non designed game design

i've been thinking about games which make use of an already existing design, the way that they can be more interesting and lumpy than design which has been specifically designed

some examples:

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lemme just quote from bennett foddy's great post on this:

The thing about making a game involving route-finding is you can't really get there by designing great routes. No matter how good your level design skills are, if the player is following a path you laid out for them, they aren't really route-finding at all. The player becomes too aware of your intentions, and their own autonomy becomes subsumed in them. As mkapolk explains:
My process for making the levels was to scatter geometry more or less randomly and then try to traverse it. Sometimes when I was going down a map if I thought that an area shouldn't be a dead end I'd add some more stuff to it, but that's about as far as it went.

You can construct a level that players can route-find through, but you can't design it... or to put it more precisely, you can't crack out the Good Game Design if you want players to experience route-finding. To pass through a well-designed level is a hike, not an expedition.

this technically isn't a case of pulling from the world but from randomness. but it feels kindred, and gets to a similar place.

OS map jigsaw

i was doing a jigsaw puzzle with my mum at Christmas. we played one that my aunt had given her, where the image was an Ordinance Survey map centred on her house. i suggested we played without consulting the map itself, which made the puzzle more interesting. the process went:

• finding the edges and the corners
• finding pieces that contained landmarks we knew the rough location of
• finding pieces which contained major arterial roads, and trying to put those together in ways that connect across the map in the places those roads are
• finding other routes that connect - train lines, marked footpaths, the run of the ridge across the left-right sweep
• finding the numbers that label the gridlines, and putting those in order
• filling out the green for parkland
• doing all the fiddly little bits

so many of these steps are satisfying in themselves but more satisfying when you know that no-one designed them for you. that no-one else has done this puzzle. that the order you are uncovering is truly being uncovered.

i think it's also that i like noticing details about the world or about a work, and this means there's more of them. the ugly copyright line at the bottom right, and how it confirmed some pieces. a designer probably wouldn't've put that there as a game element, but it worked as a game element.

Nico's jigsaw game

and of course i have to talk about Nico's jigsaw game, which we have been playing with a group of us on a Sunday morning (slash evening, half of us are Australians). it's an online web browser thing, still in development, where we do jigsaws together.

the way it's different from a normal jigsaw puzzle is that you just swap the tile positions. which leads to interesting stuff in terms of - you have to manage space, you have to shift completed sections carefully, you can get annoyed when someone loses a bit you just put together.

but the bit that's even more interesting (and relevant to this post) is that we're doing jigsaws of paintings, and the paintings are not designed to be jigsaws. it's great to look closely, to think about the texture of the chunks, to think about brush strokes. opening a new one and groaning at how brown it is. but then when the composition is completed, marvelling at how awash with colour it is, the macro structure absolutely informing the colour structure. thinking about planes and perspective and meaning, and all of this feeding into the puzzle solving while also not being designed to do so.

and the metagame of choosing pictures that would make good puzzles. or terrible, annoying puzzles, that too (still remembering Goldie picking that picture with disjointed tiles and then getting the splitlines just right so that they matched).

the game as a way of looking at a painting, not the painting as a way of finding cheap content for the game.

Untitled Goose Game

And since Nico & a bunch of the other people who play jigsaw game are the devs of Untitled Goose Game, it feels natural to mention it here. they did a whole talk about how the level design for UGG came out of doing location scouting - finding real locations and repurposing them for the game. finding details that would be extraneous if you were designing from scratch but... help give it an air of authenticity and specificity when pulled from a real place

(there's also a lot of interesting stuff about the relationship between Australia and the image they have of England, and of using references from the other side of the world)

but also it's fascinating, having played the game, to go visit the locations in real life and recognise bits. that path to the corner shop, that weird metal thing on either side of the door, the actually very nice fish restaurant that isn't in the game but you can see where it might be.

found videogames

we never actually finished it, but a good number of years ago i was working with some friends on a zine about the idea of "found videogames", the idea that the formal properties of a videogame, something like:

• has electronics
• has input and output and a relationship between the two
• has a sense of challenge
• affords "play"

is something that does not need to be created as a videogame, but is instead a set of properties that can be found within the world in many systems, which can then be viewed as a game. and so the idea was that we would create an imaginary catalog for a impossible exhibition of these games. one of my favourites was "using a subway system in an unfamiliar city". it has feedback loops, it has electronics, it has a system to engage with and gradually come to master. it does potentially have the lack of optionality, the unavoidable stakes, the ability to quit, that is possibly characteristic of games... but still, an interesting frame to see.

in this case, we are not just repurposing geography or architecture or an image as content for a designed system, but instead adopting a system wholesale and instead imposing a particular frame upon it.

some others

I don't have much to say about these right now, but I feel like I should include them:
- Geoguessr
- Audiosurf
- Scrabble
- most folk games
- football (soccer) (by which I mean, how big is the pitch?)
- mods which recreate existing places within game engines
- gambling on horse races

in conclusion

i don't know that i have a conclusion. it's something i've been thinking about, it's something that applies to a lot of the things i've been recently working on professionally (but can't talk about). most of my work within games has been on games which have one step into the "real world" - whether that is using map data or responding to social contexts or the hard constraints of making physical components. the examples i've pulled from generally sit more within a traditional game framework, but still pull in the world within them, with all the texture and rich context that provides. maybe i just like noticing things, and this is a technique that gives me more things to notice!

comments

there's not a proper comments section on here, but let me link some stuff people have said:

which in turn makes me think of plunderludics - this stuff is kind of the opposite of what i've talked about here, using the found texture of videogame as raw material for... sometimes more game, sometimes something else

Nico announced it!

School! Yes, I agree - so much of the design work I do is about creating contexts for other things, or providing new contexts for existing things.

(Marie is the "m" you can see, busy assembling the painting)

(Marie was also the host of the first Party In A Google Sheet)