Clockwork Game Design
Game Grammar and Game Design Theory – Interview with Raph Koster
This hour and a half long interview with Keith Burgun for the Clockwork Game Design Podcast covers game grammar, game emulation, early game design, and much more.
Audio
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Episode 37 of the Clockwork Game Design Podcast! I’m your host Keith Bergun.
I have a very special podcast for you today–I have a guest of high game design honors. It is Raph Koster, who you may know–you probably know, if you listen to this podcast, as the author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design… and also he was a designer on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies… and a ton of other stuff, I mean I’ll put the link to his page in the show notes. Definitely check it out. If you don’t already know about his site it’s raphkoster.com… He’s a fan of my web site naming convention… and yeah… So anyway.
This was a really good conversation, it went on long, about ninety minutes actually, so not a lot of preamble. Let’s just get right into the conversation and I hope you enjoy this conversation with Raph Koster.
So first of all how are you.
I’m doing all right. Doing OK been working on my arcade cabinet a lot lately.
What is that?
I’ve got a emulation cabinet so it’s just one of those off the shelf kit type ones with an X. arcade controller in it you know. But I have been hacking and modding it actually I’ve. Been drilling holes adding controls spinners analogue joysticks L.E.D. buttons that light up based on the correct game. I have a robotic monitor mount so that the monitor is rotated automatically to horizontal or vertical, depending on the original landscape or portrait mode of the original game console so the vector X. emulation rotates to vertical joust is horizontal and you know Raiden is vertical whatever
right sure
and and the cabinet actually emulates everything from early integrated circuit games up through most of the early thirty two bit console’s
Oh wow
So it’s a pretty giant swath of video gaming history and I’ve been working on it off and on for five years now
that’s really great yeah. That’s that’s pretty cool so so that’s just like a personal project just for fun or why do you want to I don’t know I can’t imagine what else you could do with that really have like, a party or something
yeah it’s pretty much just for fun but. I’ve actually found it super useful in terms of design practice
Oh yeah?
sure having that amount of video game history kind of at your fingertips is super useful right? Not that long ago Zoya street from critical distance I think you probably know him from Twitter. Was actually in town and he was working on a video piece about games where you are always moving forward endless runner type ones
Sure
and I was able to go to the cabinet and pull up. Things like you know the original arcade Night driver or the earliest art game I know of which is Douglas Crockford’s Hollywood medieval on the Atari eight bit which even had like an interactive procedural music system…
huh
and pull up these examples to be able to show hey look here’s stuff from the seventy’s and eighty’s that fits what you’re looking for
right.
Going through video game history chronologically is actually super illuminating I guess right because you know looking at the Games year by year to see what got invented and even how the business model changed it’s interesting right
yeah
like the earth the earliest arcade games were a quarter for a fixed duration of play not lives or anything.
Interesting
It was like quarter a minute
It didn’t have the incentives to just have the life whole like you know automatically make sure that you kill the player every X. minutes sort of design that some of the later on games like brawlers seem to have
that’s right so instead since it was fixed duration it was all about maximizing your performance in the tiny window you got
right
on the other hand it also meant that the max earning potential of the machine was fixed I guess so
interesting
so the invention right the invention of. Quarter sucking play and eventually quarters that gave you continues this kind of like. The early stages of developing Wales in the videogame business I guess so yeah it’s just useful for I guess design analysis which I guess is what we’re here to talk about right
for sure yeah no I mean you know the idea of like emulators in general are really useful and I’ve you know I’ve I’ve I’ve always found them to be really useful and you know abandonware and and stuff like that has always fascinated me and I had a good you know five ten year phase where I was just like obsessed with– do you remember Home of the underdogs by any chance?
Sure yeah
amazing website that just like catalog all these weird old games that like had the manuals for them like stuff that you could not find anywhere else and I really was obsessed with those for a while
yeah and a lot of those I grew up playing a lot of those. They’re not that weird to me.
Well some of them are very obscure
Yeah some them of are very obscure
Yeah I totally appreciate and respect like how much. How much we it’s weird I have no I have conflicting feelings about about the history of video games because on the one hand I agree there’s like a lot that can be observed and stuff but on the other hand like and maybe disagree but I sometimes feel like it’s sort of shocking how little games have changed since you know nine hundred eighty.
I agree. I agree in the sense that game design growth is generally glacial that’s actually how I used that word in an interview at G.D.C. I said it was glacial and I think that that’s generally true. But to me the most interesting thing about going back to , call it the pre-NES era, is that it was kind of blue ocean virgin territory at the time and so if anything it was one of the golden ages of innovation probably not equalled again until maybe the explosion of flash gaming which to me was another kind of grand renaissance of game systems and mechanics right?
yeah.
And it’s because cost of development was cheap. Teams between one and five people could make something complete for the platform of the time and the result was just exploration and it’s fascinating to go back to the 80s and realize, sure, we kept elements of something like a Centipede or whatever, or elements of something like a tempest but wow there’s like nothing came from joust right. And it’s really. I guess in a way it’s fascinating on both an optimistic and a depressing end. Because. It shows there is that exploration that can be done mechanically—
but it’s just not being done –
but a lot of it isn’t done
right
yeah
yeah absolutely and probably where I find this to be most stark is in the world of role playing games that are P G’s because you know the early olds and and of course even Ultima Online I mean which you famously worked on you know I feel like and that was sort of rare even for that time but but but the early Ultimas was to me are a good example of like just such a such incredible ambition for what you know these computer worlds could be like and and you know we don’t really see as much of that since then I feel like that was like the peak of that in my estimation.
I think Todd Howard has probably kept the flame alive on that right over at Bethesda with. The Elder Scrolls series but I agree
Really? I don’t know if I agree
I think well certainly relative to the rest of what’s going on in R.P.G.
Yeah
yeah right I mean back then while we were doing Ultima Online I guess it was the original Elder Scrolls games are coming out the very first one was giant proceed a completely procedural world right then came dagger fall a lot of the procedurality was toned down but. Yeah he’s continued to push the boundaries some I think from kind of the the thing that it had become which I guess you could sum it up kind of is the children of the Gold Box games the stuff done by black aisle where. You know those were a peak on on a narrative side right the writing in something like planescape torment was amazing but yeah mechanically it wasn’t trying to push boundaries in quite the same way so yeah if I would say that probably on the system side. Those guys are probably the ones carrying the torch the most but I sure do wish I saw stuff like Dwarf Fortress level simulation in a Skyrim right right. That that’s kind of where those things could come together
yeah Had To me it’s almost like it’s just kind of like a sense of the last time I got that sense of like real ambition maybe it was the troika games which were some of the black Isle people. You know mechanically Arcanum that sort of system or. You know or even temple of Elemental Evil both like to me it shows like Real like wow they’re trying to really do something that hasn’t been done I don’t get that feeling very often anymore Have you tried the new the new torment by the way?
I haven’t… but you know the thing that your comment calls to mind is a viral video that just went around a bit ago from the new Zelda which is I don’t know if you’ve seen it it’s the moment where the. Link is fighting some big monster and in attacking the monster–they’re fighting in a grass field it has a couple of birds around them–and the monster whacks one of the birds and the result is that the birds all get pissed an entire flock of them come after the monster and kill them right.
