Applying Burgun's Lens of Game Design

I recently read Keith Burgun's Game Design Theory, an intriguing manifesto on game design and philosophy. The author argues that reasoned discourse about games requires a shared vocabulary, and to this end, he offers the following hierarchy of interactive systems.

Burgun's hierarchy of interactive systems
(Taken from What Makes a Game?)

Burgun's defines a Game as "a system of rules in which agents compete by making ambiguous decisions." More specifically, these decisions have to be endogenously meaningful in terms of the game mechanics. Whether or not one agrees with his definition is less important, in my opinion, than the fact that a vocabulary helps us move forward in the science of design.¹ 


The hierarchy of interactive systems permits Burgun to explain what he's not talking about: because he wants to address game design, he can cut out problems of interactive system design, puzzle design, and contest design. Many of his game design recommendations echo what others have to say. However, it's Burgun's zealotry that makes his work so valuable: he makes fewer and stronger recommendations. In the introduction, he discusses how he sees his work with relation to other books on game design:

For those who might defend these books by saying that they're only giving readers wiggle room or that they're allowing readers to come to their own conclusions about what games are: readers do not explicitly need to be given permission to do this. Thinking persons will come to their own conclusions, regardless of whether they read something wishy-washy, or something pointed... (Introduction, page xx)

This sets the tone for the rest of his book. He is unapologetic about his philosophy of game design and leaves it to the reader to decide whether they agree or not. In fact, I don't think anyone who is serious about game design could read the book without being either uplifted or offended.

In an attempt to better understand Burgun's philosophy, I decided to apply his lens to some of my work and my students' projects. The following analyses assume familiarity with his philosophy, and while this is best presented in the book, there is an overview in the freely-available Gamasutra article, What Makes a Game?


Morgan's Raid

According to Burgun's lens, Morgan's Raid is a Puzzle² because there is no randomness: a play experience can always be replicated by repeating a series of decisions. The goal of the puzzle is to maximize score, which is themed in the game as Morgan's reputation. The impact of a player's raiding decisions on reputation are not immediately clear: a player must choose all of his orders prior to seeing their combined effect, although Basil Duke does provide thematic hints.

Basil Duke informs the player that he will help explain the puzzle.

There must be a series of decisions that maximizes reputation, but no one on the development team knows what it is. From our observations, groups of players will gladly make it a contest to see who gets the highest score, although their interest in the game wanes well before anyone finds the optimal path.

It is interesting to note that the original Spring Team design for Morgan's Raid involved more interesting behavior of the Union troops who were chasing Morgan, such that this would have made the project a Game. The original plan was for the Union's movement to be like Morgan's, making heuristic decisions in each town in an attempt to capture the player. However, working within our time constraints, we simplified the Union behavior to make them a fixed integer distance from Morgan. This distance is modified by player's decisions but in a fixed and predictable way.


Museum Assistant: Design an Exhibit

Museum Assistant is also a puzzle, albeit one with multiple solutions. Players get themed feedback based on the solution chosen; for example, creating an exhibit with African scientific artifacts from three different periods yields the generated exhibit title, "African Science through the Ages." The themes provide reason for players to try alternate paths, but from a mechanics point of view, one solution is as good as any other.

As with Morgan's Raid, Museum Assistant underwent a design change that resulted in its moving from Game to Puzzle on Burgun's hierarchy. Details of this design are described in my MeaningfulPlay paper, but to summarize, there were systems of input and output randomness that made it so the same series of game actions could produce different results. However, in the major redesign we agreed that we needed one good play experience, and that balancing the ambitious original design was outside of our scope. In terms of Burgun's hierarchy, the team decided to make a good Puzzle rather than a bad Game.


Equations Squared

While the previous two examples are student work, Equations Squared is my own, and it's certainly a Game. The player makes strategic decisions about placement of digits and operations, in terms of which to use and where to place them. Not all sequences are legal equations, and the scoring system rewards more complex equations. There is input randomness: the sequence of digits and operations you receive is different each time you play the game, so you very likely will never play the same game twice.

Auralboros

Auralboros is an experimental make-your-own-rhythm-game toy. You can make the experience as simple, as challenging, or as ridiculous as you want. To this end, Auralboros is simply an Interactive System.

Auralboros encourages players to make their own Contests out of matching keystrokes in rhythm. The system rewards such behavior with visual feedback. There's no ambiguous decisions: you either make and match rhythms or you don't. In fact, a successful strategy to seeing all the visual bells-and-whistles is to spam a single key—a useful debugging technique discovered by co-developer Ryan Thompson. However, this strategy is not much fun, as you end up just making a bad Contest.


