Nature of Rules, Response and Stuff

Ryan wrote a good, long reply to my last post that needs commenting. This probably won't make any sense unless you read the other post first.

I think there's a difference between 'games' and 'play' and one of the main differences is that 'games' have rules... the key is that the rules provide the framework for the game.

Critters have DNA, but that doesn't mean that a critter is DNA, or even that it should be thought of in terms of its DNA. The rules are one part of the DNA of a game: what grows from them can be delightful and complex.

Freeform play is a bit like a virii: it has no particular protection, no particular ability to reproduce without killing something, but it crops up everywhere and is definitely notable.

Like I said: rules (and the rest) exist to protect the experience of the play from the vagaries of... well, life in general. They try to keep the experience similar from "generation to generation."

I hope this is clear...

generally [house rules] need to be agreed upon by all players.

Please remember that many games are played with private or obstinate goals on the part of the player. For example, whenever I play Bang! (a card game with hidden roles), I play with the assumption that a specific other player is on my side. It's certainly not something that is agreed on, but at the same time it's a potent method of shaping the game. It definitely changes the experience - mostly for me, but also for others, indirectly.

You could say that I am playing INSIDE the game rather than GAMING, if you see what I mean.

That distinction is not a terribly smart one to trivialize: you have to take it into account in the same way that you can't write off various other-sized organisms when you're performing surgery.

This comparison implies that playing inside a game (sideplay?) is bad, like an infection, but I don't think that's the case. I think it's vital to keeping a game fresh and interesting - I think many boring games are boring largely because they don't have any of this sideplay adding new elements and spice.

Some games are almost entirely sideplay, like the Sims or Secondlife.

You start needing rules, or a social contract between the players or you end up with the "Bang! Bang! Your Dead!.... No I'm not you missed!" syndrome.

Yes, rules (and content, and aesthetic, and social context, and and and) protect the experience. They protect it from new players, players with different visions of how the experience should go, from the weathering of time, and even from the effects of other rules, content, aesthetics, etc.

I find it hard sometimes to differentiate between rules and general parameters or environment.

Anyone who is being honest should! The difference is simply one of scope or scale. That's kind of what made me go this route.

I mean, "A fireball spell costs 50 gold and causes 15 damage when cast". Sounds an awful lot like a rule to me! But it's also content, and suggests strongly an aesthetic.

So... it's obvious that it's not quite as nicely divided up as MDA suggests, in the same way that a cell isn't neatly divided up into "goo" and "DNA".

I love 'sandbox' games and emergent gameplay. I love games that let me play with all the settings and do things that aren't explicitly spelled out. But in my experience this doesn't happen until the game is played for a period with 'vanilla' rules/settings. You need to understand the game to be able to effectively tweak the rules.

Yes! Right now, it's all done by trial and error. This is a lot like having a creature's DNA handed to you. "What will this creature be like?"

Well, you can try to simulate it in your head... "AGCFCF? That's... um... feathers?" More likely, you attempt to grow it and look at what it's characteristics are when it's alive. Of course, that takes time.

Once you see what the critter looks like, you can look back over the DNA and say, "OH! It meant spines!" and try to tweak it to be more to your liking. In theory, at least.

Fortunately, games are not critters. I think it might be possible to extrapolate rules (and so forth) from a dynamic. I haven't posted about it, yet, because I haven't figured it out yet. As you say:

You can never guarantee that 2 players will feel the same way about a game given taste and how they experience it. One person might find it simple and boring the next might be challenged and find it stressful... by what you describe - what do you want to experience - its sounds more emotional and based on feeling.

That's the core problem, you see. The rules and content impose themselves without much regard to the player's preferences and mindset. If we pursue a dynamic, however, then we can pursue a... by the way, it's fuzzy because I don't have it nailed down myself... we can pursue a specific superset of interactions? We can tweak the rules and content because we know the dynamics the player should be experiencing.

With Star Trek...

Yeah, me too.

Challenge still stands: tell me about your DYNAMIC-centered Star Wars game design. No, I really don't have a clear definition of what that means.

Yet.

The Nature of Rules

_{Ivory Tower Alert!}

I've been thinking about rules.

I don't think games should be made up of rules.

Think about the games you played as a kid. Most of the games didn't have mandatory rules - you played with tons of house rules, whatever made the game fun. Free Parking in Monopoly being the most common example, but it's also common to change the rules to various games to give specific inept players an advantage.

This lets the game be fun for the inept players and keeps it from being terribly boring for the ept ones.

