Systems & Structures

Much has been made in recent years about the systemic game, a design philosophy where the game is made up of a set of interlocking rules which can interact with each other in unpredictable ways, causing the gameplay to be emergent uniquely for each playing. As the epitome of this, Dwarf Fortress is made almost entirely of these systematic concerns, with the design being such that all pieces are capable of interaction with each other. This is nothing new however, with this basic concept being basic to video games going back to the beginning of games. As the player always interacts with a game by manipulation of its systems, gameplay will always be emergent, even if in a limited number of systems. That glitches have been an accepted part of gaming as far back as games have been played shows this, with those being the unforeseen manipulation of systems present in order to achieve unplanned for effects within a system that was intended to be scripted.

That so much of game creation has been focused on this scripting shows an interesting problem of writing. In the common wisdom of game design, the gameplay is tertiary, an instrument to make the player feel vicarious thrill from, with the game itself being an incomplete movie. The game is structured to a set of corridors which deliver certain cinematographic experiences, cutscene or no. The overall focus for the majority of large developers has been on spending enormous amounts of resources on graphical quality for this reason, to make the script work flawlessly.

Such a focus betrays the same error as the preoccupation with diegetic story that is conventional wisdom among American teaching of Writing. The diegetic story and the writing of the text exist in the same relationship as the systems of a game and its graphics. The graphics exist from the systems, with the graphics being drawn atop hitboxes and mechanics in order to fit within the systemic concerns of the game. The true textual substance of the game is the mechanical concerns, what are the systems, how they interact, etc. The story is the same, a structure emergent from the prose, the systems (themes, ideas) emerging into an overall structure which manifests as a story. All of this is complexity and detail emerging from a singular substrate of the text. All texts are written in a way most directly shown in games, where the single object of the text is expressed into systems (prose, rules, etc) which writes the structure (structure - graphics, story, etc).