In recent years, I've arrived at the view that games are a conversation between designers and players. I feel like this sentiment is gaining popularity among designers. This passage from Melos Han-Tani of Analgesic Productions comes to mind:
Playing so many games forces me to think about why it is I’m even playing in the first place. It comes down to “oh, it’s interesting that a person wanted to share such and such thing…” To me it parallels hanging out with a person - there’s something enriching to two people taking time out of their lives to share time together. Likewise, a game designer puts time into making their game, and a player spends time playing it. I like playing games because it feels like I’m getting a sense of that person - a reminder of the breadth of our world.
And this quote from Antti Ukkola of System Erasure:
Games are an active dialogue between the player and designer, where the gameplay acts as a common language. [Some players have] accrued a huge vocabulary and are looking for more in-depth conversations. Conversations where you might disagree with the designer or feel miserable, even hurt afterwards.
This framing dates back to at least 2010, when Douglas Wilson and Miguel Sicart explored abusive game design - in which the designer has an adversarial, even cruel, relationship with the player. Later, Wilson's PhD thesis revisited these ideas and bestowed the more neutral name of dialogic game design - where the designer's presence and "rivalry" with the player are felt, but "abusing" the player isn't necessarily the focus.
The difference in perspective between Melos and Antti is interesting here. Melos describes the dialogue as a pleasant and casual one, where the goal is to learn about another person's interests, while Antti evokes the idea of a painful, perhaps frustrating, but ultimately enriching discussion.
What's interesting about this dialogue is that it almost always takes place asynchronously. The designer is not usually present while you play - they can only "speak" through fixed, predetermined game logic. Designers can only react to the player's actions by anticipating what players will do and programming a response. The response might not even be that direct - designers often construct systems that account for an infinity of actions they never considered. When these systems are complex enough, the designers themselves might be surprised by how the game responds. Then, at what point does the metaphor of a conversation break down? Is it still a conversation if one party isn't technically present, and isn't keeping track of what they're saying?
I think dialogic game design is a valuable philosophy for designers and players alike, but I've always felt some vagueness as to what the "dialogue" taking place actually is. My reason for writing this article is to better understand the mechanics of the dialogue - the ways in which designers and players speak.
Patterns
I'll be referring to "the designer" as a single entity henceforth, even though many games are designed by teams. Think of the designer as an amalgamation of their collective wills. I'll also be focusing on single-player games, and therefore referring to "the player" in singular.
All that is to say that the designer initiates the dialogue with the player. They present their game to the player and wait for a response.
The designer begins by establishing patterns. A pattern is something that repeats in a regular, predictable way. This doesn't have to be a visual pattern; it could be as simple as a cause-and-effect relationship, such as "pressing the A button causes the onscreen character to jump".
The player begins learning the patterns. The game is not so much a conversation at this point as it is establishing the framework for one. Patterns are the "common language" Antti refers to, which allow the conversation to develop.
There is a caveat to the above. Someone who has played a lot of games will already know a lot of patterns, and will approach the game with preconceptions about what the patterns will be. If a game looks like Super Mario, experienced game players will expect the character to behave in a similar way. If pressing the A button causes the onscreen character to explode and die, those players might be shocked.
Subversions
Once a pattern has been established, it can be broken - a subversion of the pattern. This is where the designer makes their presence felt! When a player starts a new game, and finds the patterns largely familiar, it might hardly feel designed at all; just a collection of well-trodden ideas. A deliberate interruption of the pattern jars the player; it reminds them that they're experiencing something created by deliberate humans.
One way for the designer to speak is to establish a pattern themselves, then subvert it. But designers can also subvert patterns that were established outside the game, such as genre conventions. In the latter case, if the player is unfamiliar with the pattern, they might just be confused; they are in some sense left out of the dialogue. But this second approach also leads to the more "in-depth conversations" for players with a larger "vocabulary" that Antti describes.
Subversions make the player reconsider their understanding of a pattern. For example, in Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels, there are Super Mushrooms that power up Mario, and Poison Mushrooms that hurt Mario, which differ slightly in appearance. A player caught by this trap might update their pattern vocabulary from "mushrooms are good" to "red-spotted mushrooms are good, but black-spotted mushrooms are dangerous".
Establishing patterns is like agreeing that both participants in the conversation will speak in English as opposed to another language. Subverting patterns is a way for designers to actually say something to the player. A subversion might sound like....
