Game Play, Game Feel or Player Fantasy, Who sits on the Throne?

When designing a video game in a team, it is often a good idea to come up with design pillars that everyone aligns around. You decide on certain elements, which become the core of the game you make, and gradually build out from that starting point.

There are different approaches to what you should deem to be the most important thing in your game. A typical one is mechanics, aesthetics, or fantasy. Here is a copy of an internal text I wrote, highlighting my own journey with these core concepts and how it has changed over the years. Who knows what the future will hold!

Game mechanic is King:

At the beginning, I believed game play was king. If you design a good mechanic, you add “dressing” to it, then you will surely sell, because good games sell.

After all, who doesn’t love Tetris and Pong?

But what about the game Banana. You open it, you click on it, that’s it

Banana made a lot of buzz; something in there clearly engages people. There is a whole genre of idle clickers out there. What is the appeal of that?

How about all the games centered around walking and aesthetic experiences like Journey? What about story games like Last of Us and Uncharted?

How about all those amazing games with deep and interesting game mechanics that no one wants to play? There is a type of board game I know I will love because it has a very impressive game design. Yet to start playing, someone has to put a gun to my head. Something about them feels so tedious.

So good game play doesn’t automatically sell?

Game Feel is king:

Emotions are central to the human experience. Works like Game Feel by Steve Swink, popularized the notion that how it feels to interact with a game system (the interface) is crucial for us believing that world and extending our sense of self into that experience.

Beyond the notion of how the machine-human interface feels, games like Monument Valley popularized the idea of games as a medium of Aesthetic. The idea was not just that the game is lightweight in terms of mechanics by accident, but by design! By leaving cognitive resources free, you free up space for the user to engage in the Aesthetic experience. If you would like to know more about that, I have written about Aesthetic before.

Emotions feel more human and are easier to market than mechanics, so the whole notion seemed appealing to me.

So for Superflight we thought, design pillar number 1, game feel. A sense of freedom and excitement. That worked out great, and I thought I had figured it out. My design philosophy for Puzzling Places was the same, and the team was also of the same opinion. Meditative, relaxing and flowy, those emotions became the pillars of our design process. As a matter of fact, those keywords are still posted on the walls of our office.

Over time, we realized we had a marketing problem. “You will feel this way” is more than enough reason for some people to buy the game, but we found out that there are a lot of people who will love the game but are not convinced by the game feel alone.

Never mind all the examples of successful games that don’t have emotion at the center of their appeal. Do you play Candy Crush because it makes you feel a certain way?

Player Fantasy:

If there is one pattern I have noticed, it is a very experienced game designer mentioning that they wished they would have noticed the importance of player fantasy sooner. Daniel Cook mentions the role the lack of appealing player fantasy played in a failed project that took years; Sid Meier talks about taking activities, asking yourself who has the most fun in that situation, and promising that experience to the player; and Jessie Shell has an entire chapter on player fantasy in his Book of Lenses, where he recalls learning about the importance of player fantasy and designing rides for Disney World.

This resonated with me and the marketing struggles we had with Puzzling Places. The Player fantasy the game promises is maybe the core reason why people purchase a game, so instead of building a game around a mechanic or game feel and then figuring out how to market it, why not build it around an appealing promise to begin with? Maybe it should be the player’s fantasy as a core pillar.

But then again, do people play Tetris primarily because of a fantasy of who they can be in relation to the game? You might argue having your initials at the top of the score board in an arcade, meant there was the fantasy of being the best. But how about now days? Or how about Candy Crush?

Game Design Theory: Over Segmentation and Formalization

How do you make a game people want to play? I hoped all the game design books out there could give me an answer. And while works like Aesthetic of Play do provide a good framework to help you make very specific game design choices, they don’t help you much in creating the overarching product.

After all, sentences like “games are interesting possibility spaces that we voluntarily explore” won’t help you decide between A and B, unless your problem has to do with interesting, possibility spaces or freedom of choice.

Another annoying pattern I noticed across all these books and talks you find at conferences is the problem of segmentation and formalization. The core premise is that a good game is made out of good individual parts. SFX, music, game play, art direction, etc. If you divide these and make them good, then people will buy your game.

Each category has its own sub-parts. For example, there are working models that break down game play into things like time-sensitive challenges, accuracy, min-max optimization, etc. And you, as a game designer, combine these building blocks, and that is essentially what a game is!

Having mental models that simplify make a lot of sense. But at least for the more creative indie games, I felt like they are missing the point. I have gone through the exercise to take a game like Hollow Knight, and run it through these models. There are a lot of games that are as good as Hollow Knight in their individual parts. But none of them are Hollow Knight!

