Today on approachable theory we’re talking about meta accessibility tools, and we’re going to start by breaking down what I mean by that term. Read more!
Today on approachable theory we’re talking about meta accessibility tools, and we’re going to start by breaking down what I mean by that term.
Continue reading “approachable theory: Meta Accessibility Tools”Genres always have soft edges, and any given work may fit into multiple genres (e.g., NYPD Blue is a drama, a police procedural, and arguably a modern noir, but it is not a crime thriller in the way that fellow police procedural Law & Order: Criminal Intent is). Games aren’t well defined by the genres we use for fixed fiction (because games are not fixed in that way, and are not experienced the way we experience books or movies).
This post is by Beau and John W. Sheldon. Check out John’s work here and find him on Twitter. Support Beau through Patreon.com/thoughty! Individual donations at PayPal.me/Thoughty or ko-fi.com/thoughty.
Genres always have soft edges, and any given work may fit into multiple genres (e.g., NYPD Blue is a drama, a police procedural, and arguably a modern noir, but it is not a crime thriller in the way that fellow police procedural Law & Order: Criminal Intent is). Games aren’t well defined by the genres we use for fixed fiction (because games are not fixed in that way, and are not experienced the way we experience books or movies).
Games need separate genres for their rules as written, for their fictional content, and for the experiences that arise from the confluence of those things with player action.
Rules genres: GURPS and Cortex share a rules genre with the D20 SRD, in that they offer a toolkit approach to providing game rules for “almost anything”. On a different axis of rules genre, GURPS and D20 share a genre because of their simulationist approach to resolving conflicts in a granular way, where Cortex is excluded from that genre.
Content Genres: the fictional and tonal content of a game deserves genre categorization. This includes whether a game is expected to be an action game, a dramatic game, or a comedy, but also the setting and time period, the level of technology, and other trappings of more traditional genres. Games can share content genres without sharing rules genres (e.g., Hackmaster and Dungeon World share several aspects of content genres without sharing much in rules genres).
Experiential Genre: a category defined by how players experience the interplay between the rules, the content, and their own contributions, the more tightly this genre is defined the less universal and helpful a descriptor it will be (since a separate game table with different people may implement rules differently, focus on different content, and make unique contributions, and thusly have a different Experience of a game with the same rules and content).
One table’s experience of Shadowrun as a cyberPUNK game focused on sticking it to the man and helping disadvantaged communities draws from the same fiction and rules as another table’s experience of Shadowrun as a neon future heist simulator.
Notes on broad category: Doing games vs Being games (those that care about what you do vs those that care about what you are). Most tabletop RPG games are Doing games – the rules respond to actions, and they lead to more actions and changes in action. Many indie LARPs are Being games – the rules instruct the players on how to be and what to consider, and players respond naturally to their new way of being – but the rules are less concerned with Doing. The Climb or Still Life are Being larps, while a V:tM larp or a boffer larp are Doing larps. Turn is a Being game, while every other group tabletop RPG I can think of is a Doing game.
When I worked on Turn, I was often asked about its genre. I found this difficult and categorized it as I could but realized over time that games have different ways of being in genres than other media, and realized I needed to address this before we talk more about Wolfenstein: The New Order which defies its own genre conventions…sort of.
I talked to John about this and it prompted his summary, and my summary was as following with a more detailed breakdown of examples of games. It’s mostly something to think about, not argue about, so I felt okay writing it down. Even John and I feel differently about some things, so remember, all is a little subjective.
Doing – about taking action, what you do. Most games!
Being – about responding to action, who you are (& how you feel). Turn, many larps, many lonely games.
We used these to break down the following genre tags for a few different games. The initial bullet points are our brainstormed ideas of what suits a game, but are not all-inclusive, and the breakdowns follow. Each one of these categories has the potential to break down even further, especially content and mechanics, which could break down into in-game tone and meta tone or various mechanical systems for live action, video, or tabletop games.
These breakdowns might take a little while to fully make sense of, but here are the core principles.
This is just the start of a longer conversation about how we use genre to apply a moral value to various games, or to belittle the quality without questioning of games. Wolfenstein is simply an FPS, but is one of the deepest games I’ve ever played. The only difference between Shadowrun 5e and Shadowrun Anarchy is the experience and where the emphasis is on cyberpunk but it makes two very different games. Turn is a combination of genre tags that don’t really have a place when they’re all combined, but it results in a unique play experience as a being game.
