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Platonism and Game Design Theory

So, I've been against a formal language of game design for a while now. Last year at GDC, Raph Koster gave a talk on a formal notation system for game design, which was close enough to get my hackles up, and presented more or less the same system in his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Just recently I ran into another, similar proposal from someone else entirely, and the ensuing discussion helped me to clarify for myself why I object to these types of approaches so vehemently.

Now, I'm a fairly big fan of systems. I think a lot of game designers are, and after all, this shouldn't be terribly surprising. Game design is largely a matter of coming up with systems for organizing gameplay. When we write game design documents, we're laying out the way that the game is going to be built, which means describing what systems are going to be necessary to support the kind of gameplay we're going for, what the inputs and outputs are, how there will be consistency in the perception and interactive choices of the player, and since a lot of this is for the programmers, it makes sense to work in systems, as the underlying code is, essentially, a set of systems. When you work with systems this much, you come across patterns. A lot of time you rely on patterns, patterns you've seen work in other games, patterns you've picked up from the common threads of description of player experiences, patterns you've used before that produced good results.

In fact, I would argue that there is a deeper, more fundamental relationship here. We like systems because they can be used to explain patterns, to produce patterns; they organize the important information into structures that are easier to remember and work with, but they also appeal to our basic desire for things to have a reason. Human beings are very uncomfortable with the notion that things "just happen". If things happen, we want to believe that someone or something made them happen that particular way. Conspiracy theory gets a lot of its charge, in my opinion, from this desire to posit an authoring force behind constellations of facts that are otherwise distressing in their randomness. An even better example is religion; not to diss people's faith, but every religion at some level establishes a story about why things happen: why we are here, why we face challenges in our lives, what it all means. On an epistemological level, religion's function is to take the things that otherwise "just happen" and make them part of a much larger system of meaning.

[It's a complete tangent, but I think that one of the reasons why interaction with games is so compelling, particularly games of skill as opposed to those of chance, is that everything does have a reason in a game world, which is a comforting relief for people constantly confronted with a world where the reasons for things, if they have them at all, are beyond our immediate comprehension, much less our manipulation.]

I would argue that the impetus behind these formal language (or the more limited formal notation) projects is precisely this desire to find a system, a logic, a reason, for why some games work and other games don't. After all, if we could discover, or formulate, a formal language that fully described games and game design, we would have defined the possibility space of all game experiences. By reducing the complexity of the problem to a formal language, we could analyze all existing games and get at the specific reasons why; we'd be past the games "just happening" and into the realm of discrete causes and effects. Beyond that, a formal language would also enable us to formulate, to speak, if you will, new games into being through our understanding of these functional relationships. Like God himself, we could bring into being through the mere act of language.

If this sounds familiar, then you probably read some Plato back in your school days. Plato believed that beyond the concrete objects of our experience in this world lay the Ideal objects of which the concrete objects are merely shadows. The relationships between the Ideal objects formed an Ideal knowledge, and this is what philosophy gives us some glimpse of, in spite of our limits. The Ideal and the divine have a pretty clear relationship, and to know the Ideal is in some ways to approach divinity ourselves. The belief in the possibility of a formal language of game design posits an Ideal that can be abstracted out of the concrete artifacts of games, and the designer who could understand this language, who could speak this language would be Divine, or at the very least the discovery of this language, like the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, would give us knowledge of the fundamental building blocks of our experience, and its discover wouldn't be a mere game-maker but rather a theorist of the highest order, a high priest of Knowledge.

In this context, it's really not all that surprising that designers are seduced by this idea. After all, who wouldn't want to be a God, or failing that, an acknowledged great thinker? The problem with all of this is that this is not, in fact, how game design works. Game design is, after all, only one small part of a much larger project of bringing a game into being. Once the designer finishes his (or her) work, the programmers and artists go to work; once they've done their job, QA gets into the mix. The Idea of the game doesn't have any substance without the actual code and content that make it work. The project of abstracting design out of the concrete artifacts of games, finding the Ideal language of the Ideas, fundamentally misses the importance of the execution of the game.

