how exactly do you analyze a video game?

King of Posters
#1

first time making a post here!

i’m unsure if this is supposed to go in king of posters or king of development so if i posted in the wrong section, please move this thread! i’d appreciate that, ty.

i’m currently working on a compsci degree but lately, i’ve been spending a lot of my free time attempting to learn unreal engine and trying to understand game development + game design. the biggest issue that i’m facing is…i don’t think i understand how to analyze a game?

one of the problems that i have is definitely taking too much notes / trying to absorb every iota of information: i booted up devil may cry 4 a while back and spent 2 hours writing down notes on the various inputs, settings, UI, etc. before i got to the actual gameplay or aspects of the game that i actually wanted to take notes on. it’s like i have this fear of missing out on parts of the bigger picture when i first attempt to analyze something.

i was hoping that making a topic here and asking other people would help give me more insight on how to approach game analysis, what to look for, etc. also some examples of a great analysis that you read (or sharing your own!) would be really helpful.

wow, that was a lot to read haha. thanks for listening to me, and i appreciate any help! :3

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#2

Hello! And yes, this is KoP material, but also, don’t worry too much about that. As the OP, you can move threads on your own, or a mod can if needed. Also, nobody gets too up in arms about that here, so no big deal.

Onto your actual question, I sorta take the opposite stance that you do, in that I tend to play through a large chunk of a game before deciding to think much more about it, if I even do that at all. Then I start thinking and maybe play it again if I want to, or talk it out with someone (this is largely how Hinge Problems happened, I think). Usually when i am playing a thing, I just get a feeling of “I want to dissect this more” or “nah, just sit back and enjoy this” and I go with that. This isn’t to suggest your method is wrong at all, though, just a different approach to things. I think my approach stems from wanting to see the bigger picture before looking at the details of how it is made.

#3

thank you for the response! i think that your approach is a lot more exciting than mine haha - i should look into giving it a shot!

may i ask you what you mean by this?

I tend to play through a large chunk of a game before deciding to think much more about it, if I even do that at all

do you think that there isn’t much to learn from some games beyond what’s presented to the player? like the game sorta…explains itself, if that makes any sense?

also, a sidenote: i believe i saw something about hinge problems while skimming through old topics yesterday - is that a podcast that you run?

#4

Mostly I just mean that some games are very surface level things for me. I enjoy them in the moment, but they don’t really warrant much more thought for me about how they work. It’s not that they are bad or anything, but I just decide to not really bother thinking about them much beyond the “do I enjoy this?” threshold. It’s not so much that the game explains itself, as much as there is only so much that I want to invest in it.

Yeah, this is a podcast I record with Rudie about once a month when our schedules can line up at http://hingeproblems.libsyn.com/.

#5

I’ll add that DMC4 is a very complex game and maybe not the easiest to analyse. Try starting with individual aesthetic or mechanical components at the low-level and work your way up to a more cohesive whole. If you can find someone who has also played the game, try discussing a point and if you feel really strongly about, say, how Nero and Dante’s personalities are represented through their gameplay differences, try writing about it.

#6

Play through the intro and ask why everything. Then do it again. Then do it again. Know that every scrap of information in a game can be designed. I would often run students through store pages and onboarding sites to carry through the idea that design can extend past the game.

I take notes and split them between specific areas of interest (level design, combat mechanics, UI, etc.) and spontaneous thoughts about themes or what I’m currently thinking. This is highly referrent to the stored knowledge I have of games and genres and is more about cataloguing differences than breaking down, say, how a specific genre works.

Read Jesse Schell’s Book of Lenses. It presents a model of looking at a game from a constructed perspective, to answer a specific question; then, it gives you roughly a hundred or so to start with. It’s the gold standard in game pedagogy right now.

