M.D.A or a Formal Aproach to Game Design

I first intended to write about M.D.A in the previous post, but I got to the conclusion it might be to long so I'll continue in this here. So: Allons-y ! 


M.D.A. What does M.D.A stand for? M.D.A or Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics, a framework developed during the "Game Developers Conference" San Jose 2001-2004, for the purpose of creating a bridge between game design and game development, criticism and research. It was created so that game designers, coders, artists, researchers could work together on the same grounds.

Games are created by designers and teams of developers to be used by players. The difference between games and other entertainment products is in the way the game will be perceived by the audience. Those who produce the games have only the vaguest idea on how their finished product's consumption is unpredictable. The string of events that take place during  the game-play and the outcome of that is unknown until the product is completely finished. The game can change it's state, purpose or design anywhere on the line of production, the outcome never being sure, until the game is out on the shelf.

The M.D.A framework brings a formal  approach to games design by breaking games into their basic, distinct components  : Rules > System > Fun  and establishing their design correspondents :  Mechanics > Dynamics > Aesthetics. And  now we're back where we started from. What is M.D.A?

Well taking them one by one :

• Mechanics :  The component of the game that describes the rules of the game. The algorithms, the code, the data, the parameters on which the game runs. This is the only part of the game framework of which the game designer is in control. He is the one that decides what rules the game should have and how it should run. 
• Dynamics :   The component of the game that shows what happens when the player interacts with the game. It also shows the interaction of the rules with each other and the choices that have to be made based on the rules of the game. 
• Aesthetics :  The component of the game that shows the players reactions to the game play. It's the emotional interaction when playing games.  

So this is M.D.A. Now what should we do with them? 

As LeBlanc had it "Each component of the M.D.A framework can be thought of as a lens or a view of the game - separate, but casually linked" (LeBlanc, 2004)  

The M.D.A can be viewed from two points of view : The designers and The players. 

The designer sees the game as a series of mechanics that gives rise to a dynamic system, which in turn leads to aesthetics which are specific to every player. 

The player sees the game as an aesthetic experience which has been born of dynamics observed throughout the game-play, dynamics which derive from operable mechanics. 

When working with games as a whole it's important to view the game as a whole, from both perspectives: that of the players and that of the designers; because one change in any of the components can change the whole game. Also it's best to take consideration the player the game is made for, because it inspires experience driven design, as opposed to feature driven design . 

In his paper, LeBlanc started discussing M.D.A from the player's point of view, with Aesthetics. 

Aesthetics in a game is all about "fun". What is fun and enjoyable for a player. But fun is such a relative and personal term that it's very difficult to use in a proper discussion about designing a game. So he points us to a more direct vocabulary, using a taxonomy as an example : 

• Sensation : Games as a sense-pleasure
• Fantasy: Game as make-believe
• Narrative : Game as drama
• Challenge :  Game as obstacle course
• Fellowship: Games as social framework
• Discovery : Games as uncharted territory
• Expression : Games as self-discovery
• Submission :  Games as pass-time 

(this reminds me of the taxonomy he wrote that was included in Costikyan's article...  ) 

Each game pursues multiple types of aesthetic experiences but usually tends to put one above the other and making it the one a game revolves around. Taking for example multi-player games are mainly revolving around Fellowship, even if they have Fantasy, Discovery, Challenge & Submission as adjacent aesthetic experiences. Each game has it's own unique pattern of aesthetic experiences, not two of them alike, even if they have the same ones, they are still in different quantities. 

Following this taxonomy, we can assess different Aesthetic Models. These different types of models can help one asses the types of game-play dynamics and mechanics. Aesthetic Models are used to observe player experience and observations, to see what is fun for them and this way realise what makes a game more or less interesting. 

Dynamics work to create Aesthetic experiences. Challenges can be created by adding time challenges and enemies. Fellowships can be encouraged by introducing social interaction across certain members of a session or supplying a series of objectives that are achievable by team-work and cooperation.