These sentiments can vary in how antagonistic they are to the player. The first case is like a prank at the player's expense; pranks can be mutually funny or they can be one-sided and cruel. Likewise, in the second and third cases, you can imagine an excited designer saying "Isn't that interesting??" or a mean designer using these methods to taunt you.
Players likewise can have varied responses to the revelations of a subversion. They might get annoyed with the designer and quit the game. Or they might laugh if off. If the designer seems excited, they might get excited too.
Innovations and Fixations
Once a common language of patterns is established, designers can speak by subverting them. But they can also speak by building on them, and combining them in novel or idiosyncratic ways. The novel ones are what I'll call innovations, and those personal idiosyncrasies are what I'll call the designer's fixations.
"Innovation" is a loaded word, and what feels novel to one person might not feel novel to others. Still, designers can strive for innovation, even if whether they attain it is incredibly subjective. When a designer tries to create novelty with their established patterns, what are they saying?
Building on patterns to explore personal fixations, as opposed to generating novelty, is another approach. What do you find interesting as a designer? What do you want to share with the player? It could be that what you want to share is innovations. But fixations can be more expressive than that, because they don't have to be novel. The patterns that excite you, the journeys you invite players on, and your beautiful constructions are used to reveal things about yourself instead of the game systems.
In the passage I quoted at the start, Melos describes playing games as giving "a sense of [the] person" who designed it. I believe that sense is the designer's fixations showing through in their work.
Innovation itself is filtered through one's fixations. Liz Ryerson in this blog post describes two innovation-focused design trends that are almost diametrically opposed:
We can view these trends as the result of designers with different fixations, different ideas of what "novelty" entails, striving for innovation. "One Clever Mechanic" games often feel to me like they speak in a stiff and dry manner, almost more like a lecture than a dialogue, while "Anarchic Maximalism" games are wild and chaotic, like a conversation that runs off into new tangents every few sentences.
Designers establish the terms with patterns, and make their presence known with subversions, but it's fixations through which they communicate the sense of self at the heart of the conversation. The subject of the dialogue is the designer sharing something they care about with the player.
The Conversations I Seek
"Please try to understand me." That's the unofficial motto of my studio, Love ♥ Game.
I haven't talked much yet about the player's side of the conversation. Of course, if a designer posts their game in a public place, then players can give the designer direct feedback. But I'm referring to the "conversation" that takes place while the player is still playing the game, reacting to what the designer is "saying".
Subverting patterns gives the designer a presence, but it can provoke a wide variety of reactions from players, from "That's amazing" to "That's stupid" to "I quit". If the player stops playing, the conversation abruptly ends.
What makes it a conversation instead of a call-and-response is that patterns can be subverted multiple times, or on multiple layers; a subversion can be subverted, and the designer can try to predict how the player's headspace evolves through the game. And if this process keeps the player engaged, they learn more and more about the designer's fixations, and begin to decide whether they share the designer's feelings.
Many players have a critical mindset, and will try to come to a conclusion about whether they think the game is "well designed" or "poorly designed". This is the kind of conversation I'm not really interested in. If I show you something I created that is full of the things I love, and you tell me that it is poorly designed, I will think you are rude and weird. If you tell me it is well designed, I will feel happy because I like being praised, but praise isn't really what I am looking for.
I want players to understand me. If they like the game, I want them to feel energized about finding someone who shares their passions. Or perhaps the game gave them a new passion they'd never considered. To paraphrase Void Stranger, I want to reach players who feel the same longing that I do. I love feeling a connection to another person through their work, and I want to create those connections myself.
If someone doesn't like my game, that's not ideal, but I want it to be clear that it was created by a person who cared about it, and that the elements they don't like might have been important to me. I want them to reflect on why someone would care about those things, and maybe gain a new understanding of them.
Golvellius
I'd like to give a more concrete example of how a conversation between designer and player progresses, so I'll talk about my experience with the 1987 MSX game Golvellius.
This is a Zelda-like action-exploration game, but it also has a few platforming sections and vaguely shmup-like vertical autoscrollers. It starts out with a platforming section, and right off the bat, it subverts established patterns by making it so your character can't turn around. You can move left and right, but your character always faces right and can only attack to the right, so you have to just keep moving if an enemy gets behind you. I suppose in 1987, platformer genre conventions weren't so strongly established, but as a modern gamer, I was amazed by this and I knew I was about to experience a great game.
