thread: 2011-06-28 : Designing Philosophical Arguments
On 2011-07-08, Josh W wrote:
Putting a bit more meat on that, the obvious way to include philosophy is mechanically, either focusing on implementing a present tence tradeoff/constriction of action or a later pattern of consequence (reward cycle stuff, gotchas, whatever).
This can be great, but you are naturally making your design more rigid, constraining the possibilities of the story.
The other way to do it, (and this is best for things relating to human psychology) is to skip mechanics out on the basis of that philosophy:
Say you feel that people gain satisfaction not so much in big things going there way as in a pattern of small consistent successes?
So you build a game where more success equals a bigger scope of possible action, that will inevitably put you into conflict with other players. Then if you make it so that the primary result of loosing conflicts is to have your scope of effect automatically reduced, in such a way that you're no immediate threat to people but it's actually difficult for them to oppose you.
Then that player who looses will keep plodding on doing whatever, and if that philosophical thing is right, will gain satisfaction in it because of it's reliability. You don't need to add a mechanic to compensate them for reduced influence because withdrawing from the fight can itself be a compensation.
That's not a very good example, but you get the idea. You set up the mechanics so whatever you're talking about is likely to occur, so the players have a chance to prove you right, rather than reacting to you mandating it.
