Everyone knows about gameplay pillars, but these usually take the forms of statements, and they are often too abstract to be useful. For example, saying “over the top, engaging action gameplay” really doesn’t get you any closer to your objective. More than a decade ago I had the minor but useful revelation that phrasing pillars as questions made conveying a vision for the game much easier to internalize for me and for the team. These questions encourage understanding of what the pillar requires.

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For example, I might include a pillar such as “Is this Southern Gothic?” and then follow the question with a short list that highlights the nature of the genre. In this case I could say “melodramatic storylines, exaggerated characters, flirts with magical realism, is set in the South, almost always ends tragically after a lot of suffering.” To cover the bases, I would create a presentation that goes more in depth about Southern Gothic with lots of photographic and video examples and literary references, then record the presentation and make the video and the document available on the network. The beauty of this approach is that people ask themselves the questions before asking me if their ideas for content or features are good for the game. For me this seems to have greatly cut down on the need to explain why inappropriate (though usually fun) ideas don’t fit into the big picture and I am able to spend more time on reviewing work in the game or whatever aspect of the project that I am interested in creating myself.

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For the curious, I’ve found that four “pillars as questions” works best for me in terms of defining a vision. The trick is to arrange them in order of importance from “must answer ‘yes’ to this question” to “answer ‘yes’ to this question if possible.” A natural byproduct of the approach is that any proposed content or feature that answers “yes” to all questions is obviously more important to include than something that only answers “yes” to a single question.

 

Another revelation: I realized that my most successful games focused on a single emotion. Certainly, one includes other emotions for verisimilitude of life, but every opportunity to create content, systems or mechanics that reinforce the thematic emotion builds memorable experiences for the player. And as a pleasant side effect, this approach becomes the invisible hand guiding the entire project. When paired with the Four Questions technique I outline above, I believe chances for success improve dramatically. And though I focused on a single emotion subconsciously early in my career, the results were the same: I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream focused on despair. SOCOM focused on camaraderie or esprit de corps. South of Midnight pursued hope. For the first two games, they had success on release but have become generational, still being rediscovered and played today on modern devices. For the latter, I suspect its message will remain relevant for generations to come.