Fundamental Challenges Part 1: Timing Challenges

The goal of developing a theory for any art form is to analyze that form and break it down into it's most basic parts. Music Theorists have spent centuries categorizing chords, musical forms, and time signatures. Game Theorists have argued about rational play, and have spent years analyzing the intuitively simplistic but mathematically intensive Prisoner's Dilemma, deriving increasingly complex strategies and situations from the basic game. Game Design by comparison has no established fundamental elements, besides wide sweeping ideas like "The graphics" and "the gameplay".

So far, Game Design books have aimed to deliver a "big picture" look at game design. Jesse Schell does delve into mechanics such as space or chance in The Art of Game Design, but doesn't really dig into any one topic that deeply. Chris Crawford, in The Art of Computer Game Design, almost exclusively looks at the bigger picture of video games as an art form. He focuses on prototyping a perspective of games and discussing how to approach game design. Besides his taxonomy of genres (which is understandably quite out of date), he barely tackles concrete fundamentals. Schell and Crawford are both looking at the big picture, rather than really attempting to investigate the most basic of game "units". I wish to remedy this, by adding my contribution to the study of Game Design as an art and science.

Schell writes that in essence all games are puzzles, or challenges if you will. Here I shall propose a taxonomy of challenge types found within all games (with examples from video games). I actually conceived this taxonomy a couple of years ago, and have been using it to deconstruct games ever since. With this tool in mind, a game designer can easily analyze a game's structure to better understand and augment it. Furthermore this taxonomy make it easy to see why a game is or is not difficult, addressing another need of game designers. I have plenty to say about all of these challenges, so I'm going to split them up into 4 different posts, one for each challenge type. Stick around to see them.

The first type of Challenge is the Timing Challenge. Timing Challenges are challenges where the player must perform a specified action within a limited period of time. Because this challenge involves Time, we can split it up into two sequential parts:

1. The Warning Window: The Warning Window is the amount of time between the player being told he will have to perform an action and the time when the Action Window starts.
2. The Action Window: The Action Window is the period of time, during which the player must perform the specified action. The size of the Action Window is the final word in the difficulty of a timing challenge. The smaller the window, the harder the challenge.

To further complicate matters, we have to consider both of these windows in terms of Actual Time and Relative Time. What are Relative and Actual Time? Here I'm defining "relative time" as time as expressed within the game's event system. In Final Fantasy Tactics (or any turn based game, really), time only passes in "Turns", and the metric that actions are judged to be "fast" or "slow" by is turns. The actual length of a turn for the player time is essentially infinite. The player can take as much or as little time as he wishes. From my observations, relative time often correlates with strategic difficulty (as in, decision making)of a game. Games with small windows of relative time are often more strategically intensive then games with long windows.

Actual time relates to the real world perception of time. As a window's duration decreases in Actual Time, the technical skill(as in reflexes and dexterity) required to complete the challenge increases. In a sense, for a window to be small in Actual Time, Relative Time must be expressed in a way that relates it to Actual Time. A great example of this is any fighting game, where time is measured in "frames". Frames are the individual animation frames of the characters performing actions. Modern fighting games (and all modern games really) run at 60frames/second, and this has become the standard unit for measuring time in fighting games. Because the game's Relative Time is a function of Actual Time, the game's technical skill requirements are heightened.

Now for an actual application of this challenge type: in fighting games, players must react to their opponent's moves and time their own button presses to land within very small Action Windows, with very small preceding Warning Windows. When I say small, I'm referring to both Actual and Relative Time, because Relative Time in this game is a function of Actual Time and the Actual time is often below a 3rd of a second (about 20 frames for those of you paying attention). Because fighting games are so rapid in both Actual and Relative Time, they require strategic as well as technical skill.

Final Fantasy Tactics also has very small Active and Warning Windows. But unlike fighting games, it features essentially infinite Actual Time to perform its actions, despite very tight windows in Relative Time. In this case a Relative Time unit is a turn, rather than a frame. Often, the player has 5 turns of information to plan with, which feels like eternity to the hyperactive fighting game player. But when things suddenly go wrong, you have an extremely limited number of turns (maybe two) to react and remedy a situation. The Action Window is quick, despite the Actual Time approaching infinity.

Try applying these tools to other games you know, Max Payne is an interesting exercise because it plays with Actual and Relative Times as the central gameplay mechanic. Music games arguably have massive Warning Windows, because notes almost always fall on the beats of the song. With this tool, I think you'll begin to look at games in a new way.