EEClone

I still occasionally install and play Every Extend (though it seems the original download site is now gone), usually after explaining to students what an amazing experience it is. EEClone is my academic knockoff, designed to explore and teach how design patterns occur in game engine software.

Like its inspiration and namesake, EEClone is a Game. The timing and orientation of incoming obstacles is not known, and the player has to make meaningful and ambiguous decisions about maneuvering and the timing of explosions in order to succeed. Of all these analyses, this one is the simplest, but it also shows how things that are obviously Games fit nicely into the hierarchy.


Conclusions

Most of my effort the past few years has been on serious games. As I use the term, serious games are those that are designed to have a particular real-world impact on the player. For example, Museum Assistant is designed to encourage players to think about collecting and curating. Applying Burgun's lens to my students' projects gives rise to an intriguing contradiction: serious games need not be "games" at all. However, Museum Assistant is no less successful in meeting its design constraints for its being classified a Puzzle. This is because the real constraint for serious games is serious, not game. It is difficult to say whether or not these projects would better meet their goals (however one defines "better") if they were Games, because this would fundamentally change them. For example, we know that Morgan's Raid could be a better Game if the maps were randomized, but this violates the goal of familiarizing the player with actual Indiana geography.³

The Morgan's Raid and Museum Assistant teams recognized that there were opportunities to make a better game—or from a strict reading of Burgun, to make Systems and Puzzles into Games. Both teams eliminated randomness in the face of time constraints, knowing that balancing games would be much more time-consuming than testing puzzles. This was shared knowledge among the team, although they didn't have Burgun's concise language to communicate the sentiment. In a similar vein, the Auralboros team was aware that we weren't really making a game at all. It is interesting to note that Equations Squared is a Game by Burgun's hierarchy, but it is not a serious game by my own definition. For the player, it is simply supposed to be fun. The serious aspect of it is in the assessment of player's behavior, an assessment conducted by someone outside the magic circle but facilitated by score, badges, and demerits.

Applying Burgun's lens to these projects has helped me to understand his philosophy. However, since much of his philosophy is prescriptive, there is not much extrinsic value in applying the lens to completed projects. That is, I do not think I gained any new insight into these projects, but then again, as an academic, I've already studied them inside and out. I do look forward to having Burgun's philosophy in my utility belt for future design projects, particularly as a lens for identifying and discussing decisions that could alter a project's position in the hierarchy. Next semester, I will be leading an experimental six-credit interdisciplinary game design and development studio, and you can be sure I'll try to keep up my reflective practice here on the blog.

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¹ At MeaningfulPlay, I got into a bit of a debate with a gentleman over the definition of "fun." He argued that a friend's autobiographical game designed around the theme of depression and abuse, in which you decide whether or not to commit fantasized patricide, could not be fun. I said that if it was a game, and if I was using Koster's operational definition of fun as learning and mastery of a system, then it could be fun, though perhaps not in the informal "enjoyment" sense. My point was that if we defined these terms, we can be clear about our meaning and avoid the baggage. He didn't talk to me any more. I tell this story to demonstrate that I am surely in Burgun's design philosophy camp, and that there is a dangerous cultural divide in "game design" that prevents communication across traditions. See also Daniel Cook's excellent essay contrasting secular and mystical approaches to game design.

² As a typographical convention, I will capitalize the layers of Burgun's hierarchy so as to distinguish the layer "Puzzle" from the general use of the word.

³ We are currently conducting an empirical study on the effectiveness of Morgan's Raid, and I will report the results here when we have them.

Auralboros and Global Game Jam 2012

On January 27–29, six of my seminar students and I participated in Global Game Jam 2012. For those who don't know about the annual event, it is a 48-hour period during which people from around the world collaborate to make digital or analog games. All of the artifacts from the jam are made available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA-3.0 license. The closest location to us was in Indianapolis, but we decided to make the trip to Columbus. This was partially to avoid the congestion due to the start of the pre-SuperBowl parties but also to give us some geographical change: putting ourselves in a completely new place allowed us to treat the whole event as a kind of retreat.

After a fun pre-recorded keynote and some comments from game designer, author, and GGJ organizer Ian Schreiber, the theme was announced:

The GGJ2012 Theme

I love the fact that the theme is a picture with deep symbolic and historical meaning. This is, of course, an ouroboros, a word which I only know as a player of Betrayal at House on the Hill.

After everyone had a chance to think for a bit, people began pitching their game ideas. Some were closely tied to literal interpretations of the theme and others to the symbolic meaning of the theme. Many discussions began with the theme but then wandered away. I found the creative challenge to be in capturing the spirit of the theme in a game, especially with respect to the combination of endlessness across generations. Based on this, I pitched an idea for a game with rich audio experience. For the next 42 hours, I worked with Ryan Thompson on what would become known as Auralboros.

