TEAM AHA! WAS ONE OF SEVEN TEAMS FORMED FOR THE 2008 SUMMER PROGRAM AT THE
Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. The team, which was made up of students from various tertiary
institutions in Singapore as well as MIT, was assembled to create a game based on an abstract
concept without the use of cut scenes.
The team consisted of: Doris C. Rusch, a researcher looking into the application of metaphors in
games; our producer Paul Yang; artists Shawn Dominic Loh and Zou Xinru; programmers Stephie Wu
and Law Kok Chung; our QA lead Alexander Luke Chong; audio engineers Pradashini Subramaniam
and Guo Yuan; audio designer Erik Sahlström; and myself, Louis Teo, the game designer.
Usually, when one talks about the "high concept" of a game, he or she refers to a simple premise
as to what the production is about. However, throughout the development of the game, we used the
term a little differently. For us, the high concept was a holistic abstract idea that was built upon a
number of abstract ideas. For example, the high concept of inner demons could consist of a number
of emotional states; each emotional state would then be an abstract idea of its own.
When we were first presented with the task of making a game based on the abstract, we were
stumped: How does one go about creating a game based on concepts such as "honor", "love" and
"trust"? Do we have to break it down into components? What metaphors do we have for these
concepts? Is it even possible to build such a thing?
Eight weeks later, AKRASIA was born.
WHAT WENT RIGHT
1) Extended Brainstorming and Prototyping Period. Of the eight weeks that it took to develop AKRASIA, we dedicated three of them to the brainstorming process. This was
one week longer than the other teams, but it was necessary to better understand the research
question at hand. How exactly does one even start on this task of giving metaphors tangibility
through game mechanics? Many contemporary games
utilize cutscenes to tell their stories and help players
understand the motives and motifs behind the game,
but we had to avoid falling into that generalization.
The team tossed around myriad ideas, from using two
separate realms as a metaphor for the passage of time to
using an art gallery as a metaphor for the human mind.
Through rapid paper prototyping of the various ideas, as
well as constant debates over what metaphors we wanted
to employ, we finally settled on addiction. More precisely,
we were going to create a game based on how we feel
addiction can be translated into gameplay.
During this paper prototyping stage, we discovered
that AKRASIA was not a game that could be prototyped
physically. This stage was immensely helpful, however,
for we now had an idea what affected a player when he
or she jumped into the game. We took into consideration
what aspects of the game the players would focus on,
and how they could derail the player from understanding
the concept behind the game.
Next, when we prototyped AKRASIA as a turn-based
board game, we discovered that the players thought
too much about their future actions and not about
what message the game was trying to convey. We tried
GAME DEVELOPER | CAREER GUIDE 2009 22
