Basic Game Design Tools - Concepts - Games, Design and Play: A detailed approach to iterative game design (2016)

Games, Design and Play: A detailed approach to iterative game design (2016)

Part I: Concepts

Chapter 2. Basic Game Design Tools

One of the first things we do when learning a new field is to become familiar with the tools of the trade. In this chapter we look at the core tools of game design: constraint; direct and indirect interaction; goals; challenge; the interplay of skill, strategy, chance and uncertainty; decision-making and feedback; abstraction; theme; storytelling and context.

Now that we’ve identified the basic elements game designers work with in the creation of games, the next step is considering the tools used to shape and combine these elements into experiences for players. When you think about tools, you probably think of game engines, animation tools, programming languages, sound design, or 3D modeling software. These are tools used as part of game design and development, but they aren’t what we are talking about here. Game design tools aren’t like the wrenches or screwdrivers you might think of for working on machines. Instead, the basic tools of game design are more like the foundational principles of visual art—symmetry, contrast and hierarchy, for example. This sort of tool helps designers understand the parameters of game design in the same way that color, line, form, and composition establish the basic parameters of visual art.

There are ten basic tools for designing games: constraint; direct and indirect interaction; goals; challenge; the interplay of skill, strategy, chance, and uncertainty; decision-making and feedback; abstraction; theme; storytelling; and context of play.

Constraint

Part of what makes games fun are the unusual ways they let us interact with the world. If, in soccer, all players really wanted to do was put the ball in the other team’s net, wouldn’t it be easier just to carry it there or maybe throw it? Soccer players could certainly do that, but would it be much fun? By constraining the way players can put the ball in the net using anything but their hands, the goal suddenly becomes much more interesting. This is constraint—putting limits on player actions and interactions with the objects, other players, and the playspace with the intention of creating a play experience.

When carefully designed, constraint provides more satisfying play experiences. An important concept here is what Bernard Suits calls the lusory attitude1—players are willing to accept, and even invite, less efficient or logical means of engaging with a game in exchange for the potential of the play experience. Constraint is one of the main ways to shape a game’s actions to generate challenge, creative strategies, and engagement for players.

1 Bernhard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, 1978.

A great example of constraint in a videogame is Messhof’s Flywrench (see Figure 2.1). It is a platformer with a twist—instead of running and jumping through a horizontal landscape, the player flies a small ship through a twisting and turning series of corridors and other environments. The ship’s natural state is falling. But if it falls into a wall, the player dies. To keep aloft, the player has to flap. This is the first constraint in the game—navigating the ship to avoid bumping into walls and other obstacles.

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Figure 2.1 A screenshot from Flywrench.

On top of this, the environment the player navigates is filled with barriers and obstacles of different colors. To pass through them, the ship must be the same color as the barrier or obstacle. Each state of the ship changes the ship’s color—dropping is white, flapping is red, and spinning is green. So not only does the player have to navigate the environment without touching the walls, they also have to time the changing state of the ship to allow it to pass through the barriers while keeping the ship moving in the right direction. This is the second constraint—color-matching. Together, these two design decisions create a layered set of constraints that establish the core challenge of the game. (We’ll get more into challenge later in this chapter.)

Flywrench’s constraints are so finely tuned that the player needs to fail over and over again to develop the skills to time their movements with micro-twitch accuracy. Flywrench creates a fast and exciting play experience by challenging players with tightly calibrated constraints on movement and timing.

Another helpful example of constraint is Young Horses’ Octodad (see Figure 2.2). Instead of having a typical humanoid player character with a rigid skeletal system, Octodad asks the player to maneuver and control a boneless, floppy, handless octopus as he carries out mundane tasks. This constraint—moving around a space and interacting with objects with a floppy octopus body—creates a playfully frustrating experience for players as they mop the floor or clean the refrigerator. This is very close to Suit’s example of the lusory attitude—golf. Why use expensive sticks to knock a ball in a hole if you could carry it there more easily with your hands? Or, in Octodad, why use a floppy suit-wearing octopus when you could use a traditional person? In both cases, it is because of the experience the games provide.

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Figure 2.2 A screenshot from Octodad.

Yet one more approach to constraint is found in Shawn Allen’s Treachery in Beatdown City (see Figure 2.3). The game is a mix of turn-based combat and 1990s scrolling beat-em ups. Players have to juggle resource collection, move selection, and hand-to-hand combat in a way that pulls their attention in multiple directions. The role of time in making all these decisions is one way in which Shawn works with constraint—players needing to make choices around the timing of their actions. Another way constraint comes into play is the interaction of two play types (a concept we’ll look at more closely in Chapter 3, “The Kinds of Play”). By interleaving two styles of play—turn-based combat and a real-time beat-em up fighting game—the player is confronted with actions and goals that run against expectation.

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Figure 2.3 A screenshot from Treachery in Beatdown City.

In many ways, constraint is the “secret sauce” of game design. Much of the satisfaction we derive from playing games comes from well-designed constraints. This often involves coming up with unexpectedly satisfying limitations that turn everyday objects, activities, and spaces into something new and exciting. In the case of Flywrench, it is a constraint of precise movement and timing, and in Octodad, it is a constraint of unorthodox and awkward control. With Treachery in Beatdown City, it is constraint of time and of unexpected play types.

