Game Analysis: Loom (Game Design: Theory and Practice)

Game Design:Theory and Practice (Book's Summary: Part 10)

Book’s Author: Richard Rouse III

Summarized by Samuel Coelho

9. Game Analysis: Loom

For 1990, the year it was released, Loom was a decidedly different type of adventure game. Loom retains the positive storytelling elements of adventure games and removes everything that conflicted with players’ enjoyment of the story. It succeeded admirably; resulting in a game seemed to earnestly want players to complete its interesting story.

Loom does not challenge players merely for the sake of challenging them, but instead includes only those challenges that are critical to the story.

In Loom the story was king, and whatever stood in its way was removed.

9.1 Focused Game Mechanics

Loom seems to be a perfect example of a game that is completely focused in what it wants to accomplish. Instead of trying to include all of the game mechanics he possibly could, it appears that Moriarty thought long and hard about what were the minimum game mechanics necessary for the telling of his story. He then eliminated everything that did not truly add something to that story. This had the result of greatly simplifying the game, while at the same time making it considerably more elegant and easy to navigate.

Including into Loom an inventory and verbs could have added a lot of depth to the game if the story was reconceived to take advantage of them. But as it stands, the game functions perfectly without them.

9.2 User Interface

Loom keeps its interface as simple as possible by having the player interacting with the game-world by using only the mouse. This, of course, makes the game very easy to learn and play for anyone at all familiar with point-and-click system.

Players could move their character, Bobbin Threadbare, through the world simply by clicking on the location where they wanted him to go.

The single click moves Bobbin towards an object; a double-click has him attempt to use an object.

Copying input ideas from established standards is almost always better than making up something new.

Loom eliminated the verbs entirely to allow users to simple double-click on a given object and then have the game figure out what they wanted to do with the object. If players double-clicked on a person, Bobbin Threadbare would talk to him or her. If it were an object with text on it, Bobbin would read it. If it was a sheep, he would poke it. The game works with players instead of against them, allowing players to perform only the actions that will be useful to them.

One of the primary requirements of any interface is that it be easy to learn. The challenges players face should be in the game-world itself, not in the controls they have to manipulate in order to affect that game-world.

9.3 The Drafts System

Loom introduces a unique and well-designed game mechanic accessible through the main character’s distaff. This system allows players to cast the equivalent of spells on various objects in the world.

The system is based around players hearing different tones in different situations and then repeating those tones on their staff. Players repeat the notes simply by clicking on different locations of the staff, a quite intuitive interface.

Loom

If players play the game in the expert setting, the learning of drafts becomes significantly more difficult. The musical notation is no longer present on the screen, and now players only hear notes.

The musical nature of the drafts and of the entire game is a tremendous break from most other games that can be played with the sound completely off. Instead of just using music for sonic wallpaper, Loom beautifully makes the music an integral part of the gameplay.

The order of the tones can be reversed to cause the opposite effect of playing the tones forward.

The objects players double-click on to originally learn the tones all correspond to the drafts they teach players: double-clicking on a blade teaches the “sharpen” draft, double-clicking on water dripping out of a flask teaches the “emptying” draft, double-clicking on a pot full of bubbling dye will teach the “dye” draft, and so forth.

The manipulation of these drafts makes up the primary source of puzzles in the game, and they are used in such a way that the puzzles are never overly convoluted.

9.4 Difficulty

Adventure game enthusiasts who had been hardened on the adventure games that came before Loom found it very easy to finish. They were used to dying around every corner and spending hours bashing their heads against nearly incomprehensible puzzles.

If players were not already experienced with these twisted and convoluted exercises in masochism, there was a good chance an adventure game would frustrate players so much that they would feel no desire to try another one.

9.5 Story

The story Bobbin Threadbare, the chosen “Loom-Child” whose task is to restore the fabric of reality, is one of simple beauty and great poignancy; Bobbin’s adventure begins, with his trips to the various guilds of the land of Loom, drawing to a unique climax complete with a bittersweet ending.

The story is ideally suited to the gameplay that Loom includes, with navigation and the spinning of drafts being players’ only actions. The gameplay and story are so well integrated that the gameplay ends up involving the player in the story far more than if the story were told in a non-interactive format.

The text in the story is kept to a bare minimum, never going into excessive detail about anything, allowing the players’ imaginations to fill in the holes.

Since Bobbin first acquires the staff at the beginning of the game, it makes logical sense that he would not yet be an expert at it. Thus players’ many failed attempts to use the drafts fit perfectly with Bobbin’s character.

Loom

If the character is too much of a departure from one players could see themselves being, players may become frustrated when that character speaks lines of dialog they would not say themselves or perform other stupid actions. Loom works around this problem by putting Bobbin Threadbare inside a cloak, with player only ever seeing his eyes.

9.6 Loom as an Adventure Game

For all of its strengths, Loom is still and adventure game, and indeed a fairly linear one.

In Loom, there’s a good chance that, if an object can be manipulated, players will need to do something with it to complete the game. This is both good and bad: good in it limits players’ actions to useful ones instead of leading them down a false path after red herrings and pointless diversions; bad in that it severely limits the interactiveness of the world. And sometimes the game’s landscape art is drawn in such a way that it is difficult to figure out where Bobbin can navigate and where he cannot.

But, truly, these are minor complaints. Is it so bad that Loom is a storytelling experience with a predetermined story? The game is only as worthwhile to play again, as it is to read a book or see a movie a second time.