An object you play with. A good toy is fun to play with. It lacks rules, unlike games.
(The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell, Carnegie Mellon University, 2008. Page 26, 31)
Toys are fun to play with for their own sake, but games have goals and are a much richer experience based around problem solving. We should never forget, though, that many games are built on top of toys. A ball is a toy, but basketball is a game. A little avatar that runs and jumps is a toy, but Donkey Kong is a game. Make the toy fun to play with before you design a game around it. You might find that once you actually build your toy, you are surprised by what makes it fun, and whole new ideas for games might become apparent to you.
Game designer David Jones says that when designing the game Lemmings, his team followed exactly this method. They thought it would be fun to make a little world with lots of little creatures walking around doing different things. They weren't sure what the game would be, but the world sounded fun, so they built it. Once they could actually play with the "toy," they started talking seriously about what kinds of games could be built around it. Jones tells a similar story about the development of Grand Theft Auto: "Grand Theft Auto was not designed as Grand Theft Auto. It was designed as a medium. It was designed to be a living, breathing city that was fun to play." Once the "medium" was developed, and the team could see that it was a fun toy, they had to decide what game to build with it. They realized the city was like a maze, so they borrowed maze game mechanics from something they knew was good. Jones explains: "GTA came from Pac-Man. The dots are the little people. THere's me in my little, yellow car. And the ghosts are policemen."
By building the toy first, and then coming up with the game, you can radically increase the quality of your game, because it will be fun on two levels. Further, if the gameplay you create is based on the parts of the toy that are the most fun, the two levels will be supporting each other in the strongest way possible. Game designers often forget to consider the toy perspective.
Lens #15: The Lens of the Toy
To use this lens, stop thinking about whether your game is fun to play, and start thinking about whether it is fun to play with.
- If my game had no goal, would it be fun at all? If not, how can I change that?
- When people see my game, do they want to start interacting with it, even before they know what to do? If not, how can I change that?
There are two ways to use the Lens of the Toy. One way is to use it on an existing game, to figure out how to add more toy-like qualities to it -- that is, how to make it more approachable, and more fun to manipulate. But the second way, the braver way, it to use it to invent and create new toys before you even have any idea what games will be played with them. This is risky if you are on a schedule -- but if you are not, it can be a great "divining rod" to help you find wonderful games you might not have discovered otherwise.
(The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell, Carnegie Mellon University, 2008. Page 90-91)