Dialectics & Conflicting Priorities: The Tension that Binds Games Together

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I’ve been teaching my third Mastering Game Mechanics course with GameDesignSkills.com and one of the concepts we talk about is Tension. Alex Brazie, my cowriter for MGM and one of the owners of GDS, likes to explain tension like a rope. A rope is loose and floppy and lacks all tension when it’s not tied to anything. When it’s tied on one end, it hangs straight, but is still easily moved. When the rope is tied tight from both ends, it’s stiff with tension. In order to create tension for players, there need to be at least 2 things pulling on you. This analogy never quite sat right with me. It seemed kind of wishy washy.

As I was writing my article on Deus Ex versus Crysis Warhead something clicked for me. It’s about conflicting priorities or objectives. That’s what creates tension. That’s what creates interesting choices, instead of just different ones. And this, like depth, is reflected fractally at all scales of a game’s design. Technically, this tension is precisely what distinguishes differentiated depth from relative depth. This is what creates Interesting Decisions, as defined by Sid Meier.

Even more accurately, this is what Hegel describes as a Dialectic: a set of contradictions that propel action in search of a resolution. In the most simple terms, there is a Thesis, the desire to achieve an objective; an Antithesis, something that stops you from achieving that objective; and a Synthesis, the line of action that allows you to overcome adversity, achieving your objective. Of course, games ideally employ multiple of these. They create desires for players and simultaneously thwart them, such that any attempt to create a resolution between them is flawed and imperfect, a temporary compromise that meets the demands of the moment, but doesn’t ultimately undo the contradiction.

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Melee Attacks in PVP Must Be Fast!

Celia Wagar6 Comments

There is a common misconception in PVP game design that melee attacks should be slow and reactable in order to make it fair for your opponents to play around them. The problem with this is that it fundamentally breaks the core game dynamic, resulting in a game where doing nothing is the best option.

PVP games focused on Melee combat must have some way to either hurt the opponent that they can’t react to, or a way to set up a situation where they cannot avoid getting hurt that they cannot react to. If a game doesn’t have this, it will result in a complete stalemate. A more broad way of formulating this is: A PVP game must have a way for any player to advance the game towards a conclusion where one side wins, and any action that would prevent this advancement must be dependent on Rock Paper Scissors Guesswork, or have a chance of failure.

I believe that all PVP games are a complex (or not so complex) combination of 3 simpler games: Rock Paper Scissors, Skill Tests (or efficiency race), and Random Number Generation. Everything PVP is a game of chance, a game of skill, or a game of prediction; or some combination of the three.

Melee combat games are games of largely RPS. Melee strikes have a commitment, like a throw of hands in Rock Paper Scissors. And when they connect with an opponent, they will inflict hitstun, interrupting the opponent’s action. This means that different choices will counter one another, like in Rock Paper Scissors. This is a non-transitive relationship between different options and how many points they score. And critically: When you throw hands in RPS, you do it on the count of 3, throwing them simultaneously, so that neither of you can see which hand the other person threw.

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Against Immersion: The Holodeck Must Burn

Celia Wagar12 Comments
This is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here.

For a long time I have been opposed to the idea of immersion in video games, to the idea that people become “immersed” in fictional worlds. I believe there is no specific mental state that can be referred to as being “immersed” in a video game or work of media. I believe the qualities that people describe as immersive are contradictory, limiting, and self-defeating. I believe that sincere belief in the idea of immersion from both a design perspective, and from a player perspective, is harmful to the creation process of video games and the enjoyment of video games. I don’t think we should make appeals to the idea of immersion, or use it as a guiding philosophy for game development.

As research for this article, I’ve been collecting statements for years about what people think immersion is, what traits they think are immersive, and what breaks their immersion. Through this, I hope not just to argue against the conceptualization and prioritization of immersion, but also to show that what I am arguing against is representative of the idea of immersion in the broader public consciousness.

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Why Don’t We Know How to Design Games?

Celia Wagar1 Comment

There are 4 categories of knowledge: Known Knowns, Unknown Knowns, Known Unknowns, and Unknown Unknowns.

