Creative Direction - Part 2 of 2: Storytelling Through Meaningful Play
In part 1, I focused on how I like to help my teams set and maintain focus in a way that maximizes creative collaboration. However, when I’m working solo, or at least setting out to develop on my own, I find myself going back to this idea of meaningful play. Where the former is practical and effective, this latter approach is a pet-project; a theoretical work in progress that’s a direct reaction to what I see as a gap in some of my favorite games.
Context and Definitions
As I’ve been designing games and analyzing the designs of games that I play, one of the things that has struck me is how frequently the meaning and mechanics of systems are frequently divorced from the theming and narrative of games.
The meaning of a game is understood through every element of a game, but it often feels like that where meaning is often the least baked into a game is in the semiotics of the mechanics themselves. Whether it’s attributed to cinema envy, or the momentum of other narrative traditions, or whatever else, few games will neglect dialogue, visual character designs, or mise en scene and environmental story-telling, but often times, mechanical systems tend to exist as distinct and holistic semiotic packages that get lightly reskinned for the narrative context that they’re supporting.
For my own work, I find it interesting to question how far games can push morphological conventions to create more intentional systems of mechanical meaning without alienating players. It often feels like that games, or maybe more accurately studios, are beholden to the mechanical genres that were the vehicles at their inception, and look to see what new experiences they can share with their player-base. And that totally makes sense for any responsible business to maximize the value they can create while minimizing the overhead that would come from incurring new tech and design debt. However, through the lens of design, it could be argued to be akin to having a solution in search of a problem - and what might games look like if we were able to appreciate the problems of potential narrative spaces in their own sakes.
Semiotics, Embodiment, and Killing “Bad Guys”
In The Rules of Play, Salen and Zimmerman invoke the idea of semiotics in designed meaning, pointing out that designed elements are symbols. Therefore the mechanical changes of states and values through the formal rules of the game contain meaning as much as the visual and auditory representations of those mechanics. What some games (and many of the games I personally play) fall short of doing is integrating the formal structure of the game into the way they deliver their themes and ideas.
One potential approach through techniques of embodiment. Game designers like Thomas Grip employ approaches like “presence mechanics”, stitching player actions into the narrative context, enactment, and consequences. In games like Soma, Grip doesn’t let players off the hook when the only way to escape is to pull the plug on a sentient automaton by letting it live in a cutscene. Instead he’ll have the player mechanically participate in every step. This approach, though likely not universally helpful, especially for mechanically and systemically dense designs that rely on heavy abstraction to keep the design in scope, does illustrate a viable way to mechanically integrate the themes and ideas of a game (in the case of Soma, horror) directly into the nature and experience of a player’s formal interactions with a game.
For my interests, I think cooperative games could potentially go in a different direction, and consider the mechanical systems themselves as a vehicle for the creation of meaning. What I mean by this is embodied in This War of Mine, by 11 bits studio. As a game about the civilian experience in a theater of front-line combat, the game creates meaning through layers of its mechanical design. On the most superficial level, the mechanics could be described as a simulation - having players participate in resource management, stealth mechanics to evade attention, and fighting to survive. However, as Gina Roussos’ article When Good Intentions Go Awry, when games like Spent try to convey meaning through simulation, thing can go awry - like doing the exact opposite of what it set out to do by reducing empathy for people experiencing poverty. Where This War of Mine succeeds is that the agentic play space that it builds for players not only cognitively engages players with its simulated decision space - it uses its mechanics to have players emotionally engage by having players create and build relationships to permadeath-threatened avatars and NPCs, to viscerally engage by keeping it’s thematic tension between risk and survival at the forefront of its level and scenario designs, and to philosophically engage by employing formal semiotic language to confront and resolve moral and ethical challenges.
Starting with Meaningful Play
For my own games, I like to start with an informal process of exploring potential mechanical and thematic integrations to create meaning. It’s a circular process of trying to find a viable gestalt identity, finding the experiential and thematic ideas that work, and identifying a mechanical heart that can create the play space to present those themes.
The goal is to start a project with a theory of meaning as the definition of a game’s conceptualization. If I can answer the the following questions, I feel like I am ready to start the rest of the process.
What is the player doing moment to moment? If the game has different play modes, what are the modes and what are the players doing in those modes and how do they work together systemically?
What is the central theme at the heart of the game? What are the ideas in tension and how are those ideas presented, experienced, negotiated, and resolved?
What is the point that the game is trying to make? What is the idea it is exploring? What is the question it’s asking? What does it want to mean?
I’ve tried and been unhappy with the products of attempts to start with any one of those and moving forward by subordinating the others. The problem often being what I’d previously characterized as a solution in search of a problem. So, currently I recognize that there is an interdependent relationship between those elements that have to work together, or else the product at the end feels forced or simply wanting.
For me, this is a conceptualization approach that can be at odds with the type of exploratory design that large teams excel at because it doesn’t rely on the excellence of any given part, but the compatibility of every part. I don’t have a way to engage with this kind of problem with a team yet, and I haven’t had the privilege to try, but in my personal work I continue to explore how to successfully employ this idea into games with commercial potential.
The Process - Prototyping, Post-Conceptualization
Intuition and theory crafting does not a designer make - so for me, I immediately set out to test and falsify the concept through prototyping - and in my opinion, the skill here is knowing what to prototype. In a perfect world, a vertical slice of every idea would be possible to test, and maybe GPTs and generative AIs will make that possible in the future, but for now it isn’t, so I have to pick my targets. The goal being to produce enough prototypes of sufficient fidelity to put ideas through their paces. And I think it goes without saying, but for this prototyping process, rapid prototyping, self-honesty, and a trusted group of critical voices is essential.
