A Year of Design
Role Playing game systems have always been my personal favorite type of game design. They are, however, huge elaborate game systems with many interconnected sub systems, taking quite a bit of time to get right and fully realize. The downside of doing this sort of design is that while other designers have a regular stream of small games to show, the RPG and MMO system designer only produces one every few years. My latest project, the AIR Steampunk MMORPG, has just reached its first year of design, and is coming along nicely. Because I have the honor of working with an absolutely brilliant team of writers, this is the first RPG project where I have gotten to truly focus primarily on the system design and its integration into a storyworld being created in parallel. What follows is a summary of what the team has been up to.
Game Mechanics are Beautiful
Game mechanics can be quite technical and might seem like the dry boring part of the game. They don’t have the visual impact of slick graphics or the memorable journey we get from well designed narrative, and so they can be thought of as just another necessary component of a game. The truth is, they are the game. Misunderstanding on this point is what leads to long and tired arguments about story in games and whether or not games can be considered art. The mechanics of a game, once set in motion by the activity are play, become beautiful; they are entirely their own form of aesthetic. What makes games truly fascinating to me as a game designer is emergent complexity that results from a well designed system of mechanics.
Brenda Brathwaite is a designer who truly understands this concept, embodied in her series of games, “Mechanic is the Message”. The game in this series which has gotten so much attention, “Train”, attempts to explore the mechanics of the system of human on human tragedy carried out in the Holocaust. A true genius in her field, Brenda sees the world in terms of systems, and noted in her research that human on human tragedy is a result of a careful and deliberate system. She has said that in designing Train, her goal was to understand this system and figure out how to put the player into it. In doing so, the player gains new insight and understanding of an aspect of human existence.
When you design game mechanics, you are dealing with the same stuff that drives the universe.