Clockwork Game Design

Keith Burgun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317630395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

Only by finding and focusing on a core mechanism can you further your pursuit of elegance in strategy game design. Clockwork Game Design is the most functional and directly applicable theory for game design. It details the clockwork game design pattern, which focuses on building around fundamental functionality. You can then use this understanding to prescribe a system for building and refining your rulesets. A game can achieve clarity of purpose by starting with a strong core, then removing elements that conflict with that core while adding elements that support it.Filled with examples and exercises detailing how to put the clockwork game design pattern into use, this book is a must-have manual for designing games.

• A hands-on, practical book that outlines a very specific approach to designing games

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• Develop the mechanics that make your game great, and limit or remove factors that disrupt the core concept

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• Practice designing games through the featured exercises and illustrations

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CHAPTER 1

THEORY

Section 1

GAMES

GAME DESIGN SPECIALIZATION

Relatively speaking, game design is a new discipline. While there have been professional composers, painters, writers, and architects for at least half a millennium, there has only been a class of specialized “game designers” for the past 50 years, and that class has only reached a healthy size in the last 20–25 years or so.

We are still in the early history—or possibly pre-history—of the discipline of game design. If you observe the progression of the discipline of, say, music composition throughout history, you can clearly see that there is a massive increase in the quality of work around the time that an institutional study and respect for the craft began. Much of our understanding of music composition is due to the act of Renaissance churches actually hiring people to compose music. While there had always been “people who composed music” before that, with this decision a class of music-composers was created. These were people who specialized in music composition, whose job it was to compose great music. When it’s your full-time job to make the best music you can, that means you have time to start asking serious questions about your craft, and that’s how progress happens.

With the rise of the “videogame,” as we know it, games have become incredibly lucrative, and that has ushered in a generation of specialist game designers. In the past ten years alone, dozens of schools have started programs explicitly focused on game design. More and more books, talks, and articles are coming out every day that seek to home in on an understanding of the fundamentals of this craft, not to mention serious scientific analysis. In short: it’s happening—we’re leaving the pre-design era—and that’s very exciting.

OBSTACLES

Unfortunately, many of the answers we’ve arrived at in our pursuit of design principles have been less useful than they could have been due to errors in how we’ve been asking the question. This should be, of course, an expected part of the growth of any discipline. We branch out in a direction, and it can seem like this direction is working for a long time before we realize some lower-level problems.

A significant source of the problem is that the “founding fathers” of popular modern game design were actually just programmers with cool-sounding ideas. A generation of designers in the 1970s through the 1990s worked really hard to create something special using their ability to program computers to make something that felt like playing Dungeons & Dragons, or that looked like watching a movie. And to some extent, they achieved those goals.

By far the largest fundamental issue we’ve had in terms of advancing our understanding of this craft is our failure to accurately categorize different types of interaction. In short, we’ve been referring to everything we make—whether it be tabletop RPGs, sandbox simulations, competitive fighting games, or cooperative board games—all as simply “games.” With this as our starting point, it can be incredibly difficult to develop some kind of guideline for “good game design.” Imagine trying to come up with design guidelines that could be applied to StarCraft, Super Mario Bros., Dungeons & Dragons and Dear Esther all at once, while still having any utility. Doing so is essentially impossible, and this is my explanation for why—with all of the existing books, articles, and even university graduate programs teaching game design—we have very little in the way of game design guidelines that have real utility.

So much of what has been said and written about game design so far is—I’m terribly disappointed to say—useless. There are a lot of “what if” musings, flowery language, and “games in culture” analyses. While these aren’t without their use, and we’re better off for having them, it’s unfortunate that this is all we’ve got.

If you listen to the modern game design intelligentsia, it would seem as though the problems of actual interactive system design are basically solved: you’ve got your FPS, your puzzle platformer, your art-installation toy. Now it’s just a matter of what kinds of themes we’re going to slap on them, or finding new ways to reanalyze the same things again and again.

Most works that come close to being directly useful are extremely low-level analysis that arguably shouldn’t even be considered “game design” theory, but perhaps more like psychology or another related discipline. A good example of this is Dan Cook’s Gamasutra article, “Chemistry of Game Design.” In this work, Mr. Cook talks about the basic qualities of any interactive system, such as “the feedback loop” and basics about how human beings learn through interaction. He says:

With the concepts in this essay, you can start integrating this model into your current games and collecting your own data. We’ve got some immensely bright people in our little market and it is almost certain that they can improve upon this foundational starting point. By sharing what you’ve learned, we can begin to improve our models of design. What happens if game designers embrace the scientific process and start build a science of game design?

This sort of work is useful in that it allows designers to speak to each other more clearly on some topics, but it cannot be used to help a person design better things. It does not suggest any course of action. Indeed, Mr. Cook is rather open about the fact that his work—like nearly everyone else’s in the field—does not provide any answers to people wondering “what should I do?” What he is saying is that this work may be able to serve as a foundation for someone in the future who can hopefully provide readers with something directly useful. But this piece itself, as he says, does not “improve our models of design.”

More useful is the work of Chris Crawford, who saw the need to break the great landscape of interactive entertainment into several different categories. His taxonomy goes as follows:

Within entertainment: “is it interactive?”—if no, it is in the same (unnamed) class as movies, books and films, else it qualifies as a “plaything.”

