Chapter 12. Meaningful Mechanics

The conventional video game industry devotes its attention to creating entertaining (and profitable) games, but games can be used for much more than entertainment. An increasing number of companies are dedicated to building games to teach, persuade, enlighten, and even heal. Many of these games try to transmit a message of some kind to their players. They can do this in various ways, but here we are concerned with mechanics and their interaction with the other parts of the game—the setting, the artwork, and the story (if any).

In this chapter, we will discuss how you can create mechanics that are meaningful. First we’ll look at serious games and what they do. Then we’ll examine communication theory and semiotics and apply the lessons learned from these disciplines to game design. Finally we’ll look at games that offer multiple layers of meaning, including meanings that contradict each other, a phenomenon known as intertexual irony. Even if you’re primarily interested in building entertainment games, you can use the lessons in this chapter to create entertainment games that are more meaningful and have a message of their own.

Serious Games

Play and learning share a long history. Humans, and many animals too, have always used play to prepare for more serious tasks in later life. When children play hide-and-seek, they exercise some of the same skills that hunters use. Hunting skills are not as vital as they once were, but other children’s games such as playing house and driving pedal cars are still relevant and prepare them for activities that will probably be in their futures.

When play evolved into the more structured activity that we call gaming, it retained this learning aspect. Game designer Raph Koster wrote a book called A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2005) about the relationship between fun and learning in games. He argues that, no matter what game you play, learning and mastering the game is what triggers our fun experience. You probably recognize the triumphant feeling you get when you figure out a puzzle in a game and execute the right moves to beat that level. Playing games is a constant process of learning: learning the goals, learning the moves, learning the strategies to achieve those goals. This goes for all types of games, even if they are abstract puzzle games like Tetris that have no obvious similarities to tasks in real life. Although Koster’s viewpoint is a bit overstated (there are many sources of fun in games besides learning, such as social interaction and aesthetic pleasure), his essential point is correct: Gameplay involves learning in an enjoyable form.

The term serious game was devised in recognition that games can be used for purposes other than light entertainment. There is no standard definition of serious game, but Ben Sawyer, a well-known proponent, suggests an inclusive description: “Serious games solve problems.” A serious game is designed to achieve a real-world effect of some kind. Many of them use the player’s openness to learning while playing games and use the game to teach something. Games also offer an opportunity to experiment with new approaches to problems safely, inexpensively, and without consequences.

Early Serious Games

Serious games drove the development of modern board games, long before the computer was invented. What we know as Monopoly today originated as a serious game. It borrows heavily from an earlier work called The Landlord’s Game (Figure 12.1). The game was designed in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie to show the consequences of an unrestrained capitalist economy. She wanted to demonstrate that the system of purchasing property and renting it out enriches the people who own the property while impoverishing the tenants. The name Monopoly is an ironic reversal of the original game’s intended message, but the game’s history does explain why its victory condition requires bankrupting the other players rather than simply amassing the largest fortune.

Figure 12.1. The Landlord’s Game board from the original patent

Most modern war games, either computer-based or tabletop, can trace their history to another serious game: Kriegsspiel (which is simply German for “war game”). Kriegsspiel was first developed by the Prussian Lieutenant Georg Leopold von Reiswitz in 1812. Later, he and his son refined it for the Prussian army to train their officers in battle tactics and strategy (Figure 12.2). In Kriegsspiel, players take turns to move colored wooden pieces over a map representing the battleground. Rules restrict how far pieces can move, and dice are used to determine the effects of one unit firing at another unit or engaging in close combat. If you have ever played a tabletop war game, this should sound familiar.

Photo courtesy of Andrew Holmes.

Figure 12.2. Kriegsspiel.

Kriegsspiel was a revolutionary innovation in the training of military officers. Despite its simplistic rules that replaced gun battles with die rolls, it actually improved the strategic skills of the officers who played it. Kriegsspiel allowed its players to try different battle strategies and explore their strengths and weaknesses without any consequences. It also gave them a chance to step into the shoes of their adversaries and think through strategies from their perspective. After a series of successful military campaigns throughout the nineteenth century, many nations in Europe and beyond adopted war gaming as a method for training military officers.

Serious Video Games

People have designed video games for serious purposes since the 1980s, originally as educational tools. Unfortunately, in the rush to embrace new technology, many early educational games proved to be a disappointment, and the term edutainment, once popular, is now avoided. Too many of the early educational games were nothing but thinly veiled multiple-choice tests. This produced games whose gameplay was constrained and uninteresting. (Of course, there were exceptions, such as the highly-regarded Oregon Trail.)

Modern educational games are better designed, and now they’re used in schools and at home to teach everything from mathematics to typing. They integrate their gameplay more closely with their subject matter, and they use the power of emergent mechanics to teach principles, not just facts.

Serious games go far beyond education, however. Online you can find many advergames: games designed as an advertisement to sell a product. Today, many political campaigns commission games that make fun of their opponents, and both news agencies and game companies have started to experiment with short games that comment on current affairs as a new version of the editorial cartoon in newspapers. Games have found many uses in the field of health care, from psychological and physical therapy to training physicians and surgeons.

It is not easy to deliver a particular message in a game that offers the kind of dynamic freedom that games of emergence create, but we are convinced that it is possible. As we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, playing a game (especially for the first time) is a process of enjoyable learning. There is no reason why a game cannot be fun and meaningful at the same time. In fact, there are many good examples of commercial games, such as SimCity or Civilization, that have been used as part of educational programs to teach social geography or political history. In the 1980s the U.S. State Department used Balance of Power, a game about the geopolitical struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, as a training tool for diplomats.

To explain how serious game designers can use game mechanics to send messages, we turn to communication theory and semiotics, the study of signs and their meanings.

Communication Theory

Games are related to other media like films, books, or newspapers; they all communicate to their audience. Films and video games use audiovisual means, while books, newspapers, and board games rely on static images and written text. Communication theory has long studied how effective different media and particular media messages are at reaching their audiences. Communication theory looks at all types of messages and meaning: advertisements, political statements, and personal opinion, but also personal artistic vision and humorous statements.