Emergence, in a Zelda game, imagine that
That’s what the what I was getting at about glacial. It does happen it’s just that the diffusion of some of those concepts just takes a really long time. And the bigger the budgets the slower it happens speech as it’s riskier
Yeah you know it makes sense. So you know let’s talk more about like theory and stuff so you you wrote Theory of Fun That to me in my world that is like the thing that you know makes you wonder if there were those great Raph Koster is this, which is my favorite book on game design. I if I haven’t told you that
Well, no! Actually I remember… I’m flashing back to the first time that I interacted with you online I was not aware you had that high an opinion
yeah I know it’s well I like it that that’s the thing is like I feel I feel that in general the discipline is is you know just kind of like getting started and warmed up and but but yours has like the most of like a thesis you know an actual thing to say but I want to hear it’s now been ten years since that book came out is tht right? like or maybe a little more now?
it’s almost … we’re at twelve to thirteen by now
OK yeah yes oh so. Like how do you feel about it like looking back on it like what do you think do you think it kind of you feel you had an impact on the game design theory community on the conversation do you like how do you feel about it?
Fundamentally And this is I think it’s one of the depressing things about working in video games as opposed to even tabletop. You know video games because the platforms are kind of ephemeral. I think people will remember me for that book long after they’ve forgotten any of my games or even are capable of playing them especially working in MMOs where the servers go away.
So in a lot of ways it almost feels like that you know the writing is the legacy right? more than the more than the games which I often feel depressing. Because you know I’m in it for the games and they’re the not for the writing…
but yeah you know when it came out like when it came out it was actually kind of controversial It got mixed reviews. It was nominated… back then Game Developer magazine did awards. The front line awards or whatever and it was nominated for Best book and it lost to like a book about game audio that nobody really remembers anymore
interesting
and you know it there was a lot of discussion around it in the academic community. And it wasn’t seen as being very practical for a game designer.
but this was in the days game programs were just getting started. So there wasn’t… you know there was a critical community that was in the midst of the ludology versus narratology Wars. There were several academics who are kind of fighting to carve out a space for a video game studies at the time carving it out of art programs and literature programs and. You know wherever they could really and creating afterward you know digital humanities or whatever
Right
And so. Today it’s more like the opposite now I get a lot of comments on how it’s dogma, how it’s just kind of accepted and, you know, needs to be challenged more. And I think part of it is because it was legitimized so much in the process of academic programs using it and taking it up.
it also had interesting influence outside of games, which, you know, as I was writing it I was not necessarily thinking of just a game developer audience. I had hopes that it would be read outside of games, by people who weren’t in games at all, like people who didn’t get games. because back then games were in a huge struggle for legitimacy. we had not yet gotten that Supreme Court verdict about whether or not we were protected speech and artistic expression.
And. Many developers actually did not see games as an art form. they saw games as just a product. there were active debates about that. And this is long before the Roger Ebert thing yeah right so there were plenty of developers on the on the oh no we’re just making toys man well
I thinka lot of people still think that even if they were all necessarily say it as as loudly they still have that mentality like that still exists I would say
I think it exists but it’s not I guess it’s it’s kind of taken for granted now I think that games are. You know have cultural importance or that games can say something or you know
That’s true
are kind of to a given these days even if you still think yeah we mostly make them for fun I go sure and we write most music for fun and we you know most pop songs aren’t exactly saving the world and most sitcoms are don’t have much to say either and so on and I think that’s just par for the course perfectly fine you know what you want to do is be an entertainer that is a frickin noble goal in my opinion entertainment is hard and worthy of respect.
Absolutely
So you know but it does feel like a really different context. the book didn’t like break out to the huge audience but it did break out in interesting directions make up picked up first probably by the. Educators and then from there it went sideways into what I think of as trainers trainers or kind of educators that work in really concrete fields right people who do training for business processes or how to fly planes or military training
Like a trade, like trade school?
yeah but I mean it isn’t just trade school because there’s plenty of these people working on white collar type things too but but yeah all of those kinds of forms of educate. And that aren’t what we think of. they’re not classroom type things right?
, gotcha, yeah
those guys all picked it resonated strongly with those guys I got asked to keynote their annual conference actually. Which was huge. Right? This whole parallel world, you know I never paid any attention to and then. A little bit later and this was partly through. Amy Jo Kim I think but. You know because she’s been a booster of it ever forever we’ve been friends since we worked together on you oh. She introduced it to the guys who founded who eventually founded. bunchball which was the first gamification company and so I found myself in this weird position where Theory of Fun turned out to be really influential on the early gamification crowd which I was entirely you know approving of.
Yeah yeah right!
Because there’s a lot of I mean obviously games can be used to help train and obviously there’s feedback loops and all the rest so game if occasion makes sense but there’s an awful lot of bad gamification that was out there. But yeah so from there it started spreading to web people
You mean, like web design and stuff?
Web design but also Web 2.0 in general when I started you know burgeoning in the period shortly after that you know in the oughts I guess. So suddenly I ended up at conferences like ETech or Supernova or the O’Reilly ones. And yeah it got picked up a lot through that and kind of taken is a more general design book like industrial design or product design whatever
one thing I’ve noticed is that you know a games have this like rock star status in our culture so like other disciplines if they can bring in someone from. Games you know that’s like something that they they find kind of exciting and so that might also be part of that is that like you know if they’re going to get someone from games it’s probably going to be like whoever wrote the most popular and you know most well acclaimed book on games you know and it makes sense to me… I’ve seen other disciplines they’re just. it seems like everybody is like excited to get someone you know rom games to do something on talk at their thing like I feel like somebody from games can talk it almost anything because it’s just so like loved at this point
yeah I tend to agree there’s you know there is a little bit of out of your depth-ness that happens I speak from experience but yeah I agree I think it’s. It’s probably to be expected we glamorize again entertainers and entertainment and games you know regardless of what you think of ideas like oh it’s the entertainment of the twenty first century or whatever, enough people believe it to give you the credit
yeah absolutely. So do you do you do you think you would ever write another book or do you have any other plans like that like to write so because I feel like if you wrote another like theory of fun 2, or. Something like it would be you know it would be a massive hit
so I’ve got two I think projects that I’ve been. Plunking away for ten years actually. One of which is probably of more interest to you than the other so I will talk about the other first
I’ve been working on trying to gather together essays and in particular game post-mortems off my website. there’s like a million words worth of stuff on my website and a lot of it gets referenced a lot, and you know linked a lot there’s essays like declaring the rights of avatars or. Stuff like the laws of a. Online world design or the post-mortems on Star Wars Galaxies that just… they drive all this traffic to my blog every day. they get pointed at, like the Avatar rights piece is in law textbooks and so but it’s I’ve never collected it. it’s been reprinted literally I think in. I think that one maybe in as many as ten books by other people, and I’ve never put it in a book .
so that’s one I feel like I should kind of gather up a lot of those articles and essays for posterity kind of thing
before you go on to the second one I have a question about that. because like what strikes me is that you know I’ve been I’ve been writing about game design for I don’t know about around ten years or so and I feel like I have a tail of like four or five years and I pretty much like either don’t eat or like massively modify most of the stuff that’s more than four or five years old because I find that like my views change and you know like a lot of my old stuff is like. Embarrassing. and I don’t do you have that feeling at all or do you are there anything out there of yours that you’re like oh God I can’t if I wrote that that was like that wrong
Totally.
