#dev pile

[talenlee]

Dev Pile: Emergence

I was first introduced to the idea of emergence by listening to my father tell one of the small subset of jokes he repeats. These are what we would later come to know as memes, but in my home life it was simply that I was used to seeing my father move through a lot of different social environments, and in those environments he was often telling a joke for the first time to people who’d never heard it before.

What had happened — I can’t remember the specifics too well — was that someone had opened a box or crate, pulled something out to get what was inside, and then had difficulty getting everything back in, despite the fact that it had all fit before, along with even more stuff. My father said, “Ah, you’ve discovered Zymergsy’s Law of Emergent System Dynamics. That is, you’ve opened a can of worms, and now you need a bigger can to put them back.”

This aphorism is one of many things my father has said that is stamped on the back of my brain. I can quote it at will, reasonably confident I’m getting it exactly right, even with the cadence — though of course you can’t hear that when I’m reading it into a microphone to later transcribe into text. The idea of emergence was largely left alone at that point. To me, it was literally a joke. I often wonder whether powerful or dangerous ideas in closed environments get unwittingly turned into punchlines so the people around us never have to contend with what those ideas actually mean.

In the context of game making, philosophy, and a whole bunch of other fields, I use the term emergence to refer to when a complex object has properties that are not inherent to any of its components, and that only become present through the interaction of those components. “Complex” is doing some heavy lifting there, too, because even something like the color red is an emergent property. There is not a single red atom in the universe, but everything I’ve ever seen that’s red is made of atoms. I think I got that quote from Daniel Dennett — who, as I understand it, was a bit of a bozo when it came to women and trans people, which is a shame, but he’s dead and doesn’t care.

The notion of emergence has all sorts of powerful ramifications for big, difficult topics. It solves a lot of things that seem too hard. In biology, the question of where consciousness comes from isn’t terribly hard once you consider how much you can get out of emergence. Societies, cultures, art, and science are all emergent properties that ultimately go back to the fact that, at some point, a slightly larger brain case was advantageous to survival. That’s just how things shook out. There are also emergent properties that themselves have emergent properties, which can be even stranger.

Evolution is an incredibly well‑understood, well‑attested theory of how the world works. It’s so fundamental that aspects of evolution are now just observable facts of how other systems behave. Natural selection will happen in any system where there is variation and reproduction. We can tell because natural selection applies to language. It applies to computer software. It’s why rocks take on the forms they do. It’s such a powerful system once you zoom out far enough, but understanding it in one area first lets you see how its effects emerge from interactions of otherwise unconcerned actors.

When we talk about game design and emergent game states, we’re bringing in some very big ideas in a way that can feel like you’re chaining them into a tiny box. No economic game ships with economic theory built in. Most economic theory either emerges from players playing the game or from players bringing outside knowledge into the game. It’s common for someone who understands the movement of money to have an advantage, but just as often they misunderstand things because they’re applying value incorrectly.

Economics is an entire field that emerges from humans attaching value to things. You can use economic tools to analyze animal behavior, but as best we understand, animal valuation doesn’t work the same way as human valuation. The only times we see something similar are with animals close to humans, like orangutans or monkeys. These ideas mean that while we can analyze their behavior economically, no orangutan has a single atom of economics in them.

Similarly, the game Chinatown and its evolution Waterfall Park, while being incredibly cutthroat economic games, are not games where anyone had to design economics into the system. When you assign values to things, close a system so players only have access to its internal resources, and tie victory directly to those interactions, economics will emerge as a natural byproduct.

Another fun emergent property in game design is ritual. Players will engage in behaviors they don’t necessarily know will succeed or fail. In religious studies, a ritual is a practice where the outcome is opaque. If you know exactly what inputs produce what outputs, it’s no longer a ritual. Part of ritual is not knowing which parts matter. You ring the bell, move the cloth, lift the candle — you don’t know which action is significant, only that the whole process is how you get the outcome you want.

Players do this all the time. They develop habits not because those habits are good play, but because those habits were present in past experiences that led to good outcomes. If you want a good example in a game with a huge data set, look at how people play Magic: The Gathering. The game has strict rules, but players still develop rituals they think are rules, or treat optional behaviors as mandatory, or they think the game requires them to behave in some way to ‘make it work,’ and don’t consider the levels of information present around them, which is often the boundary between players who make a lot of mistakes (me) and players who make a lot of mistakes but less often and less disastrously. Some players always play a land as soon as they can, even when it’s strategically unnecessary, because it feels like progress.

You can call this a bad heuristic, but thinking of it as ritual behavior gets at the heart of player enrollment. In my thesis, enrollment is the idea that the game deliberately makes the interaction between your wants and your actions opaque. You want to win. The game is a system of systems designed to keep you from knowing exactly how to do that. You have a general idea, but if the game simply let you do it, there’d be nothing left of the game. This brings us back to Bernard Suits’ definition of a game: the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

With those parameters in place, how you interact with the obstacles is necessarily emergent. I don’t have to tell you exactly how to roll a die or move a piece. You may have your own ways of doing it. I can tell you what the rules require, but the game part is the opacity.

When I talk about game systems, I’m often not thinking about what they will do or can do, but what I hope they do. It’s not hard to put up guardrails to make something impossible, but it’s a lot harder to put out incentives to make something guaranteed. And sometimes that goes badly. Last year, I reflected on an old game of mine called Crowdfund This, and I ultimately think it’s a very weak game. The design is, for lack of a better word, sloppy. I didn’t have a good handle on interface design, and I didn’t know how to prevent players from making mistakes in how they played.

But the fixed version I devised in December 2025 — much as I like it — does not make my partner Fox happy. She prefers the original’s opaque play experience: pushing your luck, drawing more cards, piling onto a ridiculous prompt. I think that’s bad design now, because I’ve seen so many players struggle with it. But Fox doesn’t have to think about all those players. She gets to think about her own experience. She’s enrolled in the uncertainty, and the ritual feels like it gets her closer to the result, so she does it.

