Surprising Design: The Walls Are Not Cheese

I love being surprised a by a game's design. Since I play a lot of games for work, many of which are based on traditional formats, it's becoming more and more rare for a game to have an element that feels totally new or just unexpected. But when it does happen, it's delightful.

At GDC a week ago I met Loren Schmidt, creator of the awesome Star Guard, an IGF finalist from 2010. While working through my stack of business cards I visited his site and discovered another game of Loren's I played quite awhile ago, and had forgotten all about: The Walls Are Not Cheese.



Like Star Guard, The Walls Are Not Cheese is a very lo-fi game paired with very modern design sensibilities. You are the purple square, and clicking fires a purple bullet in that direction which takes out chunks of the not-cheese walls so you can advance through barriers. You can also kill blue squares, which is good since some of them shoot back.

So in the first couple levels the game teaches you to kill blue squares, avoid red-filled pits, and to shoot through barriers where necessary to get at an enemy or make a hole for yourself. Around this point I've realized that I do in fact have limited ammo. As if on queue, the game teaches you how to replenish it:

 "Aha," I thought when I saw that, "I vaguely remember this from when I played it before." So I blasted a hole in the floor, pressing shift as I fall, and I was completely surprised when this happened:

 The text was made of the same not-cheese bits as everything else! Totally surprising, and yet completely sensible. The text and the bits share the same color in a game that only has about five colors. The game wasn't trying to be sneaky about it, it was just there.

In a sound design class I took in college we learned about diegetic vs. non-diegetic sounds. Diegetic sound originates in the fictional space of the movie, like the music playing on the jukebox in a bar scene. The tense, moody soundtrack that plays over the movie when the killer is sneaking around in a hot girl's house is non-diagetic: it doesn't originate in the fictional space of the movie.

Games have these two spaces as well, even more so than most media since there is a great deal of information that is communicated directly to the player but not the player's character, like the whole user interface. Jesper Juul, in his book "The Casual Revolution," notes that one of the primary differences between 'casual' and 'hardcore' games is that casual games tend to communicate reward through screen space (Like the rainbow and cascading point values at the end of a Peggle level), and hardcore games through game space (like how satisfying it is to blow up red barrels and tanks in Battlefield: Bad Company 2).

But this moment in The Walls Are Not Cheese is surprising because it crosses this boundary. The message on the wall is meant for the player, but the character interacts with and actually benefits from it. In the same way a soundtrack can link together two scenes in different places by playing across them, moments like this one break down the barrier between the player and the character. The result is immersion, if not in the narrative space of the game than in the play space, a tightening of the connection between my actions and the purple square's actions.

This kind of attention to detail is what I'm talking about when I say Loren's game's have a very modern design sense. It's also a strong argument for the role of game design in the player's emotional reaction to a game. Most titles rely on visuals to carry the emotional weight of the game, but this is maybe only the easiest, and emptiest approach. To a viewer those screens may look like blocky pixels and flat areas, but to the player they are plenty alive.