When I tell people I teach game design, they often immediately assume I do programming. And yes, I do some of that, but as anyone that teaches game design will tell you, it’s much more than that. Increasingly I think of my job as advocating for a compositional approach to game design and criticism, one that stops looking at games as unified wholes and starts looking at them as a series of design choices. To explain what that means, let’ take a quick detour through the idea of blackboxing.
Stay with me, I promise it’s brief! The basic idea is that because we deal with so many complicated systems and machines in our day to day life, we put a “black box” around many of them. In other words, we look only at the inputs and outputs we directly experience, and we stop thinking about them as complicated systems. While this makes sense in a day to day experience (I don’t want to think about the complicated mechanics that make my car run, I just want to get to work on time), it also leads to us being uncritical of the underlying systems and works to obscure complexity. It encourages us to think in wholes instead of in interconnected/interrelated pieces and systems (my car is not one thing- it is many, many pieces working together to help support the driving experience).
So what happens when we blackbox games? Well, we stop looking at design decisions, stop thinking about games as created compositions filled with all sorts of rhetorical choices and decisions. We look at them in toto, and we’re reluctant to admit any criticism of individual pieces (which, for an unexploded system, is often seen as critique or dismissal of the whole). We lose a sense of the inherent complexity, but we also have trouble articulating the systems and components that make up the complete game. Blackboxing games leads to some fairly banal observations: I liked the experience as a whole, therefore this game is a good game (or, conversely, I disliked it and so it’s bad).
Again, sometimes blackboxing is useful- in many ways it works like shorthand for our minds, helping us to reduce some of the inherent complexity we encounter on a daily basis to more manageable wholes. And if we simply want to know what someone thought of a gaming experience, a “blackboxed” response is fine- I liked it, I didn’t like it, etc. However, if we want to really review or critique games, we have to be willing to un-box them, so to speak. This means recognizing a couple things.
First, and perhaps most importantly, games are made by particular people working in particular social environments for particular cultural contexts. They don’t exist in isolation, outside of a cultural context, just as the people who play games don’t exist outside of a cultural context. Games, as composed texts made up of hundreds and thousands of design decisions and choices, participate in traditions and genres, reflecting and responding to other games and other cultural texts and values. Unboxing games encourages us to look at all of these interconnected social and cultural relationships, recognizing the situated-ness of games.
Further, as complicated systems, games are made up of dozens and hundreds of underlying rules which are constructed and designed. There are no rules that are either innate or inherent to a game, meaning that all rules are choices on the part of a designer/design team. Our tendency to blackbox encourages us to accept the rules that are presented to us as natural, rather than composed. Whether we’re talking about what information is shown or hidden on a HUD or what stats and customization options players have on a character, design decisions abound in games; they influence not only what we do, but even what we think of doing.
When I argue for and teach unboxing, I emphasize the idea of choice- designers chose to create certain rules, to follow a particular visual aesthetic, to end a narrative in a certain way. Looking at games as constructed works asks us to interrogate, evaluate, and explicate those choices as clear decisions rather than accepting them as innate elements.