Communication theorists have developed a model of communication in which a sender sends a message along a channel to a receiver (Figure 12.3). The model typically includes the following elements:

• The sender is a person or a party who wants to reach the receiver with a particular message.

• The receiver is the audience, the people who need to understand the message.

• The channel is the way the sender sends the message to the receiver. The channel is often referred to as the medium—text, images, and so on.

• The signal consists of the tangible, physical signals used to address the receiver. In a book, the signal is built from words and letters. In music, the signal consists of vibrations in the air that we recognize as sounds of different frequency and character.

• The message is the intangible part of the message that resides in our brain. You might think of it as (sub)conscious thought or the meaning. The aim of communication is to transfer the message from the sender to the receiver.

Figure 12.3. A model of communication

Different attributes of these elements affect communication in different ways. For example, if the signal is constructed in such a way that it rhymes, it attracts more attention and becomes easier to remember. A famous example is the old campaign slogan for Dwight D. Eisenhower’s campaign for U.S. president: “I like Ike.” The characteristics of the channel or the medium are also very important. Music is good at evoking moods and emotions but poor at transmitting rational assertions. Every medium has particular strengths and weaknesses that must be taken into account when you want to communicate effectively.

It is important to note that this model of communication assumes that the signal travels in one direction. It suggests that a sender has a specific message and that the receiver does not reply. This model fits broadcast media, in which one powerful sender (for example, a newspaper or a television network) sends one signal to many receivers at once. Mass communication of this sort is effective because senders often have the time and resources to produce long, high-quality signals that are good at conveying the intended message. However, it turns the audience into passive consumers of signals. This approach does not suit all applications equally well. In an educational situation, you want the receivers (students) to be active participants and to play with the message themselves to fully grasp it. That is why we list exercises at the end of every chapter in this book and provide interactive examples on the companion website.

How the Medium Affects the Message

To communicate effectively, it is important to choose the most suitable medium. You have probably heard Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote “the medium is the message” before. McLuhan meant that the attributes of the chosen medium for communication are more important than the actual signal. He was exaggerating for dramatic effect, but he had a point. The medium you choose reveals a lot about your intended message even before you send it. People have beliefs and prejudices about media that are quite independent of the actual message. For example, writing a book makes us look more authoritative than making a film would.

The strength of games as communication media is that they allow interactive communication, both between the designer and the players and among the players themselves. In a game, the audience is actively involved with the signal. This has advantages but, as we will see, also makes communicating with games harder, or at least different, from communicating with books or films. Many of the people who commission and pay for serious games—a serious game designer’s clients—still think in terms of broadcast media. They’re used to thinking about presenting data rather than giving the audience something interesting to do. While games retain some elements of classic broadcast media, they are also crucially different. Some messages are well suited to be told through games, but others are best mediated through other forms.

Games possess a unique quality that sets them apart from all other media: They are the only medium in which the signal is generated by mechanics. Games can use audio, video, animation, and text—the presentational media—to deliver their message, but their mechanics are their strength. If your game uses only presentational methods, then you might as well use some other medium that is better suited to your message. As we have shown, the mechanics that govern a game’s internal economy create emergent gameplay. To build meaningful games, you will need everything you have learned about mechanics so far and use that knowledge to create the right mechanics to fit your message.

Games and films share the quality that their signals have a high production value. This creates expectations in the audience. When we watch a film or play a game, we expect a high-quality production. We might pay a few dollars to see or buy it, but we know it costs far more to create it. This probably explains why clients expect so much when they order a serious game: They compare it with the latest production out of Hollywood and the latest batch of triple-A game titles. Serious games with smaller budgets have trouble living up to these expectations because, unlike film, a lot more work remains invisible to the casual observer—all the software engineering, tuning, and testing that filmmakers don’t have to do. Games are interactive devices and must accommodate different scenes and different endings. Unlike films, games are not just signals; they are machines designed to create the signal that must deliver your message.

How Mechanics Send Messages

Good games, serious games included, don’t lecture or preach. To use a game to communicate, you don’t just produce a clever signal to convey your message. Instead, you construct a machine—the game’s mechanics—that produces the signal for you. Figure 12.4 illustrates the idea. This isn’t as efficient as simply telling people things, but for some messages it is a better way of creating understanding and acceptance in your receiver. People infer your message by interacting with the game and observing its output.

Figure 12.4. Communicating via games

It may not seem obvious how game mechanics send messages, especially when, in video games, the mechanics are mostly hidden and observable only through their outputs on the screen and their reactions to a player’s inputs. We’ve provided two examples to show how the process works: SimCity and PeaceMaker.

In the original SimCity, the player could set the property tax rate and decide what to spend the revenue on. The game included a mechanic that caused businesses to leave town if the player raised taxes too high. Some people interpreted this to mean that the game had a pro-business, capitalist agenda. But it also included a mechanic whereby the player could increase the citizens’ happiness by spending tax money on civic amenities like sports stadiums and public parks—indeed, in the game, the citizens demand them. Some people interpreted that to mean that the game had a socialist agenda. Both the right and the left read political messages into the internal economy of SimCity. In fact, the game was a well-balanced simulation of a medium-sized American town. Both messages were intentional but never stated in the form of an explicit assertion. Instead, the players discovered them through gameplay. If you tried to play the game either as a high-tax socialist or as a low-tax libertarian, you would lose. The former would drive the businesses out of town, and the latter would drive the residents out by never having enough money to build the facilities they wanted. By making choices about how the game’s mechanics work—and in particular, what the player must do to succeed—the game sends some rather subtle messages. The true, overarching message of SimCity is that extremist policies don’t succeed, but a balanced approach does.

While SimCity was designed to be pure entertainment, PeaceMaker is a persuasive game, one kind of serious game. PeaceMaker sends a much more direct political message. The object of the game is to achieve peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and you can play as either the president of the Palestinian Authority or the prime minister of Israel. But in either role, if you take a hawkish, hardline attitude, you are doomed to fail. The mechanics are set up in such a way that only constructive engagement can succeed.