Within playthings: “is there a defined goal?”—if no, it is a “toy”; if yes, a “challenge.”

Within challenges: “is there an agent to compete against (or the illusion of one)?”—if no, it is a “puzzle”; if yes, a “conflict.”

Within conflicts: “can you impede your opponents?”—if no, it is a “competition”; if yes, a “game.”

This is a good first step along the path towards a more useful way to look at design. While it is similar to the taxonomy described in this book, it differs in a few significant ways. To begin with, most of the systems described here—such as “conflicts,” “challenges,” and “playthings” aren’t things that really manifest in the world. How would one go about designing a “conflict,” for example? I suppose stealing a co-worker’s coffee might be “designing a conflict,” but is that really useful to us as interactive system designers?

And that’s the problem with today’s ideas on design: existing taxonomy is not oriented around understanding the fundamental value and functionality of forms. Instead, what we have are shallow taxonomies created to describe the status quo—only a step or two away from using “genre.” The theory and taxonomy in this book, on the other hand, were written to describe the actual interactive forms, at their lowest level. Understanding these is the crucial first step toward building guidelines for better design.

WHAT IS AN INTERACTIVE SYSTEM?

The goal of this book is to improve our models of design, and so, to achieve that, we will be talking only about a specific subset of interactive systems, not all of interactive entertainment (as most current books do).

Interactive systems are systems of rules that humans engage with in order to experience a specific kind of learning. We tend to think of ourselves as engaging with these to have fun, to relax, or even to simply escape. None of those things are wrong, but those are actually less specific and objective than to say that we are doing these things to learn. Even if our intention with a game is to escape, the game works by forcing us to learn.

The word “learn” can also be a bit broad and unclear, so to clarify: with all interactive systems, what we want to do is explore its edges—to understand it. Humans are social creatures that evolved to gain advantages from understanding the world around them better than other creatures do. One useful adaptation towards this end is that learning is thrilling for us. Specifically, when we make a connection about “how something works” that we didn’t understand before, we get releases of dopamine that both reinforce the behavior that caused us to learn, but also help us to remember the new information.

So, learning makes us feel good. When a system has something to teach us, and we feel like learning it is within our grasp, we find that exciting or compelling. When it has close to nothing left to teach us (it’s been solved), or when the effort required for obtaining what it has left to teach us seems prohibitive, we lose interest—we see that thing as “boring.”

Different systems invite different kinds of interaction, and we call these “forms.”

COMPONENTS OF AN INTERACTIVE SYSTEM

The smallest unit we work with in interactive systems is the “rule.” Rules combine together into clusters that achieve a certain task. These clusters are called “mechanisms,” and they are the bits of information in a game that we use to manipulate the game state. Mechanisms may be loosely grouped into “subsystems.”

THE FOUR INTERACTIVE FORMS

With this book, my aim is to provide designers with useful, functional guidelines for designing better games. By “games,” however, don’t think “all kinds of interactive entertainment.” Instead, know that it refers to a specific subset of the colloquially defined “games” that, if one were forced to use existing language, might be best described as “strategy games.”

In my last book, Game Design Theory: A New Philosophy for Understanding Games, I detailed my proposed categories for interactive systems. I’ve since come to refer to this as “the four interactive forms.”

There are four interactive forms that harness the four essential types of play—toys, puzzles, contests, and games. The first thing to note is that these terms are being used with prescriptive definitions; the word “toy” and “game” as they are colloquially known have different definitions than those proposed here.

This book is not about these forms in general, it is all about the design process for just one of the forms—the game. With that in mind, it’s worthwhile to take a moment to understand the contrast between this form and the other forms.

Toy

The “toy” is simply a bare interactive system. It has rules, including limitations on what the player can and cannot do, as well as objects and variables that can be manipulated by player input. However, it does not have goals, something that is the hallmark of all other types of interactive systems. It is indeed the only form that is goalless.

The toy’s primary value could be best referred to as “mapping,” or possibly “exploration.” Playing with a toy could involve throwing it, bouncing it against a wall, building with it, stretching it, and other exploratory types of acts. When you play with a toy, you are experimenting to find the edges of this object.

A very simple example of a toy is something like a yo-yo. A yo-yo is indeed an interactive system—you can simply bounce it up and down, or you can “sleep” it (cause it to continue spinning at the end of the rope), as well as perform dozens of tricks with it. Finding the various interesting ways that a yo-yo can be “played with” is exactly what toys are about.

A much more complex example of a toy would be the popular PC sandbox Garry’s Mod. In it, you can create platforms, attach pulleys, weights, rockets, balloons, magnets and other physics objects, not to mention fully poseable character models with physics ragdoll software. You can create crazy situations, from simple stuff like building a tower and knocking it down, to creating a fully functional “Mecha” robot. You can also just pose characters in funny ways and take screenshots.

And doing all this silly stuff with Garry’s Mod is the point. You can’t “win at” Garry’s Mod, instead you play with it, just like a yo-yo. Theoretically, you can “solve” toys—this would be done by mapping every bit of them so that there is nothing left that can be done with it that you haven’t done before. In practice, we tend to get bored with toys well before we reach this point, because...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• CHAPTER 1: THEORY
• CHAPTER 2: ANATOMY
• CHAPTER 3: CONSTRUCTION
• CHAPTER 4: PITFALLS
• Index