thread: 2011-05-11 : The Un-frickin-welcome
On 2011-05-15, Valamir wrote:
This seems like yet-another-clearly-true-thing that Vincent has taken the time to codify and which now will produce much wrangling and wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth until everybody finally realizes its obviously true, and starts to talk about it as if they bought in all along...remember all those "system" discussions.
This point about "real design" seems a complete given to me.
If I as a player am totally wanting to get something out of play and you as a player are totally wanting to get something out of play, and I'm dedicated to seeing you get what you want and you're dedicated to seeing me get what I want, and we're both skilled enough to read cues and flags and body language...then what the fuck do we need rules for? We can just sit around the camp fire passing the conch and being awesome. And maybe that produces a magnificent experience, or maybe its lame because everybody getting what they want out of play all the time can lose its luster after awhile...but either way...we don't need rules for that.
We might be pretending to use rules and roll some dice and record some stats, but ultimately the social contract of our play and our dedication to fulfilling each other's expectations is going to trump whatever the rules say any way...so at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what set of rules we're pretending to use...the real rules are the system we've created for ourselves socially.
So as a game designer you have two choices. One is to be a pretend designer making rules that don't really matter (or need to work well anyway) because you know that people are only going to be pretending to use them. For examples see just about any game you can find on the internet that describes itself as "rules light" or "transparent" or "getting out of the way of play". T
Or you can be a real designer making rules that do matter. And by "matter" that simply means "yes they are fun/compelling/engaging enough that I want to use them and am committed to seeing it through" AND "they're giving me something that I CAN'T get from just you and I sitting together and playing pass the conch while being committed to delivering on each others expectations.
And here keep in mind that "delivering on expectations" could be any thing from heroic victory to emo tragedy...if what you want is your character to die a painful death with all of their ambitions unfulfilled, and I'm committed to helping you realize that...then that's still fulfilling the desires of the players through play.
Everything Vincent has written in this thread is nothing more than an attempt to discuss how a game design can deliver something we can't get without it. Whatever our social context is, there are just some outcomes that will never ever ever happen if that social context is all that's driving play. Maybe that's because there are things that we'd just plain never think of doing. Maybe that's because there's a line there that we really truly need to cross but are too chicken shit to do it. Maybe that's because I would never bring myself to just dicking you over and breaking your heart in play. Whatever, there are some places any given group at any given time just can't get to within their currently existing social context.
So for a game design to matter, it has to be able to take us to those places (or some subset of those places) and it has to do it in a way that won't cause us to over ride the itinerary and bail on going there or simply quit playing.
That's what Vincent is calling "Real Design" (please correct me if I'm missed the mark here). This seems non controversal to me.
