Orthodox Game Design: A World of Subjects

 

“The life of the eternal subjectivity is an infinite reference to its subjectivity contemplated within another “I” so as to be truly love… In any other circumstances, eternity would be either an unbearable boredom… or else an absurdity.”

St. Dimitru Staniloae 

The Experience of God

Let’s break that down, shall we? What the hell does that gobbledygook mean?

Simply: true joy and peace is to experience yourself in the context of someone else. Anyone who has ever stared into the eyes of a beloved knows exactly this feeling; parents experience  this in the eyes of their children. Without this experience of self being experienced by another self we wither and die inside. “It is not good for man to be alone” is said after Adam names all the animals; it is not until man realized nothing else in the world will do that God gives man that most ferocious of creatures, woman. 

It is essential to understand one of the primary truths of Christianity: all are subjects, all is community with the goal of “union in perfect love”, as Staniloea also says. That first statement is a bit difficult to parse, and the second statement is even harder to understand without the first. So first off we'll need to break down what the hell I mean by that and then break down what that means for game design, particularly TTRPGs, coz that's what I know.

So, what do I mean by "all are subjects"? I mean that historical Christianity, Catholic and Orthodox alike, regard all of creation as alive and sentient. It's not like us and our version of it, but the universe is alive. God loves it  and cares for it, even if we're supposed to care for it. The Golden Legend, has this to say about how active and aware the universe really is:

"The third accuser will be the whole world. Hear Gregory: "If you ask who will accuse you, I say, 'The whole world. When the Creator is offended the entire creatoin is offended.'" Chrysostom comments on Matthew: "There will be nothing we can say in response on that day when heaven and earth, the waters, the sun and the moon, night and day and the whole world will oppose us before God, testifying to our sins; and if all were silent, our very thoughts and especially our works will against us before God, forcefully accusing us."

The phrase "The blood of thy brother has found a voice that cries out to me from the ground" isn't meant to be figurative, it's literal. The Biblical world is not silent, not at all. We're just deaf and stupid in our fallenness. 

More than that, however, is there is a point to creation. The Orthodox theologian Staniloae states that creation, including time and space, were given to us, so that we could carry on a conversatoin with God. God, in His mercy, knew that we would not be able to talk to Him as creatures. God is so far removed from us by just the definition of what He is and what we are not that we wouldn't be able to focus on Him to be able to talk, not directly. The world exists specifically so we can have something to attach our minds to, so that God may babble with us about these little created things that we have cooperated with Him to refine and put the way we like them, together. And if we screw this up the world, which must be multiple myriads of consciousnesses because God is a community of persons. Even celibates, those monks who sit around and don't seem to do much, are with us, becaus they've discovered that God is as much a medium for transmission as He is person; by being in union with God directly, they are in union with all, in their own way.

So all of life is communion, even if you don't understand how all the things that can see and hear you do.

If you're wondering where I'm going with this: game design's central point should be to help you relate better. By designing artificial environments that are different from your usual you give each other a place to do the most worthwhile action of all: investing yourself into something beyond yourself, to BELIEVE again.

It is here I draw my first line in the sand: a good game helps you trust yourself to others more, possibly helping you restore yourself, possibly healing emotional and spiritual wounds in the process. Games reward investment of self (which us Christians call kenosis) by creating a framework of rules that reward certain actions while punishing others. You are expected to let go of your notion of what is real and consequential and engage with this new construct, this new environment. By doing so you imbue it with meaning, replicating the human action: to give meaning to the universe. Really good game design will bleed your experiences back over to the real world. And it should. It’s why the USA loves sports so much!

Good game design has a few factors: it encourages and requires particular actions while punishing others, while providing a sense of progression towards a goal, with usually some form of going out of yourself as the endpoint (also known as ecstasy). No, this isn’t exhaustive, no I do not have all the answers, I’m just an obnoxious loudmouth with the determination to write his silly thoughts down (mostly on a phone) in the ridiculous expectation that others may get something out of what I’m saying. No, I won't elaborate on those here. Honestly I need to think on them more.

Now, it should be obvious why general disinterest is a bad thing for a game. You get bored, you withdraw, because your attempt to invest is actively thwarted. 

I’m breaking the next line into its own paragraph, because you need to actually read it. 

YOU NOT LIKING A GAME IS NOT NECESSARILY THE SAME AS BAD DESIGN.

