thread: 2009-09-09 : Waah
On 2009-09-09, Vincent wrote:
Ha ha! Okay. I'll suck up and pontificate after all.
Start here. The lesson of Pit is this: the rules have an effect on the players that isn't the same as what the rules have the players do. In Pit it almost looks like an accident! It's not one, of course. Change anything about the rules - choose a different sorting algorithm, enact it differently, or to some different end - and you'll change their emergent qualities.
Earlier this summer I said this to Simon:
Designing a roleplaying game means more than designing rules that we can all agree to play by, and that are playable. It means designing rules that capture us - rules that become a vital part of our experience of play.
This is what I'm talking about. Designing a game means designing its emergent qualities.
An example: Luke and I talked at GenCon last year, and shared an observation that it's satisfying for a group to see a difficult mechanical process through. Some Burning Wheel conflicts, some Dogs conflicts, they're frustrating in the moment but at the end of them you're relieved, you're satisfied, and the game overall is stronger and better than it would have been without the group's accomplishment.
Another: When a group in play develops a strong but unspoken shared aesthetic, the game can feel like mind reading or magic.
So, the shared satisfaction of seeing a difficult process through, the thrill of coming to an unspoken shared aesthetic - these are things you can design for, and should design for, and you can't do it by designing an overt mechanism for them. They exist only when real human beings enact the mechanisms you design.
So that's the start. Next: (1) design as many subsystems as your game needs, not too few; (2) your real game is the interaction between its subsystems, not its rules themselves; and (3) treat both the game's fiction and the game's participants' visions as subsystems too.
