Rules of the Game: Five Further Techniques from Rather Clever Designers

How do you make your games work? There’s no sure-fire way to design great games, but over numerous successful projects the best designers develop techniques that help them craft compelling experiences. Returning for GDC 2018, the Rules of the Game session takes five renowned designers and asks them to go into detail about a rule they’ve used in their work. Each speaker has ten minutes to dive into their technique and provide detailed examples about how they have used the rule in past projects, honestly sharing the pluses and minuses including where their rule works well and where it may be less applicable. These are personal rules that you may not always agree with, but they’re guaranteed to provide interesting fodder for your own game design thoughts and help you build your own design rulebook.

This was a set of microtalks on rules that practicing designers use when making their games. I shared the panel with Erin Hoffman-John, Soren Johnson, Josh Sawyer, and Stone Librande, and it was organized and introduced by Richard Rouse III.

Slides

This is just my slides from the session; my notes are available if you hover over the slides.

So here’s an idea I’ve had more than once. (Like, literally, I’ve made four or five games about trying to capture this idea).
The thing about an idea like that is that it can really go either way – it can be about the math behind how kaleidoscopes tumble, or it can be about the sensation of a kaleidoscope, the human experience of it.
I like to say you can start from either end: have a strong idea for a game system, a set of mathematical relationships or dynamics; or have a strong narrative or experiential idea. In fact, different designers will often have very different biases towards where they start!
Board game designers, perhaps, start with a bias towards the systemic end, and certainly much AAA starts with a bias towards the experiential end. We’d never say “you can put any skin you want on this Telltale game” and think that the experience is intact, and we’d never say “why don’t we swap out the conflict resolution mechanic in Poker” and think that remains intact either.
Starting with either is perfectly valid, since by the time you finish, you rather need to have both ideas solidly in place.
because after all, very few games are pure experiences or purely abstract.
But starting from one end or another has implications, and it’s important to move to the middle quickly.
Think about starting from the system. If you fail to move to the middle, you can get stuck with an abstract game – it might be harder to market – or with really simplistic narrative wedged in between levels or something.
Finding an experience or metaphor that fits the system quickly is a better path – though often a strong system idea can actually be skinned in many different ways, all of which are viable. Think of chess sets, for example.
If you start from a narrative or experiential idea, there are a lot of dev pitfalls if you don’t develop a strong systemic core. Your game is consumable, which might even happen via Twitch. You often have to spend disproportionately on content. You end up making tons of smaller minigames, multiplying your design problems.
At heart, all of these issues have to do with the fact that it is always possible to layer missions, narrative, and static data on top of a simulation; it's rarely possible to go in the reverse direction, as attempting to add rich emergent systems to a game built mostly out of data is usually futile.
We often get into a development project and think that the various disparate pieces of content will add up to something systemic…
But it's rarely possible to go in the reverse direction, as attempting to add rich emergent systems to a game built mostly out of data is usually futile.
This matters because game longevity – in which I include a bunch of stuff that drives revenue, for those of you with a business tilt – is driven by how much “space” there is in the game. Despite our desires as creators, a lot of the power in a game experience comes from
the loss of designer control over the player experience.
The three critical ingredients in the core sim are: (a) A space that just "is" an interesting mathematical or structural landscape.
Examples might include physics. But also interesting relationships between objects. The relationships between suits, numbers, colors, and so on in a deck of cards is such a landscape.
(b) Simple, consisting of few rules, though it may have room for lots of data.
What generally works is a way to have lots of kinds of data that work on top of that underlying system, and rules for how they interact. Poker leverages the set of playing cards; Pokemon leverages the types Pokemon and the attack types.
(c) No goals to the underlying sim, so that players can instead create their own goals atop the system.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t have AI with its own goals, and it doesn’t mean that the game can’t provide goals. It means that the *system itself* doesn’t imply goals, we select them based on narrative or experiential intent. There’s a difference between a system that implies something like “get to the other side” and a system that just says “here’s cool movement physics.”
Some examples of how I’ve tried to leverage these principles over the years. SWG was built entirely around real-time procedural terrain. We generated it around you as you walked.
By itself that just sounds like a content tool. But it actually opened up both emergent and narrative gameplay, because of the tools it afforded us.
We could not have had players having massive Rebel vs Imperial wars with destructible bases that could be built anywhere without that underlying sim.
In Ultima Online we started out with a “resource system” that was intended to drive all the AI. Every object was “made of” resource types, and all AI was based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
We weren’t even able to ship with that AI! But it didn’t matter, because the resource model was super powerful.
It unlocked everything about the crafting system, which led to all sorts of emergent things like color-coded guild uniforms, or player shops and economy, and then up through player-run cities.
Minecraft too uses basically an underlying resource model and simple rules to achieve all the amazing things it does.
Even in really small simple games, like My Vineyard, which we did for Facebook, you can see this working. The experience, we knew: running a vineyard. In FB games of that era, you may recall
Maps expanded on all sides at once, and objects were one to a tile.
We used the simple idea that if the vineyard was really yours, you’d want to shape it, so we allowed you carve away the forest. Island Life, our predecessor game, was actually the first FB game to do this, we think.
This meant that discovery became a central idea – not just of the map, but of new wine varietals,
New layout ideas. We let you place objects at pixel granularity rather than tile, which hugely opened up the amount of play.
The result was maps like this – huge explosions of creativity which we leveraged into new features such as vineyard tours
Which led the game to having one of the highest ROIs and retention figures in Playdom even though it didn’t have the same size userbase or even daily revenue numbers.
Even if you begin with the idea of a particular experience you want to give players, starting out with the sim is incredibly helpful for the eventual depth of your game.
So that’s my rule: if I have an experience I want to get across, the first thing I ask myself is “how do I model this experience mathematically?” It ends up opening many more doors.

All Slides

This is a PDF of all of the slides from all of the speakers.

RulesOfTheGame2018

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