Expression comes from dynamics that encourage the individual user to leave his or her mark upon the game like systems made for buying, earning or designing game related items and dramatic tension comes from dynamics that encourage a state of tension, a release and a denouement.

As we talked about the Aesthetics of a game, the Dynamics also need to be put together into models. This way, by developing models that describe and predict game-play dynamics, some common game designing problems could be avoided. Some of the models used in assessing dynamics are the dice throw and the calculation of probabilities of certain roles, positive and negative feedback loops, fog of war or pseudo-feedback.

Using this dynamic models, games can be re-iterated, making the game more or less interesting, more or less fun.

Mechanics are defined by the various actions, behaviours and control mechanism given to the player withing a game context. The mechanics are the overall support of the game dynamics. Adjusting the mechanics of a game helps us fine-tune the game's overall dynamics. Tuning the basic rules of a game can help bring players back in the game, can shorten or lengthen a game session, and otherwise hinder progress or raise competition.

Following the M.D.A structure, game design seems to take on a more logical path of evolution, having a clear start and a clear finish and hopefully a better product at the end.

                      "Play is to be played exactly because it isn't serious; it frees us       from seriousness."

Computer Games - Vocabulary and Tools, part 2

F.A.D.T & M.D.A

Now, continuing from the last post about "Computer Games Vocabulary and Tools". In this last post I've written about the appropriate vocabulary used when talking about game designing and what tools are the best to use. I talked about a vocabulary applied to the gaming world now the tools used should be brought in the discussion.

So, abbreviations ... why do they stand for?  F.A.D.T or "Formal Abstract Design Tools" and a more detailed form : M.D.A or "Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics". So F.A.D.T first and then M.D.A. Why? Because I consider that MDA are tools and to talk about them first we must talk about tools in a general-ish way.

F.A.D.T - Formal Abstract Design Tools by Doug Church

So what a computer game is really made of? Some would say art, some would say code, some would say ideas. I would say that  all of them. And what puts them together is: design. The putting together of  ideas, art and code  across genres is the work of designers. But sadly, "design" is the least understood aspect of computer game creation. It's the aspect that puts together art, code, levels, sound into what players experience while playing. As Doug Church puts it "The Design is the Game; without it you would have a CD full of data, but no experience for the player"


Also it has the most problems evolving. There have been made discoveries in terms of technology, art and sound creation, data input and output, better equipment and better problem solving, but not in design. And that is because not enough is done to put together and build on past discoveries, sharing the concepts behind successes and apply lessons learned into one domain or genre to another.  Even as an academic domain it's still a confused about what it wants. Most courses fixate only on coding, while other only on art.

The primary problem with the evolution of design is the lack of a common design vocabulary. Going back to the last blog post I did, about Costikyan's article, as he said that the main thing Computer Games Design needs is a proper vocabulary to be used when discussing and analysing this topic.
As Church has it: "Most professional disciplines have a fairly evolved language for discussion ... In contrast game designers could disscuss <<fun>> or <<not fun>> but often the analysis stops there."
Following this point, you could say that a conference between game designers from different companies, teams, genres would just sound like a huge jumble of gibberish. To be able to communicate precisely and effectively, designers need a form of understanding each other. To do that, there's a need for shared language of game designers. And now we're back from where Greg Costikyan started.

Doug Church believes that a clear vocabulary could be discovered by analysing the tools that are used to build games with. But even though you have this tools available to you, as a game designer will have to be able to come up the idea for the game, what is fun, what's the game about and what goals it has.
He sees the vocabulary as a tool to pick apart games and set aside the pieces of  the game's design, that resonate with your idea and your vision of the game and refine them so they can be applied to your game.
You should carefully analyse what you take from a game and throw it into your game, because a game won't be made good if you stuff it up with lots of stuff that you like, making the game about just one aspect.

