Category: Game Design

I’m going to take a risk and make a statement I was taught – and in turn taught others – not to do: avoid the absolute or amorphous, timeless statements. Since the dawn of our intellect as a species, we have lived in a digital state – at least we have tried to. I base this assumption in part on our need to categorize information. Everything is quantified in a state of being a particular thing. Games have a way of capturing this concept perfectly. The visual is what lets the analogy work so well. Basically, games are digital. They are this way because there really is no way for them to represent a trinary state.

Games have yes/no values predominantly. They generally only express maybe during randomizations. Once the dice stop rolling or the cards are shuffled, the “maybe” state disappears. The same holds true of the spaces on a game board: either they are occupied or they are empty. Probably one of the purer examples of this is tic-tac-toe. Spaces are blank or filled. If filled, they contain one of two symbols. This is because of the nature of the game. The possible pieces of data that go into each space do not represent a trinary state as two of the possibilities give ownership to one of the players. None of this should seem surprising as it is something all gamers have experienced in some fashion.

So, where does this phenomenon of a digital state come from? In many ways, it is intrinsic to who we are as a species. There is a binary that operates in our thought processes; you, me; us, them; male, female; inside, outside the group/play space/magic circle. It is one of the organizing principles we learn to develop before culture informs us otherwise. Then again, a lot of what we do during our formative years is rooted in a system of classifications that allow us to make sense of the world. We do not have to go far to see this in action. We are engaging in that activity right now. Or, more precisely, you are as I sent you a coded script in your past that you just received a short time ago and are now decoding. I do not know when you will get this, but I know that you are not standing over my shoulder reading my first draft written in a notebook – in cursive – or while I type the edited rewrite you see before you now. What I know is this: you understand the message enough to get this far into it because of the rules that define each word’s place in language and the structure which determines meaningful context. All you need to make sense of my words is to identify what is acting in each sentence.

The complexity of sentences is designed to allow us to relate ideas more concretely, but we are aware on some level the categories and meanings of the words used and the ideas they are meant to express. In all, our brains are just looking for who or what acted. The remainder of the words help answer how, why, when, and where. This is a rather simplistic rendering of the subtle nuances of language, but it is the main impetus behind communication. A whole host of binaries are layered in the words: is it a synonym, is it spelled correctly, and is it used properly, just to name a few questions. Classification structures our lives and keeps us from harm as we learn what is safe and what is dangerous, just like it does our language.

Games provide us with a symbolic representation of categorization that we do automatically. We just don’t pay attention to the process because we already have internalized it. If you want to see it happen, observe two- and three-year-olds. The constant questioning and testing their parents’ limits are examples of this mechanism in action. This is how the brain learns to interpret the world. Once the gross patterns are learned, we begin to experiment. The child who makes grammatical errors when trying to conjugate verbs or apply superlatives (“I won you,” “I losted it,” and so on) are examples of attempts to use the structural patterns that define how we translate ideas from our thoughts into images others can grasp.

One of the reasons that games require time to learn is because of this need to categorize different states and to understand how the structural patterns work and how they can be used. The fuzzy state in between the rules is not unlike the individual words in a language. Slippage in definitions creates the spectrum in which meanings can exist by grammatical category and the nuances assigned to any single word. We can orientate ourselves by these signifiers in language to not only find our coordinates in a thought but in the way it seems to be heading. The same happens on a game board.

As our thoughts unfold, we know where they cannot go. On the game’s cartography, we learn the same concepts, only in a much more abstract manner. The way the game takes shape informs the players what is possible and what is not. This, too, is a binary. We might not have every piece of information to tell us all of the possible outcomes, but we do not know what cannot happen. In chess, for example, a pawn cannot move backwards, so we know that once it moves up a square, it no longer threatens the same squares it had. Those squares are not safe from that pawn for the rest of the game.

While games may use some of the tools for information theory in the guise of grammatical constructs, it is symbolic. The abstract information bound in the symbols prevents the binary state from being noticeable. We do not look at the empty spaces. Rather we look for the relationship between the pieces and their current point in the game space. The unoccupied locations only matter for purposes of determining strategic judgments and the odds of winning. Otherwise, the data is extraneous.

The binary elements of “is” and “is not” constitutes the digital world. A switch is either on or off. Games make us of a lot of binaries, but the uncertainty of the game relies outside of these binaries because they do not last long enough and their effects are more relevant than when probability is in flux. As our focus is mostly on chance when we play a game, we do not notice how prevalent these dualities really are. The random results and how we can stack chance in our favor is what we are drawn to. Why not, it is infinitely more exciting than the binary states. For games without random chance, we turn to our own skills against our opponents since we can never know what is in our opponent’s heads. Regardless, it is that underlying digital state which makes the nuances possible in the abstracts of symbolic concepts or the slippage in the definitions of words that fill the spaces between the bounds established by the binaries. It is how we define the rules that create the play space to create what is the game and what is not and allowed actions, positions, etc., that shows that games, and how we view information, are inextricably linked as a digital state.

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Anatomy of Game Design: Modifiers, Part 2

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 1

What about games that use the bell curve for their dice roll? If you look at the most recent editions of GURPS, Hero System, and BESM, they all do the same thing. What differs is the number of dice used, otherwise character construction functions like this: you spend points to buy ability scores that have a flat cost with some increases if a maximum ability score value is exceeded and then you can only do so with the gamemaster’s approval. BESM uses target numbers, which is effectively the opposite of D&D in the approach to simulation (flat vs. bell curve mechanic). So, it doesn’t allow a way to approach the issue of what modifiers are since they work in tandem with the relevant ability score ando/or skill to push the die roll total over the threshold for the target number. For example, the average adult has a rating of 4, the two six-sided dice yield an average of 7. Add ranks from a skill and that puts the average total at 12-17. The difficulty for an average task is 12, meaning success is more often the case. Target numbers adjust up or down by three, or roughly half a die’s average. Situational modifiers further refine the system, but they, too, are strength of position values used for environmental effects where the target number stands in as the measure for how hard something is to accomplish.

GURPS and Hero System take a different approach. They take the concept of the bell curve and use it for an internal system. GURPS gives a list of modifiers for a great many situations, like culture, differences in technological familiarity and the situation. All of them are still strength of position based modifiers. The challenges are within relation to the bell curve and the number or less needed for success. Even the modifiers that denote the difficulty are strength of position based. They range from +10 to -10. As GURPS uses a 3d6 for checks, this means a task’s difficulty is adjustable up to just shy of the curve’s average. A failure or success is virtually guaranteed at such extremes. Interestingly enough, GURPS, doesn’t penalize skill usage in combat the way D&D does. Though not stated, the dice roll represents the unquantifiable elements that could go for or against the character.

HERO System has a bit more variance, but this is limited by how skills and abilities are calculated. Like GURPS, the bell curve governs outcomes, but the values determining ranks in a skill are different so that ability scores are given less weight by dividing their value where GURPS uses a flat subtractor. None of this hides the artifice that modifiers are still rooted in the wargaming concept of strength of position. In fact, the penalties assessed against skills not normally used in combat confirms that the game’s mechanics are, like all the games discussed thus far, iterations of a derivative of wargames with perhaps a step or two between them and their predecessors. The bulk of the HERO System modifiers reside in the numerous augmentations to the basic power descriptions. But these modifiers aren’t used in play. Rather, they determine the total cost in points against a player’s budget. BESM and GURPS also do this, but HERO System raises it to an extreme. In this respect, HERO System is a true simulation tool. Any changes made to powers only define how they are manifested mechanically. There are some descriptive elements in the powers and their modifiers, but these are strength of position effects. If the power is housed in a firearm, for instance, an opponent has the ability to fight for possession if he is close enough to the character to grab hold of the weapon. Distance becomes a form of leverage and how far away a character opponent is from a device affects its overall value as location contains more meaning in the relationship between object and user/target.

