Verbal Spewage

Technology also plays a factor in what can be accomplished in a workspace.  Game designers are limited in what they can make with the tools at their disposal.  While a lot of what is used to make a game is conceptual, there are plenty of physical tools needed to make the task easier.  Knowing how to roll dice is one thing, but if you don’t have any on hand to get a sense of what the players will experience, it’s nothing but speculation.  The same goes for card games.  Although some games use special symbols or non-standard playing cards, game designers can keep a key handy to interpret the numbers as stand-ins for the symbols or write on the cards themselves.  These last two examples are illustrations for repurposing the supplies on hand to provide a new use to existing technology.

One of the core principles of play is to find new uses for what has already been created.  Even in this vein of thought, the objects can only function within their limited roles.  For instance, a hammer can have its use extrapolated out from its original purpose (driving fastening pins/nails into place, shaping metals, shaping stone, etc.) which is essentially leveraging a weighted end to hit an object with greater force.  The challenge is how to use what’s there for a new goal.  Using the hammer as an example, its function reaches a point where smashing items as the only option can undercut the premise of the game’s obstacles.  This limitation stems from the tool’s range of functions, which results in games that have a variation or reskinning of the object.  Whack-a-mole is still the same game even if the moles are replaced with gophers, for instance.  The game’s core mechanic is one of timed reflexes.  Reskinning the game doesn’t change the victory conditions but it can influence the player’s experience.  Without adding anything new, the game audience will be bored rather quickly.

Why so much emphasis on the hammer?  Because each tool has limits and the hammer is one of the easiest examples of this as you can scale it up to become a mallet, maul, sledgehammer, and sports equipment to include bats, clubs, and sticks used to hit balls.  Sure, they look different, have different game rules, and lead to vastly different experiences, but they ultimately use the same laws of physics to leverage a weighted end for more force.  Pen and paper do wonders in creating a design, but the complexity of a system and how the various parts interact with the players can render those tools ineffective once you get past the planning stages based on biological limitations.  The human brain can only keep so many details at the forefront and be able to react to constant changes.

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What Game Design Teaches, Part 3

The differences in the mechanics have as much to do with the skills for an age group as they do with the presentation and overall goal of the game.  By goal the reference is not to the game’s objective, but rather what the designer intends players to learn/hone from the experience.  This is what makes the design process as much fun to create as it is to explore spaces in the same genre.  It’s also how you can end up with games that rely on physics (especially in real-time games) while others are steeped in psychology and behavior studies (the core of poker and chess, for example).  Neither chess nor poker explicitly state in their rules that they rely on psychology to win, but the bluffing mechanics as well as strategic planning needed requires players to learn the subtle clues their opponents express physically or through their pieces teaches players to use these skills to discern the other’s thoughts. 

Because of the social mechanics used by these games, you have to create a welcoming space where designers are free to open themselves up to this level of self-examination.  This isn’t to say that it has to be a support group per se, but you do want to ensure that exploration of games which rely on deduction and bluffing where a person’s feelings or personal lives are involved don’t feel like a crucible or that the designers are under a microscope.  Games that use a social component may use math to govern outcomes, but their true strength and enjoyment are the rewards of successfully “mind reading” the other players.  To do this, you need different tools from more straightforward games. 

Add to this games that rely on engineering challenges (similar but not the same as physics-based mechanics) to solve puzzles (Kerplunk, Don’t Break the Ice, and Bausac, for example) or those that use a limited space for the pieces and/or game board to place all the data used therein.  The play space has to vie for real estate as much as the components do to fit on the game boards, the table, and in their respective boxes.  If the space is too small, your designers might not be able to implement their ideas as intended—or at minimum, not be able to playtest their full design.  The other problem with space constraints is the exploration of the upper limits of wieldiness for that genre. 

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What Game Design Teaches, Part 2