He gives examples of how this should be done by analysing games that give good examples of game design. The games he talks about is Mario 64 and Final Fantasy VIII. The way to undergo a critical analysis has about two phases: Prescribe the formal proprieties of the game. Then try to understand why the designer choose this particular set of elements and structure, what would've happens if they have chosen differently.

The tools or F.A.D.T's found in Mario are :

• Perceivable Consequence :  which is a clear reaction from the game world to the actions of the players.  The players are capable to assess what will happen with the game world, given the effect of their actions. This way they know to expect a blow coming from around the corner, not just getting randomly killed, loosing the progress in the game. 
• Intention: making a plan, taking into consideration the player's actions in response to the current situation in the game world and one's understanding of the game play options. 

Another game to which he refers to and in which he finds one last important F.A.D.T  is Final Fantasy VIII:

• Story :  the narrative thread, whether designer-driven or player-driven,that binds events together and drives the player forward toward completion of the game

Other tools that he talks about are : Cooperation, Conflict, Confusion. 

All this tools are used to help the game designer understand different aspects of the game's design and to maximize the players feeling of involvement and self . There are more tools than the ones explained by Doug Church, but the ones presented by him are the basic ones to understand the vocabulary of game designers.

"A good game has to have a "fun" core, which is a 

one sentence description of why it is fun"

Paul Reiche III - Compute Magazine, January 1992.

...

But, for the moment I believe that this is okay and I will cover M.D.A in a future post or rendition of this post.

Bibliography exercise

Becker, A. (2008) “The Royal Game of Ur” in Finkel, ed. pp. 11-15.

Costikyan, G. (2002) I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Game. Proceedings of Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference, ed. Frans Mäyr,  Tampere: Tampere University Press.

LeBlanc, M. (2006) Tools for creating dramatic game dynamics. In: The Game Design Reader: A rules of play anthology. MIT.

LeBlanc, M., Hunicke, R. & Zubek, R. (2001) MDA: A formal approach to Game Design and Game Research. In Proceedings of the Challenges in Games AI Workshop, Nineteenth National Conference of Artificial Intelligence.

Newman, J. (2004) Videogames. 1st ed. Routledge.

Salen, K. & Zimmerman, E. (2003) Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. The MIT Press.

Nieborg, D. B., and Van der Graaf, S. (2008) "The mod industries?" European Journal of Cultural Studies, 11(2), pp.177-195.

Turner, M.C., 2006. GAMES PEOPLE PLAY. Black Enterprise, 36(10), p.53.

Computer Games - Vocabulary and Tools

We're half way through the 1st semester, week 6 started this Monday. In the readings we had to... read until now for Rob's module, each author, or authors, wrote about how we should look upon games from a designer's point of view, what vocabulary is appropriate and what tools are the best to use in trying to design a good game. I'll write about this readings in this post and my opinion on them.

So starting with Greg Costikyan's article "I Have No Words & I Must Design : Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games".  
As the title goes, we are first introduced to what this article is about, and that is the creating of a general vocabulary for Games Design and coming up with a coherent definition for what a games is.
He starts his article talking about how games designers don't have an eligible vocabulary when it comes to talking about or analysing a game. But only have very vague or general terms on how we asses games : "good gameplay", "bad gameplay".  And I have to say I totally agree with him. Taking into consideration that terms like "good" and "bad" are as personal and subjective as terms can get, it's impossible to talk about games on a common ground. I learned that as a games designer you have to be able to look at a game from an objective point of view. By doing this you'll be able to properly analyse it and maybe reiterating it.

But to be able to have a vocabulary, you must first be able to define the object of study for which you create a vocabulary. And that would mean defining what a game is. And by defining a game, you have to know what makes a game.

