The full interview is here. This is the relevant part:
I’ve also been working with a friend on a multiplayer game called Buy That Guy that you play with a map and cards. Each player represents an interest group such as agribusiness or tech, and you buy and sell legislators who you can use to pass bills that get you money. The goal is to become the political leader by controlling the majority of the legislature. It’s cute and almost playable, but the game mechanics don’t quite click yet, so we’re still trying to figure some things out. I think that art is a little more forgiving than game design. If you have a play that’s 90% there, people can enjoy it, but a game that’s 90% complete isn’t going to be fun enough to play more than once. We still haven’t quite made it fun, but we enjoy the process of working on it.
Also relevant is this post, Uncertainty in games: How to get that balance so that there’s a motivation to play well, but you can still have a chance to come back from behind?
I wonder if the relative “forgivingness” of art versus game design is not so much about art vs. game design per se, but rather about the dimensionality of the spaces they inhabit, and how this influences people’s ability to “fill in the blanks” when something isn’t quite satisfactory.
Most works of art like plays, movies, representational paintings, and music with lyrics are strongly tied to everyday kinds of experiences. By that I mean that they involve characters we can relate to, or events with causal structure we recognize and understand, or emotions we have personal experience of. As a result, those kinds of art make contact with a high-dimensional conceptual space, where the dimensionality comes not so much from the art itself but from all those related densely interconnected concepts that someone experiencing the art brings to the table. So even if a work of art is incomplete or is otherwise lacking in some way, we can still experience it as complete and satisfying because we can rely on our own knowledge and intuitions to fill in the blanks.
Most games are much more tightly constrained. Of course, a lot of games refer to aspects of the real world, like the card game you describe. But the way the player interacts with the game is via its rules which, typically, result in a possibility space that is of comparatively low dimension. There just aren’t as many things that can happen in a game, and if those things aren’t exciting or fulfilling in some way, its hard to “fill in the blanks” with anything else because the game largely lives in its own world.
One example of a game that is *not* “low-dimensional” that would be tabletop RPGs, where the “rules” are much more flexible and enable the events in the game to make meaningful contact with the kind of densely interconnected concepts that are activated by the kinds of art I described above.
An example of art that might be “low-dimensional” in the same way as most games would be so-called “art music” (e.g., classical music, new music, some kinds of jazz, that sort of thing). Except when a piece is supposed to be understood as depicting a scene (e.g., Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) or story (e.g., Scheherezade), art music is typically understood by virtue of how the music relates to itself. In that sense, engaging with a piece of art music is like playing a game, because the piece is experienced in terms of how it engages with the “rules” of a particular style, or the “rules” that the piece itself sets up. To paraphrase, I think a symphony or a sonata or a solo that is only 90% “complete” would also probably not be fun to listen to more than once.
I agree. The fundamental property of video games that makes it a unique form of art is player agency. Using that agency properly is the trick, and it isn’t easy.
Some types of games try to overcome the dimensionality problem by essentially treating player agency like a nuisance that needs to be tightly controlled. These are often “cinematic” games that micromanage the experience in such a heavy handed way that the player is more or less conditioned to not even think outside of the bounds set by the game. These are often called interactive movies, sometimes derisively so. I’d put something like Last of Us into this bin. Apparently a lot of players are okay with their input being minimized since these games tend to sell pretty well. Alternatively, they more closely mimic an already established art form so perhaps that makes them more palatable to a wider audience.
At the other extreme you have sandbox games where the player is encouraged to experiment with the environment as much as possible. The downside is this usually comes at the expense of a compelling narrative since it is so difficult to funnel so many degrees of freedom in a focused direction. These also tend to sell pretty well, e.g. the latest Zelda game. They offer a lot of play time for the money.
The closest thing to a Goldilocks zone I’ve come across is the genre called “immersive sims.” Terrible name. But they were first developed to capture a tabletop RPG feel. There’s freedom in a lot of ways, but not to the degree where the narrative loses its focus and pacing. Incidentally, they tend to sell poorly. Baldur’s Gate 3 is similar and sold pretty well, so perhaps there is more of an appetite for that kind of thing now than ten years ago.
A lot of games that try to find that Goldilocks zone often fall flat. It’s great that I can do A, B, or C… but I also want to try D, E, and F, and the developers didn’t think of them or didn’t have the time to implement them. A, B, and C create an expectation, but the absence of D, E, and F creates a disappointment.
Game design is tough.
I think there are some interesting similarities between game design and the construction of open-ended artworks. In music you have improvisational structures that leave choice to the performer. In literature you have, I guess, the “choose your own adventure” genre. (Granted, not a fully developed literary genre, but work with me here …) In both cases you have to consider not just a single path (as in a traditional, fully composed piece or work of literature), but all the possible paths through the choice space. This is a lot harder to do.
I don’t agree with the poster.
There are a multitude of examples where “90% there” doesn’t cut it; or that it affects the overall enjoyability. Maybe I — and my social circle — are an exception since we all at least have a deep interest in music and visual arts, many of us having formal training in these fields.
ANECDOTAL EXAMPLE: I attended a burlesque show with the missus. Usually (or at least in that show which contained multiple performances) the performances contain contrasting sections which have different musical tracks. However not all performers had the skill (or access to someone with the skill required) to properly cut and link the different tracks. This did leave a bad taste in my mouth — and my fiancé agreed when we discussed it after the show. It wasn’t enough that it was 90% there!
Ah, there have been so many examples like this over the years where some technical detail has affected enjoyment a lot — but, and I apologise for this, am too lazy to dig my brain for more examples (where I’m from it’s just the morning and I’m NOT a morning person…).
Besides… don’t game designy details change all the time? People seem to be able to enjoy games even though their details (regarding the gameplay itself) are fixed — implying that in the first version the desing wasn’t 100% done.
Of course this makes me wonder what that even means. (Ah, my morningy brain is prone to these fugue like states in which thoughts just wander about until they settle to perish in a gutter smelling of booze). Players certainly have different expectations of how the game functions, so different people have different ideas ’bout what’s 90% or 100% or 30%. I think a good example of this are mods which modify the gameplay. I myself bought Battlefield 2 from a thrift store just recently and right away installed the mod Forgotten Hope 2 for it, which modifies the gameplay a lot.
I don’t know, man, I feel I’ve gone off the tracks.
If you are not already familiar with it, I think playing a few games of Corporate America (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/125943/corporate-america) might inspire you for that last 10% of your game.
It is a board game that satires corporate influence in American politics and it works surprisingly well as both a game and a satire (you can easily imagine how it could fail on either front).
I am excited to learn more as you finalize your design!