Making Deep Games

Designing Games with Meaning and Purpose

Doris C. Rusch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317607700
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Games
• Index: Computer Science

Like movies, television, and other preceding forms of media, video games are undergoing a dynamic shift in its content and perception. While the medium can still be considered in its infancy, the mark of true artistry and conceptual depth is detectable in the evolving styles, various genres and game themes. Doris C. Rusch's, Making Deep Games, combines this insight along with the discussion of the expressive nature of games, various case studies, and hands-on design exercises. This book offers a perspective into how to make games that tackle the whole bandwidth of the human experience; games that teach us something about ourselves, enable thought-provoking, emotionally rich experiences and promote personal and social change. Grounded in cognitive linguistics, game studies and the reflective practice of game design, Making Deep Games explores systematic approaches for how to approach complex abstract concepts, inner processes, and emotions through the specific means of the medium. It aims to shed light on how to make the multifaceted aspects of the human condition tangible through gameplay experiences.

1

Diving for Deep Game Ideas

Wherein the means and methods of finding and fleshing out deep game ideas are discussed:

• The importance of self-awareness as a source for deep game ideas

• Julia Cameron’s self-awareness tools: “morning pages”and “artist date”

• The “inner game designer” as a method to systematically unpack deep game ideas

– Case study: “The Bridge”—the inner game designer in action

• Finding the themes of art and media that reveal the human condition

• Trying to understand other people and their experiences

1.1 Becoming a Mind Reader

In order to make games that enable insightful, thought-provoking, and emotionally rich experiences, it is helpful to become a mind reader—not necessarily of other people’s but at least one’s own mind. So often, we live our lives barely aware of what is going on with us. We might wake up cranky and not know why, but unable to shake the feeling, or somehow anxious for no apparent reason. We have a conversation with a friend and suddenly find ourselves seething or resentful. Some buttons must have been pushed, but what they are remains mysterious. We watch a sunrise and are filled with an overwhelming sense of hope and optimism, a feeling that might dissipate as suddenly as it has set upon us. To create deep games, we need to study ourselves and pay attention to how we see the world, what drives us, what holds us back, how we relate to others, and why. We need to become attuned to and aware of our experiences, and learn to study and analyze them systematically and conscientiously, because, as game designers, creating experiences is our job, our purpose, and maybe even our calling. We cannot model something we do not understand ourselves.

Granted, every game evokes an experience when played. But is it the experience that we intended to convey, that we wanted players to have? Admittedly, there is no way to predict with certainty what players will feel when playing a game, but neither should it be completely arbitrary, if you know what you’re doing. Before we can worry about how an experience translates into rules, mechanics, and other game aspects, though, we need to be able to define the experience we want to model—to identify its quality or, as Jesse Schell (2008) calls it, its essential elements. This is much easier said than done. As Schell puts it, experiences are hard to describe. They are all we know, but we cannot see them, touch them, or hold them. They are inner processes, and, as such, they are abstract. (In Chapter 3, we will talk more about the nature of abstract concepts, the challenge of modeling them in games, and the strategies to approach this challenge systematically.) Schell continues:

But as tricky as experiences can be, creating them is all a game designer really cares about. We cannot shy away from them, retreating into the concreteness of our material game. We must use every means we can muster to comprehend, understand, and master the nature of human experience. (p. 10)

What strikes me as particularly relevant in Schell’s quote is the insight that if we want to design experiences with deliberation and intent, we cannot fast-forward to creating rules and mechanics (the concreteness of our material game). We need to know first what we want to model. Otherwise, it’s like blindly pounding the keyboard in the hopes that the next great American novel will unfold. It is very tempting to start thinking about rules and mechanics or the story, characters, and the environment before we are ready. These things are concrete, but, if they are not informed by a vision for the experience they should enable, or the message they are meant to convey, they lack substance. They can only be deep or meaningful by accident. Exploring the source system—the experience the game aims to capture—is a crucial part of the design process and deserves careful consideration. I spent more than 6 months designing Elude (a short game about the experience of depression), yet it took only 9 weeks to develop it. It took so long to get a grip on what being depressed felt like, what the core of the experience was, and how this could be turned into something playable.

When modeling the aspects of the human experience and making statements about how things work or what they feel like, every rule needs to make sense in regard to the source system (Chapter 2). No game element is allowed to be in the game that does not support the message lest it dilutes or even undermines it. Exploring the experience thoroughly before starting the design process will also help solve design problems. You can always refer back to your insights about how it works or what it feels like to identify or tweak a rule or mechanic. When you get stuck, always go back to the source. That’s why creating a strong vision for the game—knowing what it should model and for what purpose—is so important and will contribute to the game’s depth and inner coherence.

1.1.1 Morning Pages

The realization that self-awareness is conducive to creativity and expressive depth is not new. Two very effective tools in that regard have been introduced by Julia Cameron (2002): (1) the morning pages and (2) the artist date. They are best used in conjunction with each other. Morning pages foster mind-reading skills, while the artist date provides the reading material. Cameron (2002) describes morning pages as follows:

Morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness: “Oh, god, another morning. I have NOTHING to say. I need to wash the curtains. Did I get my laundry yesterday? Blah, blah, blah…” They might also, more ingloriously, be called brain drain, since that is one of their main functions. There is no wrong way to do morning pages. These daily morning meanderings are not meant to be art. Or even writing. (…) Writing is simply one of the tools. Pages are meant to be, simply, the act of moving the hand across the page and writing down whatever comes to mind. Nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid, or too weird to be included. The morning pages are not supposed to sound smart – although sometimes they might. Most times they won’t, and nobody will ever know except you. Nobody is allowed to read your morning pages except you. And you shouldn’t even read them yourself for the first eight weeks or so. Just write three pages, and stick them into an envelope. Or write three pages in a spiral notebook and don’t leaf back through. Just write three pages…and write three more pages the next day. (pp. 9–10)

