Been playing WoW again in the lead-up to the new expansion. It's a dirty, old habit from college, revisited less and less over time. Fun in its occasions despite ticking minutes off my lifespan. Like smoking when I'm drunk.
Talking with friends about Warcraft's evolving design choices lead to this post by Bashiok, Blizzard's incredible community manager, which held a perfectly succinct and universal nugget of game design philosophy:
"…a game is largely defined by its limitations, and the rules within which you must find or create a solution."
It reminds me of something Charles Eames—who, with his wife, Ray, designed most of the furniture in my house—said in an interview:
"Design depends largely on constraints."
It's simple, brilliant, and universal, yet not at all obvious until you've seen it. Just like good design; whether for iconic chairs or Flappy Bird.
To be clear: that's not constraint as limitation of freedom, but as definition of possibility. A subtle but acute difference. And (to me) it extends beyond mechanical design and platform limitations to how a game fits in to and shapes culture. A discussion that's never been more prevalent than it is today. Both production and player experience are shaped by the internal and external constraints of a changing world. A concept or mechanic or platform appropriate a few years ago may not be appropriate today.
Classic controller schemes fail miserably on mobile and have to be rethought. Decade-old MMO gameplay needs tightening when it doesn't fit in to modern lifestyles. Previously unnoticed tropes can become tired or inexcusable in the face of maturing self-reflection.
These are things I've been thinking a lot about in preparing to release my first game, Gran Text Auto. It's been fun defining a world with my own set of rules, but there's lots of external influences I believe are important that I've still tried to be aware of. Listing them all isn't the point of this, because, ultimately, I don't have control over them. That's the nature of the game, and it's OK. In fact: it's great. Because given positive attention I think personal, platform, and cultural constraints do nothing but improve design, and good design builds positive culture.
Every game is an Incredible Machine, yet no game is an island… except maybe Mountain.
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