OK yeah
Yeah, there’s absolutely stuff like that but there’s also stuff that for whatever reason some of it is turned out to be of I guess call it historical importance on a very relative scale.
Sure, yeah
There’s a lot like the rights of avatars piece in particular is turned out to be super resonant. it was written prior to social networking.
Huh.
And yet the arguments it makes are very very pointed and relevant today in the realms of social networking.
Right.
You know what rights do we have when our identities and or context or interaction is managed by third parties and. essentially they are starting to take the form of governments and you know where that was kind of an analogy in the original essay when we were talking about early virtual worlds in M M O’s, it’s less of an analogy today . it’s getting more real
Yeah
and so a lot of the arguments that are in there are turning out to be had all over again. Same thing is true with a lot of the earlier writings on on virtual worlds and MMOs. a lot of those are just basically. There’s a lot of lessons that people need to go back and learn that are getting kind of forgotten because M M O’s have not been on the cutting edge of anybody’s attention since about ’05, since the blush wore off of World of Warcraft I would say, and Second Life
so I think yeah there’s certainly stuff I’m embarrassed by and I also think there’s plenty there that is of value, and things like the game post-mortems some stuff like that never goes out of style.
Right, sure.
Stuff like that is just always valuable when I did the Star Wars Galaxies post-mortems I did that now that’s got to be a year plus ago maybe two years and we’re talking about a game that came out in 2003. And ran for eight years, so it closed years ago. And yet when I put out those articles they were picked up by AVClub and vice and time.
Wow, yeah
And you know there was all this attention on them and it was in part because of the lessons that were in there even though plenty of people don’t remember what the game was actually like
so yeah I think a lot of it just depends on the. Content So yeah I think that book is still worth doing I wouldn’t expect it to be a theory of fun level—
right—
–thing
more of an academic sort of very resource kind of thing
yeah although you know I certainly got a lot of nostalgia player people
Sure yeah yeah
like a good example would be the complete design for the dynamic ecology in Ultima online. Those articles get pointed out all the time still I get I see the referrer logs. You know yeah I now put them there
No, for sure yeah I got to read some of those. UO dominated a lot of my high school years so I I got I still have like you know so the only like that some of the warmest feelings I’ve ever had for video games are with memories of you as I’m sure you’ve told that before but.
Once or twice. Yeah it’s funny because. You know the thing about UO. The memories that people have in UO and galaxies the freedoms are also are what generated that and yet at the same time they’re also what destroyed
like yeah.
Yeah in the long run right and so that’s that’s kind of the challenge I think with with games like that there’s no doubt they really touched people like I get that evidence all the time and at the same time it’s almost like their inevitable fate is to become you know what Shangri-La that you can never get to again.
Right, that’;s funnmy.
So OK so what’s the second book that you’ve been working on?
The second book is called a grammar of gameplay
Oh somebody asked me I asked my little community and I asked them what what I should ask you and one of the big questions was about the whole game grammar project and I guess that’s what this is?
that’s right and you know it’s I mean it overlaps a lot with your work. I think of you as a fellow. Traveler on this road alongside people like Dan Cooke, Stephane Bura, Joris Dormans, and a few others. It feels to me like you know the grammar gameplay thing started because… Let me think how to give the context
I did Theory of Fun in part because I felt Star Wars Galaxies had succeeded at being a world and failed at being a good game on a bunch of fronts. right like the combat game was bad. you know there were just lots of things that were not good game design in it and lots of it… and this despite the fact that it turned out there were lots of things that were really good social design. like they were good virtual world design.
And so the theory of fun was in part about a boot camp for myself where I was like. “Wow I’ve lost touch with this. Maybe I don’t actually know game design at all.”
And in hindsight I didn’t . Right, in hindsight I was very much operating. Instinctively. I was analytical about things but a lot of it was instinctive a lot of it was you know received wisdom, a lot of it was “Wouldn’t this be cool”-ism, you know, share all of the things that come about from you know kind of practicing a craft through apprenticeship and through you know fandom, I guess
so I I did a bunch of things which included. Going back and re teaching myself how to program. I had been doing scripting and server side work on UO and on virtual worlds in general but I hadn’t done front end client side rendering and any of that since the eight bit computer days. so I taught myself how to do that all over again, and started making puzzle. Games in action arcade games on weekends, while I was researching and thinking about the issues and Theory of Fun
so that, those two things combined, led me to game grammar… and also talking with a bunch of people Dave Rickey who’s pretty much out of the industry now and Noah Falstein who just stepped down as chief game designer at Google but is a friend going back a long time. We’d been talking a lot. You know conferences and stuff, about discoveries in psychology — evolutionary psychology was undergoing a vogue at the time before it kind of landed in bad odor. And so on and you know saying wait so there’s got to be like cognitive processes we’re tapping into here. there’s got to be a reason why games are around, like why do we do this right? and so we were talking about those things and the book was one outcome of that
but even in theory of fun you can see the start of game grammar, I forget which chapter is it’s in, but there’s a moment in there where I say “so what would a problem like that be like?” and I walk through this little checklist:
It would. Have a core problem at its heart it would offer statistical variation you could move through there would be a cost to failure even if it’s just opportunity cost it would give you the feedback so you can learn what you did wrong
I mean there’s this little checklist and I at the end I say this is an exhaustive but if you’re not hitting these things you know you’re probably not heading for something fun. and that was the beginning right there that little list was the beginning of figuring out game grammar stuff
I was the C.C.O. at Sony Online at the time and Rod Humble who. Went on to–he went on to head the Sims franchise and also then worked at Second Life a bunch of other places–but he’s also best known these days for doing art games such as the marriage
oh yeah yeah
so Rod was head of the studio there in San Diego for Sony Online and so we worked together on stuff like Ever Quest two. I wasn’t very involved I just like advised him at it you know at a distance kind of thing I don’t work with the team very much. but we were talking about the crafting system and how crafting in an MMO sucks it’s just press the combine button and we worked through it. that’s how we got that checklist right we worked through this saying OK what is it that makes one of the other like combat fun if combat is fun why isn’t this fun let’s break this down and we ended up on the whiteboard with and a game atom, with like input and a loop and a feedback system and and diagrammed it out and went oh shit!
Right
Part of those discussions. Is where the marriage came from actually because the question was hey so could you convey like a theme or a lesson with just the mechanics without a skin
right
and that was part of the experiment there Jason Rohrer also told me later that. The book had also partly inspired passage
I was just thinking of that as well.
So that’s how the game grammar stuff started I ended up doing a presentation at GDC. The next year. the goal was actually how do we convey a game system design because I think my one liner was something like doing it giving people game design document is like asking them to make a movie from the director’s commentary.
Yeah
right it’s not like making it from the script and so is there a way to capture this stuff in a notation
Yeah
that’s what I was originally after but you can’t do a notation without having the theory and so I started out and at first I was super bogged down in the notation side which was is its own problem right. And then I started finding “oh look you know here’s a game atoms only restated as ludemes by Ben Cousins or as choice molecules”. I think is choice molecules the one in Rules of Play?
