I Have No Words & I Must Design

This article was published in 1994 in Interactive Fantasy #2, a British
roleplaying journal. Page down to read, or click on the links below to jump
to a particular section.

Click here for this article in Japanese.

   * What Is a Game, Anyhow?
        o It's Not a Puzzle
        o It's Not a Toy
        o It's Not a Story
        o It Demands Participation
   * So What Is a Game?
        o Decision Making
        o Goals
        o Opposition
        o Managing Resources
        o Game Tokens
        o Information
   * Other Things That Strengthen Games
        o Diplomacy
        o Color
        o Simulation
        o Variety of Encounter
        o Position Identification
        o Roleplaying
        o Socializing
        o Narrative Tension
   * They're All Alike Under the Dice.

There's a lotta different kinds of games out there. A helluva lot.
Cart-based, computer, CD-ROM, network, arcade, PBM, PBEM, mass-market
adult, wargames, card games, tabletop RPGs, LARPs, freeforms. And, hell,
don't forget paintball, virtual reality, sports, and the horses. It's all
gaming.

But do these things have anything at all in common? What is a game? And how
can you tell a good one from a bad one?

Well, we can all do the latter: "Good game, Joe," you say, as you leap the
net. Or put away the counters. Or reluctantly hand over your Earth
Elemental card. Or divvy up the treasure. But that's no better than saying,
"Good book," as you turn the last page. It may be true, but it doesn't help
you write a better one.

As game designers, we need a way to analyze games, to try to understand
them, and to understand what works and what makes them interesting.

We need a critical language. And since this is basically a new form,
despite its tremendous growth and staggering diversity, we need to invent
one.

What Is a Game, Anyhow?

It's Not a Puzzle.

In The Art of Computer Game Design, Chris Crawford contrasts what he call
"games" with "puzzles." Puzzles are static; they present the "player" with
a logic structure to be solved with the assistance of clues. "Games," by
contrast, are not static, but change with the player's actions.

Some puzzles are obviously so; no one would call a crossword a "game." But,
according to Crawford, some "games" a really just puzzles -- Lebling &
Blank's Zork, for instance. The game's sole objective is the solution of
puzzles: finding objects and using them in particular ways to cause desired
changes in the game-state. There is no opposition, there is no roleplaying,
and there are no resources to manage; victory is solely a consequence of
puzzle solving.

To be sure, Zork is not entirely static; the character moves from setting
to setting, allowable actions vary by setting, and inventory changes with
action. We must think of a continuum, rather than a dichotomy; if a
crossword is 100% puzzle, Zork is 90% puzzle and 10% game.

Almost every game has some degree of puzzle-solving; even a pure military
strategy game requires players to, e.g., solve the puzzle of making an
optimum attack at this point with these units. To eliminate puzzle-solving
entirely, you need a game that's almost entirely exploration: Just Grandma
and Me, a CD-ROM interactive storybook with game-like elements of
decision-making and exploration, is a good example. Clicking on screen
objects causes entertaining sounds and animations, but there's nothing to
'solve,' in fact, no strategy whatsoever.

A puzzle is static. A game is interactive.

It's Not a Toy.

According to Will Wright, his Sim City is not a game at all, but a toy.
Wright offers a ball as an illuminating comparison: It offers many
interesting behaviors, which you may explore. You can bounce it, twirl it,
throw it, dribble it. And, if you wish, you may use it in a game: soccer,
or basketball, or whatever. But the game is not intrinsic in the toy; it is
a set of player-defined objectives overlaid on the toy.

Just so Sim City. Like many computer games, it creates a world which the
player may manipulate, but unlike a real game, it provides no objective.
Oh, you may choose one: to see if you can build a city without slums,
perhaps. But Sim City itself has no victory conditions, no goals; it is a
software toy.

A toy is interactive. But a game has goals.

It's Not a Story.

Again and again, we hear about story. Interactive literature. Creating a
story through roleplay. The idea that games have something to do with
stories has such a hold on designers' imagination that it probably can't be
expunged. It deserves at least to be challenged.

Stories are inherently linear. However much characters may agonize over the
decisions they make, they make them the same way every time we reread the
story, and the outcome is always the same. Indeed, this is a strength; the
author chose precisely those characters, those events, those decisions, and
that outcome, because it made for the strongest story. If the characters
did something else, the story wouldn't be as interesting.

Games are inherently non-linear. They depend on decision making. Decisions
have to pose real, plausible alternatives, or they aren't real decisions.
It must be entirely reasonable for a player to make a decision one way in
one game, and a different way in the next. To the degree that you make a
game more like a story -- more linear, fewer real options -- you make it
less like a game.

