One of the things I think about as a game designer is something that's a bit fresh to the party in that particular field-over designing the experience of the player. Over designing is where you tailor the end user's experience so much that everything feels fake and that they have no control of events. The JRPG, as a genre rule, is over designed. That works for some games, and it doesn't work for others. Conversely, the average shmup is under designed. You're placed in a level and told to go.

I'm not worried about the tutorial design-my thoughts on tutorials is that they should point out some things that you don't always think about-there's documentation to teach you the hows, but a tutorial is a great place to cover the whys and the oh by the ways. KH 358 1/2 Days makes tutorial fouls for TWO STRAIGHT HOURS. I know how to jump, thanks. I have a decent idea about how to control the camera. I think I also know HOW TO LOOK AT SHIT. These are not things that should be talked about in a tutorial-these are gameplay 101 type things and the first thing most anyone who plays games does, especially these days, is push the buttons and get an idea for what does what.

Over design also reaches into the game, however. Zelda Twilight Princess is over designed like all hell, but it works, and that's the major consideration when doing design work-does it WORK? The over designed experience works in Zelda because it's amazing. You can only do the next dungeon once you have the previous item. If you try to before hand, you almost always can't get there or can't get through one of the puzzles, except in the older Zelda games which wound up being more open ended because they were not so tightly controlled.

A tightly controlled experience allows for voice acting which a lot of people really like. Obviously, you can't voice over a generated character who represents the player in game... well, you could, but you'd probably have to record the main character's dialogue like 12-15 times per gender and possibly per race to get the desired spectrum of voices to give the player choice in that regard-this avatar business is personal stuff.

So the question is, and this has been a big one in the game industry since Legend of Dragoon which should have had everything going for it, but crashed and burned in critical review past the 15 hour mark. The question is how do you deliver the tightly designed feel and cinematics without breaking suspension of disbelief?

Sometimes you can't. You'll think you're being clever when in reality you just walked right into breaking your own illusion. Suspension of disbelief requires two things-freedom to be allowed to experience something directly, and the desire to suspend your belief. If your game is designed well enough to make you want to suspend your belief, then odds are you will keep playing because that's one of the clear signs that you are having fun. However, the moment you lose that suspension is the moment where all the clever things become "i c wat u did there's." You basically see the zipper on the rubber suit.

So, the goal is thusly: How to design a loosely controlled experience that keeps the user suspending belief while not showing them the zipper on the monster. If one examines the track record of the industry since Legend of Dragoon, this is a tricksy and elusive thing.