Context in Game Design

 Hello. Once again it has been a while and after this brief exchange between us, it will be another while. This blog is written for the most selfish, indulgent reasons and i want you to take this sparseness of posts as a celebration of those reasons. I truly only write whenever i am compulsed to do so. 

    Today, like the majority of my posts, i would like to write something i've been thinking up while taking a shower. The title might say context, but today i would like to talk about Magic.

    Lately i have been working on and off in a different self-indulgent project of mine, a mod for minecraft. It began as a research mod: the world generates with a set of values selected at random and the player is called to study the world around them and experiment. Slowly i have introduced more and more fantastical elements and now the player must delve into the written literature of many many years and tackle science, alchemy, magic, various forms of religious expressions and myths to slowly uncover the full puzzle of their world. More and more however i have been toying with the idea of trying to make the player resonate with the magic of that world. So i have been thinking up stories and concepts that tackle how fiction can impact reality through the one that experiences it and by introducing that concept to the player, open them up to engage with the written material in a more earnest way, immersing them into their role as an alchemist, philosopher and magician.

    Lately ive been having the privilege of enjoying an Umineko playthrough on youtube. The reason why i am not playing it is because when i tried to procure it via perfectly legal avenues my pc warned me about a trojan horse virus which scared me into not pursuing those avenues as actively anymore. One thing that really stood out to me was its concept of magic. In very simple terms, what makes magic real is belief. If one believes in something magical, it will earnestly manifest. If one does not believe, magic remains fictional. 

    Let me take you back to my shower. While contemplating various things, those two in particular came together to form a cascade of thoughts that i would like to share with you today.

    Let's combine the two into a mechanism. That mechanism takes things found in fiction, in the immaterial, in the fake and the unreal and translates them into real things and influence in the material world, using humans as transmitters. Take a second to play with that concept in your mind. What would that look like? How would you use that? How cool would it be? Well, it just so happens that this mechanism exists.

    I suppose you are familiar with what context is. If not, think of everything associated with and related to games that is not the game itself; that's the context that the game finds itself in. Not only is context inseparable from the game but is also a huge part of the player's experience and something a designer should actively work towards influencing. In this regard, the same magic i have been talking about exists and we must tackle and figure out how to manipulate. In this sense, game designers are alchemists and magicians in a real and meaningful sense of the word!

    Unfortunately, i need to have a clear and definite definition for something in order to manipulate it efficiently. So let's get back to the question: what *is* context? 

    Context is nebulous by nature. An RTS game has every other RTS game as context. It also has the year it came out, the year it currently is, the studio that made it, the audience it targets, the part of the world it was made in, the subject material it decides to tackle and the internalized experiences of each and every player that comes across it, both individually and all at once. How do we even begin to tackle this in any sort of coherent fashion. The answer is, we cannot.

    This is why i find the moniker "alchemist" apt for a game designer. This is not something that theory has tackled and it might be unable to. Currently, the key to manipulating these nebulous circumstances that shape your game is to use your experience, intuition and anything mysterious or otherwordly that roams inside your mind and soul. The key is to treat it like magic. 

    The baseline skill for taking advantage of context i would posit is recognition. A designer needs to be able to understand the context in which the game exists to the best of their ability; and that skill is kinda like divination in magic. The magician, in this case the game designer, performs a ritual to read the fates or magic or any other thing they want to do, in this case they make a demo to gauge player reaction, and going by that reading they decide on what kind of actions or rituals are needed to be undertaken, in this case to continue developing the game or flop onto their bed and cry. Like interpreting bird movements to tell if it's gonna rain or not, game design divination takes into account the industry and society at large; but at the same time, game design divination shares the same intimacy a tarot reading would have, depending on the experience. A story-driven game delves into and toys with the vast world that is the player's mind and is called to resonate with some element found inside there.

    Recognizing the context in which your game sits in lets you shape your game around that context, to work with it harmoniously. The simplest example of that would be that you are making a shooter game, so you take a look at what all the successful shooter games have implemented and you implement it yourself. It doesn't just have to be copying the homework of other studios. One example is the Danganronpa series, which is a series of murder mystery thriller games no we dont talk about ultra despair girls which takes after common murder mystery conceptions and uses the expectations of a murder mystery enjoyer to flip the script and catch them by surprise. The sequels even do that to the established patterns that the previous games had and it elevates the enjoyment a lot. That's another thing to note: the context created by the series the game is set in.