Direct and Indirect Actions

When talking about constraint and goals, we’re more often than not thinking about the actions players perform during play. An important pair of tools game designers use to shape play experiences are direct and indirect actions. Direct actions are those in which the player has immediate interaction with objects and the playspace, while indirect actions are those that occur without direct contact by the player or the primary objects they use while playing. Pinball serves as a great example here (see Figure 2.4). Players directly interact with the ball through the use of flippers. At the same time, players indirectly interact with the bumpers, ramps, holes, and other features by hitting the ball with the flippers. If a player hits the ball at a bumper, it is going to bounce off in predictable but not completely knowable ways due to the mechanical push triggered by the ball’s impact. The player might directly act on the ball by hitting it at a precise time with the paddle, but ultimately this leads to a variety of indirect actions as the physics of the ball and other objects in the pinball game interact. So hitting the ball with a flipper might lead to the ball passing under a spinner at the entrance to a ramp, which will add to a score multiplier, which increases the value of the trip around the ramp. All of these related events and chain reactions emerge from a single hit of the ball with a flipper. This is one of the ways in which players can set into motion effects both anticipated and unexpected within a game.

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Figure 2.4 A game of pinball.

These stacked interactions of objects speak to the importance of designing the implications of how different objects interact with one another within the playspace. Designers have to think about the characteristics of the objects and what these properties may cause to happen within the game’s space of possibility. Done well, the relationship between direct and indirect actions can create a dynamic sense of engagement with a game. Secret Crush’s SUNBURN! (see Figure 2.5) is a great example of this kind of dynamic system. In the game, the player controls the captain of a spaceship that just exploded deep in outer space. All the ship’s crew has made a pact to die together, so the captain must jump from planet to planet to gather the crew together and then plunge them all into the sun. To do this, the captain must interact with the planets and their gravitational pulls and the stretchy bungee cord that connects the captain to the crew members. The properties of the planets, the sun, the rope, and the crew members interact in ways that are mostly out of the control of the player. Because of this, the player must observe how their direct actions lead to indirect interactions between the other objects to make sure they are able to successfully complete each level.

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Figure 2.5 A screenshot from SUNBURN!.

A different way to think about direct and indirect action comes from Ed Key and David Kanaga’s Proteus (see Figure 2.6). Like pinball and SUNBURN!, similar cascading actions occur in the game, but less in pursuit of player goals and more in the spirit of experiencing a world that seems alive. In Proteus, the player explores a pixelated island in first-person view. There are no clear goals or threats, so the player is left to explore and find out what happens. As they move, their presence affects other creatures and phenomena in the world. When the player approaches what looks like some little frogs, the creatures hop away, generating a set of tones. When the player sits still, elements in the environment change, and in special locations, they experience new sounds and images. All of these events are indirectly triggered by their presence; the player’s only direct actions are movement or non-movement and where the player looks. Ultimately, the player’s movements “play” the island, like a musician plays a score, triggering visual and audio events to bring the island to life, setting off cascading effects in the world.

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Figure 2.6 A screenshot from Proteus.

The concepts of direct and indirect actions are the tools game designers use to create unexpected outcomes in games. A balance between the two can provide players with a sense of individual agency through direct action and through indirect action, creating a dynamic, interactive system to play within. The more direct actions a player has access to, the more fine-tuned the player’s control can be of their experience. With more indirect actions, there is less control but a greater sense of discovery with how the world works.

Goals

As we discussed in Chapter 1, “Games, Design and Play,” the goal of a game gives shape and purpose to what the players are trying to achieve while playing. Sometimes the goals are quantifiable, and therefore strong, while in other cases, they are experiential and loose. Without a goal, players won’t know to what end they are following the rules. Soccer is an example of a quantifiable, and therefore strong, goal—one that guides and gives purpose to the play experience. On the other end of the spectrum is Jane Friedhoff’s Slam City Oracles (see Figure 2.7). Players take on the role of one of two young girls in a world filled with snack food, fantastic buildings, pinwheels, and other quirky objects. The goal? Bounce around the environment with a friend, and in the process knock things around—riot grrrls in a perfectly playful world. The player can bounce higher and higher or just stick around one area and slam to their heart’s content. While there is a score, it is intentionally complex with absurdly high numbers that provide humor more than a measure of player performance. For a player of Slam City Oracles, the outcome isn’t the focus; it’s the process of getting there and the different things that happen along the way.

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Figure 2.7 A screenshot from Slam City Oracles.

A middle ground between Soccer and Slam City Oracles is Liam Burke’s Dog Eat Dog (see Figure 2.8), a paper-and-pencil role-playing game. Instead of a clearly stated quantifiable goal that drives the play experience, Dog Eat Dog explores ideas around colonization and what happens to cultures when they are confronted with external cultural forces. And instead of loose experiential goals, Dog Eat Dog provides structure and quantifiable outcomes, but those outcomes are not the focus of the play, and to call them goals might be stretching the definition. Instead, they are outcomes that provide a way of ending the story, giving players a sense of how their performance in the game led to the fate of the characters and the island.

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Figure 2.8 A game of Dog Eat Dog.

Play begins with players naming and creating a set of traits for their fictional Pacific islands nation and then doing the same for the colonizing nation. Players are given one rule to start:

The natives are inferior to the occupation people.

