Describing games

When we recommend our favourite games to friends, we often encounter a question: how can we introduce the game as briefly as possible? Let’s try describing a game in one sentence.

To accurately convey the content of the game, we can refer to the Principle of 5W. The 5W principle was first proposed by Harold Lasswell and was used to summarise communication behaviour. By answering a series of questions, it helps summarise the event or form being analysed. After continuous use and refinement, the 5W principle has been widely applied in fields such as news writing, product design, and project management. Let’s take the classic arcade game Pac-Man as an example to see how the 5W principle can be applied in describing a game.

Question 1: Who.Who are the players? Who is the character that the player controls? This section typically includes information about the character the player is supposed to play. If it is a multiplayer game, information about the number of players and their relationships might also be included.In Pac-Man, the character that the player controls is represented by a yellow, open-mouthed circle, known as Pac-Man.

Question 2: When/Where.When and where does the event take place? This section typically describes the character’s backstory. Since some games don’t have clear information about time and place, we combine these two Ws into one question. This can be adjusted based on the actual context. Pac-Man doesn’t clearly specify the time, so in this case, we can only describe the environment in which Pac-Man is situated.In Pac-Man, the player is situated in a maze.

Question 3: What.What does the player do in the game? This section summarises the player’s actions within the game.In Pac-Man, the player needs to avoid being caught by the ghosts while eating the dots.

Question 4: Why.Why does the player take these actions? This section describes the player’s motivation. It can also include the character’s purpose in the backstory.In Pac-Man, the player’s motivation is to score higher points.

What’s Unique.What sets this game apart from similar ones? This section isn’t always necessary, but it helps better describe games that feature innovative mechanisms. Given that hundreds of new games are released every year, many developers include unique elements to make their games stand out. Therefore, besides the 5Ws, we can also add a description of the game’s unique features.In Pac-Man, after the player eats a large dot, they temporarily gain the ability to eat the ghosts.

After the analysis above, we can try to combine the answers to these five questions into one sentence to describe Pac-Man:In Pac-Man, the player controls Pac-Man in a maze, avoiding ghosts while eating dots to score higher points, and temporarily gains the ability to eat the ghosts after consuming a large dot.

Of course, this description is not perfect. Some players, upon hearing this description, might imagine Pac-Man as a first-person horror game set in a 3D space. This shows that summarising a game’s content in one sentence is quite challenging. The game system contains so much information that even the smallest difference can lead to a vastly different experience. Now, let’s take a deeper look at the various components of the game system.