From the Desk Top: The Pursuit of Good Game Design

Some Principles of Good Game Design

irbyz said here: "Indeed, but avoiding wholesale re/conjuration of one's campaign world on a regular basis or because of poor decisions in its development that cannot be easily papered over is still perhaps worthwhile being wary of?"

The above quote is yet another starting point of thought on designing games/game scenarios/and world-crafting.  The overall idea might be recast in this way:  what we adhere to can or will force us upon a path.

Embarking upon game design involves many choices and tough questions.  Of course we know that the end result must be fun for the player(s).  But beyond that, and more importantly as the front matter to this, designers must ask these questions:  Who?  What? Where? When? Why? and How? before, during and after the design has been prototyped. For published RPG adventures this tenant is most important as it points to areas where they are weak and in need of improvement.  Designers, unlike fans of their games, must stand aside and let critical intercourse take place in order to effectively achieve their creative ends.  If this is not apparent in the initial process, or worse, if the chosen model  is a worn one, then it will not push the boundaries of design but will merely imitate something, with varying results.  This raises the question which should be at the heart of every designer to begin with:  Why?  If the answer is less than the sum of the reason for providing a new idea which has worth in standing apart from other models, then more questions need to be asked to pinpoint their 'why'.  If this process is outright ignored then good design will be ignored; and if one cares not for good design then ultimately they do not care for those who they design the games for and they or their fans must therefore question their artistic morals and/or reasons for proposing or accepting such designs to begin with.

Basing designs on past models is a practical approach and is used in most game designs over the history of games. Let us assume that we have a design proposal for an underground adventure emulating EGG's "D" series.  In fact, let us further propose that the designer "loved" them and wishes to cast his or her design in the same light.  All fine and good, but what is the purpose of said emulation? Why must there be emulation?  Fiction writers and fine artists face the same questions.  I love Hemingway.  Picasso was the best.  Emulation is in itself a flattery; but as our past publishing history has shown, not many unique designs spring forth from strictly limiting creative efforts to wholesale emulation.  When basing one's designs on past models designers must in course properly identify the overall utility for doing so; and while atomizing these parts there may be, in the best cases, found a base of tools for them to work with in creating something unique. These are components, like structure, theme, narrative transitions, dialog, style, design weight, creative range, and so forth.

Short Example:  The Theme. The "Theme" is about an underground adventure. Thematically this has been done a thousand or more times in fiction and RPG.  What will set yours apart from the rest?  Nothing as good as defining if the model has been much overused from the onset:  look around, if you want a unique design, one that will actually challenge your artistic fiber rather than just add another coal to a fire which everyone is throwing said lumps upon, then don't do what others are doing, that simple.

This then begs several questions, such as, "Are the models which precede our own designs unworthy or broken?"  The answer to that is simply no and/or maybe.  What one designer brought to bear on a theme is of consequence in considering ultimate design goals but all of these components are just guides.  But if you find yourself a mere imitator, or worse, only a shadowy part thereof, then the emulation is not worthy in any case, for it takes what is a good example and exalts it with faint praise, while in turn lowering the design standard.  Take for example the imitators of Tolkien's LotR for a good comparison.

The next question is, "Then what am I to do as a designer if faced with insurmountable choices of models to draw upon?"  In answer, one can design their own models.  It is similar to asking what car manufacturers ask every year in their competition with each other.  How will we make a better car that is more attractive to consumers?  More mileage, sexier, more room, drop down seats.  In essence, "Features."  Does this make each separately branded car better? Or is each just another car as every manufacturer is doing the same thing? We are now in a very general area of concern that rarely perpetuates truly unique designs but instead more often roots them to a mocking principle. Specifically, designers must look at their designs to add non-competitive features to them.  That is, do not look at the models beyond the fact of initial realization.  I have a car.  I have an underground adventure.  By peering too long at the path of others' designs, one will eventually walk these paths for better or worse. And as with car manufacturers, more often a designer will then be but a "tweaker" of what already is and has been done, and this is not unique design.  By adding non-competitive features to your design, it will start to grow in uniqueness and sooner or later, through nursing that growth, you'll have something that stands apart from the rest.

Free Form Expression and Thinking as a Tool to Excellent Design.

Note here a recent exchange on this blog that became, and still is, a free form exercise allowed to define its own limits.  What started as a speculative post by Journalizer takes upon multi-dimensions of exchange.  In essence, it becomes free from constraints and expectations.  There is fun in this participation as there are no set limits of proportion or form.  In essence this is ART.  It is at the same time PLAY.  And overall it is a real example of possibilities when one does not confine themselves to a box but instead plays with ranges of expression.  All good designers do this, and more often they do this out of need to continue separating the thought process from the here and now, to stay in the abstract playground of creative expression so that anything can, and will, eventually happen.