Once you complete the platforming segment, the top-down Zelda-like adventuring begins. A few screens contain caves with items to purchase or NPCs that give hints. A fairy tips me off that something will happen if I defeat enemies in the nearby graveyard. Killing 6 snakes on that screen reveals a secret cave with some important boots in it. I learn that this works on many other screens - if there's no cave visible at first, sticking around and killing enemies often reveals a hidden one. One of the secret caves contains a vertical autoscrolling level and a boss fight, and upon defeating the boss, a new cave opens up on a distant screen. So I learn the caves might have reveal conditions other than just killing enemies. I start to wonder if there is a cave on every screen.
In this first section, Golvellius is establishing its patterns. I'm just "listening" and learning how it structures its world and hides secrets. I come across a cave that's revealed by repeatedly swinging your sword, rather than killing enemies. One cave with a useful hint is revealed only after I buy an expensive item elsewhere. The lead-up to the second boss is another platforming stage instead of a vertical scroller. As the complexity of both the secret design and boss stages develops, these light subversions remind me of the humans behind the work, though the conversation is still in its early stages.
A more striking subversion appears in the area you reach after defeating the second boss. The enemies in Golvellius respawn infinitely, so if you find a screen with particularly lucrative and easy-to-kill enemies, you can hang around there and grind money. I was doing just that on one particular screen, and after a while of grinding, a secret cave suddenly opened up. I hadn't found the cave on this screen, so I was excited! I went inside to find.... a fairy calling me out for using this screen to grind money! The designer had manipulated me like a puppet. I later found through experimentation that this cave appears if you kill around 30 enemies on that screen, which is a much higher count than most screens require.
Up until the third boss, the game is pretty cleanly divided into "areas": you start in a confined section of the map, find and defeat a boss, and this opens a path to a new, similarly confined section, and so on. But after the third boss, the next part of the map is huge and wide open, and figuring out where to go is difficult. To me, this feels like the designer is saying, "I've taught you the basics, and now I'm placing my trust in you."
Golvellius begins speaking to the player more actively here. Little jokes and surprises using the secret cave system become more common. A fairy helpfully tells you to swing your sword at certain gravestones, some of which contain caves with useful items... but one contains another fairy who bluntly tells you there's nothing there. A cave with the message "kill 10 enemies to the west" leads to a cave with the message "kill 10 enemies to the east". A cave appears in the middle of an impassable river, and the fairy inside tells you to use it as a bridge - when you exit, you can cross over to the other side. One cave, which I only learned about by looking up information online, is revealed by pausing the game, and just contains a silly message telling you not to pause.
Meanwhile, the boss stages ramp up in difficulty, and I gain an increasing sense of the designer's fixations. The platforming sections and the vertical scrollers both become more strict and memorization-heavy, and incorporate traps that force you out of the level (if you're pushed off the left side of the screen in a platforming stage, or the bottom of the screen in a vertical stage, you must restart). There are two optional bonus stages that don't have a boss, and simply exist to challenge players with their absurd length and taxing arrangements of obstacles. The final stage is the ultimate super long platforming zone that mixes memorization traps with wave after wave of enemies and even a few tricky jumps that seem to require damage boosting. I was amazed by this level from hell.
The designer here speaks through increasing escalation. It becomes clear that the punishing, trial-and-error nature of the stages is a fixation: it is something the designer wanted to explore, and they explored it deliberately and thoroughly. Meanwhile, the silly and inconsequential secret cave tricks in the overworld establish a sense of playfulness. Together, these elements serve to argue that the apparent cruelty of the boss stages should also be viewed in a playful light. These stages aren't trying to abuse the player and make them give up - they're trying to challenge the player in a lightly antagonistic way, one that still leaves them smiling when it's over. Much like Dark Souls, Golvellius hopes players will find something to love within repeated failure and struggle.
The sense I get of the designer is that of a person who likes exploring the sharp edges and messy parts of games, diving deep into them instead of trying to excise them. I think Golvellius resonated with me so strongly because I try to design games in the same way. It almost felt like I had found a kindred spirit in designer Pac Fujishima (circa 1987). I got a similar feeling from playing Void Stranger - a sense of recognizing and being recognized.
I observed recently that I tend to design games moreso by just filling them up with stuff I like and find interesting, as opposed to thinking about the interplay between mechanics and systems in a more detached, impersonal way. I want to make my presence and fixations strongly apparent in my work, so that no matter what kind of person plays my game, they can always hear me screaming. And hopefully, they'll be moved by my cries.