Consider: you buy a book, or see a movie, because it has a great story. But
how would you react if your gamemaster were to tell you, "I don't want you
players to do that, because it will ruin the story"? He may well be right,
but that's beside the point. Gaming is NOT about telling stories.

That said, games often, and fruitfully, borrow elements of fiction.
Roleplaying games depend on characters; computer adventures and LARPs are
often drive by plots. The notion of increasing narrative tension is a
useful one for any game that comes to a definite conclusion. But to try to
hew too closely to a storyline is to limit players' freedom of action and
their ability to make meaningful decisions.

The hypertext fiction movement is interesting, here. Hypertext is
inherently non-linear, so that the traditional narrative is wholly
inappropriate to hypertext work. Writers of hypertext fiction are trying to
explore the nature of human existence, as does the traditional story, but
in a way that permits multiple viewpoints, temporal leaps, and reader
construction of the experience. Something -- more than hypertext writers
know -- is shared with game design here, and something with traditional
narrative; but if hypertext fiction ever becomes artistically successful
(nothing I've read is), it will be through the creation of a new narrative
form, something that we will be hard-pressed to call "story."

Stories are linear. Games are not.

It Demands Participation.

In a traditional artform, the audience is passive. When you look at a
painting, you may imagine things in it, you may see something other than
what the artist intended, but your role in constructing the experience is
slight: The artist painted. You see. You are passive.

When you go to the movies, or watch TV, or visit the theater, you sit and
watch and listen. Again, you do interpret, to a degree; but you are the
audience. You are passive. The art is created by others.

When you read a book, most of it goes on in your head, and not on the page;
but still. You're receiving the author's words. You're passive.

It's all too, too autocratic: the mighty artist condescends to share his
genius with lesser mortals. How can it be that, two hundred years after the
Revolution, we still have such aristocratic forms? Surely we need forms in
spirit with the times; forms which permit the common man to create his own
artistic experience.

Enter the game. Games provide a set of rules; but the players use them to
create their own consequences. It's something like the music of John Cage:
he wrote themes about which the musicians were expected to improvise. Games
are like that; the designer provides the theme, the players the music.

A democratic artform for a democratic age.

Traditional artforms play to a passive audience. Games require active
participation.

So What Is a Game?

A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make
decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit
of a goal.

Decision Making

I offer this term in an effort to destroy the inane, and overhyped, word
"interactive." The future, we are told, will be interactive. You might as
well say, "The future will be fnurglewitz." It would be about as
enlightening.

A light switch is interactive. You flick it up, the light turns on. You
flick it down, the light turns off. That's interaction. But it's not a lot
of fun.

All games are interactive: The game state changes with the players'
actions. If it didn't, it wouldn't be a game: It would be a puzzle.

But interaction has no value in itself. Interaction must have purpose.

Suppose we have a product that's interactive. At some point, you are faced
with a choice: You may choose to do A, or to do B.

But what makes A better than B? Or is B better than A at some times but not
at others? What factors go into the decision? What resources are to be
managed? What's the eventual goal?

Aha! Now we're not talking about "interaction." Now we're talking about
decision making.

The thing that makes a game a game is the need to make decisions. Consider
Chess: it has few of the aspects that make games appealing -- no simulation
elements, no roleplaying, and damn little color. What it's got is the need
to make decisions. The rules are tightly constrained, the objectives clear,
and victory requires you to think several moves ahead. Excellence in
decision making is what brings success.

What does a player do in any game? Some things depend on the medium. In
some games, he rolls dice. In some games, he chats with his friends. In
some games, he whacks at a keyboard. But in every game, he makes decisions.

At every point, he considers the game state. That might be what he sees on
the screen. Or it might be what the gamemaster has just told him. Or it
might be the arrangement on the pieces on the board. Then, he considers his
objectives, and the game tokens and resources available to him. And he
considers his opposition, the forces he must struggle against. He tries to
decide on the best course of action.

And he makes a decision.

What's key here? Goals. Opposition. Resource management. Information. Well
talk about them in half a mo.

What decisions do players make in this game?

Goals

Sim City has no goals. Is it not a game?

No, as it's own designer willingly maintains. It is a toy.

And the only way to stay interested in it for very long is to turn it into
a game -- by setting goals, by defining objectives for yourself. Build the
grandest possible megalopolis; maximize how much your people love you;
build a city that relies solely on mass transit. Whatever goal you've
chosen, you've turned it into a game.

