Is Dungeons & Dragons a work of art? How about Dogs in the Vineyard? Or Call of Cthulu? Or Marvel Heroic Roleplaying? Going further, what about a game like Settlers of Cattan? Ticket to Ride? Sorry? What about poker, or baseball, or table tennis? Do games belong in museums? Can rolling a d20 and critting a gnoll be socially relevant?
Clearly, I’m speaking to fans, here, so I’m likely to get a certain kind of response, one couched in a full awareness of the potential awesomeness, and potential limitations, of a game.
On the face of it, the idea seems kind of absurd. Sticking the cover of 1e Deities & Demigods next to DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man seems…dissonant, if nothing else. But games have made appearances in museums before.
[video=youtube;YzGjO5aHShQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=YzGjO5aHShQ[/video]
The distinction Paola Antonelli makes in the video above between design (specifically interaction design) and art isn’t an empty one. A gun as a work of art comments on guns and what they mean and symbolize. A gun as a work of design is simply an elegant machine for killing. Chairs, cars, dresses, hats, and airplanes can be exhibitions of fantastic design, but they aren’t necessarily exhibits of amazing art.
The videogames in MoMA’s collection were determined to be great examples of interaction design, that is, the interface between a person and a mechanism (in this case, the code). The MoMA staff selected videogames to point out the artistry and intent behind creating a code so that a person wants to interact with it, to play with it, simply for the joy of interacting with it. A machine whose purpose is only to be used for the amusement of the user, an interaction that is pleasurable in and of itself, represents a tremendous mastery of interaction design.
It should be fairly obvious now that videogames contain elements of this design that rule out games that don’t use visual media so heavily. D&D is never going to be an example of a great interface between a human and a mechanism, because the mechanism at the heart of D&D – at the heart of any tabletop RPG – is the other humans. A videogame’s code is applied with ruthless logic, but a board game’s rules are subject to interpretation and alteration, and an RPG’s rules are at best nebulous suggestions.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that tabletop RPG’s can’t be great examples of other kinds of design. Like any chair or airplane or gun, they have their own requirements and their own methodology, something that certain communities and individuals have become very interested in developing over recent years. The Forge might have a lot of spurious theory and
In fact, the four major criteria Paola and her team used to break down whether or not a videogame was appropriate for the MoMA collection can be extraordinarily useful as a way for thinking about what our tabletop RPGs do, as design objects. They look different in our different media, but these elements are here in our games, too.
Aesthetics
A videogame wears its aesthetics on its sleeve. From Yar’s Revenge to flOw to Katamari Damacy, a videogame’s appearance is key to its function as an entertainment – video is right there in the name, folks.
For our tabletop games, we can see the aesthetics most blatantly in the game’s artwork. Setting a mood, depicting characters and threats, and presenting the world of the game are all done through the artwork.
That’s arguably one of the most minor points of aesthetics in our games, however.
The design of the book overall features into this: is it a manual? A reference tome? A novel? What’s it look like, and what does that look tell us about what it’s meant to do?
Beyond the books, we get into things like arts, dice, peripherals, minis, and other fobs. Part of the aesthetics of 4e D&D is the battlemat and the minis; part of the aesthetics of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is the cards and the charts, part of the aesthetics of Deadlands are the poker cards, part of the aesthetics of Dread is the Jenga tower. The art of a warrior facing a vampire is good, but using a Jenga tower to model the rising tension of horror? That is utterly brilliant aesthetic design.
Space
Space, in a videogame, is manifested as virtual space, the area through which you move your avatar and the architecture it inhabits.
In a tabletop RPG, space can be thought of similarly: it’s the places your character can go, and the choices your character has and the experience of moving through those spaces. However, in a tabletop RPG, the experience isn’t so much architectural as it is behavioral.
The classic representation of avatar space in a tabletop RPG is the dungeon – your avatar makes choices about where to go, and encounters challenges in those places and along the way (keyed and random encounters, traps, etc.). The hexmap and battlegrid also fall into this category: they represent space in the game-world, and help define where your character can go, and what they experience as they go from point to point.
Another representation of space is something like FATE’s zones, which correspond to narrative conventions and ease of storytelling rather than precise spatial relationships.
But space is also represented through things like quest trees, dialogue options, or relationship diagrams, too. And through the design of the narrative itself. The player moves through these elements, one to another, changing as they do. It’s part of why railroading is seen as such an onerous problem: it is a blank corridor on a moving sidewalk. Good spatial design moves you through the world and through the narrative in an engaging way, a way that enhances the overall experience.
Time
Paola’s talk references videogames that take 5 minutes, and videogames that take years, and videogames that are essentially never-ending. There are games that are meant for short periods of stimulation, and games meant for longer periods of contemplation. A game with strong design principles knows how long it takes, and uses that to its advantage.