This raises an important point: What makes mechanics-as-messages work is the effort that the player expends to win the game. Games punish certain behavior and reward other behavior, and to win, the player must learn, and then do, what the game wants. If you created a sandbox game that offered an unlimited supply of resources and no negative consequences for anything the player did, the player could ignore any message that your mechanics were supposed to send. In fact, she would probably never become aware of a message at all, because the game would not constrain her behavior in a particular direction.

The fact that the player has to act to produce the signal is an important quality of games. Although delivering your message through the mechanics is more subtle than direct presentation, the player is more likely to remember the message because she deduces it for herself over a longer period. Having her doing things, and thinking about their consequences, is much more effective than simply telling her what is expected.

Design Challenges

Writing an essay or making a documentary to send your message requires talent, but at least you know that you have complete control over the signal you create. Sending messages via mechanics is trickier. You have some control over what will be in the signal—the computer’s outputs—because you provide the sounds and the images the game can display. But the player’s own actions will affect the way the signal is produced. The player may do things that reveal those sounds and images in a different order, or perhaps not at all. Nor can you be certain that your player will necessarily infer your intended message correctly. He might not be perceptive enough, or he might not care enough to think about it. Really hardcore players often treat a game simply as an abstract system to be optimized and pay little attention to context or meaning.

As a designer of a signal-producing machine, you have to be aware of all the possible signals that the game might produce. Look closely at the player actions that the mechanics require of the player (as we mentioned earlier, things the player must do to win) and at other actions that are available but optional. If shooting things is a core mechanic in a game and required to win, there is no point in denying that the game sends the message “violence succeeds.” If you want to offer a nonviolent strategy in the game, it should be a clear and viable option, one that can also lead to victory. The economic structure of a game will dictate how the game might be played, and the most effective strategies will send their message more clearly than less effective ones. If a player can win a game rapidly and easily through violence but only slowly and with difficulty through nonviolence, that sends a message that violence is an efficient way to solve problems.

Even though mechanics are a more subtle way of sending your message than presentation, they can still seem preachy if you aren’t careful. If you frequently offer a player a choice of options (say, violence or negotiation) but always punish one, the player will quickly realize that it’s a false choice. Role-playing games that require players to behave in conformity with their chosen good or evil character alignment often make this mistake, producing what’s known as the “Jesus/Hitler dichotomy.” Players who choose to be good must be absolute saints, while those who choose to be evil must be homicidal maniacs. Their mechanics for determining whether a player is acting according to his alignment lack any subtlety.

PeaceMaker, the game about Israel/Palestine diplomacy, avoids this problem by requiring that the player conciliate the hawks on his own side. You have to make peace, but it isn’t enough simply to be a dove all the time; that will get you thrown out of office by your own people. No matter which side you play, you must deal with your own side’s religious militants as well as the other side. In effect, to win the game you have to reconcile two mechanics with different criteria for success: the need to stay in office and the need to make peace. It requires a nice political balancing act to pull it off. In the early stages of the game, your own side’s militants are powerful. Later, as your policies begin to succeed, they don’t matter as much.

Even abstract mechanics that lack any context or back story can still create a certain emotional tone. A game produces a different message—and evokes different emotions—when resources accumulate faster and faster because of positive constructive feedback than when no resources are produced and the players need to survive and make do with what little they can hang on to. The theory and design methods we discussed in the previous chapters will help you to understand what messages your game sends.

The Semiotics of Games and Simulations

The field of semiotics offers another relevant theoretical perspective on meaning in games. Semiotics examines the relationship between signals and their meaning (or the message)—in other words, between what the receiver perceives (sounds, images, words) and what the receiver understands them to mean. It is often called the theory of the sign. In classical semiotics, a sign is a double entity that has a material signal that stands for an immaterial meaning (or message). Based on the relationship between its signal and its meaning, signs are classified into three types:

• An icon is a sign where its signal resembles its meaning. A good example is a picture of a person: The picture simply looks like the person. Certain words are also icons: They sound like the thing they indicate (such as the barking of a dog), but these are rare.

• An index is a sign where the signal is causally related to its meaning. The classic example is a footprint that signals that somebody has been there (meaning). Similarly, smoke (signal) can indicate the presence of a fire (meaning).

• A symbol is a sign where the signal is related only to its meaning by convention. Individual names are a good example, as are many words. Names do not resemble the people they indicate, and most words we use share nothing with the objects they indicate; we need to learn them all. Another example are roses (signal) that can stand for love (meaning). The roses have no inherent relationship with love, and our association between them is learned from convention. Cultures in places where no roses grow use other symbols to stand for love.

According to semiotic theory, symbols play an important role in our knowledge of the world. Symbolic signs such as words allow us to speak about things in the world in general terms and transfer observations from individual cases to more general situations. The word apples is just a sound we make with our mouths, or a series of squiggles on a page, but it can refer to a particular collection of real apples or to the general concept of apples, including ones of different varieties. It also has a whole range of other connotations and usages. The Dutch word for potato is aardappel (“earth apple”) because when potatoes first arrived from the New World the Dutch had no name for them and chose to modify a familiar one. The sentence “you’re comparing apples and oranges” isn’t even about apples at all; it means “you’re making an invalid comparison.” Finally, the fruit that Eve ate in the Bible is often described as an apple (though that’s not actually in the Bible), so the apple has come to stand for eroticism in art (though that’s not in the Bible either). In sum, words provide shortcuts with which we can communicate large and complex meanings efficiently.

Semiotics were developed to study signs in traditional and mostly static media: spoken language, texts in books, film, visual art, and so on. Applying semiotics to games, we need to consider what we classify as signs. We could use semiotics to look at the signals produced by the game machine in the same way as semiotics would look at the signs and signals in any other media. In that case, we can talk about the realism of the signal, or its resemblance to its intended meaning. We can also try to apply semiotic theory to the game itself and not so much to its output. In that way, you could say that a game (as a tangible system of rules) stands for another system. For example, the game World of Warcraft (the game with all its mechanics) stands for an imaginary fantasy world (with all its intended complexities and nuances). In general, this is exactly how many people think about simulation, in which you create one system (the simulation) to model another system (the weather system, for example).

