I wanted to move to video and use less editing in this AI Generated world and so I decided to make videos instead. I hope you all enjoy the new format and that it inspires you to learn the craft and not generate the outcome...
Tag: systemic game design
The Design Filter: How To Tell Whether More Content Actually Makes A Better Game
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
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
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
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...
The Avatar Isn’t The Character. Identity Comes From Action
Games spend enormous amounts of time establishing who the player character is. There are biographies, costumes, cinematic introductions, tragic childhoods, complicated family trees, heroic musical themes, and enough lore to explain why somebody has worn one particular shoulder pad for the last three hundred years. All of that can help define a character, but it can't make the player feel like that character. A detective doesn't become believable because they wear a trench coat. A survivor doesn't become vulnerable because their clothes are dirty...
Good Friction Makes The Fantasy Stronger
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...
If Players Can’t Read The State, They Can’t Play The System
A game can track hundreds of meaningful states, but if players can’t see what changed or why, systemic depth feels random. Here’s how to make simulation readable without turning the screen into a spreadsheet...
When Everything Affects Everything: The Overconnection Problem
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...
Process Trust: Why Believable Games Need Accountable Systems
Players are getting better at reading the process behind games. They notice when a world behaves consistently. They notice when a studio can explain what it made, why it made it, and who is accountable for the result. They notice when a mechanic keeps its promise, when a rule survives new situations, and when a production claim sounds like something the team can actually defend. They also notice when a game asks for trust it has not earned. That is why production is becoming part of design. Not in a boring spreadsheet way. In a player-facing way. The tools a team uses, the systems it protects, the shortcuts it accepts, the rules it keeps consistent, and the people it allows to own creative decisions all shape what the player eventually believes about the game. This is process trust...