An Introduction to Situational Game Design

[Music] just a little bit of background situational game design is a book that i wrote um i'm going to talk a little bit about what's in it and why you might be interested in using it in an academic setting myself i've been in the industry for over 20 years i'm currently the chief creative officer at a little startup called croquet studios if you've tried to reach me to do consulting work when i was freelancing i'm very sorry that i haven't responded because we're starting a new studio and it's been crazy so in order to explain why situational game design exists i first have to explain a bit about my first book the aesthetic of play um i wrote the aesthetic of play because i was troubled that my own thoughts about how game design worked weren't really reflected in what i was seeing in the existing

literature and the existing way people were talking about things and i wanted to basically lay out my own philosophy for how to design games and what the meaning of play is as a book it's an argument it's an argument for a particular stance with relationship to play and towards toward game design but it's not really a teaching text it was designed more as a a polemic to convince people to think about play in certain ways so this was a problem because then i was approached a couple years ago by brenda romero who said essentially i want to use your your book to teach my undergrad class on game design and i was very flattered but my response was i don't think that's a very good idea the reason why is because it really wasn't geared toward an undergrad audience it was a whole bunch of really weird esoteric

theory about why i think i'm right and not really anything about a practical methodology for how to uh how to actually make games using the techniques i was laying out so as a result being a good friend i decided to write a book for um and that wasn't the only reason but i wanted to take the ideas that i'd put forth in the aesthetic of play and try to turn it into something that could actually be used both by undergrads and also by working designers so it's not like you're not this is not something you're trying to be convinced this is like here is a methodology that you can use to analyze games and to design games and so that's basically what i'm going to talk about one of the things that prompted me to do this talk is because i gave a smaller talk on this subject at usc uh last fall as part of their plaything series and i discovered that they had actually adopted situational game design as one of their texts and i thought well

if ufc likes it then maybe other people would like it as well and so maybe i could talk a little about it and people could see if they were interested and it would be useful for their own game design programs so in order to describe what situational game design is i should first start with what i what we normally think of as game design and which what i call transactional game design and in transactional game design we tend to focus on what the game does we focus on the affordances that the game offers to the player and we focus on the sort of the interactions that that can occur we think of play in transactional terms as being something that happens on the interface between player and game so the game lets you do certain things and in doing them you are playing it's focused on getting good interactivity having good feedback loops making sure that interface that exists between the player and the game is really crunchy and chewy and

satisfying and wonderful because that's where all the play lives um so as a result it's focused on how do we design the game it's very game centric but it's also player agnostic it kind of assumes that a good game is a good game for everybody and that um games sort of exist as platonic ideals rather than something that is they're actually played by specific players with with their own specific agendas in contrast situational design is extremely player-centric um and thinking about how i approach my own game designs um i don't think of the game as being something that stands apart from the player i think of the game is actually being something that exists is is a fusion of a an external rule set an external set of constraints and the internal set of of predispositions and attitudes and

strategies that the player brings to the table play in that case is not centered on the interface between game and player but play is centered in the mind of the player themselves and so as a result it allows you to analyze certain things that are a little hard if you think about everything being about interactivity so for example you can think about what happens when the player is holding very still and not actually interacting with the game but is still enjoying themselves you can think about in a turn-based game what's going on in the off turn experience where you're waiting for somebody else to move but you're still actively engaged engaged in gameplay you can think about the ways that it can be playful to experience a narrative or to experience an emotional moment in the game and so as a result whereas transactional game design is useful for certain sorts of very interactive heavy games situational game design gives you a set of tools that you can use to analyze these other sorts of experiences that we don't often think of

as game play but are still very very playful and so it's player-centric and also as i'm going to explain it a little bit on what i call a constraint agnostic and i'm going to explain that on the very next slide so what is a constraint constraints are central to the notion of situational game design constraints are anything that limits player action from moment to moment so in most games a rule is obviously a constraint but things like the layout of a play field or the constraints so the bouncing bounciness of a soccer ball is a constraint on how soccer is played the layout of a level on a first person shooter is a is a constraint on how it's played and even things that we don't usually think of as being in game are also constraints so the physicality of a controller that you hold in your hands is also constrained on the sorts of ways you can play which is why that you have a very different play experience if you're playing with mouse and keyboard

