Defining the fantasy

The common association in the part of the word fantasy is with a fictional world populated by magic and fantastic creatures. Let's leave that idea of fantasy behind for now. By fantasy here, we mean the activity of imagining things, not necessarily things that cannot happen in our real world. You can fantasize about being a doctor, an athlete, or a gangster. That's what we mean by fantasy. Defining the fantasy means establishing the imaginary settings and environments for the game world and the actions the player is able to use in it.

The fantasy is not something that needs to be explicitly stated in the game concept, as it emerges from how the game is designed around the initial vision.

In the example we made previously in the Prototyping section, we were creating a strategy battle game set in a medieval past. Through iterations, we strip the game to its core, imagining the fun of issuing orders to our units, commanding a charge through enemy lines.

What we did there is come up with a fantasy. The fantasy of being a general ordering troops to charge into battle and conquer enemies. Note how the genre influences the fantasy. A strategy game with many different troops to command implies the player is the strategist, therefore the fantasy is being a general of a medieval army.

If the concept (and the prototype) was about a first-person action game where you command a Knight during a charge on the enemy lines, we would have a completely different fantasy (the player being the heroic knight leading the charge). Different fantasy, same setting (and same battle).

Other common fantasies in games include being a hero through his journey to save someone (from Super Mario to Legend of Zelda) or controlling a team in a specific sport. Again, a fantasy always suggests a genre, but it describes something more telling: a bigger story about the player's actions. Clearly, defining a fantasy means setting up more guidelines that will drive the entire development and any design decision down the line.