Players then add to this a list of rules that are followed in the engagement between the two cultures. As an asymmetrical game, one player takes on the role of the occupying nation, while all others play the role of natives to the country. Players take turns setting up scenes in which two or more of the characters engage in a situation. If in the course of the scene a disagreement occurs about what is happening or how things resolve within a given situation, then the rules come into play to help resolve them. At the end of scenes, judgment is passed on whether everyone followed the rules, with coins taken and received to account for everyone’s behavior. The Natives then add one new rule to the list, and the next scene begins. Play continues until one side runs out of tokens. At that point, players recount the epilogue, which tells the story of how the occupied nation fared. If the Occupation ended the game without tokens, then the epilogue should recount how and why the occupying nation gave the power back to the Natives. If one of the Natives ended without tokens, then the Natives should talk about how the occupation impacted them. After all the epilogues are stated, the players still holding tokens decide the final fate of the islands.

As a group, players tell a story together. At the same time, each player manages their tokens so that they can define how the end of story is told. The purpose of the game’s experience is the unfolding story, from beginning to the end. In the case of Dog Eat Dog, there is a quantifiable goal articulated by the tokens, one that delineates the end state of the game, but it is not the focus or purpose of the play experience. The experience is the real drive, and the goal is simply a catalyst to allow that experience to unfold.

Games can also have layered goals. Take Tale of Tales’ Sunset (see Figure 2.9). Players take on the role of Angela Burnes, a housekeeper for a wealthy man living in a fictional country in the middle of a civil war. The game consists of a series of days, each with a different list of housekeeping tasks for Angela to complete. Each subtask—wash the windows, unpack a few boxes, wash dishes—is necessary to complete as part of the larger goal of a day’s work. The overarching goal is to complete Angela’s assignment at the house, which is done by completing the smaller goals within a given day. In the case of Sunset, there are three layers of goals: complete an assigned task, finish a day’s task list, and complete the game. But these more structured goals build to the experience of the game’s story. And so in this way, Sunset’s structured goals build toward a looser experiential goal—learn about Angela’s life.

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Figure 2.9 A screenshot from Sunset.

Goals are a really useful tool for game designers. They are one of the only ways we can guide players’ experiences in engaging with the actions, objects, and playspaces we design. A game’s goal frames the play experience, suggesting to players how they might engage the game. The goals shape the space of possibility for players. A game’s goals also shape how players perceive the available actions and objects within the playspace. Do they approach them as a means to an end or simply as an experience unto themselves?

Challenge

One of the things that designers use to craft a player’s experience of trying to reach their goal is challenge. All games provide some level of challenge, even if the players provide it themselves. Challenge is often described in relation to the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of the flow state.2 For Csikszentmihalyi, flow is described as a state of high focus and enjoyment. Perhaps most famous is his chart of the flow state, showing the “flow channel” between anxiety and boredom, rising with skill and challenge (see Figure 2.10).

2 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York: Harper Perennial. 1996.

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Figure 2.10 A representation of the flow state.

Many game designers use the concept of flow state to describe an ideal difficulty for level design, increasing the challenge to fit evolving player skill by just the right amount to avoid spiking into the anxiety zone or plummeting toward boredom.

Certainly, flow can be a useful concept for game designers, but here’s a word of caution about the idea of flow. It can be tempting to correlate a state of flow with good game design, but just as many movies might provide us with an escape from ordinary life or a happy ending, not all movies need to be that way. Sometimes great films are made about ordinary life; or their endings aren’t happy. For games, flow is a response to challenge meeting the player’s skill level, and it creates a kind of play that can be highly satisfying. But equally satisfying are games that don’t challenge players’ skill. Instead, the game might confront the player with a challenging narrative or an experience that the player can enjoy regardless of skill. So, flow can be experienced in games, but it’s not the only kind of experience players can have in games, and it’s not better than other kinds of experiences. The flow state is simply something the game designer might try to develop for or might not. It really depends on the values the designer wants to explore with their game. We’ll get more to this idea of design values in Chapter 6, “Design Values.”

An alternate concept to flow that emerges from challenge is absorption. Players can become deeply engaged in their play experience, but not in a way that is about a single state of being like flow suggests. A good example of absorption comes from the folkgame ninja (see Figure 2.11). Players gather in a circle an arm’s length apart. The game begins when all players freeze in a “ninja” pose. Players then take turns trying to hit the hand of an adjacent player in one smooth movement ending in a new ninja pose. The player who is attacked can move only the hand aimed at by the attacker. The game tends to pull players deep into the game, taking on the silly premise of ninja-posing without self-conscious worries. In other words, the players become absorbed in the game and give themselves over to it in the spirit of Bernard Suits’ lusory attitude discussed in earlier in this chapter.

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Figure 2.11 A game of ninja. Photo by Scott Chamberlin / Elliot Trinidad. Used with permission of the IndieCade International Festival of Independent Games.

The point of this digression into flow and absorption is to simply say that challenge can generate these—and other—kinds of experiences with games, but that challenge, as a tool, can be used in varying degrees and for a variety of purposes. One purpose, which we will touch on later, is to encourage player skill development. As players encounter new and increasing challenges in a game, they must get better at overcoming them. This entails developing one’s skill at the actions in the game. Another kind of challenge can be to achieve the goal of the game. In soccer, it can be to score the most points by the end of the time, for instance. Another kind of challenge might be found in the content of the game; the game might provide players with content that challenges their notions of gender, for instance.

