Philosophical Game Design

An advisory: this is a really pretentious one.

Philosophy is one of the most applicable fields. It might not have much practical use, but as the history of ways of thinking it represents something relevant to any intellectual endeavor. Let's talk about how one might use philosophy to make a game.

You might select a specific idea from the corpus of philosophy, and construct a new mechanic (or variation on an existing mechanic) which summarizes the concept. It's been done already, too. Most obviously, any combat-heavy RPG is a decent example of a Hegelian dialectic: the player faces a series of roughly symmetrical challenges between his avatar and another one; after each one, the avatar changes in a manner based on the conflict, and proceeds to the next. Turn it around backwards and you've got Warning Forever; make it multiplayer and you've got a single-elimination tournament. If you explicitly set out to make a game with that philosophy, however, you'll come up with something that pays very close attention to what happens in the challenge, or even combine some attributes of the vanquished avatar into the victorious, rather than genericizing everything into EXP and learning.

To make a game in favor of determinism, construct a low-chaos system in which all player actions lead to the same conclusion; to make a game opposed to it, do the opposite. Pascal's Wager, where the option on which the player bets determines the reward for betting correctly, can easily be modified to represent a gambling game. Peter Molyneux and the good folks at Bioware have already caught onto this idea by attempting to find models of ethics that can function in a game, to varying degrees of success.

Narrative-driven games can employ the techniques that authors have been employing for centuries to advocate any argument under the sun. It's intuitive, though the bolder the idea, the more skill needed from the writer (so the more jack-of-all-tradey among us might want to tread carefully).

I mentioned earlier that games have themes. A philosophically-designed game is one that is intended from the beginning to contain a specific and lofty theme. Since before Socrates, philosophers have constructed hypothetical, highly improbable settings which simplify a new, complex idea. Since these settings rely on a specific set of rules, it's fairly straightforward to use games as a continuation of the practice, with the added option that the audience may learn the idea by exploring it, rather than having it explained to them.

Music to my ears

Chris Dahlen has made a startlingly good point about games, video games especially, being like music. In a particularly apt comparison, he mentions the importance of technical expertise, subtle emotional effects, and the thrill of listening or playing that games and music have in common, not to mention the spectacular successes that result when the two media are combined. It is a remarkable insight and I hope everybody who's even a little bit important in games takes it to heart. But I disagree with his conclusion about the synergy between games and story. He's right that a game need not have a story any more than a song does, and to expect one is silly. But I think it is worth mentioning that the conjunction of music and storytelling is a prehistoric practice.

The clearest demonstration of this is in the form of the ballad: a narrative poem set to music. A simple, iconic story that resonates with some fundamental component of human nature can remain in the public consciousness for decades, or longer if special effort is taken to preserve it. A well-developed and catchy melody, exemplifying an emotion, has a similar lifespan. The only ones that last longer are those that are really good. If the two are combined, however, they'll last a lot longer, with less effort, even if neither is as masterful. Music being inherently emotional, the tune helps to reinforce the emotional theme of the story. Stories being inherently memorable, the narrative helps to form a mnemonic for the melody. The final effect is that by using these two media in a complementary fashion, the threshold of artistic immortality is lowered considerably.

Music and story have been combined to great effect in other ways. The one that is most applicable to the field of video games in particular is the opera. Opera has been regarded for some time as the single art form which most thoroughly showcases the extremes of human emotion. Their stories and music alike are awash with pathos, and typically focus on love so deep that any real person would be lucky (or unlucky!) to experience, concluding with perfect happiness or ultimate despair. Operatic narratives are rarely more than a straightforward (if occasionally convoluted) love story, and the most memorable music is always found in the dances, overtures, and arias, when the story is not developing. But, especially to a connoisseur of the high arts, the combined effect is breathtaking.

