Evolutionary Design
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Giants and Castles
To derive the design process, I built a board game called Giants and Castles. The basic concept is that you are a giant who wants to build a beautiful golden palace.  Unfortunately, you are a giant and building is not exactly your strong point.  Using your impeccable giant intuition you decide to clomp over to a nearby valley full of pre-built human castles. With a nod of your hat to the local lords, you rip out their treasure rooms and lug them back to your home.  With a little balancing, you toss together a spectacular palace in no time.

As luck would have it there are several other giants wandering about the board searching for treasure rooms.  Mass destruction, panicked exploration, and grand larceny ensues.  Thank goodness. 

I used the following requirements.

·        Rules consisting of a single page
·        5 minute learning curve
·        Average play session of one hour
·        Must entertain a wide range of people
·        Must have a concept that is instantly appealing.

Other than the limited rule set, these requirements could easily be the foundation for most modern mass-market video games.

The Evolutionary Process
Design is the creation and modification of the rules governing a gaming system.  The quality of the overall system of rules is the result of balancing the rules against one another. The process of balancing a game is merely the creation and modification of rules while continually evaluating the effectiveness of the resulting system.   This view of design suggests that good design can be created through an inherently iterative process.

1.      Create rules (Initially this will be the fundamental activity)
2.      Play through the rules.
3.      Observe how players react to rules
4.      Identify problem areas with rules
5.      Return to step one in order to create new rules that address the problems

This process will slowly evolve a game towards a more enjoyable state.  You can think of the rules as the DNA of the complex emergent system we call the game.  The fitness of the game in each generation is determined through play and analysis. At the beginning of the new cycle, rational mutations on the old rules are created and tested once again.

The Death of the Ego
Note that there is very little sense of an overarching ‘vision’.  At no point does the designer say ‘the project requirements lists 35 pre-described weapons so we must have them.” Instead, the act of playing the game suggests additional rules and gaming systems that would be an improvement.

Isn’t the purpose of the designer to have a grand vision that describes every element of the finished game?  Unfortunately, though there are optimistic designers who believe in this technique, in practice it tends to fail. 

The basic problem with ‘grand vision’ game design is that it is incredibly difficult predict how a complex system will behave when you make changes to it’s rule set.   In Giants and Castles, I removed a major system of rules. I had great reasons and ‘in theory’ everything should have worked out perfectly. Three fourths of the way through every subsequent game, the spell card system was completely broken.  No one had enough resources to cast spells, and people were holding onto dozens of cards.  Due to a rather intricate emergent behavior of the system, my carefully designed rule change broke the game. 

Emergent behavior consists of patterns present within a system that result from the atomic interactions of the elements that make up the system.  In the classic cellular automaton simulation Life, one can observe patterns of growth, expansion, and death similar to an ecosystem.  However, the rules governing the simulation make no mention of these patterns. They deal solely with the interactions of one cell with its neighbors.  The higher-level patterns are the result of dozens of interactions between many cells.  All games rely on emergent behavior to define their play.  The designer creates simple rules, and the complex interactions of those rules determine the game play patterns.

If I were an omnipotent designer, I would have predicted the exact result of my changes.  However, most of the time, I am not omnipotent and my understanding of emergent behavior is limited.   By making incremental changes and then immediately testing those changes, you minimize the unexpected disruptions to the system. This increases your ability to make rational improvements. 

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