This is where it gets tricky and actually requires adult conversation and that really gray thing called discernment, wisdom. A good game can ask for a type of investment that you may not want to give. And I know all about that one! I’m designing tabletop role playing games! That aren’t Dungeons and Dragons! I’m in niches that are so pathetically small that subatomic particles are calling their exterminators because holy crap I thought we got rid of all the freaking subatomic roaches.

So not wanting to invest doesn’t make a game bad. It’s a game; by its very nature not liking or even loving a game isn’t a grave matter. But bad design does exist. It is a thing. Bad design can hurt you. Bad game design specifically uses your dopamine receptors against you while providing nothing in response. Instead of you playing the game, the game takes you over and plays you. You're not trying to interact with an object on its terms, you're just wasting time as your dopamine gets upped.

Or, y'know, in the case of Dungeons and Dragons or Magic you're just putting up with it because you genuinely don't know better stuff exists.

Please stop giving the supervillain money. Thank you.

Speaking of DnD, there’s another bad form of game design, one which people are more attached to, because its allure is so strong: having a ton of complexity that doesn’t really fit in with the game’s stated goals, or obfuscates the core loop of the game. This has the knock-on effect of making a second game that’s effectively divorced from the supposed real game. All modern DnD games fall into this trap, even my beloved 4e, where the option bloat invites one to tinker and tinker and tinker… to no actual difference. I’m not talking against games that have builds being a part of the loop; I may not like Pathfinder, but I’ll be the first to admit it doesn’t hide its core loop with its options. Even games with core loops I don’t like, like Marvel Champions and Arkham Horror the LCG, are games that use its “build” mechanics well. But building for its own sake, where the engine you’re supposed to be building for gets left behind, is bad design. If this is done well it’s an opportunity to give greater meaning to your experience. If it’s done poorly it’s modern Scholasticism.

Seriously, the difference between modern scholastics and build whores in games is nil.

The point is: bad design actually hijacks you against yourself, removing you from relating to others and plays your own brain against itself. A lot of mobile games are built this way, weaponizing your dopamine receptors against themselves. You can also design a game that can not support a player well enough in the design goals. This is a much harder one to identify, and is much more subject to taste than we'd all like to admit... but clunky designs do exist. I mean, c'mon folks, SpiderMan 3 the video game exists. We all know there's such a thing as designs that don't live up to their potential. These designs prevent you from giving  subjectivity, and thus relationship, to the design. Without gifting meaning to the design you are stuck in a series of meaningless actions, isolated and stuck within your own subjectivity. It's doomscrolling on your phone, but with an object that was actually supposed to help you practice your primary function as a human being: giving meaning.

Yeah, we got a word for that: Hell.

I think that's what I got for the moment. Good game design is meant to be a function of you giving meaning to the world and those around you. Great design makes that central human function easy and enjoyable, sublime. Bad design frustrates this ability. Horrible design will make you forget it's your job to give meaning entirely, either because the base engine is bad or because the game distracts you from its core too much.

OKAY, SO THIS IS THE SHILL TIME. If you go away after this point that's fine! Really!

If you like what I've written and want to see it in action, go over to my Itch, and pick up my game Apex, which is a single-page game that packs a lot of punch to it. It's way better than any one-page RPG has any right to be and it's really easy to play.

If you like what I'm saying and want to see what I'm up, design-wise, I update my two games on my Discord on an-almost weekly basis. If you want to see the drafts, go on over to Discord and take a look!

Oh, what am I working on, in general? Glad you asked! I'm working on three games: Dragons and Planets, The Truth Found in Death and Crescendo.

Dragons and Planets is a one-shot space fantasy game for two to six people, in the tone and tradition of Star Wars, Pacific Rim, and the Matrix. Gameplay is fast, frenetic, and extremely collaborative, while being surprisingly relaxing. Oh, and it's diceless and uses your favorite book. From character and world creation to the end it takes about two hours.

The Truth Found in Death is a game for two to six people, emulating the blood-punting pulp of Robert E. Howard. Yes, that includes Kull. Game sessions feature an original D6 dice pool system, with lots of risk, reward, and blood. Each game sesssion takes between two to four hours, character creation included.

Crescendo is a long-form fantasy game of character development for two to four people. Innovative journaling with easy-but-deep storytelling mechanics, Crescendo is an intensely rewarding time for those who really want to sink their teeth into their characters and the setting.

You can find the most recent drafts for both games on the Discord.

