Interesting article on Warioware's game design

http://www.gamestudies.org/0501/gingold/

The story: Wario, realizing there is lots of money to be made in video games, decides to found his own game company. The resulting game: Play through a rapid-fire series of bizarre micro games. Each WarioWare level consists of 24 micro games, each about 5 seconds in length.
Wario Ware is a game about games. Some of its micro games are straight re-implementations of earlier Nintendo classics, but WarioWare also parodies older games such as Super Mario Bros[7]. and The Legend of Zelda[8]. WarioWare exhibits and distorts many game design conventions we take for granted. The Dungeon Dilemma game at the end of the Orbulon level, for example, seems to adhere to the conventions of a computer role playing game, but something is off: (do look at the pic from the website as stated above)

The menu system looks like a computer role playing game interface, but the menu options, “success” and “failure”, are not be found in a genuine RPG. The conventions of a RPG have been transformed into an action game: the cursor moves between menu items on its own accord, and you have to push the button to stop it at the right option. WarioWare is crammed full of parody, subversion, and quotation of game clichésand conventions. WarioWare plays with game design idioms, and in doing so foregrounds game conventions. As a result, WarioWare has a great deal to teach us about game design.

WarioWare's most obvious departure from conventional game design is its discontinuities, which illustrate the effects of continuity on game experience. Wario Ware's ultra-compressed games contain only a minimum number of ingredients. These miniature games illustrate how complex games are generally built out of simpler ones. WarioWare’s nonsense and absurdities also explore the relationship between fiction and rules.

In a sense, WarioWare is an Understanding Comics[4] of video games: a text that uses the representational strategies of a medium to reflect upon that same medium. But where Understanding Comics is discourse on comics, written in the language of comics, Wario Ware is more like Chuck Jones's meta-cartoon Duck Amuck[2]. WarioWare and Duck Amuck violate convention, and in doing so draw attention to how cartoons and games are both constructed and interpreted.


Do read the rest of the article, as it tells us more on an atypical game design. Warioware seems to defy all the conventional design aspects by... mixing in all types of game design!

In view with the topic discussed this week, Warioware is an interesting example to look at its narrative aspects. For most conventional games, you see that there will at least be some link of the gameplay and the narrative. In games like final fantasy, you will be shown with a nice cut scene and dialogues, but after which the game play will be a continuative action of the story, when players are now in control to 'move the plot'. In warioware, it seems like there's no story at all, cos you'll be playing mini-games which are totally unrelated, but the game cleverly make these unrelated games into a systematic narrative - you gotta beat the games to see an ongoing story of wario himself and his plans in making his company the best in video gaming! So a seemingly collection of mini-games.. there's still a narrative that is driving it!