have, since, as I mentioned, much of my understanding is more akin to a “sixth sense”
than anything I could hope to write down. But the ideas contained in this chapter should
provide a solid foundation.
Unique Solutions ..............................
For me, one of the most exciting moments of being a game designer is when I hear
someone talking about playing one of my games, and they explain a successful tactic for
a given situation that I had never considered. This could be a solution to a specific puz-
zle, a new strategy to incapacitate challenging enemies, or a method for maneuvering a
perilous canyon. I see the games I develop as creating situations in which game players
can utilize their own creativity to succeed. When players’ creativity can lead them to
solutions that I had not envisioned, it shows me that the players and I are sharing in the
creation of their experience, instead of my dictating everything. And when the players
and I share in the authorship, I feel my game is doing its job.
Anticipatory versus Complex Systems.................
Good designers will try to guess what players are going to attempt to do and make cer-
tain their game responds well to those actions. For instance, take an RPG that features
a puzzle that involves placing weights on a series of pressure plates. (Having put such a
puzzle in a game of my own, I would like to implore game designers to be a bit more cre-
ative than that, as pressure plates are surely one of the most overdone puzzle devices.
But I digress.) Suppose the designer leaves a conspicuous pile of rocks a few rooms
over from the pressure plate puzzle. The obvious solution to the puzzle is to use those
rocks on the pressure plates to achieve the desired results. But what if players try drop-
ping their various weapons on the plates instead? This is a perfectly valid solution that
should work equally well, provided players have weaponry of the appropriate weights.
What if players have the Summon Minor Threat spell, which allows them to summon a
variety of different small monsters? If players summon those monsters onto the pres-
sure plates, they might do the trick too.
Now the designer, having thought through the puzzle fully, can have the program-
mer add in code where the game reacts correctly if rocks, weapons, or monsters are on
the plates. This is the anticipatory school of game design, where the designer thinks of
what players might do and hardwires the game to work well with those actions. I agree
that this tactic is surely better than allowing for just one solution. However, what if
players think of some other weight they can place on the pressure plates? What if play-
ers use their Berkshire Blizzard spell on the pressure plates, causing snow to fall on
them? Enough snow could conceivably pile up on the plates to have a significant weight.
However, if the game has been hardwired only for rocks, weapons, or monsters, the
game will not react appropriately. Players will have thought of a perfectly reasonable
solution and the game will fail to recognize it.
Instead of hardwiring, however, what if the designer had the programmer come up
with a system where every object in the game had a weight associated with it? This
would include rocks, weapons, monsters, weather effects, blood, and any other
dynamic objects found in the game-world. If the programmer then made the pressure
plates simply measure the weight of all of the objects on top of them, regardless of their
116 Chapter 7: The Elements of Gameplay