Even so, the software doesn't support your goal. It wasn't designed with
your goal in mind. And trying to do something with a piece of software that
it wasn't intended to do can be awfully frustrating.

Since there's no goal, Sim City soon palls. By contrast, Sid Meier and
Bruce Shelley's Civilization, an obviously derivative product, has explicit
goals -- and is far more involving and addictive.

"But what about roleplaying games?" you may say. "They have no victory
conditions."

No victory conditions, true. But certainly they have goals; lots of them,
you get to pick. Rack up the old experience points. Or fulfill the quest
your friendly GM has just inflicted on you. Or rebuild the Imperium and
stave off civilization's final collapse. Or strive toward spiritual
perfection. Whatever.

If, for some reason, your player characters don't have a goal, they'll find
one right quick. Otherwise, they'll have nothing better to do but sit
around the tavern and grouse about how boring the game is. Until you get
pissed off and have a bunch of orcs show up and try to beat their heads in.

Hey, now they've got a goal. Personal survival is a good goal. One of the
best.

If you have no goal, your decisions are meaningless. Choice A is as good as
Choice B; pick a card, any card. Who cares? What does it matter?

For it to matter, for the game to be meaningful, you need something to
strive toward. You need goals.

What are the players' goals? Can the game support a variety of different
goals? What facilities exist to allow players to strive toward their
various goals?

Opposition

Oh, say the politically correct. Those bad, icky games. They're so
competitive. Why can't we have cooperative games?

"Cooperative games" generally seem to be variants of "let's all throw a
ball around." Oh golly, how fascinating, I'll stop playing Mortal Kombat
for that, you betcha.

But are we really talking about competition?

Yes and no; many players do get a kick out of beating others with their
naked minds alone, which is at least better than naked fists. Chess players
are particularly obnoxious in this regard. But the real interest is in
struggling toward a goal.

The most important word in that sentence is: struggling.

Here's a game. It's called Plucky Little England, and it simulates the
situation faced by the United Kingdom after the fall of France in World War
II. Your goal: preserve liberty and democracy and defeat the forces of
darkness and oppression. You have a choice: A. Surrender. B. Spit in
Hitler's eye! Rule Britannia! England never never never shall be slaves!

You chose B? Congratulations! You won!

Now, wasn't that satisfying? Ah, the thrill of victory.

There is no thrill of victory, of course; it was all too easy, wasn't it?
There wasn't any struggle.

In a two-player, head-to-head game, your opponent is the opposition, your
struggle against him; the game is direct competition. And this is a
first-rate way of providing opposition. Nothing is as sneaky and as hard to
overcome as a determined human opponent. But direct competition isn't the
only way to do it.

Think of fiction. The ur-story, the Standard Model Narrative, works like
this: character A has a goal. He faces obstacles B, C, D, and E. He
struggles with each, in turn, growing as a person as he does. Ultimately,
he overcomes the last and greatest obstacle.

Do these obstacles all need to be The Villain, The Bad Guy, The Opponent,
The Foe? No, though a good villain makes for a first rate obstacle. The
forces of nature, cantankerous mothers-in-law, crashing hard-drives, and
the hero's own feelings of inadequacy can make for good obstacles, too.

Just so in games.

In most RPGs, the "opposition" consists of non-player characters, and you
are expected to cooperate with your fellow players. In many computer games,
the "opposition" consists of puzzles you must solve. In LARPs, the
"opposition" is often the sheer difficulty of finding the player who has
the clue or the widget or the special power you need. In most solitaire
games, your "opposition" is really a random element, or a set of
semi-random algorithms you are pitted against.

Whatever goals you set your players, you must make the players work to
achieve their goals. Setting them against each other is one way to do that,
but not the only one. And even when a player has an opponent, putting other
obstacles in the game can increase its richness and emotional appeal.

The desire for "cooperative games" is the desire for an end to strife. But
there can be none. Life is the struggle for survival and growth. There is
no end to strife, not this side of the grave. A game without struggle is a
game that's dead.

What provides opposition? What makes the game a struggle?

Managing Resources

Trivial decisions aren't any fun. Remember Plucky Little England?

There wasn't any real decision, was there?

Or consider Robert Harris's Talisman. Each turn, you roll the die. The
result is the number of spaces you can move. You may move to the left, or
to the right, around the track.

Well, this is a little better than a traditional track game; I've got a
choice. But 99 times out of a 100, either there's no difference between the
two spaces, or one is obviously better than the other. The choice is bogus.

The way to make choices meaningful is to give players resources to manage.
"Resources" can be anything: Panzer divisions. Supply points. Cards.
Experience points. Knowledge of spells. Ownership of fiefs. The love of a
good woman. Favors from the boss. The good will of an NPC. Money. Food.
Sex. Fame. Information.