And to return to the story at the start: my dad is one of those people who can pack a truck like it’s Tetris. I wonder how long he’s had that joke ready while fixing things that were unpacked improperly.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Dev Pile: What It's Like To Like A Thing

Ian Bogost is a contentious man in my circle of friends and a respected reasonable academic who I even cite in my PhD Thesis (creeping closer and closer to done please I am trying so hard to be good). I get it, I really do. Bogost, referred to hereon after by his surname, has done a lot of stuff, and the stuff he does that’s easily accessible and not in the depths of long form books with weird titles like Alien Phenomenology: What It’s Like To Be A Thing are, well, they are somewhat prone to being seen as annoying to a lay person.

A few years ago, he opined that games were better without story, which drew criticism from his peers and created quite a lot of writing that I like a great deal. It’s where I got the term ‘medium store,’ and where a friend of mine helped me coalesce the idea of the hierarchy of forms. Cinema is serious and difficult and marvellous and books are serious and difficult and expansive, and between these two polarities all inferior mediums flit, hoping to one day being elevated to one or the other.

None of this is to engage with Bogost directly. I don’t think I should, and honestly, I don’t care to. I don’t imagine I could say anything he cares about and I don’t imagine he’d deliver to me much that I shouldn’t get first by doing the readings. One of the annoying tings about being an accomplished academic, you have written a lot of things down.

Strangely, my reading of Bogost seems to imply that he’s not actually happy about that.

Content Warning: Ian Bogost, and explaining ideas from him in the context of my friend circle who have no reason to like him, but also may only know him from annoying slivers in time.

First things first, I am by no means a scholar of the form or even in the spaces of Bogost’s own. I write about games, but I am engaging with games as things that people make and the ways we make meaning out of making things, while Bogost’s work is definitely biased towards the consideration of videogames as operators of rules-based computer science.

I have only really read three of Bogost’s books. They are in increasing relevance, Persuasive Games, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, and Alien Phenomenology: What It’s Like To Be A Thing. I do not think that any of these books are in any way bad, even though my primary engagement with Unit Operations is to modestly disagree with it. In that book, Bogost describes the idea that in a digital game, all components can, in fact, be completely isolated from one another, presenting the idea that a videogame engine is fundamentally divisible into every meaningful component on its own. I disagree with this because I think that all of this information is then being presented to a player’s brain, where all that refined isolation immediately collapses together into the messy wet analogue of an experience. This isn’t to say Unit Operations is by any means a bad tool for how it wants to analyse things, I just find it completely useless for my model of engaging with games. My tools want to consider games as things that two meat people interpret with one another, like the game is as much a modem as it is a medium.

I should save that phrase.

There are some ideas from Bogost that I actively like. Particularly, he is the source as best I’ve been able to find of the summary of Bernard Suits’ treatment of games in The Grasshopper, where he describes games as:

The consensual overcomming of unnecessary obstacles.

Bogost is also the source of the idea of the Shit Crayon. Shit Crayons are things that are created to have the form and to direct the user to imagine them in creative, playful experiences, but where the only product they can create is fundamentally shit. A game that’s meant to help you design your own little farm but where the primary job of that farm is to encourage your neighbours to pay money into the same little economy game is an example of a Shit Crayon. I like the concept of the Shit Crayon, because it has room for the idea of crayons having variable degrees of shittiness. A cleverly made level in Disney Infinity that uses its tools to make a really interesting puzzle that you still ultimately are making in a sandbox meant to get kids to think their creative play experiences are there to be ratified by the Disney company.

The book of Bogost’s that I have read the most, and reread the most, is the piece Alien Phenomonology: What It’s Like To Be A Thing. It’s a book about ontology, specifically the model of object oriented ontology (or OOO). Now, I’m not going to give a meaningful summary of OOO here in order to demonstrate my mastery of the topic because I don’t have one. Deep philosophy about the ontology of objects overwhelms me easily and I find myself confusing terms easily and creating ambiguity. What summary I will give of the movement is that, as best I can express it, Object Oriented Ontology wishes to consider the existence of things and their relationships to one another as if humans are just another type of thing. That is, there is not a ‘subject’ and an ‘object’ – the actor and the acted upon – but rather that all things are objects, even humans. This both elevates relationships between objects (because they are not ‘lesser’ than subject-object relationsihps) and diminishes the idea of the subjective human (because they’re just another object).

In a lot of ways, I can eff with OOO in no small part because it really seems like other forms of philosophy like to imagine humans having some kind of transcendental thinking, choosing part of who they are, and as someone who is invested heavily in games (which are entwined exceptionally with ideas of emergence), the idea that magic gets involved when we start making decision seems unnecessary and untidy with me.

Of course it’s also possible I don’t undertand OOO and my assumption of this significant emergence is just wrong.

Alien Phenomenology has this anecdote in it that sticks out to me as an example of Bogost making a point in a way that tells me something about the character of Bogost, if not anything about Ian Bogost the person. When I say ‘character,’ I really do mean a constructed identity present in the text used to make sense of it. It’s like death of the author; this author, this person, never existed because this person is a sliver of ideas expressed on a page and only present in what it implies, and there’s no way to trust it’s a reasonable insight into an actual human.

The anecdote runs kinda like this; Bogost, a big Latour guy, likes the idea of Latour’s Litanies, which were a kind of thinking exercise. Latour’s litanies were lists of words that were chosen and constructed, ideally, with no association between one another. The idea is that a litany is hard to do; once you create one you can almost always immediately start seeing how you got those ‘unrelated’ associations and this is useful for considering the unobvious ways our minds construct relationships. But Bogost is a computer science guy, so in the book he demonstrates some code that’s capable of generating genuinely random litanies, and then shows that the reader then imposes relationships on the litanised items.