Games and Simulations

Game developers have debated the kinship between games and simulations for some time. They are similar because they both use a system of rules (or mechanics) to represent another system (or rather an idea of another system). Yet they are also different. Game designer, Chris Crawford, observed the following in his 1984 book The Art of Computer Game Design:

Accuracy is the sine qua non of simulations; clarity the sine qua non of games. A simulation bears the same relationship to a game that a technical drawing bears to a painting. A game is not merely a small simulation lacking the degree of detail that a simulation possesses; a game deliberately suppresses detail to accentuate the broader message that the designer wishes to present. Where a simulation is detailed a game is stylized (Crawford 1984, p. 9).

More recently, game scholar Jesper Juul observed the following:

Games are often stylized simulations; developed not just for fidelity to their source domain, but for aesthetic purposes. These are adaptations of elements of the real world. The simulation is oriented toward the perceived interesting aspects of soccer, tennis or being a criminal in a contemporary city (Juul 2005, p. 172).

Although Crawford distinguished between simulations and games, he was really talking about simulations for science and engineering versus simulations for games. Games simulate things too—they’re just different things for different reasons. In the next two sections, we’ll contrast the way the simulations in scientific and engineering research work with the way simulations in entertainment games work.

Simulations in Science

In the ordinary practice of science, the scientist begins by making observations of the real world. She then forms a hypothesis about how nature operates to explain her observations. To test her hypothesis, she performs experiments on the real world and makes further observations. The results of those experiments either support her hypothesis or disprove it; if they disprove it, she revises the hypothesis and tries again.

However, some hypotheses are expensive or impossible to test in reality, including those about very large or very slow systems (such as the behavior of galaxies) or events in the past (such as geological processes). In these cases, the scientist forms a hypothesis from observations as before, but instead of running experiments, she builds a simulation that models her hypothesis about how nature operates. She then runs the simulation and compares its results with more data from the real world. If the simulation produces results that differ from the real world, she revises both her hypothesis and the simulation.

Once a hypothesis seems to be solid—it has been supported by many experiments or observations and never disproven—it becomes a theory and can be used to predict future events and plan construction or other activities. Scientists can use simulations to predict such things as the time and place of the next solar eclipse, for example, and engineers can use them to design buildings and aircraft.

Scientific simulations focus on accuracy: They model the important aspects of a system as closely as they can within the limits of the available time and computing hardware. It is very important that the simulation’s model resembles the real mechanisms of the system the simulation represents, and in order to refine the model, scientists and engineers check it against available real-world data. In semiotic terms, we might say that the simulations are iconic: The signal (the simulation rules) resembles its meaning (the real mechanisms).

Simulations in Games

In ordinary games the designer’s object is not accuracy but enjoyment. The designer starts with a game idea and refines it into a game design. Although it may change over time, the design is a static rather than an interactive thing, a collection of documents and diagrams and notes taken at design meetings. Programmers then write software that implements the systems specified by the design. In many genres, the software simulates something: a vehicle, a battle, a city. Both the designer and the programmers may borrow ideas from observations of reality (such as the law of gravity or the performance characteristics of aircraft), but they often ignore or alter real-world systems for entertainment purposes. This produces the peculiar conventions found in video games, such as cartoon physics: Characters can fall much longer distances without hurting themselves.

Instead of testing a game’s simulation by comparing with reality, game developers play test it for enjoyment. When we refine our simulation, we refine it to improve the entertainment value it delivers, not the accuracy with which it reflects the real world. We care about accuracy only if the players care about accuracy. With vehicle simulations or sports games, the players frequently do care about some aspects of accuracy; but in other genres, they care much less. It’s important to know just which aspects matter to your audience.

In semiotic terms, games use indexical and symbolic signs much more frequently than they do iconic ones. Instead of trying to actually show a fighter’s state of health through the appearance of the fighter, which would require a very large amount of animation, we show a power bar. It’s both more efficient (requiring fewer visual assets) and more effective (the player can read it instantly). Besides, the simulation of the fighter’s health isn’t accurate anyway, because in the game the fighter fights at full strength until the last moment. The game, a stylized simulation of fighting, focuses on the most interesting aspects of the system it represents and shows these aspects with much more clarity.

Considering this difference between games and simulations, it is curious that game developers spend so much effort on making games more realistic. Realistic games are like iconic simulations: They try to create mechanics that resemble the mechanisms of the real thing they represent as closely as possible. Although realism and iconic simulation in games is not a bad thing, it’s generally a mistake to concentrate on realism in games at the expense of enjoyable gameplay or to assume additional realism will lead to more fun. Games for entertainment should concentrate on communicating their ideas through other, noniconic forms of simulation instead. Later in this chapter, we will explore the notions of analogous and symbolic simulation in more detail.

Abstraction

In either a scientific or a game simulation, we have to build mechanisms that are simpler than the mechanisms in real life. This is necessary because otherwise we would build a replica of the original system, which would run at the same speed and operate on the same scale. We wouldn’t be able to use a replica to fast-forward time or test ideas in a safe environment. Because a simulation must be simpler than the system it represents, the simulation designer makes the decision to leave out certain details. This process is called abstraction.

There are two kinds of abstraction: elimination and simplification. In general, you can safely eliminate factors from your simulation that have little or no effect on the operation of the mechanics. In simulating the aerodynamics of an automobile, it simply may not be worth going to the trouble of including the windshield wipers or the radio antenna; their influence is too small to bother with. And of course some details, such as the interior décor, are completely irrelevant.

When we abstract through simplification, we look for features of a simulation that contribute to its overall mechanics but whose inner workings don’t really matter. Then we model those features in a very simple way, without including those inner details. An example will show what we mean. Suppose you are trying to model the effects of military vehicle failure on military readiness on a grand scale—all the vehicles in an entire nation’s armed forces. Suppose that you also know from collected statistics that one in every 10,000 aircraft landings puts the airplane out of commission because of damage to the landing gear. Your job is not to actually figure out what’s wrong with the landing gear but simply to include this factor in your model of overall military readiness. Instead of modeling the landing gear machinery in detail, you just build in a random 1-in-10,000 loss factor for landing gear damage. You have abstracted the landing gear problem to a simple random factor. When you run the simulation, you can change the rate of loss to study the effects of improving the gear on the overall system, even if you don’t know how to actually improve the gear itself.

