Gameplay vs story. Mechanics vs narrative. Red vs blue. Reconciling these has been a basic tenet of critical game thinking for as long as I can remember. They represent a two-tone spectrum, much like the left-right spectrum that we use in politics. Each seems to stand for an ultimate form of something and so becomes the basis of a very easy argument. Are you for gameplay or for narrative? Industry or academia? Puzzle or plot?
However, consider games such as Minecraft or FarmVille and they don’t really fit. Both are wildly popular, but neither is about gameplay or story. It can be entertaining to attempt to jam them in, saying that the player is creating his own story. Or you could try claiming that the farming system’s emergent effects constitute a kind of gameplay. Yet these ultimately feel like exercises in equivocation.
Left-right is easy to say, but in reality there are socially liberal fiscal conservatives, socialist advocates who are also moral-value voters, and many in between. Groups such as The Political Compass advocate using quadrant graphs instead, overlaying attitudes about personal and economic freedoms with the aim of reflecting a greater diversity of types. Such systems are pretty common, from the Myers-Briggs personality test to Richard Bartle’s famous graph of player types. I have long thought that game makers could be categorised similarly, and have developed a graph to do just that.
On the horizontal axis I place emergence vs experience. I call this the ‘frame’ axis, because it’s about the systems and mechanics of the game, irrespective of how it looks. Broadly speaking, games tend to go down the road of either enabling play to develop chaotically (emergence) or according to well-timed beats laid down by its creator (experience). So this is a graph of freedom against restriction, but also toyset vs emotion.
Meanwhile, role and rule are placed on the vertical axis. I call this the ‘fantasy’ axis, because it’s about the importance of fiction, character and context. Is the game inviting you to play a clear role in a well-thought-out world? Does it pay attention to any source material, or just use it as a lick of paint over some interesting puzzles? The key to understanding this axis is the degree to which the rules are naked, or whether the game’s trying to portray a coherent place instead.
The result is four ‘lenses’ – world views through which developers interpret games, evaluate their quality and make design decisions – I call tetrism, narrativism, simulationism and behaviourism.
Tetrism is the mix of emergence and rule. Named after Tetris, perhaps the ultimate example of this kind of game, tetrists consider elegant abstract games where a few simple rules lead to endless dynamic fun as perfection. Tetrism also encompasses many sports and board games. Tetrists tend be fans of older, simpler games and advocate getting back to those roots. They love games that have one clear innovation, and often consider aesthetics as little more than marketing.
The polar opposite (experience and role) is narrativism. Many games are strings of encounters with predictable outcomes, and the challenge is to overcome them to progress a story. In some cases, encounters are a linear series of emergent challenges (God Of War), but in others they are highly constrained (Heavy Rain). A narrativist wants to impart emotion and complexity of character over systemic fun, and thinks of games as emotional arcs and storytelling opportunities.
Then there’s the kind of game in which you play a role, but it’s up to you what you do. This covers everything from Populous to Elite, and I call it simulationism (emergence and role). It’s about unguided veracity, building complex worlds from elegant code. Emergent AI, representative physics and so on all feature, and the player gets to do with them what they will. Simulationists believe that games will one day be alternatives to reality.
Their opposites are behaviourists (experience and rule), who care less about gameplay, simulation or story. They instead see games as reward engines. Although some behaviourist games may look like sims (FarmVille), they guide players toward particular actions and dispense with systemic complexity. Behaviourists believe in measurement, and this makes behaviourism the most creatively conservative of all lenses. In their most noble form, behaviourists aspire to using games for education and habit correction, such as Wii Sports. Less nobly, behaviourism is also the lens that produces gambling and competitions.
Just as in politics, no lens tends to be wholly in the right. David Nolan addressed this in his version of a political quadrant graph by delineating a fifth space in between them all as ‘centrism’. My theory is that this holds true for games, that tetrist games with aesthetic charm (Triple Town) tend to be more joyful to play, and simulations that sometimes guide the player likewise. Gambling games that also involve skill tend to attract mastery-type players, while story-led games with solid gameplay underpinnings tend to be the ones that we finish. The secret to making great games seems to be avoiding the extremes of any one lens – call it thaumatism.