Orthodox Game Design: An Overly Quarrelsome Introduction

Orthodoxy is a word with many meanings, depending upon connotation. You can use it to mean "right doctrine", "true beauty",  My personal favorite, however, is “right glory”… but I mean it in a corrective sense, like in orthopedics: a glory and beauty that corrects and strengthens, a glorious compassion in a form immediately discernible, even as it cannot be fully understood. A beauty that heals, brings someone back into harmony with creation. Orthodoxy, as I mean it, is a medicinal reality. It is imperative to understand that I do not mean some faux-pious bullshit nonsense. I mean something with trackable, real-world, results.  So when I say I am "Orthodox Christian"I do not mean I identify principally as the member of a has-been former imperial Christian Church that was universally dumped upon by any of the "Enlightenment" thinkers whose naivety directly led to WWII.

I mean, I do identify with that has-been former imperial Christian Church that was universally dumped upon by any of the "Enlightenment" thinkers. Very much!

But I think the Orthodox Church serves, channels, that corrective light. It may know the most about that light, sure, but it's a servant, not the healing light itself.

It is of the utmost importance to understand that this healing and creative light (which the smart figure out is alive and sentient and thus call God) does actually have rules, and "He" manifests under specific conditions, regardless of media. 

What does this have to do with game design? 

I'm getting there.

Chill out.

The problem is that, ultimately, you can't address whether or not a design is O/orthodox or not without talking about the elephant in the room: us moderns are stupid. We have fallen into this idiotic notion that the world can be defined principally in abstractions. This is such a laughably obviously bad idea that we now have at least two entire industries (porn and therapy, in that order) dedicated to cleaning the idea up so it doesn't break the entire population.  None of the abstract frameworks we abuse like Walter White's crystal were meant to be used like how we are using them now. They're descriptive, in the same way that you use a medical textbook to diagnose an illness. They're shortcuts so you don't have to reinvent the wheel everytime. You're meant to look at the world around you and apply your knowledge to the symptoms of the world so that way you can get about to address the situation more quickly.

So when I say there are orthodox principles to game design, I mean that game design can be used in a way to reveal existentially healing beauty to those who play the game, not whether or not someone namechecks Jesus or the characters choose to not have sex before marriage because their purity is meant to be saved and all that happy modern garbage. One is identifying a phenomena happening in the real world and the other is just a Soviet-style checkbox. I am saying there are ways to heal the soul, just as much as healing the body, if not more ways to do it.

And, when I say "games can heal and they can do it on purpose" no one is really able to argue that. You can say you don't think the term "orthodox" shouldn't be applied in that way. And that's something I can respectfully disagree with.

I'll give you an example. I came to videogames late, later than TTRPGs even (19 versus 15). Twilight Princess was one of my first games. There's a lot about Twilight Princess I don't like now, but the ending of that game is not one of them. And then this happened:

For those of you who don't know, the ending of Twilight Princess is a sword fight between the protagonist Link and the antagonist Ganondorf. It's a tense affair, and then all of a sudden you lock blades and you have to tap that A button as fast as possible. Now, I've done that "tap button fast" crap in other games before and since and normally it's boring. But the thing is that Zelda does it right. You've spent all this time solving puzzles and most of the gameplay is about trying to find the most elegant solution to problems possible...

And then all of a sudden Ganandorf is just trying to bowl you over.

And all the people in the story, this sad and broken world, your own survival, requires you to button mash "A" as fast as humanly possible, all so all your work at outmaneuvering Ganondorf isn't destroyed. 

The time for subtetly and craft is past.

Knock that jerk over and nail him to the ground with the sword.

And he then dies standing up. What. The. Hell.

I know I'm not the only one who was rather deeply moved by that climax. There's something about it that opens up a fire in the gut, where the only thing that now counts is whether or not you can mash that ridiculous button hard enough to get your shot in. You've not come this far to get overpowered by a dude at least a head taller than you thank you very much. This a moment where you are told to stand your ground or fail. The game has spent so much time telling you to be clever that the one time it tells you to just have raw gumption hits like a ton of bricks.It's a moment where the world of the game and your own interior world fuse, just for a second, just long enough to where you are Link, all the evils and travails in the world are Gandondorf, and you're going to win.

And then you do.

It's not like you lose sight of the fact that what happened on the screen is factual. It's something so much more mysterious. A part of you came out to the game and said "Yeah, I can do that too. I can fight. I'll fight till I drop." And, even though the victory on the screen isn't factual, a part of you said "No, I think I can go on now" that did not think so before. Something happened inside your soul that is far greater than the thing that prompted it.