When a game includes a feature in which the avatar carries cash around, it seldom keeps track of the exact numbers and denominations of the notes and coins. It simply says the avatar has $25.37 and leaves it at that. The inner details about the cash have been simplified out because the player doesn’t care and it doesn’t affect the rest of the mechanics. Both scientific and game simulations do this kind of thing all the time—games more frequently. Scientists and engineers also tend to abstract different features than game developers do, and for different reasons. A scientist wants an accurate outcome, while a game developer wants an enjoyable one.

Simulation in Serious Games

The simulations in serious games fall somewhere between scientific and entertainment simulation, depending on the purpose of the game. A game that intends to persuade will skew its mechanics to make its point, as PeaceMaker did. An educational game will make an effort to represent its subject matter correctly, as a professional flight simulator does.

In entertainment games, we often abstract out details that aren’t fun. This is why entertainment war games never deal with the logistics of transporting food and fuel to the battlefront or transporting the wounded to hospitals, because they’re not as much fun as the strategy and tactics of combat. But a serious game that genuinely intends to educate people about the logistical challenges of warfare cannot afford to completely ignore these aspects and needs to instead find a way to include them. This can create a conflict between keeping the game fun and sending the correct message.

To resolve this problem, design your serious game directly around the subject that you want to teach, and abstract out other areas even if they would be more fun in an entertainment product. To design a serious game about logistics, research the economics, challenges, and actions associated with logistics, and build mechanics to simulate them. Eliminate or simplify the combat so that, while it may affect the game, the player does not participate in it. Concentrate on making logistical challenges enjoyable in their own right, choosing game mechanics that complement this focus, and make the subject accessible to the player without distracting him with other issues.

Also, just because your mechanics must simulate your subject matter accurately in a serious game, it does not mean that they must simulate everything else accurately too. Serious does not mean serious about everything. It’s perfectly acceptable to make a game about logistics with cartoon physics (and cartoon graphics, for that matter) as long as your simulation still teaches the core principles correctly.

It is almost always a mistake to start designing a serious game by trying to copy an existing entertainment game. Build your mechanics and gameplay around your subject matter.

Analogous Simulation

An inventory is an example of an analogous simulation. Ever since Adventure (1976), video games have included an inventory. The game allows the player’s character to pick up objects and carry them around. The player manages these objects in the game’s inventory screen. For design purposes or physical memory reasons, most games use some means to restrict the number of things that the character can carry. The game may limit the player to a fixed number of items, or it may assign a weight value to each item and restrict the player to a certain total load.

The inventory system introduced by Diablo is a good example of what might be called an analogous simulation. The mechanics of that inventory system do not resemble the mechanics behind the represented system directly, but the underlying ideas are causally related. In semiotic terms, the inventory is an indexical sign.

Instead of trying to simulate all the details of an item, such as size, shape, and weight, Diablo’s inventory system uses an item’s relative size as its main restricting factor (Figure 12.5). Each item takes up a number of inventory slots, and the available slots are limited and organized in a grid. An item may take up 1x1, 2x2, or 1x4 slots, and so on. The player character can pick up an item only when there is enough space for it in his inventory.

Figure 12.5. A Diablo-style inventory

This type of inventory is an example of analogous simulation on games because the main factors that limit what someone can carry in real life (shape, size, and weight) are represented by easily understandable two-dimensional shapes. There is a proportional relation between number of slots of the virtual items and the weight, shape, and size of their simulated counterparts. The internal rules and constraints of the inventory mechanics are immediately apparent and intuitive (not in the least because they are tailored toward visual representation on a screen). Yet, the management problems the system gives rise to are very much like those problems in real life. The system even allows players to make an inefficient mess of their inventory, teaching them something about the need to organize their property to fit more items in their inventory—although some find this a tedious chore in a fantasy game.

The Diablo inventory system takes a lot of complicated real-world factors and replaces them all by a single mechanism that is well suited to the medium of the video game. Obviously some accuracy of simulation is lost (in Diablo an item cannot be large and light at the same time), but the overall behavior is retained (the players are limited in what they can carry). The cleverness of the Diablo inventory is that it collapses all the nuances of managing an inventory into a size puzzle, which is easily represented by a computer screen, instead of weight, which was the more common choice in earlier games but which translates to the visual medium of the computer less well.

Another example of analogous simulation is the way most games handle health. The health of characters and units is often represented by a simple metric: a single percentage or a discrete number of hit points. Obviously, in real life, the physical health of a person or the structural integrity of a vehicle is a complex matter to which many different aspects contribute. By using a generic health value for a character, most games bundle all these aspects into one convenient mechanism. Both players and computers can easily work and understand the numerical metric to represent the bundle.

Symbolic Simulation

Analogous simulations are based on a relationship between their source system and their simulation mechanics, as in our example of the Diablo inventory mechanism described earlier. They make use of a similarity between the two systems: not a sensory, iconic similarity but a causal, indexical one. (In other words, the shape of a real sword bears a causal relationship to the shape of the sword in the game.) Symbolic simulation goes one step further. The relationship between the original system and the simulation’s mechanics is not causal but arbitrary and based on convention. The use of dice in many board games tends to be symbolic. For example, the roll of a few dice can stand for the outcome of a complete battle in a game of Risk. In this case, the relation between rolling dice and fighting is arbitrary, and one simple action well-known from other games is used to simulate a multitude of actions for which most players would lack expertise. Dice can replace these battles because, for the purposes of the game, the player should have little influence over the outcome of these battles. Risk is about global strategy, not about tactical maneuvers on the field of battle. A player cannot control the result of dice just as a supreme army commander cannot conduct every battle personally. (He does have the power to decide how many troops he will commit to the battle and when to withdraw.)

