One Missing Corner
Game design metaphor time, because what game designer doesn’t like metaphors? Are not all our games metaphors??? Anyway.
When I’m stuck on a design, it almost always looks like this:
I’ve got a solid idea of what I want the game to be (it’s a square!) and I’ve got most of the procedures that create that thing (three corners are set!). But then… there’s a missing bit. The last corner. I know the exact size and shape of the gap, but I’m not quite happy with what I’m putting there to complete my square.
And of course if I put the wrong thing in, I don’t get a square at all. No matter how solid the other corners are, if that last corner is wonky I might wind up with a totally different experience than I intended for the people playing the game.
Fast forward months or years of me poking at that one elusive corner. That’s my curse. It happens with just about every game I make to some degree or another. Some designers might just go “meh whatever” and send it out with some spackle over that hole. And ironically, I’ve seen games that were accidentally genius, because some part of the rules did something the designer never anticipated, but that’s not in my genetic code. I want to know what my game is going to do.
A square makes a nice graphic, but it also implies the missing bit is a full quarter of the design, which is generally not true. So pretend the graphic is a pentagon, hexagon, or most accurately a shape with a whole bunch of sides. But the concept is the same: no matter how many corners you have figured out, if one is messed up you don’t get the shape you intended.
For bonus points, look at my different games and see if you can guess what singular element remained mysterious and unknowable long after everything else was settled! Relive my nightmares!
Leave a reply to Ben Robbins
Being bold enough to cut out bits that are precious to you but don’t serve the greater good is 100% virtuous game design! It’s possibly one of the hardest parts. Kudos!
Oh thank god, it isn’t just me.
In my case, every game I make has something I agonize over until very near the end, when I yank it out in a moment of blind frustration and realize how much better things work without it. It’s happened in three or four projects now, and I think it might just be my process forever… glad to see someone wrestling with their brain similarly.
Honestly, when I’ve played Microscope, full-blown scenes have been quite rare, just because they’re time-consuming. The usual pattern is a big set-piece scene once a game has started to gel, which gives direction to the rest.
In Microscope it was resolving what was true during scenes, because scenes are such an outlier from the style of the rest of the game. Old methods used “drama” to take control of the narrative, then later it was “what you see is what you get” with the option to push to disagree (and push is honestly not a great system).
Legacies work pretty great, but their primary purpose is a little subtle, which is giving us a break from a shared focus and letting one person just explore and fill in a blank. But if you’re playing a one-shot game, the way the rule is phrased is awkward, because it’s geared towards explaining how legacies will unfold after many rounds. Not ideal.
I Use The Square To Begin My Solutions Because The Square Is A Non-choice, Really. In The Course Of Development, I Search For The Forces That Would Disprove The Square. – Louis I. Kahn, architect (1901-1974)
It’s not hard to guess with regard to Kingdom – I was there for both playtests! In the first edition, definitely how to resolve conflicts between players. In the second, maybe the reactions? (I love them!)
I still think it was a mistake to take away pending orders from Power. It put the option on the table, so to speak. Imagine if Perspective were similarly “freed”, but in fact limited: “You can make a prediction any time! No need to write it on the card or anything!”
For Follow, I’m honestly not sure.
For Microscope, I’ll go out on a limb and say the Legacy. It’s always stuck out as a weird appendage rule that somehow works.