When you are a subject matter expert on something, like a competitive game, or coding, or a lawyer, doctor, or scientist, your knowledge is a known known. You know how much there is to know about the subject, and you are aware of exactly what parts of that subject you have in memory. This is a Known Known.

When you are an experienced professional, like a painter or an athlete, you have an intuitive understanding of your craft that you can’t necessarily explain to other people. You know these things from practicing them, but you aren’t even aware of what has become habit for you. This is an Unknown Known.

When you are a student, being taught by someone who has more knowledge than you, your teacher is able to show you all the things you have yet to learn. You don’t have this knowledge yet, but you know it is out there. This is a Known Unknown.

When you are blissfully ignorant and have no idea that a subject even exists you don’t consider what might even be out there. You don’t know about it, and you aren’t even aware what you’re missing. This is an Unknown Unknown.

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Player Agency Doesn’t Make Sense

Celia Wagar1 Comment

A commonly invoked concept for video games is the concept of Agency. In real life, Agency refers to the ability of individuals to act upon the world and shape their life outcomes, especially in relationship to other people. I don’t think this concept or framing makes sense for games, and the game The Stanley Parable, kind of lampoons this concept, especially in this trailer.

I don’t think the concept of Agency makes sense for video games, because I view games more abstractly than stories or simulations. If games are self-contained systems of rules and interactions, basically a big bundle of math, then how could you have more or less ability to affect the world or society when there is no world or society to affect? How would you compare the agency of action puzzle games, such as Tetris, Panel De Pon, Puyo Puyo, or Puzzle Fighter II Turbo? How would you compare the agency of sports, such as Soccer, Basketball, American Football, or Tennis?

Am I expressing Agency here?
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Boosting Enemy Stats is not “Artificial Difficulty”

Celia Wagar12 Comments
I’m sorry for choosing the annoying meme for the banner.

Hollow Knight: Silksong has revived an annoying line of discourse about “Artificial Difficulty”. Artificial Difficulty is ostensibly things that make a game appear more difficult, without actually engaging player skill. However in practice, most people claiming that a game has “Artificial Difficulty” are just complaining that the game is too hard for them, and this isn’t their fault, but the game’s fault. It did difficulty “wrong” in some way.

If we were to take the language of Artificial Difficulty at its face, then we’d consider whether or not a game is engaging in a fair test of skill with you. And in this way, some obstacles in Silksong aren’t fair actually, such as the bench in Hunter’s March that is rigged with a trap, which will damage you when you try to sit on it (I fell for this one). There is a very short tell, the bench depressing like the pressure plate traps in the prior section, giving you a brief opportunity to get off the bench and dash away. Disabling the bench trap requires going through a hidden tunnel and pressing a hidden switch. Silksong has a number of moments like this, which I believe were intended to be funny, because I found them funny and I know other people did too.

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Design Space: Dimensions of Game Design

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Design Space is tricky to define, because it’s the water we swim in. Mark Rosewater (who probably coined the term) says that design space is roughly how many new cards can be made from a new mechanic. A mechanic that affords a large design space interacts well with the rest of the game and allows them to create a wide variety of new cards. In other words, Design Space defines how many differentiated game elements (cards, weapons, characters, moves, enemies, obstacles, projectiles, etc.) you can create from the base mechanics of your game.

Relative to my 3-filters theory of Depth, Design Space acts almost like a 4th filter, above Possibility Space. Design Space defines which possibility spaces can even be made with the mechanics and attributes you have available to you. Possibility space is all the things that can happen in your games. Design space is all the possible games (or content) that you can make with the mechanics and systems you have chosen. In this way, game designers strive not only to create possibility spaces that are rich with possible game States, but design spaces that will allow them to create elements that enable those possibility spaces to contain a multitude of game states. A more richly detailed character allows for a more richly detailed environment for that character to interact with.

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10 Years of Critpoints

Celia Wagar2 Comments

10 years ago (and 2 months, but who’s gonna nitpick that?) I started this blog, Critpoints. Before that, I had been writing for Gather Your Party, a modest blog that aimed to challenge the establishment of professional games journalism with a staff of volunteers, no advertising, some of the early crop of gaming video essayists, and the tagline, “Honest Gaming Journalism”. For a lot of fairly predictable reasons, we burned out and eventually the site shuttered.