I believe the key to a good prototype is to go in with a clear question in mind, and to build just enough to be able to answer the question. And a good prototype has to balance the concerns of ensuring that there is enough fidelity to allow both you, the designer, and any play testers to engage with the context, while at the same time, making sure that there isn’t so much fidelity to create the false-impression of potential by loading it up with polish and spectacle. It has to have enough polish so that players aren’t fighting with the controls or too busy being confused, while at the same time, being rough enough that anything generated is easily discarded or repurposed for future use. That doesn’t mean that paper prototypes or that modding and repurposing other game systems is off the table, just that it should be considered if those options contain too much or not enough polish to meaningfully engage with the prototype’s purpose.
As for what to prototype, I like to focus on the elements of the game that if not up to the task, would prove the concept unequal to the intent. Specifically, what I’m looking to test for is if the plays in a way to get players to engage with the mechanical themes of the game. You’d want to capture a handle’s shape to judge its comfort, or a sign’s size and colors to judge its legibility - for a game, I want to see how it feels to play, if it feels the way I intend to play it, and whether the themes are perceptible.
Prototype Example 1 - Familiarity Limit Testing
I think it takes a huge amount of trust on the part of players for a designer to throw something at them that is not “generically” grok-able. So where I might start is where I would need to push morphological conventions to suit the design’s needs. For example, I am working on a game that emphasizes cooperative play, so it was important to deviate from some of the conventional elements of its genre adjacents - so the prototype started by begging the question of whether this hybrid twin-stick / third person wave shooter was familiar enough to pick-up-and-play so that players had the bandwidth to engage with their partner and the game’s intended thematic layers.
To test this question, a prototype had to be built that had to built that included the basic combat mechanics, enough assets and tech art to convey the mechanical context, basic enemies with navigational and behavioral AI, UI and feedback systems for players to understand the essential details of the game state, and a means of prompting players to their goals and failure conditions.
In this case, the first prototype proved that the morphological changes to the generic expectations weren’t breaking players’ abilities to engage with the higher dimensions of the game after a few minutes of unsupported familiarization. To approximate typical game conditions, live testers were asked to talk through their game play experience, and remote testers were asked to screen record their play session and live narrate their thoughts and reactions. Going into it with the intent to disprove the assumption that it would be familiar enough that new players wouldn’t feel like they were fighting the controls helped the design to proceed with confidence, and also helped identify some aspects of the game that need to be redesigned to be more legible.
Prototype Example 2 - Strategic Design Assumptions
For that same game, another prototype was built to test the concept’s strategic layers’ assumptions. The reason for the game’s departure from conventions were to keep the play light enough in its input skill and cognitive demands to permit players to verbally coordinate and strategize with each other. The current design makes several assumptions regarding how player can approach each level, having them engage with exploring the level, acquiring resources, splitting responsibilities, etc., and there are many ways in which the design could fall short. There could be degenerative strategies that negate the need for meaningful strategy, they combination of elements makes the play space too complex and muddy for players to bother strategizing around, the layers are so siloed that any given layer can be optimized and self-contained.
To test this aspect of the design, the prototype needed to include a version of the systems that would be creating the strategic problem space - resources, upgrades, level designs with relevant assets, interactive systems, missions, and a more robust failure condition assessment system. The development load for this prototype could have been too much to justify for a prototype, so intentional mitigations were taken to keep it in scope. Where possible, systems and code were taken and modified from previous projects, assets from a prototyping test kit were used, and a deliberate code architecture plan was implemented from the start to make it easier to drop in and excise systems.
In the case of this prototype, testing is still on-going, so no firm conclusions can be drawn yet. That said, several assumptions were validated, such as the resource management systems and mechanics work as intended and impose various strategic considerations that players will have to adapt to. At the same time, other assumptions were found to need revisions, such as the game’s difficulty progression which were insufficiently legible with the system’s dynamics being unrecognized by players. In this case, this prototype was a huge success in that it helped identify the areas that require attention and additional design work.
Prototype Example 3 - Thematic Engagement
Another prototype on the design roadmap is to test the game’s thematic experience, in this case resource insecurity and spending priorities. This prototypes assumes that the previously tested aspects of the game will be able to deliver on the resource insecurity part of the equation, but that feels like a known design problem that will revolve around tuning, so what’s left is how that idea can be leveraged to invoke the game’s thematic core and central conflict. This will likely be the last major design threshold to cross before the game crosses my design viability threshold and justify additional production, monetary and time investment, and so on.
This aspect of the design could be adequately paper prototyped, if not just a very different stripped down digital prototype. This has two major benefits, the first being that it will be comparatively fast and easy to test, requiring a lot less dev time and assets to assess. The thematic engagement is no less important than the mechanical and experiential layers of the game, but because the assumption is more related to the experience of the problem space and approaches to content, the interface and abstractions of interaction aren’t essential to validate the design. This makes the prototype easy to iterate, and low commitment enough to abandon and reattack.
Secondly, it allows the prototype to engage directly with the themes to see if they are engaging without the shiny distractions that games can throw at mundane interactions to siren-song players into playing longer than they might for their interest alone. Since, for this design, this layer of the game is an essential pillar of it’s identity, it is important to see if it can stand on its own.
Pursuing Meaning in Play
This approach to creative direction and conceptualization is admittedly risky, but I find it personally very gratifying and expressive. I admire games that have delivered on highly integrated conceptual designs that integrate their experiential themes and formal structure, like The Last Of Us, and The Forest ; I want to continue to work on games that constructs its meaning through its formal structure as much as through its content. And that’s the reason why I will continue to explore this process that centers and tests that integrative nature from the start.
