Art in mechanical design - has always been an awful idea?
JoyWriter:
Quote from: Callan S. on July 11, 2009, 09:42:22 PM
Quote
I'm not sure I agree; people re-purpose things all the time
I'm talking about game authors and their design goals (specifically how a certain pair compromise each other to no benefit) - specifically about making new designs and how drawing from the old idea of baking art into mechanics might be a bad idea to learn and practice. End users taking the product and using it for some other purpose isn't an issue here :)
"End users" aren't the only people who re-purpose mechanics! Game designers do it, with their own games or other people's, finding elements of old systems that can fulfil new purposes. Reread my comment with that in mind and I suspect you'll find something more in it!
otspiii:
Huh, the way I see it there are three main topics of interest to me brought up in your initial post: making sure the objective gameplay resembles the fiction, making sure the individual player experience suits the fiction, and the fiction telling you to sit down and shut up because it's not your turn to have fun.
I haven't played Rifts, sadly, but I have experienced the same thing in Shadowrun, so I'll use that as my example. I remember the first time I played the game with a bunch of more experienced friends. I was pretty familiar with the rules, but I didn't really understand the consequences of a lot of them; I had book knowledge but no play experience. I threw together a mage character that was decently effective and everyone started playing. The problem I had with the game cropped up pretty quickly; whenever a fight broke out everyone else was taking 2-4x more actions than I was and I just kind of sat around for half an hour (there were a bunch of players, too) between every turn. Everyone else was a fun enough roleplayer that the game stayed fairly engaging even when I was just watching, but it still struck me as a little painful that just having a good initiative made such a gigantic difference in how much of a contribution each person got to make to combat in the game. Is this pretty much exactly the same as your example in your first post, Callan?
Here's my take on how each of the three topics of interest tie into my experience.
Making the objective gameplay fit the fiction: I think this is what you mean when you say art in mechanical design? It's trying to make the rolls and actions in the real world mimic the events going on in the game world as accurately as possible. It's the idea of 'well, he has all this weird bioware that makes him see the world moving way slower than other people, I guess he should take two turns to represent this'. It's a desire to make the dice the physics of the game world, to make it so that a 3rd party person watching the game unfold could easily see the connection between the rolling and mechanics being used and the actions going on in the imagined world. This seemed to me what you were focusing more on in your post, the idea that inserting 'art' (this character punches more times in a second than other characters) into the 'mechanics' (so the player gets to take more turns per combat turn to represent this) is dangerous and can really screw up player enjoyment.
I don't see the point in making this a design goal at all, although this is something I have butted heads with people over this issue in this forum before, such as in the Disabling Pawn Stance and Enforcing Character Beliefs on Action thread. That said, I think you're making a mistake in assuming that this is just how the fiction and the mechanics always interact. It's true that this design goal has no regard for player enjoyment or experience, but there's a really similar way of approaching the mechanics that is entirely built around the player experience.
Making player experience fit the fiction: On the outside this looks a lot like making the objective gameplay fit the fiction, and when viewed from the outside gameplay designed in this way will probably look very similar to gameplay focused on objective play, but the focus is entirely different. It should also be made clear that this is a design goal rather than a type of mechanic. It's designing the rules to make the player feel like the character they're playing. It's having mechanics that make you really feel nimble and quick when you build a acrobatic character, or really feel like a powerhouse when you roll a gigantic handful of dice for damage when you connect with your gigantic destructive axe. Delta's D&D Hotspot had an interesting post on "Games Within Games" that might clarify what I mean a little.
The multiple rounds per combat turn that wired reflexes give a character in Shadowrun fit both objective play design goals (he punches twice;roll twice) and player experience design goals (his speed is overwhelming;take an overwhelming number of turns), and I's day that most rule-sets for games are the same way. If you approach from an experience rather than action based perspective 90% of the rules you'll write will be the same, but those 10% will really change the tone of your game. Also, by staying in a player-experience based mindset you become more mindful of avoiding the third issue.
The fiction justifying not having fun: The thing about designing to make sure player experience mirrors the fiction is that by itself it doesn't assure that the players will have fun. Even without playing, I know that Rifts is a good example of this. If everyone comes to the game with glitterboys and you come in with a vagabond it pretty much means that whenever a fight breaks out you can just kind of go lay down on the couch until the fight gets resolved, because you really just do not matter. To connect it to my Shadowrun experience, my character thought/perceived/acted so much slower in the imagined game world that it made sense that I wasn't getting to do things for half-hours at a time, but that doesn't mean it still wasn't lame.
Actually, I think Exalted is the game that most exemplifies this problem that I've seen, although it has less to do with mechanics and more to do with setting. It's a game that's all about being an amazing god-like hero who can do anything. . .but the fiction is all about these countless enemies who are all impossibly stronger than you and will smack you down in a second if you draw any attention to yourself. There's this weird tension between the fact that the whole concept of the game is that you can do anything, and the fact that if the ST runs the game's fiction to the letter the moment you do anything you attract the attention of a bunch of people who can and will kill you effortlessly. The fiction is telling the players to shut up and keep their heads down in this game of exalted heroic action.
Just mixing mechanics and fiction/art isn't a bad thing, but you can't build them separately and expect them to reinforce each other. That path does just lead to huge amounts of "shut up, I don't care that you aren't having fun, this is how things REALLY ARE". Both the fiction and the mechanics need to be built around each other, making sure at every step that both of them raise the other to greater heights, rather than just kind of putting them near each other and hoping they get along.
