So Mo is advocating in Getting Around to (One of) the Point(s) (and I thought I liked parentheses) that players can, if they don’t like how the published system does something, do it another way and get the same result.
Judson is talking in the Story Games thread The Akido of Game Design about how games can be designed with the naive assumption that all rules will be followed, with the even more naive intent to make the rules unbreakable, or turn the whole thing around and design the game rules so that “exploiting” them is how the designer intends it to be played.
It’s not a new idea that players will ignore rules they don’t like. However, I’ve read a big pile of posts and threads and articles where indie players and designers avow that they play their games “exactly according to the rules” or “exactly as the designer intended” which is, when you get right down to it, more or less impossible. (Short version: authorial intent has an influence on reader reception, but it does not and cannot dictate reception exactly due to the very nature of language.) Players will interpret rules, even if they don’t introduce formal house rules.
A great example of this is Lacuna Part 1, where Jared refuses to allow players the illusion that they’re following the rules exactly and producing a play experience as he intended. How you play Lacuna will be determined by your personal idiosyncracies, and in fact how you play says something about you as a person and as a gamer.
Process and Product
Rules channel play. They determine not only what happens but how it happens, at what cost and with what side effects, guiding players to interact with each other in specific ways. Rules are about creating a product and provide a process to get there. Players select rules based on both what those rules produce and how they go about it, and players abandon rules when they either produce something they don’t like or when they do it in a way they don’t like.
Mo’s central conceit is that the point of a game is to produce a certain end result — a product. Dogs is designed to put players in a situation where their beliefs are challenged and they must either escalate or let their beliefs be trampled on. Primetime Adventures is designed to foster a groupthink atmosphere where the players collaborate on creating a television serial. And so on. There are many different techniques (processes) that will get players to that same end product, and different players have different technique preferences. A given game book may offer a desirable end product but an undesirable process to get there. Mo’s argument is that, assuming that the social contract allows for it, players may elect to use processes beyond those presented in the book to get to the end product that is.
Judson and later comments in the thread point out the potential disconnect between the product that a book promises and the actual product of the process the book provides. If a game says that it is about epic derring-do and then hands you a character who has trouble killing rats, well, there’s a problem there. You might want to modify or abandon the process that ends with your character covered in rat bites. The designer might see you changing things willy-nilly and put out a new edition. The new rules do not make your character triumph over the rat population; they make it harder for you the player to change things around in the published process (or make changing this less effective). Or to put it more kindly, the designer may try to provide a system that does not “need” to be modified in order for it to be played. I suspect that this impulse usually comes from a Design What Doesn’t Matter philosophy — you needn’t be spending your time worrying about rules when you should be playing.
…it is not an exagerration to say that the game is the process.
One strand of indie design inverts the problem by putting a focus on creating a set of rules that “hits the target” of a specific intended type of play. These games provide a rule set which encourages players through overt and subtle means to play a certain way and get a certain result — the process rewards the players to keep them on-target to create the end product. This shifts the emphasis from liberating players so that they can create the end product on their own to showing players how to reliably create the end product by specific processes. While the end product is still the eventual goal, these games focus on the process that creates it; in many ways it is not an exagerration to say that the game is the process.
Which seems to bring Mo’s proposal in direct conflict with this design philosophy. If the game is about the process, about the steps and obstacles and progression towards the end result, avoiding that process in favor of another one is, in effect, playing another game entirely. One of my own designs, Agora, is an extreme example of this. One of the prime tenants of Agora is that in order to create any progress, you have to risk what you’ve already got. This is exemplified in the dice mechanic, in which any die roll risks losing that die. You roll in dice representing the things that you are risking in the conflict, use those dice to make the other side lose dice, and whoever runs out of dice first loses their stakes. Usually players will surrender their stakes rather than continue on, since the risks can easily outweigh the potential gains. The product of the game is to put yourself and your followers on the line for your vision of future society; the process is a pretty straightforward matter of risking dice representing things that you care about.
