Game design has "moved on"

[am181d]

I see this phrase all the time: game design has moved on. Game design has progressed. The 'technology' of game design has improved.

What does that mean to you? Is game design a science or an art? What elements are "improvements" to you? Are any of these things merely fashions? Can flaws be features? Is the reason older games get played less simply because they are less supported, or because they are not as good?

I think it's fair to say there's no one right way to design a game, but there are DEFINITELY wrong ways. Rules can simply be badly written, poorly constructed, too complex to be usable, contradictory, etc.

 

[Umbran]

Engineering.

Pretty much, yes. Engineering creates the design for end-user products. Science discovers the rules of reality upon which those designs are based.

That being said, I think the science of gaming has advanced. RPGs aren't about just manipulating numbers, but is a crazy intersection of math and human behavior used to create a desirable play experience. Over time, we've learned more about the math, the human behavior, and the range and nature of desirable play experiences than Gygax and Arneson knew back in the 1970s.

The engineering of games has certainly worked to incorporate that new knowledge, and I daresay there are some old assumptions that have, over time, been demonstrated as inaccurate and discarded. In that sense, yes, it think there are times when we can say that game design has "moved on".

 

[Mallus]

What does that mean to you?

Not much, other than the person saying "design has moved on" is wrong. They're trying to couch heir personal preferences/tastes in terms of some kind of theory about the history of RPG design that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. RPG design itself isn't analogous to technology, so there's nowhere you can really go with that argument.

I read statements of that kind as: "I like X and not Y". I accept them as true, I'm happy to read the reasons why a person likes X (and not Y), because it's interesting to see how different people react to and use different gaming techniques/mechanics/abstraction & resolution methodologies, but --so far-- I'm not convinced those reasons can ever add up to a demonstration game design is progressing to an objectively better state.

On the whole, production values have gotten better thanks to technology, but the rules themselves? Nope.

Is game design a science or an art?

Art with a side of math.

What elements are "improvements" to you?

Transparency with regard to goals. For example, I really digging 13th Age right now, because it's very clear in what it tries to do. It has openly game-y bits combined with openly narrative bits and does a pretty good job at explaining why they're there.

Are any of these things merely fashions?

To an extent, yes. And that's not a bad thing.

Can flaws be features?

Absolutely. The classic example is a lack of social encounter rules. It's a serious flaw to some gamers. It's a feature to others.

Is the reason older games get played less simply because they are less supported, or because they are not as good?

I don't think support is a big issue. With the ease of finding fan-created materials/active fan communities for almost any given system online, I can't think of a truly unsupported system these days.

I think the simple answer is: people's tastes change. And then change back. I've been running AD&D for the past 2.5 years now, after a 15-year hiatus. As DM, I'm loving it. But 2 of my players miss the the more player-option rich systems we were playing beforehand.

So at some point, I imagine we'll switch back.

 

[billd91]

I don't think support is a big issue. With the ease of finding fan-created materials/active fan communities for almost any given system online, I can't think of a truly unsupported system these days.

I think the simple answer is: people's tastes change. And then change back. I've been running AD&D for the past 2.5 years now, after a 15-year hiatus. As DM, I'm loving it. But 2 of my players miss the the more player-option rich systems we were playing beforehand.

So at some point, I imagine we'll switch back.

I think publisher support actually is a major issue. Without support the game is out of print and, eventually, unavailable for first purchase at your typical outlet. Once you reach that point, the potential for the player pool to grow is significantly reduced. The game can no longer spread as easily via gamers browsing the game shelves - it must spread by contact, word of mouth, and sharing of materials. If that can't grow or even maintain the player pool as much as that + new sales, then you will see a shrinking pool of players. That pool may hang on a long time, but it will taper off - faster if the game was only of middling quality or niche appeal to begin with.

 

[Janx]

Pretty much, yes. Engineering creates the design for end-user products. Science discovers the rules of reality upon which those designs are based.

That being said, I think the science of gaming has advanced. RPGs aren't about just manipulating numbers, but is a crazy intersection of math and human behavior used to create a desirable play experience. Over time, we've learned more about the math, the human behavior, and the range and nature of desirable play experiences than Gygax and Arneson knew back in the 1970s.

The engineering of games has certainly worked to incorporate that new knowledge, and I daresay there are some old assumptions that have, over time, been demonstrated as inaccurate and discarded. In that sense, yes, it think there are times when we can say that game design has "moved on".

That's well put.

Back then, there was no such thing as a degree in Game Design. Now there is.

