Oakland, CA, Sept. 7, 2011 – I got to do something I hadn’t done in years: attend a baseball game. This probably wouldn’t strike any fans of the game as a big deal, but having not lived in the region for seventeen years and being the first game I’ve been to in fifteen years when on leave from a deployment to Bosnia, the significance changes. Even better: the seats we had were behind home plate. Now, I suspect that like most people who are fans of the game, walking on the field is a joy, especially in front of a crowd. Imagine doing that on Little League Day in your uniform for your team that season. Add to this spending time in the stadium while the home team and their opponents practice with only ushers and concessions people in the stands with you, all while you haven’t entered the school system just yet. Yeah, I’m that guy.
Due to astigmatism, dysgraphia, and light sensitivity, I stopped playing the game. I didn’t stop enjoying it, however. I take the time here to lay out my association with baseball because of what I noticed for the first time on this particular day. Perspective is everything and a lot of things are lost when you view a game from different angles or on television.
Baseball, as the saying goes, is a game of inches. From the size of the ball and width of the bat to the motion on the ball’s trajectory, the game is won or lost on the minutia generated in the space of the strike zone. But what happens as the ball crosses the plate is tempered by the shifting of the seven players behind the pitcher; and, more importantly, those of the catcher and the batter. It’s what the seats behind home plate revealed that I never noticed before. The obfuscation of distance by camera lenses or seats elsewhere in the stadium; the slight shifting of feet. How a catcher shifts his feet determines what bases he can throw to if necessary to prevent a runner’s advance. In addition to when the batter swings, his feet also affect the outcome. What a player is capable of affects the strategy pursued.
Basketball is another game of precision that uses finesse and momentum to defeat the opposing team. Angles are of great importance as the hoop is just large enough to allow the ball to pass through without any difficulties and have a margin of space. This margin helps to prevent a halt in play as well as to provide a range of angular attacks to make guarding against scoring opportunities require as much skill as trying to circumvent those defenders. Short of driving to the hoop, players target the rectangle on the backboard indirectly to score. As physically moving opponents is a violation of the rules, players get as close as possible to each other without committing a foul all while being as fleet of foot as possible.
Not all games of precision require timing or as much movement, however. Golf is one such example. This is a game of precision that requires patience. It isn’t about concentration as much as it is intuition. Players try to drive the ball as close to the hole as they can in the fewest strokes, but it’s how they position their bodies that affect accuracy as much as the clubs used to get there. Here, the chief skills are gauging the angle and power behind the flight of the ball. The rest is trusting that one’s body will generate the natural swing to ensure the desired result.
Reducing the amount of physicality again, we come to the game of pool. Depending on the type of billiards game played on the table, the amount of calculation needed increases. Calling the pocket and following a strict sequence of which ball can be struck by the cue ball first brings in the need to calculate not only angles for bank shots, but where to strike the cue ball. Using English changes the way one has to think about bank shots and what energy must be imparted into other balls. As one improves in skill, it becomes easier to place the balls on the table closer to what one has in mind when they stop moving. Such skill requires precise control of aim and power.
In baseball, a pitcher’s ability to put spin on a ball works like a pool player’s use of English. The way such energy is imparted on the ball affects its motion to curve, rise, or sink from its projected trajectory. The movement is inches of difference. Batters try to read a pitcher’s body and the ball to adjust their swings. The motions are small, the time to process the information in a blink of an eye, but the consequences are huge.
Fencing, sometimes referred to as physical chess, works in a similar fashion in regards to minutiae and adjustments, but rather than trying to redirect the momentum of the ball, both competitors jab points smaller than cue sticks at one another. Like basketball, fencers can’t physically move their opponents. They’re not allowed to touch other than to shake hands after the match. Movements are small and quick. The point is to get one’s opponent to fall for a feint that lets you get past any defense by throwing it out of whack.
Games that utilize chance rely on precision for the same reasons such skills are necessary in the aforementioned sports. Game designers don’t have the luxury of leaving their work to chance. The purpose of playtesting is to add defined limits while avoiding zero-sum states. The obstacles that delineate the game have to create a balance that preserves the game while promoting the use of a skill set. Any exploitable weakness in the rules has to be rooted out and brought to heel. Even if a game or scenario starts with me at a disadvantage to you, there must be a condition I can reach to achieve victory. If not, I won’t play again.
