Worldview-Centric Design

This post was adapted from : http://blog.latinforimagination.com/worldview-centric-design/

Definitions

Normally I would start something like this by going over some definitions. That’s a little bit tricky with this topic, because what I’m trying to do is explain some of the origins and reasons behind the definitions and heuristics that I use. There are only a small number of things I want to clarify before getting into the actual interesting bits of design philosophy.

As a standard disclaimer, I want to be very clear before I get started that outside of specific contexts, I believe words are unimportant. We use them to accurately and precisely convey ideas to each other, but there’s no inherent moral reason why one set of audible sounds ‘means’ one thing over another.

If allowing games to be an all-encompassing field is necessary to have a smooth discourse, so be it. If games must be defined as a very narrow and direct type of interaction with a player, then so be that instead.  What I’m trying to say with all of this is that while I’m going to very shortly make up a lot of terms and a fair number of definitions to go along with them, none of that is the point of what I’m writing here.

Classifications are valuable in that they allow us to apply heuristics and rules to how an object or system behaves. It goes without saying that your personal classification systems may differ from mine, but that does not necessarily mean you will disagree with what I’m saying.

When defining games, I use the word in a very broad sense. I realize that many people define games to strictly refer to gameplay: as a set of choices, or an expression of agency, or as a series of voluntary challenges leading to a set reward.  I don’t think those people are incorrect, but the vast majority of video games now incorporate more than pure gameplay, and are consumed, I believe, not just for core gameplay but for their secondary elements as well.

As such, it would perhaps be more accurate for me to use the word “media-experience” in place of “game,” but for the vast majority of people reading this, the second word is much clearer.  I don’t believe that the principles I discuss here are exclusive to games, so whenever possible, I’ve tried to use general language.

Some Context

For better or for worse, I pull a majority of my personal philosophies from my theological beliefs, which heavily shape my approach to game design and media in general. When I first started forming my views on media, I was doing so primarily from an angle of personal development.

I was interested in figuring out how media affected me personally, and what that meant from a theological standpoint. In opposition to a more nihilistic view of entertainment, I didn’t and don’t believe that games are purely chemical experiences, or that everything can be neatly reduced to simple sequences of actions and rewards.  Pulling from some of my own theological beliefs, I instead came up with two theories.

Using my own reactions to games, books, movies, and genres as data points, I started refining those theories and using them to figure out how I preferred to view the world and how I actually viewed the world. Based on discrepancies between the two, I started to figure out what my more basic goals in life were.

By the end of school, I had added a third theory to the list, based around an, again, theologically motivated belief that some goals and desires are shared universally among people as a whole:

Or, more simply put:

When I initially went to college it wasn’t to make games, even though I was in the Game Design and Development major. I liked programming, but also other forms of graphical work, and I was a fairly good artist.  My plan was to pursue a programming job, but get an artistic set of skills in case I wanted to fall back on illustration or animation.

Once in the GDD major however, I started to immerse myself more in gaming culture and theory than I had done previously. Where before games had been a very private activity, I was now running into more people that were both regularly playing and talking about games, and were doing it in a social way.  On top of that, classes were also regularly bringing up game design, and I was getting frustrated that when I either agreed or disagreed with people, I didn’t have clear terms and explanations of why.

I re-assessed a number of my views on media, and ended up forming a final more unifying theory that brought together many of my previous thoughts:

Or, more simply put:

While since then I have refined that hypothesis, I was able to use it to start forming more concrete views on how games actually work.

Communication

Just about everything I’m going to say is based around a specific idea: that games and media are primarily tools used to communicate worldview.

What I mean by worldview is a person’s opinions on the nature of reality: not in the form of preferences, or political views, but as a statement about how the world works on a much more basic level. Is the world dynamic, static, or does it cycle through events and repeat itself? Is the unknown dangerous or an adventure?

To say that a worldview is communicated goes beyond claiming that a player will understand what that worldview is on an academic level. On the contrary, most of the time academic communication will never happen. I mean that for the duration of the experience, a player will literally see the world of a game as reality.

Using that world as their basis, the player will reform their own worldviews, and upon exiting the experience, they will either internalize this new worldview and use it to adjust their behaviors or beliefs, or they abandon it and move on.

States of Being

Consciously, or unconsciously, people gravitate towards media in order to enforce a particular worldview onto themselves.  Through interaction with a medium like a game, a person is able to place themselves in a reality of their choosing. It’s important for me to note at this point that I’m not referring only to escapism in the narrative, other-world fantasy sense, or only to escapism in the sense of an alternative to reality.

Worldviews are positional: Again, “What is the nature of the reality around you?”  That question doesn’t need to be answered only with a setting or story. Is the world predictable and safe, or is it dangerous and adventurous? Is the world enforcing a sense of agency or does it move regardless of the players prompting? Although narrative can play a role in answering these questions, general aesthetic or even pure gameplay can be just as effective.

Another key point to emphasize is that I’m not only referring to highly artistic games. I do believe that people who play casual mobile games or traditional shooters and platformers, are still able to use that media to enforce worldviews upon themselves.

Neither an idea nor its communication needs to be novel or revolutionary to be valuable to someone.

Gratitude Loops

In practice, approaching gameology from the perspective of communication and states of being allows me to more accurately describe what a successful game does to its audience.

As an extension of the idea of gaming experiences being applicable to the real world, I use the term “gratitude loops” to describe how an ideal experience transforms a player over time.

