music, at least in the United States, has a bit of a stigma outside of the southern states.  Many people frequently claim that they “Listen to all kinds of music…except country.”  While the reasons for this are varied, the market split is very identifiable.  If listeners hear a song that they believe is country, then they will automatically be turned off.  However if it is of another genre that they’re more familiar with, they’ll be open to it.

Record labels and recording artists understand this.  Having a song labeled as “country” has very real effects on the song’s mainstream potential.  Thus, successful artists are very aware of the choices they’re making when producing a song.  They will have decided beforehand what market they want the song to perform well in, and then accommodate in the track.

As a result, you’ll often hear subtle, seemingly meaningless differences in the mainstream and country versions of a popular song.  It can be as simple as replacing a background instrument from a banjo (country) to an electric guitar (mainstream pop).  This is the only change in the song, and yet this small change has severe implications.  Listeners who hear the version with the banjo will, within seconds, deny the possibility that they might enjoy the song.  They are completely closed off to it.  However hearing the same song with the electric guitar is treated like any other pop song, and they evaluate the song fairly like they would any other pop song.

So back to the games industry, it would be beneficial to developers to be aware of the limiting (or expanding) effects that aesthetic layout alone can have on a game’s reception.  It’s a tragedy to see a game with unique Gameplay not even be considered by players because the Aesthetic Layout was goofed.  For example, a game that would appeal to older women, but has the graphics of a 90’s medieval RPG.

Painting Worlds and Inviting Players

The Aesthetic Layout is incredibly important for developers to think about, because it determines a game’s audience.  The images and sound, story and input devices, though seemingly divorced from the rest of the game’s design, greatly affect who will be open minded about a game and who will never give it a chance.  Additionally, it is the artist’s chance to leave their mark on a game, to take something that is just a simple computer program and liken it to a masterpiece painting.  By nurturing these elements to their fullest, game developers can begin to construct and complete their works of art for the world to interact with.

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