Reviews: Game Design on Television

This is the first entry of my last section of articles, which feature television, movies, books, music, and/or video games that I have watched, listened to, or played recently. This will probably be mostly about video games, but I don't know exactly. I'm flying blind on this section, which may be why how I got into the mess I'm about to get into. You see, the very first of these reviews is for The Amazing Race, a reality show.

You hear that whistling sound? That's my geek credibility plummeting down a bottomless abyss, never to return.

To be fair, the show is sometimes argued to be less a reality show and more a game show? Doesn't help, huh? Oh, for the day when that genre was respectable and not some has-been celebrity asking three questions in one hour. But I digress. Despite the reputation of the reality show, it has some shows worth watching, and in fact they could even be very informative to game designers.

The Amazing Race is a perfect example of this. The popularity contest elements so common in most reality shows are almost completely gone, making this a contest about navigation skills, physical acumen, and maintaining calm when everything goes to hell. For those who never saw the show, let me give you a quick summary. Eleven teams (usually, plus or minus a team once in while,) of two people (four people in the disastrous one-shot family edition,) have to race around the world. They do so by finding between ten and thirteen checkpoints. Because this is a race, most of these checkpoints reward the first team to arrive with a prize, and most also penalize teams who arrive last by eliminating them from the race. In the end, there are three final teams that look for the final checkpoint, with the first ones there earning a cool million dollars. On the way to each checkpoint, they have to use clues and follow directions to different counties and cities and are stopped by physical and mental challenges they must complete before they are allowed to continue. Strategy factors into these challenges, as every leg of the race has one point where teams must choose between two challenges, and another where only one member of the team is allowed to complete the challenge.

Adding in flights and other means of transportation, two-person filming crews for each team, and the need to keep these teams relatively close together and keep them from getting hurt or arrested, and you get a show with some of the tightest game design out there. It has to be; if one team gets an advantage of a day or two, the entire rest of the race is rendered moot, which makes for boring television and a cancelled series.

What sort of lessons can a video game designer learn from this show, though? For starters, the show's emphasize on traveling around the world instead of the claustrophobic environments of Survivor or Big Brother matches our industry's tendency to appeal to a gamer's wanderlust. From the increasingly advanced graphics to the big, sprawling worlds of games like World of Warcraft, Oblivion, the Grand Theft Autos, and the recent Assassin's Creed, we make it both possible and lucrative for the player to explore out of the way paths, finding hidden treasure and other secrets. The use of cooperating players per team is ingenious, as well. Besides the usual skills for reality show success, the ability to get along with your only ally for hours, days, and weeks at a time often proves the difference between successful teams and those left behind. With multiplayer, especially cooperative multiplayer, becoming so common in video games, it begs the question if we can't create games that do the same. Is emotional compatibility as much a part of games as tactical compatibility? Will the games we make strengthen relationships or damage them? Should we even be concerned about it?

Finally, by watching enough of The Amazing Race, the ability to evaluate their choice of game design improves. Nearly any watcher of the show will start out criticizing points of the show. Why force them to wait for hours after every checkpoint? Why set up the race so the teams regularly bunch up, eliminating hours of leads? Wouldn't it be more fun to give the teams complete freedom and just let the most skillful team win? But after watching for long, the justifications for these decision soon start to appear. We see a team gain a few hours of lead, often through nothing buy luck like a particularly skillful cab driver, and wonder if or when the other teams could catch up. Viewers might even go back to watch the show's first season, where a lack of well-made safeguards gave two teams a day lead over the others. There was almost no question that one of these teams would win the race, and it's not hard to imagine how the show would have ended if only one team got that advantage. Besides, what team is more skilled, the one who gained the lead time after time, or the one who took an early lead and never had the risk of losing it?

Similarly, we have to ensure that our games have balancing in the long term. Nobody wants to lose a game by a score of 3000 to 4, but if every game starts things with a clean slate, even the less skilled players retain that hope of winning, and that keeps them coming back until they become the skilled players. If we take the lessons of this mere reality show to heart, we probably won't win an award for the game for countless years in a row (like the Amazing Race did, having won an Emmy for Reality Show for every season it existed,) but we'll see the results nonetheless.