You'll see this kind of thing even in deathmatch computer games: if your friend is pretty bad, you're likely to go easy on him, or refuse to use the rocket launcher, etc.

There's an innate compulsion among gamers to make games always somewhat challenging: to tweak the rules so that it's never boring. Frequently, this involves giving advantages to the weak players, but just as often it simply involves setting unlikely goals for yourself. How fast can you beat the level, how far can you toss his corpse...

Obviously, there's something more than simple rules to a game. The experience of a game is almost independent from the rules, in that a lot of people will change the rules to try to keep the experience intact.

Take poker. At it's heart, poker has only a few simple rules that define a game of skill, chance, and psychology. However, to preserve that game, more rules are made, usually ones of fairness. No tabletalk, no missing or marked cards, no this, no that. These rules aren't really poker rules, they're rules protecting poker.

Similarly, in a complex RPG, there are a thousand little rules and limits - how you gain gold, what you can spend it on, how powerful that spell is, what the chances of an enemy encounter are. These rules (which border on "content" in many cases) are not there to define the game. They're around to keep the experience of the game sailing true. With a broken system, the way the game is played changes, usually for the worse.

The aesthetics of a game are the same: the game's aesthetics aren't the game proper, they're a way to frame the experience and keep it in the right zone.

This can be taken to extremes. For an extreme version of this, every rule and aesthetic exist to either protect or teach the experience of the game. The actual feel of the game isn't something that is contained in the rules or in the aesthetics, although it is a result of them (along with some other things like social context).

Now, we can easily describe aesthetics. We can say "oh, steampunky" or "make sure it's rated G" or "this is a castle in the clouds, waterfalls pouring off the sides."

We can describe rules as well, less easily but more clearly. "Roll 2d6 for damage", "move 3 spaces", "start to the right of the dealer and go counterclockwise..."

But we really don't have any language for talking about the dynamics of a game, the actual play experience. Every time we want to describe it, we say things like "oh, make it like Grand Theft Auto, but a MMORPG!"

This seems a bit lopsided, since the dynamics are really the important part. I mean, we describe mechanics and aesthetics in these same ways, but only if we're giving a ridiculously wide overview. When we actually talk in more detail, we don't stick to describing them in terms of what other games they're like. We describe them using well-anchored words that other people in the industry can turn into a working product. Sometimes we're very specific, sometimes we're vague and leave the specifics up to them.

Why can't we describe dynamics in that way?

Why can't we say, "this game is ticky-wicky, with an undercurrent of pressure pelting" the same way we say "the game is turn-based, and has a lot of gore"?

No, "ticky-wicky" and "pressure pelting" don't actually mean anything. But they sound like they could, I think. They sound almost like they describe a specific kind of play experience, although what it might be is kind of vague.

"Grinding", "griefing" and a few others are sort of a beginning, but their focus is kind of off. After all, there are a lot of different kinds of grinding, and they feel very different. Not every rule set that involves repeating similar situations over and over has the same feeling.

...

Even now, I think in terms of the play experience rather than the rules or the aesthetic. I think this is the case for most game designers. There's sort of a feeling that the equation is a+b=c, and we can solve for whichever we really want to solve for.

Think back to Star Wars, before it died. Before the new movies, before KotOR. Back to the old movies and the fan books and when knowing what a bantha was meant you were a terrible, terrible geek.

If you were asked to make a Star Wars game, what would you make? "Can't be a space shooter" says George. "Too many of those on my conscience. Make it anything else."

What do you go with?

The aesthetics are pre-made, although you do get to choose a scale. You know Star Wars aesthetics inside and out, since you're a terrible, terrible geek.

But the actual game? You could argue it in any direction. The universe... is it ripe for an RPG? Sure! It's also a really great universe for an RTS! And an FPS sure wouldn't be out of line, would it?

Okay, forget that crap. Seriously, forget it.

Instead of thinking rules, think dynamic. Sure, genre is kind of a mixed bag of rules and dynamic, but forget about it!

What do you want to experience? What part of the Star Wars universe makes you want to play? What's the feeling you're going for?

I'm eager to hear your ideas for a game revolving around a dynamic.

As a fun contrast, think about a Star Trek game using the same methodology. Which dynamic would you pursue in the Trek universe? What kind of game would it build?

Mario Says...

Yesterday's postmortem was great: I took four pages of notes, which is something of a record. None of the presenters were boring, although some were obviously uncomfortable. I'll probably mention some of that stuff later, but right now I want to talk Mario.

I work for a start-up, which means three of us in one big room rather than any kind of normal office environment. This also means that all of us get to see whatever game someone is playing on the TV today, although they play with headphones on.