Operas and folk ballads alike have been suppressed by various tyrants throughout the ages, because the power of music to inspire and compel in conjunction with stories is known well. Powerful ideas - perhaps not subtle ideas, but powerful ones - can be made at home in music, although it's quite true that these songs tend to be about something, whereas music and story can both exist in isolation as a testament to their creators' talent. If the combination of music and narrative possesses such potential, and music is comparable to games, then surely there is room for a powerful combination of games and narrative.

However, it's not enough to simply say that it can happen. As game creators we already believe that games can do anything. We need direction. And that direction, I believe, can be found by an examination of how, specifically, musically narrative media is complemented by its components.

Music is an inherently emotional medium. This seems to be a genetic trait shared by all humans, even if disagreements abound as to which music in particular kindles the intended emotions and which just annoys the listener with its droning, grating noise. The stories which have most benefited from attachment to music are, thus, the very highly emotional ones: epics, tragedies, classical comedies, inspiring tales of heroism and love and great deeds, stories that awaken us to the breadth of the human heart, cause us to empathize with the protagonists, and otherwise inspire strong feeling.

A game, on the other hand, is not an inherently emotional medium. Our primal connection with games is not as an emotional device, and emotional exuberance of any sort than intense concentration or Zen-like disconnection tend to be detrimental to our connection with the game or our performance therein. A number of conclusions might be drawn from this: it is, perhaps, an intellectual medium (in that a game engages the intellect), or a systemic medium (in that a game is a representation of a system), or an educational medium (in that a game teaches us something beyond its own scope).

Not only the stories told by games, but also the way in which they are told, need to be told with consideration to the fundamental nature of the medium of games. Thus far, video games have indeed remained closest to film, which, as a descendant of the combination of theater and opera, tends to be either emotional or philosophical in its narrative, and this sort of narrative may not be appropriate for games. I do not think that further meditation on my part will be of much use to answering this question; instead, we should look to games which have attempted different types of story, as well as make more games with that particular intention, and examine which are effective.

What Players Want

Obviously, all players want to win in general terms, and, if the game is being played recreationally, most want to have a good time in the process. However, just as not all players have the same idea of a good time, not all players will agree from the beginning just what it means to win.

Each game has its own victory condition, but for a player, winning does not necessarily have anything to do with victory. It can be much more subjective. A player enters a game with a goal, however subjective and nebulous, and pursues victory as a part of obtaining that goal. Most commonly, the victory condition is there to give players the motivation to play in a way that tests a certain set of skills. For example, rock-paper-scissors is not a game intended to test your ability to fight. As a consequence, the inventor of rock-paper-scissors did not construct the rules so that punching your opponent in the face is a victory condition. Very few players, as a result, are motivated to punch their rock-paper-scissors opponents in the face, which is why this rarely occurs.

Sometimes, though, a player brings his own motivation, to the shock and misery of unsuspecting faces everywhere. It's a very difficult problem. As a game designer, you control players by defining victory and establishing interesting constraints for achieving it. What can you do about players who don't want to win?

It goes without saying that there will always be a certain portion of players who will not be motivated by victory. They have their lives, their little frustrations, and so on, and it's not your place to force them to behave. Additionally, some games can be enhanced, or even based entirely around, finding interesting ways to indulge players' unique goals. Neither of these are appropriate for you to attempt to curtail in your game. Instead, it is better to focus on what turns normal players away from the desire for victory in a normal game.

First and most obvious is boredom, the Ultimate Evil of game design. Boredom manifests itself differently for different players, but insufficient engagement and insufficient understanding of the rules are the general causes. A player who is bored just wants something to happen, even if it means losing. Incorrect motivation is just one of the many reasons why boredom is the enemy.

In team-based competitive situations, especially where players may be playing with strangers, and even more especially where players can be anonymous or play in front of an audience, players are sometimes motivated not to win but to feel powerful or heroic. They will not play strategically, instead doing specific actions that are glamorous but ineffective. Oftentimes they will also deliberately turn on teammates, either nursing a grudge or just in a random act of rudeness. The solution to this situation can be approached mechanically or metaphorically. Mechanical solutions involve penalizing behavior not conducive to the team, making it difficult for the prima donna to successfully act independently, or by providing additional metrics for success that individuals cannot earn effectively. This can be difficult, however, because if the would-be hero were intelligent enough to notice, or care, that his antics are causing himself and his team to lose, he probably wouldn't be acting in that way in the first place. The metaphorical approach heavily emphasizes team-related iconography and scenarios, essentially propaganda, to put players in a cooperative state of mind where they will be more likely to perform effectively. There is a definite art to this approach.