If the game has more than one 'resource,' decisions suddenly become more
complex. If I do this, I get money and experience, but will Lisa still love
me? If I steal the food, I get to eat, but I might get caught and have my
hand cut off. If I declare against the Valois, Edward Plantagenet will
grant me the Duchy of Gascony, but the Pope may excommunicate me,
imperilling my immortal soul.

These are not just complex decisions; these are interesting ones.
Interesting decisions make for interesting games.

The resources in question have to have a game role; if 'your immortal soul'
has no meaning, neither does excommunication. (Unless it reduces the
loyalty of your peasants, or makes it difficult to recruit armies, or...
but these are game roles, n'est-ce pas?) Ultimately, 'managing resources'
means managing game elements in pursuit of your goal. A 'resource' that has
no game role has nothing to contribute to success or failure, and is
ultimately void.

What resources does the player manage? Is there enough diversity in them to
require tradeoffs in making decisions? Do they make those decisions
interesting?

Game Tokens

You effect actions in the game through your game tokens. A game token is
any entity you may manipulate directly.

In a boardgame, it is your pieces. In a cardgame, it is your cards. In a
roleplaying game, it is your character. In a sports game, it is you
yourself.

What is the difference between "resources" and "tokens?" Resources are
things you must manage efficiently to achieve your goals; tokens are your
means of managing them. In a board wargame, combat strength is a resource;
your counters are tokens. In a roleplaying game, money is a resource; you
use it through your character.

Why is this important? Because if you don't have game tokens, you wind up
with a system that operates without much player input. Will Wright and Fred
Haslam's Sim Earth is a good example. In Sim Earth, you set some
parameters, and sit back to watch the game play out itself. You've got very
little to do, no tokens to manipulate, no resources to manage. Just a few
parameters to twiddle with. This is mildly interesting, but not very.

To give a player a sense that he controls his destiny, that he is playing a
game, you need game tokens. The fewer the tokens, the more detailed they
must be; it is no cooincidence that roleplaying games, which give the
player a single token, also have exceptionally detailed rules for what that
token can do.

What are the players' tokens? What are these tokens' abilities? What
resources do they use? What makes them interesting?

Information

I've had more than one conversation with a computer game designer in which
he tells me about all the fascinating things his game simulates -- while I
sit there saying, "Really? What do you know. I didn't realize that."

Say you've got a computer wargame in which weather affects movement and
defense. If you don't tell the player that weather has an effect, what good
is it? It won't affect the player's behavior; it won't affect his
decisions.

Or maybe you tell him weather has an effect, but the player has no way of
telling whether it's raining or snowing or what at any given time. Again,
what good is that?

Or maybe he can tell, and he does know, but he has no idea what effect
weather has -- maybe it cuts everyone's movement in half, or maybe it slows
movement across fields to a crawl but does nothing to units moving along
roads. This is better, but not a whole lot.

The interface must provide the player with relevant information. And he
must have enough information to be able to make a sensible decision.

That isn't to say a player must know everything; hiding information can be
very useful. It's quite reasonable to say, "you don't know just how strong
your units are until they enter combat," but in this case, the player must
have some idea of the range of possibilities. It's reasonable to say, "you
don't know what card you'll get if you draw to an inside straight," but
only if the player has some idea what the odds are. If I might draw the
Queen of Hearts and might draw Death and might draw the Battleship
Potemkin, I have absoutely no basis on which to make a decision.

More than that, the interface must not provide too much information,
especially in a time-dependent game. If weather, supply state, the mood of
my commanders, the fatigue of the troops, and what Tokyo Rose said on the
radio last night can all affect the outcome of my next decision, and I have
to decide some time in the next five seconds, and it would take me five
minutes to find all the relevant information by pulling down menus and
looking at screens, the information is still irrelevant. I may have access
to it, but I can't reasonably act on it.

Or let's talk about computer adventures; they often display information
failure. "Oh, to get through the Gate of Thanatos, you need a hatpin to
pick the lock. You can find the hatpin on the floor of the Library. It's
about three pixels by two pixels, and you can see it, if your vision is
good, between the twelfth and thirteenth floorboards, about three inches
from the top of the screen. What, you missed it?"

Yeah, I missed it. In an adventure, it shouldn't be ridiculously difficult
to find what you need, nor should victory be impossible just because you
made a wrong decision three hours and thirty-eight decision points ago. Nor
should the solutions to puzzles be arbitrary or absurd.

