Game Segmentation, yo!

It was last week that I mistakenly read the “Rounds, Levels and Waves” article thinking that I needed to read it for Tuesday, but instead it had to be read for Thursday. I felt really silly about it because on the day Rob told us that he was giving a lecture and providing notes for us as well! Fancy that, I wouldn’t have had to do any work because it would have been done for me, oh well. But I think that for reading the article I did take some things away from it with me, in my mind.

The article itself was mainly about game segmentation in retro games, and as it went on it mentioned three types of game segmentation, each type is fairly different from the other and affect the game in a different way, and perhaps could turn a game into a completely different game if different kinds of segmentation are used in it, or if all of them are used at once.

Temporal Segmentation

The first type of segmentation the article talked about was Temporal segmentation, this is the kind of segmentation that involves time within the game.  Mostly this is the type of segmentation that is all about time limits or turns between players.

“Temporal Coordination” was the name given to the little subsection of Temporal Segmentation, and temporal coordination is the part that is all about the rounds and turn taking.  Chess is a fantastic example of Temporal Coordination being used in games as it involves rounds and turns, both of the players have a turn during a round and once the round has been resolved with both players taking a turn, another round begins. The players aren’t limited in the time that they have to take their turns, and their actions have consequences which they have to resolve.

Then there is the enigmatic interleaved-games, which is a part of Temporal Coordination that you don’t see very often nowadays, or too much in retro games in the first place. I don’t really understand the point of it, but interleaved games are ones where the player plays with his friends and they alternate between players after the previous player who just played the game dies. Now, I can probably think of a couple of games that have this, however the best example of this I can give is when in childhood at the arcade, you and your friend had money for only two lives at a game, and you made a deal to play for one life each. Obviously this sort of coordination is now obsolete because you’d get players that are too good at the game and the rest of the players wouldn’t get to play the game.

The other part of Temporal Segmentation is “Temporal Resource”, and it’s the time limits in games. A game might only be played for half an hour, however that doesn’t mean that the half hour can pass in one sitting. The half hour could be divided into three-ten minute checkpoints. This is what Temporal Resource is all about. Similarly to interleaved-games, there can be a deal between kids to play at certain time checkpoints in the game; this would make the game a lot more fair for the children as well.

Spatial Segmentation

The second form of segmentation that is mentioned in the article is called “Spatial Segmentation” and basically spatial segmentation segments the game areas into levels or relevant but unique screens.

An early example of this could be an early Atari RPG where you’d explore one screen for clues for something, and then you’d move off the side of the screen to a different, unique, area that is still relevant to the previous area because they are connected by the game software, and it can be revisited again by walking off the screen in the right direction again.

This kind of segmentation can still be seen in current day JRPGs where you would walk through a door and enter a completely different but relevant area.

There are also the continuous types of spatial segmentation where you scroll across the screen and the background scrolls with you, giving you the illusion of you getting somewhere. Like in an old cartoon the background wouldn’t change, however something in the foreground might change, like the enemies that are attacking you, the obstacles. This can be found in most side scrolling shooters like GRADIUS, or a plat-former like Super Mario Bros.

Challenge Segmentation

The last kind of segmentation that is discussed is the “Challenge Segmentation” and basically it’s all about how the challenge in the game is segmented.

First off the article talks about the waves in a game, waves are; as I understand them, a large amount of harmful entities which you have to dispose of before a certain limit of time has passed, or before you are over-whelmed by the enemies and are eventually destroyed. The best example of a wave in a retro game is in Space Invaders, Space Invaders is one of the earliest, if not the earliest; game to incorporate a wave of enemies that you have to destroy.

And then the article goes on to talk about puzzles, puzzles are a very neglected form of challenge segmentation in retro games, maybe they aren’t neglected however they were scares. Going back to the old Atari RPGs that you might have seen, those are the ones that you would have the most puzzle elements in it. Mostly the puzzle would be “Bring the right thing here” but of course there are some puzzles that broke free from that formula to become actual puzzle games.

Then there are the Boss Challenges which are also a part of the Challenge segmentation. These unique challenges called Bosses are usually found on the highest “Level” of the game, they are the strongest, hardest and require the most skill or intelligence to beat, hence the name; Boss. Because it’s usually hard to get to a boss in a retro game, the bosses would only be visited by the best of players that can pass every level in the game. There, however, could be an end-level boss – like in Sonic the Hedgehog, you would have to fight Dr. Robotnik at the end of every three stages before you could move on to a different area.

That’s about all that I got for Segmentation in games from that article. In all I thought that it was a pretty good read, still I am a little disappointed that I mistakenly read this article instead of the one that I was supposed to read (especially since I spent a night reading it) but I feel that I’ll be taking these kinds of segmentations into consideration when designing my own games in the future, and the near future (introduction to scripting module).