    Thinking back, i think it is a great hallmark of a game to put me in a pensive mood. Whenever Umineko talks about magic i have been consistently able to draw a parallel to art, which is why i utilize talking about magic as a way to cleave through the differences between me and the reader as people and penetrate into the recesses of their mind, so what i am talking about is not only understood deeply, but felt. The greatest concept i value in Umineko is the foundation of its world: "Without love, it cannot be *seen*". Another part of the game's context that we must not forget to analyze is the emotional relationship between a creator and their work.

    Do not be deceived by the endless crusade of capitalism against humanity. Feelings and especially love are foundational to any piece of work, especially art. This principle also applies to videogames. 

    First, i want you to ponder this: while coming up with something, how can a designer gauge that people will like it? Find it worthwhile? A lot of answers might spring into mind, like reading the context the game will be made in as we have described it above (the current gaming landscape and what it asks for), which would certainly make for a game that takes advantage of the sensibilities of the times it found itself in. These however are the games that are left by the wayside once the world moves on. If we were to analyze the games that stand the test of time, we would find that those games oftentimes do not care to strictly take advantage of their contemporary gaming landscape. Oftentimes, games that stand the test of time are unique and weird and one-of-a-kind. Oftentimes, they are labours of love.

    While coming up with something, how can a designer gauge that people will like it? For me, i cannot be sure that anyone will like anything. My analysis unfortunately cannot 100% accurately predict that. I can, however, make sure that one person in the entire world will like what i am making. That person is me. 

    It is very common to hear from creatives that someone should be creating for themselves first and foremost, to the point of me saying this surprising nobody. However, i don't support this principle out of an idea of someone's work needing to be self-pleasing first. I do it for the sake of the work and the people who experience it.

    I am sure you have felt it. The difference between something "being pretty good, yeah" and something clicking and incorporating itself in your mind, or even soul. My analysis aims to reach the latter. So how do we make sure that the game we are making has the potential to click with people? We prove it through making the game click with us, the creator, first. Once the game has demonstrated that potential, we can then confidently say that the game will click with an audience. And a creator, whose creation, while being created, has found itself in a special corner of their thoughts and emotions, can be said to love that creation.

    If you do not understand what i am talking about, don't make fun of the principle of love in creation. Falling in love with a piece of work, whether that is a game, piece of music, drawing, bout of dance, sculpture, poem or anything else a person has created animates your body and your mind. A creator working on something they love will not get tired working on it the same way someone playing through a game they love will not get tired playing it. A creator working on something they love will not stop thinking about it the same way someone playing through a game they love will not stop thinking about it. A creator working on something they love will put a piece of themselves in that work the same way someone playing through a game they love will find ways to see themselves in it or express themselves through it.

    However, i can feel you thinking it. That's the easy part. Working on something you love is the easy part. If reality permitted me to do that and only that, there would be no problem. I know your pain. My answer to this is that love, as a creator, is a skill.

    It's not unreasonable to say that people love what they love. They have preferences. They would rather work on one thing and not on another and those preferences are not influences by that person; rather that person is influenced by those preferences. What a person likes and what they don't can be likened to a vast sea, whose waves obscure, reveal and change the landscape constantly. Which is why i encourage you to explore that sea as much as possible. Find what you like, enjoy and love, by trying out new things, by talking with people who enjoy the same or different things and by revisiting things you've experienced in the past. With that, imbue your work with love. I personally have worked for a lot of projects and have worked on games whose genres i hadn't even touched in the past. It was possible for me to imbue every single one of those games with elements i could love, even games i was indifferent to at first. This is what i think every creative should strive to do. I know that creatives naturally tend to do that; this is not something to be left as a small unconscious error in the process. This is part of the process proper.

Without love, it cannot be seen.

    To take you back to the mechanism i laid out at the beginning of this article, this is the process i have been thinking about: a creator's real feelings and the real circumstances during which their work took place are encoded into fiction. This fiction then is sent out and experienced by another real human being and through that, impacts them and the world around them. Not only do i believe that this process takes place, i also believe it is meaningful and can be meaningfully influenced by the creator. It should be taken into account. I also believe that the emotions felt by a creator have a real, definite, quantifiable and meaningful impact on the work, on the same level of the times the work was made in or its genre. Which is why i included them all under the umbrella of context.

This is all i've thought about so far.