What is your game’s genre breakdown using this metric? Does it play like you’re doing or being? How do you feel about ignoring genre or exploring it more deeply? Respectfully discuss in the comments and elsewhere. I look forward to hearing your discussions!
Hey, friends, supporters, consumers, and colleagues. this one is a little important.
I hope the best came for you in major holidays for each culture and religion or lack thereof that came before this post, and the same wishes for you in the festivities (or lack thereof!) to come. Please stay safe in the continuance of COVID-19 and the many dangers all marginalized people face, and seek joy in every moment – even if it’s fleeting, it heals more than all the rest.
That being said, this is me. Beau Sheldon.
Content warnings for discussion of mental illness, physical disability, financial insecurity, gender identity, gender dysphoria, mention of hallucinations, mention of schizoaffective disorder, mentions of political and social issues in the United States, and details of creative dysfunction.Continue reading “A Very Merry Mental Illness to Me”
Hi all! Today I have a post from J Dymphna Coy on the subject of post-consent safety paradigm. For some advance clarity, consent is basically whether or not we grant permission for people to do a given thing. And if you click here, you can find some references for the safety tools mentioned. Otherwise, I think you should be able to follow the article pretty well!
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A few months ago, I attended a session at RightsCon about Sidewalks Toronto. Sidewalks Toronto is a project by Alphabet (i.e., Google) to build an entirely new neighborhood in the city of Toronto from the ground up. They want to create a so-called “Smart City,” which uses various electronic surveillance tools in order to allocate resources more efficiently.
Naturally, the attendees of a digital rights conference cast a somewhat skeptical eye at this development. But one of the things I kept hearing about was “informed consent.” The most common question was some version of the following: “How can we make sure that people have informed consent about what kind of data is being collected about them?”
Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation brought up an interesting point: the business model of Google (and virtually every other Silicon Valley company) is to collect as much data as possible and then decide what to do with it all later. How can we even have informed consent, he said, when even Google doesn’t know what we’re consenting to?
Ultimately, my conclusion from the session was this: consent is ultimately meaningless in the context of the information economy. We cannot place the burden upon the populace as individuals to protect itself from Big Data; we must collectively assert our rights as a society and place the duty upon megacorporations to not exploit us.
So what is the difference between consent and safety?
Consent* happens before a game begins, or during a game. It involves mechanisms for determining the content of a game, or whether the game will continue at all. The X-Card, cut-and-brake**, and lines and veils are all good examples of consent tools.
Safety happens during or after a game. It involves mechanisms for directly attending to the emotional well-being of the players. A well-done debrief is a safety technique. De-roling is a safety technique. Anything that requires that players provide care (rather than merely asking if care is necessary) is a safety technique.
This is not to say that consent tools are bad, or should not be used. Quite the opposite is true! But they should be regarded for what they are, and used in a way that complements safety tools.
So why should I bring up Google’s data collection practices in this context? Surely a put-upon LARP organizer who already has to deal with the utterly thankless task of running a game does not have anything in common with Silicon Valley megacorporations. After all, the power relations are completely different. We can negotiate consent with another player of a game in a way that we can’t with a company like Apple. I can walk up to my fellow player and say, “Hey Fred, please don’t include bananas in this game, I have terrible fructiphobia!” By contrast, the notion that would could just write a letter that read, “Dear Apple, Please remove line 52 of this iTunes agreement because I don’t like it!” and expect results from it is absurd.
I bring up the comparison because much like Sidewalk Labs, your fellow players of a game have no idea what’s going to happen, and therefore any consent-based paradigm has limited utility at best. I bring it up because I want to emphasize the importance of safety and care, and to make sure that we’re not glossing over these things as designers and communities.
I’m not a big fan of making up categories of things for its own sake, or of having self-important internet arguments, or crushing my community with the tyranny of small differences. But I’ve heard the common complaint for years that safety mechanics don’t quite do what they’re advertised, and I hope that making the distinction between consent and safety might make something clearer in at least one person’s head, and maybe even make games a little better for the people who play them.
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*It is perhaps worth noting that consent originated as a legal term. It’s designed to protect various parties from indemnity or liability. While legal protections are important, focusing on what technically legal is not necessarily the best way to give guidance on how to navigate ways to avoid hurting or exploiting the people around you.