Now, I can easily see players disliking that process. Deciding to sidestep that process in pursuit of the same product, though, changes things. Resolving all conflicts in, say, open negotiation as to what you’ll lose in order to gain your stakes, would result in an almost completely different game — much more staid, controlled, less dangerous, less risky. And that would be perfectly fine.
Publishing Books, Popularizing Games
I design games and I write books. I don’t write games.
I am not going to explode in a puff of smoke if somebody plays my game differently than I intended it to be played. There’s no reason whatsoever for me to point out that they are playing it wrong, that they are ignoring important rules, or that they won’t possibly enjoy themselves playing that way. Most likely, they are enjoying themselves playing that way; that’s why they play that way. And in fact, if somebody out there took something I wrote and played something based off of that material and had fun, that’s a cause for celebration! I’ll more likely ask to hear what they did and what happened, because that’s absolutely awesome. I will no more count it a failure than I would count it a failure if someone used a sculpture that I made as a decorative doorstop (which, for reference, my dad still does ten years after I made that sculpture). Here’s why: I design games and I write books. I don’t write games. So when somebody reads my book and enjoys a game that comes out of it, I count that as a success.
Mo’s proposal that an undesirable process can be sidestepped in favor of a more desirable process is not (generally speaking) changing the rules of the game being played. It’s simply using rules that weren’t presented in the book. Back to the Lumpizzle Schiprizzle: “System is the processes by which the players agree on the characteristics and development of fictional content.” This has no direct correlation to the rules presented in any book anywhere. This refers only to what happens at the table. If Mo’s table uses some rules they found in a book and some other rules that they found somewhere else and they have fun doing it, that’s awesome. If the end product of following these patchwork processes resembles the end product promised by the book in question, that’s just gravy. What’s important is that the end product they create is something that they all want to produce and the process that they use to get there was entertaining for everybody at the table.
The book is not the game, and that has some pretty significant repercussions for the production of the book. This is actually a portion of the publishing process where the mainstream guys are leagues ahead of the indie guys. A book is a product sold to customers and read by consumers; a game is an experience enacted by players. That the players may be the consumers or that the customers are buying the book in order to play the game does not equate the book and the game any more than a chicken farmer made my dinner last night. The book and the game are related, certainly, but they are not the same.
Some people buy the book without playing the game. Some people buy the book without any intention of ever playing the game. There are a ton of books out in the world that were written and published in order to be sold, not played. The obvious examples are tie-in novels the likes of which White Wolf and Alderac both produced with a good measure of success. Less obvious examples are sourcebooks which provide flavor and background, whether or not the events of an actual game ever take place in that location or directly concern the faction or technology or whatever the sourcebook is about. These books provide two things. The first is simple: context. If I’m playing Changeling, the material I read in Kithbook: Redcap will be useful to me even when I’m not playing a redcap or opposite a redcap. The second is a little more amorphous: inspiration, both in terms of fictional content and in terms of process. I have not yet played Exalted or The Shadow of Yesterday, but having bought and read the books, the content has inspired me to create epic storylines like Exalted and tie flags to character advancement like TSOY. And to be perfectly frank, White Wolf and Clinton have my money despite me not playing their games.
Some people play the game without buying the book. This may sound odd, but this is actually the majority of gamers in the world — one guy buys the book and plays with his four friends. One sale, five players. I’ve played Nine Worlds without having read more than a paragraph out of the book. I’m sure you’ve played games that you haven’t read the book for, too. From the designer’s standpoint, they’re putting a lot of hard work into that game’s design that will be enjoyed by people who have not given them any money. For some altruistic souls, that may be fine, but there is also some more pragmatic considerations taken into account. Most obviously, simple play can lead to later sales. Games of all stripes operate on this principle, from indie games to board games to sports (gotta buy a baseball mitt). If it was fun to play the game that Jimmy brought, I’ll buy the necessary materials to play it on my own later. Additionally, this can generate cross-sales. Nine Worlds was all sorts of fun at Gamex; I’ll buy Dust Devils to see how that plays out, too. Lastly, this also helps build brand recognition, a high-level concern that the indie publishers are only starting to realize exists. To take a page from the web comics guys, it’s not a stretch to consider selling teeshirts, mugs, and dice bags imprinted with logos, characters, and memorable quotes, and sell them not only to people who’ve bought the books, but to people who have only ever played the game. The game itself can be an icon.