The more that games are played online, the more that the next type of non-winning-motivated player will become important. The griefer, a player who goes out of his way to make the game worse for other players, occasionally demonstrating commendable resourcefulness and cleverness in his methods, is a player which most game designers want to discourage from existing in their games. To the griefer, a game represents a field of opportunities for hilarious pranks. Thus, one deters a griefer with the same strategies used to deter a practical joker: either a policy of swift and harsh retribution (which can give you a reputation for strictness, which is not fun), or a social environment which views the practice as immature (which is harder to foster the more inclusive or popular your game), or a community which remains unfazed by their antics (which can lead to an out-of-control arms race as griefers try harder and harder to aggrieve other players), or a culture of well-manneredness (and as soon as anybody discovers how to reliably create one of these, please let me know).

You can't put an end to all external motivation, but as a designer, a certain degree of responsibility for the phenomenon falls to you.

Game Masters and Referees

Certain games are so complex or have sufficient room for uncertainty that the players themselves cannot be relied upon to accurately and fairly enforce the rules. In such cases, a non-participant is added for this purpose. This is a referee.

The presence of a non-participant with knowledge of the game state creates an obvious new opportunity: parts of the game state which are unknown to all players, and whose very existence is unknown to all players. An entity managing unknown information and the interactions between game elements is a game master.

The difference between a game master and a referee is best understood in terms of knowledge: a game master knows things that the players don't, whereas a referee does not. Both of them enforce rules and adjudicate disagreements, both of them are considered to have authority over the state of the game which supersedes even the written rules, and both of them have a shared purpose of ensuring fairness and maintaining a structured flow of the game.

Because of the greater complexity of a game master's task, and the greater authority he carries as a result, a game master has substantial power to influence a game creatively, taking the role of an assistant game designer.

A computer is an excellent referee and can perform some of a game master's tasks very efficiently. Tasks requiring any degree of creativity or subjectivity are obviously best left to humans, however.

When designing your game, consider thoroughly how necessary independent rules verification is. For a computer game, this may not be an issue, as "independent rules verification" may also be considered "software." Certain genres of game consider it a privilege, rather than a chore, to be a game master (most notably the tabletop role-playing game, whence the term originates), whereas this is rarely true for a referee. If any part of the game state is to be acted upon by players who do not know its state, then a game master may be necessary. A highly structured game may require an unbiased third-party of either sort to ensure that the players do not trip over each others' attempts to play, and perhaps inadvertently ruin the game by revealing sensitive information to each other.

Since being a game master or referee is sometimes a chore, it may be best to hand off specific elements of this person's responsibilities to various players, for example, by christening one Monopoly player the "banker." This practice is ripe for extension into game mechanics of its own. Games based around the management of game-managing tasks already exist, and carried to their natural conclusion they become what is called a "legal game," a subject for a later post.

The relationship between all the participants of a game is a matter that a game designer must consider fully, and not all participants are players.

Mechanics Follow Metaphor?

Recently I discussed the challenge of ensuring that a game's metaphor reinforces its mechanics. An easy way of ensuring that this is true is by selecting a metaphor first and modeling it mechanically. This approach may be called simulation. While selecting the metaphor first may be a useful source of inspiration, that is not simulation, strictly speaking.

Certain considerations must be taken when using a simulative approach to game design. Simulation tends to be typically computationally expensive, which is prohibitive when not using a computer. It can be difficult, at times, to present information about the state of a simulation in a manner befitting a game (that is, clear and unambiguous, except where it needs to be obscure or unknown). Certain simulations' unique behavior comes from their subtleties, and inaccurate modeling may completely invalidate them, unless you so simplify them that it becomes pointless to call them a simulation any longer.

