"Just Deal With It."I've recently been trying my hand at hyperbole when discussing game design - it's a time honored tactic that goes back to the earliest days of both gamers and game designers and I thought I had better get with the program. There are certain things I never do or always assume as a designer, which I think many designers could benefit from - call it hubris, call it experience...it all works for me.
The idea of asking a player to cope with a game or rule is just one of those things that wrings the hyperbole from me like Crest from an alumninum tube. Coping, in my mind, is the polar opposite of what gaming means; we game to make our own fun, not to deal with someone else's ideas of how that fun should be structured. Everytime you ask a player to "just deal with" a rule (not a ruling, mind you, but a rule itself - rulings are vital to keeping a game working) you are saying, 'My fun is more important than your fun,' and that's anathema to a good, healthy game group. Gaming is by its very nature - a group of friends telling a story together - a democratic exercise, and needs to remain as such as much as possible.
At the designer level, believing you can tell players to deal with your specific concepts is even more seductive and even more unforgiveable. There are many guys who don't write settings in their books, but write their
campaigns. While there is some utility in this approach from a procedural standpont, writing a campaign, which is built for the people you game with specifically, ignores the many possiblities and interpretations that actual play groups bring to the table.
Making a game that respects the play group's vital contribution to the life of that game is both thrice as difficult and half as rewarding for the ego - people are not playing
your game now, but rather
playing a game you equipped them to run. It forces you to consider what people might want to do with your game beyond your vision, and worst of all, accept the distinct possibility they just don't
give a fuck what you like or what you think about how a game should run beyond the mechanics.
This is exactly what makes writing games so challenging for me in the beginning, and so rewarding at the end. It's like how I describe game design to non-gamers - 'it's like writing the beginnings of 50 novels, where you don't know the characters or the plot, and have an editor who can do whatever the hell he wants to your manuscript once you put it down.'
So game designers, my message to you is: accept the fact you're enablers, creating the possibility for good, fun stories rather than telling them. That's why you're not a novelist...that and the fact nobody cares to hear about your character.
Just deal with it.
Labels: game design