Let’s look at a couple of games that try to reduce the emphasis on the strength of position in the application of modifiers: White Wolf’s new World of Darkness and Alternity. The World of Darkness uses a dice pool mechanics where each die is independent of the others. No matter what results turn up on other dice, they do nothing to alter the outcome of this one. Each ten-sided die has a 70% failure rate, however. This value is static. The whole of the system revolves around the number of dice thrown. So, for WoD games, it really is a numbers game when it comes to the mechanics. The adjustments are relative strengths of position on first glance. Unlike the values for other systems discussed so far, the addition or reduction modifiers in the WoD system do not translate into as large of a jump in percentages guaranteeing success that most systems incur as part of their mechanic for initial adjustments. The formula for success in WoD is consistent, but the percentages scale. Without including the math for the “10 again” rule that allows rerolls for 10s, the chance of success is 1-.7^x, where “x” is the number of dice rolled. This is not ot say that other systems don’t have varying percentages or that the WoD system doesn’t skew towards larger intervals, but that at the average dice pool size of 4, the loss of a die only affects the chance of success by 10% and adding a die increases it by 7%. Like bell curve systems, the chances along the extremes grow more noticeable.

Each die still retains its rate of failure at 70%. This fact is what changes the system from modifiers that are purely strength of position to ones of relative strength or relative position. It might seem like an argument of semantics, but there is a lot of room between the two ideas as the former is an absolute, giving it a hard edge. Yes, success becomes more likely, but unlike the adjustments for D&D and the bell curve games discussed, this system relies purely on random chance. It is true that the number of dice rolled influences probability towards the player’s favor, but such modifications don’t work to shift the average total. The artifice is still visible, but the dice pool does reduce the visibility. One of the masks is to require a number of successes to be rolled, which affects the probability but brings attention to the number of dice rolled and the adjustments slide towards their wargame roots. Even the permutations on the rolls can’t prevent the slide, but does keep the game from collapsing into the wargame mechanic.

Alternity is a special case in light of everything discussed so far. The game is in many ways the forerunner of the d20/OGL system. All actions are governed by the roll of a d20, but it gets modified by the inclusion of another die. The game is an internal system, quasi-point-buy, and a linear cost for ability scores. There are a few twists, however. Success increases in magnitude if the thresholds reached are half the ability or skill score or half that number again. The d20 serves as a control die and is always used. The bonus or penalty determines what size die, if any, accompanies the d20. There’s no bell curve for average tasks under common conditions. Any inclusion of a bell curve thus represents an unquantifiable but noticeable condition that makes a task easier or more challenging. Plus, it has the added bonus of varying percentages.

Adjustments in Alternity look like those from other games, but this is superficial. The addition of a die or two may create a bell curve, but it varies by circumstances and represents a more nebulous approach as the chief mechanic applies more descriptive terms to situations that represent the linguistic component to a random roll. A +1 or +2 step penalty isn’t a flat adjustment, but changes a d20+d0 to a d20+d4 or d20+d6 respectively. The descriptive term is used to complement the die penalty or bonus. Like internal systems, this game doesn’t make use of varying target numbers. The mechanic is somewhat similar to WoD in that the control die is independent of the situation die. Yes, there combined total matters, but the situation die is a random value and not a flat number that moves the bell curve along the number line. Add to this the same potential to slide into the strength of position by paying attention to the dice rolled and the artifice is revealed once more. Rather than relying on the permutations that WoD has as options, Alternity uses them up front (for example, there’s no equivalent to “10 again” or the like as an Amazing result already addresses that issue and counts as multiple successes). The inclusion of complexity for tasks at the outset is also encoded in descriptive terms. But, because of these compensations and nuanced negotiations, the game shows its artifice all the more and reveals that the situation die is still a form of strength of position modifier, only one with more randomness.

It seems that RPGs are too rooted to their wargame predecessors. No matter the system or method, the vestiges of the strength of position are embedded in the fabric of the game. There are a few glimmers that this won’t always be the case, but the math and its manipulation are barriers. Both Alternity and World of Darkness contain methods of mitigating the problems that adjustments present, but both also reveal that the only meaning ascribed to these values are a character’s relation in respect to proximity. The result is a conflict between potential and probability. If a system can remove the only meaning as one of relative strength by position, then the modifier can take on more nuanced meanings and leave behind physical and theoretical terrain features used in RPGs up to this point. A fully random mechanic seems to point a way toward that end. For now, however, it seems the answer to my question of what a modifier is is a relationship of strength based on positionality in any given frame of reference.

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Anatomy of Game Design: Modifiers, Part 1

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Anatomy of Game Design: A Digital State

Models, simulations and games all seem to use modifiers, but there doesn’t seem to be any explanation for what they are and why they have the set values they are assigned. So I have to ask, what are modifiers? No, seriously, what are they? I’m sure the question comes across as being rhetorical, but it’s not. I’ve been designing games for over thirty years and I don’t have an answer. Sadly, anyone who thinks that I would have a solid idea of what they are because I use them would be mistaken. I know how to use them enough to fake it, and I suspect that I’m not alone. I understand how to use the math well enough, but that isn’t the same thing as understanding the concept. I might stumble through this essay the way I often find myself doing when developing a game, but my attempt here is to explore the ways in which modifiers are used and try to discern what they are.

The first thing is to recognize that the math behind any game is arbitrary. It’s clear that anything designed to simulate reality is an artifice at best and cumbersome at worst. The goal is to have a semblance of balance. So, a game utilizing discrete probability like Chutes & Ladders is predicated upon. The fairness in such a game is that the results are random for everyone and the bonuses and penalties are contingent on what space you land on for your next move. The situation is theoretically outside of player control with the exception of a person’s dice rolling or spinner manipulation skills. Monopoly uses doubles to modify the game with bonuses and penalties. Mathematically, you have the same chance of rolling a 7 as you do doubles. The board has 40 spaces. If the average value is used, it should take six rolls to go around the board (5.7 if you divide the number of spaces by the average). With a one-in-six chance of a double or 7, this comes out to about five turns to complete a circuit around the board. The modifier means everyone gets paid around the same time. Equilibrium a game does not make, however. Unlike linear board games with instructions printed on them like “go back 3 spaces,” Monopoly uses three options to break up equilibrium: Chance, Community Chest, and going to jail. All modify board position or resource management, which effectively amount to the same thing. The dice rolls, a board space, and a Chance card can even halt progression on the board by sending a player to jail. Pay the fines, wait three turns, or throw doubles before then to get out and resume progression. Three rolls later, you should find yourself on the other side of the “Go to Jail” space. There is a recurring value with the dice or turn sequencing and is thus used as a modifier that gets tied to the dice rolls.

Some games just have skewed math, like Risk. The more armies you use to invade a territory, the more likely you are to win even if the opponent has the same number. Part of this lies in the limitations of the defender. In the early stages, it is easier to defend as the number of free armies available to attack is low. This is why consolidation by continent control is vital. Once players begin drawing enough cards to turn in sets for additional reinforcements on top of those gained at the start of a turn, the game begins its runs towards a tipping point. Several modifiers are at play: bonus armies for owning all the territories of a continent, progressively larger numbers of armies gained from turning in a set of cards, and the skewed math that gives an attacker three dice to roll compared to the defender’s two. The game becomes less risky if you make your position as defensible as possible in the early stages. That strategy will have repercussions that might mitigate the effects of probability.

Wargames also use modifiers, but they don’t operate with quite the same abstract nature as board games, though Risk does point to the same type risk/reward scenarios found in wargames. Since the creation of Kreigsspiel, wargames have been built around the notion of relative strength, which Risk represents abstractly. This is the reason many games are limited to specific eras. The value of the units is defined in such a way that the arbitrary math that makes game play possible appears to be less so. Now, the same rules may work quite well for different eras, but this hinges upon the units never appear in battles not of their historical timeframe. One of the reasons is that the modifiers will skew results outside of the artifice of the game mechanics and expose said mechanics for what they truly are: arbitrary. The other is verisimilitude, straining the math too much reveals how it’s just a grainy approximation. Imagine a unit of English longbowmen squaring off with machine gunners from WWI, WWII, or the American Civil War which introduced trench warfare and hand-cranked machine guns.