Also, what about Chrono Trigger? The game that easily disproved whatever else I used to believe makes a game excellent?

Chrono Trigger

I recently played Chrono Trigger for the first time. If you ignore the music, which is incredible, none of its individual parts are anything special. Story, pacing, combat, etc. are all okay; they might engage you individually for 15 minutes. If you had to green-light this game based on its individual parts (say you received a gray box prototype or a story board), you would probably struggle quite a bit. Playing Chrono Trigger, I thought: “This is a perfect game”. How does this make any sense?

Turns out, amazing games are waaaaay larger than the sum of their individual parts, to a point where it is almost pointless to look at just their individual parts. Similified game design models ignore some “inbetween” details that are not centerlized to their model, but NOTHING is irrelevant in a game like Chrono Trigger, and everything contributes to a way greater whole.

Value Proposition

It’s amazing how blind I can be to the most obvious things. All this time, thinking about games abstracted away from an individual player. Sure, humans are part of the model of something like Game Feel, after all, the player is the one feeling. But this “player” is Platonic in a sense — an average man representing all players everywhere.

If you want to make games that individuals buy and play and enjoy, you can’t abstract away the “individual” from your design pillar. People play games for very different reasons, and games as products fulfill a vast array of needs. So how about we center the development around that, around what EXACTLY the value proposition is?

Why did I love Chrono Trigger? Because it promised me a fun, crazy JRPG-like story, blending together magic, SCIFI, time travel and the typical JRPG turn-based combat without forcing me to play 300 hours. What does Candy Crush do for people? Maybe it enables them to entertain themselves passively in environments where they still have to pay attention to what is going on around them.

Chrono Trigger has to only excel in that ONE THING it promises, and as long as there is enough people to whome that promise brings value, it will be a perfect game for them. Regardless of the quality of the individual parts.

Why not just a Pitch then?

This sounds a lot like a pitch. This article almost reads like “man discovers what pitches are years into the industry”. But it doesn’t sound like game pitches as I know them; it sounds more like a start-up pitch. “Our product will provide this value to this specific group of people in this specific context/ problem they have”. But my experience with game pitches hasn’t been like this. Most game pitches I have seen are aimed at publishers, investors and journalists. Interesting enough, in that pitch language, I can almost hear the exact same pitch for both these games. As a matter of fact, mechanic centeric game designers often complain that these two games are the same game.

“Game” is an open world action-adventure video game played from a third-person perspective. The player has a variety of gameplay options to reach objectives they are given.

You might say, “Hey, that is a very bad pitch”. It doesn’t mention the unique selling point. But even things like unique selling points are all from the point of view of the game-making process and the game maker. Market analysis, competitors, how this is different to them, audience size, access to the audience, and audience purchasing capability are all music to a publisher, but this is not how your users perceive the world.

They don’t look at Ghost of Tsushima and think “this is how this game is uniquely different than the totality of open-world games; hence, it stands out to me. I shall purchase this”. Ghost of Tsushima enables you to play around with the idea of the way of samurai, honor, contrasted to pragmatism, in a setting of idealized, serene and pure Japan. Horizon Zero Dawn lets you shoot mech dinosaurs with a bow. That’s probably why people buy it, play it and love it.

So the game’s value proposition is like a pitch, but 100 percent user-oriented. Not broad and general, but very specific. For example, in the specific context of coming home and being tired, you want to have some fun but don’t want to engage in anything complicated or start something cumbersome. Maybe your game will fill that specific need.

You can define that very specific pitch, and truly take that as a design pillar. You can design everything around that and work toward it. Mind you, this can very well mean you end up with mechanics, feel or fantasy as game pillars after all.

For people who have played a lot of games, they start noticing the patterns of game design. They have gotten so used to clichés that your standard game doesn’t excite them anymore. Maybe your product brings innovative game mechanics that they have never seen before. This value proposition very well means that game play is really king in this context. You can easily think of other contexts in which game feel or fantasy can come to the forefront. All because it is demanded by the user we are making the game for.

Last but not least, a game can have several value propositions aimed at various users. The more user personas you encapsulate, the bigger your target audience. Having said that, keep in mind that resources are limited, and less is more. Sid Meier mentions that “one good game is better than two great games”. The idea is that each variation of your game and how it is played has a center of gravity. As you are combining these different variations of your game, if they oppose each other, they will cancel each other out. And you will be left with the soup that is modern AAA game design. In your average AAA game there are a lot of amazing games that come together in not-so-harmonic ways. Though if you have that much budget, maybe that is a good problem to have.

Thanks for reading, as usual you can follow me on various socials. All linked on my website: IRCSS.github.io