There has to be a value to incentivize me to repeat an experience. Short of sex and death, there aren’t a lot of thrilling items out there people are likely willing to cheat or try again. Without diving into too much Freudian psychoanalysis, it’s the twin drives of the pleasure principle and thanatos that provide a nearly infinitely repeatable set of experiences. It’s a safe bet that most people like not dying. What’s even better is getting as close as possible without crossing the boundary and bragging about it. Sex is the same, except we don’t’ discuss it in polite company; society frowns on that sort of thing. The longer you can stave off the inevitable, the better it feels.
How does this tie into gaming? The goal is to outwit your opponent, but the greater the struggle, the better it feels. This is because the brain releases the same chemical that gives people a sense of pleasure. The closer you get to losing only to defeat your opponent, the greater the high. It’s cathartic. The terror of loss drives us to compete while it seduces us to fail. The simulation protects from harm as much as it gives a semblance of the real thing. But the rules must be narrowly defined. For baseball, it’s the strike zone; basketball, the hoop; fencing, a narrow point; and pool, a cue and six pockets.
It seems counterintuitive to define things so narrowly. But, the tighter the controls, the more creative players must become. Roleplaying games seem to break this heuristic, but let’s examine it a bit closer. The genre is akin to programming languages in that both are defined in how they function. What matters is how a person uses the definitions to create. The rules of an RPG are often reduced to keyword terms that embody a host of rules. In library science and information theory, this is called a controlled vocabulary. How a search can be conducted or information is stored is restricted to a predefined set of terms that determines how information is stored and indexed. For instance, the phrase “roll Attack vs. AC 30” tells a d20/OGL player several things. Gamers used to this system know an Attack Roll is a twenty-sided die adjusted by various factors. In this case, it’s against a fairly high target with its own set of variables. The concept behind Armor Class (AC for short) is the measure of a creature’s or character’s protection from physical attacks. But, like the Attack Roll, AC is a complex concept. When it’s learned, a player knows how to rate an opponent’s defense and what sorts of command codes can be used to rewrite his opponent’s adjustments. That’s because the higher level concepts like AC are roleplaying equivalents to object-oriented programming.
Classes and objects are created from the basic code words that instruct a computer how to execute commands. The more a programming language looks like a natural language, the more instructions the computer needs to translate it into zeroes and ones. The core mechanic is a root command. An attack roll is a root command. A character class is, well, pretty self-explanatory in this light. Yet, the components that go into a class aren’t as necessarily unique. In the system resource document for the d20 game, Wizards of the Coast gave the barbarian and thief classes the ability to sense traps and avoid them. Paladins and clerics both cast divine spells, though both have their own lists. This trend holds true for other game systems as well.
Let’s go back to that game I attended. The significance of my observations is in the precision of the root code (literally) embedded in a player’s feet and a pitcher’s hand to impart some sort of motion to spin the ball. These subtle differences in position change the programmed physics of the basic unit (body or ball). Pool is an excellent example as well, because any English applied to the ball is the player’s instruction code. The ball-as-computer executes what it is told to do. Any errors that result inform the programmer he needs to debug his work to find what he did wrong. This is what game designers do to preserve the balance of their work through playtesting. Like any writer, they have to master the spin they put on events to convey the intended messages with minimal errors from one mind to another so that the concept and math are preserved.
Why is this important? Consider this bit of advice on page 171 of White Wolf’s Armory Reloaded: “Describe everything…the players should know what’s around their characters, so that if they want to use the scenery as cover or weapons, they can.” It’s like a programmer missing a key word or two; without the relevant information a coherent picture cannot form and the intended results cannot be achieved. Precision means adjustments are possible. Precision means an experience can be repeated with variations to keep things interesting, like cheating death. Stories don’t throw curves that you can’t see coming. How big those curves are is another question in itself.
The game I saw ended with the Oakland Athletics winning 7-0 against the Kansas City Royals. Guillermo Moscoso nearly threw a perfect game up until the eighth inning. Oakland’s victory came from precision of pitching as much as from hitting that day, verging on a historic event in baseball. Memorable experiences from games stem from a similar form of excellence: a well crafted set of rules that challenge without frustrating.
Previous:
Anatomy of Game Design: Experience Points
Next:
Anatomy of Game Design: Basic Margins of Error