Comments on: An Economy of Rules (part 3)

By: Walter

Walter — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 20:07:36 +0000

Yes, and if the movie industry is any indication, there will simply be no way to drive out rule-based ideologies of production.

By: JP

JP — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 19:44:01 +0000

“The argument is that the purported rules of game design act to keep games, as a form of expression, from turning into some other form. The rules are conservative, they act to maintain games in a certain state. But different people have different perceptions about what games are, so while everyone is trying to preserve the game form, they are actually pulling the form into several directions.”
I see your point. Definitions and rules are indeed potentially dangerous things and can be created and wielded in the service of an agenda. That bothers me as a creator because I feel the only “correct” direction is Every Possible direction. Rules and axioms like that limit what is possible. Definitions are merely lenses through which we can view a subject, but those can also be proscriptive in a way that disregards valid avenues of study.
I’m coming to believe more and more that the central conflict in the study of games and game design is not the spectral “narratology VS ludology” but rather a constant and low-level lack of understanding between those who are studying games as they *could be* (academics, perhaps, and designers who want to push the boundaries of what is possible) and those who are studying games as they *should be* – as dictated by market forces. Like I said, some of the fondest advocates of “game design rules” just want a fool-proof formula with which they can make endless piles of blockbuster games.

By: Walter

Walter — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 17:35:42 +0000

I like some of the analysis here, but with regards to your larger project, I have to ask: who is actually proposing such a rule? Or at any rate, a rule as simple as “Nonlinear plots are better”? Iirc, Ed Fries was instrumental in installing greater nonlinearity of a sort in Crimson Skies, and I think other games, although it’s unclear to me that this was really motivated by an essentialist idea about what games are. And in general I’m not sure that this is the case, either. As JP noted, highly linear games are well explored, quite prolific, while the gaming masses are starting to feel the constraints of such design. It seems to me that market forces, in attempting to accomodate both a rising demand as well as differentiate product, would adopt a *mantra* that nonlinear plots are better, but not as a general rule of design.

By: Brandon

Brandon — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 16:49:56 +0000

Here I’m using “plot” as a convenient synonym for “story”, and using neither to talk about the user experience but rather the story embedded into the game. I know this is all part of the big messy debate about games and stories, but for the moment, on this blog, I’m ignoring the positions of that debate.
And I chose this rule largely because it is such a messy one. I think it is a structure rule because it deals with relationships between elements; the construction of those elements requires craft, but where those elements go in a larger framework is a structural process. I would include level design and game balance in structure as well, because although they require some crafting, they require more in the way of structuring, in looking at different arrangements and choosing the most interesting ones.
I have a larger argument which I am trying, hopefully, to outline with these essays. The argument is that the purported rules of game design act to keep games, as a form of expression, from turning into some other form. The rules are conservative, they act to maintain games in a certain state. But different people have different perceptions about what games are, so while everyone is trying to preserve the game form, they are actually pulling the form into several directions. When someone insists that this is what a game should be, that plots should be non-linear, they may end up with something that doesn’t classify well as a game.

By: JP

JP — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 12:11:38 +0000

“Proposed structure rule: Nonlinear plots are better.”
This rule is for designers who would rather throw in with a pat, sweeping absolute than acknowledge that games are an art medium where every creative choice can be made to work depending on the artist’s intentions and the context of the piece. I say that not to establish some sort of intellectual happy land where nobody is wrong, but to point out that the linear / non-linear spectrum (a very complex and hotly debated issue you have chosen for your discussion of rules – did you really intend to dive into this issue in earnest or keep the focus on the meta-issue of rules?) is one of preference rather than empirical truth. For this reason I’d say your rule is more of a craft rule than a structure rule (game design IS a craft, though it is often ignored or subsumed into programming and art content creation), and a flimsy one at that, tantamount to a Rule of Visual Design that reads “Too much red is bad”.
Intellectual curiosity might motivate us to say that strongly non-linear game structures are “better” (as strongly linear design is a very well-explored field while the most interesting frontiers of open-ended games are, most likely, still to come) but intellectual maturity would require that we view it in terms of costs and benefits. Anyone who advocates either perspective as the “proper” way to design a game is limiting their options and attempting to reduce an art to a craft – this happens all the time in the mainstream game industry though, where any creative decision that leads to fewer sales is a bad one and is rigorously codified as such.
Also, why the use of the word “plot”? Does that concept even apply here? Games only become stories when you talk about them in past tense, a game session that has already been played.