He first talks about interaction and goals and calls in information from "Art of Computer Games Design - Chris Crawford (1982)". Chris Crawford talks about separating puzzles from what he calls games on the fact that puzzles are static and don't imply a direct form of interaction with the player, unlike games who change with every action the player does. Here Costikyan states that not all puzzles are like that. Of course there are puzzles like a crossword, which is just that, a puzzle because it has no true interaction with the person completing it, and any decision taken may never affect the outcome or the "path". Whereas many puzzles are part of games. We've all played puzzle-adventure games. One of my favourite is "Syberia", both the first and second game, a game whose sole objective is the solution of puzzles to get to the end of a mystery. Thus the winning condition is a consequence of puzzle solving.

If you look closely enough you can see that every game has some degree of puzzle solving. You can't separate puzzles from games entirely because they consist of a major part in user-game interaction. Always this puzzle solving tend to lead to a goal, most games having an explicit win condition.
But to reach this goal and truly have a "fun" element in your game, the player has to experience some kind of struggle. This is required to make the user feel like he has a major role in the story and that all the puzzle solving and decision making he had to put up, gather towards a finish. The huge variety of games found on the market deliver a lot of types of goals: straight to the point goals, vague goals, multiple goals or user-made up goals.
But all of this has to be included in a structure. Interaction of the games own rules, components and software help create a structure in which people can play. It helps to think of a structure as an ecosystem, a complex, interacting system that does not dictate outcomes, but guides behaviour through the need of achieving a single goal.

And so we get to the first part of Costikyan's definition of games : "A game is an interactive structure that requires players to struggle towards goals".

Following this line of thought, we can notice that a game structure creates it's own meanings within itself . That which is caused by factors inside the system and gains importance within the structure is endogenous to the structure. And so we get to the next component of a game : Endogenous meaning. 


We should first start talking about the fact that a game belongs to fantasy, not reality. Everything that takes place in the game world has value only there. And this is where endogenous meaning takes it's place in the components that are required to make a game. It represents something that has meaning only in the game world and if tried to bring out of the game world it would have no meaning. "Monopoly" money have value only during the game. Take them to the market and try to buy something and the salesman might just politely point out to you that the 100$ note you gave him has no value

. Another example would be found let's say in an MMORPG. Taking "WoW", let's say I've worked my fingers to the bone, levelling up a BloodElf mage, bringing it up to, let's say level 80. And then I get bored of it. So I make a new one and sell this one for either gold coins in the game, or real money. Either way, at this point, I have great prospects and I'm sure I'll get my money. But then I wake up the next morning and suddenly "WoW" does not work any more. The game just crashed forever. Thus the character I've put up on the internet with the hope of earning something of it, has lost it's value. It's just a character drawing. This is what endogenous meaning means. This also applies to game mechanics and dynamic, because if I say "Wingardium Laviosa" while pointing a stick at my sofa, it won't suddenly start floating around the room like in "Harry Potter" (the game)... (or the movie)... ^_^

But this can, if used properly, can work both ways. This way real elements and happenings in real life can be given endogenous meaning in games that re-contextualize reality in a game. Taking the "Age of Empires" series as example, the game starts on the basis of military campaigns in Europe, Asia , Africa and later the American continent, dating from the Ancient Roman Empire, to the Mongol Invasion, Medieval wars, Colonial wars, Spanish conquering of Central and South America and early Modern age. This game starts from real facts but let's the player decide the outcome of the fights, being able to alter history while in the game world. This way Napoleon might just conquer the whole of Europe.

And so we might just say that we've covered the whole of Greg Costikyan's game definition : "A game is an interactive structure of endogenous meanings that requires players to struggle towards goals". 

But he covers two more aspects in his article, those being the categorising of games as "Interactive Entertainment"  and includes Marc LeBlanc's taxonomy of game pleasures.

So once we've looked upon this definition, we should ask ourselves : If games are a form of interactive entertainment, what else goes in this category? Costikyan explains very succinctly that only games should be deemed as " Interactive Entertainment"  due to the fact that, to be a form of interactive entertainment, you require both a structure and an endogenous meaning. The form of interactive entertainment must contextualize itself and must provide meaning that makes sense in the context shown. To be part of the "Interactive Entertainment"  the product must prove to be a form of entertainment, that requires people to actively interact with it towards the achievement of a goal, and as far as Costikyan goes, only games fulfil all this requirements simultaneously.