Something similar occurs in Kriegsspiel and many later war games. In contrast to Risk, these other games are all about tactical maneuvering on a battlefield. As a result, their rules are quite elaborate, but the rules covering individual combat are left to dice and attrition tables. Again, these games were designed to train tactical skills, not how to use a gun.

Dice are wonderful devices to create a nondeterministic effect without the need for detailed rules. At a suitably high level of abstraction, a complex and nondeterministic system, such as individual combat, has a similar effect as rolling a few dice: a complex system whose outcome is hard to predict and control. This is exactly the same sort of abstraction that we described earlier in the section “Abstraction” when we discussed aircraft landing gear. Especially when the player is not supposed to have much influence over this system, dice mechanics can be used to replace the more complex system. The characteristic randomness of different dice mechanics can be used to match many superficial, nondeterministic patterns created by more complex systems.

Other examples, such as jumping on top of enemies to dispose them in the classic video game Super Mario Bros., fall somewhere in between symbolic and analogous forms of simulation. Although the precise implementation differs from enemy to enemy, and certainly does not work against all enemies, it is a frequent feature throughout the game and the series to which it belongs. This method of fighting is a little odd, to say the least, but is simple to implement in code. The ability to inflict damage by jumping on top of an opponent has become a convention within platform games that is instantly recognizable to gamers and ties in with that genre’s defining action of jumping from platform to platform.

The connection between jumping on top of something and defeating something in real life is not completely arbitrary, but its use in platform games has become so conventional it parallels the definition of a symbolic sign in language. In the real world, there are creatures that can be squashed by jumping on top of them, but it’s a peculiar thing to do to a robot or a turtle. What is more, this method of fighting in Super Mario Bros. is motivated more by the fun of the genre’s most prominent action of jumping than it is motivated by any claim to realism. The link between the simulation and what is simulated is both arbitrary and conventional—especially in the multitude of platform games that followed the example set by Super Mario Bros. (In Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic had only one type of attack in the whole game: jumping.)

There is, however, some relationship between the skills needed to defeat enemies in Super Mario Bros. and in real life. In the game, it requires timing and accuracy, which are among the skills involved in real fighting. Our point is that the simple representation in the game allows us to do more than to hone and train those skills. The metaphor of jumping on top of enemies is easy to grasp by the player, but the game then goes on by inviting the player to experiment and develop strategies. The jumping-on-enemies mechanism is a very clever way of adding combat rules to a jumping game; it introduces no new actions for the player. It does this by replacing actions it tries to represent (fighting) by other, arbitrary rules already implemented in the game (jumping). This reduces the number of actions the player needs to learn, allowing him to quickly move on to a deeper, more tactical or strategic interaction with the game instead of fussing around with its interface. As we argue shortly, symbolic simulation effectively reduces the system to a simpler construction with more or less equivalent dynamic behavior.

Less Is More

Analogous and symbolic simulations tend to create simpler game systems than realistic iconic simulation would, with beneficial effects. Simpler games are easier to learn, yet they still can be quite difficult to master. Games are not the only medium for which the expression less is more rings true. In almost any form of representational art, people appreciate conciseness and economy—especially critics and connoisseurs. One exactly correct word is preferable to 20 others that miss the mark.

We already know that relatively simple mechanisms can produce emergence, and games can create interesting gameplay with a small set of mechanics. Using a small number of design patterns to generate complex gameplay has many advantages. The design becomes easier to manage for the designer and easier to implement for programmers and artists, and the game becomes easier to learn for the player. In our simulation examples (Diablo’s inventory, health points and dice in Kriegsspiel, and jumping in Super Mario Bros.), using analogous and symbolic simulation resulted in a simpler rule system than an iconic simulation would have. Compared with a completely detailed, realistic simulation, analogous and symbolic simulation aims to capture the essence of the source system with fewer elements.

In terms of Machination diagrams, analogous simulation reduces the number of elements in the diagram by replacing similar mechanisms with only one mechanism. Symbolic simulation goes one step further, by connecting mechanics in the game where they would not be connected directly in the real world. As is the case with the use of symbols in spoken and written language, some symbolic simulations work better than others. The symbols that work best seem to connect two unrelated rules that still have some affinity between them. In the case of Super Mario Bros., there is a natural relationship between the physical skill and timing involved in both jumping and fighting.

When used correctly, abstracting features to produce analogous and symbolic simulation reduces the number of elements in a system without affecting its structural complexity (for example, the number of feedback loops) and emergent properties too much. This has three advantages:

• Because the game removes unnecessary detail, it allows the player to focus on the structural features and strategic interaction that is allowed. (It also reduces the complexity of the user interface, which many players appreciate.) As we have seen throughout this book, these structural features drive emergent behavior. By offering a simpler version that is easier to understand, games can train players to understand far more detailed complex systems in real life.

• A system that uses analogous and symbolic simulation can allow a complete session of play in much less time than the system that the play represents could run with many complex systems represented. The player learns the results of his actions and decisions fast and efficiently. On the one hand, this allows players to go through the process more often, and on the other hand, it will contribute to the pleasurable experience of agency and power that drives many commercial entertainment games. (In contrast, scientific and engineering simulations, with their emphasis on accuracy, often run much slower than real time.)

• For game designers, game systems that are reduced to their essence are easier to manage and easier to balance. Without many parts, the designer can focus on those elements and structures that contribute directly to the game’s emergent behavior and more easily tweak that behavior into the desired shape. Games would do well to strive for symbolic or analogous, emergent gameplay rather than detailed realism. It is economically more feasible, and it allows more effective communication. (The audience’s preferences will influence this, however: Hardcore racing fans will not be content with Mario Kart.)

Super Mario Bros. is a great example of gameplay design in which only a handful of game mechanisms are combined in many interesting challenges. The value of each mechanism does not arise from its power to represent a realistic aspect of exploring a forest or a dungeon but from the interesting combinations these mechanics allow. The exploration challenges offered by the game are almost always the result of combinations of simple, reusable gameplay mechanics that are often quite analogous or symbolic.