For a while now the game du jour has been Mario Galaxies. I'm sure most of you have played at least some of it, but let me describe a very different experience than the ones you've had.

I've seen most of Mario Galaxies second-hand, with the only sound being the relentless chiming of the wiimote. My soundtrack is whatever I listen to personally.

I was very impressed, which I'll talk about in a minute, but this led me to actually try to play the game. I knew I'd made a mistake as soon Mario opened his mouth with the most asinine, squeeky "SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUPAAAAAAAAAAA MAAAARIO GALAXYYYYYYYYYY!" ever.

A lot of people have commented on how this game is pretty much the ultimate in "back-seat playing", because the second player has enough to do to keep him interested without actually requiring him to jump and spin and all the rest of that really complicated Mario shit that makes me lose.

The two players are actually playing completely different games, and so it's obvious that their experiences are completely different. I can't speak to the exact experience of a second player, but the experience of a spectator is different again.

To me, watching intermittently with only my own music, the game was not a Mario game. There was no brutally cheerful music or childish storyline: there was a man exploring a universe of endlessly unique puzzles and creatures. If we're talking about mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics, then I was only getting the dynamics and a few aesthetics. The mechanics - jumping, dying, frustration - were being performed by someone else. The aesthetics - kiddie music, dumb sound effects - were also largely absent.

The dynamics were in full force, though: romping through a huge variety of wonderfully unique levels.

Watching Mario Galaxy was exactly like watching Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Or, hell, the movie Dark Crystal, if I could shout at the characters.

Playing it proves to be a massive letdown for me, because suddenly I have to deal with the mechanics and the aesthetics, both of which I dislike immensely. This isn't to say they are bad, they're just not to my taste.

It got me to thinking, though. Although the game's monsters are silly and the graphic design is all bright colors and childish melodramatics, that doesn't really come through much when all you're doing is watching. Ico's and Mario's dynamics have the same feel to them, even though their graphical design couldn't be more opposite.

The sound effects, on the other hand, are impossible to ignore. I think that if you substituted Mario's sounds into Ico's game, you would suddenly have a childish, silly game.

Perhaps it's just the level of immersion. Maybe if you were in VR, with the game world all you could see in every dimension, maybe then the tone of the graphical design would have a more significant effect. Maybe it's just a fundamental difference between how we (I?) process sound and vision.

Anyway, that's really very secondary to the basic idea. To me, dynamics are and will always be the most important part of a game. Aesthetics and rules are important to some extent, but only as (A) hooks to get people playing and (B) rails to guide the dynamics.

But when you're making a computer game, it's easy to let the rules and the aesthetics rule the roost. They are what you are actually making, after all. Mario can jump four feet, eight feet when he upgrades. Mario has a red hat and speaks like a parody of Italy on helium.

What that contributes to the dynamic of the game is not always (or even often) directly related to what the designers might wish contributed. It's common for a designer to add what I consider very heavy-handed mechanics and aesthetics to a game to try to "force" the issue.

I find a lot of forced mechanics in tabletop games. For example, in AD&D, they have a ton of weird little nitpicky rules about how far you can run, how far you can shoot, whether you get stunned, what your exact saving throw is...

To me, those rules shouldn't really be there. They are cement rails: you're stuck following the path they build, even though most of the time that path is NOT the right one for the content you're using. That isn't to say that complex, nitpicky rules shouldn't exist. It's simply to say that complex, nitpicky rules should serve the dynamic, not try to force it.

Similarly, a lot of computer games have a really forced aesthetic. A good example is Bioshock, where the aesthetic was really the only thing in the game. Bioshock's dynamics were not terribly good, but they certainly weren't a "fear for your life in this subaquatic hellhole!" It was more "march forward killing shit, occasionally hack a toy". It gradually converted to "spend a lot more bullets to kill shit than is at all reasonable". These were not good dynamics, and they were not in line with the aesthetics, either.

Similarly, Mario's goofy, childish sound and graphics aren't even tangential to the exploration dynamic. They're just completely unrelated. There really isn't anything childish or goofy about the dynamic: forge through a thousand unique, hostile worlds killing most anything that moves, trying desperately to rescue your kidnapped girlfriend and coincidentally save the universe.

Okay, maybe a little escapist. But not exactly a bright, cheery set of actions.

Apparently, not everyone sees these as forced. I think these people think about things differently than me. To me, if your aesthetic and your mechanics aren't working towards a unified dynamic, why bother?

I have no idea whether I'm being clear or not...