4. Exercise 2.7: Premise

What are the premises for the games Risk, Clue, Battleships, and Guitar Hero?

Risk

You are a military strategist and leader of your country’s armed forces. To achieve global supremacy, you must deploy your forces skillfully, form diplomatic alliances, and engage in warfare to conquer territories and continents.

Clue

You are a guest at a mansion where a murder has been committed. By following clues and exploring the mansion, you must deduce which of the guests committed the murder, with what weapon, and in which room.

Battleships

Two rival naval fleets find themselves locked in a fierce battle for supremacy. You are tasked with locating and eliminating the enemy fleet. You must employ your strategic skills to determine the coordinates of the opposing ships and sink the enemy vessels before they can do the same to you.

Guitar Hero

You dream of becoming a rock star, but first, you must prove your skills on the guitar. Only then can you master increasingly difficult songs and rise through the ranks toward stardom.

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Discussion

Compelling games often have a simple premise. This does not need to be especially realistic (the props and premise of Guitar Hero can seem ridiculous outside of the world of the game itself). In fact, as I saw with FM2024, too much adherence to the ‘real world’ can have a negative effect on the players’ experience of the game. Interestingly, in Guitar Hero the premise is reinforced by the design of the game props – if the controller was just a series of buttons it would still work, but having the controller resemble a guitar adds to the narrative element.