Tag: Immersive Design

The Design Filter: How To Tell Whether More Content Actually Makes A Better Game

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

BioWare’s closure raised a difficult industry question for me last week: what happens when we become better at counting production output than recognising design judgment? This is the question at a smaller, practical scale. When a proposed feature arrives, how do we tell whether it belongs in the game? I use a design filter. It asks what fantasy the feature supports, what decision it creates, how the game responds and whether the existing rules can support it. Those questions won’t make production easy. They will stop a team from mistaking an expanding feature list for a developing game...

Why Persistent State Makes Player Actions Matter In Systemic Games

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

A lot of game worlds have the memory of somebody walking into a room and immediately forgetting why they’re there. The player breaks into a secure facility, empties every cupboard, knocks out twelve guards, destroys the security system and leaves through a window. Five minutes later, the guards have returned to their original positions, the building is operating normally and somebody has apparently restocked every cupboard during an active emergency. Games can’t remember everything the player does. Recording every moved chair, opened drawer and disappointed shopkeeper would become expensive, complicated and a wonderful way to make the save system begin quietly smoking. However, a world should remember the actions that matter to its fantasy. When behaviour changes the state of the simulation, decisions gain weight...

Coherence Is Expensive: Why Consistent Game Rules Require Disciplined Systemic Scope

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

Systemic games are often described as though the solution is simply to connect everything to everything else. Fire affects grass. Water conducts electricity. Sound attracts enemies. Objects have weight. Characters remember what happened. Weather changes visibility. Food spoils. Doors react to pressure. Somebody suggests adding wind, and suddenly the engineering team is explaining why every loose object in the game now needs an opinion about aerodynamics. These relationships can create remarkable depth. When rules remain consistent across different situations, players begin treating the world as something they can understand. They form expectations, test ideas and carry knowledge into new encounters. A mechanic stops being a button they press and becomes part of a larger model of how the world behaves...

The Fear Of Letting Go: Why Game Designers Need To Author Rules, Not Outcomes

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

Games are expensive, complicated and held together by an alarming combination of specialised technology, production planning and at least one tool that everybody is frightened to update. When a team spends months creating an encounter, cinematic, environment or narrative sequence, it naturally wants the player to experience that work correctly. The problem begins when protecting every authored moment prevents the player from meaningfully participating in the game. The player can move, aim, select dialogue and activate objects, but they can’t genuinely construct an outcome. Their role is to confirm a sequence that has already been decided. Systemic design asks designers to let go of some direct control. Instead of authoring every solution, we author rules, relationships, spaces and constraints that allow players to form solutions for themselves...

Identity Needs A Verb: Why Playable Characters Are Defined By Action, Not Backstory

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

Games spend a lot of time telling us who a character is. We get biographies, costumes, voice lines, tragic backstories, cinematic introductions, and enough lore to explain why somebody has been angrily wearing the same shoulder pad for three hundred years. That information can describe a character, but it can’t make the player feel like them. Playable identity comes from action. If the game says I’m a detective, I need to investigate. If it says I’m a survivor, I need to manage scarcity. If it says I’m a thief, I need to observe routines, identify weaknesses, and quietly panic whenever a guard changes direction for absolutely no reason...

Good Friction Makes The Fantasy Stronger

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

A lot of games are designed around removing friction. Movement becomes faster. Failure becomes softer. Resources become plentiful. Objectives become impossible to miss. Characters automatically grab ledges, recover health, identify important objects, and politely solve half the problem before the player has finished working out what the problem was. These decisions can improve accessibility, pacing, and usability. That doesn’t make them bad. The problem begins when removing friction also removes the behaviour that makes the fantasy meaningful...

Games Shouldn’t Aim For Realism. They Should Aim For Believability

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

A lot of games are trying very hard to look real. Skin stretches over simulated muscles. Rain collects on individually modelled surfaces. Characters have pores, eyelashes, fabric fibres, dental records, and enough facial detail to make you wonder whether the art team has accidentally created a second human being. None of that automatically makes the experience believable. A game can reproduce reality with extraordinary accuracy and still feel artificial the moment a character slides across the floor, an enormous creature changes direction without transferring its weight, or an object that appears physically important refuses to react to anything around it. The image looks real, but the behaviour underneath it breaks the illusion...

When Everything Affects Everything: The Overconnection Problem

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

A strong systemic game isn’t one where everything connects to everything else. It’s one where the right systems connect in ways players can understand, predict, and use. When too many consequences propagate at once, depth becomes noise...

Gameplay Exhaustion: Why More Content Is Making Your Game Feel Empty

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

There’s a growing issue in modern game design, and it isn’t a lack of content. It’s the opposite. Games are full of things to do, but very little of it carries weight. Players move from task to task, clearing objectives, ticking off systems, progressing through experiences that feel large on the surface but hollow underneath. This is what I call gameplay exhaustion. It’s the point where the player is still playing, but no longer thinking. At the start, everything works. The player is learning patterns, testing systems, figuring out how things behave. That learning phase is where engagement is strongest. But over time, that process stops. The player begins to predict outcomes. They recognise the structure. The game becomes readable in the wrong way. Not understandable, but repetitive. That’s where exhaustion begins...

Generative Resilience: Why Good Failure Keeps Players Engaged

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

Failure is usually treated as something to reduce, smooth out, or remove. But there’s a specific kind of failure that does the opposite. It keeps players engaged, focused, and willing to push further. This is what I call generative resilience. It occurs when failure is produced by a system that behaves consistently, where outcomes emerge from the player’s own decisions rather than from arbitrary punishment or scripted outcomes....