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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8633014" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Then I would consider that a player desire, rather than a game-purpose. Player desires include several things that either can't be (or are extremely hard to be) directly designed for but still result from design (effortless performance, strategic depth, cleverness in design), or are as much or more a matter of what the players do with it (humor, "awesomeness," poignancy). These things are emergent properties. One can strive hard toward them and simply fail, and one can be oblivious to them and succeed. I don't think that's possible for any of the things I've defined.Yeah, I'm very much against conflating "are you a bad enough dude to save the president?" play with exclusively violent conflict. Score can be applied to almost anything, cooperative or competitive. A game about being chefs where the players are cooperating (to win awards for their restaurant) and competing (to win top prize/top position within it) should theoretically involve no violent conflicts at all, despite the presence of many knives, but can still be thoroughly Score-and-Achievement focused with only a thin veneer of the other things.Well then, as stated, this seems like less a purpose, in the sense that I'm not really sure people set out to design a game for the purpose of having a really good ratio of actions-taken to opportunities-to-influence-state. Instead, this seems like a useful experience that can arise from a well-designed game which features resources, action economy, and varying amounts of available information.As I mentioned before, from what I had surmised of those meanings...I see it everywhere. Like, I'm struggling to think of a game where there is no tempo-and-flow experience whatsoever. Consider, for a non-TTRPG example, Doom 2016. If you try to play it as a cautious sniper-style affair where you never expose yourself to risk, you're going to have a really bad time, because you'll be constantly pushed out of your intended play-space (entering an arena that was peaceful and suddenly fills with demons) and you'll struggle with health and ammunition. The intended tempo-and-flow of the game is almost more like a brawler than a shooter, because the "glory kill" mechanic causes the killed enemy to spurt out a veritable shower of health, ammo, and even armor (IIRC that requires a rune though). This tempo-and-flow is extremely well-designed for its purpose, to the point that even I, someone who generally doesn't care for shooters, legit enjoy playing it.This is part of why I struggle to fit this dichotomy into the same space as the ones I have already. For this dichotomy, it seems to be something fundamental to game design generally; pacing and fluidity are vital components of seemingly all "active" media things (that is, music, movies, games, performances) and even some forms of "passive" media (literature and poetry). That obviously means it is something worth including in one's design, but this seems a matter of polish, rather than one of purpose. A well-made game (of any kind) should have good tempo so that it flows.Firstwise, these seem to me to be...techniques or experiences, rather than purposes. The exception being Skill/Arena which looks like Score-and-Achievement, just using "what the player personally is doing" and "where/when the conflict occurs" rather than "what defines better success(/less failure) vs worse success(/more failure)" and "the pursuit of success." You seem to be proposing, apart from Skill/Arena, either particular ways to implement the purposes (tools), or valuable consequences of good design that successfully implements that purpose (experiences.)That is, within S&A, one is likely to face Risk (since that is a way to make the process of Achievement meaning), and an Offer is a possible technique for provoking interesting thought in the pursuit of Achievement despite Risk, since humans are overall risk-averse. But you can pursue and earn Achievements even without Risk. My made-up chef game sounds like it wouldn't have much Risk, nor much likelihood of Offers. Instead, the Score (aka "what defines Skillful play") might come from memorization, synergy, creativity, humor (as demonstrated above by that example game where the point is to deploy witty Victorian one-liners in the funniest way you can), etc., and the Arena is already understood as the two-part situation of "the kitchen" (where the player has direct control) and "the table," where their control as a chef is limited, but they may still have softer forms of influence.So...it seems that the questions you want to ask--"what tools or techniques are involved in a 'gamist' game"--are more specific things than my taxonomy is going for. Where I see (parts of) Edwards' model as too broad in an unhelpful way, I see yours as narrow in a complementary and helpful way. You're doing something useful, deep-diving into this specific narrow part (with openness to the possibility that these tools and experiences could also appear elsewhere). Perhaps that helps frame things better?If I might add some further dichotomies: Merit/Praise and Depth/Choice. The former is an "experience"-type element, analogous to your Tempo/Flow, just a different experience, as Merit is not really something that can be designed per se but is an extremely likely result of Score-and-Achievement design once the rubber hits the road, though I wouldn't call it inevitable. Merit/Praise is a valued experience that might drive someone toward playing a S&A-designed game or aspect thereof, e.g. tournaments. Here, I define "Merit" as "the character of certain deeds or thoughts as being noteworthy in their excellence," and Praise as "the act of giving or receiving recognition for the Merit of a deed or thought." Many people are extremely motivated by praise in the casual sense of the term, so Merit/Praise is a prime player motive, but it's difficult if not impossible for a game to tell people that they should think a certain deed is meritorious.By comparison, Depth/Choice is a tool one can use to enrich and enliven S&A design. Depth is a characteristic of systems rather than an emotional state or performative process induced by systems, so it's more design-able (hence tool, rather than experience). I would call a system that has Depth one that has a high density of strategic options with valuable differences, but a comparatively low density of minutiae involved in expressing them. This contrasts with your Construct/Perfect dichotomy (more of an experience), in that Constructing tends to be about collecting together disparate things, the goal being to do so with novel finesse, hence Perfecting, whereas Depth is about having relatively few options but being able to do a great many things with them, enabling both diversity and subtlety in Choices. You could think of it as the option-design equivalent of Tempo/Flow, as well; it is very difficult to intentionally design a deep game, but if your design is in fact deep, it will be a very satisfying experience for many people.Is that useful to you?I have not, but I'm not at all surprised to hear there's work on the subject. I very much see fiction-in-general serving (often, not exclusively) as a testing ground for moral behavior; we read about heroes partly in the hope that, should we ever be hard-pressed, we will follow their fictional example. Games heighten this even further by actually having us making choices, not just witnessing others do so. Play-acting, as opposed to reading.</blockquote>

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