Tactics introduced tabletop board wargaming. It based combat resolution around abstracted odds that reduced each side’s relative strength to a value from one to six for or against and then a die roll on the appropriate table to determine outcome. As a result, it was a game that took the step towards situationally-based modifiers in board games. The amount of strength you brought against your opponent, in this case. Optional rules in Tactics II carried the premise further by doubling defense values based on the terrain in which the unit occupied. These same rules applied to Kriegsspiel, but Tactics set the stage for many of the conventions, including those from Kriegsspiel, for tabletop play without the need for a third-party referee watching over the game. The modifiers didn’t really emphasize what they defined other than an advantage of some sort over the opponent. Modifiers spoke of some element that affected the overall usefulness of a unit in varying terrain or weather conditions. Even a game like Squad Leader doesn’t mention how the numbers translate. Its big brother, Advanced Squad Leader, with its intricate rules does not mention what the modifiers represent, only when they apply. The best guess from reading and playing such games is that they represent relative strengths of position, meaning the modifiers are inherent in the situation as much as they are in the unit’s composition. This is no different from Chutes & Ladders and what space you land on if you remove the strategic element.

A lot of this sort of math made its way into roleplaying games because they are the progeny of wargaming. This is why levels of experience have built-in modifiers to combat abilities. The more seasoned one becomes, the more efficient he is in combat. Likewise, the more proficient one becomes in a profession increases the speed and ease at which tasks can be preformed. But what measures the strength of position for noncombat related events? Performing research or conducting and investigation are not the same as holding the high ground in a firefight. While having the right tools is paramount, they don’t fully explain how or why some modifiers apply to their use.

Performance under stress shows how artificial modifiers are. Why are characters performing a task during combat or under a time crunch considered to be stressed but a combatant facing an obvious superior foe isn’t? Some games, like Dungeons & Dragons, use a morale check to see if creatures and nonplayer characters will flee or fight, but not player characters. Unless a player decides otherwise or the character is compelled supernaturally to turn and run, the character stands his ground. Both provide sources of undue stress, but in the case of combat, it’s somehow subsumed into the system. Physical actions, or those not related to Wisdom and Intelligence, also seem to catch a break so that only mental actions that require concentration of any amount bear the brunt of situational modifiers in combat, unless they are related to environmental conditions.

The question remains, however, of what the modifiers represent. The strength of position argument seems invalid since there can never be an advantage to performing a task under pressure during combat that isn’t related to fighting opponents. What strength in position is there in having access to a vast library if you do not know where to start? Consider that even if you find the right sources, do they have enough pointers (index, table of contents, etc.) that would speed up the process? Say the character has to diffuse a bomb. Outside of the device’s complexity and his knowledge of explosives or electronics, there is not strengths of position to measure. The threat of death should be enough that a firefight should not be an additional stressor if the character is protected by allies. That said, ducking bullets is another issue altogether meriting its own modifier. The circumstances aren’t the same however. The math might be, but that doesn’t seem to be a logical or reasonable fix.

Complexity might come close to replicating the challenges faced in the midst of combat, but the methods by which the actions are resolved are still suspect. In an attempt to discern what is going on, let’s look at a few systems and try to untangle the issue’s nuances. Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 uses a rather simple system modeled on the bell curve used to generate ability scores which it has inherited from the original rules. The average value of the three six-sided dice is the same as a twenty-sided die. The average result for a d6 is 3.5 and 10.5 for a d20. As such, 3.5 x 3 = 10.5. While the new method of character generation uses 4d6, drop the lowest value, the average is still 10.5 as scores will still fall between 3 and 18. So the modifiers from ability scores (which roughly coincide with standard deviations) shift the average as much as the number of ranks in a skill. The difficulty is set as a target number or higher to be rolled with the bonuses from skill proficiency and ability scores. It is the same mechanic as combat, but again there is no penalties for facing a superior opponent that aren’t already factored into the target’s Armor Class, the character’s level, and environmental conditions. When you attack a noncombat challenge, its “Armor Class” is the Difficulty Check. Granted, combat can be – and often is – construed as an environmental condition, but if you are trained for combat conditions or can perform certain tasks without thought you’d pay attention to other stimuli, like tying your shoes; you don’t think about the steps involved, you mastered it and look at your surroundings. So, why is it that the characters can’t do the same for something like First Aid if they are reasonably free from attack, ranged or melee? D20 Modern should follow the same line of thought as it has options for characters in military service. A demolitions expert shielded by allies and obstacles should get the same break, but doesn’t. Being trained under fire or pressure doesn’t grant a reprieve, to include not drawing an attack of opportunity because you aren’t on your guard. One can argue that feats like Skill Focus or class abilities count, but a +3 bonus or taking a flat 10 on a roll plus skill ranks and other bonuses is not the same if the penalties for combat still apply to the character. If anything, it papers over the issue by reducing everything to just the numbers.

The problem of the approach is in the mechanics as much as it is the math used to hide any concerns. Ability scores are generated using a bell curve and then resolutions are done using a linear system. Yes, the aggrate of the dice rolls average out to 10.5, but the rolls can’t be taken across the lifetime of the character when increases in skills are also linear. The Difficulty Check is also linear. It’s weighted towards the average, but it is still a flat line. The die itself will always roll from one to twenty. As a character progresses through levels, the accumulated skill points and feats require that the DC continues to increase like the AC of opponents to keep apace to provide a challenge. In effect, you have a system that ranks the differences between success and failure in 5% increments. A DC of 15 means there is a 70% chance of failure; a DC of 20, 100%, and a DC of 25, 125%. Now, when you factor in skill ranks, bonuses, feats, etc., that failure rate starts to drop, but it’s always uniform. The higher DC scores are meant to put some tasks out of reach for the nonprofessional, but the effects of the bell curve average over time always remains. The characters are essentially just getting better in their specialties, but the bell curve is just shifting. The character is like a surfer riding a wave with the adjustments acting like a tidal force to keep them moving.

How does this modifier fall short? The assumption is that the bell curve still applies to everyone of the same level of skill. Everyone is essentially the same and it becomes the province of the die’s results. The modifier doesn’t account for the situation, it accounts for likely factors that move the percentage of failure up or down while masking that the unquantifiable aspects of the situation are referenced in the die roll. It’s a mask because the modifiers affect the fixed value of the character’s proficiency in the skill. That said, if you change the DC, you are saying the task is not as hard as one believed it to be. Thus, either anyone can (almost) do it, or few can. The game is still fun, it just doesn’t do a good job explaining why, how or what adjustments are or represent and it’s too easy to manipulate a fixed incremental percentage value. The artifice requires players to interpret outcomes in a way that also deflects from the shortcomings of the game’s mechanics.

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Anatomy of Game Design: Driven Towards Extinction

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 Anatomy of Game Design: Modifiers, Part 2

Games have a dirty secret. It isn’t anything of a conspiratorial nature. Rather, it is something that not even game designers may be cognizant of or willing to discuss even if they know it (I suspect it’s more the latter than the former). Those of us who do know don’t seem to talk about it publicly, except maybe for books on game design to teach people how to make games, not unlike what I’m doing now. Call it an occupational hazard, if you will, to let people in on the secret. The truth of the issue is simply this: games are meant to go the way of the dodo.

This isn’t something people really want to hear when looking to buy a new game. But it should be noted that games aren’t like most forms of technology. Games aren’t designed to be replaced with the latest, greatest version the way cell phones and computers are despite what some companies may have you believe. Games are designed to be replaced with a different game, usually of the same type. The reason for this is quite simple: once you master the skills necessary to overcome the challenge presented by a game, you lose interest; or, you should since there’s little left to learn. This isn’t a bad thing and is actually the point of a game. You are supposed to master the skills necessary to overcome the obstacle and then move on to something much more worthy of your newfound mastery.

Why games expire is rooted in how challenges in games work. To understand this, we have to deconstruct a few things about games from the point of view of the three basic hats a game designer has to wear: writer, designer, and educator. Let’s have a brief over view of these jobs. As a writer, my job is to inform or entertain you, the reader – preferably both. As a game designer, my job is to provide you with the means to an experience. As an educator, I’m trying to teach you without your realizing that’s what is happening. Most of the above is culturally defined and not accurate. They give satisfactory explanations, albeit misleading ones, for each role. However, they are useful as cursory overviews.

The roles probably are not what one would expect in relation to this subject. As such, let me take a moment to clarify that not only are they related (their differences are in how their emphasis or methodologies work to get at the same concept), but it is their perspectives which make them all the more so for understanding game design. For the purposes of this piece, the nuances of how this is so goes beyond the discussion. It is mentioned here in the spirit of full disclosure that the delineations between the three are made and the knowledge that a bit of conflation may occur.