Thank you so much to Dymphna for the excellent article! I hope you’ve all learned something a little new today. 🙂
P.S. If you’d like to write an article for approachable theory, email Brie at contactbriecs@gmail.com with a one paragraph pitch, your name, and your pronouns.
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Hello all! Many of you have likely seen me mention the methodology behind my design, destructive design, and I thought it was due time I broke the idea down a little bit. I thought approachable theory might be the best place to do it, because simple is good. I’ll talk about the origin of the methodology, how it’s applied, and what’s the difference between destructive design and hacking. I hope you enjoy the article!
Destructive design has existed informally, for sure, for a long time. From the first time someone took the time to examine a game’s design and use it to construct something new, the roots have been there. For me, personally, they’re rooted in the approach my dad taught me for repairing engines and similar things – I talked about this a little on [insert quest here].
My dad can take anything apart, put it back together, and fix the problems it had – his repair skills are legendary. He taught himself a lot of the skills necessary for it using the root of the mentality for destructive design. He would take things apart entirely – whole engines, down to the nuts and bolts – and put them back together. In the process, he could find the root of what wasn’t working just right, learn how the machine worked, and find opportunities to improve things. He taught me this when I was a young kid, and it stuck with me.
When I started in games, I kept finding games that were almost there, nearly right, but not quite what I needed. I wanted to fix it, and the only way I knew how to do that was to take it apart and put it back together. A common misconception is that my games and things I create with this method could be that they’re the put back together part – but that’s not how it works. I build something new – maybe making molds of ideas or pieces, but never copying right over – and try to make what I want to see, whether it’s like that other thing at all or not.
After all, my dad – an engineer – did that, too. He could take what he learned from those engines and build new designs for machines and tools. And it was pretty cool.
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| My dad also likes to fish. Photo by Bonnie Cousins. |
It maybe isn’t easy to do destructive design, depending on your approach, but the core ideas are simple:
For an example, we’ll look at Struggles in Turn. Turn is a game about shapeshifters in small towns who must find balance between their human and beast identities. Struggles are what might otherwise be moves in a Powered by the Apocalypse game. There are just some slight changes, but they matter. Moves in Monsterhearts are one of the first parts that I broke down.
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| The “turn someone on” move from Monsterhearts. |
Here are some of the base parts of moves*:
– Descriptive prompt (when you ____, roll with _____).
– Requires die roll
– Stats can be penalty or bonus
– Success ladder (10+ succeed, 7-9 succeed at cost, 6- fail)
– Narrative options
– Mechanical options
– Risk of failure
When I designed struggles, I started with a different set of assumptions based on what I learned here. First, I built the pieces back together and realized that one of the key elements of these moves was what I wanted to avoid: failure. In Turn, while it might take time and will have consequences, you always succeed at what you do. So I struck out “risk of failure.” Next, I wanted struggles to exclusively be something that happened when you were doing something that your opposed form didn’t want to do, or that it might resist, or in situations where you were trying to hold your opposed form back from doing something. When you look at Monsterhearts moves, they’re only when you’re actively doing something, and you’re assumed to want to do it. I decided to make you always rolling a penalty to these rolls, so I took out “stats can be penalty or bonus.”
The success ladder is just handy, and I did want to require a die roll. I also wanted to include mechanical and narrative options for any pick lists. But with the ladder now, the 6- wasn’t a failure – it was just a giant pile of consequences. You do want you want, but the ladder represented the severity of consequences for succeeding. The base parts of struggles are now like this*:
– Descriptive prompt (when you ____, roll with _____).
– Requires die roll
– Stats are penalty
– Success ladder (10+ no or few consequences, 7-9 more consequences, 6- all consequences)
– Narrative options
– Mechanical options
– Guaranteed success
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| The “mind your manners” struggle in Turn. |
If you swapped these two mechanics – put struggles in Monsterhearts and moves in Turn – the games would be radically different. Giving characters in Monsterhearts guaranteed success could end up with towns overrun with monstrous teens, meanwhile making it so the stats could be bonuses could make shifters in Turn even more dangerous. It would change tone, and alter how people play.
The process of breaking these things down is really exciting sometimes! It is good to see what’s lying beneath the surface, what’s grinding the gears – and when put into application, destructive design can be revealing and instructive.