While I wrote there, I authored a column called, “More Than Mashing”, which showcased and explained different advanced video game techniques and play. This translated into a few YouTube Videos, most of which have been lost to time. I later ended up reviving this concept as a Facebook page, which did great until I got bored of it, and ran out of clips. Currently, that idea survives as a channel in my Discord Server, and as the banner in this site’s layout.

Since GYP, I’ve been involved in a few different projects, including Design Oriented, a group of game designers who were interested in exploring a more mechanical angle to video game design. I ended up leaving due to differences in point of view, but one thing I held onto was the name, “Crit Points”, which I had suggested as a potential name for the DO project. I tried combining the different ideas of “critique,” “hit points,” and “critical hit” into one short name. The tagline under the website name is intended to reflect the triple entendre. (Similarities to ActionPts, someone I used to work with, and ContraPoints are coincidental (I didn’t hear about ContraPoints until 2018) ).

Critpoints became my new brand, and I started this blog in March 2015!

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Building Counterplay for PvP Games

Celia Wagar3 Comments

I have a 4 factor model for move/option design in PvP games:

  • Stake (how much you stand to lose by choosing this option, either in costs or penalties)
  • Reward (how much you stand to gain if this option succeeds and stand to gain regardless)
  • Difficulty/Chance (the likelihood that the option will be successfully executed)
  • Counterplay (what range of options this move beats, and how hard/soft a counter)

The purpose of dividing across these 4 factors is to help illustrate to designers the different levers they can pull, instead of focusing purely on a linear risk/reward relationship.

It’s common for a lot of designers to get stuck thinking that everything risky has to have a proportionate amount of reward, and everything rewarding has to have a proportionate amount at stake. Having lopsided stake/reward relationships is possible and healthy when the difficulty and counterplay are considered.

A subtle factor of this model is that cost is a type of risk, and therefore something you put at Stake. When you pay a cost, you’re risking that that investment won’t pay off. Therefore An upside of this model is that it separates Risk from Difficulty/Chance of Success, which are often conflated. “This move is risky, because you’re likely to mess it up.” By separating Risk out into Stake, Difficulty, and Counterplay, we can think more carefully about how each of these different factors play into an option’s design, and we have a wider design space for option design.

Within counterplay there is a lot of nuance to how counters can be designed. I’m going to identify 2 spectrums:

  • Hard vs Soft
  • Wide vs Narrow

A hard counter is one that is guaranteed to always shut down the option that it counters. A soft counter is one with more wiggle room.

A wide counter can beat a wide variety of options. And a narrow counter can only deal with a very specific one.

By dividing counterplay across these two axes, we can see the relative strengths and weaknesses of different moves and intentionally alter the counterplay of moves relative to our needs.

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I Don’t Really Like Deus Ex

Celia Wagar1 Comment

Deus Ex is THE game that popularized the Immersive Sim genre. It lived as a cult classic for decades until it was picked up again for Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, then dropped like a sack of potatoes when Square Enix tried to split the plot of Mankind Divided across 2 games in order to get twice the money and the audience decided they didn’t like that.

So what is an Immersive Sim? I think Imsim is a specific design lineage among the developers of Looking Glass Studios and Ion Storm, much like the modern Souls-like subgenre. Many people credit the first imsim as Ultima Underworld, and it was succeeded by System Shock 2, Thief, and Deus Ex, going on to produce later examples such as Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Bioshock 1 & 2, and the Prey reboot.

Immersive Sims are typically set in the first person perspective, have fairly linear story progression through a series of “mission” levels played in a specific sequence, but many routes that can be taken through each level, and access to these routes is modulated by the RPG skills or upgrades that the player has chosen to invest into. When dialogue with NPCs is possible, there are frequently many different options available, and NPCs and notes found scattered around the world provide a large amount of exposition about the events of the game setting

In addition to this, imsims tend to place a strong focus on systemic interactions between different objects and entities, outside of the player. This can be through physics (stacking boxes), NPC interactions, or other environmental features (Thief’s water and moss arrows). This has the stated goal of provoking “emergent gameplay”, which is something I typically hold in high esteem.

So why don’t I like Deus Ex? I don’t think the game’s various systems add up to all that much.

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