Regardless of the format or audience, I still have to entertain my readers as a writer. One of the reasons why technical manuals are so hard to read is because of the intense boredom they incite in most people. The dryness of the language isn’t encouraging to say the least. If I wasn’t doing my job of keeping and holding your attention, you’d move on to something else. My audience would be quite small if I didn’t’ make the writings I offer as enjoyable as possible. This piece, like most of my entries, is of the more informative vein. As such, I have to balance information with keeping your interests on my words. Effectively, this is the kind of writing you’d find in a game’s rules.

When it comes to a story, the opposite is true. I need to keep you as long as possible, engrossed in my story. The balance here isn’t in fighting boredom that could set in, but in preventing you from being cheated while maintaining your suspension of disbelief in the logic of my story. Otherwise, the tale feels too rushed or contrived. If I maintain that balance, you will relish every moment and want it to end, but not just yet. The odd thing is that we want to be strung along by a good story. Part of the gratification of a good story isn’t just that it’s well told, but it also has to delay the promised gratification. Here is where a writers smuggles in (intentionally or not) his message while the reader is thusly entertained. This is how the writer informs the audience. Whether conscious of it or not, the reader is gaining that information. This isn’t to say writers are insidious or odious in their practice. What it means is that the news, facts, etc. are more palatable for the audience. Failing to do this often leads to turning off the writer’s readers as they may feel the author is being heavy-handed or worse.

From the perspective of a designer, it’s all about the experience inherent in the design. The formal structure cannot and should not try to capture all of the implications of a game’s experience. Rather, it should frame the likely possibilities. When a design is undertaken, the first step is to develop the unnecessary obstacle that lies at the heart of the game. The game Pac-Man will suffice to illustrate this point. Pac-Man is a test of finding the most economical route through a maze. By itself, this is an easy task. The ghosts are an unnecessary obstacle. Their purpose is to make the quickest route a lot more of a challenge when four arrestors move around the map in seemingly random patterns to include chasing your avatar, but are also affected by your avatar’s movements through the play space. In effect, a form of hide-and-seek with no safe place and four guards is the core of the game’s formal structure.

As much fun as this game may be, you’ll eventually get bored of it. The experience of being chased forever by ghosts that are relentless wears thin and has an ultimate conclusion: losing. Another game with this outcome is Tetris. The goal is to keep the blocks from piling up to the top. So, what do these games have in common? They’re not about inevitability, they are games of endurance. The experience isn’t in the graphics or the interface; those are merely window dressing for framing the experience. What these games are about is how long you can concentrate on a single task. The number of points you earn are a way to do it with style. Some players are more daring than others and it is their scores which will reflect this. As a designer, I bury the experience behind the façade so that what you see is essentially a new iteration of the same concept and how it can be applied to different situations while using some of the same skills.

The final hat I have to wear should seem straightforward, but it’s not. Let’s face it, raw knowledge is boring. Being given information you didn’t ask for is annoying. Add to that the fact that learning is work. Knowledge with no clear purpose is meaningless. That’s why people call it “trivia.” Not only does the knowledge being imparted require that it have meaning, but that the way it’s transmitted is also meaningful. Written instructions for how to wield a hammer with the least amount of time spent on each nail is not as useful as a live demonstration. The medium of transmission is as critical as the valuation of the information.

One of the critical skills for an educator is the ability to cater to different learning styles. Active demonstrations, written texts, physical objects, and the like are ways to engage the audience without alienating anyone. Examples of play in games fulfill this requirement in the same way that a classroom lecture highlights the key elements an instructor is actively stressing are important. What these different methods have in common is contextualization of the knowledge to be gleaned. This is where information gains meaning. So, the job of an educator is to make the context speak to people in a way that makes them want to learn and have the information possess meaning for them as well.

Eventually, one reaches a point of diminishing returns. This is what mastery causes. Once you know 2 +2 = 4, you begin to get irritated being asked to solve it every time someone demands the answer. Mastery leads to boredom. Hearing the same information get rehashed time and again in various classes is why so many begin to tune out their instructors. Understanding how the story ends, the way it’s structured and the characters’ personalities can only sustain interest so far before the magic of the tale begins to wear thin. The same thing applies to the thrill of an experience. None of these things are infinitely repeatable even if the sheer number of possible games can never be reached by a group of players.

Games try to overcome this, but they, too, cannot escape the inevitable. The game has its own relentless arrestors, like Pac-Man. Once a player has learned what the game teaches, it is only a matter of time before it is abandoned. Such is the fate of tic-tac-toe once players realize the game is rigged to conform to patters that are finite in number. That said, it’s a great way to teach a player the basics of cartography. Go does the same thing, but the depth of strategy required to master the game is far greater and inordinately complex if indeed it is even possible. Though the number of possible outcomes outnumbers the atoms in the universe, this isn’t enough to prevent a player from growing bored with the game. Such players have gained as much as they can stomach before they need another game to recapture the joy of the learning experience.

The experience is used to hide the lesson behind the context of meaning. The lesson comes in multiple forms in the game via art, rules, performance, game pieces, and a whole host of other media that represent the entirety of the game. The writing of the rules helps set the mood and tone for the game before it’s played, even if that’s simply a description of what role you have in it, such as Monopoly being self-described as a wheeling-and-dealing real estate game. The style in which the rules are written draws the audience in, but it exposes the formal elements, meaning you learn from the outset what the game teaches even if you don’t know the quickest route to mastery of the material. My job is to make myself obsolete by passing on what I know to you, but as there are multiple ways to view an obstacle, and the experience should last long enough to make you feel that your time invested in each play of the game is unique enough to warrant the effort through the meaning you create in the experiences you have. As such, my words are almost poetic in their prose insofar as that you have to puzzle out all of the nuanced meanings inherent in how the rules work.

Once all the players have learned their lessons, they graduate to another game. Students move on to the next grade. Martial artists gain a higher degree via colors of belts. Readers move on to the next writer or the next volume in an author’s body of work (if they haven’t exhausted his or her catalogue). We design new works to continue the exploration, but the old works remain to teach a new generation of players who learn the lessons and will also move on in time. Old hands can take pleasure in teaching and living through the experiences of new players. Once we learn, we teach; but we don’t become extinct, only unable to teach the same skill to the same audience without a shift to a new perspective. And, for that reason, we create objects driven to their own extinction for each individual who took up the challenge of their own volition.

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Anatomy of Game Design: Blurring the Lines

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Anatomy of Game Design: Modifiers, Part 1

Three installments ago, I attacked the concept of the magic circle. My assessment wasn’t completely fair in that I didn’t fully disclose why I did so. Eric Zimmerman wrote about attacks on the magic circle in a February 7, 2012 piece on Gamasutra’s website. He argues that many of these complaints use straw men fallacies to establish the author’s position. On a cursory read, I do seem to be using just such a tactic in how I approached the subject. So, why did I do it if I knew that it would appear as if I were basing my premise on a logical fallacy? In part, what I was trying to do was cut through the complexity of the subject to isolate one component to illustrate the need to separate the mythic structure of the social contract in the guise of the magic circle from its reality. The other reason was that in an essay format, there was too much material to cover and I knew I would have to write this piece in order to address some of the missing elements.

This is why I did it: in my experience with literary circles of academia, the liminal space gets conflated with the play space as if they completely suspend the rules of reality in the same manner. Now, this makes sense if you only apply the theory to works of art, visual or print. It is a part of what the surrealist movement was about. The material of that movement actively works to circumvent the notions of reality and the need for art to conform to the world we know and asks us to question what we accept as “realistic.” Anyone who has studied the more artistic humanities will appreciate how this playing with normative conventions is meant to inspire discussions on the role of art, what it reveals, etc. Art is artifice, after all. If only it stopped there.

As studies in drama taught me, the same thing is applied to theater. The roots of drama are ritual ceremony. When one entered the sacred space, it was a liminal place. Some of that is still retained in Western cultures, but ceremonies are not strictly linked to the supernatural or in reverence of the divine. Add to this the fact that not all rituals are clad in the trappings of symbolism meant to reveal or invoke an altered state, and the artificial space created by the social contract is anything but magical. Someone who acts as the master of ceremonies at a charity event cannot be necessarily said to be heading a religious experience, for example. Even the ritual of graduation from an educational institute does not invoke a higher power, despite any prior associations. Yet, in drama, the stage is still seen as a magic circle in some respects. The play is no longer bound to religious stories, though the tales may speak to common situations that affect the community as a whole.

