I’m going to post a series of GDC Articulates (noun, ahr-tik-yuh-l?t). These are things I’ve known or believed on some level, but haven’t quite managed to put words to until I spent a week talking about game design and the industry with hundreds of other game designers/developers/artists.
I do not design games, I design opportunities for play.
Part of me wants to say this is a nearly irrelevant distinction. The end result of both approaches is the same–a game. The tools are the same and the processes very similar. Both require systems and both, hopefully, focus on the agent’s experience. But the core difference, I believe, is one of authorship versus interpretation. Most of the game designers I talk to design systems to enforce a particular experience, to guide the agent through a predetermined path to a foregone conclusion. I, on the other hand, prefer to create systems that allow agents to express themselves, to explore their own stories, through the gameplay.
Providing opportunities for play is a sandbox approach, but it’s not always a wide-open sandbox like Second Life. Rather, it’s more like providing the agent with a limited set of meaningful symbolic content and seeing how they choose to assemble the symbols and what meaning they derive from doing so.
This approach is evident in every game I’ve designed to date–Renown (which is going into a new testing phase this summer), HoneyComb Engine, and Addicube. And it’s certainly evident in the tile-based storytelling game I’m in the early stages of designing.
This approach, of course, is much more difficult to implement in video games–particularly when you’re not a programmer. So, it looks like I really ought to do something about that. After I finish the HCE handbook, of course.
0 comments:
Post a Comment