I don’t remember
I don’t remember but lots of people were saying here’s this thing and then Dan did his article A chemistry of game design and you know oh look what a surprise right here’s a similar concept and he actually had gorgeous diagrams for something that I only had crappy sketches of and yeah after a while it really felt like we were all touching an elephant.
that. There is structural stuff implicit in the nature of games that is actually call it. I don’t know if immutable is right it’s just structural it’s like it’s almost like physical characteristics of what games are like yeah and. As you the more you start digging into the theory the more you end perceiving that it’s complicated. It’s both complex and complicated. the atom is simple that one’s easy but when you start getting into richer stuff particularly when you get into dynamics right it gets both complicated and complex.
the more you dig into it the more you find it touches on a lot of fields. You know like it it became apparent. I mean after a while that the same atom exists whether we’re talking about like in a driving game the controls or it’s pretty very haptic and physical right? whereas in a turn based strategy game it’s a much slower paced typically and you don’t, the haptic element is lessened, but the learning loop is still there. you know there’s a good structural case to be made that actually the complete loop is there it’s just we’re operating at different speeds or operating it kind of different you know that your muscles are themselves a game to learn… you know that kind of thing.
And so you know that means you start finding yourself suddenly, like I found myself reading blogs on sports medicine. And sports training. and then on a different day I’d find myself reading. Narrative theory right because. The it’s the structures in the loops are incredibly similar It’s the nature of the tokens that changes, the nature of the “controls” and I put controls in quotes that changes. But the structures are very similar
I ended up making this map I call it a map of game. All of the different fields that it touches that my complete picture of what games are like and I think there’s like thirty or forty in it now.
And most things about games are really focused down on you know four or five at a time. So yeah what I thought was “Oh I’ll have this book done for you guys next year.” They actually got an I S B N for it and even it’s listed on Amazon as forthcoming right and that I’ve now blown the deadline by thirteen years and counting
Wow
the publisher went away actually in the meantime
so thirteen years is it is there a like some kind of like. Sort of a hard walls on on finishing it like are is it like there’s actually a like you know how much of it is like oh it’s coming along slowly but surely it has and are some of it like you know there’s at like I have to there’s something that hasn’t been figured out that I need to figure out and is really challenging ?
so I mean this is going to sound arrogant and clueless simultaneously I actually do think I now have kind of a grip on the whole thing. The hard part is explaining it and when you explain it it gets harder to you know you can’t hide
the problem is you got to use English you know use words to explain it and then in your head everything’s out the window like or you know and yeah
I often find that the act of explaining itself helps me figure shit out. So
and confuses every one else in the mean time like everyone is is like, wait but you said this one word then that now I’m thinking about some other totally different thing and you know I mean
yeah that’s right and you know one of the one of the biggest ones that I remember we had some. I think it was actually comments on on one of the essays I put on the blog a few years back. You know the whole question of… I’m not even sure how to summarize it I wrote this this article about “playing with game” and whether game was the right word.
Because for me actually a huge insight that turned out to be super useful was that these structural qualities sometimes just are out there already right. And some of the obvious examples that I tend to use there are basically like the necessary requirements for a game exist in the systems of music, the stock market, How wikipedia works and my aquarium. It’s just that they’re missing the bit of intentionality that turns them into what we generally then say oh yeah that’s a game now.
Sure. Like in the spoonful of sugar song
Right yeah except except that part is actually bullshit there’s lots of systems out there in the world that don’t meet the criteria. Right but there is this set of them that do write that because it to really get it you know there’s there’s the standard hierarchy that we all use right the toy up through puzzle and then into game and we all define it slightly differently but it has a lot to do with the solution space right and how large it is… where exactly you slice it everybody uses slightly different terminology but we’re all broadly in agreement
Yeah.
There’s a huge amount of systems out there that are actually puzzles. Most of them probably
Yeah, I agree
but there are the ones that are games and to me that was one of the begin sites that those are out there and you know it’s not like I can suddenly say Oh music is a game. I. Have always had this issue with you can’t it’s hard to fight common usage right
that’s what language is really
right and so for the longest time it was easy to just go along saying game for this stuff and then as you know there was the great formalism wars of you know twenty fifteen or whatever. And I started using ludic system to mean systems that meet the criteria. And then I could say and if you build one on purpose then that’s an artifact right that’s a ludic artifact but the ones that are naturally occurring are still ludic systems and they’re just out there and that actually helped clarify my thinking and left you know left the word Game alone and I still use game in casual talk. But you know it just helps me be more precise
the other thing that was super valuable out of those discussions in particular was actually it reinforced something that is in theory of fun, and I needed reminded of it a super fundamental level, I guess, which is that if something meets the criteria but the players can’t perceive it, then to that player.
It doesn’t meet the criteria
It doesn’t meet the criteria
whatever the at the end user perceive this is basically as good as the reality
right exactly and so that’s such an importabt, I mean it’s a core principle in all fields of design but it’s also easy want to lose sight of I think especially when we’re in formal land because in formal land we often have to think in essentialisms that we have to say oh but no this really does meet the criteria but if the player doesn’t see it as soon as you try to get them to play at your hosed
so the way to think about that by the way is just to say that like it better you know just because this meets my formal criteria and players don’t get it there’s some other formal reason that they’re not getting it that I may not be aware of that other formal law but there’s some you know it can be explained and it can be just you know I’m just trying to push back on the idea that I don’t think you would have but some would have of like oh these are like the the limits of you know formal theory in general that you know sometimes people just don’t like stuff and it’s totally mysterious and and so therefore theory is not useful so
the theory always useful I think because I do think we can understand reasons why. Different people’s cognition has been trained by their experiences there are reasons why they might have preferences towards one thing or another and there’s tons of literature out there on that stuff, like, piles. This is not a new problem right now vast swathes of academic ink and acres of paper have been spilled on things like learning styles and you know cognitive biases and all the rest so there absolutely are reasons and we can come to understand them but I’ve come to think of it as it’s part of the landscape right? that’s part of our territory when we design we just need to get we’re not going to we can’t change those people right that’s not well not in that way I do think we change people but you know what I mean
yeah
and then the other thing though is that there’s a mirror image too. Which is it also means that. If there’s something that wants to call itself a game and doesn’t meet this criteria but other people choose to accept it as that and other people don’t.. you know basically nobody gets to stand on the high horse and say “My take on it is going to be correct” because the audience is always going to end up making a decision
sure
so yeah that so that to me was actually a super valuable outcome of those arguments although they were kind of personally painful but no need to dwell on that. For me the upshot of all the game grammar stuff is that I now have… Because of hammering on the problem for so long even though I don’t necessarily feel like I can explain it all… like if you push me I can explain a given piece of it fairly well. I don’t have a good organizing principle to explain the whole thing. I’ve tried using the loop. I’ve tried doing. I’ve tried using the map and a few other things but the biggest thing is that hammering on each of these individual problems and trying to research them with their own fields has led me to internalize a bunch of stuff that now I tend to use kind of intuitively.
Which is. Great for me. but not so Great for passing it on to other people and so I still wrestle with how to explain it or teach it.
But it’s it’s been great for me in terms of my own practice. I’ve found that… I’ll give you a super simple example for the kind of things I’ve been making lately I’ve been making an awful lot of abstract strategy board games
I’ve played a few of them last year and they were really really cool
yeah I am super proud of them because. kind of for me, one of the other realizations of all this was you know I still love making vast intricate complex worlds with you know entire, designing entire societies. this is like at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. it’s some abstract tokens on an abstract field.