Then there’s the issue of rules. As much as I would like it to be the case, formal structures are not always elegant enough to rise to the level of art. Personally, I know of no one who has ever exclaimed that the combination of specific phonemes is art. Nor have I heard the rules of language described that way. How they are used, on the other hand, is where people generally speak of language arts. It is how one wields the rules where the quasi-magical occurs. Otherwise, languages would be considered artistic expressions on their own without the need to distinguish them from the works written in any given tongue. All this is a long-winded prelude to my attempt in decoupling the liminal space from the social contract is simply that not all things remain within the play space; some experiences impact the game and the real world and this is a direct response to the implications of the social structure imposed on the bound space without the need to rely on ephemeral notions like liminality.

Whenever anyone enters/leaves the play space, attitudes enter and knowledge leaves. The permeable barrier between the social contract of the play space and reality cannot slough off the relationships and emotions of players as they enter. Those behaviors and outside relationships are key to who the players are for that play session, if not in reality. The porous boundaries of the so-called liminal space allow for a constant exchange of information and attitudes between reality and the game. Don’t believe me? You might want to check out The Ungame. Its primary purpose is to make you learn something about your fellow participants that has nothing to do with how they play games. The information learned is brought in from outside the play space and makes the player a component of the game. There is nothing magical in this nor is it liminal, it’s part of the rules of the game. Say, however, the game is less “educational” in scope. The experience remains with the players. It isn’t extracted as some form of selected amnesia when the game is left behind. Players also take away improved skills whether they won or not; and, when returning to memories of games played, they may think of ways to better their chances of winning.

Games are spaces of confusion. This is deliberate, but likely where the conflation with the liminal is most flagrant. Whether we are meant to ascribe our own meaning to the play experience or our relationship to the various forms of knowledge, we are expected to work within the game’s framework. That is appropriate and respects the conditions enacted by the social contract. The admixture of seemingly unrelated subjects is grounds for us to relax and rethink how information or concepts from different disciplines might be related. On the face of it, this idea sounds magical. However, science has offered an explanation why this is the case and how it further debunks the erstwhile mythical view of genius in action. This is one of the points raised on The Dylan Ratigan Show when Jonah Lehrer was interviewed during his March 19, 2012 appearance in relation to his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. It’s the thread between ideas, no matter how tenuous, that helps create insight. This has bearing here as it shows that while a formal structure can provide the security to fail time and again until a solution is found, nothing magical or liminal is attached to it. This should not be taken to preclude experiences from feeling magical only that engendering environments are not equitable in this capacity.

Furthermore, the obscuration players use as fiat to mask their strategies to win are often designed to confound opponents as much as possible. Second guessing your own moves in a game is a way in which a player has managed to confuse you. Why did he make that move? What does she hope to gain by playing that card? Both are examples of questions of player-generated confusion. The route taken is not prescribed by the rules. Add to this the ways in which the conditions of reality or the game impinge upon the other and it’s a bit easier to see how the barriers between game and reality are blurred sufficient enough to confuse where one ends and the other begins, to say nothing of the emotional states of the players. As the environment was the subject of much of the entry on house rules, I’ll leave the subject at this for the sake of brevity.

One problem with the conflation of the magic circle with the liminal, artistic space is how people can be hurt through its application in ways it should not be used. Granted, wisdom is the outgrowth of the pain from knowledge and may be induced during rituals in order to inure the initiate against future agonies, but that makes for a very bad game. The whole point of keeping the social contract separate from the liminal is to reduce the confusion and expose the artifice for what it really is. Games are a form of art, yes, but they are by no means magical or necessarily ritualistic and transformative experiences. The art is in the crafting of the artifice that you, as a player, use to create your own experiences. The blurred boundaries of art and religious experience aren’t meant to be destructive. If they inflict pain, it is in order to reveal the world as the community sees it and the subsequent realignment of the individual’s ego to the group’s worldview. A game like poker shows how this isn’t always the case with games.

The confused experience of game spaces like poker work to create the potential of a dangerous situation. This is the key difference between the shock of ritual and the empty wallet from a poker game. Sure, you might learn the hard lesson that chance can lead you to ruin, but it doesn’t mean you won’t come back time and again to lose it all to your friends. The ceremony, however, was designed to align members to the community’s interests where as the poker game is one of self interest. In part, this is due to the emotional entanglement created by both the ceremony and poker. One is decidedly more positive than the other given our social needs as a species. Games that deal with relationships and/or psychology mimic some of the same core elements of our most sacred rites, including secular ones. When you take real money in poker, you deprive someone of their earnings. This is not a slam against the game, I’m just pointing out the rules of the game.

Like religion, poker requires a communal responsibility, but this conflicts with the game’s goal: win as much as you can. The attitude of the players matters because they determine how much they will respect the limits of others and even go so far as to prevent fellow players from draining their savings, especially if the game is played amongst friends. There are moral and ethical issues in games and rituals which have this level of impact on the world at large for the participants. Play is taken less seriously however, and it is this very attitude which is conducive to the blurring of the lines between reality and play spaces.

To reiterate: players always take something away when they leave the play space. Our capacity to retain memories of an experience only helps to reinforce that a game can produce emotional entanglements between that extends beyond the play space in a like fashion as religious ceremonies. While not magical or liminal for games, it is intangible. Players will remember how they were treated by fellow participants. The more a game or ritual conflates liminal spaces with reality, the greater the emotional entanglement is as the barriers between the two become so diffused that it may be harder to distinguish them. This is in no small part due to the involvement of the person’s body or ego in the game. If this weren’t true, why have rules of sportsmanship to govern behavior and curb emotional outbursts or the disclaimers so often found in roleplaying games that players are not their characters?

Why should a clear delineation between game spaces and reality matter so much? Because not everyone wants to play the game. And, if they should, they likely do not want to play at the same time as others for myriad reasons. Chances are that if they do wish to participate, they do not wish for the social contract to be in play anymore than they may wish the play space to expand beyond what is needed. This is tantamount to a form of moving the goal posts and it runs the risk of removing a player’s agency, forcing him to continue to unwillingly participate. If the divisions aren’t clear, the liminal never ends and all spaces risk collapse in conflation. Imagine the stress of such emotional entanglement in an activity that you would prefer does not interfere with other activities in your life. In such games, players are always playing, even when they are not in such a scenario. This is essentially the essence of what people do to others to earn description of “gaming the system.”

Finally, not all so-called liminal spaces are meant for play. Despite being pageants that do not have practical significance beyond the emotional states they are intended to create in a person, the conflation of play spaces with the liminal/artistic and sacred rite/magic circle is the very thing that must be respected while simultaneously guarded against in the way these similar, yet radically different concepts are described and conducted. We need play, ceremony, and art, but not always at once or combined. What’s needed is a recognition that the social contract requires a sense of responsibility for our fellow players as the real magic is the forging of community and the nurturing games provide via creative associations accepted knowledge have with one another. When the use of social contracts and liminal spaces are better understood by disciplines beyond game design, the lines likely won’t be so blurred. It is the community that is sacred; games and rituals are merely the glue to keep people bonded to one another.

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Anatomy of Game Design: House Rules

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Anatomy of Game Design: Driven Towards Extinction

Say you are playing a game and you run into a situation that is not covered by the rules. What do you do to keep the game going, default to the closest rule, disallow the action, argue until you are blue in the face, or create a solution? The solution one chooses speaks as much about the situation as it does what those around the table think about the players involved to some degree. Stopping in the middle of a game to adjudicate the rules is not fun. Not only does it take players out of the social contract that defines the play space, such gaps in the rules mean they have to confront the social contract and its failure(s). There is little to do as a game designer to prevent this situation from arising as it is impossible to predict player behavior or all nuances of the game created. Add to this one very simple truth: all games have gaps in their rules as a condition of the ambiguity in their rules that creates the play space, but which can lead players needing additional clarifications that arise out of their unique experiences within the play space.