or if you're playing with a console controller but there's some other things beyond this that also count as constraints and these are things that exist in the mind of the player these are things like genre expectations so if you're playing a first person shooter you have certain assumptions that you bring to the game that stand outside of the system of constraints that the game itself imposes on you you may have strategies that you adopt you may know that during certain things is a bad idea and so you don't do them that counts as a constraint um certain games are more fun if you know um if you know a lot about how to play them so you if you have a very steep learning curve it might be like well this is really boring and frustrating oh but once you know everything about it then it's interesting because you have the right strategic constraints in order to make something interesting to play and things that like narrative flow or your sense of characterization who it's who it is you're playing you if you're playing somebody who is

a hero you may actually choose different actions while you're playing than if you you're playing somebody who you think of as a villain and finally um there are all sorts of of um what i call um perversions or misunderstandings because the game you play is often not the game that is imposed upon you the game that that has been designed but the game that you think you're playing um if you don't know certain things or certain features exist within the game then you won't you actually use those features they won't become part of the constraint space that describes how it plays or you may willfully decide to to ignore them so for example you may play in perverse ways years ago when i was playing a lot of doom a group of us got together and tried to see how big a human pyramid we can build in doom it was complete perversity of how doom was supposed to be played but by imposing our own unusual and very strange constraints we actually had a really good time with it and so there are maybe all sorts of ways

that you can play within a games play space that are not constrained by the actual rules or built-in constraints of the game so constraints are what define what i call a situation a situation is a relatively stable set of constraints it is a a place you find yourself in playing the game where the constraints around you are not changing very much now by relatively stable i mean you know within the within the um stable within the um the context of like a fraction of a second when you're actually making your gameplay decisions so if it's true if it's a turn-based game your constraints may be you know stable for you know several minutes but it's a fast-paced action game your constraints may be relatively stable for a few milliseconds but in any case it it gives you a way to get at the um the moment-to-moment experience and form a model of something that's stable that you can analyze

so a situation is composed of of constraints and then within a situation you have moves moves are things that you can do in a situation there are there are things that are allowed to you by um the constraints and then finally what makes a move a move is that a move is something that changes your constraints so that every gameplay experience or every play experience can be understood as a continual motion through this cycle where you have a set of constraints that structure a situation within that situation you have a set of moves you pick one of those moves that changes the set of constraints and now you're in a new situation and this gives us a way to have a theoretical model of what is happening moment to moment in the mind of the player as they're moving forward through a game so anything that changes the constraints is a is a move pressing a button on a controller obviously is a move but many moves can happen entirely inside the player's head so if you're um playing a game like

portal and you're standing staring at a a a puzzle room that has a bunch of different um possible solutions you're actively engaged you're actively working through a set of moves but the moves that you're working through are not ones that you're making in the game in the the the external game they're moves that you're making entirely in your head you're moving from one situation to anoth one internal situation to another within your within your own mind and what makes a puzzle game like this interesting is the way these internal situations are structured so that is you're moving from from one considering one possibility to another you have the right number of possible permutations of of moves that you can select in order to in order to move forward so what this gives us the notion of the situation gives us a way to conceptualize the

moment-to-moment experience of playing a game and it gives us a way to analyze this experience so that if you have a student who's designing a game and they're they're not sure why something isn't working properly or you tried to do a critique of a game you're like yeah i'm playing this and it's just not fun what's wrong here breaking things down into situations and trying to understand the situations that structuring can often give you these answers so in any moment you can say okay what constraints are is the player actually operating under here what are the limitations on the player's behavior and what assumptions might i be making about limitations on the player's behavior that i am not taking into account you know is this game boring because the players have discovered master strategies that have that have eliminated all their choices is it frustrating because they don't know the things they need to know trying to identify the constraints that exist in the situation can often give you a way to analyze whether it is working