Lea Schönfelder and Peter Lu’s Perfect Woman (see Figure 2.12) is a good example of all three kinds of challenge (skill, goal, and content). Perfect Woman is a game using computer vision (the Kinect) that provides the player with the (almost impossible) goals of trying to attain exceptional personal, professional, and familial success defined by the “lean in” lives expected of many 21st century women. To do so, the player is asked to strike increasingly difficult poses with their own body to match the body of their in-game character, and ultimately, to attain their life goals. Instead of difficulty being determined solely by player skill moving through each level, it is also based on the choices players make during the game during different life stages. For example, if the player chooses to be a street kid in the beginning of the game, it will be very difficult for her to attain the correct pose for a rich woman later in life. But if they chose princess, it will be easier. As Lea Schönfelder describes it:

“...it is almost impossible for the player to always live their ‘perfect life.’ It may be okay for a while, but eventually your life history will catch up to you and you will have a real conflict with all the different aspects of your life that ‘need to be perfect,’ such as work, family, friends, individuality, health, to name a few.”3

3 Gamasutra, “Road to the IGF: Lea Schönfelder and Peter Lu’s Perfect Woman” by Christian Nutt, 2013.

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Figure 2.12 Perfect Woman.

The goal of the game—to balance all the way to a long life—entails balancing one’s physical skill in the game as well as one’s life choices. Challenge in Perfect Woman operates on multiple levels and serves to embody (pun intended) the difficulties of attaining life balance.

Think of challenge as a knob that you can turn up or down, like heat to a pot on a stove, to influence the intensity of a player’s experience, help them develop their skills at the game, provide meaningful effort toward the game’s goal, and to give them access to concepts that can be difficult to express in any other medium.

Skill, Strategy, Chance, and Uncertainty

Emerging from challenge is a quartet of concepts that have a deep connection to one another: skill, strategy, chance, and uncertainty. Skill is the degree to which a player has mastered an action within a game, while strategy is the ability of the player to determine the best ways to perform the actions of the game in order to achieve their goals. The more chance, the harder it is for a player to develop strategies, regardless of their skill. This is because no matter how much one practices, there is uncertainty that can lead to unpredictable events in a game.4 The less chance, the more room there is for them to develop strategies. In game design terms, how much of the play experience is driven by the quality of player actions and the decisions that the player makes relative to the things that happen outside the player’s control?

4 Greg Costikyan’s book, Uncertainty in Games, provides a deep dive into ideas around chance and uncertainty.

Take darts as an example (see Figure 2.13). The game requires a high degree of skill in throwing the darts at the board. Players make decisions about how to aim, and they develop strategies. The game contains no chance at all. There is, however, uncertainty around where the opponents will throw their darts, which impacts the player’s strategies, causing on-the-fly changes to a player’s pursuit of winning.

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Figure 2.13 A game of darts and a game of roulette.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is roulette (see Figure 2.13, right). There is very little skill involved. The player simply picks a color, a number, or a grouping of numbers and then hopes they guessed correctly. So while there are decisions to make, they are made without much to go on—the result is purely based on chance, and completely uncertain. There isn’t meaningful information to take in and process to guide decisions beyond the basic probabilities of hitting a certain color, number type, grouping, or individual number. This isn’t to say there isn’t fun in chance-based play, but it is of a different nature than in skill-based games.

Sometimes, uncertainty comes through the interaction of a player’s direct actions and the interplay of objects within the playspace indirectly caused by the player. The Japanese arcade game pachinko (see Figure 2.14) is a perfect example—players shoot balls into a vertical maze of pins and gates with the goal of getting the ball to a payout at the bottom of the maze. The arrangement of the pins and gates makes it difficult to predict how the ball will travel through the maze. Players can learn the responsiveness of the pins and gates as a means of developing strategies for getting the ball through the maze, but there is always a degree of uncertainty in what will happen.

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Figure 2.14 A pachinko machine. Fashionslide

Basketball (see Figure 2.15) is a good example of a game that relies on skill and strategy, has no chance, but has plenty of uncertainty. The game is one that rewards height and speed, and of course dribbling, passing, and shooting skills, but it also awards smart decision-making and team play. On offense, players move the ball around from player to player to get the best opportunity to shoot a high-percentage shot. On defense, the goal is to keep the other team from having opportunities to shoot or at least make easy baskets. Players can predict many things—how the ball will bounce off the rim after a missed shot, where teammates will go on the floor to be ready to catch a pass, and what the opposing team will do when the player with the ball shoots.

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Figure 2.15 A game of basketball.

Though there is no chance in basketball in the strict sense (we don’t roll a die in the game or randomly generate the game’s elements), there is plenty of uncertainty. At what angle will the ball come off the rim? Will a teammate be waiting in the corner for a pass? Will the other team run to the goal to rebound the ball? Everything the opponents do requires analysis and reaction and thinking about what is the best way to achieve the goal of scoring more points. Basketball is a sport where players develop skill and manage uncertainty by reacting quickly to the constantly changing state of the game.

Poker, on the other hand, mixes chance and skill in a way that requires players to develop strategies around the heavy dose of randomness inherent in the game. Let’s use Texas hold ‘em as an example. As in most card games, the deck is shuffled before play begins, and no one gets to look at the order of the cards. To begin play, everyone is dealt two cards face down. Players then make bets on their hands. This is a tricky time to bet in the game, as there is so much chance and uncertainty. What is in the other players’ hands? What’s still in the deck? Players have seen only 2 of the 52 cards. That means they have no idea which cards are in the other players’ hands. This requires players to have a good sense of probabilities around poker hands. After the first round of betting, the dealer plays out 3 cards face-up in the middle of the table. These are considered shared and can be factored into all players’ hands. Even by the end of the game, players only know the identity of 7 of the 52 cards in the deck. That’s only about 15% of the deck, leaving a lot of uncertainty and chance in play. So players are left to rely on their knowledge of the probabilities of the different poker hands like four of a kind, full house, two of a kind, and so on. Just as important is their ability to guess what their opponents are up to. Will the other players remember two aces have already passed through in the previous hand? Is one opponent bluffing about having a great hand? Did the other player who folded early do so as a longer-term strategy?