Okay, maybe it does not sound so simple after all. To reiterate, no game designer can conceive of every possible situation that can occur in any given game session, regardless of how straightforward or clear the rules are. Some of these come down to the environment in which the game is played. Only players can choose where and when they play. Not even the rules can affect this outside of a required environmental component such as ice for a hockey match. Field hockey does not qualify as a house rule in this example as it has a few additional modifications that changes the game in fundamental ways. Barring such changes and conveniences of modern technology, one cannot play ice hockey outside without a frozen pond or the like. How much of the frozen surface constitutes the legal playing field is a form of a house rule, however. It is the denotation of boundaries that is at the heart of any house rule.

As established in previous entries of this series, performance impacts play. How a player behaves and interprets the rules is as important as the role of the rules in defining what the game is, its inherent sacrosanct obstacles, and the basic performative behavior required to participate. The role of the rules is threefold because the rules have to establish the context of the game without regard to conditions that do not correspond to the internal consistency of its own grammar. Ignoring this consideration runs the risk of confusion. Under ideal conditions, the game works fine, but the environment and the players’ individual personalities change the external conditions. The rules, cannot account for everyone or everything as the list of contingencies would be so long that people would lose interest if not the purpose of the game before they even started playing it. Players have to interpret how to integrate the implied social contract of the game into their surroundings in order for the game to be a successful play experience. This can, and often does, lead to a clash of styles as the players determine what their ideal strategies are under the double imposed conditions and their opponents. Both style of play and interpretation are metarules in the sense that they are beyond the scope of the written instructions of the game. So, what happens when a gap opens up between the internal and external conditions of the game’s rules?

The behavior of players and the experiences they create will always run the risk of falling into the interstice between rules and reality. While part of it deals with the complex interplay of reality, individuals, and the play space, it also stems from the rules. No matter how simplified a game appears, it is anything but. Consider the definitions of each word involved in the sentences that make up the descriptions of the rules. Not only is there the linguistic component of syntax, but also the nuance in meaning that each word contains within it. If the meaning of the construct which is supposed to generate a meaningful experience is tied up in the meaning of the individual words, then something is going to open a breach and allow confusion to creep into the play space in a similar way that this overwrought sentence is likely doing to someone at this point in time. What it boils down to is this: rules are highly complex and their relationships to one another affect clarity.

Complexity between individual rules and the game with external conditions ultimately will lead to a need to amend the social contract whenever gaps between the environment and the play space occur. Yes, this includes play styles and behavior. Whenever anyone engages in an act that disrupts the flow of the game, it transcends individuality and becomes an environmental condition. To prevent a change in the environment from destroying the game, a house rule is enacted so that the game can be adapted to its surroundings. In this way, it is not unlike using modern technology to create ice rinks to play ice hockey in the spring despite the warm weather. The rink does not change the game, only the methods in adaptation along the lines of saying “New rule, we play indoors from now on.” This is an example of how the social contract is amended to preserve the integrity of the game in that the external conditions are manipulated (“If you wish to continue playing with us, you have to do it in there”).

Prevailing conditions can also be used to gain an unfair advantage. This particular rend between the play space and the outside world is one of dishonesty. Rather than relying on one’s own skills to best an opponent, a cheating player uses the environment to compensate, augment, or otherwise gain leverage that can be used with a smaller expenditure of resources to meet the game’s challenges. In effect, the central obstacle becomes less so for the cheater. In American football, the teams change directions so that any environmental condition is neutralized by both sides being able to utilize it for roughly half of the game. Since house rules are not part of the game, both parties must be made aware of them so that they understand what the changes are and have the ability to object should it prove that the change is designed to disadvantage others. Another example from sports is how some stadiums rule what happens if a ball hits a wall or scoreboard. The former is still in play while the latter is often ruled as a ground-rule double. Fenway Park’s prodigious left field wall, the Green Monster, is still an obstacle to right-handed hitters making it fair to both sides trying to get a baseball over the wall. The only real advantage the Boston Red Sox players have is they get to practice against it eighty-one times a year. What has not changed for any player, however, is the methods to achieve the goal of hitting a home run.

Should the conditions not provide a reason for the break between the environment and the game, then another possibility for the creation of a house rule stems from what I call, a broken grammar inherent in the rules. Just like language, games have a grammar. Whenever it is broken, from an inconsistency in how a rule is applied or the multiplicity of meanings generated by play or the semiotics from the game’s physical components, players have to pause in order to sort out the meaning. There is a lot in common with this failure to convey meaning as there is when trying to understand a non-native speaker. If the confusion in the grammar is strong enough, it can destroy the meaning and threaten the pleasure of the experience. Herein lays the problem with the semiotics of games.

Some aspects of games are highly subjective. This stems not just from the symbols used, but also the concepts described by the rules. An individual’s interpretation of what is expected does not necessarily correspond with an opponent’s because rules are fuzzy to allow wiggle room to overcome the central obstacle of the game. If I change the way I make my moves in a chess match without violating the rules and it confuses my opponent, then my interpretation in how I can move my pieces is different than my opponent’s. For instance, if I lifted my pieces a foot or more off the board before placing them in their final resting place, it may distort the meaning, which is what happens when someone tries to speak a language he or she does not fully grasp. I have stretched the limits of communication without fully destroying the grammar, but breaking it just enough to force my opponent to work harder to understand the movements I am making that have nothing to do with the game’s final outcome. However, it is an interpretation that lets me play the game just as well as my partner. If the pieces are changed to a set that does not conform to the shapes most recognized, that too can affect the way in which I or my opponent interact with the game. Semiotics, through symbols and nebulous concepts, stretch and deform the grammar of language while being the language of the game.

One of the things that games cannot do is provide players with a list of every conceivable rule for not only how to play, but how to set up the game and govern player actions. That was in part what my previous example about the chess match demonstrated. How does one know where to put the board for the board game and its subsequent orientation? Where does one put the bank in Monopoly in relation to the game? For the most part, these are unwritten rules that default back to the environment in which the game is played. That said, how does one roll the dice, use the spinner, etc? Again, there really is no way to rule on this from the standpoint of the game designer other than possibly where the rolling should be done in relation to the board and the players (e.g. on or off the board and in full view of other players). These rules are either missing or assumed, depending on your perspective on the issue. They have no direct impact on the game in the same manner as external conditions.

Ambiguities in this area are a pain to encounter and fix for most players. It is not hard to understand why. After all, who wants to spend money and time on a product only to have to go through it a fix the problems encountered? The reason is usually because the overall concept and experience the game creates is worth it. Often, the need for house rules is encountered in ongoing serial games like roleplaying games where situations occur repeatedly that produce a gap in the rules or a conflict between them. Which rule takes precedence? Sometimes it is not clear and players adjudicate how to deal with the problem from that point onwards for as long as they continue to play the game. Fixing the grammar is thus a way for players to share the same interpretation of the rules and rein in the potential meanings generated by semiotics.

Those are the problems that can occur, but they do not represent the full panoply for why house rules are designed. One of the most salient reasons for house rules is that tweaks to a game’s core design keep the game alive for its players. The changes essentially create new challenges or new conditions (sometimes both) for the game’s core obstacles for the players to solve. This keeps the game from growing stale so that players feel they have gotten everything out of the game that they possibly can. Experimentation of this sort can lead to game design and further exploration of the play space that the players favor. So, in addition to extending the life of the game, the house rules lead players to become designers of their own experiences which they can then test and share with others. It is not quite the same as creating an entire game from scratch, but it is one of the more surefooted methods for getting there.

Some games just naturally leave themselves open to interpretation. RPGs are one such genre. Not only are players engaged in a shared experience via storytelling and world-building, the rules are designed to facilitate the majority of common elements, but the setting, a conceptual environment, imposes itself on the implementation of various rules. The more compartmentalized the game, the easier it is to patch it, ignore it, or rewrite it so that the feel matches the world envisioned. What could be a clearer sign that house rules or interpretations of what is written in the books invites change as needed? While it is explicit in roleplaying games, all games are subject to the whims of the players to reinterpret or restructure the game as they see fit.