This is hardly a new problem. In fact, it's so common and been around for so long that there's a specific word for describing it: hermeneutics. In the abstract, this is the relationship between the whole and its parts, more specifically that it is impossible to distinguish whether the whole is the sum of its parts or whether the parts are derived from their relationship to the whole. That's a slight mis-statement; in fact, hermeneutics is concerned with the reciprocal relationship wherein the whole is the sum of its parts and the parts are derived from the whole. Properly speaking, this is a dialectic, not a case of "either or" but rather "both and", and more deeply because the "both and" is a dynamic relationship rather than a static one, with each side constantly informing (and deforming) the other.

Back in the nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold wrote Culture and Anarchy, which while deeply flawed in some respects, takes an extended look at the hermeneutics of culture. In it, he describes the relationship between the Platonic Ideal of knowledge (which he connects variously to Appollonian, Hellenistic, Light, and various other terms) and the empirical experience of artifacts, things in the world (Dionysian, Hebraic, Sweetness, and other terms in opposition to the first set). Rather than privileging one side over the other, Arnold carefully moves back and forth between them, demonstrating that neither approach in isolation provides a full understanding of the world, but rather that there is a dynamic interplay between them, in which the true richness of experience can be understood. The designers who claim that there is an Ideal language of game design, and implicitly that game design is an Idea that can be abstracted from its execution, are missing not only the other half but the fundamental exchange between both halves.

I expect better from working designers. It reminds me of the scene in The Player where the producers are gathered around a table, making newspaper headlines into movie concepts, with the point that writers aren't needed to come up with stories. Tim Robbins' character joins in with the statement that they're really on to something, and if they could just get rid of the actors and directors, they might get somewhere. This treatment of game design as though it were an Idea makes the programmers, artists, sound designers, producers, and in fact everyone else involved in making games into irrelevant, non-essential personnel. That sort of misunderstanding may be rational for people who've never worked with a team, but for those of us who have, it should be immediately and indisputably clear that the game design is only one part of the larger whole.

Even for game players, it should be readily apparent that the design in itself is not what makes the game fun, but the particular execution of it. For example, I've recently been playing a lot of Guitar Hero. While mechanically the game is almost identical to other rhythm games (Dance Dance Revolution, Donkey Konga), the execution of the game is vital to my enjoyment of it. While they could have picked nothing but heavy metal songs, they've sprinkled in alternative rock, pop rock, classic rock, progressive rock, and as a result, the game is more fun for me. I'm not much of a heavy metal guy, so the fantasy of being a guitar god would have been lost if the only songs I could have played had been those types of songs. Instead, I can connect not just to the physical challenge of the game but also the emotional fantasy of it. While the difference in content doesn't fundamentally change any of the structural elements of the game, and an abstract mapping of the game systems would look identical regardless of the songs chosen, the way the game developers (not just the designers, but also the programmers, artists, and sound designers) actually made the game makes a huge difference. Another example is the use of the custom controller. While there's nothing about the abstract system of the game that would prevent it from being played on a standard PS2 controller, the fact that you're holding something shaped like a guitar and pushing buttons that are spaced like frets helps to get you into the emotional fantasy.

So, putting it all together, this approach to game design, the idea that there is an abstract layer that can be described in a formal language and that this will make all the difference, not only is false and self-aggrandizing, it misses what makes games the experience that they are. In other words, a game designer who advocates this approach is demonstrating that they don't understand the realities of game design. And this is why it produces such a vehement reaction in me every time I run into it. It's one thing to deal with ignorance of game design in the game-buying public, and another thing to run into misconceptions among non-designers who work in the industry, but to see designers not only falling prey to this intellectual trap but also trumpeting their misunderstandings as though they were some sort of ennobling traits, well, it's hypocrisy of the highest order. Before you can teach others about your craft, you have to understand it yourself, and those who promulgate this fantasy of the formal language of game design do nothing but demonstrate their own shortcomings. And for that, they should be chastised, not praised.

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