How do you decide what your game is about?

I know this seems like a really dumb question, but it's turning out to be much harder to do than I anticipated.

After you have an idea about the setting and a general idea of what you want for gameplay it seems like the next step would be to determine exactly what the game is trying to say or do (i.e. what it's about). Then all of the decisions for game mechanics should be supporting what it's about. Right?

I was listening to an interview with Judd Karlman and he mentioned thinking that The Dictionary of Mu was about honor, just to be told by Ron "no, it's about hope." How did he get that far into the design without knowing fully what it was about? And, how do I stand a chance of figuring out what my own game is about when far better designers still struggle with the question?

Hi again, MJ,

Wellll, I thought what a game is about, starts/exists before setting and a general idea of gameplay come to exist. Indeed what a game is about, decides setting and general gameplay.

Not that I haven't played plenty of RPG's where they have a setting and a kinda general gameplay, but they don't seem to be about anything, so you decide what they are about within those ideas. But if your designing a new game, you start, or atleast are free to start right from the outside.

So, why are you starting off with a setting and general gameplay? It might be constricting you for no reason that meets any of your goals, and by thinking within those restrictions, it might be blocking thinking about what you really want to get at? Perhaps imagine dropping the setting, dropping the general gameplay, and then deciding from that point whether you want to make a game. If you do, why you want to - that 'why' will tell you what the game is about. Then in relation to that, start to decide setting and start to decide general gameplay.

It might help to make a flow-chart.
Start out with a small number of verbs, adjectives, and nouns that describe what you want, and try connecting them and branching them out into other ideas.

In playtesting Mask of the Emperor, I found out what my game *isn't* about - it can't run the standard wandering-and-fighting-baddies routine you see in so many fantasy RPGs. Because of the focus of the game and what the mechanics cover, stories in Mask have to involve personal relationships, a dozen or so recurring, signature characters, and a combination of intrigue and combat; if a game tries to move away from highly personal conflict, it just sort of peters out.
What is the focus of your game? In any sense of it, really; whether you had plans for what one *does* during the game, or the focus of the rules, whatever, as long as you have some point to start from, you can start playing and see where things naturally lead, what works the best/is most exciting and what doesn't/isn't, etc.

Hope this helps!

Callan wrote:
Wellll, I thought what a game is about, starts/exists before setting and a general idea of gameplay come to exist. Indeed what a game is about, decides setting and general gameplay.

What does it mean to you to be "about" something?
For that matter, the CA of a game (or more accurately, of the people playing it) doesn't inherently limit its capacity to be "about" something. Still, if you like theme and mood and so on, I think Narrativism is the only one that'll directly address the issue of plot-with-substance. Sim is about the exploration itself, and Gamism is about the competition.

Certainly, you could use the competition itself as a commentary on the relationship between justice and power (i.e. the big guy wins, but look how far he has to go to make people think him good), and the exploration could provide all kinds of complicated moral situations, but Nar really cuts to the quick and says "This is explicitly what we're on about". I'm thinking that if you want your game to show off a cool setting, or to successfully capture some kind of attitude or how-the-world-works message, that's a Sim design impulse. If you're inspired by a cool new way for people to contest with each other, that's a Gamist design impulse. But if you want to specifically angle your game in the direction of being "about something", then go ahead and fill yourself with Nar ideas.

I think in the RPG 'The riddle of steel', it has quite a nifty, fairly support of gamism sword fighting system. But because of the reward mechanic, it's always going to be heavily nar supportive. Gamism is always going to be 'the other woman'. Dabbled with, but without commitment and always rushing to the primary 'woman' when push comes to shove.

In a gamist game, the positions reverse. Nar becomes 'the other woman' (if there's another woman at all) and while dabbled with, is never commited to.

Gamism can be about something else other than just competition, but it's always going to just be the 'other woman'.

So I think you can have some other meaning without lying to yourself, but if you think it'll actually get full on commitment to, then you would be lying to yourself. It'll get noticed, even mulled over, for sure. You might even find yourselves talking about what it's about, after the game. But not commitment during play. I think, anyway.

Can you think of a meaning for the game, that is content to come second place? Second place doesn't mean absent.