The meaning that emerges from symbolic and analogous games is not necessarily less detailed or less valuable than games that aim for detailed and realistic simulation. On the contrary, as the challenges in game are more abstract, the skills and knowledge the game addresses are more generic. As we already mentioned in our discussion on semiotics, in communicating knowledge effectively, language benefits from having many symbolic constructions. In the same way, the message of a game that is less iconic is more applicable outside the particular setting of the game. This is especially useful when one wants to express something through a game that has value beyond the game and its immediate premise. What you learn from Monopoly applies to many situations both in games and in real life. You would learn less if Monopoly tried to be a precisely realistic simulation of the real estate market in Atlantic City, New Jersey (where the original version of Monopoly is set).

Multiple Layers of Meaning

The most monumental works of art in human history have different layers of meaning that appeal to different audiences. According to semiotician Umberto Eco, Shakespeare was a master of this aspect of creating works of art (2004, p. 212–235). In Shakespeare’s time, his plays had a strong popular appeal to the general audience. They had romance, drama, humor, and tragedy that was accessible to everyone. At the same time, Shakespeare’s plays also appealed to the social and political élite, because although many of the plays were set in distant times and distant lands, they frequently commented on current social and political affairs of the day. Moreover, Shakespeare managed to do all these things while writing beautiful prose and poetry that is appreciated even today.

Umberto Eco points out that having multiple layers of meaning in a single work of art is good for three reasons:

• It gives the work a wide appeal to many people.

• It invites the audience to explore the work in different ways (you might say it creates replay value).

• Contrast and contradictions between different layers of meaning create the opportunity for humor and irony.

Games are not different from other media in this respect: They can also create different layers of meaning. They have a natural capacity for this, because games communicate through the signals they produce but also through the mechanics that produce the signals. There are many games that make good use of these different layers of meaning. In the following sections, we’ll discuss a few examples.

Unrelated Meanings

Shakespeare’s plays appealed to different levels of his highly class-stratified society by offering them different forms of entertainment suited to their interests, even if they were unrelated to one another. He included political satire for the élite and dirty jokes and puns for the peasants (though the élite may have enjoyed them as well). The fact that he was able to do this in a single play, while still preserving its harmony, is a measure of his genius. For example, Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy about love and feuding families, but it begins with an extended riff of silly wordplay intended to set even the least educated in the audience giggling. The wordplay then evolves into swordplay and becomes more serious.

One of the best recent examples of a game that offers multiple unrelated layers of meaning is Bioshock. On the surface, Bioshock is a survival horror first-person shooter with some role-playing game elements. The player can, if he wants to, ignore everything else and concentrate on surviving, amorally killing his opponents, and optimizing his attributes. We might call this the physical layer of Bioshock.

At another level, the player can take the game’s moral choices seriously and try to play the game without harming innocent characters known as Little Sisters. He is not obliged to do so. It is riskier, and the game offers larger short-term rewards if the player simply kills them. But he experiences different gameplay, and gets a different ending, if he does avoid killing them. This is the moral layer of Bioshock.

At another level still, and unrelated to gameplay, the player can appreciate the extraordinary Art Deco landscape of the game. Bioshock’s art is so stunning that it has been printed and sold as a coffee-table book, a rare achievement for a video game. Neither the physical nor the moral aspects of the game depend on the artwork; it is simply another part of the entertainment in its own right. We call it the aesthetic layer of Bioshock.

Finally, and only noticeable by those who are familiar with political theory, Bioshock is a satire on Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. (The founder of the game’s world is named Andrew Ryan, an intentional reference—in fact, an indexical sign—to Ayn Rand.) Objectivism is a variant of Libertarianism that argues (among many other things) for “uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism” (Rand 1964, p. 37). Bioshock offers a vision of what might happen if an Objectivist society were to engage in uncontrolled, unregulated biological experimentation: disaster and destruction. This is the political layer of Bioshock.

Bioshock’s physical and moral layers of meaning are provided by its mechanics, which enforce the player’s need to survive and calculate the effects of his moral decision-making. The aesthetic layer of meaning comes from its artwork, and the political layer from its story, told through moments of narration. It is not a game to be emulated easily, but it is well worth studying.

Contrast Between Appearance and Mechanics

September 12, designed by Gonzalo Frasca, states on its instruction screen that it is not a game but a simulation that allows users to “explore some aspects of the war on terror.” It presents the user with an isometric perspective of what looks like a cartoonish Arabic city (Figure 12.6). In the city, civilians and terrorists walk around; the terrorists are visibly carrying guns. As the player, you can launch missiles at them, which will destroy buildings and kill terrorists and civilians on impact. However, it is hard to aim the missiles precisely, and they do a lot of collateral damage. Most importantly, civilian casualties cause other civilians to transform into terrorists. The best way to keep the number of terrorists under control is to do nothing, because over time the terrorists transform into citizens. As a simulation it is a very simplistic representation of the war on terror. September 12 might refuse to be called a game, but it definitely is not an iconic simulation, either.

Figure 12.6. September 12

The significance of September 12 for a large part arises from the contrast it creates between its appearance and the way its mechanics operate. In appearance, September 12 looks very much like a cartoony shooter game, not unlike many similar games you can find on the Internet. However, the mechanics are set up in a way that goes against the typical shooter game: shooting doesn’t get you closer to the goal, assuming the goal is to get rid of the terrorists. September 12 cleverly makes use of the user’s expectations set by countless games to set them on the wrong foot. The discovery that September 12 goes against their expectations creates a meaningful turning point that drives home the argument September 12 makes: Indiscriminate brute force is an ineffective way to deal with the problem of global terrorism.

September 12 is a good example of simplicity in design, which uses a contrast between different layers of meaning to drive home the point it tries to make. Because of its reference to shooter games, it has a lot of popular appeal, while the hundreds of thousands of letters its designer received after its release indicates that, though it did not please them all, many players caught the message.