That’s interesting, I like that as a demonstration of minds constructing meaning.

Thing is, this litany software was rigged up to a sign of some variety at the university, which was about trying to draw students to attend a talk by Bogost about the otnological work he was doing. The software, very cleverly, could fish a stock image of something random and attach it to the poster every time it was generated on the screen, which meant at one point, these poster showed (for example) a pretty lady, standing next to text that said something akin to ‘THE INNER LIFE OF OBJECTS.’

Which was not a good look.

I am summarising this because this article is long enough, but the narrative presented in the book sticks with me because it’s hard to not read Bogost (the authorial character) as being kinda cross at being asked to adjust the code to ensure it didn’t accidentally call women objects. The author snits about it, claiming that, well, they are objects, but so is everything else, and now the code is untidy because it’s got a bunch of exceptions in it to ensure that it doesn’t accidentally produce a ballerina, or the like, with that provocative title.

I find this embarrassingly relatable. I find it annoying every time I have to change a clean, simple rule to prevent unforseen consequences. If I write a rule, why do I have to say ‘three or more,’ when I can just say ‘more than two?’ The ambiguity there shouldn’t matter.

But it does.

Ian Bogost is as best I can tell, a very smart person who is responsible for saying some things that a lot of people around me find very annoying, and, lacking as I am in any access to the man’s inner life it is often hard for me to tell if he’s unconsciously creating category errors or if he’s just so used to discussing things in a particular atmosphere of philosophy that makes him seem like he’s not even meaningfully talking to anyone else.

The idea that games are better without stories, or that games are a medium for children, feels to me so much like an idea with more and more interesting things to say about what the speaker wants or thinks should be, and we are just treated to a sliver of it, peeked through a window. It is not the whole man, it is not the whole of his mind. It is, in isolation, extremely silly sounding, but the aggregate of these ideas make this person who is by my reading, pretty honestly smart and thoughtful.

It is a byproduct of these medium forms, that create tiny infantalising moments, that Bogost is reduced to objects.

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[talenlee]

Dev Pile 2025-10 — Instructions

Rules are magic. Rules are a way for you to to put words on paper, and then, without any involvement from you beyond the words you put on that paper, another person can come along, read that paper, and play a game that they did not know existed before you put those words on that paper.

Rules are also incredibly hard and it sucks to write them and it sucks to read them.

An Exercise: What games can you fully explain the rules to? If you’re a game designer, how much of your rules of something you’ve made can you explain, easily and coherently, to another human being such that they can play your game?

If you’re talking about a videogame, try and explain the instructions for interacting with the game. The interface can be very complex for games, but the fundamental instructions of what a player is doing, and how they should progress through the game, that should be explicable. Even if only in broad genre terms, such as ‘it’s a platformer where you head to the right.’

If you’re talking about a game of pools like Magic: The Gathering, the fundamental instructions is almost like a folk game. You have a basic set of steps that you can go through, and then when the game pieces introduce new rules information, you address that. You address it one piece at a time, and those pieces are all part of a very large, very complicated archive of information.

What if we’re talking about a much simpler game, like Poker? Poker has a set number of hands and rules for just following the patterns of player behaviour. Not ‘how would you teach someone to play poker well,’ but rather, ‘can you explain a set of rules for one specific form of poker from start of the game to the end?’

You might think ‘hey, Poker isn’t that simple.’ It depends on what you mean, though. Poker, the game of hands and cards and betting and showdowns is reasonably simple as a set of instructions. The values of the hands are complicated, but only in that they’re not obvious until you’ve mastered them. Playing poker well, and working out the emergent properties of poker, like signalling and defending ranges, those are things that aren’t obvious until you play, and they’re also skills that form a sort of inner club. Defending your ranges is something that will serve you well against less skilled players, over time, but in any given hand, it’s not fundamentally relevant the way ‘players get five cards’ or ‘there are three community cards are.’

Now, the point of this exercise is to get you in the mindset of thinking about not just what kind of rules you can explain but how you explain them. Game rules, expressed in the game you share, are going to be explained in a particular way, and that language is itself, part of the game, and part of how they communicate. You can convey that one and one is two, and you can present 1+1=2, and you can even do that as one plus one equals two, but each of those comes with different language benefits. Highly technical, mathmatically concise language is going to benefit game designs where the game has to make adjudications quickly and decisively, for example. Magic: The Gathering has several rules defining just the basic idea of ‘the turn’ and ‘this’ and ‘target,’ all terms with seemingly obvious meanings that the rules need to very technically adjudicate.

When you know how to communicate in your rules, you get to start using the game language to pre-load player behaviour. If you can talk to players clearly in one language, you can lie to them in it.

Heck, not even lie – cajole. Mislead. Obfuscate.

Consider a Warhammer army with a special ability that says you do minimum damage when you roll a 6 and get maximum damage on a 1. This is a simplified version of a rule that exists: by flipping two numbers’ results, statistically, you’ve changed nothing, but you’ve created a technical piece of rules information that a player can relate to when they ‘feel’ unlucky. It’s just raw stats – there’s no way for a flip of two digits like that to make a mathematical difference without other interactions – but the way it’s framed can make a player feel like they’re getting something when they’re not. This is a way you can create an impression of a rules space without the specifics of it. In an army-based game like Warhammer 40,000, there are a host of factors that are involved in balancing an army, and sometimes there are things that are there to feel good that aren’t meaningfully good, because the rest of the balance is being handled over there, in math-land.

Mark Rosewater calls this kind of thing trinket text on a Magic card. Where a card has some small rules concession on it that makes a card feel less empty even if it’s not mechanically relevant.

Alright while I distracted you, can you do those instructions again?

How different are they to last time? Did you find something you’d rather do differently?