Tabletop RPGs have struggled with this a bit over the years. Due to the nature of the medium as intensely local, tabletop games have typically left the answer to “how long do you play for?” open to individual interpretation.
However, this isn’t universal. A game like Fiasco is explicitly designed to be experienced in its entirety in a few hours. A game like 4e D&D? If you want to see all 30 levels, it’s asking for something like two years.
5e D&D seems to be looking at this, judging from its fast combats and stated “38-sessions to go 1-20” intent. If so, it is designing for a certain time frame.
You can also find attention to this dimension in how the characters in the game experience time. The characters in The One Ring have a very specific yearly rhythm to their missions, and a context to undertake those missions with a definite chronological start and end point. This contrasts in feel with, say, 3e D&D characters, which are often up to full after each encounter, if someone remembered to bring the curing wand, and straight on to the next challenge until the spells run out.
Taking time into account in your design means not leaving it up to chance or intuition. If your game deliberately designs its timescale, your players will be guided along their experience as firmly as the players of Passage.
Behavior
In a videogame, behavior is the reaction of the code to the player’s input, how it acts when you press a given button or spin a little marble.
In our tabletop world, the best way to think about behavior is in terms of mechanics. What do our players seek by playing our game, what happens when they choose to perform a particular task, and how does that event play into the overall design of the thing?
Think about something like the sanity mechanics in Call of Cthulu as coding for behavior. A PC knows they will risk losing sanity when they undertake missions, and running out of sanity will result in dire consequences, so they carefully investigate and research and prepare, always nervous about what might lie underneath. The players’ behavior is cautious and strategic, which is the kind of behavior the genre would expect out of the characters the players are playing as. The rules reinforce this behavior.
Or think about the milestone mechanic in 4e, and how it exists in tension with the attrition of healing surges. Pushing forward despite overwhelming odds is rewarded, and this is how a heroic fantasy character likely would act, as well. The behavior of being in-character is rewarded.
Every DM’s a Designer
The lens of “interaction design” is a useful one to look at our games through, tabletop or otherwise. If we look at how each of these four criteria are designed for in our favorite games – if we see what areas our games do well, what areas our games fail on, and what other games might succeed in these areas – we can develop games with overall better, tighter, more coherent design, and, ultimately, more fun games. Whether they end up in a museum or not, that’s a result that I think is worth getting toward.
For our own tables, we can look at examples of games that do one of these four things very well, and perhaps weld them together into our own version of the Franken-game.
So you tell me: what’s your favorite bit of game design in the games you’ve played relating to one of those four measurements? What games have had good aesthetics, time, space, and behavior? How did they achieve that? And how might the rest of us steal a bit from those games for our own?
Let me know down in the comments!
Clearly, I’m speaking to fans, here, so I’m likely to get a certain kind of response, one couched in a full awareness of the potential awesomeness, and potential limitations, of a game.
On the face of it, the idea seems kind of absurd. Sticking the cover of 1e Deities & Demigods next to DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man seems…dissonant, if nothing else. But games have made appearances in museums before.
[video=youtube;YzGjO5aHShQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=YzGjO5aHShQ[/video]
The distinction Paola Antonelli makes in the video above between design (specifically interaction design) and art isn’t an empty one. A gun as a work of art comments on guns and what they mean and symbolize. A gun as a work of design is simply an elegant machine for killing. Chairs, cars, dresses, hats, and airplanes can be exhibitions of fantastic design, but they aren’t necessarily exhibits of amazing art.
The videogames in MoMA’s collection were determined to be great examples of interaction design, that is, the interface between a person and a mechanism (in this case, the code). The MoMA staff selected videogames to point out the artistry and intent behind creating a code so that a person wants to interact with it, to play with it, simply for the joy of interacting with it. A machine whose purpose is only to be used for the amusement of the user, an interaction that is pleasurable in and of itself, represents a tremendous mastery of interaction design.
It should be fairly obvious now that videogames contain elements of this design that rule out games that don’t use visual media so heavily. D&D is never going to be an example of a great interface between a human and a mechanism, because the mechanism at the heart of D&D – at the heart of any tabletop RPG – is the other humans. A videogame’s code is applied with ruthless logic, but a board game’s rules are subject to interpretation and alteration, and an RPG’s rules are at best nebulous suggestions.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that tabletop RPG’s can’t be great examples of other kinds of design. Like any chair or airplane or gun, they have their own requirements and their own methodology, something that certain communities and individuals have become very interested in developing over recent years. The Forge might have a lot of spurious theory and
In fact, the four major criteria Paola and her team used to break down whether or not a videogame was appropriate for the MoMA collection can be extraordinarily useful as a way for thinking about what our tabletop RPGs do, as design objects. They look different in our different media, but these elements are here in our games, too.
Aesthetics
A videogame wears its aesthetics on its sleeve. From Yar’s Revenge to flOw to Katamari Damacy, a videogame’s appearance is key to its function as an entertainment – video is right there in the name, folks.
