One of the stranger aspects of game design is the relationship between information and the formation of the play space and the subsequent experience they help produce. The classification of game elements in respective categories is the same skill as cataloging of data for any field. Systems knowledge is the discipline of structuring the categories of relevant information and controlling how it is rendered so as to not overwhelm a user. While this feeds into the user experience and the user interface, what it does is filter out details that are extraneous to the task at hand. Embedded in this is the concept of meaning related to the system’s purpose. In business (and politics) this is useful in shaping the narrative. In games, this is a particularly sticky widget.
While you absolutely do want to shape the theme and concepts behind your game, you don’t want to have a fully formed narrative. This is the minefield best imagined as organized chaos. Your game has to have a parameter or it will diffuse into the ether. There would be nothing to hold it together. But, you don’t want to have the game feel artificially constrained. This is part of the reason why game development takes so long. The whole of the artifice has to feel natural.
Think about this. The information has to be structured to produce meaning but it has to do so without calling attention to this fact. Playtesting helps the designer make it feel natural by finding the instances where it feels too jarring because the design limits stand out in stark contrast to the expected experience. The graphics help shape a view of the conceptual framework in a game’s system as a form of representation and reference point because pure information is virtually impossible to imagine without an image to contain the concepts represented by the data. First-person perspective games do this in the most obvious way without causing the artifice to become a focal point. Namely, the illusion of a z-axis, or depth. The brain is manipulated into seeing depth by use of formulae that describe the x- and y-axis coordinates to contain the polygons that render an object as it would appear scale-wise. Basically, they’re stretched and squashed as needed to maintain a natural depth perception while being on a flat display.
The use of visual representations as data sets doesn’t stop there, however. The tokens used in a board game also carry information. Sometimes it’s just an issue of position while in others it represents whole cases of data used to define a single object, as is the case for mechs in Battletech and characters in roleplaying games when you use miniatures and record sheets containing the information that makes them interactive elements of their environments. Some categories of information use natural language to do the heavy lifting for the designers and make certain details obvious. But not all games operate in this manner and even games with easily understood categories have those which need explanation.
Data classes have to be defined and their measures rendered in a useable format. Programmers and number crunchers of all stripes are familiar with this idea and it refers back to An Unbridgeable Divide with the notion of positionality as a method of establishing relationships. The act of measuring and determining what to measure and how to use it is where meaning arises. Even if most of the data classes are mutable or devoid of value until data is added, meaning develops. With meaning comes emergence. Emergence reinforces the thematics and meaning inherent in the system’s design and leads to gameplay that lends itself to repetition of play.
Now, the reason repeat play is important in this context is that it allows the establishment of a world/reality where the data classes have greater and lasting weight. With that gravitas comes a greater focus on how data within their parameters is applied. The system used in a game shapes what players can do either to expand/extrapolate upon the game or navigate the space available. In either case, the system creates not only the experiences possible, but also how the players process information. This is because what a designer has actually done is built a guide to creation. It is a method for shaping new elements for use in the play space.
The most obvious examples of systems lending themselves to creation are point-buy roleplaying games. These games have dearth of terms to shorthand the meanings packed in such a compact space as represented by the character sheet. Taken in conjunction with the numeric values used to provide mechanical weight, the whole creates a way to evaluate abilities in relation to one another before they are applied to a character. But, this act of balance for play assigns vague meanings that clarify when combined into a character, object, etc. The game invites you to think in terms of the system and all the permutations it can and cannot simulate without catachresis.
The system is the world it creates. In no small way does the grammar of the system show itself to be the words of power that invoke realms into being. Equal but different does not prevent the contrasts, it invites the comparisons that highlight how equal isn’t always so and under which situations one set of abilities thrives or fails. From there, the players are left to decide what they’ve created, not unlike the characters in Neal Stephenson’s System of the World where something was in its genesis but the characters weren’t sure what that was or what it portended. Not unlike the beginning of a new campaign for an RPG as well.
What information and systems provide, then, are nothing less than a suite of tools that makes communicating relevant data possible. The system prioritizes details and classes over other possibilities which lead players to optimum choices to better leverage the tools and facilitate play. This expediency comes with a cost, but the trade-off is in sharing material with others. What’s lost is how to incorporate what’s outside the system’s limits to accommodate any additional material you may need for further exploration in the play space. And this creates a paradigm for how to view and create within that structure.
Previous:
Anatomy of Game Design: Design as Art