*Not necessarily an exhaustive list.
What’s the difference between destructive design and hacking? Well, they’re not mutually exclusive. In fact, plenty of people who hack games use destructive design. The real core differences are that with destructive design your goal is to create something notably different on a structural or conceptual level, while some hacks intend to be similar, matching structure and concepts but with different dressing – and destructive design is an active and purposeful process.
Destructive design can happen even on the smallest mechanical or narrative design level. Some people do it, but wouldn’t call it that, because we don’t always label how we do something. Meanwhile, I use the term because it helps me align my methods and do things with intent. A person could consider Turn to be a hack – and some people do – but I don’t, because I think that I used destructive design to change fundamental concepts and structure. Like all parts of game theory, though, people’s perspectives differ.
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| I love these animals from ravensribbon.tumblr.com. |
One of the most significant examples of destructive design is Turn, which is currently in production. Turn was born of playing Monsterhearts and finding it wasn’t quite hitting the nerve I wanted, and then sitting there with my ideas piled up for like four years before I finally wrote anything down. There’s definitely evidence of Monsterhearts in Turn, but it is a completely different beast.
Another example of destructive design by me is Script Change. It doesn’t seem like it would be one! It’s just a content and safety toolbox, right? Well, some could say Script Change was inspired by the X-card… except the inspiration was to break it down into concepts and try to make it what I wanted. After using the X-card for a while and talking to John Stavropolous and so on, I realized it was a great tool, but not the right one for me. I examined it, watched it in play, and then figured out what worked best for me.
Many of my works are destructive design – including Let Me Take a Selfie! All of the games inside come from the root of seeing other selfie games and wanting to see how I could use a mechanic I cared about to tell the stories I wanted to, but not by using the same methods as the other games. None of them are directly inspired, none of them are intended to be similar at all to other games – they just come from the root of “break down this idea and build it back up so I can build something new.”
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| The approachable theory logo. |
Hi all! Today I have a post by Selene Tan on Types of Fun! Selene is a game designer who is always up for a design competition, and writes about games and GMing. This post is about types of fun – the ways we enjoy games – using a variety of existing theory and talking about how we can understand those things in our own experiences. Selene said she loves “interacting with dynamic systems that produce unexpected and inspiring outcomes, and it’s even better with friends!” So let’s see what she has to say!
I ask that you remember the requests I put forth about treating my writers with respect and understand that a lot of game design theory is still growing, so definitions can be a little fluid.
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| A collection of materials for a game of Roar of Alliance (Game and photo by John Sheldon.) during play. |
Whether you call it “fun,” “enjoyment,” or “involvement”: when you’re playing the right game, there’s something that makes you want to play it, and keep playing. But not all games are fun in the same way.
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| I used Roar of Alliance because it has a variety of materials and two parts of play, with strategic combat and “downtime” roleplaying making up the game – both could be very different kinds of fun. (Photo by John Sheldon.) |
Another scheme is Quantic Foundry’s Gamer Motivations. It classifies reasons that people play games, where each reason is a type of fun. There are two schemes, one for video games and one for board games. The video games scheme has 12 motivations in 6 groups, while the board games scheme has 11 motivations in 4 groups.
Make a list of all the things you like and dislike when playing RPGs.
Then play an RPG session with that list in mind. Afterwards, write down a new list of things you liked and disliked from that session. If you won’t get to play for a while, make a list from your most recent session, but it’s best to do this while it’s fresh in your mind.
Pick a scheme and classify your list items. For each like, write down the type of fun. For each dislike, write down the type of fun it interferes with, and if applicable, the type of fun it promotes. Don’t worry about forcing things to fit: it’s okay to have some lone items. But if there are a lot, you might want to pick a different classification scheme!
For example:
I like to play characters that help people. (Fantasy, Expression)
I dislike games where everyone plays backstabbing schemers who are out to get each other. (Inteferes with: Fellowship, Submission. Promotes: Challenge, Expression.)
You’ll see trends arise from the lists. Some categories will have more items than others, and some reasons will keep showing up.
The categories that keep showing up in your likes are the types of fun you enjoy the most. You have the most experience playing and creating that type of fun, and the strongest intuition for them. You’ll also find complements: groups of types that keep showing up together, or types that show up occasionally on your list of likes but not in your dislikes. The types that show up on your dislikes list interfere with or detract from the types you enjoy.