As a designer one must ask many questions to promote the idea of an expressive design to successful completion.  What am I expressing here? And why?  How will I best achieve that? If your "base" answer to the second question is 'My Expression should be unique' then you have won the first battle against mediocrity, one which otherwise destroys any long-lasting success at design.  It then remains up to you, the creator, to find a unique ground on which to express and build your creation.  But remember this:  I can express myself by driving a BMW, but that does not make me unique as there are thousands of them out there (and as a car salesman friend of mine once added to this, "Yeah, and even then it doesn't much matter for expression if they are leased...").  Same for any type of design.  Just because everyone is driving them indeed makes them the SAME, and therein should be found the glorious contradiction which puzzles and challenges all those who wish to create anything which reaches beyond these predefined limits.

As I began this article, so will I end it, with a quote from a Scotsman, this one from a letter written by Robert Louis Stevenson:

BONALLIE TOWERS, BRANKSOME PARK, BOURNEMOUTH, HANTS, ENGLAND, FIRST WEEK IN NOVEMBER, I GUESS, 1884. 

MY DEAR LOW

"I am Philistine enough to prefer clean printer's type; indeed, I can form no idea of the verses thus transcribed by the incult and tottering hand of the draughtsman, nor gather any impression beyond one of weariness to the eyes.  Yet the other day, in the CENTURY, I saw it imputed as a crime to Vedder that he had not thus travestied Omar Khayyam.  We live in a rum age of music without airs, stories without incident, pictures without beauty, American wood engravings that should have been etchings, and dry-point etchings that ought to have been mezzo-tints.  I think of giving 'em literature without words; and I believe if you were to try invisible illustration, it would enjoy a considerable vogue.  So long as an artist is on his head, is painting with a flute, or writes with an etcher's needle, or conducts the orchestra with a meat-axe, all is well; and plaudits shower along with roses.  But any plain man who tries to follow the obtrusive canons of his art, is but a commonplace figure.  To hell with him is the motto, or at least not that; for he will have his reward, but he will never be thought a person of parts." 

The Continuing Battle Between Creativity and Conformity in Our Society: Observations and Links

(This is in part an answer to Endymion's post in Up on a Tree Stump #4™ (below) and my continued commentary upon the matter.)

RPG Examples abound--and I  limited the contrasting part of my essay to 3E+.  It is also true that a new consumer market was created with the advent of computerized gaming; just as a new consumer market was created with the advent of RPG; and with the spread of Sc-Fi/Fantasy, with a big boost from JRR Tolkien's trilogy to help with the latter.

The coincidence is that all three of these markets just about occurred at once or very close in time to each other.  Fantasy-Fiction>RPG>Computerized versioning of both.  This has lead to different understandings of "what" out of these three are cross-adaptable markets and how to wean these "whats" into existing or merging ones.  But that is matter for another essay I am currently outlining.

What Endymion said...  >...wonder if the reason players today are perhaps reluctant to indulge in free play of the sort you recall is because the presence of technology itself has contributed to a regimented life that discourages initiative< ... is true.  Of course we have the challenge of built in competition at one of its highest levels in the history of American education and business, and so technology is being manipulated to cut avenues for it, time is being squashed due to societal demands, and children are being routed towards goal-driven futures at an extremely fast pace as everyone seems to a lesser of greater extent to be keeping up with the JONES.  Starting with the introductory link in the Boyd/Spolin post I am further summarizing the already known antithesis of play and creativity.  Also note that this embodies in part an over emphasis on competition (now, IMO, a cultural syndrome) as was negatively commented upon by Neva Boyd almost a century ago:

'At the time, public recreation programs in the main stressed formal sports, calisthenics, and competitive activity, which Neva Boyd found to be constricting and sterile.  She believed that the essence of such activity should be social development rather than mere physical exercise.  Consequently in her play programs she stressed the use of games and activities in which the leader and participants engaged both psychologically and physically, which resulted in improved social relationships.  She believed such activities should be valued for their intrinsic good, not for external rewards.  Applying this to her teaching, she noted:

                "The greed for power, the hatred and dishonesty which have become associated with competitive games are not an inherent part of them but have found their why in them through a false sense of values [emphasis mine].  Prizes separate people, pit them against each other, discourage the less able and set the more able apart."

    Miss Boyd believed in goodness and that the love of goodness must be cultivated.  “Social living,” she said, “cannot be maintained on the basis of destructive ideologies – domination, hate, prejudice, greed and dishonesty.  A society cannot hold together without a good way of life for all….Virtues are dynamic products and cannot be taken over fully developed without being continuously developed.'”