Or consider freeforms. In a freeform, a player is often given a goal, and
achieving it requires him to find out several things -- call them Facts A,
B, and C. The freeform's designer had better make damn sure that A, B, and
C are out there somewhere -- known to other characters, or on a card that's
circulating in the game -- whatever, they have to be there. Otherwise, the
player has no chance of achieving his goal, and that's no fun.

Given the decisions players are required to make, what information do they
need? Does the game provide the information as and when needed? Will
reasonable players be able to figure out what information they need, and
how to find it?

Other Things That Strengthen Games

Diplomacy

Achieving a goal is meaningless if it comes without work, if there is no
opposition; but that doesn't mean all decisions must be zero-sum. Whenever
multiple players are involved, games are strengthened if they permit, and
encourage, diplomacy.

Games permit diplomacy if players can assist each other -- perhaps
directly, perhaps by combining against a mutual foe. Not all multiplayer
games do this; in Charles B. Darrow╒sMonopoly, for instance, there's no
effective way either to help or hinder anyone else. There's no point in
saying, "Let's all get Joe," or "Here, you're a novice, I'll help you out,
you can scratch my back later," because there's no way to do it.

Some games permit diplomacy, but not much. In Lawrence Harris's Axis &
Allies, players can help each other to a limited degree, but everyone is
permanently Axis or permanently Allied, so diplomacy is never a key element
to the game.

One way to encourage diplomacy is by providing non-exclusive goals. If
you're looking for the Ark of the Covenant, and I want to kill Nazis, and
the Nazis have got the Ark, we can work something out. Maybe our alliance
will end when the French Resistance gets the Ark, and we wind up on
opposite sides, but actually, such twists are what make games fun.

But games can encourage diplomacy even when players are directly opposed.
The diplomatic game par excellence is, of course, Calhammer's Diplomacy, in
which victory more often goes to the best diplomat than to the best
strategist. The key to the game is the Support order, which allows one
player's armies to assist another in an attack, encouraging alliance.

Alliances never last, to be sure; Russia and Austria may ally to wipe out
Turkey, but only one of them can win. Eventually, one will stab the other
in the back.

Fine. It's the need to find allies, retain them, and persuade your enemies
to change their stripes that makes sure you'll keep on talking. If
alliances get set in stone, diplomacy comes to an end.

Computer games are almost inherently solitaire, and to the degree they
permit diplomacy with NPC computer opponents, they generally don't make it
interesting. Network games are, or ought to be, inherently diplomatic; and
as network games become more prevalent, we can expect most developers from
the computer design community to miss this point entirely. As an example,
when the planners of interactive TV networks talk about games, they almost
exclusively talk about the possibility of downloading cart-based (Nintendo,
Sega) games over cable. They're doing so for a business reason: billions
are spent annually on cart-based games, and they'd like a piece of the
action. They don't seem to realize that networks permit a wholly different
kind of gaming, which has the potential to make billions in its own right
-- and that this is the real business opportunity.

How can players help or hinder each other? What incentives do they have to
do so? What resources can they trade?

Color

Monopoly is a game about real estate development. Right?

Well, no, obviously not. A real estate developer would laugh at the notion.
A game about real estate development needs rules for construction loans and
real estate syndication and union work rules and the bribery of municipal
inspectors. Monopoly has nothing to do with real estate development. You
could take the same rules and change the board and pieces and cards and
make it into a game about space exploration, say. Except that your game
would have as much to do with space exploration as Monopoly has to do with
real estate development.

Monopoly isn't really about anything. But it has the color of a real estate
game: named properties, little plastic houses and hotels, play money. And
that's a big part of its appeal.

Color counts for a lot: as a simulation of World War II, Lawrence Harris's
Axis & Allies is a pathetic effort. Ah, but the color! Millions of little
plastic airplanes and battleships and tanks! Thundering dice! The world at
war! The game works almost solely because of its color.

Or consider Chadwick's Space 1899. The rules do nothing to evoke the
Burroughsian wonders, the pulp action thrills, the Kiplingesque Victorian
charms to be gained from the game's setting. Despite a clean system and a
detailed world, it is curiously colorless, and suffers for it.

Pageantry and detail and sense of place can greatly add to a game's
emotional appeal.

This has almost nothing to do with the game qua game; the original Nova
edition of Axis & Allies was virtually identical to the Milton Bradley
edition. Except that it had a godawful garish paper map, some of the
ugliest counters I've ever seen, and a truly amateurish box. I looked at it
once, put it away, and never looked at it again.

Yet the Milton Bradley edition, with all the little plastic pieces, still
gets pulled out now and again... Same game. Far better color.