When you’re designing a game or wrestling with a mechanic, ask yourself what types of fun you’re aiming for. If the mechanic doesn’t seem to be working, is it encouraging a different type of fun than the one you’re aiming for? Is it related to a fun that interferes with your goal? If you have a design that feels like it’s missing something, try adding one of the complementary fun types.
If you want to read more about classifying and analyzing fun, here are some resources:
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| Roar of Alliance is a fun game to play, and now after reading Selene’s article, I can’t stop wondering how someone would evaluate the game in regards to the type of fun – what type of fun is your favorite game? |
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| approachable theory logo. (By Brie Sheldon) |
Mathematical balancing can be an intimidating subject for RPG designers, but crucial for making a game that works like the designer intends is the solid foundation of having the correct dice rolling method. While familiarity with some methods of rolling are usually understood by designers, what questions to ask when deciding on a dice rolling system, the differences between said systems, and how to pick what’s most suited to the game can be a tough subject. The first question to tackle is often one of how many dice are appropriate.
The most familiar method of rolling dice in RPGs is the simple “roll a 1d20, add a number to it, and compare to a target number,” due to its use in Dungeons and Dragons and related spin-offs. One common modifier to that is instead of rolling 1d20, use the sum of 3d6. These two methods make for useful comparisons of the difference between rolling a single die vs rolling multiple dice and adding them. Both average out to the same result (10.5), and have similar maximums (20 vs 18) and minimums (1 vs 3). The following graph shows the probability curve of rolling each result on a 1d20 and 3d6, comparatively.
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| This chart shows the probability of rolling a specific result, visual by Michael. Full details in alt text. |
The probability of getting any specific result on a 1d20 is equal – each number is equally represented by once face of the die, giving a 5% chance of rolling any number in its range. The flat nature makes it easy to do calculations with – if you have something that activates on certain numbers being rolled (like critical hits on 20, or special moves on even rolls), it’s easy to just add up those 5%s, even in your head at the table. On the graph “Probability of Rolling a Specific Result,” the line for the 3d6 is a “bell curve” shape – the most common results are in the middle of the dice range, due to an “averaging out” effect, where there’s multiple different sums that can achieve them.
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| This chart displays the probability of rolling a specific result or greater, visual by Michael. Full details in the alt text. |
What does it mean for the 3d6 that the extreme results are less likely, and average results more common? The biggest take away is simple: that if you’re already favored – and so the average result is a success for you – using 3d6 instead of 1d20 means you become even more so. But if you’re relying on an extreme result to have a chance of success, moving from 1d20 to 3d6 lowers your chance of success even more. Using a 3d6 allows a character to perform “lesser” tasks reliably, but struggle at performing tasks above their skill level. It promises easy success to the specialized, and warns away those not well suited to a task from even attempting it.
Deciding which tasks – reliable or risky – you want your dice system to encourage isn’t the only change in player behavior you’ll see from it either. An important consideration is how valuable a +1 bonus is to the success at any given task. This won’t be obvious to all players, but some will understand how this works, and others will pick up a sense of it as you play. The following graph shows the probability of a +1 bonus changing a failure to a success for each roll needed.
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| This chart shows the probability of a +1 helping, visual done by Michael. Full details in the alt text. |
The probability of a +1 bonus having changed a failure to a success is the exact same as the probability of rolling the number one fewer than whatever you’re trying to roll. As such, the graph of the +1 bonus helping is the same as the graph of individual roll results, except shifted one number higher. If you’re rolling a 1d20, no matter what task you’re performing, a +1 bonus is giving a 5% greater chance of success. If you’re rolling 3d6, that instead varies.
For tasks which are near impossible or very easy to perform, the +1 might not be worth sacrificing much for. But for tasks that you already have a near-even chance at, the value is very high – over twice as much as you would be getting on a d20! Players are more incentivized to spend resources or time in order to get any small bonus they can when they expect they’re close to the average of an attack or defense.
All of the above shows the difference between 1d20 and 3d6 – but what about other dice, or rolling even more? The following graph shows a comparison between six types of dice rolling methods, all with roughly even averages of 10-11.