According to Stafford Beer, "The purpose of a system is what it does", in that any system (including a game) can be considered to be perfectly designed to produce some end, if it always produces it, regardless of what you actually designed it to do.
This includes train systems "designed" to annoy people, and game systems "designed" to produce group friction, but it also applies to nicer results too, like games that always make you think about your relationships with your parents, or leave you feeling excited and full of energy.

Now obviously such a pragmatic approach requires finding some thematic equivalent to an attractor in the game, and depending on how strong that is your natural group dynamics can shift where the game heads. So Ron and Judd could be both right, if the game heads towards the hopeful end of honour, or the honourable end of hope! In both cases the presence of one or both of those people in the game could shift it towards one or the other as it's consistent theme, often because of expected leeways in the rules. So sometimes a catchy one or two word phrase doesn't cut it, but in those cases it should be that the tendencies of the game are clear, even when they just aren't expressible easily in English. Be careful before you assume that is your game, in that you should be able to get agreement on that something (definable or not), to say you are getting a defined theme or style from your game, and getting agreement on an indefinable thing is tricky.

So that's one way that you can be "mistaken" about what your game is about, and I find it a good exercise: You can look at any game system you have played and what it does to the game and try to find some summary for what it does. The character and dynamics that games of that system have. This works with good games and bad ones, and generally the "better designed" games end up with your final game looking more like what the book's intro suggested, and some games can be awesome despite the creators plans, heading off in ways they never expected! To be fair, many people are better at writing games than advert blurbs, so you might still be playing as they intended, but you get the idea.

On one hand, it's not the role of the artist to tell people what his work is about. It's the role of the audience to tell the artist.

On the other hand, the designer must have an intent/premise in mind when designing. He must slavishly tie his designs to that premise. However, ultimately, only his audience can truly tell him what the game is about. In the case of games, the audience are the players. And the "telling" is done via play. And if the play generates the results the designer intended, then all things are in harmony and accord. If it generates something unexpected -- which it often does -- the designer must examine this. Will he keep the elements that produce this unintended effect or will he scrap the design and retrench, looking to capture his original intent?

It's a struggle that we all go through. There's no right answer!

I can have trouble putting my game's premise/intent into words sometimes, but I have a very clear vision in my head of what the experience of playing ought to look like.  M.J., do you have that?  If not, can you form one, based on the ingredients you started with?  If you have a mental model of how your game should play, you can compare actual play to that and have some pretty good material to base decisions on. 

When I don't have a clear vision of ideal play in mind, I consider myself to be still experimenting, throwing toys around, and the game isn't "about" anything yet.  Asking that "about" question too early just gets me headaches.

Luke wrote:
On one hand, it's not the role of the artist to tell people what his work is about. It's the role of the audience to tell the artist.

On the other hand, the designer must have an intent/premise in mind when designing. He must slavishly tie his designs to that premise. However, ultimately, only his audience can truly tell him what the game is about. In the case of games, the audience are the players. And the "telling" is done via play. And if the play generates the results the designer intended, then all things are in harmony and accord. If it generates something unexpected -- which it often does -- the designer must examine this. Will he keep the elements that produce this unintended effect or will he scrap the design and retrench, looking to capture his original intent?

It's a struggle that we all go through. There's no right answer!

David wrote:
I can have trouble putting my game's premise/intent into words sometimes, but I have a very clear vision in my head of what the experience of playing ought to look like.  M.J., do you have that? If not, can you form one, based on the ingredients you started with? 

I was thinking, for various reasons, a mental exercise might be to imagine your setting is already a game - that someone else made and didn't do justice to it. How are you going to do it right when they did it, but it came out wrong? Imagine that you've played it and gone "Oh no, they did this!? When it should be THIS!" and write it down.

I know, odd mental exercise. It came to me when I realise that playing mmorpgs was actually stimulating my imagination on how I'd like things to be more than staring at blank paper does. Just remove the actual play, because that gets in the way of designing, and just imagine your playing and your off! :)

MJ,
  Maybe the phrasing is throwing you off.
  Don't ask, "What is my game about?"
  Try, "What are my design goals?"
  I did this for LOL and it really got the juices flowing. Also, the answers helped mereign in all the other crazy ideas I wanted to throw in.
  Also, Power 19 can help you get at this from a different angle as well.

  Finally, You might just want to look at your genre and use what it is about to identify what your game is about, no? Like if it's a sci fi genre, maybe your game is about the morality of using power?

  Either way, good luck on your new design.