LUDORUM DESIGNATIO: Game Design as a "Field Theory" Map (Patreon)

Here's a much more polished version of the Ludorum Designatio map which accompanies this video on game design theory (if you're seeing a dead link, it's because the video will go live tomorrow).

A higher resolution version of the map is available as a downloadable attachment, at the bottom of this page.

As per the disclaimer in the corner, this was created as a playful approach to sociological field theory, and using it to think about how game design is understood and taught in videogame development. It is not intended to be an authoritative claim about how things "actually are", or an idealization of how they should be. However, I'll use this post to talk about some of my thoughts while making it, which probably run a little deeper than the video essay will.

I've put some little gags and hidden references into the map, firstly because I am an inherently silly person, but also because I want it to feel like a bit of a Where's Wally image where you can spend some time tracing paths and getting lost.

Why Am I Is It Like This?

I experimented with different ways of subdividing the map with lines, colors etc. and settled on doing this with some faint lines and rough tonal shading. This ended up looking more visually pleasing, but also helped to emphasize that these aren't meant to be hard distinctions.

I don't intend for the three territories (Craft, Games, Players) to have very hard distinctions between them, because I don't see them that way and I don't think most developers or educators do, either. Sometimes the purpose of a taxonomy isn't to divide for the sake of it, but to make divisions for the purpose of drawing your attentions to possible omissions. In other words, telling you "there are these three things you should know about" might draw your attention to the fact that you are fixated on one to the detriment of the other two.

Some topics - for me - sit very clearly at intersections between "territories". For example, Playtesting lives exactly at the border between craft methodologies and understanding players. In other places, the positioning of elements was more the result of my lack of planning and inexperience with the software.

Semiotics does belong in the "understanding players" area, in and around linguistics and anthropology, but it should also be in the "games as media" area, east of Ludo-Narratology, (most instruction in visual media uses Semiotics as its basis of understanding how humans make sense of images). So in this case I'd ask you to imagine that some of these locations have magic portals to other parts of the map on them (perhaps I'll add those if I ever return to this project).

In our map, I've drawn a crumbling old wall around the middle of the kingdom. Everything in this wall represents the kind of things which would be encouraged in a more traditional game design education; the "core" of the game design field. This isn't meant to represent my own preference for what "is" and "isn't" game design but rather the calcified majority consensus on what a game design education should include.

Mandelbrot's Magic Missile

One of the uses of field theory, is that by visualizing a discipline as a "space" we also get the concept of a center and a periphery" If a practitioner is at the center, they're more likely to be "safe" (intellectually, economically etc.) because they are conforming to and supporting the status quo of that field, but they're also less likely to make a novel contribution.

It's often the periphery where the most interesting stuff happens in an intellectual field. This is where you find the folks who cannot help but be interdisciplinary because they are more interested in the territory itself than the map.

I recently watched the documentary Clouds Are Not Spheres about Benoit Mandelbrot, which puts a strong emphasis on Mandelbrot's inability to adhere to the expectations placed on him regarding academic fields and their boundaries. It's quite inspiring, contains a lot of hilariously naff 3D magic-eye-ass animations, and is probably the perfect "watch on mushrooms" hippie movie.

Mandelbrot did amazing things in his field specifically because he was not content with its boundaries, and was more than happy to transgress them. It makes me sad to think how many brilliant iconoclasts are prevented from doing so because it is impossible for anyone within the field to tell the difference between brilliance and madness. Its painful to consider how many incredible contributions are lost because people with a particular fascination are more interested in really actually exploring the territory rather than getting involved in existing squabbles over the map.

"If you're free you're never see the walls" - Chris Cornell

This was my experience during grad school. My first supervisor was deeply embedded in Sociology, and wanted me to follow in his footsteps, quibbling about what terms meant in increasingly small and irrelevant rooms. I always wanted to look at the world through multiple lenses, and it turns out that senior academics in their sixties tend to not like that so much.

I was respectful of Sociology, but I had no intention of being a Sociologist (or a Psychologist, or any kind of -ologist). So while the "field" was interesting to me, I was more interested in the territory (society) than the map (Sociological Theory).

I write all of this, about Mandelbrot, and my own brief time in academia, because it all gets at a fundamental tension I feel as an arts educator. I get the value in having a replicable "core" field of study - but I wish people were more committed to seeing what's out there. For me, being a "game design theorist" is about seeing how we can enhance our understanding of games and play by working out where all the overlaps and interplays are.

The Centre is For Noobs

The real interesting work is, I feel, in what we bring in and why. This is why I think it's cool when Tracy Fullerton writes a game design textbook with such a strong emphasis on dramaturgy, and it's why I use people's generally relatively better understanding of musical concepts to explain game design ones.

So when I draw a little wall around certain parts of the map and say "this is the edge of our agreed-upon understanding of what game design is", it's not me saying "and that's how it should be". I settled on "crumbly old walls" for a reason. Well, mainly, it was because they were in the editor. But they are kind of oppressive-looking, while also being broken, and that feels appropriate.

Better to think of this fantasy map as a piece of satire; it's Discworld, not Lord of the Rings.

The center of the field exists because it needs to - because a field needs to be oriented around something. But it's not all that is, and it's definitely not where the interesting stuff is.

When it comes to understanding players, we have very established psychological concepts like Flow and Operant Conditioning which - for better or worse - get to occupy the center space in the field. This is because they feel indisputable in terms of explaining how certain things work for games and players... but they are so morally neutral that they can be used for anything.

