Harmony and Game Design

 Happy holidays!

    The flow of my brain activity has decided to bless you all today with another game design article. What i want to talk about today is harmony. More specifically, the idea that design begets design.

    Some time ago, i read somewhere that Michelangelo said that he doesn't sculpt; rather, he "frees the statue trapped inside the slab of marble". It's been so much time actually that i don't even remember if it was Michelangelo, but this saying stuck with me. At first it seemed like a romanticization or just something stupid because like, come on dude. There's no statue stuck in there you're just chipping away at a block of marble with your chisel. But now that i am more experienced, older, wiser and more mentally ill i can see that he had a point.

    One key pillar of game design i think we can all agree is that different aspects of design need to agree with each other. I cannot design a horror monster to be spooky and scary and have its mechanic be that players need to balance between glancing at it to be able to move around it but not look at it too much or else they die and then give the player a railgun that obliterates the monster and two walls behind it; it just wouldn't mesh well. The idea is that concepts must support each other. From a creator's perspective, as a designer, i must make a conscious effort to fit what i'm currently designing to what i have already designed. If we reverse this idea however, something curious happens: if i design something and i set certain rules or parameters of how i want my design to happen, then the things that i can add ontop of that design become limited enough for me to feel as if they come on their own, already designed, rather than me coming up with them. To return to Michelangelo (or whoever i was quoting), if i have a pose in mind and i decide to portray the human body in a certain way (let's think of David for brevity) and i manage to sculpt a single arm, the rest of the statue has already been decided. If i sculpt the arm to be 1 meter long and i want to keep realistic proportions then unfortunately i cannot sculpt the legs to be 10 centimeters each, no matter how much i'd like to. If i did, then i would be breaking the fundamentals i have decided on. This is design harmony.

    Design harmony might seem as a no-brainer, like duh, design fits with only certain design that supports it, but i see harmony as something more than an ontological thing. Harmony is a method of design: rather than ask "what should i make next", we should ask "what *comes* next? what does *the game need* next?". This especially goes out to designers that struggle with coming up with content for their game, after fleshing out their systems and mechanics. You shouldn't despair at the infinite possibilities of what to add to the game: your mechanics and your goals are axes that determine what should be added to the game, to keep design harmonious. A game with a grappling hook will naturally have verticality and lots of open space, right? But why? Why is it natural? Couldn't a game with a grappling hook be set in a claustrophobic series of rooms, where the player is almost as tall as the ceiling? The answer is, it could! But it wouldn't be harmonious. The level design would not support the grapple hook.

    Another point to support my whole spiel is the idea that designing is like playing with cement. At first everything flows freely and the designer can shape the cement any way they want. The more they build upon it however and the more time passes, the more the cement settles; and the harder it is to make changes.This is logical from a harmony standpoint. If i design 10 levels after a single mechanic and then ditch the mechanic, the levels lose the thing they were built around of. To spin this again in reverse, this means that designers should endeavor to understand and foresee how the landscape of potential design changes with every decision. As a visualization, imagine a recursive algorithm that takes an element on the screen (a line, a rectangle etc) and creates a lot of that element, under a rule, such as "every time an element is drawn, it is rotated by 3 degrees and moved by 3 pixels towards the element's forward direction". Then, moving the original element, someone would be able to see in real time the shapes created by the algorithm changing to fit the initial parameters. This is design and i believe it is a real skill to get as close as possible to being able to visualize an entire game being made out of a single concept. A skill such as that would open more possibilities than just helping a designer understand; it is much easier to change things in one's head, after all. Plus, expanding their horizon could afford the designer to see things that haven't been seen before, breaking new ground in ways that were seen as unharmonious before. Not that being unharmonious is a bad thing, necessarily though.

    This is where things get much more complicated. I don't know if i can call design that works unharmonious so i will call it dissonant: design decisions that, through an analysis of harmony, look like they wouldn't work although they do. I touched on dissonance in my previous article by talking about design that seems dissonant, or in the case of Demon's Souls for example, being tossed aside for that same dissonance, until people came to enjoy it. How can a designer account for dissonance when exploring a game through the lens of harmony? 

    One definite mistake that i used to make is believing that only a single set of design principles can work harmoniously: the idea of a golden canon of game design, a collection of rules that design must adhere to. Different experiences however demand different design fundamentals and i have seen designers who have differing sets of principles produce enjoyable games. This is one thing about harmony that expands it greatly: ideas can be dissonant to each other under a set of principles and resonant with each other under a different set of principles. Slow movement, clunky combat and off-putting writing and voice acting would be enough to condemn a game since they would restrict the player and create a feeling of uncanniness. Those however are the base for a good horror experience. So, another skill i am trying to hone and i encourage other designers to also hone is to be able to switch principles. There is no size that fits all in design. We will have to expand our horizon once again.

    Another approach to exploring dissonance, which becomes possible through training the brain to see as much design as it can before the design needs to be developed, is the monkey on a typewriter method. Can a dissonant idea work? Nevermind that, can we *make* that dissonant idea work? Just take any sort of silly idea or concept and roll with it. Design as much as you can and see where that takes you. Whether the idea "works out" doesn't matter. All that matters is to inspect and analyze the design. An idea "working out" is subjective anyways: the goals of a concept are part of the initial parameters of harmony! I wouldn't exactly call Tekken 7 relaxing so if i looked at it through the principles of say Animal Crossing, Tekken would be a failure. There is no win or fail at design. Even making something that "people like" is nebulous. Which people? Like what about it? What if i made a game where i didn't care if people liked it or not? Now we are really getting into some alien territory... And so, to return to the monkey on a typewriter method, it will only make one a stronger designer to be able to blast through an entire game's design in their mind. The faster, the better. And if they can design an infinite amount of games in an instant, then we have truly reached Game Design Singularity. Maybe some kind of AI will be able to do that in the future. I'm not interested in pursuing that though; i am too pre-occupied with being the game designer equivalent of a monk living ontop of a mountain...