A similar contrast between appearance and mechanics can be found in Brenda Brathwaite’s 2009 tabletop game Train (Figure 12.7). In this case, the roles of appearance and mechanics are the opposite of what they were in September 12. The rules are simple and rather vague, while a correct interpretation of the meaning of the game’s appearance creates a powerful contrast. The rules of the game require you to race railroad cars to a destination and pick up as many yellow passengers as possible. As you play, there are several hints that something is amiss. The passengers are transported in freight cars, and the broken window that serves as the “board” creates a disturbing ambiance. When the first train reaches its final destination, the location is revealed to be a Nazi death camp. Just when you think you have won a game, you’ve been made an accomplice in one of history’s greatest atrocities. Even claiming ignorance at this point (“I didn’t know; I was just playing a game”) leaves you to wonder whether or not you should have picked up on the hints. The broken glass is a reference to the Kristallnacht, the coordinated nationwide attack on German and Austrian Jews in 1938 that left the streets littered with broken glass, and the passengers are yellow because Jews were forced to wear yellow stars in occupied Europe during World War II.

Figure 12.7. Train

Intertextual Irony

Difference in meaning between multiple layers of a game can be used to create an effect that Umberto Eco refers to as intertextual irony. Intertextual irony is created when a game’s (or book’s or film’s) style refers to well-known genres or settings outside the game, while at the same time contrasting that message with an opposed meaning on a different layer. A game that uses intertextual irony a lot is Grand Theft Auto III and its successors.

Grand Theft Auto III offers many layers of meaning. First there is the game itself, with its mechanics that allow the player to steal cars and commit various acts of crime. For that reason it has been called a joyride simulator or a “SimCrime” game. The game is set in a city that resembles New York. Many of the city’s sites and inhabitants refer to real locations and common stereotypes. The game is filled with references to popular culture. You can find many advertisements in the virtual environment for brands that look convincing at first glance but are quite ironic at a second glance. For example, you might see an ad for a film called Soldiers of Misfortune, with the tagline “They left together but come back in pieces,” which sounds like a typical movie tagline but whose meaning is quite the opposite of the usual blockbuster bravura. The car radios offer a choice of soundtracks complete with fictional commercials and weird jingles that sound right but are really disturbing if you pay closer attention to them. For example, one radio station proudly advertises that it owns several networks and satellites but also ten senators. You hear commercials for a company that mails pets in boxes and a reality television show that has ex-convicts fight it out in the city streets with real weapons until there is only one left standing. Playing this game, it is hard to miss all these references and jokes, and it satirically suggests a relationship between the criminal lifestyle of the game’s main character and the over-the-top consumer society he is part of. If anything, Grand Theft Auto III is a deeply satirical game that holds up a distorted mirror to society. The game mechanics generate a vast accumulation of wealth that anybody within the world of Grand Theft Auto seems to aspire to, no matter what the methods of accumulation are.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas provides another good example of intertexual irony based on the contrast between appearance and game mechanics. In San Andreas the player character needs to shop for clothes; the more expensive his clothes are, the greater his sex appeal is, a vital statistic required to succeed in certain scenarios. One of the most expensive shops is called Victim (Figure 12.8). On the one hand, the shop name alludes to the urban gangster lifestyle the character and player supposedly identify themselves with, but at the same time, you should wonder who exactly is the victim here when your character finds himself spending thousands of dollars on a new outfit. Your character’s criminal lifestyle means he can get the money he needs to buy outfits at this exclusive shop, but he risks his life in doing so, adding a completely different dimension to the shop’s slogan “to die for.”

Figure 12.8. The Victim shop in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

According to Umberto Eco, one of the positive effects of using intertextual irony is that it invites the audience, no matter what its background is, into a more reflective attitude about the work. In contrast, America’s Army lacks any hint of satire in spite of the peculiarity that all the players consider themselves to be American soldiers—good guys—and consider all others to be insurgents. The game implements complete moral relativism: No one is unequivocally the good guy. To those who are paying attention, it invites the question, “if we’re all alike, why are we fighting?” But it takes itself too seriously for that. Players of America’s Army are never prompted to reflect on this situation.

Summary

For the final chapter of our book we have examined ways to communicate messages with games, particularly with game mechanics. We defined serious games and discussed what they’re for and how they work. We also looked at how entertainment games such as Grand Theft Auto III use elements of satire to make fun of their own premise. Communication theory and semiotics both offer useful models for thinking about how a game can represent ideas and convey them to its players. You can use analogous and symbolic simulation as tools to communicate meaning efficiently, without trying to represent real-world ideas exactly. And finally, by creating games with multiple layers of meaning, you can build especially rich experiences for your players, games that transcend light entertainment and approach the status of artworks.

We hope you have enjoyed Game Mechanics and found it useful. Although we have not concentrated on particular genres or on software implementation techniques, we feel that the tools we have offered—in particular the design patterns and the Machinations framework and tool—will be invaluable in your career as a game designer, no matter what kind of games you design. Thank you for reading!

Exercises

1. Choose a serious game (or your instructor will assign one). What message does it try to convey? Does it convey that message through its mechanics or by some other means? If it does use the mechanics, analyze them and explain how the player infers the message from their operation.

2. Choose a game with a strong simulation element (or your instructor will assign one). What mechanisms in the game are iconic, what mechanisms are indexical or analogous, and what mechanisms are symbolic? Explain why.

3. Choose a game (or your instructor will assign one). Which aspects of the game do you feel are truthful about their subject matter, and which ones lie? Be sure to distinguish simplification from outright falsehood. If the game is a serious game, do you feel the falsehoods undermine the game’s intent, or are they acceptable?

4. We gave Bioshock as an example of a game with multiple layers of meaning that were not closely related but permitted the player to play and appreciate the game on several levels. Can you think of another? Explain what the different levels were. Was the result harmonious?

5. We mentioned September 12 and Train as examples of games whose appearance contrasts with their mechanics. Can you think of others? What do you think the designers intended by including such a contrast?

6. The Sims and Grand Theft Auto III both satirize materialism and consumer culture. The Sims does so gently, Grand Theft Auto III much more harshly. Can you think of other games that also work as satire? How, and what do they make fun of?