Lost Garden: Creating a system of game play notation
(Visited 8061 times) Game talk
Jan 172006
Lost Garden: Creating a system of game play notation is a fairly direct application of music notation towards measuring gameplay flow. Interesting. I am guessing that DanC hasn’t seen my own Grammar of Gameplay” stuff.
There’s a group out there (they’re operating kinda quietly, so I don’t want to say who or where) that has elaborated the grammar-and-syntax idea to the point where they say they can actually spec out games with it. I am supposed to hear more sometime soon. 🙂
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I believe understanding of music helps with the understanding of how to understand us humans and how we consume emotions. The direct game design application of music schooling I use on a regular basis comes from music analysis which is easily described to people who lack musical schooling. Typically such as intro, verse, prechorus, chorus, interlude, solo etc is familiar enough to everyone to be useful without the fuzz of teaching people a new language.
Secondly for myself I enjoy labelling my ambitions with some more abstract notation such as accelerando, pianissimo, forte, and possibly harmonies etc to get a feel for the flow.
Then ofcourse, listening to specific and varied kinds of music when designing different kinds of systems helps 🙂
To back off a minute, let me apologize for my recent negativism on this site. I know I keep sweeping in as a naysayer. I mean it, however, in the spirit of (as David Brin would say) CITOKATE — Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error. If I didn’t see merit in the initial ideas, I wouldn’t bother to post.
That said, I’m afraid I’m going to delve into another bout of naysaying.
I think that we can find certain gems of insight. I’m not sold on this grammar or on the idea that we can solve much through static grammars. “Introduction, complication, climax, conclusion” is a grammar of stories (although arguably possible to break). But it is only the very beginning of writing, not the end and what separates a J.D. Salinger from an average blog commenter isn’t explained in such simple terms — his wit, wisdom and artful storytelling is far too subjective a matter and a result of thousands of complex traits, not a handful of simple ones.
The theory of music is very interesting and does describe some interesting things. But in practice, how useful is this for the mainstream music audience? Classical music can only tell me a little bit about why I personally like bebop instead of smooth jazz or synth rock versus hard rock, liberal, progressive lyrics versus conservative, traditional lyrics, or prefer trumpets to saxophones. At best we can say that these are different attributes of music that some like and some don’t, and that this set of attributes will change with time. For a look at practical “grammars” of modern music look at Pandora and the Music Genome Project. It is a very interesting characterization of music and a great way to explore new music that as at least similar to what you already like. Yet the majority of stuff that, grammatically, is similar to what I like, I still don’t care for too much. Perhaps I need to take the grammar deeper? By the time I have any understanding of the lower-level structure of a certain branch of synth rock, there will be 10 new genres of rock to explore, and the higher-level grammar will have changed (because in the end it is still not fundamental and is only relative to current tastes and modes of expression).
And I am only talking about my appreciation of music. You are talking about the creation of art not just the appreciation of it.
And while it’s well and convenient to use classical music theory as an analogy for game design, why aren’t you instead using modern art for example? Try walking into MOMA and finding someone to talk to you about the fundamental grammar that ties all those pieces of art together. I think there is a tendency to assume that the path to wherever we want to go is fundamentally understandable whether we have evidence of this or not. The danger is that we try to “climb a tree to the moon”. Sure, the branches are close and we are making good progress at present. But are we really going to get anywhere near the destination we desire? This desire to create a grammar of game design seems to me to be not dissimilar from attempts to capture cognition with symbolic AI. Symbolic AI is very useful, granted, but not for capturing cognition. We have to get our hands dirty, study neural physiology, engage in trial and error, etc., to really make much progress there.
Well, I should probably talk about this in relation to the other post on iteration, but in a nutshell:
I don’t think anyone creates anything in any medium based initially on the grammar.
In other words, knowing there’s a grammar is helpful, and it often guides us into new and fresh areas, or it helps us learn our chops (I saw in your newly launched blog that you emphasize how important it is to just learn chops). It’s like learning scales in music. You don’t start writing music based on a scale. But internalizing the scales is hugely helpful.
Really, a goal with a grammar is to lay open the field of possibility. The very boundaries of the grammar suggest new ways to develop ideas — and often ways that lie outside the grammar itself.
So, in short, I’d never try designing a game directly with a grammar. But it can help us anyway, both in understanding what we are doing, and in broadening our palette. IMHO, of course.
I agree with most of that. But I still don’t think you’re going to get to the moon that way. I think that, at best, you’re going to get a few nice insights.
Look at writing. We’ve been writing fiction for millenia. And as far as grammars and systems go, we have “introduction, complication, climax, conclusion” and some general advice about showing instead of telling. And that’s pretty much it. Deeper analysis of literature is usually comparative, to other examples of literature, and not against some fundamental grammar because there is no such grammar, just a few guidelines and insights. And literary analysis, instead of leading to these firm Platonic rules, has lead to post-modernism.
If you reads a lot of essays by good writers you’ll find that there are a million different ways to write good stories and that the frontier for what to write good stories about, and methods for doing so, is constantly changing. If anything game design is more complex than writing stories (as games can embed stories within a wider context). At the very least, it has a broader range of tools, and is far more contextually sensitive (the primary media for stories, spoken word and words on paper, have been static for centuries). If writers haven’t been able to do any better than a few general guidelines and words of advice, I’m not sure why we would.
Well, yes. But who said I was trying to get to the moon? (Metaphorically speaking?) I’m not trying to create the Grand Unified Theory here…
Fair enough. 🙂
I do think there have been many good insights already about MMO design, many coming from yourself. I do however feel like a lot of people are waiting for a Grand Unified Theory to sweep all of the really hard problems under the rug and make game design as easy as they’d hoped it would be. I think that examples can be cherry-picked to support this conclusion (or similar, lesser conclusions) when there are also good counter-examples. And I think that sometimes it is necessary to admit that there are no easy answers before you can set off in the right directions to solve the really hard problems.
For me solving these problems means more of a focus on creating opportunities for risky iteration and trial and error. Instead of focusing on grammars and theories I think we need to find ways to create lots and lots of games that people can play and give feedback on, so that we can gather a lot of data and impressions on potential directions to take our designs (and it’s not enoguh to make them, they have to be played as well). We can develop grammars and theories along the way to describe what we come up with and how they succeed or fail. We need to create or exploit contexts for game design under high environmental stress where large leaps of evolution will be par for the course. I think that will happen as niche markets develop, not through some monolithic theory coming out of the larger publishers (who will continue to make more money from vanilla, WoW-like games which polish well-known mechanics targetted at a lowest common denominator). A variation on the Cathedral and Bazaar if you will.
I think by and large the large companies are less interested in theory than you are. 😉
To me the grammar and analysis is useful precisely because it creates opportunities for creativity. Looking at games formally gives me game ideas, to put it as simply as I can. When I try to figure out how a puzzle game worls, it makes me think “could a puzzle game work this way instead?” When I try defining a basic premise of how games work, it challenges me to try to make a game that defies that premise. And so on.