Now that a definition for games has been brought up on stage, a definition which brings insight to what is required to create a compelling game, it's good to about what people do enjoy about a game. What makes that game tick for them. And here we get to the one part that I think is one of the most important, a taxonomy, in this case: LeBlanc's taxonomy of game pleasures. Why do I think this is one of the most important parts to take into consideration  when making a game? Because I believe that one of the most important thing is knowing what your audience expects of you. This is backed up by a paragraph in "Beginning Game Level Design" by John Field and Marc Scattergood, which I recently started reading. It goes something like: "They (the games designers) loose sight of the core fundamental which is that games are about one thing, entertaining people. This is the first and most important thing to think about when you're making any kind of game, whether is a teensy mod or a huge, 250-hour RPG. In making a game you become an entertainer, not a puppet master bent on world domination. As such your primary concern should be the happiness of your audience. You have to make your game fun." (2005, pg2).

In his taxonomy, LeBlanc brings forward 8 elemnets:

• Sensation : which is provided by good video and audio, but also tactile sensation and for some games even muscle pleasure, like in sports games or dance games ("Dance Dance Revoution"). But even though video and audio elements, which are the most commonly used to achieve sensory pleasure, they must not be seen as the main component of the game, because they might just be a way to hide a dull game behind beautification aspects. 
• Fantasy :  And by this he doesn't just mean let loose the orcs and elves and wobbly mages  in the midst of human civilization. But setting the game in a time and place which does not belong in reality. And if this means creating a whole new universe in which your game would take place, with it's mandatory elvish-gibberish-made-up language and a whole new history that dates back to the fall of the Gods and goes all the way to the creation of the steam-punk toothbrush, you'd better start writing.
• Narrative : As we all know a good game has also a good story, and a good story is mandatory for keeping a player immersed in the game world; be it your usual A through Climax to get to B story, or a user made-up story such as in D&D. But narrative doesn't mean just attachment to a story, it means creating a sense of drama in your game, going through tension building, then a climax and finishing with a sense of accomplishment. 
• Challenge : Which could be considered Costikyan's equivalent for struggle. This is viewed as a must in every game, because games might just be able to limp around without graphics of fantasy or narrative, but a player who will not encounter any challenge while playing the game, then they will just throw it away in a dark corner and let the dust settle on it. 
• Fellowship : This is close, if not exactly what players experience while playing an online game. More generally, shared intense experiences breed a sense of fellowship. For gamers, it’s often the games they've  played. Even offline, where the experience is not shared directly, shared experiences provide points of contact with other people, and reasons to feel friendly toward them.
• Discovery : This relates to both the discovery of the hidden game world, and the reveal of information from one player to the other. Like in playing "Poker", "Blind Dice" or I would say "Magic: The Gathering" would be a very good example, because there are so many different Magic cards that if you play a lot, you’re always encountering one you hadn't seen before or hadn't battled against it before.
• Expression: By this LeBlanc refers to self-expression through game. Be it the construction of your character in an RPG, the construction of your sims in "The Sims", or of your own world in "Spore", you add a little bit, or a little bit more of your looks or personality to the game, thus transforming it into a way of self-expression and also becoming more familiar with your game.
• Masochism : This last one is the one I find the oddest of them all, because it refers to pleasure derived from pain. But then, if you think again it might refer to the inhumanly number of hours spent playing a game, depriving yourself of basic needs, just to level-up your character, or discover a new area or carrying on with a game of D&D late into the night/early into the morning. I'm sure everyone of us has gone through one of this forms of self-torture just for the sake of doing better in the game and this is what I believe LeBlanc was referring  to when he added this to the list. 

                "One of the most difficult tasks people can perform, 

how ever much someone may 

despise it 

is the invention of good games"