House rules provide a hidden experience that many players may not know they are accessing: agency. Games designed with too much rigidity are quickly abandoned after mastery. Take the game tic-tac-toe, for example. Once players learn that the game is essentially rigged in that there is a system for O to prevent X from winning, there is little incentive to keep playing. Should you lose the players, the game ceases to exist. Let me rephrase that for emphasis: players are the game’s true core. Remove them, and the experience cannot be had. Thus by changing the rules players are given permission to rework the experience. This change is powerful and shows the players how crucial they are to the game, albeit it is a subtle mechanism. The self-designed experience gives players ownership. It is the ultimate form of mastery of the skills developed by the game. Once one has gone beyond the point of diminished returns, another challenge is needed to keep a player’s attention.

The gaps in the rules are there for a reason. This is not to excuse poor game design, but rather to highlight the impossibility to make a rule for every situation. House rules are necessary because of this. They develop the unique play experiences of the players and fix or enliven the challenge. By taking an active role in interpreting and applying the game’s mechanics to any given situation, players become the focal point of play. Breathing new life into a conquered test exhibits mastery, which means house rules are important. Bridging the gap exhibits another form of skill that may not be part of the game per se, but does show how well a person knows the game. House rules therefore show who really has power over the social contract governing the play space: us.

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Anatomy of Game Design: Kitchen Table Theater

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Anatomy of Game Design: Blurring the Lines

In the last installment, I talked about the magic circle and its role in games. I also mentioned there was a use in other performative ventures for the magic circle. The truth is, games also have a performative element to them. Players shift from focal point to audience as their turns come and go. More importantly is what a player does or how he behaves. Like actors, games take on roles; even if they are unaware they do so. This is why games are kitchen table theater.
The play space of a game is no different than that of the stage. Everyone is given a part. The boundaries are made distinct by the grammar of the genre. Players and actors both interpret what their roles are within the context of the rules of the game or play. Pratfalls and witty dialogue are inappropriate for most dramas, but they are expected and conform to the rules of the comedy genre. There are games where some behaviors are not only discouraged, but completely inappropriate.
Let’s look at a game like Monopoly to see what kitchen table theater looks like and how some roles are affected. The premise of this game is to accumulate more wealth than anyone else. Players are left to determine which strategy they will pursue to achieve the game’s goals. Will one haggle, buy everything in sight, negotiate, cooperate with some players and not others, or play out of spite? This last one is often a result of sibling rivalry. When we play a game like this, we are assuming a role permissible not only by the rules, but also our fellow players. It’s probably safe to assume that not every waking moment of siblings is spent in rivalry or animosity. As such, the behavior during play isn’t necessarily a reflection of filial emotions in the long term. It can be a carryover of feelings in the moment, however.
Using the table as a theater, the game becomes the setting for the scripted framework for the type of story the players are about to watch and perform in. For those versed in theater, there should be some identifiable elements of the tabletop theater with Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed (that’s because he used games). The spectators are the actors and their ability to shape the performance as it unfolds is just like what gamers do when playing Monopoly.
You won’t see the same behavior in a chess match as you do in a game of Monopoly. That’s because the structure of play changes not only the performances allowed, but also the rules which govern the roles available. So, it isn’t just how you act, but what persona you adopt that is at stake. The game might not have a story itself, but the lack of one does not negate role assumption.
Most people aren’t cutthroat real estate brokers, even if they are realtors! Chess players aren’t necessarily generals using cold, calculated logic to navigate everyday situations. They might be better planners, but that is a result of skill, not the role assumed. To claim otherwise is to assume one well versed in the role of Shakespeare’s Iago is as ruthless and conniving with his friends and loved ones offstage as well as on. The actor’s familiarity with the role and his skill at playing it does not mean he’s going to harm anyone outside the play any more than one who’s assumed the role of the spoiler in Monopoly is going to eternally cajole, nettle, and foil the targeted relative until the end of one of their days when the game is over. But, it is still an act performed on a stage. Only difference is the audience isn’t the world; it is the handful of player-spectators who are also putting on their own show, congruity not required.

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Anatomy of Game Design: The Social Contract/Magic Circle

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Anatomy of Game Design: House Rules

If you’ve followed the progression of roleplaying games since their early days, you may have noticed a trend towards equality in every area of play for every role a player may choose. There is a huge problem with this, however. One glance may make you dismiss this view or feel confused by it, but here’s how that view is misleading: the streamlining and flattening of the rules systems towards a mathematically balanced approach destroys the very thing people are trying to achieve and strips out critical elements of the sandbox notion of roleplaying games.

The greatest offender of this drive towards equilibrium is the genre’s flagship property. Dungeons & Dragons has, through its many incarnations, tried to address one mechanical issue or another to make the game feel balanced. In the earliest versions, the solution was to create individual experience point (XP) tables for the classes. On the whole, this looks crude and can lead some players to avoid playing one class or another out of fear that their character will be outclassed quickly. These classes look like they’ve been cheated.

Incremental changes to the game gave more meat to these classes outside of combat, but at what cost? Wizards are exceptionally powerful and clerics aren’t far behind. In a fantasy game, this makes a lot of sense that magic eventually becomes the star of the show. It’s the defining element of fantasy. That’s a huge problem in cooperative play, though. It’s also what’s driven the changes over the years.

Some of the overhauls in the 3.x games tried to fix these issues in one fell swoop beginning with a single XP progression table for all characters that then had the classes balanced to reflect comparable prowess. Wizards lost a large number of spells compared with earlier editions in this offset. The result had clerics on top and wizards still just a step behind. Mathematically speaking, the versatility of these classes (and most spellcasters in general) outweighs that of the others. Sure, wizards’ spells do more damage, but the flexibility in casting and domain spell slots give clerics the upper hand in so many instances that it’s no surprise there are some complaints about game balance. All of this results in an imbalance in parity the designers sought. One of the problems here is the mechanical assumptions that these classes will create magical items and expend XP in the process. That’s a huge problem.

Instead of making item creation an incentive for gaining XP as a form of insight gained in the character’s pursuit of power, the opposite has occurred as a result of metagaming (you can’t escape this, it’s human nature). Why waste resources if you don’t have to with no visible long-term gain? This is one of the Achilles’ heels of 3.x games that causes the breakdown in the mechanics and shows how the balance in the game isn’t there.

4^th edition tried to correct this problem by designing all of the abilities using the same template. This completely removed asymmetric play from the game and is at the root of the “sameness” complaints despite the tightly defined prescribed roles classes were stuffed into. This is a major design flaw for a roleplaying game outside a box housing silicon and circuitry. But as the point was to get the attention of the MMO crowd, the idea seemed durable. Nice try, but not good when put in practice as computers aren’t people.

Now we have 5^th edition and it’s plagued with the same legacy issues compounded by the design flaws from 3.x on. The game tried to remove a lot of the bloat and detritus of all editions to date. But, it kept a lot of elements and concepts so deeply synonymous with the brand that they only furthered the flaws that will continue to destroy the asymmetry integral to roleplaying games. The remnants of a balanced approach have changed the roles of the classes, the source of which is combat. More on that later.

There is a persistent myth amongst theorists of a construct enacted amongst groups to explain the relationship between group members and the acts that unfold before/between them.  The concept is known as the “magic circle.”  It is an unseen and inexplicable boundary that can be traversed without movement. All one has to do is agree to participate in any given activity to enter into this liminal space.  That is the core of the magic circle’s purpose: to facilitate transition across the barrier; what underlies it is the rules by which it operates.  All magic circles are temporary social contracts, which use rules that supersede a culture’s normative behavior.

To make sense of this, this piece will look at what social contracts are and how they function.  Social contracts are comprised as much by codified laws as they are the unwritten scripts that inform a culture of its standards.  They are arbitrary systems by which a group defines what it means to not only be a member, but also what governs acceptable behavior that ultimately promotes the group’s survival.  Games are no different in this regard as they operate under similar rules as any other social contract.  In a game, the rules define acceptable behavior and the limitations on how one can conduct himself.  Anything outside that code is a violation of the group’s trust of the individual, just like in society at large.  This is effectively the definition of cheating.