Cameron uses the morning pages as a way to outwit and silence the inner critic or censor that blocks creativity, but, apart from that, they are also very effective to point toward one’s personal themes and issues. Whatever is there, buried in the subconscious or preconscious, slowly bubbles to the surface and makes itself known through the morning pages. Suddenly, that unspecified, uneasy feeling or nondescript restlessness has a name, and you can put your finger on it: e.g., I’ve been missing my grandparents. I need to go visit them, to get in touch with my roots. I never liked those curtains; why don’t I get new ones? I need to show myself that I care about myself. I used to love playing music but haven’t in ages. I need to find a piano somewhere that I can use. Why do I always think work is so much more important than play?

Sometimes, morning pages directly lead to game ideas, and, the more you do them, the more often this will happen. However, that is not their primary purpose. Their primary purpose is to pay attention to your inner chatter. You’re tuning in to your very own frequency and listening to what you have to tell yourself. When personal themes start to crystallize, morning pages help you explore them and make sense of them. They help you ask questions to understand yourself better. It is a skill that also translates to understanding others better. You stop just assuming things or blindly projecting (e.g., what’s true for me must be true for others). A critical analysis of thoughts and feelings becomes second nature. This is a precondition for grasping the elements at play in the human experience, for getting beyond a superficial, shallow, commonsense understanding of emotional concepts and dynamics.

1.1.2 Artist Date

Morning pages get you in touch with your personal themes, dreams, and desires and help you make sense of your experiences. This presupposes, though, that there is something to make sense of. You can’t read without reading material. If you sit in your room all day, staring at the wallpaper, your realm of experiences is quite limited. The artist date takes care of that. It is a commitment to yourself to expand your horizons, to play, and to fill the well. What is it?

An artist date is a block of time, perhaps two hours weekly, especially set aside and committed to nurturing your creative consciousness, your inner artist. In its most primary form, the artist date is an excursion, a play date that you preplan and defend against all interlopers. You do not take anyone on this artist date but you and your inner artist, a.k.a. your creative child. That means no lovers, friends, spouses, children, no taggers-on of any stripe. If you think this sounds stupid or that you will never be able to afford the time, identify that reaction as resistance. You cannot afford not to find time for artist dates. (…) Spending time in solitude with your artist child is essential to self-nurturing. A long country walk, a solitary expedition to the beach for a sunrise or sunset, a sortie out to a strange church to hear gospel music, to an ethnic neighborhood to taste foreign sights and sounds – your artist might enjoy any of these. Or your artist might like bowling. (…)

Above all, learn to listen to what your artist child has to say on, and about these joint expeditions. For example, “Oh, I hate this serious stuff,” your artist may exclaim if you persist in taking it only to grown-up places that are culturally edifying and good for it. Listen to that! It is telling you your art needs more playful inflow. A little fun can go a long way toward making your work feel more like play. We forget that the imagination at play is at the heart of all good work. (Cameron 2002, pp. 18–20)

Artist dates are invaluable to identify your true north. They point you toward the themes that resonate with you at a given point in life, and morning pages help you figure out why. There was a time when my artist dates frequently led me to flea markets. I was both fascinated and appalled by them. There is the thrill of finding a gem among all the junk, but there is also the sadness that very personal items, such as reading glasses, that once were almost a part of someone are now being discarded. Flea markets provided a tangible meditation on the fleetingness of life, on how our belongings—maybe once coveted and treasured—will inevitably end up as garbage. It made me realize that now is the only time to be happy and that moments we have with our loved ones are precious. It made me think about culture and civilization and what it all means and who we are without all of our stuff. There is a game in there somewhere about love and loss and the meaning of objects.

Morning pages and artist dates promote authentic creativity. If we do them regularly, we start to feel more strongly about things; we know better what we like and what we don’t like, and what is important to us and why. This fosters the development of authentic projects—projects that are informed by a certain inner clarity, that have a point of view, that want to express something, and that mean something. Maybe not everyone will get their meaning, and much depends on the actual implementation of the experience into the game, but, nevertheless, this is the seed of conceptual depth and coherence, of thought-provoking and insightful gameplay.

1.1.3 Conversing with the Inner Game Designer

As your connection to yourself gets stronger, and you become more attuned to your inner life through morning pages and artist dates, ideas will start to bubble to the surface. While they very rarely arrive as fully fleshed-out game designs, they tend to have a special quality that marks them as personally meaningful and worthy of further exploration. You will know when an idea has such a quality. It might be an image, a sentence, a quote, or just a very strong feeling you cannot shake. This could very well be the seed for a deep game. The nature of a seed, however, is that it needs to undergo a transformation to fulfill its potential. It is still a mere promise of a plant, and what it will turn into has yet to be discovered. With the right nourishment and care, though, it will grow and bloom. The followi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Author
• Introduction
• 1 Diving for Deep Game Ideas
• 2 Games as an Expressive Medium
• 3 Modeling the Human Experience—Or the Art of Nailing a Pudding to the Wall
• 4 Experiential Metaphors—Or What Breaking Up, Getting a Tattoo, and Playing God of War Have in Common
• 5 Allegorical Games—Or the Monster Isn’t a Monster Isn’t a Monster
• 6 Designing with Purpose and Meaning—Nine Questions to Define Where You’re Going and Make Sure You Get There
• 7 It’s Not Always about You!—Lessons Learned from Participatory Deep Game Design
• 8 The Same New Kid in Yet Another Hood—Deep Game Design as Creative Arts Therapy?
• Index