To bring this back to Shadowrun, for the person taking the 4 rounds a turn the mechanics and the fiction work great together. He's flying all over the place, getting a ton done, being absolutely terrifying. Taking a bunch of rounds a turn is great for him and really helps him get in the mindset of a over-the-top killing machine. The problem is that this experience comes at the cost of the other players' fun. Rather than having the mechanics tell them that they are competent mercenaries, as the fiction claims, they're just telling the player that they're bored. The rules didn't properly account for player experience, and although they hit spot on at times they are in no way reliable at doing so.
Interestingly enough, I think this is the big strength and weakness of games with more universal resolution mechanics, like HeroQuest seems to have. The fiction and the mechanics aren't really related, so they don't get in the way of each other at all. On the other hand, the fact that they're so disconnected means that they don't re-enforce each other at all, either. You're guaranteed not to break the player experience, but you don't really do anything with the mechanics themselves to add to it, either. The Games Within Games blog post I linked to earlier is all about this. I say it can be made up for to an extent with non-mechanical means of engaging the players, but there are a lot of people who feel like a game that doesn't use its mechanics to reinforce immersion is like a dog with three legs. It can walk, and even run, but it's still just not as elegant or quick as one with four.
Callan S.:
Joywriter,
I don't understand? I'm talking about having a design goal of making a group activity. I'm not talking about having that as a design goal and then for some reason repurposing it? That would be giving up the group activity design goal. I think your sort of arguing a point which is based on throwing out(repurposing) a design goal I talked about at the start. If so, no. Atleast for this thread a design goal is that it's a group activity and it doesn't get repurposed into something else. Indeed the very thread is talking about trying to add design goals which then fail/compromise that group activity goal, without granting any actual benefit to either goal in doing so.
Hi Misha,
I think you've looked past the design goal of it being a group activity (people get mostly the same amount of turns) and your looking at forfilling 'player experience' or as you directly put it latter, immersion. It seems to be just ignoring the original design goal of it being a group activity and looking at another goal entirely (player experience) instead, and your point is based on whether player experience is forfilled?
otspiii:
Quote from: Callan S. on July 12, 2009, 04:01:32 PM
I think you've looked past the design goal of it being a group activity (people get mostly the same amount of turns) and your looking at forfilling 'player experience' or as you directly put it latter, immersion. It seems to be just ignoring the original design goal of it being a group activity and looking at another goal entirely (player experience) instead, and your point is based on whether player experience is forfilled?
Wouldn't the group aspect be a part of the individual experience? Multiple individual experiences and the way they interact with each other are the building blocks of any group activity. I only touched on it briefly and indirectly with the bit about favoring one person's experience over another's by letting one player take a bunch more turns, but it's just one of the uncountable different considerations you have to make when designing a game experience. You do have a good point in that it's, by far, one of the most important ones, though.
I'd say that it's more than just immersion, though. It's a sort of mix of immersion and creative agenda. What emotions/ideas do you want to inspire/explore with your game? I was confused at first by your use of the word 'art' because that's the definition of art I use in my mind: any form of expression that communicates an emotion or idea through indirect means. I see things like the fiction just being a tool you use to help that emotion or idea connect to your audience better, not as being the art itself. I'm not calling your definition wrong, though. It's one of those horrible words where everyone takes it to mean a different thing. I had figured out what you meant by the end of your post, so there's no need to worry over semantics.
Danny2050:
Quote from: otspiii on July 12, 2009, 04:29:54 PM
Quote from: Callan S. on July 12, 2009, 04:01:32 PM
I think you've looked past the design goal of it being a group activity (people get mostly the same amount of turns) and your looking at forfilling 'player experience' or as you directly put it latter, immersion. It seems to be just ignoring the original design goal of it being a group activity and looking at another goal entirely (player experience) instead, and your point is based on whether player experience is forfilled?
Wouldn't the group aspect be a part of the individual experience? Multiple individual experiences and the way they interact with each other are the building blocks of any group activity. I only touched on it briefly and indirectly with the bit about favoring one person's experience over another's by letting one player take a bunch more turns, but it's just one of the uncountable different considerations you have to make when designing a game experience. You do have a good point in that it's, by far, one of the most important ones, though.
I'd say that it's more than just immersion, though. It's a sort of mix of immersion and creative agenda. What emotions/ideas do you want to inspire/explore with your game? I was confused at first by your use of the word 'art' because that's the definition of art I use in my mind: any form of expression that communicates an emotion or idea through indirect means. I see things like the fiction just being a tool you use to help that emotion or idea connect to your audience better, not as being the art itself. I'm not calling your definition wrong, though. It's one of those horrible words where everyone takes it to mean a different thing. I had figured out what you meant by the end of your post, so there's no need to worry over semantics.
I think group experience can be directly built in, rather than have it "emerge" from parallel individual experiences. The best example of that I have seen is not from an RPG but from the board game "Battlestar Galactica". Each person plays an individual with different abilities and opportunities for helping the humans achieve their goals. Many "tasks" are team tasks that each parson may contribute to, by playing cards secretly into a pile that represents group effort. The cards are shuffled and revealed to determine if the group as a whole succeeded. This allows opportunities for the traitors in the group (cylons) to chuck in detrimental effort without revealing who did it.
Anyway, my point is, the mechanic is aimed at group interaction. There are times during play where individual effort and experience is highlighted, but short lived so 80% of the game is group time, with lots of interaction and negotiating.
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