How does the game evoke the ethos and atmosphere and pageantry of its
setting? What can you do to make it more colorful?

Simulation

Many games simulate nothing. The oriental folk-game Go, say; little stones
on a grid. It's abstract to perfection. Or John Horton Conway's Life;
despite the evocative name, it's merely an exploration of a mathematical
space.

Nothing wrong with that. But.

But color adds to a game's appeal. And simulation is a way of providing
color.

Suppose I think, for some reason, that a game on Waterloo would have great
commercial appeal. I could, if I wanted, take Monopoly, change "Park Place"
to "Quatre Bras" and the hotels to plastic soldiers, and call it Waterloo.
It would work.

But wouldn't it be better to simulate the battle? To have little battalions
maneuvering over the field? To hear the thunder of guns?

Or take Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, which I designed. I could have
taken Gygax & Arneson's Dungeons & Dragons and changed it around, calling
swords blasters and the like. But instead, I set out to simulate the
movies, to encourage the players to attempt far-fetched cinematic stunts,
to use the system itself to reflect something about the atmosphere and
ethos of the films.

Simulation has other value, too. For one, it improves character
identification. A Waterloo based on Monopoly would do nothing to make
players think like Wellington and Napoleon; Kevin Zucker's Napoleon's Last
Battles does much better, forcing players to think about the strategic
problems those men faced.

And it can allow insight into a situation that mere narrative cannot. It
allows players to explore different outcomes -- in the fashion of a
software toy -- and thereby come to a gut understanding of the simulation's
subject. Having played at least a dozen different games on Waterloo, I
understand the battle, and why things happened the way they did, and the
nature of Napoleonic warfare, far better than if I had merely read a dozen
books on the subject.

Simulating something almost always is more complicated that simply
exploiting a theme for color. And it is not, therefore, for every game. But
when the technique is used, it can be quite powerful.

How can elements of simulation strengthen the game?

Variety of Encounter

"You just got lucky."

Words of contempt; you won through the vagaries of chance. A game that
permits this is obviously inferior to ones where victory goes to the
skilled and smart and strong. Right?

Not necessarily.

"Random elements" in a game are never wholly random. They are random within
a range of possibilities. When, in a board wargame, I make an attack, I can
look at the Combat Results Table. I know what outcomes are possible, and my
chances of achieving what I want to achieve. I take a calculated risk. And
over the whole game, I make dozens or hundreds of die-rolls; given so much
reliance on randomness, the "random element" regresses to a mean. Except in
rare cases, my victory or defeat will be based on my excellence as a
strategist, not on my luck with the dice.

Randomness can be useful. It's one way of providing variety of encounter.

And what does that mean?

It means that the same old thing all over again is fucking boring. It means
that players like to encounter the unexpected. It means that the game has
to allow lots of different things to happen, so there's always something a
little different for the players to encounter.

In a game like Chess, that "something different" is the ever-changing
implications of the positions of the pieces. In a game like Richard
Garfield's Magic: The Gathering, it's the sheer variety of cards, and the
random order in which they appear, and the interesting ways in which they
can be combined. In Arneson & Gygax's Dungeons & Dragons, it's the
staggering variety of monsters, spells, etc., etc., coupled with the
gamemaster's ingenuity in throwing new situations at his players.

If a game has inadequate variety, it rapidly palls. That's why no one plays
graphic adventures more than once; there's enough variety for a single
game, but it's the same thing all over again the next time you play. That's
why Patience, the solitaire cardgame, becomes dull pretty fast; you're
doing the same things over and over, and reshuffling the cards isn't enough
to rekindle your interest, after a time.

What things do the players encounter in this game? Are there enough things
for them to explore and discover? What provides variety? How can we
increase the variety of encounter?

Position Identification

"Character identification" is a common theme of fiction. Writers want
readers to like their protagonists, to identify with them, to care what
happens to them. Character identification lends emotional power to a story.

The same is true in games. To the degree you encourage playes to care about
"the side," to identify with their position in the game, you increase the
game's emotional impact.

The extreme case is sports; in sports, your "position" is you. You're out
there on the baseball diamond, and winning or losing matters, and you feel
it deeply when you strike out, or smash the ball out of the park. It's
important to you.

So important that fistfights and bitter words are not uncommon, in every
sport. So important that we've invented a whole cultural tradition of
"sportsmanship" to try to prevent these unpleasant feelings from coming to
the fore.

Roleplaying games are one step abstracted; your character isn't you, but
you invest a lot of time and energy in it. It's your sole token and the sum
total of your position in the game. Bitter words, and even fistfights, are
not unknown among roleplayers, though rather rarer than in sports.

