GDC day 2 (or 4)

I realized last night I forgot to really hit day 2.  Day 2 was my day for actually making it to a couple of game design talks.  I saw Marc LeBlanc in the morning, and Cliff Bleczinski (I wonder if I'm spelling that right?) in the evening.  Sort of a Yin / Yang of game design - Marc LeBlanc gave me the apparatus to differentiate them - he talked about intuition vs. intellect.  We do most of our work through intuition - I know fun when I see it! - but sometimes we switch to intellect to get out of a rough spot, like it's a low gear.  And when we give talks (or write in our blogs) we tend to be in the intellectual mode.
After explaining that difference, Marc gave a very intellectual talk.  This was the first time I was exposed to his Mechanics - Dynamics - Aesthetics framework;  it wasn't what I thought it was going to be.  In his framework, Mechanics is your entire game, including the dressing or color;  Dynamics is the experience of playing the game that a player has;  Aesthetics is the player's response to it.  Which means I'm fucked.  Just when I thought we could settle on Mechanics being the name for the formal abstract portion of the game - the "salad" as Hamumu put it - it turns out Marc LeBlanc's already got a different definition for the word.  I said to him, "So now we need another word for the part of the game that doesn't include the dressing or color."  He didn't seem to think so - he said that Whack-A-Mole and Whack-A-Baby are very different games, that dressing is more important than mechanics in that case.  I still think we need a word.  Rules, I guess, is what they call it in *Rules of Play*.
Okay, and then, in the evening, Cliff B., pretty much an anti-Marc, gave his talk.  Very, very intuitive.  "Graphics matter", "Firing a gun with a nice mesh (that has some kind of reflectance shader) and a pretty muzzle flash and a good sound and an obvious effect on the environment is fun", "Story is a motivator", "Game design isn't that hard (we know fun when we see it)", "Trust your instincts (using the goop gun from Unreal as an example)", and - this was the good fortune cookie of the bunch - "End the game when the kids are having the most fun." 
That last one is counterintuitive but obvious when you think about it - for example, in Half-Life 2, I was usually starting to get bored of one sequence before they switched to the next sequence;  if the different kinds of gameplay where marbleized together, so that I'm still having fun with the boat ("Hey, I wasn't done with that yet!") when they give me the car, I'd be motivated to play more hoping for more boat.
Cliff also talked about loops, which converges with something I've been thinking about lately.  More on that later, because Cathy wants me to be in some photos with Sofi now.

Comments

[isaac]

I am sitting here, completely stunned! Last year, after attending the Game Tuning Workshop I was talking with Mahk and broached the issue of game components that I felt fell outside the MDA model. Then, after the MDA paper was published, I wrote up some thoughts on it and sent them to Robin. In it I posed two hypothetical games based on whack-a-mole: one plucked cartoon daisies, the other popped baby heads into bloody pulps (I wanted the contrast between cute and demented to be dramatic). My argument was that the differences between the two artifacts fell outside the scope of the model. Because the games are significantly different though mechanically the same, it indicates a weakness in the model. But I was unable to attend the tutorial sessions this year. What was the context in which that example was raised? Was it in conversation or was it part of the presentation?

In general I still find MDA to be a nice model for relating player experiences to the game mechanics and I refer to it in the game design chapter of Introduction to Game Development. But I stop short of presuming the model accounts for all aspects of a game—there is nothing wrong with that; "mechanics" can mean just what most already believe it to mean we traditionally think of when we use the word and MDA is no weaker for it. Tim Stellmach pretty much rattled my conviction that a grand unified theory of games is a necessity (in a good way).

Isn't the whole concept of game loops pretty old? I can remember discussing loops a number of years ago and I'm sure someone introduced the idea to me. The whole "intuition" approach is usually paired with an attitude that game design cannot be taught, hardcore uberalis, and everything supported solely by authority arguments (e.g. "I'm So-and-So and, having done This-and-That, hereby decree...") etc.

[Jamie]

It was in conversation, after the thing, that he mentioned Whack-A-Baby. And I don't know if you've read *Theory of Fun*, but Raph does a similar thing by turning Tetris into a throw-people-into-a-pit game.

[isaac]

Ah that makes more sense. I couldn't figure out why the example would be raised in the regular session since I still think it highlights a weakness in the model; one that isn't satisfied by just calling it "dressing."

By any chance are you getting mail from your old blog?

[Jamie]

Not sure what you mean, getting mail from my old blog. I haven't changed e-mail addresses...

[MAHK]

I don't think that the whack-a-mole/pop-a-baby example actually does highlight a weakness of the model. I actually think that it demonstrates a strength of the model.

MDA does not contemplate the difference between whack-a-mole and pop-a-baby as a matter of "dressing." Rather, it illuminates the fact that the important distinction between pop-a-baby and whack-a-mole is the causal relationships between the objects being represented (be they babies or moles) and the user's actions. The user has an important causal role in whacking the mole, which changes the meaning of it. The process by which the player ascribes fictional meaning to the game (i.e. he deduces that he is whacking moles or popping babies) is very much part of the dynamics of the game. That is to say that the experience of whacking a mole is not part the rules of the game, it is part of what happens when you play. The process of human cognition is part of game dynamics.

Using the same art assets for pop-a-baby, one can also create "resurrect-a-baby" and "watch-babies-pop." MDA claims that these are indeed different games, and their difference is a matter of dynamics (i.e. the emergent causal relationships between the objects) and aesthetics (i.e. how the player feels about those relationships).

Why am I chasing down and commenting on a 6-year-old thread, you wonder? I'm actually hoping that you still have the illustrations you made for your whack-a-mole/pop-a-baby document, and that you'd let me use them. I'm thinking about doing a talk on games and meaning.

- MAHK

[Jamie Fristrom]

Hey Mark -

I'm guessing it's not likely Isaac (I assume he's the one with the doc) will come back and read this thread. e-mail me at jdfristrom at gmail dot com and I'll pass on his e-mail.