Instructions are both a very technical thing to do, a set of proceses for a complex operation, but they are also an empathic experience. You need to think about the person reading them as if they are a person, but also, as if they then need to explain those rules to another person, and the way they will explain them being easier to say than it is to put on a page in the way you might if, say, you were doing technical documentation. This can get as nitty gritty as considering whether or not game language you’re using is phonetically varied, so players can’t mix up spoken language terms easily. You may love a pun but if the pun makes it hard for people to play your game, or worse, recruit others to play your game, it’s got to go.

I’ve said it before: Writing instructions to a game is like programming a random stranger, and there’s no way to know if it won’t compile.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Dev Pile: What's a Philosophy Engine?

I have described at times games as ‘philosophy engines,’ but I don’t think I’ve spent time anywhere explaining what that means or why I use it. The simplest descriptor I use is that a philosophy engine is:

A structure of interconnected components that when engaged necessarily express philosophical frameworks essential to their continued operation.

If you read that and think ‘that doesn’t help anything,’ then yes, I know, and I’m sorry, there’s a reason there’s a rest of the article. After all, what’s a structure? Any collection of things with a set of rules determining how they relate to one another. What’s a component? Any thing. What’s engaging mean? Uh it can mean anything that… engages with it. It is necessarily a phrase where every part of it needs to be understood as existing for further explanation.

This is an article that intends to explore some of the deeper ideas that I think underpin games. If you don’t think that that’s a true way to think about ideas, then let me phrase it as ‘deeper ideas that I use to consider games.’ While it’s relevant to my study, it might not be helpful to you if your primary reason to read about games is working out cool tricks for things like grids or numbers. I’ll do more of those soon, don’t worry about that!

At some point, a long time ago, someone said that to think like a designer is to consider games in constant reflection and while I think it turns out that guy kinda sucks, it’s still useful advice. This is something where I think we can be rewarded when we bring to bear ideas from disciplines deeper and vaster than we’re used to.

The term ‘philosophy engine’ was first described (as best I can find) by Annamaria Carusi, way on back in the year 2009. (ref at the bottom). It’s in a paper that idea builds on earlier ideas from Ihde & Selinger in 2004. Ihde & Selinger described the idea of an epistemology engine, which refers to the material-semiotic connections that oobtain for any specific rendering of an idea, and it is largely concerned in the paper with the idea of the engine of these things being types of language that make sense of information. As an example, consider prose versus poetry and how those two different tools are meant to express ‘meaning’ to you — and yes, I am just basically explaining the abstract to you.

In the paper on philosophy engines, titled Philosophy Engines: Technolgoy and reading/writing/thinking philosophy Carusi describes them (the engines) as not just a type of epistemic engine, but specifically, a set of frameworks for communicating multiple different sets of ideas. Carusi gives the example of the distinction between spoken ideas and written ideas, and how the transition from one to another as the primary way of ‘doing philosophy’ changed the kind of philosophy that happened.

When philosophers spoke ideas to one another, their ideas were always in dialogue with people. It was possible to repeatedly negotiate with someone to present to them individually the best and most convincing version of your idea. and could include ideas like explaining to the one person in front of them what they mean. The transition to written philosophy lost the ability to understand and explicitly engage an audience of one, to be both philosophically sound and immediately convincing. Written philosophy must be written to try and explain ideas to an entirely neutral, abstracted audience, someone who cannot be seen or engaged with but merely imagined.

I don’t know exactly where I first got onto this paper. It’s published in Discourse, it’s from a journal about very serious philosophy being done by people with very strong minds for hard ideas. Many people dismiss philosophy because it’s too arbitary, because it feels meaningless. I disengage from philosophy because I can recognise just how difficult it can be to keep these ideas consistent in a head with a fuzzy memory. Maybe I should write something down –

And in the process lose something, oh no!

Anyway, I think at one point my PhD Supervisor used the term, or worse, I fear I may have used the term just fumbling around for a description, and he reacted to it like I’d mentioned something he’d read. I spent the rest of the day trying to find the paper, and then, when I stumbled into it, I searched for the word ‘game,’ found it, and then proceeded to try and read through it. This was years ago, and there was a lot in it that went right over my head.

Still, the paper uses the phrase ‘playing the game‘ in it, and that was enough to convince me to stick with it. It’s been some time since I first read it – I’m writing this because I reread it today, to make sure I’m not misrepresenting anything. By the time this article goes up, I bet I’ll have an awkward reaction like ‘oh shit, maybe I’m misrepresenting it and I should reread it to double check.’

What Carusi uses games to describe is the idea that someone was engaged with a philosophy engine because you could tell when they were capable of communicating in a proper hypothetical way in a place. They could, as it were, play with ideas. This notion, that belonging in an appropriate structure to make meaning, connected an idea I already had from Johann Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.

In that book, Huizinga presented the idea that playing games is important to culture, perhaps even foundational to it. I don’t know how much we can rely on Huizinga’s descriptions of history and the idea of the pre-human formation of ideas, given what little the researchers of the time had to work from, but it does seem reasonable to me that part of how we go from hunting and feeding ourselves in the most immediate sense was the consideration of hypotheticals and the ability to socially represent falsehoods that we can temporarily agree on.

Like, fictionality is a thing we can do, and the way we use that is by, literally, playing with ideas. That means we could have hypotheticals we all agree on like ‘what if it rains tomorrow?’

Games then, in this context are shared fictional practices that are about playing with shared ideas. When you play a game, you are agreeing upon a shared fiction with all the players in the game that are willing to entertrain this consensus unreality with you. You may imagine briefly that you’re not playing with anyone else – especially if you’re playing a videogame, but every developer who contributed to that game is part of that play experience, even if they’re all standing very far away to hide. Even if you’re playing entirely in your own head, a solo game that you’re not telling anyone about, you’re still engaging with ideas of games that you have experienced in the past, and there’s a connection to all other examples of fictions you’ve experienced.