The interaction of player skill and strategy are impacted by the ways the game’s designer uses chance and allows for uncertainty, whether within the space of possibility of the game or through the actions of other players or through players’ pursuit of goals. Finding the balance of these is one of the greater challenges in game design.

Decision-Making and Feedback

There are two related game design tools to consider when thinking about how players understand a game’s state: the decision-making and feedback that propel a player through their play experience. Let’s use bicycles as an example here. For a bike to go forward, the rider has to pedal it. But while doing the pedaling, the rider is making hundreds of decisions every second—how fast should they go? Which direction should they head? Are there cars, pedestrians, or other cyclists to keep an eye on? While operating a bicycle, the rider has to make lots of decisions.

Games also require that players constantly evaluate what is happening while continuing to carry out their actions in the game. This is what Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman refer to as the “action-outcome unit.”5 All play experiences are made of a sequence of actions—pedal the bike—that have outcomes—the bike moves forward—that lead to the next action—turn the handle bars—that lead to the next outcome—the bike turns left. Ultimately, this is what gameplay is made up of: dozens, even hundreds or thousands, of small decisions that each creates a change in the game’s state. From these, play experiences emerge, shaped along the way by the goals and subgoals, however loose or strong they might be.

5 Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play, 2003, pg. 62.

Let’s look at a game of chess (see Figure 2.16). Chess is a turn-based game. One player takes a turn, then the other, and so on. This allows more time for decision-making and thus for interpreting the game’s state. For instance, one player moves her knight a few squares in front of the other’s king. Check! The second player is in trouble now, so he has to do something or the first player will win. Her actions have had an effect on how close she is to winning and how close he is to losing. So he has to react accordingly to the effects of her move. Maybe he decides to move his bishop to take her knight, which eases up the pressure on his king.

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Figure 2.16 A game of chess.

Because each player has time to contemplate their actions, the game gains the “thinking person’s pastime” reputation it has. In order to understand the game’s state, to assess the available options, and to then make a decision about what action to take with a play piece, the player needs to be able to “read” the game. And in turn, the opponent needs to be able to understand the impact the player’s move had on the game’s state.

Turn-based play encourages deliberate decision-making. But what happens if we make chess a real-time game? Bennett Foddy’s Speed Chess (see Figure 2.17) does just that—and makes it a 16-player game to boot. In Speed Chess, eight players per side use NES-style controllers to move their play pieces across the board as quickly as possible. No need to wait your turn, as it’s a mad dash for the king in 30 seconds or less. Because every play piece is moving at the same time, the game becomes something completely different from chess. Speed Chess is more like a chaotic sport, where coordination between teammates is attempted, but because of the sheer speed of the game, players are not always successful. That’s ok, though, because the next game is just a few seconds away. Speed Chess is a real-time game, where all the movements of players happen simultaneously and the state of the game board is constantly changing. That’s the point of the game, really—things are happening so fast no one can really understand the game state as a whole or the more granular actions and their outcomes and impacts on the game state.

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Figure 2.17 Speed Chess. Photo by Bennett Foddy.

A well-designed game provides feedback on player actions. When a player does something—move the left stick on a controller, for example—the object moves to the left. But there are other forms of feedback in the game, too, that are essential to the player knowing what is going on. Meshoff’s Nidhogg (see Figure 2.18) provides a good example of this. In Nidhogg, two players square off in a sword fight in which they try to defeat their opponent by stabbing them fencing-style, or punching them, or even throwing their sword at them. The goal of the game is to make it to the other side of the game world. The first one there wins. Players can parry, run, jump, and crawl to beat their opponent. The game is constantly taking player input and giving feedback to confirm the action and to show the consequences of that action. When the player moves the character side to side, they walk, which provides feedback on the player’s actions—the movements of a controller stick. Or when the player thrusts their sword by pushing the X button, the little character dutifully responds. The game also provides feedback on player progress by showing which player is in the lead by transitioning to screens that are closer to their goal and showing the direction they should run in with an arrow graphic at the top of the screen. Finally, when a player reaches their goal, they are given feedback on the outcome of the game by being ceremoniously eaten by a gigantic serpent and declared the winner.

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Figure 2.18 A screenshot from Nidhogg.

Even games with looser goals and more experiential play experiences are composed of these decision-then-feedback loops. Porpentine’s Howling Dogs (see Figure 2.19) is a great example. It is a text-based game in which players make choices about their movement through the game’s environment. This being a text-based game, the actions—choosing a text branch within a body of text—will lead to an outcome—the loading of the corresponding text. Clicking on a highlighted link results in new text. The players choose between “hydration unit” and “food dispenser” and are then told about the results of that choice and given one or more choices to continue from there. These decisions aren’t building toward a measurable or competitive outcome, but instead informing the course the story will take. And so while choices about how the player moves through Porpentine’s game don’t generate a score, they do have poetic as well as story-changing impact on the play experience.

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Figure 2.19 A screenshot from Howling Dogs.