Another example, really the example for me, was my second Burning Wheel campaign, The Revenge of the Countess of Fire. We finished the last session, and everyone just... stared... into space. There was utter silence. It was so thick you could cut it with a knife.There was a beauty to what had just happened. Marian, the villain, had just been proven to be a patsy for a greater evil, and she was wanting to end it all. She didn't see another way out. And the players, driven to pity, talked this child-drowning monster out of killing herself and trying to do something with the gift the players have given her: a chance to make a difference, the right way. Marian could make a difference, because the past wasn't king. And that was the victory they'd just had: convincing a monster to try to genuinely love, just one more time. After eight sessions of holding their noses around Marian, they had finally seen her as a person, saw what made her tick, and helped her want to try again. It was a moment that somehow went beyond the game. Not a soul was unaffected.

Some of you are nodding along, I know. You know what I mean now. You can see why it's so hard to define, because by definition you cannot define that movement in your own soul, can you? You sorta describe it, say what it's sorta doing, but that's about it. 

That moment? 

That is a moment of "corrective" beauty, of orthodoxy. You run into the beautiful infinity. And, as Victor Hugo says so freaking eloquently:

“The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no me, the me would be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words, it would not be. But it is. Then it has a me. This me of the infinite is God.”

That beautiful infinity, that moment, is with a person.. We historically have called Him God, and  “God is responsible for all good”, says St. Cyril of Alexandria. All good. Including what happens in something as seemingly trivial as playing a game. But nothing is too small for God “not even a teardrop, or a part of a drop”, as St. Symeon the New Theologian says. All things are His, all experiences of good things are a relating to God. And, just like any relationship, there are principles, a mode of thinking, that let you do this on purpose. Which means there are principles of design that can bring you into contact with the Almighty Himself. Because, as it turns out, there's thousands of years of techniques to get you into the proper mindset.

And this means that there are principles that can be used to shift your mindset while playing a game.

Now, for anyone who has not been paying attention over this last post, I'm not advocating someone sets up a checklist of stupid things like "Do we talk about God in this game? Do the characters act in a 'wholesome' manner? Do the good guys always win?" and all sorts of silly things that so many conservative Christians would want on such a list. Or, y'know, SJWs, who are just as prudish and dogmatic as the conservatives. 

Yeah, no.

What exactly am I advocating for? Wait, you wanted me to have this mapped out? Figured out? Ha! Look, you want an honest look at this, or someone trying to sell you something? Me trying to sell you something is down below. You'll figure out very quickly I don't sell anything too well on this blog. I'm practically allergic to being a company man. Hell, I have a game I've published and I still keep forgetting to put a link up on this blog so the dozen or so people (if I'm lucky) might buy it. Maybe. Probably not. So I got news and it's either going to be refreshing or it's going to be terrifying: no I don't have this mapped out. I'll be taking this series irregularly, off-the-cuff, and a bunch of other words that I'm sure everyone will find as I go. I will make mistakes. And I will be wrong.

So you're either in for the ride or you're not. 

As for me, I'll be messing around here. We'll see where it goes!

Thank you for reading!

OKAY, SO THIS IS THE SHILL TIME. If you go away after this point that's fine! Really!

If you like what I've written and want to see it in action, go over to my Itch, and pick up my game Apex, which is a single-page game that packs a lot of punch to it. It's way better than any one-page RPG has any right to be and it's really easy to play.

If you like what I'm saying and want to see what I'm up, design-wise, I update my two games on my Discord on an-almost weekly basis. If you want to see the drafts, go on over to Discord and take a look!

Oh, what am I working on, in general? Glad you asked! I'm working on two games: Dragons and Planets and Crescendo.

Dragons and Planets is a one-shot space fantasy game for two to six people, in the tone and tradition of Star Wars, Pacific Rim, and the Matrix. Gameplay is fast, frenetic, and extremely collaborative, while being surprisingly relaxing. Oh, and it's diceless and uses your favorite book. From character and world creation to the end it takes about two hours.

Crescendo is a long-form fantasy game of character development for two to four people. Innovative journaling with easy-but-deep storytelling mechanics, Crescendo is an intensely rewarding time for those who really want to sink their teeth into their characters and the setting.

You can find the most recent drafts for both games on the Discord.