On creating desire

Thinking today about how much of game design is about creating desire from nothing, or from the smallest things.

You sit down to play a roleplaying game. You create some characters. Who are they? Where do they come from? What ... wait for it ... do they want? They go into a tavern, they meet a wizened stranger, he offers up a quest, and at the end of it... We look for things to desire, and when a possible object is offered up, we leap at it. It is the thing that animates the characters and brings them into conflict. One desire leads us on to another - What does my weary warrior want? He wants peace. He wants to retire and settle down. He needs enough money to buy that cottage in the countryside. He needs to take on one last job. He needs to trust his companions to succeed. From one desire, many desires are created. The chips are down... he sacrifices himself, his original dream, and saves his companions. None of that momentum is possible without him starting off by wanting something. And then a satisfying (if tragic) resolution. Desires come into conflict, and the character says something meaningful by choosing between them.

You install a free to play game on your phone. It looks neat, and you're bored one lunchbreak. It's a tactics strategy game, you have a cast of characters and they do different things. They look different, too. One of them has a cool coat. And there's little levels to solve, almost like puzzles sometimes, each needing a different combination of abilities. Abilities that your characters have, in varying amounts. And – did you notice? It happened so quickly – already desire has crept in - you were given some tasks, and now you find you want to complete them. You're working through the levels. The starting characters get you through the first week, and you're levelling them up to make them stronger. But you know (you've played this kind of game before) that their power curve will tail off and you'll stop making headway soon. You turn to the slot machine (of course this game has a slot machine). You can see the prizes you might win when you pull. There are characters who are strong, characters who are interesting, characters who are... sexy?? The financial success of this game relies upon offering up access to the JSON files and JPEGs that constitute a character. Small amounts of data, sitting behind a CDN, ready to be enabled once a variable in a database is set correctly. But yet that data has meaning behind it. What a magic trick, to design a system such that these bytes have such weight!

A clown walks on stage. The clown is wearing a hat. Another clown walks on and stands next to him. The second clown looks at the first clown, and thinks... I want that hat. A whole routine ensues. The hat moves onto the floor, onto another head, onto the floor, is kicked about, goes into the audience, back on the first clown's head, is sat on, and finally into a bucket of water. The hat is just a hat, but the clown works hard to want it, and to express that wanting to you.

You're playing a game where the flow of water has been modelled with care. You have the ability to build dams. A small river runs through a deep valley. Do I need to say more?

I could continue, and maybe some day I will. I'm fascinated by this magic trick we do when we design a game. Where does this desire come from? We start with rules, images, text, movement. Players construct meaning from them, and find that that meaning brings with it desire. Something is unresolved. We want to resolve it. We want, we want, we want... But as designers we need to carefully nurse this desire, we need to cradle it like a candle in a draughty house. A gust from the wrong direction, sustained a little too long, and it can be extinguished. Boredom, the ick, overwhelm, distraction. But if it is sustained, then it can pull us for forwards through a game. It can drive us into new situations where we find, maybe, new things to desire and pull us yet further onward. What a thing to work with as a raw material!

I was going to end it there, I felt that was a nice conclusion to the post. But then I had a little time after and I realised I actually had some practical advice for game designers coming out of this. And that advice is: remember that you are not just responding to desire, but also creating it. A system which takes existing desire and works out how to resolve it is a tool, not a game. So if there is a problem with your design, think about how to inspire desire in the right places, as well as just fulfilling it (or not fulfilling it, in the case of free to play).