Michaël Sawyn vs. the Rule-Based Game: Why mechanics matter.

Tale of Tales has a reputation to uphold. Ever since their manifesto – “Over games” – stirred up the e-hornet’s nest, founder Michaël Samyn has been the Art Games Man. As the company’s spokesman and most visible member, he’s the go-to guy for that perfect outrageous quote to unite the proletariat in a spot of hatred. You could say he’s the Nega-Ebert – approaching the issue from the other side, but provoking just as much controversy. He’s anti-games, he’s overconfident, he’s pretentious – oh, he’s very easy to hate.

So, as the sands through the hourglass, he posts a new article on the escapist – “Almost art”, following the theme of his previous talks. In “Over Games”, Tale of Tales declared that Games are Not Art, and thus reasoned that in order to make Art, they must create Notgames. “Almost Art” continues the legacy with statements like “…underneath their superficial artistic appearance, videogames are bland, unforgiving, meaningless, cold-blooded, rigid systems.” You can guess how the comments section took that.

It’s this central idea that systems are game’s greatest weakness that I can’t abide, and I think it’s worth providing a counterpoint. So shockingly enough, I’ve written a blog post about it, analysing his position and explaining why cold-blooded systems are the best thing games have going for them. In a further stretch of the imagination, you can find it under the jump.

Before I start, it’s worth pointing out that Samyn says some things I agree with. Down in the third page, for example:

“Instead of starting from a well-defined format (such as a rules-based game) and skinning the system with some story to justify the mechanics, the design process needs to start from an idea, an emotion, a concept. Then all interactions, graphics and sounds are created to support the expression of this idea.”

On that point he’s absolutely right. If you want to make a good story or message then you need to start with that and work out, not layer it over mechanics you’ve already decided. Going further into his stance, a lot of the inflammatory nature of the article just comes from his confidence. “Art creation is not a team sport,” he declares, and it’s easy enough to poke holes – but those complaints come from the way he’s talking, not what he’s saying. Samyn provokes argument because he shouts his opinion instead of muttering it, never leaving room for phrases like “I think” and “In my opinion”. He chooses to stand by his thoughts and take the flak for it, and for that I applaud him. It’s certainly better than waffling your way around a definition of art in an attempt to please everyone.

Here’s where he and I part ways, though. In the article, Samyn seems to mark out the boundaries of a new genre: “Rule-based games”. The term, which encompasses every game designed since the stone age, is uttered with disgust. It’s no surprise -Tale of Tales really hate rules. Systems, they claim, are meaningless, cold-blooded, rigid – games based on them cannot affect society. Art has no rules or goals, and so our only hope is to get rid of them. “We will take your games and rip out their guts of stupid rules and challenges,” froths their manifesto. Past that, you can see it clearly in their games. From The Path, which mocks objectives, through to Vanitas, which has almost no rules at all, their design philosophy is clear: The further games get from their rules-based heritage, the closer they get to art.

The reward is just metaphorical, too.

There’s two problems with this.

A. Games are systems made from rules. They’re so firmly entrenched in the medium that attempting to take them out diminishes games, not elevates them. To take the rules out of a game is to rip out its spine. To make a game’s system unimportant is to cripple it.

Most importantly, though:

B. Rules are the purest way of creating meaning within a game.

Each part of a game is a set of rules made to represent something – real or imaginary. By testing the limits of that system we can see how the developer believes the represented object would act in every kind of situation possible, and then compare that understanding to the object itself to see if it fits. Through that comparison, we can ideally come to understand something we’ve never personally experienced. This object could be anything from a gun to a person to a hurricane to a system of government. Every game mechanic has meaning and a message behind it, intended or not.

Despite that, it’s fairly obvious that most mainstream games don’t have a clear overall message. Samyn attributes this to mainsteam’s over-reliance on “Cool Mechanics” as a whole. Instead, I’d say that they’re not focusing on the right mechanics.

If you look at the mechanical style of most blockbuster titles, you’ll see an over-emphasis on micromanagement over macromanagement. That is, these games concentrate on the tiny things, spending massive amounts of time on making the immediate systems of running, jumping, and shooting fun while leaving the larger picture out of focus.