This is where the philosophy of the game plays into it. Sometimes there’s a lot of detail to the philosophy of a game, presented obviously and in text. If someone makes a game about Burning Billionaires In A Big Barbecue Pit, they might have a philosophical idea they’re trying to present very clearly and unambiguously. But there are other philosophical ideas that the designer doesn’t necessarily mean to put in the work. After all, if a game is about how the acquisition of an arbitary score of money to a single end makes everyone poorer, but also, the player with the most points wins the game, there’s at least something there that merits some kind of examination, and in order to experience that philosophy, the making of that point, the player has to do philosophy to make the game proceed so they can experience it.

This brings me back to Jesper Juul’s principle in Half Real, where he describes games as made of real rules and fictional worlds. That games create and present a fiction is pretty well established; that fiction is that the things on screens are peoples or bugs or even that the tetronimos exist. The rules – the things that make the game function – are real, but that they matter or that they are enforced is entirely dependent on who you’re playing with.

(You are one of the people you’re playing with. Changing the rules even if nobody notices is still changing the rule, and Bernard Suits has opinions on that).

Where they become philosophy engines, in my usage of the term, is how that it isn’t just that the fiction exists, but that the fiction is used to inform and enforce how the game objects interact, and therefore, the players who engage with the game are encouraged to think like that fiction is true for the purpose of maintaining the game state.

I’ve very much become interested in the way that ‘fictional’ is a term most people use to refer to something as being made up, but that’s not the same thing as fake. Games are fictional, but so to are science textbooks – not because they present falsehoods but because they present a shared set of stories that are there to explain the truths they have as best they can.

Heck, money and nations are shared communal fictions – there is no United States when there are no people to tell you it exists. Anything that exists solely in the minds of humans explaining them to other humans seems to me to exist on a level of reality away from falling rocks and growing carrots, as it were.

Carusi, A. (2009) Philosophy engines: Technology and reading/writing/thinking philosophy. Discourse, 8(3). Available at: PhilPapers entry

Ihde, D. and Selinger, E. (2004) Chasing technoscience: Matrix for materiality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Juul, J. (2005) Half-Real: Video games between real rules and fictional worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Available at: MIT Press

Suits, B. (1978) The Grasshopper: Games, life and utopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Available at: UTP Publishing

Huizinga, J. (1949) Homo Ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Available at: Routledge

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Dev Pile: Intersections of Axes

Here, let me talk about the intersection of systemic structures and the meaningful construction of academic language.

Oh, don’t be afraid, it’ll be easy.

I’ve talked about my model of game experience design. I talk about this in my thesis and I explained it a little with an example last week; it’s a three-structure model that works with ideas of Abstraction, Enrolment, and Stuffness. These are the terms I use in my thesis, because I need to stake out space that’s academic in its nature and which can be used unambiguously. For example, at one point I used to use the term ‘materiality’ for Stuffness, and that is a term that goes wild if you start attaching it to terms like ‘analysis’ or ‘condition.’

At some point I was at risk of having to become familiar with academic discourse on Marxist Analysis, and I do not have the boots for that hike.

Lemme reframe them in a way that’s more familiar; you have story, mechanics, and components. Now, by using these deliberately broad terms I’m trying to make sure I catch things that don’t obviously have those factors. I think most people consider Chess and Checkers as lacking a story, for example, but it’s a lot easier to recognise that they have an abstraction. Similarly, when I talk about ‘components,’ some games get a little weird. When I ask people about the components of soccer, they tend to just talk about the ball, and maybe goals; the field is, however, part of the ‘stuff’ that makes up the game. Enrolment, I need that because a game’s mechanics is more than what people think of as its mechanics. Gravity plays a part in a bunch of games’ rules (think like Kerplunk), but nobody thinks of Gravity as a mechanic.

Basically, these are the boxes I started with, then I found I needed bigger, and bigger, and bigger boxes until I could fit merely everything inside. I think I’ve gotten boxes that big.

Interactions Explained

Part of the point of these different ideas for examining a game is that they can be considered separately or together. That is, I can talk about (say), the abstraction of a game at length, but then when I want to talk about the abstraction and the enrolment, I can do so by looking at the way they intersect.

ABSTRACTION + ENROLMENT = Thematic Coherence

If the abstraction and the enrollment work together, you get thematic coherence. That is, where the fiction that your game is telling and the rules for expressing that fiction have a vibe that works together, you get that thematic coherence. The fiction helps remind people of how the rules work, and the rules help people understand the fiction.

Consider for example, in a game like Pokemon; fights end when you run out of hit points, but you always have the same Pokemonto play with afterwards. In the game, the fiction is that your Pokemon are engaging in a sport match, and fighting as hard as they can until they hit their limit and pass out, rather than fighting to their death. This means you can be invested in your team, but you can have the familiar play pattern of a normal dungeon crawler JRPG. Rather than a team that dies all the time, you have a team that grows slowly and steadily, and you have a reason why they don’t die, and it helps to give ideas for building out the rest of the world to make this make sense which is great because it’s a game aiming at little kids.

ENROLMENT + STUFFNESS = Perceptible Strategy

When you have boards, when you have pieces on a board, having the pieces clearly communicate what they are, so the rules can be maintained more easily, creates coherence for those rules. Similarly, if the rules make it so that you value the items on the board properly, the rules are enhancing the value of what each token means.

You’ve absolutely been in situations in a board game where someone has moved a little piece of plastic or a little piece of wood, and you’ve been looking at that and going, “oh no, I really don’t want them to have that.” That’s because the game’s stuffness is enforcing the rules value of that thing, and those two things are creating the ability that you can make good, meaningful judgments about how you want to operate within the rules.

