![]() The metaphor in Helmet (classic or modern) is pretty stupid, which shows that a game may depend on its system far more than on its metaphor. The metaphor is changed, but the system is exactly the same. The metaphor is completely swapped out: not a workman dodging spanners to get from a towerblock to a shed Wario dodging mallets to get from a castle to a mushroom. Proving the point that system and metaphor can be separated, Nintendo’s Game & Watch Gallery 2 on the Game Boy Color includes a “modern” version of Helmet. These facts are all inessential to the system, but the metaphor helps explain the system to the player - it adds the workman character, his environment, his motivation and his purpose, and makes clear what the goal is. He’s on a building site he’s trying to get inside a shed he’s panicking. That shape’s a workman, and he’s avoiding falling tools, which will kill him. ![]() The system in Helmet is in the rules of movement and collisions, the definition of what results in adding points or reducing the number of remaining goes, and the way these are manipulated by pushes of the buttons. (That is what your parents think videogame design is.) could be changed without changing the underlying structure of the game. It’s easy to see that the shapes of the LCD electrodes - workman, tools, door, etc. In Nintendo's Game & Watch Helmet ( Headache in Europe), the player uses two buttons - for left and right - to move a workman from a building to a shed, dodging falling tools until the shed door opens. The racing car and the track are a metaphor for the underlying rules of when you should press which button and what the results will be. It’s a metaphor for the system - for what’s really going on. Metaphor is the superficial presentation of the game, the images and sounds that tell you what you’re “doing” in the game. System is the underlying logic of the game, the relationships between inputs and outputs, and the logical structure of success or progress and failure. The relation between system and metaphor is an expressive device available to games makers that is not available to creatives in other media. System and metaphor can also be aligned well or badly with one another. We can roughly order all games on a spectrum based on the relative prominence of system and metaphor: they might be system-heavy, metaphor-heavy, or more mixed. “Let Me Bore You About Videogames” - Part 1Īny game has two aspects: system and metaphor.
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