In light of the above, why is the magic circle so special?  In part, it is because it lets us suspend social and cultural norms.  The magic circle is also a temporary social contract that can be broken with few to no stigmas attached to withdrawing from the contract.  The magic circle is truly magical because it makes everyone equal in the activity undertaken.  Despite all appearances, everyone’s participation carries the same weight no matter how small an individual’s role may be.  Artistic performances, sports events, religious ceremonies, and other forms of play all require participation by everyone in attendance in some form or another.  Sermons are ineffective without a congregation, for example.  Plays do not carry the same meaning if no one outside the cast and crew see the performance.  So, by virtue of attendance alone, an audience is equal to the speaker or performer, and a member’s silence gives license for the person(s) at the center of attention to continue.  Historically, this hasn’t always been the case (patrons regularly shouted out at one another and the actors of stage performances in the 15^th-17^th centuries), which is what makes such instances of the social contract seem so magical to us today.

Pointing to an earlier installment of this series in which I discussed issues of game balance (Precision Games), there has to be something that provides an incentive to make players want to repeat the experience.  The necessary conditions that provide balance are the same that give the players a feeling of equality.  After all, it is the rules of the game which establish the conditions under which the game behaves, not the respective roles participants must enact.  There is no incentive for following the rules; or rather, there are no punitive measures that dictate how players behave while in the play space.  The former is only partially true.  The reward for following the rules is in knowing that you are more adept than your opponents by winning the game.  By agreeing to follow the rules, a player is accepting the conditions of the magic circle and tacitly a contract with one’s fellow gamers to extend to them that only skillful actions within the narrow confines of the rules will be used to best one another.

One of the reasons for why the magic circle is a myth is the ease in which one can walk away from the performance at its core.  The circle is that fragile.  This is why suspension of disbelief is critical.  To lose that is to lose the erstwhile magic inherent in the activity.  Suffice it to say, magic is fragile for all its power.  It is why in some stories a kiss can break a spell.

What if one wants to play with the magic circle rather than abide by its strictures?  Certain activities are often held sacrosanct by the majority of a population, like ceremonies.  Most people would be unwilling to disrupt these outright, but playing with those rules is another story.  It is like laying another magic circle atop the one which everyone else has agreed to.  Sneaking food into a movie theater, ducking out in the middle of a performance or even walking in front of the stage while the speaker or performer is playing the role the audience came to see are examples of transgressing the rules of the magic circle without completely breaking them.  Doing this in a church is likely to get more attention than at a sporting match or concert.  Granted, the audiences are often larger at the latter two, but the fact remains that it will disturb those around the transgressor to some degree.  With games, there is even less of a chance that this will draw ire from an audience, although it might anger the other players.  By playing with the rules, gamers are playing something else entirely.  It is this sort of behavior we commonly refer to when speaking of metagaming.  For some, this is where the magic circle may take a weird twist.

Other than fudging the numbers on a die role, there are few ways to “game,” or cheat, the system in an RPG.  But that leaves open the door to play with the rules and their intended meaning.  Rules lawyers do just this.  Technically it isn’t cheating.  Language, being a fuzzy thing, makes an easy target for those looking to get a word in edgewise for their benefit.  Grammar, which includes the procedures in a game, can’t be questioned unless there is a flaw somewhere in the logic.  The exact meaning of the words used to describe the grammar can be, however.

Playing with the social contract of the play space is still a form of play and can be the focus of the game.  Games like Fluxx and the recently released Metagame are prime examples of games that play with the rules and make transgressing the liminal barrier part of the game (Metagame does this by making other games the subject of play).  As such, the actions of rules lawyers and supposed cheaters are still within the scope of play.  Where they differ with other players is in what game they are playing.  These various levels of play show that none of the elements of the magic circle are sacrosanct, regardless of the venue, as much as we would like to believe.  That said, failing to observe the social contract that makes the space possible disrupts the illusion of equality within the magic circle’s power enough to anger those who would like to preserve the circle for the duration of an event.  In this regard, cheaters never prosper as repeat offenders often find themselves without an invitation at worst and on the outside looking in at best.

This is a complex topic and further discussion will be forthcoming to cover other aspects of the magic circle.

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Anatomy of Game Design: The Technology Involved

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Anatomy of Game Design: Kitchen Table Theater

Perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of game design is the level of technology involved.  Whether we recognize it or not, this is a very technologically-driven job.  Game designers do not develop new technologies; they repurpose devices that already exist.  With this, they change our relation to the technology employed in the game.  The results are such that new applications may be found, which furthers the life of a device in fields it was not originally intended to support.  Games are a way of breathing new life into a concept as much as other more recognized art forms.

Games force players to experience objects in new ways and to imagine the experience as legitimate uses of the devices as such.  For example, in a game of hide-and-seek, players may be called upon to envision a tree, lamppost, telephone pole, etc. as “home.”  This is a mental construct that stands in for the object envisioned: a zone of respite.  While not a complete analogy, it is similar to what games do when integrating devices into the fabric of their rules.  To show how the change occurs, let us look at some actual “technological” devices to set the reference point into this inquiry.

Two devices based on similar properties are the Eye Toy and the Kinect.  Both are effectively webcams.  One is stereoscopic, which lets it take advantage of technology used by other fields.  The Eye Toy is little more than a webcam that uses collision detection from one two-dimensional object with another two-dimensional object.  The device could not do much more than turn the image of a player in the camera’s line of sight into a flat graphic.  In fact, this has long been the problem of remote imaging systems for most of their history.  From photography to cinematography, we have relied as much on our experiences as we have the scale and relative plane an object is on in relation to others (basically how near or far by what is on top of other objects in the frame).  When stereoscopic cameras were first employed, the use was for military and scientific application, such as the Mars Rovers.  The Kinect uses the same principle by linking two webcams and using the data to read body motion and depth to then turn it into instructions to relay how the screen should change from the input.

The feedback loop used in the video game works the same way as the programming instructions for the rovers.  The distance involved necessitates that the vehicle be semi-autonomous to avoid hazards in real time that the earthbound operators cannot foresee.  In the play space, we have turned the technology back on ourselves by making the machine observe us as the objects of study for our own amusement.  This is a case of how we change the relation to the object from tool to toy.  Just about every device has undergone this transition outside of the most complex industrial machines.  But, even then, they have given rise to recreational devices.

The wheel has become a hoop to toss objects through or to keep in constant motion.  The mallet and club has become the club for golf, baseball, croquet, and cricket.  Dice and cards also fit in for their various roles as tools, games, and religious/spiritual objects.  Even pen and paper falls into this repurposing and relational shift pattern.  Other than record keeping and communication purposes, writing has been used to codify social edicts, codify laws, and even create art.  While a roleplaying game falls under this type of game, it is not the only one.  Before Battleship, the game was played on a 10 x 10 grid on paper.  Lest one forgets, there is also tic-tac-toe.  The latter probably predates paper given its simplicity.  The point being that the vitality with pen and paper make it a good example of how technology is repurposed.  It is not longer the canvas in which an image is sketched and an emotion is experienced, it is a map that a gamer can interact with for an entirely different experience.  The image is no less a form of art, only a new relationship to it.

War games shrunk the battlefield so that officers could explore strategic and tactical plans and test them against real world data.  Over time, these games evolved not only to take advantage of new innovations in technology on the field, but also the data of each engagement reported.  Along with the measures of weapons from precision tests, rates of fire, and field operations, the collected data of all equipment and troop readiness helped build the strengths of a given army.  Adding effects of terrain, weather, and the unforeseen, reliable statistics for chances of success emerged.  What changed were the ways in which wars were fought.  Conflict was now mathematically governed and required greater precision by the orchestrators of troop movement and deployment.  An example of some of these developments in games would be the use of boxes, curtains, or other obscuring devices to hide the composition and number of troops in a player’s forces as seen in H.G. Wells’ Little Wars.

In repurposing technology, game designers take on the role of artificer by forging new links, often between concepts and seemingly too disparate to rate as sharing commonalities of any sort.  Such combinations are often confusing at first.  The play space and each player’s cultural and social experiences become the site of a generative first.  Game designers effectively provide an engine which players discover what they can do with it.  Therein lays the secret: you change yourself by connecting to others within the narrow confines the rules impose and the devices you have to see anew to overcome the game’s varied obstacles.

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Anatomy of Game Design: A System for Every Occasion?

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Anatomy of Game Design: The Social Contract/Magic Circle