Warning! Danger! Other exclamations accompanied by loud noises and/or flashing lights on-screen! The boss fight is a staple of single and co-operative multiplayer game design, instances placed throughout a game to act as a final and extreme test of a player’s skill at a given game’s rule set. In his expert dissection of boss fight design over at Gamasutra, Nayan Ramachandran uses the metaphor of pedagogical structure to describe the roll of boss confrontations in gaming:
Games in which bosses appear have levels that are usually designed like a traditional class syllabus. If you were to liken the the length of a game’s level to a semester of studying, learning the game’s boundaries and mechanics and the flaws of the enemies it throws at you, then surely the boss is the final exam for the class.
Testing the skills you’ve learned on your journey to this powerful character, as well as the powers and weapons you’ve collected over time, the boss character is meant to be a milestone of achievement for the player. It offers structure where there might not be any. It is the personification of a climax.
Ramachandran predominantly uses examples and forms culled from action based gaming to examine the form but boss confrontations cross most game genres. The traditional Bowser-type waiting at the end of a platformer/action game level might be the first to come to mind but look at the ramped up AI of opponent vehicles in a racing game’s final grand prix or the increased speed of falling blocks in a twenty-level Tetris challenge.
In closed design, games that end (or “won”) as opposed to ongoing games with no discernible final goal, can games forego the boss type? Would a player gain satisfaction or joy from the game without a distinct, play-based climax? Even games that appear to forego a boss scenario, such as in Halo where levels end with not a single powerful, still conclude with more complex combat scenarios than those preceding it thus acting as a multi-part boss.
I’m not sure if games broadly can forego escalation. But there may be a home for boss-less design in narrative driven design. If the goal of the game is to tell a story as opposed to series of more elaborate or difficult challenges, there’s no need for play to embody climax.
We’ll need some better writers first.