Rules of idiom
The rules of idiom are rules about the genre of a game. A game falls into a genre when it satisfies the idiomatic characteristics of that genre.
A Real Time Strategy (RTS) game might be described idiomatically in this way:
| 1) Activity takes place in "real time". |
| 2) The playfield is preexisting according to some set of parameters. |
| 3) The production of units (the pieces which the player or a computer can manipulate) requires the consumption of playfield resources. |
| 4) There is a set of direct dependancies which determine which units may be produced based on the current state. |
| 5) There is conflict between opposing sides. |
| 6) Combat between units of different types is non-symmetric. |
Here's the same table with the same rules defined as negative qualities:
| 1) Activity takes place in "real time" | Not turn based. |
| 2) The playfield is preexisting according to some set of parameters. | Playfield is not created during play, a la Carcassonne or Zombies! |
| 3) The production of units (the pieces which the player or a computer can manipulate) requires the consumption of playfield resources. | No predetermined allowance. |
| 4) There is a set of direct dependancies which determine which units may be produced based on the current state. | ? |
| 5) There is conflict between opposing sides. | Someone has to lose. |
| 6) Combat between units of different types is non-symmetric. | Outcomes are not random. |
Readers are welcome to quibble about the quality of my idioms, and whether or not these accurately describe both Starcraft and Rise of Nations.
As you can see, these rules tend to extend out from the merely idiomatic/lexicographic level of the object and into the structural level of the object's internal elements.
Note how the rules help to establish a set of terms: real time, playfield, units, resources, sides, conflict. This is the lexicographical power of idiom.
What makes these rules merely idiomatic, how do they structure the object differently from the structure rules? Idiom rules operate on the object as a whole, in relationship to other objects in the same genre. A game is an RTS game because it "fits in" with other RTS games. Genre is determined by exemplars, by the games which seem to best define that genre, and games fall into genres by analogy: this game is an RTS game because it is like that other game, which is an RTS game.
Some games are honest and direct clones of other games. This is often done for commercial reasons: if such and such a game was a commercial success, then we can make another game just like it and it should be just as successful. What distinguishes the games that result from this kind of production are their relative qualities of structure, craft, and surface.
If you view a set of idioms as a set of semantic relationships, where the meaning of things like "resources" and "rush" and "technology tree" are understood because they carry their meanings into new games from previous genre games, then it becomes pretty clear why the market strategy above is useful: people know what games they enjoy, and if a new game appears tobe analogous to a previous game, people will be more inclined to buy it. This suggests that the rules of idiom exist mainly to perpetuate themselves — a conservative purpose.
It shouldn't be too surprising that such a conservative effort centers itself on the level of semantics; meaning has to be shared to be meaningful, and historic meanings are seen to be the most widely known. To keep things "the same", the best strategy is to lock down your idioms.
When idiom is presented as solid bedrock, it is somewhat natural to approach game design as just another engineering problem. Idiom-as-bedrock gives you a solid foundation for building, a place to lay down your structures, exercise your craft, and detail the surface. Engineering is a creative endeavor, in so much that it deals with solving problems on the structural level.
Engineering doesn't address the creation of idiom, however. The creation of idiom is the making of meaning, and this meaning is one that is penetrated by external, cultural forces. Here I'm stuck with overloaded terms: designer, architect, author. This is the role played by someone who reconstructs the idiom, the person who adds and substracts and exchanges the terms of the game.
The designer/author is still limited in their power by the form they have submitted to. To write a computer game is to write a computer game, and not to write a novel. The computer game is a form, one with many idioms, but the action of computer games takes place in the same space, on the computer screen, with a keyboard and a mouse and a network connection.
(continued ...)
Posted by B Rickman at April 5, 2004 01:25 PM | TrackBack