Arcade Berg Game Designer

Wanting to make it harder than it is

When playing Scribblenauts I constantly find myself trying to make each and every scenario harder than it has to be. And it’s fun!

I’ve spent a few hours with Scribblenauts for the Nintendo DS. A game that instantly became one of my all time favorite handheld games. It’s brilliant.

The game in itself is a designers dream, really. If you don’t know about it, I recommend reading up on it or checking some video review.

Summary, coming up:

You’re Maxwell and your mission is to get your hands on a Starite (a star) on every level. Either by simply reaching it, or by solving a puzzle; depending on if it’s an action level or a puzzle level.

The amazing mechanic however, is that you can bring up a keyboard and write any word in it, and it will spawn in the game world. And the crazy thing is, it has a huge amount of words hidden in there. I’ve spawned “laser sword”, “tranquilizer gun”, “wings”, “behemoth”, “ninja”, “shuriken”, “Kraken” and so on… And so on… And so on…

Each thing has a behavior, so you can attack with weapon, shoot with guns, drive vehicles, etc. If you write “hunter” and then “bear”, the hunter will kill the bear.

And yes, you can write “maid” to have her clean up and then type “shotgun”, grab it and kill her. Amazing, isn’t it?

The game in itself is worth all the attention it is getting. I, like many other developers are thinking:

- Why didn’t I think of that! Daaaamn you, 5th Cell!

You could chop it down with an "axe", use a "chain saw" or why not tie it to a "helicopter" with a "rope"?

But(!) the thing that I find really interesting with this game is how I, and most other people play it.

For example, there is one level where the mission is to reunite a cat on a rooftop with a girl standing on the ground.

An obvious, working and easy way to do this would be to simply type “ladder”, climb up to the cat, pick it up and carry it down to the girl.

Did I do that? Of course not! I tried a ton of stuff, like using dynamite to simply destroy the house. Unfortunately, the cat died and I failed. I used a “fan”, placed it on the roof and had the cat blown down. You can use a “helicopter” to get there. Or why not a “jetpack”?

I know I’m not alone in pondering on how to finish the level in a cool, interesting, unnecessary complex or just not an “obvious” way. That’s what makes the game fun for us.

You can’t really “beat the game” (don’t confuse this with finishing it, which you can) because we’re encouraged to try out these mad ideas.

This shows that if you give the player a big enough playing field, there’s a good chance for him to have fun on his own without constant pampering from the game’s creator. This is also often the case with games including a lot of physics, where the player is likely to play around with that, finding different solutions for a given problem.

It’s a fantastic thing, when players start having fun in a game when it’s not just by progressing in it. It’s more of play than a game.

Scribblenauts isn’t the only game that empowers this behavior, but it’s the game that does it best in a very long time! To be completely honest, right now I can’t think of any other game that does it as well.

PS.

The two funniest words I’ve found out yet are:

1. Longcat – If you’re a lolcatz-fan and is familiar with 4chan, this one will crack you up!
2. Ninjashark – It’s a friggin’ Ninja Shark! That is just pure awesomenesss!