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| This chart shows the probability of rolling a specific result, visual done by Michael. Full details in the alt text. |
The more dice are rolled, the steeper the bell curve becomes. Anything that could be said about 3d6 in comparison to 1d20 is even more so for 4d4, and the trend continues to strengthen the more dice are rolled. If you want it so the average result comes up very often, and people with even small advantages are heavily favored, you want a system that rolls many dice at once. Another design consideration that emerges is the range of values possibly – when rolling 1d20, there are 20 possible results. When rolling 3d6, there are only 16 results – and four numbers (9-12) come up almost half of the time. When rolling 7d2, there are only 8 possible results, and two numbers (10-11) come up 55% of the time.
When so few numbers are likely to be rolled, this means that characters gaining small bonuses or penalties can very quickly put them in the realm of instant success or failure. It only takes a +4 to go from the average value to an instant success on a 7d2, as opposed to a +10 on a d20, meaning there’s not a lot of room for individual bonuses to make a difference and still have a chance of failure. This however also allows a stratification in difficulty – it doesn’t require very large bonuses for an expert character to be able to complete tasks a non-trained character cannot, keeping numbers reasonable if you want multiple tiers of difficulty.
In summary, there are multiple considerations that go into choosing the dice rolling method for your game. A single large die, or fewer dice in general, is more appropriate if you want a game to have multiple conditional sources of bonuses such as gear, positioning, and teamwork, to keep tasks from ever seeming too reliable, and to encourage risky maneuvers. Multiple dice, or smaller dice, are more appropriate if you want to make small bonuses matter a great deal, allow characters to treat lower-difficulty tasks as trivial, or to have hard tiers in difficulty. Neither method is inherently superior; instead, both are proper tools for their tasks.
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Thanks so much to Michael for the excellent article! Please share around and I hope you all gained something from reading this post on approachable theory!
If you would like to write an approachable theory post, send an email to Brie with your name, pronouns, and pitch. Responses may be delayed over the next two weeks as Brie is recovering from grad school, but they’ll get back as they can.
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| The approachable theory logo. |
Today’s approachable theory post is by Jacob Kellogg, creator of the new Journey Away rpg on Kickstarter, and is about complexity in game design! Find out more about Jacob after the post! Please read and enjoy.
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| Jacob Kellogg, selfie portrait. |
Complexity in game design can be a touchy subject. Sometimes a game is so complex that it feels more like work than play, or deters your loved ones from wanting to learn it. Other times, a game might be criticized for not being complex enough, with critics saying it’s been dumbed down. In some cases, you might even find both opinions regarding a single game.
If you’re designing a game (or even just like to ponder game design theory), this can leave you with some confusion about the role of complexity in design. How do you know if a game needs to be simpler or more complex? What does complexity offer to your design? What does it cost you? I hope to shed some light on this issue by defining complexity, detailing its relationship to the separate concept of depth, and sharing some other considerations about the role of complexity as well.
Before we get started, I’d like to give a shout out to the Extra Credits team, specifically this video, for the lessons I’ve learned on this and other topics thanks to their hard work. Check them out!
Now, we can’t really discuss complexity until we’re all on the same page about what it means. When I refer to complexity in terms of game design, I’m talking about all the details and rules that you have to learn (and all the gameplay actions that are required) to play the game. For example, if you have to roll a die to determine the success of an action, that’s more complex than if the action just succeeds by default, because you have to know the rule about how that die roll works. If a player might have a special quality that lets them re-roll the die if it comes up as a 1, that’s another rule to learn, and therefore another layer of complexity.
Now that we’re all on the same page about complexity, what does it contribute to our games? While there are a few answers to that question, the primary role of complexity is the creation of depth. What do I mean by depth? Depth in a game refers to the number of meaningfully different gameplay experiences that can be had. That is, if there are two different ways of doing things in a game, having those two paths actually FEEL different in play is depth. For example, if playing a speedster in a superhero game genuinely feels different than playing a hulking brute, that’s depth. If they feel the same in play, the depth is missing.
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| Picture of the Shadow Amps section of Shadowrun: Anarchy & note from Brie: here’s a place where you have to look at the depth and complexity of different mechanic. Does this math result in greater depth in play? What do you think? |
But there’s a catch.