The artgames iconoclast and the LinkedIn Metaverse grift artist can both accept these kind of psychological "facts" about games as true... they just take different stances on how the knowledge should be used. If someone can explain how gambling addiction works, that's useful information both to people who want to enshittify everything every app and turn Therapy into Duolingo, just as its useful information for people who might not want those things.

When a piece of human insight becomes a game design truism, it comes to rest inside these crumbling walls which demarcate the center of our kingdom. Here at the center, we tend to find insights which have been reduced to "best practice" i.e. repeated ad infinitum in textbooks and blogs:

"When a game asks you to do two things at the same time, that's experientially different from doing those two things separately?" (MDA Theory)

"Here's why people enjoy different things" (Player Taxonomies)

"Boredom feels bad, but so does too much challenge!". (Flow)

I am presenting these in a deliberately reductive way, because that's how they are presented to new students of game design.

The same has happened with Anthropology in Game Studies and to a lesser extent Game Design instruction, with keyword-snippets of Huizinga ("the magic circle") and Callois (types of play repeated and reduced many times. The amount of people who know these names as secondary sources (self included) greatly outweighs the amount who have engaged with the original texts. I'm very grateful to the hosts of the Game Studies Study Buddies podcast for doing a lot work to elucidate many of the issues with these sources (tldr; Callois was a racist and Huizinga "did anthropology" without ever leaving a library).

Note, in all of these cases, there are interesting insights and perspectives to be found in the original text. But the segment which gets excerpted and mooshed into a game design "advice" soundbyte tends to end up being something you could've learnt simply by being someone who actually likes playing videogames. The insights into human play behaviors which get to make up the core syllabus in a game design class tend to be relatively self-evident to anyone with any level of interest in games and people.

Do As I Do, Not As I Say

I want what any good educator wants; not to tell people what to do, but to encourage them to develop a passionate curiosity. If you're engaging with game design literature and you find it interesting when the author brings in insights from psychology or anthropology, that's great in itself! But you're often receiving a heavily paraphrased insight which the author has shoehorned to fit around their need to write a snappy instructional guide. The benefit of thinking about these things lies in how it stimulates your creativity and further inquiry; not in whether it gives insights into proven laws of reality.

Maybe it's because I have anarchist leanings, but I would love the takeaway from reading a design book to be more "do as a I do, not as I say". What I would love is if students of design took things a step further and thought to themselves "hmmm... the people who write these books seem to be generally interested in psychology, sociology, and the anthropology of play... maybe I should get interested in those things too!" When we cover books like Schell's Art of Game Design or Sylvester's Designing Games on the Game Developers' Library podcast, I would love the main takeaway to be "game designers are interested in people and in the world" rather than "I need to do x because someone more experienced than me told me to".

The problem with the orthodoxies presented in the core of game design literature is that they're not really meant to be orthodoxies. They only become so as educators piece them together into syllabi and present them to classes not as "things to think about", but as direct instructional guidance. Good educators would not do this. But YouTube is not full of good educators; many are decent technical instructors at best, and instruction is about developing specific practical skills, not fostering the attitudes necessary to create interesting things or to feel comfortable making difficult decisions.

The most important thing about Koster's A Theory of Fun For Game Design isn't actually Koster's theory or any of the individual musings or sources which feed into it. The most important thing you can learn about game design from Koster's book is this is the kind of person who makes games. This is the kind of person who gets to make a living entertaining other people. Look at how many things they are interested in and passionate about! This is how they think about and engage with the world. They are a thoughtful interdisciplinary scholar, and they take things from all over the place and put them together.

This is why in the coming video I try to draw attention to designers like Engelstein and Cook, who aren't just regurgitating the same three pieces of psychology which are already accepted in the field, but doing the work to find out how other insights from the discipline might fold into our understanding of what makes games work. They are showing you what a good game designer is, not by telling you how to design, but by exemplifying a level of curiosity we should all try to embody.

When people try to approach game design as simply viewing a set of common human perceptual and behavioral quirks to be "hacked" you get... the majority of game design discussion currently existing on YouTube. (Perhaps this should've been drawn on the edge of the map as a looming Mordor-esque place.)

One example: After Two Star Games found success with Choo Choo Charles and opened up a second channel called called "Scientia Ludos", the only existing academic work I have seen discussed in any depth there has been - you guessed it - evolutionary psychology. Nothing from the last two decades of work in Game Studies, or the studies in other disciplines which precede it. I'm not going to rag on Scientia Ludos' Gavin any more than that, especially seeing as the players of CuffBust have already laid lie to any delusions he may have had of mastering some universal law of how to use play to extract money from people.

I hope Gavin recovers from the failure of CuffBust and goes on to mature into someone who sees game design as an exercise in connection with people through humanist creative principles, rather than a money machine driven by the mastery of cunning illusions (don't worry, you'll still make money from people even if you stop viewing them as fat-pocketed marionettes).

As people who teach people to make games, we need to have a solid foundation of things we consider important enough that everyone needs to know. But I'd like to think that everyone who purports to be some kind of games educator is more interested in expanding and exploring the field than simply replicating the least interesting parts of it.

So, that's my ramble about many of the things which led me to make a stupid map of game design as an educational field.

I hope they made some sort of sense.

I may update this essay as people respond with additional questions or - as is always the case - point out my spelling errors.

Feel free to download and distribute the map as you see fit.

Made using https://inkarnate.com/.