Look, the easiest example I can give is Scrabble. Every piece of Scrabble is very clearly signalled, with the marks on the board showing their increased value, and the tiles clearly communicating what pieces they can interact with. The rules are clear and explicit about what these things are for and what they do. Even just placing pieces on a board to indicate what they relate to and how they relate to is really important for maintaining game states.

STUFFNESS + ABSTRACTION = Material Significance

If it is represented by something material in the game, it is easy to attach significance to it, and it is easy for that to express something about the fiction. If there’s a really important thing in the game, it probably should have something to represent it. It’s a thing that some games can really walk into face-first, where a game with a particular theme doesn’t spend the game’s material stuff to represent that stuff.

In Monopoly (yes I know boo hiss) there’s a lot of significance to money and how it’s used to track value. To make that handleable, the money is a material object, in the game, and it’s presented in a way that’s easily handled and distributed. As players engage with the game, the fiction makes it very clear that money is very important, and that money can then be used to represent things about the game.

(Mind you the Monopoly money is really boring but that’s what happens when you ask an American to do civic art.)

Conclusion

At the heart of this triad is the actual player experience. It’s composed of all these elements working together. It isn’t like games can have ‘none’ of these things, or ‘more’ of these things; it’s about how to look at the focus the designer makes, and ways that the game can deliver on ideas using those things. While it’s possible to say that a game has ‘very little stuffness’ if it’s made up of (say) a stack of twelve cards, that means that those cards are together, 100% of the stuffness of the game, and therefore, everything they represent is the important stuff in that game’s abstraction and enrolment.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Dev Pile: Bridged Pairs and Apologetic Traitors

Hey, Lysen Co is a complicated game and there’s ideas in it that even now I don’t think I’ve properly documented. Here are some!

The first thing I want to talk about is something that comes up in small groups of play of Lysen Co. The idea is one of bridged pairs, which came from a playtesting session in February 2024, with one of my PhD Supervisors.

In this version of Lysen Co, and this is worth mentioning because this idea persists even to now, is an emergent mechanic I didn’t quite recognise in the design at first. Here’s the setup; you have a two player game of Lysen Co. In a two player game, the deck flips the card to start the trick, and the leader of the trick chooses up or down; then people contribute into the trick until the trick hits 5 cards, and the trick is flipped over to check.

In Lysen Co, a trick passes if more than half of the cards in it are kept, and you see if cards are kept if they follow a Stalin Sort. A Stalin Sort works by going from the starting number and counting in the direction and then dropping anything from the list that’s out of order. If the leading number is, for example, 1, counting up, and then the cards after it are 3, 8, 5, 12, then the 3 is kept, the 8 is kept, but the 5 is out of order. The sort drops it, and that means the list is 1, 3, 8, 12, and you only had to do one parse. Thus the power of a Stalin Sort.

What my supervisor found is that in these small games, pairs of cards which are very close together, or very far apart, represented a lot of power in this game. Since only two cards need to be kept after the original card, if you can guarantee a pair, then you control the trick, and you can make it so none of your opponent’s cards are likely to get in.

Here’s the simplest example. Let’s start again with our flipped card of 1 and counting up. If in my hand, I have 50 and 51, and I play first, I can almost completely eliminate your ability to land any cards; I put my 50 on top of the 1, then you place a card, and I place my 51 on top of the stack and you place whatever. The flip over then goes 1, 50, some number that probably isn’t higher than 50, and I know it can’t be 51, so it gets dropped. Then 51, which gets kept, and you have only one possible card that could be in that last spot.

That’s one kind of bridged pair, and it locks a player out of any cards when you can make it happen. In a larger game, this strategy fails. In a three player game, you may be able to contribute two cards to a trick if you lead the trick, but only after two other people add to the trick, and if you do something that locks both of them out, they can team up against you and cooperate to punish you for your hubris. The players form a type of control mechanism on your options.

Another type of bridged pair, which works better when you move to the three-player game, is the extremes. If you have a two numbers near extremes – 1, or 52 – then you can reliably force both numbers into the trick in second place. You lead with one, then you count in the direction of the other, and you can ignore what the other two players do, since you’re ‘closing’ the trick with the other part of the pair.

Thing is, this means these pairs are most valuable to use on your own turn, and cards that can turn into this kind of pair are really valuable to hold onto in your off turns. You’re not just playing cards to try and force them into tricks, or to lump traitors on people, you’re aiming to try and sculpt your hand for these pairs. And this is a really interesting puzzle because at the time I was genuinely unsure if anyone wanted that kind of strategic depth in the game.

I found it novel. Most playtesters were more interested in something else, but this kind of play option told me that there was strategic depth for players who wanted to outwit and outplay other people. And any time the game introduces or exposes more complexity, there’s always the question of ‘hey, do I want this?’ As it is, the audience for my games don’t tend to express themselves as proudly competitive (outside of the audience for You Can’t Win).

Another moment, another time. I know I’ve spoken about it in the past, but I had this thread on Mastodon where I talked about revising the card face. I think this thread is a really good resource for all sorts of examinations of choices I was making, but most significantly is interesting because of how it shows me resisting the problem of the font being ambiguous around 6 and 9.

I know this didn’t just happen on Mastodon. I know this because Fox was in the room with me and we spoke about it, and then we spoke about it more and I kept trying to find good explanations for why, actually, the ambiguity wasn’t a problem, actually. After all, the 6 and 9 were never going to be the most significant digit (the ‘1’ in ‘12’ for example). Setting aside this is silly, because this is a game where the gap between 36 and 39 is in fact, quite important, this is a good data point because eventually I came to the conclusion I was just wrong.

Another thing that had to change in Lysen Co was the density of traitors. Back in that playtesting experience with my PhD supervisor, I felt that traitors were perhaps ‘a bit much.’ Playing with my family a few weeks later, I felt that they were definitely too dense when spread around a group of four players. I wound up peeling away 8 of the traitors, pulling them down from 15 (about a quarter of the cards) to 7 (about an 8th of the cards).

