If we’re going to talk about games, we need to cover some basics.
Some terms
For the purposes of our discussions, a game is pretty simply: A set of rules that transforms some input into some output.
‘Input’ in this case is inclusive of a variety of things, from the current game state, to the outcome of randomizers like dice, to, perhaps most importantly, the choices of the players. To be clear, ‘player’ here is inclusive of all participants in the game, regardless of some special role like ‘Game Master’.
The output, on the other hand, is quite simply ‘what happens next’, constrained to the game space. The changes imposed on the game state and world.
With this, we can think of games in a couple of other, equally valid ways: A set of rules to determine what happens next, and a set of rules that tell a player how to get what they want.
The purest expression of this is the ‘ur-game’. Not to be confused with the Royal Game of Ur, the idea of the ur-game is not new to this blog, but for the purposes of this discussion, the rules of it are ‘if a player says that something happens, it happens’. Basically, we’re describing totally freeform roleplaying. We have connected our input directly to our output, with as little intervening structure as possible.
Incidentally, we can also imagine an ‘un-game’ along similar lines. ‘If a player says that something happens, it doesn’t’. The total disconnect of input from output. We never determine what happens next, nothing ever happens!
Gaming the system
You can put literally anything between the input and the output, so I don’t want to dwell too much on talking about games in this sort of ultraminimalist sense, but there is one last ‘pure’ form I want to talk about, which I’m going to call the ‘no-game’. The no-game is also very simple: ‘If a player says that something happens, the opposite happens’. Remember, before I said that we can think of a game as ‘a set of rules that tell a player how to get what they want‘. The player in the no-game still wants things, but the game will give them the opposite of what they ask for. So what do they do? They ask for the opposite of what they really want.
Often we talk about games, especially TTRPGs, in terms of ‘fun’, and that ‘having fun’ is the most important thing. I don’t necessarily disagree, but I think that saying that the point of games is to ‘have fun’ is about the same as saying that the point of cooking is to ‘make good food’. Technically correct, but not really useful as a guideline. I would instead suggest that we think of games in terms of ‘goals’, and that ‘fun’ is what happens to a player of a game when their goals are met.
‘Goals’ are still a very broad category. A goal could be something very explicit, like desiring to see a particular narrative arc develop and resolve, or to slay a powerful beast. But it could also be something more subtle, the kind of thing that isn’t stated as a goal, like wanting to participate in a coherent and internally consistent world. Goals can even conflict- the player that wants to ‘slay a powerful beast’ likely also wants to struggle somewhat in that pursuit. If the game doesn’t put obstacles in the way of the goal, slaying it might not be as impressive a moment. Part of the enjoyment comes from the nature of the task being difficult in the first place.
It’s important to recognize this, because players are going to pursue their goals. They know the ‘output’ they want, and so they’ll use the control they have, their ‘input’, to try and produce that output, keeping in mind how the rules in the middle will transform their input.
Game design, then, is essentially the art of creating obstacles and incentives, that either frustrate or facilitate a player’s attempts to fulfill their goals. Almost everything we talk about after this point will essentially come back to this. The rules we come up with are the connective tissue between players and their experiences, and knowing what sort of tensions a given rule will place between them will make us better at figuring out which rules to use.