In an attempt to transition out of hiatus, I will be posting the scripts of my Thinking Beyond Mechanisms segment. I don't plan to edit them, so there may be some differences between the audio and written versions. Take the audio as the correct version. I also plan on offering some additional thoughts in separate posts—commentary on the episodes, if you will.
Ep 5: Designing Opposites
Welcome to Thinking Beyond Mechanisms, an in depth look at some of the other aspects of game design, the segment that looks at some of the theory of board game design that goes beyond what typically gets covered when we learn how to design games. My name is Sarah Shipp and today I want to talk about how designing games involves thinking in opposites.
There are a few ubiquitous traits that designers strive for that are nonetheless difficult to achieve. A few of these are balance, elegance, and efficiency. Designing games that exemplify these traits can be a daunting task. I believe this task is made more difficult by misunderstanding the role the designer plays in these traits.
For instance, if I am attempting to design a balanced game, I may already know that the perception of balance is more important that the underlying math to the play experience. But whether I am trying to create a balanced experience or a balanced game engine, I may end up with a game that feels flat and boring. If I see my role primarily as creating an even playing field, the gameplay may be so smooth that nothing interesting happens.
On the contrary, it is my belief that a designer’s job is to determine the correct amount of imbalance for their design. How off-kilter should players feel? What sorts of decisions arise from having more or less imbalance? Balance is a single platonic state; imbalance is a spectrum that can be dialed up or down.
Imbalance adds uncertainty and tension to designs. If player’s feel that the stakes are high, there is likely a decent amount of imbalance as well. However, too much imbalance can leave players feeling as though their decisions don’t matter. Imbalance can be added in the form of randomness, asymmetry, or even unequal player skill. The types of imbalance you choose further shapes the play experience.
Thinking in opposites, such as imbalance instead of balance, is essentially a mindset shift that allows you to focus on an area of design in a way that feels more actionable and is more true to the role of the designer. Additionally, by viewing a problem from a new perspective you may discover new solutions.
Efficiency is even more important to consider from its opposite. Efficiency is a player goal. The design goal is to create obstacles to efficiency. A designer’s challenge is to incorporate inefficiency into a game in order to create obstacles for the players to overcome. A game’s rules will almost always prohibit the most efficient option, which is to let players collect whatever they want whenever they want it.
Rules introduce inefficiency. This inefficiency may or may not be compounded by the players getting in each others’ way. As designers, player dynamics are as much in our purview as mechanics. When determining the right amount of inefficiency in a game, we must consider how much inefficiency will be added by player interaction versus how much is added by the rules.
Inefficiency is about ensuring that certain things do not happen or do not happen quickly or easily. The danger of too much inefficiency is that the game will feel as though nothing happens and the players do not achieve anything during play.
Elegance is a more challenging concept. Avoiding inelegance is certainly easier than setting out to design an elegant game. However, we often confuse elegant with merely being simple or uncluttered. While those traits often contribute to elegance, I would like to put forward that the spectrum of clarity to obscurity is more vital to creating elegance.
I am using obscurity to refer to player confusion rather than hidden information. A lack of clarity in a design is more easy to identify than a lack of elegance, although additional clarity will usually add elegance. Removing player confusion can involve removing unnecessary mechanisms, changing the graphic design, eliminating edge cases in the rules, etc. I referred to this in my previous episode as removing the chaff in a design. Removing or changing the elements that create player confusion will add a measurable amount of elegance to a design.
Too much clarity may leave players feeling as if there is nothing more to discover after a single play. A small amount of obscurity or uncertainty can intrigue players. This could be implemented as imbalance or inefficiency, both of which can be said to be inelegant in the absolute sense.
There are other ways of implementing elegance, efficiency, and balance to a design, but thinking about their opposites will get you eighty to ninety percent of where you want to be. One mistake designers make is focusing on clever solutions before implementing simple fixes. Thinking in opposites encourages designers to look at the underlying issues, rather than adding clever work arounds on top of a system that may not be serving its purpose.
I encourage you to explore other areas of design that can be viewed from the opposite side.
For more ways of thinking beyond mechanisms, you can visit my blog at shipp board games dot blog spot dot com or catch future episodes of thinking beyond mechanisms on ludology.
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