Say we’re designing a traditional heroic fantasy RPG and deciding how different weapons compare to each other. If we want a two-handed greatsword and a little dagger to feel different in play (and we probably do), we need to add some complexity to define their differences. So, we decide that the greatsword deals a lot of damage and uses two hands, while the dagger deals piddly damage but only uses one hand and is easy to conceal under your clothes. Great! Now players can have genuinely different gameplay experiences (depth) with these two weapons, thanks to us adding a little bit of complexity.
Now let’s say we want to go a little further: we also want shields in our games, which can’t be used with a greatsword, but it feels weird for shield-users to be restricted to daggers for weapons, so we create a longsword to sit between the two. It deals less damage than the greatsword, but more than the dagger. The degree of depth between the longsword and either of the other weapons is smaller than the gap between the greatsword and the dagger, but it’s probably still noticeable, offering real depth to players.
But let’s go even further. I mean, there are more than three types of blades in the world, right? So we start adding bigger knives, smaller swords, axes, swords with different degrees of curve to the blade, and so forth. Conscious of creating depth, we make sure that each of these weapons is technically unique: most of them deal different amounts of damage from each other, and when we ran out of unique damage amounts, we started giving the redundant weapons special abilities, like slight bonuses to disarming your opponent or breaking their shields.
By the time we’re done, we have a two-page chart of weapons, but they’re so close to each other in their abilities that a character with one weapon could swap it out for a similar one and never notice the difference. We’ve added quite a bit of complexity: the player has to read two pages of listings and learn what all the abilities mean before they can make an informed decision about their weapon choice. And yet, we’ve added precious little depth: while the high-damage weapons feel different from the mid- and low-damage weapons, everything else feels the same. The feel of gameplay is almost identical to what it was when we only had three weapons.
This is what we must watch out for as designers: just because game options are technically different (complexity), that doesn’t necessarily mean that they feel different (depth). Before adding a layer of complexity to our games, we must ask ourselves whether the resulting gameplay options will feel meaningfully different from each other. If not, we are not creating depth in our game, and we need to seriously consider whether adding that complexity is truly a good idea.
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| Dice rolling on a white table, by John W. Sheldon. |
Complexity is an important part of game design. While some games need complexity to support their themes, its main purpose is as the main source of depth. Designers must decide how much depth they want in their games, figure out how much complexity will be required to get there, and then reconcile the two until our games have sufficient depth without excessive complexity. We’re looking for that sweet spot.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you find these concepts as helpful for your own designs as they’ve been for mine. All the best to you and yours, and best of luck in whatever your next adventure is.
Thank you so much, Jacob, for writing this post and simply sharing some thoughts about complexity!
What do you love about games and gaming?
@JacobSKellogg on Twitter
@JacobSKellogg on Mastodon (dice.camp)
@PurpleAetherLLC on Twitter
@PurpleAetherGames on Mastodon (dice.camp)
https://www.patreon.com/jskellogg
Journey Away RPG Kickstarter
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Hi all, I have a new series (only a few coming up so far, but it’s here) called approachable theory that’s going to focus on writing posts about game theory, design, and similar topics in a tone that’s approachable for new gamers, non-academics, and designers who are getting their start. I’m going to try to do some of my own once I get done with grad school, but in the meantime, I’m hiring other writers!
The criteria I have for the posts are that they’re under 2000 words, hopefully under 1500, and I have to be able to read them without using Google more than 3 times. Youns know I have trouble reading research at times due to its dense text and unfamiliar terminology, and I wanted theory posts that I could learn from on my worst days.
To pay the writers, I’m going to be using the patreon.com/briecs payout from each post, and pay any remaining funds personally to ensure they’re paid $0.05/word, which is just the best I can do right now – and hopefully you will all consider it a valid rate. I’m still taking pitches for it, and I’d love to get more diverse writers on the schedule over the summer.
Coming up first will be Jacob Kellogg, who has a game on Kickstarter right now called Journey Away. Jacob’s writing about complexity in game design, and I’m really looking forward to you all seeing the post!
All I ask is for you all to join me in treating the series with respect. Please don’t interrogate the writers about “what a game is” or if the subject is “really theory” – that’s antithetical to this series. Remember, also, that not everyone has a well-educated, well-read background and that some people were born well after the original D&D could drive. If you find that something is legitimately factually incorrect or ethically problematic, please do raise the question. Just don’t be a jerk, and be enthusiastic for the material.
Thank you all! Looking forward to another series of posts and hoping it makes game design and games more…approachable.
<3
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.