This family playtest also showed me what the game looks like when the players aren’t interested in competing and just want to build their own groups. They don’t think to talk to one another – ‘hey, if I play a 38, can you use that?’ – even though the rules don’t bar communication. But they did apologise as they played traitors into each others’ tricks, claiming ‘I didn’t have any other choice,’ and even took plays that wasted their hands, just to burn traitors out of their hands and let them get closer to a version of the creative, building game they wanted to play.

That is the same period where I realised that the card faces had problems that needed to be sorted for ‘order’ – I realised that when you flip the stack over, it can be easy to lose track of whether you’re counting up or down and in what direction. That meant adding the line to the game to make the stack-flip work better.

These are just some experiences that I feel needed documenting! They existed in scattered notebooks, but now they’re on the internet for general access!

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Dev Pile 2025-06 — Starter Kit

Making dev piles is a new experience for the blog in that they are explicitly deliberately timely. Where most of the work on this blog is thrown weeks, sometimes months in advance if it doesn’t fit neatly in a single spot, I am trying to make sure I write any given Dev Pile article covering the ‘week before’ the article goes up. This is a new kind of work for me, and it’s necessitated working ahead.

The week this article is being ‘written in’ is the week after Cancon. I had a plan for this week: I was going to spend the week writing an article developing the game dev I did, at cancon, in the dull periods at the table between the sales. Thing is, this year, that did not happen – Cancon was pretty much completely constant, so much so that the first day I didn’t even notice I never pulled out my notebook and what notes did get taken during the whole event were surface, or sketching out some minor ideas.

Therefore instead of a single intense focus here, this is going to be something of a hello and hey, here’s how to get started article about game making, tools, and prototyping.

Who Can Make Games?

You can make games. I can make games. Anyone who wants to can make games. The access you have to industrial scale production equipment to make the game you’re designing into something that looks like conventional product is a little more attainable than you may think, thanks to modern tools.

The core of you making games is this: Can you explain a set of rules to another player that let them understand how to play the game?

Great, then you’ve made a game. The next step is working out how to make that game the kind of game you want it to be. And to paraphrase what Adam Savage once said, the difference between doing game development and screwing around is just writing things down.

Tools

First things first, if you have a tool you like for any of the stated purposes, then you should use the tool you like. The tools I describe here should all be free, but that can make them less convenient in ways you may not like.

To write rulebooks, I use LibreOffice. This is a text editor in the same vein as Pages and Word, and much like Google Docs. We’ve pretty much solved ‘writing in a document for a computer user to read’ as a format, and that format has been kinda the same for thirty years. Notably, a formal editor like this lets you do tables and give texts formatting entries like heading styles, which means you don’t have to work to translate that stuff to a website like a wordpress content management system. Under the hood, these two things know how to talk to one another.

Notepad is a valuable tool as well for when you need ‘scrap’ text – no formatting, just some numbers or the like, but literally anything will do here.

Almost inevitably any given game design I have will need a spreadsheet. Sometimes a spreadsheet lets me present a skeleton of a game, with say, a sheet of 52 entries that just indicate the information on a card’s face. That means I use LibreCalc, but I only started using that seven months ago, when I learned about the IFS function. The version of Excel I was using from 2007 didn’t have this ‘new’ functionality, and I found that very useful. You may ask: How often do you need ‘IFS’ in game development and the answer is never. There are definitely thihngs I can use spreadsheets for, but these functions are not super necessary.

To do visual editing I use GIMP, pronounced ‘noo-imp,’ because gimp is a silly word to use in everyday conversation and it has worn its welcome out in my tongue. GIMP is a program that takes some getting used to, but the heart of what it is is a powerful photoshop-level program that puts almost everything it has directly under your control, including warp tools, healing tools, stamp tools and other simple filters. I will usually use GIMP to generate a template file or example for how a card should look, and then, when I want to put those cards into a file to make a pdf for printing, I turn to…

Scribus! Scribus is my layout and DTP program that I avoid using in every situation I can. I dislike Scribus interface a lot, and as a result, I route around it – I try to make sure that if I’m doing something in a design that Scribus ‘could’ do, I will ensure that Scribus is the only thing that can do it, and if something else can do it, I’ll do it that way. This is a combination of familiarity and convenience: Scribus is by no means a bad program, I’m sure, but I don’t like using it and it feels very easy to break things, which means when I do use it, I’m probably using it ‘wrong,’ and a Scribus expert would want to correct my technique.

For making simple slideshow videos, where I just show a thing, talk about it, and move on, I use the program OBS, which you can use for rules tutorials or explainers. OBS has its own ability to do slides – which you can make in a slideshow program like Google Slides or powerpoint or Prezi if you like – and then you talk over it, advancing the slides in OBS. It’s a very powerful, very flexible tool, but I can understand if it’s a bit overwhelming to start with.

If you want to record audio for your game, which is a cool thing to do, I use Audacity. It’s a simple audio program if you’re just using it for its basic functions, but it can be great if (for example) you want to record audio diaries of your creation process.

Also, mixed in with this is, cardboard, paper, scissors and glue. Playing cards need a standardised form so you can make a ‘blank’ deck of cards by taking an ordinary deck of cards and putting large, white, laundry stickers on each face, ‘wiping’ it so you can write what you want on the face.

Art Though?

I use free art where I can. There’s a lot of art assets, paid and free over on itch.io, which you can definitely use to make your game work look more interesting than base. And of course…

Bandaid tearing off time,

There are free image generators that you can use if you are comfortable with that. My advice is that you should only ever use generators for ‘zero value’ forms of media; that is, nothing you intend to sell and nothing you intend to use as identifying for yourself; don’t use a generator for a logo for your identity or brand, for example, because that’s uncopyrightable and then someone can just copy it. Even if they don’t, the fact they can undermines the copyright value of designing your own logo and title.