But on the other hand these are also the kinds of games that last a thousand years and I consciously said to myself at one point you know what I’d…That sounds like a pretty kick ass design goal. You know? I would like to try making a game that could last for a thousand years, or I’ll settle for one that feels like it has already been around for a thousand years
sure
you know even if it doesn’t last, because obviously there’s lots of marketing and cultural and reasons why it might not
Yeah, a things I would just say really quickly that those kind of the simpler something is the harder it is to make it interesting you know like you know where like that the hardest things to make are these like super simple minimalist kind of thing so so yeah it’s a challenge I think if nothing else
yeah you know even when making the big things though like I thought of UO or a Galaxies as actually being a world with a giant collection of super simple things in it. And that’s actually how… that to me is actually one of the things that… You know game grammar says that games are fractal. That. When you look at a given system in a game, it decomposes into smaller systems. Each of those smaller systems might actually also meet all of the ludic system criteria right. And that keeps happening until you get to a game that is trivial.
Which might be the game of picking up the chess piece and setting it down someplace else. Right for a toddler then– this is why that relativism perspective thing matters– to a toddler that game is also goddamn hard
Sure
Butt most of us have mastered it. It is actually I mean you know– objectively speaking, picking up a piece and putting it somewhere is absolutely brutally hard and if you don’t think that then go try doing it with a claw machine look right do it with a different interface and you realize holy shit no it actually is a brutally difficult problem that’s a great basis for a game. it’s a it’s the system is for real a game system. it has all of the you know emergent challenges, endless statistical variation you know feedback loops are present or not in interesting ways, it meets the criteria, right.
But most cases are the ones that we have rendered trivial and of course our world is full of objects that we have designed to make it trivial. we do not make our tables bumpy. we do not make our table.
Sure
like water mattresses.
Sure
So in essence, We’ve built our world to be the easy mode for that game. Right but that game is a real game it’s just one that we eventually kind of outgrow it.
So if you think of game design as fractal in a lot of ways that’s kind of the trick to being able to build something truly massive, is if you can decompose things that way. in my head I literally see like Star Wars Galaxies, I would tell people they’d ask “Wait are you sure that we can cut this system and not that one” and I’d be like “yes because in my head I see this cool. Glittering like Dyson sphere and it’s Got you know it’s not a solid sphere it’s got holes and patches and it’s got some nodes that are more important than others but that one only has like two connections to it and this one’s got twelve so if we cut that one we’ll be OK We want it but will be OK It’s got ripple effects but we can’t cut the one with twelve” “but you’re saying we’re cutting Land Speeders and leaving in hairdressers” in galaxies and I’m like I know it’s ridiculous but trust me right
So that kind of view of it is a lattice as this fractal Web. Is kind of just always in my head now and when I think of something big I think of it as being made of these smaller parts and these days my rule of thumb for smaller things is a lot of rules of no more than three rules no more than three variables kinds of ideas.
when I go into trying to make the strategy games I literally say I want first I’m going to find an interesting challenging. It’s technically it’s a topology, like an interesting playfield OK? The playfield is not necessarily a space
it’s not space
right so I walk you through the most recent game I just made it’s called Tiny castles you have a two by two grid but that isn’t actually the topology right in the two by two grid it’s probably easiest to explain it with playing cards you’ve got cards that are one two three and four and you have two of each. And you take turns placing the cards in one of the four cells. And you must you can only place a card in a cell if its value is higher than whatever was already there.
OK Sure
so that means the topology of the playfield is actually this shifting ground right it is not a two by two it’s got this
A third dimension of value
that is constantly changing and it changes every turn right. Now the current Your cards are of your color let’s say I’m playing with the black suits and you’re playing with the red suits right
sure.
So then the the rule of thumb that I have arrived at that I can kind of quantify in. In game grammar terms kind of. what I call the orthogonal rule OK And so. If you have this strategy game the basic case of it is you keep putting these cards down once there is a four you can take that that stack that is topped by a four and replace it with qa one if you have it
OK
and then the cards go back to whoever’s they are they go with a you get returned to people’s piles
OK
. But then in this game the orthogonal rule has to do with the win conditions right. And this is this is the shortcut trick that I often use. what we’ve now got is these four cycling pillars right that can cycle at different rates because you can jump from a one to a four
OK
Right so the permutation space is actually pretty large right and you know what other people have because there aren’t that many tokens but you have now a large enough space that it can’t be held in somebody’s head easily
Right
right and that notion of can’t hold something in your head easily. I formalize that in game grammar I often use the shortcut device of N.P. hard problems. But it isn’t just that it’s really properly spoken of as capital H hard capital P problems because math problems will be N.P. or pspace complete you know they fit into certain ranges of complexity. but social problems often are also quote hard problems, and we don’t have math language to quantify them as much as you know.
Social science Stuff
Yeah but a lot of it just isn’t quantifiable borrowing you know game theory John Nash-style stuff a lot of it isn’t that
and even a lot of that is very like you know heavy on assumptions sort of economic activity yeah
yeah yeah I’ve started putting math into like a game of diplomacy right you quickly realize well this is actually a capital H. hard problem set, from psychology right? and psychology just operates on other rules and some of them are non-rational acting right and that’s OK You can read up on them and you can learn them and start leveraging them.
And then similarly, physical problems are also often hard. fine motor control or you know endurance or whatever. We can try doing the math of endurance and say Oh well if we could model out oxygenation and. Fast response fibers versus slow response muscle fibers and you know and in theory you could build a math model there but you know we just kind of know that’s physically hard that isn’t right
Sure
then there’s the cheap one which is chance. Chance iss always hard right? we’re lousy at it. We’re terrible at extrapolating probability so if you start putting some uncertainty in the game it very quickly balloons into something that we you know anything nonlinear anything stochastic, we cannot hold in our heads. And so there’s you know there’s a set of tools on the workbench and they’re suitable for different purposes
like chance. Chance is basically degenerate math. But it’s actually super useful for accessibility right it’s a great it’s kind of like the ketchup of game design. it’s a seasoning that you can put on a system that automatically makes it friendlier to newbies who are not strategic thinkers. Right
yeah yeah there’s a lot of different kind of manifestations of randomness Yeah but yeah that’s one of them
yeah your piece on imput randomness and output randomness I thought was brilliant because it really codified it and drill down into into that you know and randomness is one of those things that. Actually as far as I know you Greg Costikyan and. Vegas
who is the last person you broke up a little bit.
You are like the only people who thought deeply about
Sorry say that last name one more time because it broke up again
sorry the city of Las Vegas
Oh I see, Las Vegas, OK Oh yeah I thought you said like Vega in street fighter
City of Las Vegas big gambling industry. But we don’t tend to dive into chance we use it really. We’ve used it as through folk wisdom when it turns out there are codifiable understandable reasons when to use this particular seasoning in a recipe right so so yeah so I love that piece so this game that I’m talking about actually has no chance. Right everybody has the same pieces everything is public. Other games can have a chance I think you know it’s it’s a different way to add a kind of hard problem.