For our tabletop games, we can see the aesthetics most blatantly in the game’s artwork. Setting a mood, depicting characters and threats, and presenting the world of the game are all done through the artwork.
That’s arguably one of the most minor points of aesthetics in our games, however.
The design of the book overall features into this: is it a manual? A reference tome? A novel? What’s it look like, and what does that look tell us about what it’s meant to do?
Beyond the books, we get into things like arts, dice, peripherals, minis, and other fobs. Part of the aesthetics of 4e D&D is the battlemat and the minis; part of the aesthetics of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is the cards and the charts, part of the aesthetics of Deadlands are the poker cards, part of the aesthetics of Dread is the Jenga tower. The art of a warrior facing a vampire is good, but using a Jenga tower to model the rising tension of horror? That is utterly brilliant aesthetic design.
Space
Space, in a videogame, is manifested as virtual space, the area through which you move your avatar and the architecture it inhabits.
In a tabletop RPG, space can be thought of similarly: it’s the places your character can go, and the choices your character has and the experience of moving through those spaces. However, in a tabletop RPG, the experience isn’t so much architectural as it is behavioral.
The classic representation of avatar space in a tabletop RPG is the dungeon – your avatar makes choices about where to go, and encounters challenges in those places and along the way (keyed and random encounters, traps, etc.). The hexmap and battlegrid also fall into this category: they represent space in the game-world, and help define where your character can go, and what they experience as they go from point to point.
Another representation of space is something like FATE’s zones, which correspond to narrative conventions and ease of storytelling rather than precise spatial relationships.
But space is also represented through things like quest trees, dialogue options, or relationship diagrams, too. And through the design of the narrative itself. The player moves through these elements, one to another, changing as they do. It’s part of why railroading is seen as such an onerous problem: it is a blank corridor on a moving sidewalk. Good spatial design moves you through the world and through the narrative in an engaging way, a way that enhances the overall experience.
Time
Paola’s talk references videogames that take 5 minutes, and videogames that take years, and videogames that are essentially never-ending. There are games that are meant for short periods of stimulation, and games meant for longer periods of contemplation. A game with strong design principles knows how long it takes, and uses that to its advantage.
Tabletop RPGs have struggled with this a bit over the years. Due to the nature of the medium as intensely local, tabletop games have typically left the answer to “how long do you play for?” open to individual interpretation.
However, this isn’t universal. A game like Fiasco is explicitly designed to be experienced in its entirety in a few hours. A game like 4e D&D? If you want to see all 30 levels, it’s asking for something like two years.
5e D&D seems to be looking at this, judging from its fast combats and stated “38-sessions to go 1-20” intent. If so, it is designing for a certain time frame.
You can also find attention to this dimension in how the characters in the game experience time. The characters in The One Ring have a very specific yearly rhythm to their missions, and a context to undertake those missions with a definite chronological start and end point. This contrasts in feel with, say, 3e D&D characters, which are often up to full after each encounter, if someone remembered to bring the curing wand, and straight on to the next challenge until the spells run out.
Taking time into account in your design means not leaving it up to chance or intuition. If your game deliberately designs its timescale, your players will be guided along their experience as firmly as the players of Passage.
Behavior
In a videogame, behavior is the reaction of the code to the player’s input, how it acts when you press a given button or spin a little marble.
In our tabletop world, the best way to think about behavior is in terms of mechanics. What do our players seek by playing our game, what happens when they choose to perform a particular task, and how does that event play into the overall design of the thing?
Think about something like the sanity mechanics in Call of Cthulu as coding for behavior. A PC knows they will risk losing sanity when they undertake missions, and running out of sanity will result in dire consequences, so they carefully investigate and research and prepare, always nervous about what might lie underneath. The players’ behavior is cautious and strategic, which is the kind of behavior the genre would expect out of the characters the players are playing as. The rules reinforce this behavior.
Or think about the milestone mechanic in 4e, and how it exists in tension with the attrition of healing surges. Pushing forward despite overwhelming odds is rewarded, and this is how a heroic fantasy character likely would act, as well. The behavior of being in-character is rewarded.
Every DM’s a Designer
The lens of “interaction design” is a useful one to look at our games through, tabletop or otherwise. If we look at how each of these four criteria are designed for in our favorite games – if we see what areas our games do well, what areas our games fail on, and what other games might succeed in these areas – we can develop games with overall better, tighter, more coherent design, and, ultimately, more fun games. Whether they end up in a museum or not, that’s a result that I think is worth getting toward.
For our own tables, we can look at examples of games that do one of these four things very well, and perhaps weld them together into our own version of the Franken-game.
So you tell me: what’s your favorite bit of game design in the games you’ve played relating to one of those four measurements? What games have had good aesthetics, time, space, and behavior? How did they achieve that? And how might the rest of us steal a bit from those games for our own?
Let me know down in the comments!