or not as a play experience and then knowing what moves you can make as a result yeah so so the no recognizing in a situation the tensions that exist between between moves and uh and constraints can help answer game design questions so once you look at a situation um what i also provide is a set of heuristics or rules for determining whether a situation should theoretically be playable or not or playful or not this is a set of of general principles for what makes situations interesting for us to be in um and it's broken down into into six different heuristics um if you want to know more detail i don't have time to really go into them in a lot of detail but i can explain briefly um what the uh what the theory behind it is um we like situations where we have

a handful of moves where we have three to seven different possibilities that are meaningful to choose between if we don't have enough a game feels boring and if we have too many a game feels confusing and so when you're looking at situations you think you know what are the meaningful moves that a player can make here and do i do i give them too many or too few situations also can't repeat you need to have situations that you need to be continually encountering new situations the reason for this is because um your memory of your previous um of a previous move you make within a situation affects your it becomes a constraint upon your new moves so if you encounter the same situation over and over again and you've already picked a move that you like and you're happy with it you will automatically pick that move and now this new constraint your knowledge of what you've done before reduces the number of moves from what might have been an interesting number the first time you encountered it into

just a single move and the situation becomes boring this is the moves need to have consequences this is kind of baked into the definition for moves moves need to change the the constraints if a move does not take you to a new situation if it feels empty or pointless then um you're you sort of by default repeating the same situation over and over again that makes it less interesting they need to be predictable when we choose moves we need to have a reason to choose one move over another we need to feel like we are accomplishing something when we choose moves in a situation and in order for that to happen the move has to be predictable we have to be able to run through a chain of possible moves in our head and see that it might probably arrive at a future situation that we find desirable whether because it leads us towards winning or because it answers some question we have about the game or because it allows us to perform some role um within our within the make-believe that we have the game we want to be able to we want to feel like our moves have consequences

and that we can determine what those consequences are but at the same time they can't be too predictable we can't be absolutely sure that the moves we make in a situation will give us the result we want because otherwise we can run through future situations in our head this is the mirror of having situations that get played out because we encountered the same situation over and over again if i'm able to run through a long chain of situations um by imagining all the moves that i'm going to make then it becomes boring when i actually get around to making those moves i've already made the choices in advance and i've already taken um i've already already used up all the fun uh this is an example where you know in a chess game where um the the end of a game is a foregone conclusion someone may say something like mate in three well there's no point in actually playing because everybody knows how it's going to go and at that point there is no more play left in the in the the situations that you'll be encountering and finally is satisfaction um it's not enough to know where you're going but you want to be able to um to pick moves

that lead you at least in in that offer the uh the possibility of success so um you know you want to you want to be able to choose moves that you think will help you win or that will give you some other reward as um either personal or internal as you're playing the game so in order for all of this to work you really need to come into this thinking about who's your player and not who's your player in the very vague um sort of um oh we're targeting the action of the action adventure demographic or you know we were intended this we're intending this to be about um the uh about um fans of fighting games um you need to try to get yourself into the mind of the player and think through themselves through what sort of constraints they might be bringing to the table so that um different people from different backgrounds from different ages different ethnicities different genders people will bring different pre-existing

constraints to the game and so um when you're thinking about assembling a set of constraints that will offer interesting situations a lot of times what you need to do is be thinking okay what assumptions am i making about the player um no game exists entirely with um with that is entirely self consent con contained we all make assumptions when we're designing games that players will bring certain pre-existing constraints sometimes these constraints are drawn entirely from the real world so if you make a driving game you kind of assume that even if people don't know how to drive they know in general what driving is and what the rules of the road are and so um simulation games rely heavily on people having a sense of what they're supposed to be doing before they start to play and so when you think about how to design games using situational game design a big part of it is thinking about you know who is going to be playing it and how are they going to change as they're playing

