“With slow precision, he read two versions of the same epic chapter. In the first, an army marches into battle over a desolate mountain pass. The bleak and somber aspect of the rocky landscape made the soldiers feel that life itself was of little value, and so they won the battle easily. In the second, the same army passes through a palace where a banquet is in progress. The splendor of the east remained a memory throughout the glorious battle, and so victory followed.”

So, too, with games. Even a very linear game has many possible paths between the fixed points, events that happen to one player and playthrough and do not happen to another. In a game designed to have choices a the macro level, the possible paths approach infinity.

Borges mentions two men meeting in a garden, with two different results: “…in one of the possible paths you are my enemy, in another, my friend.” This exact situation has been encoded in many games, where the non-player characters the player meets have no way of knowing at the time of compilation if this time the player will be their friend or their foe. The designer must prepare for every possibility, because the meta-narrative the characters exist within needs to contain every probable scenario and configuration.

Now, it’s obviously impossible to write or design these scenarios by hand, adjusting the story to the player’s every possible move, without having the designer in the game loop itself: Dungeon Masters in roleplaying games, and the Storyteller in Jason Rohrer’s Sleep is Death take this route. This is possibly as close as you can get to writing as a performance art.

But what about every other game, the ones that can’t have a live human writing the outcome of every situation? Either the designer must account for every possible outcome, or the designer must create a system that generates the outcomes from the player’s input. In practice, these two solutions overlap: it’s impossible to write everything, and even if it was, there must still be a way to choose between the possible alternatives.

So a game has a system, a process for taking an input and turning it into an output. And the process can sometimes take two radically different stories and generate the same event, because they were close enough on the dimension being measured to result in the same output. Therefore, games cannot be understood apart from the processes that drive them. Two games or two playthroughs of a part of one game, may have the same visual appearance, the same plot, the same structure, the same fabula and syuzhet—and yet have occurred through entirely different means and have completely separate antecedents. In the same way that the Kuleshov effect can give cuts in a film startling different meaning, the underlying processes can give two games that are visually identical entirely different meanings, meanings invisible to the eye but made distinct through the underlying mechanics.

To understand a game requires an understanding of the systems and processes that make up the game. This is complicated in video games by the game usually existing as a black box, the inner workings hidden and only the input and outcome exposed. The mechanical processes of board games makes them more open, and easier to analyze from an outside perspective, but in both cases the importance of the process in the meaning of game is difficult to underestimate…and can be completely invisible from a purely visual or literary analysis.

We can term these two levels of player agency as microagency and macroagency, respectively. Microagency deals with the player’s small moment-to-moment decisions, macroagency is about the player’s ability to shape the larger course of events.

Microagency is more closely connected to immersion, with the player’s physical actions often mimicking the avatar in rhythm or unconsciously mirroring the avatar’s pose. Microagency is present every time the player chooses to turn slightly to the left rather than the right, to jump at this particular moment, turn this particular piece, or otherwise manipulate the environment or the avatar.

Macroagency is more concerned with the overall picture. How can the player shape the condition of the playspace? If every session features predictable events, with the player given little control over the result, there is little macroagency, even if the player is given lots of control over when and where to jump. In contrast, if the space is rhizomic, a web of possibilities with many possible results and no defined ending, there is a lot of macroagency.

They are not mutually exclusive, rather they are opposite ends of a spectrum. Tetris gives the player a lot of microagency, while Civilization and Chess are largely focused on macroagency. But Tetris also has a lot of player choice in where the pieces go, creeping upwards towards the middle of the spectrum, while the final condition of every Civilization game is built out of thousands of tiny actions that coalesce into a whole.

In both cases, the meaning of the agency is still important: irrevocable choices carry more weight than reversible choices, and choices that affect other choices multiply their importance. If there are many ways to traverse a space, but the order does not make a difference to the experience, then the choice of order is largely a false choice. But in most cases the order is important, even if just emotionally, and the changed context does have an effect.

  

Ideals of the Nations, designed in 2011 with Sarah Scoggins. The design constraint was to make a cooperative board game about negotiation that involved actual player negotiation, themed around the Treaty of Versailles. Oh, and I decided to make it a match-3 game.

The game consists of a deck of Negotiation cards and a set of Agendas. That’s one of the Negotiation cards pictured above. The Negotiation cards formed the actual match-3 board, and players took turns making moves and matches. The rules for the match-3 system were altered significantly from the standard Bejeweled-ish digital template to something that worked far better and faster in an analogue format. By itself, the cooperative match-3 game was a system of interesting choices in its own right, which was really encouraging during playtests.

Players are playing against the board, trying to cooperatively create matches and try to meet the goals on the Agendas…but every move they make requires them to also put points on the opposing side of one of the Agendas. Play becomes a balancing act, with the difficulty of the game changing dynamically. In the card above, it can either be played as a -2 to one of the agendas, a +1 to one of the agendas, or it can be put in the player’s hand and it’s effect used later.

This made balancing the cards easier. While the interacting systems as a whole could tip things towards either side, the actual numbers on the cards generated fairly even results. The card effects, and when to use them, became the second set of interesting choices.

The theme of the game comes out in this second layer; the players are not the individual participants in the thematic debate, but act rather as the agents of the perfect peace treaty, attempting to embody the ideals of the nations and guide the conference to a possibly better end.

Of course, even a perfected treaty has no guarantee of avoiding World War II or the Great Depression. Which is, I think, appropriate when making a game about a treaty that already had so much idealism and retribution imposed upon it.

And here’s the thing that has kept me from posting lately. Click through to watch it in HD on YouTube.

Getting the entire thing to reflect the idea of fractals took some doing, but it is mostly self-affine over three levels so the editing itself arguably counts as a fractal. I’d like to revisit it with an actual budget and a more exact fractal structure to the edits, but for now this is my tribute to Mandelbrot and his influence on my work.