Designing for Players Not Using the Published System
So once we start looking at the book as a separate monster from the game, players disregarding portions of the book in favor of personalizing their game seems like less and less of a crisis. In fact, once you separate the book and the game, the design that goes into the book is pretty profoundly altered.
In the most basic terms, you promise something (a play experience) and you need to deliver on it.
First, though, the absolute rock-bottom basics. You’re providing a book and making claims about what the book is good for. If you’re a good indie designer and have that target of intended play, the text that you provide must give clear instructions on how to follow the intended processes to get the intended end product. Players won’t do everything “right” all the time, even when they’re trying, but the text needs to get them to the point where they’re performing processes accurately enough to get the end product. In the most basic terms, you promise something (a play experience) and you need to deliver on it. Simple.
However, let’s elaborate on that a bit. You are promising a play experience; you are selling a book. When you sell anything, you present its features — this sportscar goes 120 bazillion miles a second — and so the features of the thing that you are selling — the book — are the things that need to be what’s featured. So in order to make a solid sales demonstration, you need to present how the book provides the game experience. Put the book in the potential customer’s hands; have them read a pertinent section explaining a rule or look up the cost of whatever they want their character to buy or do. Put the quick-reference chart out of the book in front of them. Send them home with the character sheet out of the back of the book. Link the book to the game. Which is all salesmanship and I was talking about design, right? I still am. In order to do any of that you need to have that easily-read rules section, equipment costs table, quick-reference chart, and character sheet. In order to sell the book as essential to the play experience, the book needs to be essential to the play experience. And you can’t make that essential link as long as you’re considering them the same thing in the first place.
However, once you’ve made that sale and the customer takes the book home, hopefully to become a consumer and play the game with others, then’s when the real design work pays off. Because the players are not going to play the game exactly as you intended. Not only may they want to make a few little changes to accomodate their social reality, but they will, inescapably, interpret the rules as they read them. The ensuing game is what sells their friends on buying the book; it’s what sells the original customer on buying a second book; it’s what sells everybody on buying into the brand.
So you give them options. At any given time in any given game, any given player should have more than one option. Options should be within and without the fiction of the game. Mo should be able to call down a conflict and throw her dice around and she should be able to offer up a mutually beneficial and mutually appreciated alternative to rolling dice. Problems encountered in the game should allow for multiple approaches, not only in terms of in-character action (sneak past or overpower?) but also in mechanics and interactions at the table (roll dice or narrate or cut scene?). Players should have resources available to them that can swing results in their favor when it’s important and some means to signify when the results aren’t important. And lastly, leave one option open, unconstrained by the processes presented in the book — the “Say Yes” portion of “Say Yes or Roll Dice.” Consider it an expansion port that they can plug in whatever procedures they’d like to add.
Additionally, design with a space for player input to make a significant difference in the game. Again, this goes for both in-fiction events and at-the-table interactions. If a game design is a rattling machine that always does one thing, it’s entertaining once per playgroup, and the players are engaged as an audience experiencing a spectacle rather than as creators collaborating on something personally significant. This can be as high-brow as thematic concerns that the story will address in play to the down-and-dirty simple mechanics of spreading points out on a character sheet. The more input each player has, the more that player owns the ensuing experience and it becomes not something that happened to them, but something that they did themselves. Not only will this reduce players abandoning the published system, but even when they do supplement the provided processes with their own stuff, the tie-in that the design guides them to make will keep them from straying so far that they miss the intended target that you’ve promised them when they bought the book.
The point, for both options and input, is that these provisions supercede silly little things like how many dice to roll when. Options and input empower the players to take the processes provided in the book and run even further afield from what you might have intended. It makes the game about the players making choices about the play experience they are creating. And it makes the game less about what the designer originally intended. It is providing the seven-cornered cube, and inviting the players — and the readers — to take what you started and create out of it something profoundly original.
And how much better is that than getting some people you don’t know on the other side of the planet to roll dice in a certain way?