There’s another perspective used when trying to make – to artist’s copy. We’ve recently been stepping frame-by-frame through God of War combat footage to break down exactly every feedback technique they use, from the inverse kinematics to the recoil branching and popping to the rate and direction of blood particle spawning. This is also useful when you’re not sure where to begin on a system, but if you dig you’re likely to find this work existant. For example, much of what you need to know about 2D game cameras can be found cataloged in Itay Keren (Mushroom 11)'s encylopedic article.

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#7

Meanly

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#8

listen to bustedastromech

My advice (other than to listen to busted) is to pick a specific thing you’re interested in and dissect that.

For me, it has to be a game I already like and know somewhat well. Then I can pick one thing that is interesting about it and try to understand (a) how it works granularly, (b) how it works as a whole and © how it fits into the bigger picture.

The example that comes to mind is the driving in Deadly Premonition during missions. Granularly, the driving controls themselves are sort of awful but have nice touches like being able to signal and turn on/off the wipers. It’s arcadey in the sense that I don’t have to drive particularly well to be successful, but it’s very slow and not exactly fun to do, so it can fall into the background in a particular way that games with great driving can’t (i.e. GTAV where driving is actually fun on its own). It’s the boring parts of a road trip - just look ahead and make sure you stay on the road. And maybe signal.

As a whole, the driving is meant to center the conversations that York is having with Zach (who is his alternate personality BUT also the player), and it does this wonderfully by being explicitly dull. I can listen to York talk about 80’s movies and The Ramones and all of that without getting distracted, but it takes my mind away from the feeling that I’m just sitting there listening to someone talk at me. I’m the driver, and I have a very interesting passenger keeping me company.

As part of the larger design, these sequences serve the purpose of giving a soft intro to a mission, but not by exposition dumping or tutorializing. Instead, I am getting into the zone of being Zach. Zach is the driver, Zach is the listener, and at the end of the day, Zach is the one who shoots the gun. York is along for the ride, but York is also the one giving everything flavor. York is the one who provides meaning to the player character and to the player’s actions. The entire game is encapsulated in driving for 10 minutes down a boring road listening to a very strange man talk about movies and serial killers. My actions as the player are somewhat dull and repetitive, which is the whole point.

Anyway, this may not be how people who are in the biz do it, but it’s my way of engaging with a game beyond the surface mechanics. I also feel like I have to let a game engage with me on a surface level first before I can get any deeper. Otherwise, I’m analyzing something before I understand the bigger picture.

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#9

No, you’re doing it right. ‘Bad’ games that are interesting are really bad in that they’re nonprofessional, in that they don’t follow the established solutions and they’re probably solving different problems anyway. Games can encompass all of human activity and professional games are only comfortable with trails already blazed so looking at weird stuff is generally fertile.

NYU Gamecenter especially and UC Santa Cruz minorly have built their programs to encourage this type of thinking; not especially helpful for becoming a person who can get paid doing this, but very good at pushing the medium forward and producing interesting works.

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#10

i think about how it makes me feel to play it mostly, a lot of times this goes into thinking about what works may have inspired the developers and how they wanted to use those to convey something

#11

as someone who does not fall under the categories of academic, developer or semi-pro/hobbyist commentator (to be more accurate, an asshole), I approach things in closed-minded fashion because there are specific things I like and hate

  • I like to mess around with the granularity of mechanics and verbs present in the game; they tend convey a lot of things about how I will react to further twists later on in the game and how the designers approached the game. for instance, a simple “can I be a son of a bitch and animation cancel this move which will certainly break things” can tell me how genre savvy the developers were or if they’re specifically creating systems around thing.