And. Let me throw something at that real quick so so the idea of. A system that doesn’t have that’s totally you know no hidden information and so so how and I guess what you are saying is yeah but there’s some point at which you know just the amount of calculation required is so huge that players just kind of like they don’t they only look out they there’s a soft look ahead cap right based on like just how much a normal human being can or is willing to look ahead. but my argument against that is yeah that if the designer chooses that point, then players are in that sort of uncomfortable position of like should I calculate out the next thing I like or not or should I just do this move? you know I mean? like which to me is a weird choice for players after a make it’s almost like them having to choose their difficulty setting. does that make any sense
it does but I do think that it’s important. To bear in mind that the kind of chance matters right. there are a lot of different kinds of chance distributions and some of those are like you said about look ahead. And some of them are literally the brain is not capable of doing the look ahead so there’s a difference between look ahead what that is actually possible and look ahead that is not and that’s kind of what I meant by like it’s a known factor in psych research across… it’s been validated multiple times, the brain can do linear extrapolation the human brain is actually pretty good at that the brain can even do interesting first and second order derivatives on that pretty well otherwise we wouldn’t be able to catch a ball right
Sure
there where we’re extrapolating linearly on several different fronts right? but. What we suck at and it’s good we don’t have it’s like we’re missing the floating point Chip to do it OK is. Exponential non-linear and stochastic distributions. We just do not do.
right
we look at them and we think they are linear and we curve fit to that and we’re wrong. And I mean this can be anything from the ponies to the Black Swan book where it’s treated in a in the realm of economics to, oh, what we think about the likelihood of a terrorism attack versus dying in a car crash OK it’s a known cognitive bug.
Yeah
and so there’s that that there’s a difference there between “oh I’m going to roll Di six which gives me kind of a finite spread”. And chance that makes use of curves like that
right
right and they each have their place in different ways. if you’re doing if you’re going down to even like a strategy game that has a let’s say a decent component in it right let’s say it’s a roll for damage kind of thing right. Roll for damage actually. It’s a good example of that fractal thing right? roll for damages a mechanic to summarize what should be a more complex smaller atom down under there that we’re choosing not to model, because it starts getting fiddly or whatever. so we’re going to put a stand in there and simply say here’s the range of possible outcomes you need to account for that range. that is you know we can’t model everything, right, in any given game so it’s a reasonable thing to say “hey this is as deep as we’re going to go and we’ll just put in you know a range or a small curve in there”. Right it’s a cut off point for how deep you go
that’s that’s the use for that kind of randomness. it’s summarising. It’s summarising an atom that isn’t present. rolling the dice to choose how the weather changes right is an example of a we’re going to change the environment to a different environment that hopefully has gameplay effects, but we’re not going to model the weather. Because that’s a huge amount of work to do, right and so there that’s one kind of way to use randomness.
Stuff like moving along a race track is a classic in games for kids because it removes skill and focuses, when used well in game design, what it does is allow the child to work on the cognitive tasks appropriate to them. Right it doesn’t… you know and they have cognitive they have hard games to play
Sure
they have a hard game of moving the pieces of counting the squares, those are challenging puzzles or challenging problems that are age appropriate. so we use chance or that you go higher up in your cognitive training and it stops making as much sense. or a or you treat it as landscape variation
right
now one of the reasons I believe we play games in part for cognitive training to chunk heuristics.
Right
heuristics are they’re not solutions. they are decent approximations of solutions that let us get by
right, right rules of thumb
yeah they need to be responsive to varied situations so that’s why games present statistical variations so that your heuristic can get broader to encompass more types of situations. sometimes you have a heuristic and you throw a new situation at it and it completely breaks and that’s when we hear of players saying they’ve plateaued because they need to completely revise their cognitive training to account for a variable they did not include Right and this happens like it’s famous for happening in among musicians right like oh shit I need to throw away everything I know about the guitar fingerboard. I was learning chords now I need to understand intervals. Ah shit. And that’s why most guitar players don’t get past chords you have to throw away everything you can go and do and build a new heuristic right
so a chance has its place and when you have things like stochastic things, where that is a stick has to curve is one where we don’t put you through a nicely graduated learning ramp we throw stuff out of the complete… out of band stuff at you. And you know in the real world that happens right. But in a game if if the intent and is to teach the player then stochastic is often really brutal, it’s like throwing a level hundred monster at you on level one on a die roll
yeah
I’m sorry sometimes that happens
and the other reason I tend to be harsh about that kind of randomness is that it you can actually have a very solvable and kind of like badly designed system that appears unsolvable, unsolved, to players because they because they you know are getting they’re getting basically like oh I rolled a one so I now every now it’s hard you know I mean like whereas actually like Statistically if you had played through this a bunch of times you have this solved you have this you have this solved since the second time you played it. But just seems unsolved because of the. Huge variance in the middle of the system
yeah so having I mean but that gets back at things like you know the proximate range for learning, it gets back at the concepts of flow and all the rest. We’ve always known that there is a channel there right that works and if you’re too high above if you’re above it or below it stuff stops working for the player.
A Good example maybe is like if you played Monopoly and you only had a D. three and other people had a D6, right, there’s a whole new problem space there for you to learn that is interesting actually D3 might actually do you’d have a lower income but higher odds of picking up monopoly so that’s kind of an interesting one but…
So saying oh through random chance I got all ones on every roll. Is in the possibility space it’s just a brutal part of the math of that possibility math.
Yeah gosh I was talking about the orthogonal rule. we wandered pretty far off! [laughter]
That basically if I see these things as tools on the workbench and they all have different uses right There are times where I want to make a game super accessible or I want to be a party game or something and that’s what the audience is, therefore i go oh chance is a good tool here.
sure.
There are other times where I go I want this game to you know captivate people and have them take thirty minutes to think of a move, chance is probably not in there. instead I’m looking for a really broad permutation space. And that puts me most likely in mathy areas right. Sometimes I want it to be something that inspires feelings of camaraderie in which case I’ll be looking at cooperative play, I’ll be looking at risk profiles, I’ll be looking at the roles of altruism and sacrifice right, and suddenly we’re using social tools
so to me these are tools on the workbench. in this little game. You know we’ve been stacking these in the landscape cycles and shifts in ways that you could the permutations space is somewhat predictable, but the victory conditions are what changes it, because I have one victory condition which is. If you place a card such that what is now showing is one two three four of anybody’s in any combination on the board. You win.
or if you place a card such that all the cards on top are your color you win.
Or if you place a card that prevents the other player from making a move at all.
OK
so now we have a game here where we have a total of it’s a two by two grid we have sixteen tokens. It’s played fairly quickly and yet it is a quote capital H. capital P. hard problem right it is actually surprisingly deep. And the idea of the two victory conditions that compete, and that’s what I mean by the orthogonal rules if there is more than one way to. Earn a victory point in this case it’s victory of the whole game but in other games… I think you played you played settlement the one with the hexes and the dots
Yeah I did yeah
so in that game there the the standard rule is hey I can be flipping other people’s tiles in order to. In order to gain points and the value of the dots on the tile is how much they’re worth at the end and I designed the whole game with that in mind. and I finished I went “wow I’ve ended up with a pretty good. B”.. I ended up with a B.. And then I added the orthogonal rule of if you make a triangle of three tiles of your color you get a bonus but the bonus can be destroyed.