Auralboros Logo by Rebecca Austin

You can play the game on the Web, or you can go there indirectly through its GGJ entry. Note that it requires Unity Web Player, which is only available for Windows and Mac OS X, unfortunately. I encourage you to play the game before you read on, lest I give away some of its secrets. There are not many secrets, so you can understand why I'd want to keep them safe.

We decided to use Unity very early in the project. We knew that this would let us easily produce a game that could be hosted on the Web. We also figured that it would be easy to add pizzazz once the core mechanics were done. We invested several hours into the core gameplay sans audio, and it wasn't until midday on Saturday that we realized that Unity's audio API is practically non-existent. To be clear, you can very easily play back audio—including 3D audio—within Unity, but it does not support synthesis. In the end, after painful struggles with my laptop to try to get full-duplex audio to work, we ended up using MuseScore to drop notes onto the staff and then export WAV files. I had hoped to test the game with both chromatic and pentatonic scales, but we never got that far.

I had been looking for an excuse to practice some of the tips in Clean Code, but the truth is that I don't program anywhere near as much as I would like to. Working with Ryan provided a great opportunity. This was also my first time pair-programming. I've been having my students pair-programming for years, but I've always been forced into a "mentor" role rather than a "peer" role. For Auralboros, Ryan and I were simply working together as a team, and I'm happy with the results. He caught a few of my errors, and I caught a few of his. I definitely took the lead on some of the more abstract software design ideas, but none of them were so wild as to be outside of his understanding once we had them down.

We had the core game experience working by early Sunday, and so we turned our attention to beautification. I knew from early in the design that I wanted to have feedback based on a player's matching their own sounds. That is, Auralboros does not force you to do anything specific with it, but if you make yourself a rhythm game, then you get positive feedback. Our first attempt involved counting right and wrong notes, but after this failed, I realized that what we needed was a physics simulation. We created a "gravity" value as a constant downward acceleration. Each time you get a note right (i.e. you hit that key again when its cube is at the top of the screen), you get a boost to upward acceleration. This affects a velocity, which in turn affects a point. We map the point first through a series of greyscale values for the background, and then for increasing opacity on the two feedback orbs. After capping acceleration and velocity, this worked like a charm. Along the way, Rebecca Austin joined our efforts, designing our logo and textures on the two feedback orbs.

The Auralboros Team

For the most part, we kept to the headphones as we developed the game. It was always fun when someone would ask to see the latest build, leading to strange sounds and usually laughter filling the room, though I don't blame anyone for being a bit miffed at the distraction...

Josh's reaction to Auralboros during GGJ, as captured by Rebecca Austin

A few hours into development, Ryan and I started using Trello to manage our tasks. I had read about this tool and recommended it to others, although I had never quite found a use for it myself. This was a perfect application, and it helped that sharing between two Google Accounts was seamless. We had three sections to our board: defects, for those things that were broken; to do, for features we wanted to add but could live without; and paulish for ideas that would make the player experience more glossy. There was only one to do item that we didn't have time to add, and that was having the cube halos fade in and out based on distance to the apex. We finished our game about an hour before the deadline, so we may have been able to squeeze this in, but it would have meant re-exporting and uploading, and that was just not worth it. The GGJ servers were getting hit pretty hard.

I think it was good for all of us Ball State folks to have a classic R1 campus experience as well. We were at two different buildings for the event. On Friday, Parking was hard to find, and we walked around the building once due to poor signage. It happened to be a teaching building, and it was cluttered and musty. The classroom in which we met had grimy walls and inadequate blackboards. We did appreciate that we could lean back in the chair-desks, which would make it easier to rest during boring lectures. The next day, we were in the OSU Union—not a teaching space, but a place for events, meetings, and chats with alumni and benefactors. It was absolutely gorgeous, my favorite part being the totally gratuitous projector-that-descends-from-the-ceiling in our meeting room.

Special thanks goes out to Brian Orchosky, the site coordinator: if you see him, buy him a drink. 

Site coordinator Brian Orchosky

Global Game Jam 2012 was the largest game jam ever, and it was great to be a part of it. You can check out all 2000+ games at the GGJ Web site. Note that you can search by site, so you might want to take a look at the other games created in Columbus or in a city near you.

The Ball State University contingent in Columbus at the end of GGJ 2012

It was a great event, and we all enjoyed the weekend together. Thanks to Phil and Kristen for stopping in to see us, even if you couldn't participate in the whole jam. The only real downer was that when I got directions to the Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream on our route home, it turned out to be the one in the North Market, which was closed by the time we got there. I suppose we'll just have to go back sometime.