Games are made out of a continuous cycle of small decision-feedback loops, each providing players with information on the game state. Ultimately, that is what game design is all about: creating play experiences fueled by player consideration and interaction. In chess, the turn-based structure allows deeper player contemplation, while the frantic real-time nature of Speed Chess prioritizes instinctual responses. And in games like Howling Dogs, the choices prioritize experience rather than player control. The more clearly a game designer crafts the ability of players to understand the game state and the impact of their actions on it, the more chance players have to feel empowered in their play.

Abstraction

Let’s look at abstraction, another important game design tool. The most common way to think about abstraction in games is found with the abstract strategy game Go (see Figure 2.20). The board is a grid, the pieces simple black-and-white stones. In this case, abstraction refers to the fact that the game doesn’t represent anything in particular. Compare this to the boardgame The Game of Life (see Figure 2.20), in which everything is representational—the little cars and passengers, the road and bridges, the buildings, and the money. Go embodies a kind of abstraction for games, but there are two other forms of abstraction game designers use to craft play experiences: abstraction of real-world activities, and abstraction of systems.

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Figure 2.20 The boardgames Go and The Game of Life. The Game of Life photo by Fabian Bromann, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

A classic example of abstracting real-world activities is the relationship between tennis and Atari’s Pong (see Figure 2.21). In tennis, players can move to any spot on their side of the net; they can hit the ball to any spot on the opponent’s side of the court they are able; they can hit the ball high or low, soft or hard, with or without spin; and so on. But in Pong, tennis has been simplified in a number of ways: players travel in a straight line along the baseline; the ball can only travel along a single plane; there is limited opportunity to control the direction the ball travels when hit.

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Figure 2.21 Tennis and Pong. Tennis photo by Madchester, File: London 2012 Federer-Isner Quarterfinal Warm Up.jpg, Used under CC 3.0 SA Unported. Pong photo by Rob Boudon, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

In other words, Pong is an abstraction of tennis. It takes a real-world game and reimagines it as a videogame. The process of abstraction involves reducing the real-world game down to an essential form that is appropriate for the new medium (and for the technology at hand). The tennis court is flattened, play only happens along a flat plane, the player and racket are replaced by a paddle that can only move along a single line, and force of swinging is removed altogether. As a result, a new play experience is created.

A different approach to abstraction is found in Matt Leacock’s Pandemic (see Figure 2.22). Players work together to protect the world from a set of four deadly diseases. This is done on a gameboard with a simplified map of the world, player tokens and identity cards, color-coded cubes representing the diseases, a deck of cards representing a selected list of international cities, and a set of cards representing disease outbreaks. Players are assigned roles like Dispatcher, Medic, and Scientist, each with unique abilities. Together, the players work to cure the four diseases by moving around the gameboard, healing cities and treating virus outbreaks.

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Figure 2.22 The boardgame Pandemic.

Pandemic uses abstraction differently than Pong. Instead of using abstraction to create a playful structure around something we already do in the real world, Pandemic models a real-world phenomenon—the spread of viruses—into a game system. This is all done by abstracting real-world systems and actions. Instead of traveling by car, plane, or boat, players simply move their pieces from city to city following the rules of the game. Another example is the way Pandemic abstracts epidemiology. The diseases spread by placing cubes on the cities, and they are cured by removing the viruses. This is a modeling of how viruses spread and are cured, but within the structures of a game, it also is how play and fun are produced.

We have three different ways we can use abstraction as a design tool: as a nonrepresentational approach to the design of game elements (Go), as a means of reimagining everyday activities to suit the medium (Pong), and as a way of simplifying real-world systems into game form (Pandemic). Abstraction gets rid of extraneous details and lets game designers focus on what’s fun about the interaction of the game goals, the actions players can take to reach those goals, and the objects and playspaces.

Theme

The next basic game design tool is theme. A game’s theme is the logical framework for how the game represents itself. Designers use it to shape the player experience and help them understand the game more quickly and intuitively.

Take chess as an example again. Chess doesn’t have a story, at least not an implicit one. In fact, when we talk about chess, many people call it an abstract strategy game. (The abstract in abstract strategy game refers to the game not having representational qualities, similar to Go.) But chess does represent something through the appearance and movements of its pieces and its board—namely, a war of territorial acquisition. The king is the ruler, with his powerful queen by his side. His advisors, the bishops, are nearby, while his military, the knights, are just to the side of the bishops. And on the outside of the knights are the rooks who form the outer protective guard. In front of them are the pawns, or the foot soldiers. And on the opposite side of the board is an identically organized opposing force.

Players very much engage in strategic warfare when playing chess, with the goal of taking down the opponent’s king, conquering and controlling his territory. And the actions for each object in the game—the six kinds of play pieces—move in a way that relates to their role. The king is weak and slow and must be protected; the queen is powerful and fast; the two rooks begin along the edges and move in straight lines that define edges; the pawns are plentiful but slow. So even an abstract strategy game like chess has a theme that impacts the way we think about the game and its play. Theme is essentially a conceptual handle for players to be able to grasp how the world might work. And as they play, theme provides a way to interpret the decisions and their outcomes on the game’s space of possibility.