That one is in competition with the heuristics and the strategies for the other and so you’re constantly forced… I mean this is a this is almost like a game design hack. because there are these two ways to do things and they call for a different mix of resources at all times and one will probably damage the other, at all times
Yeah
you always have an interesting choice every turn
the way I would describe that is like something like strategic axes like different you know the classic one is like rush down and econ or whatever you know… rushdown, econ, defense or whatever the people talk about unlike fighting games or R.T.S. games where you know like yeah you can like invest you know invest into this late game thing or go for this early game thing now you know like they’re just making sure that there are multiple sort of strategic basically multiple like super strategies, kinds of strategies to pursue.
Except this is at the tactical level not the strategic, right, and I think that’s the that’s the difference probably is that this is a this is a decision… these are tools because you can they use either like either of those two gets you you know victory points in a way right but they do it in different ways and they each have different strengths and weaknesses so your strategy is actually how many of one versus how many of the other do I use. Right and actually there are more you play the game so you know that actually territory like the positioning of how you place the tiles is also hugely important. So that one is yet a third one. But it’s a good example because the positioning of the tiles is critical if you’re trying to play the triangle moves. But it serves a completely different purpose if you’re trying to play the capture kinds of moves
right
you can do the captures in any direction you cannot do that captures in a direction if you’re playing for triangles in a given tactical scenario
Gotcha
that’s what at the end of the game the winner has almost certainly not chosen one or the other exclusively
Oh yeah no no and that’s true with econ and rushdown as well I mean I have you know a lot of the times it’s dance between these multiple strategic axes and you’re sort of like you know I go a little bit more in this direction and then you go a little bit more in this sort of counter direction and then I change and then you adapt and like this constant dance around a circle of like a rock paper scissors sort of circle
Yeah so yeah to me it’s funny how powerful it is turned out to be to take an abstract game and then simply say at any given move: “OK I’ve made a game here that has it meets the criteria it has this interesting system and we can play a fun game out of it. And that’s fine but it doesn’t feel amazing.” And that’s usually what ends up happening to me, is that it’s fine but it’s not amazing. what I end up needing to find in there is almost a second game. Same pieces, same interactions, almost all of the same atoms ,right but one that has a different structural goal to it. And then players end up having to hold both goals in their head at the same time each with their permutation spaces.
Playing both games at once just kind of automatically carries me over the line into really interesting strategic territory
Yeah I totally agree with that the whole like way of thinking about it, and I agree with your feeling about like you know. Once a game feels that way that I think I get I agree it goes from being like OK to being really interesting. however I would just say and maybe you wouldn’t disagree with this but I would say that multiple goals are not necessarily the only way to achieve that. I think you can achieve that with one goal but maybe you’re just talking about with super simple abstract kind of minimalist games, in which case, maybe multiple game goals are more necessary but like well yeah
yeah I think multiple goals is. Remember since the structure is fractal.. like in settlement the multiple goals are happening like on a like on a small arc. They happen every few moves you achieve one of those two goals. Although if the other players are good they might be successfully blocking you at all times. So you’ve got those that are moderate look ahead but there’s still only one way to there’s only one goal in settlement in the end you win by having the most points.
in the tiny castle game the multiple goals happen to be at the end. right so they exist on the top most atom. On the lower level atoms you don’t have multiple goals except insofar as the you know they build towards the final ones. so the multiple goals can happen at any point I suspect, they can happen at any point in that fractal depth thing right.
There is you’re talking about also like short term goals not like the actual victory conditions right. that’s what I was talking about multiple victory conditions are not necessary to achieve …
not necessary yeah no. but again if games are made out of games if it’s a truly a fractal structure then me winning at the short term arc was a game atom too
I think that’s something, something I think I don’t think
They’re self- similar all the way down
I think that’s probably somewhere we might disagree a little bit is that I don’t think games are made out of games because a game has is and is you know be done and like I said to me the match structure like the beginning middle and end that’s very important and significant and those little I agree there are things that like the look game like throughout a game like there are these I call those like arcs or or sometimes feel called in loops like there are things that are definitely like systemic and they and I could see a way that you could say they’re kind of like games inside a game but I would say just formally it is also really good to remember that the find the overall system… That’s the thing we’re building and that is its own thing and to just say that they all these other little things are also games is like saying that every part of a car is a car or something you know.
I actually, I’ll advocate for the stronger position I see going through the entire game the whole of it, is completing a loop.
Right ,but it is also distinct it is its own thing like this there is something special about just that one loop right
Sure, well like it’s the container for all of the smaller ones right, it is still a loop and that will
but I isn’t it more than just the container for the smaller ones though because I feel like it is I feel it’s more than just a container
what formal characteristics does it have that the other smaller loops don’t.
The biggest strategic arc you know so like you have all these like smaller things
biggest is a magnitude comparison not a difference in nature.
Well I’m. The match structure is I mean that is the game and granted you play that over and over again and you would have so that’s what you’re saying by it being a part of a larger set of loops but the the rules and the system that we’re building that’s the complete system is the game, is the match.
Let me put it this way I guess maybe this is a way to split the hairs on this.
You know there are for example tournament structures of repeated iterations of games, that include shit like brackets let’s say where people actually. Play games with the bracketing right you’re familiar with that stuff.
And so we can say for example absolutely people can play games with the bracketing. But the real thing is the actual match right. Sure. and then we can drill down into the actual match of something like… soccer is one where they play with the bracketing a lot in the World Cup stuff “oh we need to eke out enough points so if we play for goals as opposed to playing just for victory “right there’s it’s a good example of those oh look one of those orthogonal goals popped up right. We can get enough points to tie which gets us through the bracket you know whatever
Oh I see
Right so there’s alternate goals start appearing at that tournament level but then you play the match OK but then within the match like soccer has at least two distinct games in it. it’s got the standard game of soccer, and it has a penalty shoot out which is unquestionably a different game. right you know it’s clearly not the same it’s a built out of a couple of atoms that are very similar but. It’s clearly not the same. it has different durations, different different structure. We say the game of soccer is those two things, complete
Sure
but we could totally take penalty shoot outs just like we can take basketball shoot outs and use that to make HORSE right. And then even within those like each penalty kick is a loop right that has a very clear defined beginning middle and end in victory conditions and strategies and all of it
so when I say there’s self similar it isn’t about the debate over whether or not one has primacy. you know is the tournament more important you know as a World Cup more important than a match? that isn’t really what I’m interested in. what’s useful to me as a practitioner is that I can use all of the same analytical tools. I can use all of the same evaluation tools on a match of soccer, on a penalty shoot out, on one penalty kick. I can also use them on the bracketing, and on the entirety of the World Cup
That to me is the value of saying that they’re so similar So when I say oh it’s all a game or games are made out of games what I really mean is what we have here is nested lusic systems each of which if in isolation, right meets all of the criteria, of you know ,the formal definition of a game.
and one piece of evidence I’d offer for that is managing soccer teams is clearly a game. Football Manager is a thing. Right? what does it do below a certain point it uses chance to not model everything. But there is that game of playing the tournaments in the brackets, where you as a coach get to play that. and there are video game versions of it that attempt to simulate out the matches to a certain point. so there is something that is a functioning ludic structure. At the match level we have a functioning ludic structure at the shootout level we have a functioning ludic structure at the penalty level we have a functioning ludic structure and I go further–at the moment of trying to kick the ball we have a functioning ludic structure anybody who’s ever played the game of I’m going to try kicking a ball and hit the same point twelve times right knows that’s a really hard game. right and it fits all the criteria.
so that’s what I mean by the nesting. the value isn’t about whether or not one of those is more special, the value is that I can use that and say “OK Each of these loops, that are of different size and magnitude and yes, relative importance; each of these loops can be designed. Each of these loops should have strategic depth. Each of these loops should have statistical variation to get any broadening my heuristics, each of these should be a worthy game.”