They've tried to make shooting this gun the most fun you'll ever have- BUT AT WHAT COST?

It’s still possible to derive some meaning from these micro mechanics, of course. From the way Wander moves in Shadow of the Colossus you can see that he’s awkward and vulnerable, and from the way the Colossi work you understand that they’re ancient and powerful. From Arkham Asylum’s one-button combat system it’s obvious that Batman has no trouble taking down a group of thugs. From the way a gun handles in Call of Duty you can get a sense of how the developers view its real-life counterpart.

By focusing on these small things, though, these games limits their ability to make their systems present a bold artistic statement or overall point of view. Bioshock focused its mechanics on the gunplay, and so its systems give us little idea of how Ryan’s undersea utopia worked. Because it focused on the mechanics of jumping and collecting, the rules of Psychonauts have nothing to say about mental illness or the human mind. The inventory puzzles of Grim Fandango are irrelevant when it comes to analysing its vision of a corruption-filled mexican afterlife. It’s only by getting past this micromanagement and zooming out their mechanical point of view that a game’s rules can make an overall statement by themselves. By analysing Sim City’s systems, for example, it’s possible to understand Will Wright’s views on everything from population growth to economics, and get some idea of what he believes the perfect city would look like.

Sim City, of course, is meant purely as entertainment. There are very few games that intentionally make their systems as a statement – just about every game that does try for an artistic message does so through its art or writing. The best examples of games that do attempt it, though, come from what I think of as the Anti-Tale of Tales: Russian developer Ice Pick Lodge. Their first game, Pathalogic, models the system of a town being ravaged by plague and quarantined, with you as a doctor who’s attempting to fight the infection. By forcing you to survive within the rules of this system, the game constantly confronts you with questions about your own morality. Would you murder a child for vital medical supplies? It’s one thing to put the question as a simple moral dilemma, and another to put it in full context. Irrespective of their art-game status both Pathalogic and Ice-Pick’s second game, The Void, would be nothing without their strongly enforced systems. It’s the very fact that you can’t escape the system that makes the games so engrossing; leaving a way to avoid starvation or making it unimportant to allow the player to concentrate on the art and writing would immediately rob the games of their power.

Despite all this, I fear that Samyn has gotten his way more than he realises. Art games are currently skewed well away from mechanics. All our best bets- Bioshock, Psychonauts, Grim Fandango – belittle their mechanics, simply tacking their beautiful art, sound and writing onto the readily-available frameworks of shooting, jumping, and collecting. On the indie side of the spectrum (where Tale of Tales lies) rules are diminished even further- enough that many claim they aren’t even games at all.

Lovely, but a dead end nonetheless.

I believe that this is absolutely the wrong direction to head in. Interactive art pieces can be beautiful and moving, but if we want to actually create art through games, instead of despite them, we need to embrace all the medium’s mechanical origins.

Imagine a Bioshock game that had you actually play as Andrew Ryan, exploring his viewpoint by making you attempt to keep his undersea utopia together as it crumbled around you. A Psychonauts that had you managing your mind, using a system that forced you to battle your own mental fragility or be overwhelmed by insanity. Even a Batman game that had you actually attempting to crush crime in a city, making you think about the best methods of reducing crime-rates instead of putting you through a series of small pre-made challenges.

That, my friends, would be a beautiful future. For now, focusing on creating fun mechanics is right and just; but it’s only when we really get down to exploring the educational and artistic possibilities of the systems they’re made of that games will begin to reach their full potential.

For further reading (or to find out where I steal my ideas from) check out Rod Humble’s escapist article Game Rules as Art or read Clint Hocking’s essentially all-encompassing response to Roger Ebert, and for some examples have a fiddle with Humble’s accompaning experimental proof-of-concept The Marriage or look over Brenda brathwaithe’s “The Mechanic is the Message”. If you’re curious about Ice-pick Lodge’s games, go here for the best review I’ve read of Pathalogic and here for The Void. Many thanks to Jim Rossignol and The Sunday Papers for putting me on to Michaël Sawyn’s article, and no hard feelings to the man himself.