These technical and logistical risks are great, but they are negligible next to the psychological risk. If you are making a game out of a simulation, the process you simulate must be worthwhile as a game. Simulations proper have myriad uses throughout business, education, and science - but how many of them are really entertaining? However you define fun, a game has to have it. A person wouldn't play a game if they could get the exact same kind of fun from real life. This is why a game needs to differ from a person's real life in some significant way - and why it is so dangerous to make an accurate simulation that is also worthwhile as a game.

The real value of a simulation-game, I propose, is as a provider of vicarious experiences, be they of somebody else's mundanity or of a fantastic but internally consistent setting. The player of a simulation-game seeks novelty, which is a kind of fun. The difference between a simulation-game and a purer game with an exotic setting is that the simulation-game tells the user what it's like in lots of little ways, whereas the game proper asks the player to fill in the experience with his imagination. It's a blurry continuum, but the accuracy and detail of the presentation is the axis along which it is measured.

Matching Metaphor and Mechanics

As I discussed previously, the metaphor and mechanics of a game combine in various parts to produce a theme. The point of metaphor, you will recall, is to relate the mechanics to players in a more familiar manner. What happens to the theme of a game, then, when the metaphor and the mechanics are contradictory? At the minimum, it would be misleading - one might imagine a game about pirates in which sharing is a better strategy than plundering - whereas at worst it makes the game difficult to learn, because there are no shortcuts or mnemonics for remembering the rules. Soren Johnson recently remarked on a board game series which suffers from this problem.

It is a fairly simple thing to find congruence between metaphor and mechanics in a broad sense - simply find a real-world scenario that works according to rules similar to those which govern the game, or, if no such scenario exists, or it is unusable for any reason, invent one (which goes a long way to explain the proliferation of science fiction and fantasy in games, in comparison to other media). However, there may still be problems. Even a slight discrepancy between metaphor and mechanics can be jarring, at times - but, at other times, for different players, the discrepancy can be written off as a necessary concession to the mechanics. If you include a scenario which functions exactly like the game, then you more than likely have something so far removed from reality that it might as well be a decontextualized description of the mechanics.

Finding a scenario to relate your rules to the player is a difficult balance. In some situations, the scenario will be too much of a stretch. In others, the mechanics will too closely follow from the scenario, including the boring or tedious parts from which people play games to escape. Your scenario may be so outlandish that it fails to capture players' imaginations, or it may be so mundane that it does not excite them. But before all of this, the most important thing is making sure that metaphor and mechanics match.

Modes of Play

A single game can usually only be played in a handful of ways, but it has many to choose from. Here I intend to enumerate some of the more common considerations.

Number of players: this is not merely a count of the number of people involved. The organization of them can have great impact on the act of play.

• Solitaire: a single player pursues a goal.
  
• Competitive: several players autonomously pursue goals mutually exclusive with those of other players.
  
• Cooperative: several players coordinate to pursue a shared goal.
  
• Team: two or more groups of several players cooperate with each other in competition with the other groups.
  
• Diplomatic: players or groups pursue goals which may be shared or mutually exclusive, and must choose individually whether to cooperate or compete.
• Massive: large numbers of players apply one of the above, and events in several concurrent games are capable of affecting each other indirectly.

Symmetry: the options available to a player from the beginning have a considerable effect on the dynamics of the game. Symmetry is a matter of degree, not of kind.

• Symmetrical: all participants begin under identical or virtually identical conditions.
• Balanced: participants begin with starting conditions which are considered equally likely to win.
• Asymmetric: participants begin with unlike conditions.
• Handicapped: participants' starting conditions are altered to compensate for skill differences between them.
  

Timescale: the limitations placed upon when the players may influence the game state. These are largely subjective, and others have been experimented with, but principally it is a question of the relationship between the player's decision to act and that act affecting the game, to say nothing of the possibility of other players, or the game, responding to the intention rather than the act.