While I suspect game designers had some inklings as to what made a good game, they did not have the principals as clearly defined as occurs nowadays.

Consider the 2E concept of THAC0 (actually I hear it evolved in the WSG or some other AD&D add-on book). While we deride the concept of THAC0 now, consider how elegant it was back then. Especially when you consider that though the math is identical in pre-THAC0 times, the original game made players use a table to perform the look-up.

Meaning, game design was so ill-presented, that they couldn't simplify the explanation down to a simple A minus B compared to a dice roll concept even though that is exactly what was occurring mechanically.

So part of the evolution of game design is identifying the functional components of the game mechanic and simplifying how it is presented.

I have no doubt, we could take the AD&D 1E rules and re-write them so it operates statistically and mechanically the same, but is presented in a far clearer way.

 

[Scorpio616]

What does that mean to you?

It merely means people are trying to sell new games, think people should embrace their ideas on game design or are trying to get more people playing the new games they like.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Pretty much, yes. Engineering creates the design for end-user products. Science discovers the rules of reality upon which those designs are based.

That being said, I think the science of gaming has advanced. RPGs aren't about just manipulating numbers, but is a crazy intersection of math and human behavior used to create a desirable play experience. Over time, we've learned more about the math, the human behavior, and the range and nature of desirable play experiences than Gygax and Arneson knew back in the 1970s.

The engineering of games has certainly worked to incorporate that new knowledge, and I daresay there are some old assumptions that have, over time, been demonstrated as inaccurate and discarded. In that sense, yes, it think there are times when we can say that game design has "moved on".

Most defintely agree with all that. I would only add that, IMO, some NEW assumptions have similarly, over time, been demonstrated as unneeded or unwanted. There are missteps just as there are improvements, but the trend is generally onward and upward.

 

[pedr]

Artistic application of science, rather than one or the other. Perhaps architecture! -Making something both functional and aesthetic from the extant technological building blocks.

I do believe game design evolves, both within game designs (see Mearls' column today discussing attacks of opportunity - something which sort of existed from early D&D and has been through various versions since, or Fate Core's refinement of the Fate actions) and across the game design community - development of new techniques for randomization, for instance, enable designers to create new games (to use Fate as an e.g. again, it's built on a set of dice and the development of an understanding of the way randomness interacts with the other elements of roleplay gaming to create something which was not creatable in 1974).

Not all invention is undoubtedly good in itself, but all invention enables future invention so the development of game approaches that an individual doesn't like, or experimentation with new design 'technology' is, overall, a good thing as it enables a better understanding of games as a whole, which can improve even games which choose to use older approaches.

 

[Shemeska]

It's a crock.

It's like saying food tastes or fashion styles have "advanced". No, they haven't. They're just different now than a decade ago, and they'll be different in another decade in some way or form. But by no means is the fashion sensibility of today "better" than the fashions a decade ago. It isn't technology. There isn't a clearly measurable metric by which to measure "progress".

I never saw the term applied to RPGs till circa 2008 when it was being used as a defense of 4e versus 3e, because 3e was old and 4e was progressive game design whatever that means. I've seen it used more lately by folks bashing 5e online as "backsliding" or "going backwards" in terms of game design. It doesn't make sense there either if you ask me. It's just edition warring framed with a different coat of paint to justify as something other than personal taste.

 

[Hussar]

It's a crock.

It's like saying food tastes or fashion styles have "advanced". No, they haven't. They're just different now than a decade ago, and they'll be different in another decade in some way or form. But by no means is the fashion sensibility of today "better" than the fashions a decade ago. It isn't technology. There isn't a clearly measurable metric by which to measure "progress".

But, OTOH, you can certainly make arguments for advances in materials used in fashion. It's not like they had nylon 100 years ago. There are things you can do in fashion today that you absolutely could not do before.

And, like, say, music, one can certainly apply science principles to the creation of music. And, again, there are a number of things one can do today that you simply could not do a hundred years ago.

I never saw the term applied to RPGs till circa 2008 when it was being used as a defense of 4e versus 3e, because 3e was old and 4e was progressive game design whatever that means. I've seen it used more lately by folks bashing 5e online as "backsliding" or "going backwards" in terms of game design. It doesn't make sense there either if you ask me. It's just edition warring framed with a different coat of paint to justify as something other than personal taste.

Where were you? Good grief, 3e fans repeatedly stated this about earlier editions all the way back to 2000. This isn't anything new at all. You can go back into thread after thread after thread and see exactly this argument whenever comparisons between 3e and AD&D were made. Heck, you see it in THIS thread when people talked about THAC0.