That to be is the good is the design value as a practitioner.
Yeah so we’re we’re we’re kind of over time so I just wanted to say yeah really quickly can I get your impression of what like how what the state of game design writing in the industry is you think that things because what you were just talking about that whole era with when you started the game grammar and Dan Cook’s blog was big and it seemed like five to ten years ago there was just like this kind of renaissance of game design writing and in the last few years like three or four years a lot of my favorite game designer writer type people have stopped and there haven’t been like a big crop of new ones really necessarily So that’s my perspective and I’d love to hear yours.
Yeah I think there’s probably a few factors there
first is that was very much a. Practitioner eruption, right. And a lot of the writers today just as before them. Are academic. So that’s one difference right
Another is that the younger generation of folks who are figuring stuff out, a lot of this stuff is kind of obscure, people aren’t aware of it, people don’t know it’s out there. You know there is no book on this stuff other than. Fairly academic and difficult to read ones. so I think here there is JHoris Dormans and Ernest Adams book on machinations and that is absolutely a compatible with game grammar working out of one direction right in this.
Or a different one I often use as an example… well out of those there’s also characteristics of games which is the Garfield Gutschera Elias one. Which is very good I think but it’s kind of from a you know it’s a bit more on the patterns side than on the you know notation analysis side but again touching the elephant right so.
Some of these are out there but I also count something like Steve Swink’s book on game feel. he’s touching the elephant from the haptics side. but it’s a very rigorous working out of the haptics. right so but all of those have written by working designers who have other things to be doing
Sure
the academics. Are starting to dig into this more. I was at this fantastic conference in Banff Canada and it was called computational modeling of games. and it was a bunch of the people who work in the procedural generation area and Joris was there, as well as several other academics who’ve taken up sort of the kind of the game… you know they think of it as we are going to model and simulate games as a mathematical entity right. And so there are folks who are working at it from that side but their academic right and you know the most practitioners don’t follow the academic scene so you know…
Finally, we’re entering a period where. You know we are in a period of larger budgets and so on and so a lot of the Indies did do work down these lines thinking here of the book that Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark did together yeah that one also right for all of the facts that you know we may have been on the opposite side of it and I in formalism wars or whatever nonetheless she’s got strong formalist streak too… Looking at the book there’s some stuff in there it’s like yeah that lines are more touching the elephant right so. It happens but
I think it’s important to realize it was never a very large group of people right and. You know I mean it was small enough it used to be that many of us we would just get together a G.D. C. every year and it was me and Dan and we would have some of the academics like Michael Mateas for example would be there and Jesse schell. Would be there but so would Ian Bogost who is also touching the elephant but from a very different you know you know he’s also exploring formal characteristics of interaction, just he comes at it from philosophy and right
Sure
but his stuff still fits like it to me this all integrates because it’s all the same elephant.
So it’s out there it’s just it was never that easy to find.
I get ya, yeah
You just have to keep digging for it and right now a lot of it is pretty academic and difficult to follow
right
but it’s happening there was a great article by Katherine Neil not very long ago. If you googled Katharine Neal that’s with a K A T H. A. R I N E I think and Neil N E I L. “design tools” you should find first she did an essay that was published it was on GamaSutra and on medium both, That gives– it’s actually neat–it gives a history and credit to all of us from ten fifteen years ago! that says look at all the Is Doug Church was offering formal abstract tools and Steffan Bjork wrote a book on patterns and. Wow what happened to that stuff right yes the history and then makes the case it’s time to revisit this stuff it’s time to go back to it
and a G.D. C. she gave a little talk where she walks through some of the tools that are now available. Ranging from machinations to Articy draft to others you know Articy is a very formal list approach to planning game narratives and stories.
But you know where I think in a weird way the influence ended up poking out.
Where’s that?
Unity. Unity and scratch and Game Maker and are all of the other things, since when they set out to try to make game making I.D.E.’s — and this is the same thing I ran into when I developed Metaplace. You have to go back to a formalism about how our game structured.
and sure there’s programming formalisms to like whether you go O. or not or whatever. but fact of the matter is you quickly end up at concepts of tokens or objects, verbs, currencies I think there’s a reason why all of these tools end up as objects with messaging events, and currencies, and topology spaces, and it’s because games are made out of those things, and they are touching the elephant too.
so I actually think that these integrated game I.D.E.’s like Unity are giving formalism lessons to all the game developers in a way that was not true ten years ago. if you even go back and look at the formalisms in unreal versus the formalisms in unity they are very different. And I think part of that is because unity kind of started at a place closer to seeing the elephant
And just that it’s easier for people to just literally dive in and start building systems
not just that. it’s that the tools themselves are structured in a way that is compatible with the kinds of systems that games are
right
right. You know I often do napkin sketches of game flows where I break down the verbs the currencies. And the objects. Right. you can napkin sketch and analyze something, that’s where I ended up with that whole notation line of game grammar was on that. When you look at the implicit structures that are in a game maker or a unity that’s also kind of how they work and so… Yeah it’s almost like they’re training people in certain kinds of game formalisms
makes sense I do want to… I agree with that and it may be that we’re sort of in a learning mode right now, and so that we may you know sort of like planting the seeds for the next generation of writers and people actually coming out and like trying to elucidate theory and that kind of stuff so because that’s what I’m specifically… I agree with you that like the learning is probably going faster than it ever has but the discussion which is maybe the other half of it.
The documenting
The documenting, Yeah exactly that’s what seems to me to be a little bit lower than it has been but perhaps not just wanes that you know goes up and down over time
well maybe I’ll write my book maybe Tadhg will finish his, maybe we can get Dan to stop designing five games at once Spry Fox and actually write more down
That’d be great
Or maybe you’ll do it
sure yeah I’ll keep writing articles but there’s a few other people but and I’ve been trying to actually get I’ve been trying to encourage more people to write I think one of the things is I started this little website that’s going to just like kind of be curated content and sort of like whatever someone writes a new game design article hopefully they can like send it to us and we can write and talk about it and you know maybe we can do things like “oh the best game design articles of twenty seventeen” like you know that kind of thing that kind of gives us a little bit more a kind of institutional you know the feeling that someone will read this if I write a game design article.
Right.
I feel like I met some important we kind of had a little bit with Gamasutra and a few other websites not as much anymore and so I feel like that’s something that maybe those kinds of things have also helped.
Yeah I’ve been watching the site develop, so yeah we’ll see.
Yeah
So much of it is just about the… The community these days is so spread out. That that is definitely a factor. I think that moment of blogs that were very interconnected and everybody reading them all every day, discussions happening across the blogs was. You know, also one of the factors. The more diffuse the community is, the harder it is to capture that feeling of like a salon
Yeah yeah that’s true all right so we should wrap it up thank you so much Raph Koster amazing game designer writer and great dude and thank you so much for coming on
it was my pleasure this was a lot of fun
All right well thanks again.
