What Games Are

The Narrative vs Mechanics Circus

Last month I contracted what seemed to be a simple cold which progressed into a bronchial infection combined with asthma that knocked me out for three weeks.

It was really bad timing because around the same time, Raph Koster posted a blog bombshell when he said ‘Narrative is not a game mechanic’. A fair few commenters arose in support or ire. Posts flew about whether the meaning of narrative was too broad or limited, whether this was really about a limited formal view of games versus their possibilities, and so on. Exciting stuff, but I couldn’t really get into it.

I’m still recovering, but being ill has given me the chance to reflect and remember that there’s a reason that I don’t normally use the phrase ‘mechanics’. There's also a reason why I tend to dismiss broad narrativism. It’s because both of them are part of a pretend debate over correctness, and each – in their own way – is just circular flame-bait, an ever-burning meme that goes nowhere.

Calling Out The Clones

In the same week, two stories about cloning are making various rounds. One involves Triple Town, a neat puzzle-sim game from Spry Fox, being cloned on the iOS App Store. The other story involves Zynga (predictably) first offering to buy and then copying Tiny Tower. Both have resulted in the original inventors calling out the clone for what it is in public.

Should anything be done?

Why Pro-Amateurs Are The Future

The fact that professional makers are feeling under threat is not news. There are calls for tax breaks for game makers and novelists, scrambling efforts to lock down (or at least shut up) the Web through legislation. There is even Rupert Murdoch, once champion of anti-establishmentarian ideals of publishing, tweeting about why a search engine and mass theft are supposedly the same thing.

They have good reason to feel threatened. The Great Recession has accelerated the process of deconstruction. Nobody wants to invest in professional art in a time when we’ve started to use the word “trillion” in everyday conversations about national debts. Add to this the chorus of devaluation that digital distribution has wrought in all creative fields, the largely hazy arguments surrounding piracy, and cultural trends toward lionizing the past (great for back catalogue sales, not so much for new artists).

To many, it looks like Doomsday. However I think not.

The Perils of Franchise Fatigue [Single Franchise Publishing]

Q: What’s the biggest mistake that a successful studio can make?
A: Walking away from its key franchise.

Q: Why would a studio do that?
A: Because the staff get bored.

Q: Why is it a mistake?
A: Well…

The Four Lenses of Game Making

For years it’s been apparent that interpreting games and their makers through the opposed lenses of gameplay or story is inadequate. Such a one-dimensional spectrum breeds false oppositions (fun-or-art?) while either ignoring many games that don’t fit or reinterpreting them so they fit badly. The spectrum is too reductive and, while it is easy to summarise, it leaves out too much context.

Rather than talking about games in terms of two lenses, I use four (potentially five, but I’ll come back to that). Each represents a common set of assumptions and predispositions that I often see in makers, and there are correlations between them which makes for an interesting (though perhaps deceptively symmetric) diagram.

This post is long, but I’d like to take you through each in turn. I think you’ll find it useful.

Execution Is Worthless Without Vision [Game Design]

"Ideas are worthless. The only currency that holds any weight is the ability and drive to execute." writes Mike Birkhead.

I know plenty of great executors whose game development careers are going nowhere and are staring mystified at the success of companies whose products they consider to be massively inferior to their own. Being focused purely on execution is generally a way to avoid taking creative risks, and the stereotypical "ideas are worthless" line is more of a self justification for good engineering and technical execution of art, audience be damned.

Execution is worthless without vision. Nobody cares if your game is well made, they care that it's remarkable, not the norm, a new idea. You’re not in the business of making better toothbrushes.

Interactivity Means Doing Stuff [Narrativism]

In discussing some of my older posts on players, characters and stories, I often come across a logic that says stories are interactive, games are also interactive, and therefore games are stories. Which makes sense except for one crucial detail: Stories are not interactive.

Interactivity is not how you react to what you see. It is how you change what you see. To be interactive, a game (or any art) needs to be capable of being intentionally altered by the viewer’s actions. It may sound obvious, but games are about the doing, not the viewing.

Camera Comes First [Game Design]

Games have their own visual rules which are often contrary to other kinds of camera. Camera design dictates how players see into the game world, and ultimately how they play, so without good camera design your whole game may end up unplayable.

It’s very difficult (read: expensive) to change a poorly designed camera without rewriting a game entirely. This is why I consider gamatography (like photography, but for games) to be the first design task on any project, the first spec to be written and the first code that needs to be prototyped.

There need to be clear rules that will govern the camera throughout the whole of the game, sooner rather than later. Do it right and camera acts as a foundation on which you can build. Do it wrong and you’ll create a user experience nightmare.

The Law of Fascination [Game Design]

It don’t mean a thing if it aint got that swing.

Duke Ellington’s point was simple: Across all genres and eras, music needs to swing. It’s a creative constant. I make a similar point about fun, arguing that it too is a creative constant and a game is not a game if it lacks the joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics.

But some kinds of fun are more appealing than others. Some are innately fascinating and inspire the play brain to play, where others just don’t. I call it the law of fascination.

The Ding Economy [Art]

Some will frame the work of Steve Jobs as showmanship, hoodwinking millions in the quest for power and money. Those same people will roll their eyes in disbelief at fans who left flowers or memorials at Apple stores, or think of it as evidence of just how clever at branding this man was. That cynicism is what prevents ambition or achieving anything of worth and is why most people live what Thoreau called ‘lives of quiet desperation’.

Jobs once said that his ambition was to put a ding in the universe. He did it through being a businessman and artist rather than one or the other. It’s a way of working which inspires loyalty, which social media amplifies. It’s no accident that art-and-business companies like Apple and Nintendo have dominated their respective fields over the last decade, or why James Dyson can charge more than competitors for state of the art vacuum cleaners and yet still win.

The 21st century economy belongs to business artists. It is a creative economy where dings spread like viruses and create huge profits. It’s also the economy where commodity jobs get devalued down toward near zero. I’m not saying you need to be Steve Jobs. I am saying you need to find your own ding and then create it. What does your ding in the universe look like?

(Today’s image comes from Scalar Scopes.)