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Second-Order Design
Engines such as these occur in non-digital games as well. A card game such as Magic: The Gathering, with its thousands of different cards types, is a hothouse of emergence, designed specifically to facilitate the creation of card-combination engines by its players. In Magic: The Gathering or in Gearheads, the use of game elements in combination with one another facilitates a rich space of possibility. The toys of Gearheads or the cards of Magic are the simple elements of a language. By using them in different combinations, the player makes his or her own meanings through the play of the game. Unit combinations and engines are not the only way to create emergent effects in a game; if your game does contain a number of different kinds of objects, design them to work in combination with each other, so that the breadth of your space of possibility can increase exponentially. Designing an emergent game system that generates meaningful complexity from a simple set of rules is challenging. Why is it so difficult? As a game designer, you are never directly designing the behavior of your players. Instead, you are only designing the rules of the system. Because games are emergent, it is not always possible to anticipate how the rules will play out. As a game designer, you are tackling a second-order design prob-lem. The goal of successful game design is meaningful play, but play is something that emerges from the functioning of the rules. As a game designer, you can never directly design play. You can only design the rules that give rise to it. Game designers create experience, but only indirectly. In a complex emergent system, every element gains its identity by virtue of its possible relationships with other elements. When one element changes, the rest of the relationships are all affected in turn. Key to the iterative process is the ability to think of games as systems, to analyze the way that they function, to know when, why, and how a game system fails to generate meaningful play. Every rule adjustment results in a change to the play of the game, and you will never be able to test out every possible rule variation, or even a tiny fraction of them. That is why anticipating how changes to the formal structure of a game affect its play is one of the core skills that game designers must develop. Over time, game designers acquire a structural "sixth sense" of what will and will not work in a game, of how changes to one part of the system are likely to play out in the experience as a whole. At the same time, one cannot anticipate every effect. One of the great pleasures of being a game designer is seeing your game played in ways that you never anticipated, seeing players explore nooks and crannies of the space of possibility that you never knew existed. Understanding how emergence works and creating a design that encourages emergence is one way your games can bring you this pleasure. Although a rules-based approach is not the only way to understand games, it is an indispensable part of a game designer's conceptual toolset. By defining rules and framing games as emergent systems, we have laid the groundwork for thinking about games in structural terms. The game design schemas that follow all offer more specific ways of thinking about and designing games as formal systems.