I define a gratitude loop as consisting of three stages:

1. Expectation :  A player is drawn into investing time and energy into an experience in an attempt to activate a desired emotion.

2. Delivery : Media improves a player’s life in a consciously or subconsciously recognizable way, and the player is able to somehow attribute a specific experience to that change. It's important to note here that while delivery and expectation can line up, they don't need to. It is by no means required that the only thing a player gets out of a game be what they originally thought they were going to get out of it.

3. Response : The player holds literal gratitude towards the media or it’s creators, depending on how aware they are of the game’s creation, making them more open to further manipulation.

Gratitude loops are different from traditionally defined behavioral loops because in their most ideal state, they are designed not to refresh an experience indefinitely, but to continually transform it.  By their very nature, gratitude loops are self defeating – they require that a player externally experience the benefits of interacting with a medium, which reduces dependence on the original source to get those benefits.

While gratitude loops don’t foster pure repetition, they do foster relationships that can be used to create repetition. These can manifest themselves between a player and a medium, genre, creator, or idea.  Past experiences determine not only what a player chooses to engage with, but how they approach and interpret both current and future experiences. The result is that, once they’ve been through at least one cycle of a gratitude loop, a player’s response to a designer’s work will be different than how they would have initially judged it.

In other words, a player's willingness to enter into the first stage of a grattitude loop, expectation, may very well be a response to a previous gratitude loop.

Gratitude loops are useful then in allowing a designer to shape future experiences for the player.  Each time a player completes a cycle, completing a future cycle becomes easier. Players become more engaged in their experiences, more exploratory, and more forgiving of certain kinds of flaws. Because of this element of trust, they become better listeners to the monologue or experience that the designer wants to give, and more supportive of a designer’s efforts to create these monologues.

The quintessential example of all of this, and one of the best evidences that worldview-centric approaches to media are accurate, is in how fandoms operate: gratitude loops explain a lot about why people and groups of people can have these highly emotionally charged reactions to media.

If you talk to people involved in fandoms, you start to see patterns crop up, even if those fans aren't consciously aware of what is happening. Consumers that have gone through gratitude loops externally manifest their internal attitudes through protectionism of the medium, huge amounts of hype over future products, and an otherwise almost unexplainable need to expose other people to the medium and connect with others who have already been exposed to the medium.

Fans see their media experiences as a reflection of the beliefs and worldviews that they value. One becomes tied up in the other – a person insulting a show or game isn’t just attacking an experience that the fan liked, he or she is attacking everything that is represented by that piece of media: the talent of the author, which is in itself an implication that what they communicate could be false, or the genre and message behind the experience, an implication that those who love it are deluded.

On top of this, fans don’t always understand why they like what they do. Most players think of liking games in a moral sense: you should like games that are well-made and well-executed, and you shouldn’t like games that aren’t well-made or well-executed. Without a way to distinguish between a technically-admirable game and a game that is worth personally admiring, attacks on one side of the game are translated into attacks on the other.

Some Heuristics

So what the heck does all of this mean for actual game design?

Within my own studio, we define a “good” game as one that succeeds in three areas:

To succeed in the area of Purposeful Inclusion, a designer must think about why an element exists in a game.  Nothing should be added unless it does something.  In practice, this may mean rethinking whether or not a game experience actually should have unlockables, or RPG elements, or to be in 3D.  It may mean removing mechanics or adding them.

To pay attention to purposeful inclusion is to make a game that is elegant and that feels complete. A designer should feel confident when asked about any piece of their game, that it should exist and be the way that it is.

Unity of Theme states that, since each part of a game exists to serve some sort of purpose, there should be a sense of unity between every part of the whole. For example, Angry Birds works best when its story is trivial and light – a serious narrative with deep emotional investment would conflict with the series’ gameplay and give an experience that felt bipolar.

That’s not to say that a game can’t employ contrast between elements, just that those elements should ultimately work together to make a singular experience overall. The best analogy for unity of theme is teamwork, like in a sport or office.  Many small parts work for a common goal, and that goal remains the same regardless of the individual role.

Finally, Strength of Telos anchors a game to the real world. This could perhaps be rephrased as : “games should have a reason to exist.”  What a game does to and for people is the most important measure of whether it was worth making.

None of this means that a game must be artistic to be good – just that all games, lighthearted or deep, fun or grueling, serve some type of purpose to the people playing them. Understanding why someone plays your game, and evaluating whether or not your game is benefiting them or harming them, is the crux of good design.

Some Conclusions

The point of this entire discussion is that, as designers, we can make more sophisticated commentary on the principles of good design by building off of a solid and understandable philosophical base. Thus, we can develop rules that predict how people will respond to given situations, and rules-of-thumb to help us provoke or avoid certain reactions.

However, I believe that at least on a small scale, a problem in current gameology discussions is that we approach those rules from vastly different paradigms, and rather than figure out the differences in what we believe on very basic levels, we’re assuming that our conclusions on high-level topics should match up regardless.

You don’t need to share any of my beliefs, but if you’re interested in engaging with me on a topic within game design, it’s important for you to understand where the conclusions I’ll draw are coming from.  I want to encourage you to figure out what your views on game design are,  not only at a high level but as a core set of beliefs, and to use those beliefs when forming your other opinions. Developing your own heuristics from the ground up will always be more consistant than just deconstructing them from the top down.