Getting players to identify with their game position is straightforward
when a player has a single token; it's harder when he controls many. Few
people feel much sadness at the loss of a knight in Chess or an infantry
division in a wargame. But even here, a game's emotional power is improved
if the player can be made to feel identification with "the side."

One way to do that is to make clear the player's point of view. Point of
view confusion is a common failing of boardgame designers. For instance,
Richard Berg's Campaigns for North Africa claims to be an extraordinary
realistic simulation of the Axis campaign in Africa. Yet you, as player,
spend a great deal of time worrying about the locations of individual
pilots and how much water is available to individual batallions. Rommel's
staff might worry about such things, but Rommel assuredly did not. Who are
you supposed to be? The accuracy of the simulation is, in a sense,
undermined, not supported, by the level of detail.

What can you do to make the player care about his position? Is there a
single game token that's more important than others to the player, and what
can be done to strengthen identification with it? If not, what is the
overall emotional appeal of the position, and what can be done to
strengthen that appeal? Who "is" the player in the game? What is his point
of view?

Roleplaying

HeroQuest has been termed a "roleplaying boardgame." And, as in a
roleplaying game, each player controls a single character which, in
HeroQuest's case, is a single plastic figure on the board. If you are a
single character, are you not "playing a role?" And is the characterization
of this game as a "roleplaying" game therefore justified?

No, to both questions.

The questions belie confusion between "position identification" and
"roleplaying." I may identify closely with a game token without feeling
that I am playing a role.

Roleplaying occurs when, in some sense, you take on the persona of your
position. Different players, and different games, may do this in different
ways: perhaps you try to speak in the language and rhythm of your
character. Perhaps you talk as if you are feeling the emotions your
character talks. Perhaps you talk as you normally do, but you give serious
consideration to "what my character would do in this case" as opposed to
"what I want to do next."

Roleplaying is most common in, naturally, roleplaying games. But it can
occur in other environments, as well; I, for one, can't get through a game
of Vincent Tsao's Junta without talking in a phony Spanish accent somewhere
along the line. The game makes me think enough like a big man in a corrupt
banana republic that I start to play the role.

Roleplaying is a powerful technique for a whole slew of reasons. It
improves position identification; if you think like your character, you're
identifying with him closely. It improves the game's color, because the
players become partly responsible for maintaining the willing suspense of
disbelief, the feeling that the game world is alive and colorful and
consistent. And it is an excellent method of socialization.

Indeed, the connection with socialization is key: roleplaying is a form of
performance. In a roleplaying game, roleplayers perform for the amusement
of their friends. If there aren't any friends, there's no point to it.

Which is why "computer roleplaying games", so-called, are nothing of the
kind. They have no more connection with roleplaying than does HeroQuest.
That is, they have the trappings of roleplaying: characters, equipment,
stories. But there is no mechanism for players to ham it up, to
characterize themselves by their actions, to roleplay in any meaningful
sense.

This is intrinsic in the technology. Computer games are solitaire;
solitaire gamers have, by definition, no audience. Therefore, computer
games cannot involve roleplaying.

Add a network, and you can have a roleplaying game. Hence the popularity of
MUDs.

How can players be induced to roleplay? What sorts of roles does the system
permit or encourage?

Socializing

Historically, games have mainly been used as a way to socialize. For
players of Bridge, Poker, and Charades, the game is secondary to the
socialization that goes on over the table.

One oddity of the present is that the most commercially successful games
are all solitary in nature: cart games, disk-based computer games, CD- ROM
games. Once upon a time, our image of gamers was some people sitting around
a table and playing cards; now, it's a solitary adolescent, twitching a
joystick before a flickering screen.

Yet, at the same time, we see the development of roleplaying, in both
tabletop and live-action form, which depend utterly on socialization. And
we see that the most successful mass-market boardgames, like Trivial
Pursuit and Pictionary are played almost exclusively in social settings.

I have to believe that the solitary nature of most computer games is a
temporary aberration, a consequence of the technology, and that as networks
spread and their bandwidth increases, the historical norm will reassert
itself.

When designing any game, it is worthwhile to think about the game's social
uses, and how the system encourages or discourages socialization. For
instance, almost every network has online versions of classic games like
poker and bridge. And in almost every case, those games have failed to
attract much useage.

The exception: America Online, which permits real-time chat between
players. Their version of network bridge allows for table talk. And it has
been quite popular.

