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The Interesting Thing About Bishops: Simulation Boundaries in Splinter Cell
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The Interesting Thing About Bishops: Simulation Boundaries in Splinter Cell,
2530

Game Design, Lecture

Clint Hocking
Creative Director, Ubisoft Divertissements Inc
Monolith's Craig Hubbard once observed; "In real life, bishops can go anywhere they want. In chess, they can only move diagonally."
This statement illustrates a fundamental concept in game design: we must make decisions about what aspects of our fictional world will be open to player interaction and what aspects of that world will be closed off. Like bishops in chess who have illusory freedom to move over the entire board, we want the player feel he has access to the entire world, while at the same time carefully limiting him to only a portion of it. Our ability to create rules and systems that disguise the difference between the 'black squares and the white' will directly impact the player's enjoyment of the game and his feelings of agency in the game world.
Using Splinter Cell to illustrate both successful and unsuccessful approaches, this lecture looks at ways to create a complex world that runs deeper than the surface of the game's interaction model without leaving the player feeling like he's watching the game instead of playing it.

Attendees leave with a better understanding of where, why, and how to draw the line between systems that should be included in a game and those that should be left in the backdrop.

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