so this is kind of reiterating what i just said but play is the intersection between a well-designed game and a suitable player we create sets of rules we create the game as designed and then the player brings their own internal constraints both that they had previously and their understanding of the game and it is the intersection of those two that produces the play space where play emerges but more importantly this is not a static system games will change us as we play them so as you are playing a game you are constantly developing new constraints based upon what you're learning from playing the game you have new ways of understanding the game you have new strategies you're developing you try something out it fails you're like oh that that was wrong i shouldn't do that and so when we're thinking about designing these constraints it's not we're not just designing for one assumed player we're designing for an assumed player who's going to be evolving through time in response to the problems that we're posing for

them so in many ways we can think about that if somebody is really into a game and if you if you're if you're if you if you don't just abandon the game because you're not interested in it then what happens is that you are becoming the player that you need to be in order to play through a game and that gives us a very powerful tool for thinking about how games can actually affect and influence people so we talk this is another advantage of situational game design is it gives us a really concrete way to get at what games mean meaning is not what a game tells us it is not a didactic exercise in a game instructing us meaning is the residue of the experience that we have while we play the game meaning is what what we have were is meaning is what we have learned to be in order to successfully play the game and so that games that are very very meaningful to us are games that reinforce particular patterns of behavior that then linger with us afterwards they give

us ways of being in a playful world where we were rewarded for um for adopting certain attitudes and certain strategies and then those attitudes and strategies persist after they've gone they are the residue of the play experience so really quickly because i only have half an hour and i want to have a little time for questions so there you can think about how we put this all together in order to have a coherent model for designing games within this um and this is this is sort of this is how i approach it i start off with an intended experience there is something i want players to to feel some some way i want them to be within the games that i am creating and then that way of being within the world will lead to a set of performative moves because since meaning is the residue of experience the experience i want to deliver is composed of performative actions that they will perform in the context of the game these performative actions will emerge

out of situations so that if i want to create particular particular actions that give a particular feeling to a game i need to design situations that are going to make those actions emerge naturally and fluidly where i wanted those actions i'm not doing because i'm told to but because that's what it seems natural to do and then the design of those situations is constrained by the heuristics of play so that in order to keep people engaged in making these these performative moves we need to structure situations that from moment to moment will keep them continually engaged the need to have these situations gives us an idea of what sort of constraints we need to have what are the limitations that we put on the player and in particular how do we what assumptions do we make about what the player already has is constraints and what can what is the minimal amount of constraints that we can add what they already have to structure these sort of playful situations and finally the need to generate these these these constraints gives us a way to get at the game system so that the system we're creating is

um um step by step um produced from the experiences we are into we are intending to evoke in the player we are creating a system that will have that will contain constraints that will interact with the constraints that the player already has that will structure the situations we want that will be playful in a way that will keep the player engaged and as a result of that they'll have a set of performative moves that will reinforce certain um either understandings or strategies with within the player that will linger with them after the game is over and gives us a way to actually convey something meaningful hopefully to players who are part of receptive audiences thank you very much that's that's it in a nutshell it's kind of hard to summarize a um an entire book in in 25 minutes but uh and there's there's there's a whole lot more in the book about designing goals and anticipation and how this all ties into narrative

but um this at least gives you a background and gives you a sense of whether this might be something that you're at all interested in and so now if there are questions um there is a microphone and these lights are in my eyes and i have no idea if anybody actually goes to it or not so um uh hello yes i could i could kind of see you okay cool um so where i teach uh brita university of applied sciences in the netherlands um we're very much focused on what you described as the transactional model at the start there and then after a couple of projects we jump straight to uh we're very focused on like the ubisoft rational game design really deep dive like what are your parameters for your variables kind of approach um do you have any experience with that ubisoft kind of model or that kind of level of not really because i um i've kind of been designing this way for my entire professional career okay so okay it sounds very much like this sits between those two concepts and we have noticed

we have a gap there so this is really interesting oh cool okay yeah actually i'm supposed to repeat the questions the question was whether this ties in at all with uh ubisoft's model of um rational game design okay yep thank you sure is there anybody else i think that maybe yet then thank you very much and uh enjoy the rest of the session or the rest of the show