The aforementioned, when coupled with many other salient facts as I've previously noted, notes challenges within our society to the very notion that play is important to begin with.  That is why I posted Boyd's theory, then, in posting order, that codified theory in practice as contrasted between two historical versions of D&D, and then Brown's applications which incorporate free-form play in practice in the realm of design.  Within the comparisons derived from OD&D and Brown's POV, we see both stressing open exchange models as paramount and as the very route to abstract expansion, and all of this taking place within a constantly readapting and self-regenerative system.   What we as RP(game) designers are in essence creating are combinations of rules which when transferred from the imaginative play ground of thought to a pencil and paper game, or to other real-time environments, that must be codified to a certain extant to be understood in a base form.  This is what Brown asserts as the "Serious Side."  Beyond that designers run the risk of over-structuring and thus turning the sword back upon the original intent of keeping exploratory paths open in their RPGs.  OD&D/AD&D also asserts this in keeping the rulings open to DMs, in encouraging player/DM inputs and in open and free-form play and creation.

Non-abstract thinking players often see this free form style as hocus pocus.  "I cannot see where the result is derived from." Thus a DM is sometimes viewed as fallible or even unreliable in such games where the reliance is upon absolute rules structure.  Contrast this give-and-take to a playground game where a group of children are playing and adapting as they in turn input to the ongoing real-time design and you may find that there is what I call a missing link somewhere in the transiting stages of growth from child>young-adult>adult.  Also note these links, 1,  2,  3.  We see a growing reliance on the rational mind as compared to the abstract and a diametric shift away from what is wrongly considered "chaotic play" as we grow older and adapt to the rigidity of societal forms; and this leads us back as to why, and which in part we have already noted and answered.  Tim Brown asserts that finite and free-form wholes are not mutually exclusive parts.  He correctly notes them as interdependent due to their use when needed.  Thus when we strip all structure from an RPG we are back to parlor games or the playground.  If we add too much structure we are at the finite board/miniatures game.  OD&D/AD&D creatively bridge finite and free-form concepts, and actually on many levels given the medium, merges them, which is quite a creative achievement if one thinks about it.

A computer game (and thus the contrasting perspective of DM<>Computer as DM, or even by extenuation, RULES as DM) is not often if ever seen as fallible in that regard (even though these are programmed by humans, and thus the overall view is false to assume so, as such fallibility when it exists will not come in the output stage (results from pressing a button or keys, etc) but is still present in the initial data and programming stages, all of which I touch upon in another upcoming essay, "Illusory Ground.").  These are accepted for what they are as they can be no more than what their data allows for.  Thus games which emulate them are what they are and provide a comfortable feeling of sameness and security of understanding.  Computer gaming is in fact similar to shopping methodology:  you can take time, you can PAUSE, you can retrace your steps (SAVE GAME) and you can start over in case of disaster (I LEFT MY WALLET AT HOME), not to mention the inevitable LIST of goodies sought.  During breaks from the computer game, players can plan to overcome its more often static environment which has not changed during that interval (or very little depending on what has been programmed into it, or what has been reduced in the meantime as in online games). Players can numerically figure it all out while retracing their steps many times before then to derive what is for the most part the one correct answer, or even a series of one correct answers.  This in turn corresponds to what is prevalent in our educational systems today (and which is noted in the above links, 1,2,3) and which is stifling creative thinking at that level. Finding correspondences to the above example in OD&D's design and play is difficult, as a DM has the ability to recreate situations on the fly and at a pace far out distancing and out creating what is possible for data dependent computers.  All that must prevail is the willingness on the DM's part to do so and a perceived need to continue working on their creative ranges.

This may have also contributed to an interesting cultural/psychological nuance:  that when consumers of these many computer games find ones that are distasteful they express their distaste more often in terms relating to the named game itself and not often to the company, or to the person(s) who programmed these.  "Ork3 sucks." But when we have a pencil and paper game, or even a board game to a lesser or greater degree, the finger is inevitably pointed at the designer, especially in our niche industry.  What should be important to track at all levels--quality of design and who(m) is manipulating it for consumption--at some point becomes obscured as its dissemination reaches mass market proportions.  I have not found this so in fiction, illustration/art nor with movies, and in these cases there are readily apparent reasons as to why this is not so.  The relevancy of such may lie in the fact that people disposed to mass intake have less demand for satisfactory return on all levels and this too may be a contributory reason for lack of creative need as many people are used to accepting the good alongside the bad and mediocre.  In retrospect, I have always found the American expression, "It wasn't that bad," to be a result of this thinking process; and of course in return to those saying such I always respond:  "I'm sorry..."