  • goddammit if this game wastes my time with stupid bullshit early on I ain’t waiting around for it to get better (read the endless legions of modern games-as-service and MMOs where players routinely claim the real game starts at endgame. let me harp on Destiny for a second, because, yes, having seen those raid encounters, those are some cool examples of encounter design, no doubt, but when 100% of getting there is the same damage sponges until my number says I can do them, nope)

  • are there multipliers. multipliers make me horny

  • does the game grade me because this will tap into my perfectionist streak and then I have hit max rank on everything and you got me you assholes

  • the gameloop feel. things built on rules are inherently grounded in repetition. however, the games that we single out as being “repetitive” are the ones that either a. don’t do enough to add the tiny new elements that ultimately change how you approach without broadly affecting the loop or b. are transparently The Loop and nothing more. there’s nothing wrong with asking the player to do the same thing over and over again, but either you have to mix things up slightly or at least pretend there’s something else to the proceedings. I’m much more kind to an effort to dress things up than I am to “fuck you, run through this tileset again”

  • okay, look, the story/plot of a game is not inherently important to how it plays as a game and often what I think of the game as a whole but if your game’s plot takes some stupid bullshit turn or trots out some stupid nonsense, I’m holding that against you (as an a example, holy shit a fucking dead robot cries in a cutscene in Phantasy Star Universe and I was fucking livid and finished the rest of the game out of spite for the game and myself)

  • fun is kind of a bullshit metric because anything done enough times ceases to be fun so it’s less “is this fun” and more “when does the fun stop”

  • how much did I pay for the game

  • hey guys did you know the dualshock 4 has a gyro in it, maybe you could use that for something

  • reviewer’s tilt: oh my god I love this character/world and this overrides the sane part of my brain where I recognize that the game is objectively bad/mediocre or is good with some serious issues but I’m going to overlook those because I am charmed, even though I will openly talk about these things while all the while saying “but”

  • why is this game not running at 60 fps I am a giant asshole blah blah blah

once you navigate this confusing morass of contradictory points, congratulations, you have made a game I might like. honestly, it depends on my mood when I play it.

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#12

this is mostly my advice too, but I’m not as good at the detail-oriented stuff so I usually end up using a frame of reference as opposed to a distinct “thing” within the work itself

a “frame” being something kind of like a specific reading or meaning I’m foisting onto the work in order to figure out what aspects of it fit into the frame

analysis in this regard doesn’t really need to make logical sense or even be a frame or reading that I agree with, it’s just a tool being used to highlight in my head different things I would normally overlook in a game

this distinction matters (pretty much only to me) because analyzing a specific aspect usually involves understanding the work’s relationship with itself, and I’m always much more interested the work’s relationship with other works

I started playing The Colonists recently (gosh that title is not great) and I’ve been interested in it through the pretty arbitrary frame of “automation”. I can see from playing it that the way it allows the player to make decisions about the game’s autonomous systems is pretty similar to Factorio, somehow, because of its emphasis on roads and paths as The Thing Wot Governs Efficiency, which is how Factorio kind of does it as well. and then I can go into some rabbit hole about the design priorities that different games have with regards to automation, etc.

#13

Yeah, I definitely should start with more simplistic things. Kinda went ahead and took a dive on the deep end there, which is quite unwise for me to do. Appreciate the advice!

#14

This is fantastic advice, thank you so much! I’m definitely gonna give the book a listen - I’ll let you know what I think about it as soon as I finish! Is there anything else that you’d recommend? Resources, games to play, etc.

#15

yeah, i think that feeling is something that’s very underlooked. it’s really difficult to pay attention to it in the grand scheme of things, but i really think i should take some time thinking about how i initially feel before i even approach any other aspect of the game. thanks for the response! :3

#16

you said this, which really grabbed me: this distinction matters (pretty much only to me) because analyzing a specific aspect usually involves understanding the work’s relationship with itself, and I’m always much more interested the work’s relationship with other works

when you mean other works, do you mean other games that were created by that team or do you mean the allusions and concepts expressed throughout the game?

#17

this is a really great example! the larger scope as a whole is definitely something that’s tough to really see. i do think that understanding the game really well helps out with this too - it’s much more difficult to draw conclusions about games that you don’t have much knowledge on.

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#18

(FYI, if you highlight some text in somebody else’s post, a quote button will show up and allow you to more clearly insert quotes into your post than copy/paste and italicizing it. It is kinda wonky on mobile though. Also, welcome to the forum.)

#19

thanks! I appreciate the tip <3