Cross-posted from my Substack newsletter TTRPG Teleology
A while back on twitter, game designer Paul Czege posted his definition of game design:
The art of getting people to behave as players within your instructions.
While I think there is some truth there, on balance I think it’s a bad definition.
Let’s give it a fair chance
Paul has done most of his game design in tabletop RPGs, with his most-recognized game being one of the standouts from The Forge, so I think it makes sense to consider the definition in that context. For example, the Lumpley Principle asserts that “System (including but not limited to 'the rules') is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play", which implicitly casts RPG system design as relating to getting people to agree to things. And designers Luke Crane and Jared Sorensen have presented the perspective that Game Design is Mind Control, that the game designer’s art involves applying psychology to get people to do things in games.
And of course the TTRPG community has a famously inconsistent relationship when it comes to whether or not to actually follow the rules of a game, so an RPG designer would obviously be concerned with getting players to follow the instructions they’ve laid out. Plus, convincing people to play your game is a big challenge for an indie designer, since there are a lot of other choices out there, some of which are big cultural touchstones like D&D. So it makes sense that getting people to play within the instructions of your particular game is something that would be important to an indie TTRPG designer. And furthermore, any dynamic system needs to be concerned with being self-sustaining, and gameplay can only happen when players are engaged in the game, so game design will necessarily involve getting and keeping players involved in the game.
In addition, past internet arguments have shown that people can be overly reductive in their conceptions of what “game design” means, such as separating a game into “crunch” and “fluff” and thinking that crunch is where the game design happens. But nearly any aspect of a game, from the setting design, to the art, to things as abstract as the “tone” or “vibe”, can meaningfully contribute to the experience of play, and therefore can fall under the umbrella of “game design”. So it’s understandable to want to be broad in scope.
We can also infer that Paul’s intended primary mechanism for getting people to behave as players within the designer’s instructions is to make that experience a compelling one. For example, in a later tweet thread he expressed this sentiment:
Your job as a game designer is to inspire people to behave as players within your instructions. This is what the creative act of game design is — designing actions that people are inspired enough to take.
So, presumably, the technical aspects of designing a game are entailed in Paul’s definition.
Nevertheless, I disagree
When a model of a concept doesn’t run through the core of the concept but tries to cleverly black-box the hard-to-define parts it runs the risk of that core being pushed aside as people try to aggressively pursue what is included. For example, the “shareholder value” model of running a business presumably assumed that people would achieve that value by running their businesses well, but in practice it has encouraged squeezing the slack out of every part of businesses to make fragile shells that superficially meet the short-term desires of financial analysts. Or consider the clicks-and-eyeballs model of internet journalism: doing journalism with honesty and integrity is an inefficiency that gets optimized away.
In the indie TTRPG scene I think there’s been a huge amount of time and effort focused on marketing, such as how to have good elevator pitches, how to build buzz, or how to position a game in a Hot New Trend™. I’m not saying that Paul’s definition is causal of that tendency, but I think Paul is crystallizing something that’s been implicitly in the indie water supply for a long time. It makes sense that these things seem important, but I think we lose something if the energy and attention drifts from the core of what games are and what designing them is about.
Cultural Tools for a Cultural Job
In his book Games: Agency as Art, Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen presents the idea that games, like all art, are not merely the materials but are experienced through a prescriptive frame. Consider paintings to illustrate the point: to experience a painting you look at it from the front. You can’t say you’ve experienced a painting by looking at it from the back, even though that would indeed be looking at the physical thing we call a painting. You can’t say you’ve experienced a painting if you keep your eyes closed and lick it to taste the pigments on the canvas, even though that would indeed be having a sensory experience with the materials. Our culture has an idea of what a painting is and how you experience it, and a painter generally expects that frame to be there in order to achieve their art. To actually experience a game you generally geed to adopt the values that the game needs you to have (e.g. if it’s a competitive game you need to care about winning) and operate within the rules framework of the game.
TTRPGs, unfortunately, have kind of a weird relationship to following the rules. In order to cover for some of the flaws or corner cases in games like D&D, people like Gary Gygax deployed an Emperor’s New Clothes maneuver: The rules work well if you have Good Players™ and a Good GM™. They know the unwritten rules about when to use rules and when not to, they know the real game behind the game written in the rulebook. This can make an effort to understand rules of an RPG or attempt to actually follow them look like low-status behavior.
Paul’s definition suggests a solution to cutting through that fog: If you’re a good enough game designer it doesn’t matter, because it’s your job to get people to play within your instructions, so as long as you succeed at that then it doesn’t matter what the barriers were. But I think this analogizes to thinking that it’s possible for a painter to make every square inch of a painting so visually compelling that people would want to look at the whole thing even if they initially encountered it covered by a pile of junk. Yeah, I guess that’s possible? But if that’s the way that everybody has to do it then we’re putting a very weird constraint on what kind of paintings “work”. Sometimes paintings use things like contrast and counterpoint to achieve their effect, and they only work if people are willing to take them on their own terms. If we demand that every artwork carry 100% of the cultural load of getting people to understand how to engage with it then the art is very constrained. Paintings as a medium work better when people understand how to look at them. The TTRPG world would also be better off if people were willing to let each game be its own thing by meaningfully engaging with the actual rules of each particular game.
So, rather than taking Paul’s approach to defining “game design”, I think it more makes sense to go the simple route of thinking of game design in terms of manipulating components to lead to fun and/or interesting game experiences, just like I think it makes sense to think of painting in terms of the techniques and results of putting pigments onto surfaces to produce visual experiences. That’s where the art is, so we ought to be careful about putting that part into a black box when we conceptualize it. “Game design” is the art of creating the things we call games.