GameDev Noob - Meaningful Mechanics

Making a game to better understand the "Furidashi" approach to designing game mechanics.

This is how UrbanPlan first started its journey in the world. A jumble of handwritten notes, crossed out and scribbled over, as I thought better of my earlier decisions.

For now, it’s a 6x6 grid, broken down into four 3x3 “districts,” each centered around a school. It might not stay that way; it might become more freeform, but that’s the kind of thing I’ll have to decide through play testing.

Right now, though, UrbanPlan is primarily an idea, roughly sketched out, starting to take on concrete rules and mechanics. I’m making major design decisions pretty quickly, and second guessing myself all the time. From early on I had to confront a simple but serious question:

What is the guiding principle of this game?

Human Driven Design

Lauryn and I have spent a number of weeks now on the podcast talking about game mechanics, mostly to reconceptualize them. We have this working theory that the game is, in fact, an event, the moment of interface between the player and what they can do, and likewise between the player and others. It’s not just player driven design—it’s a kind of human driven design.

Mechanics as “an action a player takes in the game” emphasizes how mechanics aren’t just the code in the game but the relationship between the player and that code. ¹

So in a nutshell, I wanted to design for this mess of a player, not the abstraction of a “player type.” So I am, in some sense, designing for myself, Nicholas.

I live many lives in this world, and one of those is deeply engaged in local politics, especially around housing justice. I both know what AMI² stands for and why it’s a dumb metric. And in this experience, I’ve come to realize that urban planning is fundamentally a social and therefore a political problem. Even if historically the discipline hasn’t always seen itself that way, thematically, in a game, I want to represent this constant political struggle that determines the nature of the place you live in.

You’re probably going, '“there’s many games like this, Nicholas: city builders (Cities: Skylines, SimCity) and political city role games (Citadels).” And you’d be right. So not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I wanted a social interaction as well as a building system. How you develop or “build” in the game has a great impact on the sense of a “social dynamic.” Enter my first game reference: Machi Koro.

In MK each player has their own array of buildings. You’re not constructing something together; you’re constructing for your own gain. In urban planning (not within a game), you’re ultimately building for a common used space, a shared goal. MK lacks that sense of shared space—it’s more like we’re each making our own towns alongside each other.

This is the first pillar of my game: a sense of building something together.

Enter the second game reference: Carcassonne. This game has tile-based mechanics where “building” takes place in a shared domain. Each player is building the map of the world that each player can take advantage of—for better or worse. One player’s decisions have a direct impact on all the others. A city isn’t just an array of buildings, though. It’s a human system, designed by and for those messy creatures. How could I get those players to interact?

I thought about how Settlers of Catan allows for trading and negotiation, but there it’s optional where the back-and-forth in real life is compulsory. You can, in fact, play Catan entirely in silence, never once engaging with your peers, but people almost never play that way, because it’d be pretty boring. So that’s where I was, when I began plotting out UrbanPlan, drawing from elements of the familiar while still lacking that human driven element I was chasing. That’s when I decided to integrate a rather unusual element for builder-type games: role playing.

This is the second pillar of my game: specific political roles define how players interact within a shared map-building space.

Designers as Players

We’re about a year and a half into the whole Furidashi project, and one of the things I’ve realized over that time is the importance of playing smaller, more experimental games. Games that are less about eating up 100 hours of your leisure time and more about exploring an idea. Now, I’m not trying to denigrate the former when I say this, but I want to explore what it means to develop game mechanics that aren’t about creating 100s of hours of content in a similar genre, but about exploring the nature of the mechanic itself.

A mechanic that means something.

To define this, a mechanic means something when the experience of using it communicates not just the game’s broader themes but also serves to progress the game forward in a meaningful way. This means the mechanic serves both to loop you into the system of the game, but fundamentally makes (in my case) a political statement about the game world you are choosing to create.

And it’s not simply a matter of saying this is “ludonarrative harmony (ptui!)³” where story and gameplay merely fail to clash, but rather a reconceptualization of mechanics as a language. Mechanics, much like words, are a system of signs that tell you what they mean, even as they show you what they mean.

Mechanical systems both convey and impose a worldview. They are a deeply human experience. Much like in What’s Your Gender? the level design becomes a mechanic as you progress through the world to learn more about gender. And your choice as a player to choose a path directly influences the “gender narrative” of your design. All the while, leading you through each definition—or even skipping some entirely—creating a political statement that is as profoundly global as it is personal.

I probably use this game as an example far too often, but it really is that good, and you should play it right now. For those who won’t play it, or want a specific example right now, continue in quote.

Anyway, at the beginning of the game, your first person perspective stares out onto a limitless horizon, and as you move forward, you are presented with a binary choice between a blue door and a pink one. But if you try to go back to the boundless expanse, you soon discover the game has trapped you. Once inside it, you cannot escape the gender binary, you can only work with or against it in hopes of maybe someday transcending it. By taking away a particular affordance, the freedom of movement, literally a mechanical limitation, the game conveys the experience of being caught up in the very gender binary it wishes to explore. That’s what a meaningful mechanic is: actions have real consequences, and those consequences are something your further gameplay experience builds upon.

Obviously What’s Your Gender? is not the only game that does this but it is one of the few where that language of the mechanics taps into broader social conditions. It understands the player as a human being in a particular time and place experiencing the tumult of culture and history. It’s a fantasy, to be sure, but it’s one that’s grounded in lived experiences.

This is what I want to do with UrbanPlan: to create a game where the mechanics relate to and convey a particular lived experience of local politics and land use.

I may not succeed—it’s hard to know—but I hope to learn something along the way, and maybe you will too.

Either way, I’ll write these articles as a series to show the growth, the development, and the disasters along the way.

1. Taken from Lauryn’s definition in Furidashi Podcast Episode 56, “Mechanics I - What Are Mechanics?”

2. AMI stands for “Area Median Income” and is a complex metric, based on household size, that determines the “average” income level for a given census region. This metric is used to determine a whole host of things, including whether one qualifies for various social programs like TANF (i.e. “food stamps”) or the Housing Choice Voucher Program, more commonly known as Section 8.

3. Much to Lauryn’s digression here, as she’s slowly edging to becoming a scholar of this and defines ludonarrative harmony as the “synchronization of gameplay, mechanics, and systems that create a player-driven story within the context of a larger game narrative.” This is still a working definition, though.