A different approach to theme comes from the two-player cooperative game Way (see Figure 2.23). Way has a more explicit theme—two players in very different environments, dressed in the clothes of two different cultures, trying to find ways to communicate with one another without a shared spoken or written language. All the actions players perform to achieve the goals are designed to support the idea of having to establish a language through which the player can communicate. Players are able to indicate emotional states and use gestures to suggest speed, direction and anything else the players are able to convey through a simple gesture system. The game’s goal—move through the puzzle-based platform levels—supports the theme of communication quite well. It is impossible for a player new to the game to solve most levels without assistance from the other player. Way illustrates how theme can be handled through a mix of design and visual representation to help us reflect on communication and cooperation. Way then is “about” something, which provides the thematic framing for the entire design of the game, and in turn, the play experience.

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Figure 2.23 A screenshot from Way.

Kentucky Route Zero by Cardboard Computer (see Figure 2.24) represents yet another use of theme in games. It has a very strong theme in terms of its mood, its art style, and its interaction model. The player is an observer on a storyworld centering on a truck driver named Conway who travels along the eponymous Kentucky Route Zero. The game draws on old graphic text adventures and point-and-click adventure games combined with a clean, minimal illustration style and cinematic animations. While the interactivity and the story of Kentucky Route Zero are not as tightly coupled to theme as they are in Way, they do work well together to create an atmospheric play experience. Everything about the sensory elements of the game supports the moody, magical story inside the game. Kentucky Route Zero explores an aesthetic theme that envelopes the player in a space of possibility more focused on atmosphere and narrative.

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Figure 2.24 A screenshot from Kentucky Route Zero.

What we see with theme is that a game’s goals, actions, sensory style, story, and world can be combined in all sorts of ways depending on what kind of play experience you want to provide. Sometimes, as with chess, the designer wants a light theme coupled with strong game design and a near-abstract presentation layer that helps the player understand their role and provide context for interpreting their decisions and outcomes. Sometimes the designer wants a conceptual theme tightly integrated with the game’s goals and actions and light but supportive visuals and sound, as demonstrated with Way. And sometimes the designer wants theme to provide a particular kind of tone that is expressive, as in Kentucky Route Zero.

Storytelling

This brings us to the next game design tool: storytelling. Often, a game’s theme is embedded in its story, as happens with film, comics, literature, and more. Many games are constructed around storyworlds within which players inhabit characters and carry out actions via their avatars. Decisions made by the characters lead to the unfolding of the story. Of course, we can tell stories through sports—recounting the tale of the winning goal just seconds before the match ends—or in boardgames—recounting the story of how the players came to almost, but not quite, eliminate the four viruses in Pandemic. But in many videogames, the story is a larger part of the experience. The layered impact of our actions and the advancing of the story often go hand-in-hand. The less directly we control our role in a game, the more story cues help us make sense of what happens and how well we are advancing the story.

In the game Braid (see Figure 2.25), players control the main character, Tim, who has lost his princess. To help Tim find her, the player navigates Tim through a puzzle platformer game. Instead of controlling anything and everything about Tim, the player can only make Tim move along platforms, up and down ladders, and they can make Tim jump. That is it. Through these limited forms of action, the player interacts with the storyworld and unfolds Tim’s journey to find his princess. Tim also has some control of one other aspect of the game—time. The player can rewind time, and in the process, undo the things the player has made Tim do. This opens up a whole new vantage point on the game and the storyworld of Braid. Each time-related interaction with the world provides a place to consider different ideas relating to our actions and how they impact the world around us.

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Figure 2.25 Three forms of storytelling in Braid: (clockwise from top left): the menu, the level introduction texts, and the gameplay itself.

Braid becomes a game that uses story as another element in the production of play. The story in Braid unfolds through several conduits: the written story elements read at the beginning of each level, through the actions carried out by the player to move through each level, and through the meta-narrative formed through the game menu, represented by a cut-away view of Tim’s house. Together, these elements produce the story of Braid.

In the case of The Fullbright Company’s Gone Home (see Figure 2.26), the storytelling involves similar elements of exposition, player action, and contextual information. But in Gone Home, the whole point of the game is the player interacting with the environment to experience the story. Gone Home lacks many of the elements we might expect from a 3D game—no shooting, no enemies to vanquish, and no “winning” or score. Instead, players move through the space to piece together the story of Katie’s sister Sam, and more generally, Katie and Sam’s parents. The goal of Gone Home then is experiencing the story. To do this, The Fullbright Company made moving and looking the primary actions of the game. The player looks at the house, they look at the objects in the house, and through these and key audio snippets, they piece together the story.

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Figure 2.26 A screenshot from Gone Home. Screenshot courtesy of The Fullbright Company.

Liam Burke’s Dog Eat Dog illustrates another way storytelling can emerge from a play experience. The game provides a structure and context, while the players generate the story themselves through their decisions and interactions with one another. As a result, the stories players generate through the tabletop role-playing game generally share broad thematic elements, but they differ substantially in terms of the details.

Sometimes, a game’s story is the full play experience. Dietrich Squinkifer’s Conversations We Have in My Head (see Figure 2.27) is a story-driven game about one character’s memories of their relationship with a second character. The two are on a walk in which the first character, Quarky, reminisces on this childhood relationship. At points in Quarky’s monologue, the player can select responses from the second character. These insert slight branches in Quarky’s thoughts, but they stay on track in thinking back on the childhood. If the player doesn’t make a choice, the story continues to unfold. The story is the game in Conversations We Have in My Head.

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Figure 2.27 A screenshot from Conversations We Have in My Head.

In these examples, we see story emerging through an interplay of text, player action, and the game’s challenge and goals (Braid); story emerging through the navigation of playspace and interaction with objects (Gone Home); story emerging through the game’s structure (Dog Eat Dog); and story being the primary activity and content of a game (Conversations We Have in My Head).