But yeah, image generators are available online. When I need an image for an example, the one I recommend using is dezgo, because it doesn’t require a login, doesn’t require you to pay money, and all it asks of you is time to let it finish working. You’re not going to get timely bulk media out of it, but that means, in my mind, that any artwork it generates is going to be worth scrutinising and editing to make it more appropriate to your needs. This is part of a greater conversation, but for now, the important thing is that if you’re going to use generative tools you need to make sure you recognise what they’re bad at and what they’re bad for.

Getting Started?

Alright, you have some tools to make what you have in mind more possible. What I recommend you do, and I will delve more into this later in the week, is make a prototype, and then, once you have the prototype, look at it seriously.

You’re going to have to get your head around the question what do I like without asking the followup question why at first. What is it about your prototype that satisfies you? What would you change if you could? Why isn’t it satisfying to you, what about it makes you concerned. Are there things you haven’t thought about because of biases you have? Is it a game you can’t play with one hand?

The point is the prototype marks the point you start finding out. You don’t need a perfect game to prototype – indeed, I have a lot of very ugly games as prototypes and I think those ugly prototypes work really well as a place to start working out what to do next.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Dev Pile 2025-11 — Blood And Bones

Starting next week, I will be in a classroom with a bunch of students talking about ideation and experimentation. That’s going to involve some generative tools and showing them ways that they can use those tools to launch off ideas. My plan is to take them the skeleton of Moonshiners and show them the way that these tools can be used to generate the templates of card faces. Then, when I have those concept assets generated, I can show them the steps I go through to take those ideas and make them into my own.

The aim here is to demonstrate the use of these tools as a kind of word calculator. I use Excel to do math for me, and I use it to generate random things. I use texture libraries and public domain art, I know that there is a value to having convenient things to prime the pump, to set up a template.

Anyway, because I have Moonshiners in a skeletal form, and I want to use that class exercise to demonstrate the process on that skeleton, what I’m going to do this week is talk a bit about progress on Bloodwork.

LaunchTableTop is my current toolkit for game making. This means that I have a good framework for volume of cards I can jam in a box, and, indeed, the box itself. I can look at the example of Cafe Romantica, our game they’ve printed, and use that as my framework for how many pieces I want to go into a box. That’s about 120 cards, and some tokens.

Bloodwork is meant to be an asymmetrical game with symmetrical pieces. That is, the players are both playing clans of vampires, and Old Vampires and Young Vampires treat their resources very differently. The Old Vampires have institutional power and can carry resources from turn to turn, with a slowly growing base of power. They’re supposed to win end games, but also take some time ‘waking up,’ while Young Vampires have to recruit and construct themselves out of what’s available. There’s a common area, called the Street, which has resources in it that players can access, but will react differently based on what gang they are.

Stuff in Bloodwork is meant to be therefore, just a set of player mats, showing the nature of your gang and how to play them, fundamentally:

There’s a vampire that’s a multi-level marketing scam, arranging its cards in a pyramid. The start of the game, this player takes 24 cards, and deals them out face-down in front of them. Each turn, they take one of these cards and flip it face up, then takes an action based on what’s visible in that tier for that clan. Originally, this was going to rely on dice rolls to trigger cascades in the organisation. They still care about what’s in the street, though, because while they can’t recruit, any thralls in the pyramid can be swapped with Vampires in the Street, and, they can exploit figures in the Street to get bonus actions.

There’s a vampire that’s running a cryptocurrency scam. They have a resource that drags Thralls out of the Street automatically, and they follow one of four different fake currencies they have going on. At the beginning of their turn, their weakest cryptocurrency (with the fewest thralls) collapses, losing all its thralls and that’s the amount of resources they get to work with that turn. They have to spend resources to establish a new cryptocurrency to call Thralls back, and at the end of their turn, these thralls are dealt out at random between their currencies.

Then there’s the vampire that’s running a police force. Their organisation is a single line. Every turn, they pick a card in their line to ‘retire’ and it fires off everything on one side or the other, then slides the rest in place. This means that they have their existing power structure, and it does change and have good or bad days, but it’s just a matter of rearranging who’s in charge.

The idea I’m currently brewing here is the idea that any given game of Bloodwork has to feature an Old vampire and a New Vampire building out of a shared common deck, where the Old Vampire has the victory condition in their deck somehow, and it’s the job of the Young Vampire gang to find it out. That means the Young Vampire can be aggressive and have limited ways to handle being attacked, while the Old Vampire can be defensive and have limited ways to handle doing damage. In a lot of ways I’m borrowing from the concept space of Netrunner with this idea.

In the original form of the game, it was based on Liar’s Dice; players would roll a dice and then tell the truth or lie about what in their tableau fired. But you could lie, and another player could call you out, and if they did call you out, it meant you’d given up paying attention to one of a small pool of victory-point jackpots known as the ancient tombs.

In this new idea, the game becomes straight up head to head, but where Netrunner was a game of asymmetrical pieces with a pre-emptive deckbuild, the Old Vampires get a cache of cards to start with, and they view the street as a place to play, a way to deploy threats. They can rile up vampires on the street, making Young Vampires have to deal with them, or fight them, before they can recruit them. They can deprive the Young Vampires of access to Thralls, and choke off their resources.

That means the game is going to feature these Young/Old playmats, then along with that a collection of 120+ish cards. Of those cards, the majority will be Thralls, Vampires, Resources and Events, and then there will be the return to those Ancient Tombs that the Old Vampires are protecting as a base of their power, for consolidation and control. They’ll have the same back as other cards – and depending on what the Old Vampire is doing, those cards will rest in some space or other that other Vampires can try and attack.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!