• Real-time: players influence the game state at any time the rules do not forbid it.
• Turn-limited: only one player may influence the game at a given time.
• Asynchronous: players announce their intentions to influence the game at various times, but they are applied simultaneously.
• Simultaneous: players affect the game at the same time.
  

Information: what players know or are capable of knowing about each other and about the state of the game.

• Perfect: players are aware of the entire game state at all times.
• Imperfect: players are aware of only certain parts of the game state, but they know of what they are not aware.
• Paranoid: players are aware that the knowledge of the game state given to them is inaccurate, but they do not know in what way.
• Knowable: players are not aware of the entire game state, but they are capable of discovering any given part.
  
• Unknowable: players are not aware of the entire game state, and parts of it are totally beyond their ability to know.
• Deductive: players can logically conclude the nature of parts of the game state which the game has not explicitly told them.
• Inductive: players must predict unknown parts of the game state without logical certainty.

Metaphor, Mechanics, and Theme

There are many ways to divide a game, and one of them is into a mechanical component, a metaphorical component, and a thematic component. Some games' metaphorical components are basically transparent, and so tenuous that they are essentially to be ignored, but all games have them.

The mechanical component of a game are just the rules, stripped of any context and reduced to their mathematical roots. In the game of chess, the mechanics are the starting layout of the pieces, their respective movement and capture ability, the special cases regarding the possibility of a certain piece's capture, and the way that the players take turns.

It is difficult to even describe chess without using metaphor, as "move" and "capture" are both terms best explained by the metaphor. This is because a game's metaphorical component is the part that relates the rules of the game to the player in terms of concepts they already understand. The opposing sides of a chess game are depicted as warring armies or nations, with each piece given a rank and an appearance roughly relating to its power. This is especially apparent in the pawn and the king: "pawn" denotes expendability and straightforwardness, whereas the word "king" denotes importance, suggesting its role as the ultimate goal of the game. "Capture" is a term drawn from the assertion that the opposite sides are at war, and the limitations on the pieces' movement throughout the board is best understood by thinking of them as men that cannot walk through each other (except the knight - which can "jump" over them - another metaphor).

A game without mechanics would be a daydream, or the sort of things that children play when they aren't playing anything in particular - and even then the players are not free of such things as the basic laws of physics, or their inviolate precepts about the universe. A game without metaphor would be inconceivable, as humans use metaphor to comprehend everything, but my guess is that the closest that exists is a card game, since the original symbolism of the fifty-two card deck has mostly passed from us, or a modern sport.

That leaves the thematic component. A game's theme might best be described as the assertions the game makes about the world. Like the same term applied to literature, it can be nebulous at times, and is most apparent when the metaphor is very strong. Since games are used for learning, a common theme of a game is that strategies successful in the game will also be successful in life - at least in situations that resemble the game's metaphor. In an abstract game such as go, the player is invited to substitute his own metaphor, in a rather distinctively eastern manner.

What is the theme of chess? Since it's unlikely that the player will ever be waging a totally symmetrical war in which both opponents have perfect knowledge of the battle, its metaphor is obviously not the source of its theme. Rather, its themes relate to the strategic choices a chess player may make: an opponent can be manipulated with threats and traps; an advantage is worth at least as much a resource; you must anticipate the results of your actions. Not all games are so richly conceived, but any ancient children's game is certain to contain layers of practical lessons; such games have been used since prehistory to teach real lessons for physical and social survival. The thematic component of a game is, in fact, what allows games to be used to teach.

The modern video game tends to contain a rather generic or all-purpose set of mechanics for presenting either a (frequently cinematic) story, or a series of puzzles and challenges. In the former case, the metaphor is the storyline and the theme are its narrative themes; in the latter, the metaphor is the explanation provided for the functions of all the components (avatar included), and the theme is found in the problem-solving strategies that are most successful (which most likely have to do with heuristics or lateral thinking).

The capacity of a game to contain a theme is what elevates it, in my mind, to the status of art.