Context of Play

The last basic tool of game design is the context within which a game is played. Taking into account where the game is played and by whom has a real impact on the experience. Will players be playing on their phone or tablet? In a public space? Alone or with friends and family? Of course, game designers can’t always predict this, but taking it into account can make a big difference for the player. Imagine trying to play a mobile phone game that has hour-long play sessions, and you will soon see why most mobile games have shorter sessions developed around the concept of playing during a commute, in between meetings, or at a coffee shop waiting for a friend to arrive.

Speaking of mobile games, take the iPhone app, Tiny Games, by Hide and Seek (see Figure 2.28). Tiny Games includes just that: a slew of tiny physical games meant to be played in short sessions in a variety of contexts. The first thing the player sees when opening the app is a question: “Where are you?” The player can select Home, Walk, Road, Bar, In Line, or Work. Selecting “Home” and “two players” might get you the game “Knife Fork Spoon,” based on the folkgame Rock, Paper, Scissors, to be played while waiting for a piece of bread to pop out of the toaster. Each round, the winner keeps the utensil the other player played. By the end of the game (when the toast is done), players have the utensils remaining for their meal. This game is designed to be played with a friend in a kitchen, and as with all of the Tiny Games, is meant for a specific context.

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Figure 2.28 A screenshot from Tiny Games.

Another example of designing for context is Jenga Classic, Jenga Giant, and Drunk Jenga, all based on Leslie Scott’s classic game Jenga. In Jenga, players remove one block at a time from a tower constructed of 54 blocks, placing the block on top of the structure. Over time, the structure becomes more and more unstable, leading to the exciting climax of the blocks tumbling down. Interesting aside: Jenga is one of the few games that ends with a loser (the person who made the tower topple) rather than a winner.

Because of its popularity and the simple nature of the game’s materials (54 wooden blocks), it has been remade and redesigned by players for different contexts. Jenga Giant is a version of the game with much larger blocks, which makes the toppling much more of a spectacle. It’s popular in bars and backyards, whereas classic Jenga is more often played on household tabletops. This is design for context—making a version of the game that’s fun in a different context; the larger blocks of Jenga Giant provide players and spectators with a large, easy-to-see sculptural game. The development of the larger version of Jenga then leads to the DIY modification called Drunk Jenga or Drinking Jenga, depending on your circle of friends. In this game, each block has an instruction written on it in marker like: “ladies drink,” “tell a secret,” or, in more racy variants, “remove an article of clothing.”

Tiny Games is a set of games that are designed to fit a variety of contexts, considering where the game is played, when it is played, and how many players there are as the primary setting for the game to unfold. The Jenga variants described here are the same game, with slightly different forms and somewhat different features all developed to fit different contexts (home, bar, outdoors). Context provides the setting for a game but can also change the nature of the gameplay, leading to new variations and forms.

Summary

Game design uses a series of basic tools that are not so different from the basic principles of visual art. These basic tools are used to combine the six elements (actions, goals, rules, objects, playspace, and players) in ways that can generate endless possibilities for player experience.

The 10 basic tools of game design are constraint; direct and indirect actions; goals; challenge; skill, strategy, chance, and uncertainty; decision-making and feedback; abstraction; theme; storytelling; and the context of play. Each can be used alone, in combination, or to design new games.

Image Constraint: The limitations we put on players through the design of the actions, objects, and playspace of a game.

Image Direct and indirect actions: Direct actions are the kinds of actions that allow players to have immediate interaction with objects and the playspace. Indirect actions are those that occur without direct contact by the player or the primary objects they use to perform actions.

Image Goals: A game’s goals give shape and purpose to play experiences by giving players objectives.

Image Challenge: The ways in which a game resists players. Sometimes challenge comes from the difficulty of achieving a game’s goals, and sometimes it comes from the concepts embodied in the game.

Image Skill, strategy, chance, and uncertainty: Skill is the mastery of a game’s actions, whereas strategy is a player’s ability to determine a path to achieving the game’s (or their own) goals. Chance is the use of randomization in a game, whereas uncertainty is the unpredictable nature of what will happen as a game is played.

Image Decision-making and feedback: Based on the game state and players’ pursuit of the game’s or their own goals, players make decisions about what their next action should be. To understand the game state, the player interprets the feedback the game provides on their last actions and the changes brought about in the game state by that action.

Image Abstraction: The modeling of complex phenomenon into game form.

Image Theme: The logical framework for how a game is represented.

Image Storytelling: A series of tools for shaping player experience that borrow from traditional narrative structures.

Image Context of Play: The consideration of when, where, with whom, and other aspects of when players play a game.

Exercises

1. Think about your favorite game and what would make it easy to achieve the game’s goals, and then think about how the game designer used constraint to make the goal fun to pursue.

2. Choose a game with direct action—perhaps a sport where the ball is directly handled by players—and make that interaction indirect. Now try making indirect action direct. What does it change about the nature of the game?

3. Take a purely strategic game like chess and add an element of chance to it. How does this change the play experience?

4. Watch a game that allows for strategic play. Keep a log of the game state to help you examine the role of uncertainty in the play experience.

5. Find examples of games using abstraction to model the real world. How close is the game system to the real-world system? Where does it depart from the real-world system?

6. Pick a game you like, and consider how it uses theme and storytelling. How do the theme and story relate to how players engage with the game?

7. Pick a game you play at home. Reimagine the play experience if it were played in a public park.