Or as another example, many tabletop roleplaying games spend far too much
effort worrying about "realism" and far too little about the game's use by
players. Of what use is a combat system that is extraordinarily realistic,
if playing out a single combat round takes fifteen minutes, and a whole
battle takes four hours? They're not spending their time socializing and
talking and hamming it up; they're spending time rolling dice and looking
things up on charts. What's the point in that?

How can the game better encourage socialization?

Narrative Tension

Nebula-award winning author Pat Murphy says that the key element of plot is
"rising tension." That is, a story should become more gripping as it
proceeds, until its ultimate climactic resolution.

Suppose you're a Yankees fan. Of course, you want to see the Yankees win.
But if you go to a game at the ballpark, do you really want to see them
develop a 7 point lead in the first inning and wind up winning 21 to 2?
Yes, you want them to win, but this doesn't make for a very interesting
game. What would make you rise from your seat in excitement and joy is to
see them pull out from behind in the last few seconds of the game with a
smash homerun with bases loaded. Tension makes for fun games.

Ideally, a game should be tense all the way through, but especially so at
the end. The toughest problems, the greatest obstacles, should be saved for
last. You can't always ensure this, especially in directly-competitive
games: a chess game between a grandmaster and a rank beginner is not going
to involve much tension. But, especially in solitaire computer games, it
should be possible to ensure that every stage of the game involves a set of
challenges, and that the player's job is done only at the end.

In fact, one of the most common game failures is anticlimax. The period of
maximum tension is not the resolution, but somewhere mid-way through the
game. After a while, the opposition is on the run, or the player's position
is unassailable. In most cases, this is because the designer never
considered the need for narrative tension.

What can be done to make the game tense?

They're All Alike Under the Dice. Or Phosphors. Or What Have You.

We're now equipped to answer the questions I posed at the beginning of this
article.

Do all the myriad forms of gaming have anything in common? Most assuredly.
All involve decision making, managing resources in pursuit of a goal;
that's true whether we're talking about Chess or Seventh Guest, Mario
Brothers or Vampire, Roulette or Magic: The Gathering. It's a universal;
it's what defines a game.

How can you tell a good game from a bad one? The test is still in the
playing; but we now have some terms to use to analyze a game's appeal.
Chess involves complex and difficult decisions; Magic has enormous variety
of encounter; Roulette has an extremely compelling goal (money--the real
stuff). More detailed analysis is possible, to be sure, and is left as an
exercise for the reader.

Is the analytical theory presented here hermetic and complete? Assuredly
not; there are games that defy many, though not all, of its conclusions
(e.g., Candyland, which inolves no decision making whatsoever). And no
doubt there are aspects to the appeal of games it overlooks.

It is to be considered a work in progress: a first stab at codifying the
intellectual analysis of the art of game design. Others are welcome, even
encouraged, to build on its structure -- or to propound alternative
theories in its defiance.

If we are to produce works worthy to be termed "art," we must start to
think about what it takes to do so, to set ourselves goals beyond the
merely commercial. For we are embarked on a voyage of revolutionary import:
the democrative transformation of the arts. Properly addressed, the voyage
will lend granduer to our civilization; improperly, it will create merely
another mediocrity of the TV age, another form wholly devoid of
intellectual merit.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

The author wishes to acknowledge the contributions of Chris Crawford, Will
Wright, Eric Goldberg, Ken Rolston, Doug Kaufman, Jim Dunnigan, Tappan
King, Sandy Peterson, and Walt Freitag, whose ideas he has liberally
stolen.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Orthographical Note: In normal practice, the names of traditional games,
e.g., chess, go, poker, are uncapitalized, as is usual with common nouns.
The names of proprietary games are written with Initial Caps. This usage is
inconsistent with the thesis that games are an artform, and that each game,
regardless of its origins, must be viewed as an ouevre. I capitalize all
game names, throughout the article.

We capitalize Beowulf, though it is the product of folk tradition rather
than a definite author, just as we capitalize One Hundred Years of
Solitude. In the same fashion, I capitalize Chess, though it is the product
of folk tradition rather than a definite designer, just as I capitalize
Dungeons & Dragons. It may seem odd, at first, to see Chess treated as a
title, but I have done so for particular reasons.

I have also, whenever possible, attempted to mention a game's designer upon
its first mention. When I have omitted a name, it is because I do not know
it.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
⌐ Copyright 1994 by Greg Costikyan. All Rights Reserved. Comments may be
directed to costik@costik.com . For more information about Interactive
Fantasy, contact journal@aslan.demon.co.uk or write Hogshead Publishing
Ltd., 29a Abbeville Rd,
London, SW4 9LA.

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