Exploring How Changes in Game Systems Generate Meaning Batu Aytemiz, Nick Junius, Nathan Altice Department of Computational Media University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA, USA {baytemiz, njunius, naltice}@ucsc.edu ABSTRACT In this paper, we use Florence, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and Descent: Freespace - The Great War as examples to analyze how changes in the game mechanics can be meaningful. We argue that play is essential for this interpretation and by changing their mechanics games can deliver plot points in a way unique to the medium. We look at a game’s temporality in addition to its play to be able to further interpret changes to its systems. To conclude, we compile a list of interpretive and design- focused questions intended to further explore this space of interpretation. Keywords Game Design, Game Mechanics, Interactive Narrative INTRODUCTION It was difficult for me to drag the lifeless body of my brother into the freshly dug grave. Over the past three hours, I had formed a close bond with the titular characters in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and now I was controlling Naiee, the young sibling burying his older brother. The game taught me the brothers’ interdependence by requiring me to use their combined strength to make progress. Each brother was assigned one half of the controller, with a single button enabling their interactions with the world and each other. Naiee was terrified of swimming, and he could only navigate the waters by piggybacking on his older brother. Alone such tasks were impossible. Now, Naia was gone, leaving the left side of my controller lifeless and his younger brother to fend for himself. The game was coming to a close. I had guided Naiee to the Water of Life, and now I needed to bring him home. I could see the house in the distance whenever lightning struck. A final obstacle remained—a river. I urged him into the river with the right analog stick, only to see him shake his head and refuse to go in. I continued to press forward, but Naiee refused to swim. Then I moved the left stick, the one that had allowed Naia to move. Only then did Naiee muster the courage to brave the waters and swim across. Though his brother was dead, Naiee was drawing on his strength. Without dialog or other overt representational prompts, Brothers had delivered this story beat by changing a core mechanical function late in its runtime. How did the meaning connect so powerfully with the play experience? Many commercial videogames deliver their story beats through representational elements like cutscenes, text boxes, visuals, audio logs, and dialogue. In Brothers, the player must experience this beat through play, because it is directly connected to the mechanic changing. Proceedings of DiGRA 2019 © 2019 Authors & Digital Games Research Association DiGRA. Personal and educational classroom use of this paper is allowed, commercial use requires specific permission from the author. In this paper, we examine three games that compel players to experience story beats through play. The primary method Florence (Annapurna Interactive 2018), Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (Starbreeze Studios 2013), and Descent: Freespace - The Great War (Volition, Inc 1998) use to deliver certain story beats is through changes in their rules and mechanics, rather than solely focusing on changes in the representational elements. Additionally, these games deliver these changes across varying temporal dimensions, both at different points in time and with differing frequency within their game’s total duration. In each game, when, at what frequency, and at what scale the mechanics change is informed by their overall duration. RELATED WORK Building upon the definition proposed by Sicart (2008) the three terms we use in the rest of the paper are mechanics, rules and properties. Mechanics are defined as “methods invoked by agents, designed for interaction with the game state.” Rules are defined as constraints, guiding the way mechanics function. Finally, properties are values that modulate the rules. While there has been much discussion of interpreting the meaning generated by game mechanics (Bogost 2007) (Treanor et al 2011) (Treanor and Mateas 2011), there has not been enough discussion of how changes in these elements are interpreted by players. Conversations on plot and story structure often revolve around understanding change, whether it is about how small units of action flow together to create arcs of plot or how the protagonist changes over the course of the story (Chemers 2010). Even though mechanical change is a critical part of how we understand and relate to games, it is an underdeveloped concept in game studies, especially how mechanics and play relate to narrative. A significant body of work focuses on investigating the connection between game mechanics and game narratives. Clint Hocking initially coined the term ludonarrative dissonance (2009), referring to Bioshock, to describe how a game’s mechanics might work against the meaning that its story intends to convey. Using Passage (Roherer 2007) as a case study, Mattie Brice (2011) coined the term ludonarrative resonance to describe how a game’s emergent qualities can echo and strengthen its narrative. Pynenburg (2012) built upon the concept of resonance by introducing their own term, ludonarrative harmony, focusing on cases where the interplay between mechanics and story is not only sufficient to capture the narrative, but rather, especially synergistic and necessary. Wendy Despain (2016) attempted to operationalize these insights to create an actionable process for game designers to achieve ludonarrative harmony in the games they are developing. When we look at further deep readings of games we similarly see an extensive focus on the static aspects of game mechanics without much exploration of change. This focus fundamentally stems from the choice of games (if there is no change in mechanics, there is no change to explore) and the general methodology the authors take. Michael Nixon and Jim Bizzocchi (2013) conduct a deep reading of the game Heavy Rain, identifying how its mechanics add to its story. Mike Treanor (2016) does the same for Sage Solitaire. Both papers focus on the static content present in their selected games without much discussion of change. The concept of procedural rhetoric 1is an established lens of interpreting meaning from a game’s rules and is generally unconcerned with the interpretation of the accompanying purely representational elements (Bogost 2010). Further developing 1 The act of making an expression or argument through a game’s processes or rules. -- 2 -- this lens, proceduralist readings were created to better emphasize the representational power of game rules (Treanor and Mateas 2011). Not only have these approaches, deemed proceduralism, been criticized for prioritizing the interpretation of a game’s rules over its play (Sicart 2011), an attempt to apply proceduralist readings to the classic arcade game BurgerTime proved there was a need to look beyond a description of the game’s rules and system diagrams, and turn an eye towards play, to create a more comprehensive reading of the game (Treanor and Mateas 2011). Figure 1: Beat diagram of our three examples. The lighter lines are smaller changes. The darker lines are larger changes. The jagged lines represent time compression to allow the three games to fit their durations into a single image. What the criticisms of and exploration of proceduralist readings point to is the need to look at players’ interaction with game mechanics and rules and not simply at the mechanics and rules themselves. This also implicitly points to the need to look at how game rules and player interactions exist over time. In the following examples, we track thematic changes across three different axes of temporality, duration, time “slices,” and the frequency and spacing of time slices: Florence, through a frequent and small change over the course of a few minutes; Brothers with its two major changes in its control scheme late in a game lasting a few hours; and in FreeSpace, how its rules for combat change early in the game’s plot and again in its final moments. Each of these games use their changing rules of interactivity as a component of their storytelling and our readings focus on how time in addition to play is necessary for interpreting these changes. FLORENCE Florence, developed by the Australian studio Mountains and published by Annapurna Interactive, is a mobile game released in late 2018. The game tells the story of Florence Yeoh through a series of minigames that portray different moments in her life, starting from her childhood days and ending with her life-changing romance. The gameplay consists of simple interactions wrapped up in small puzzles that range from “liking” a post on social media to decorating drawings using different patterns. Unlike other similar interactive narrative games, Florence uses very few words to deliver its plot. Instead, Florence tells its story through short interactions and visuals. In certain moments, Florence uses mechanical change to convey the progression of the plot. Chapter Five (“First Dates”), for instance, highlights Florence’s first date with Krish, a cello player who she met in the previous chapter. The episode guides the player through Kris and Florence having dinner, sharing dessert, and finally -- 3 -- kissing, all while they are learning about each other through conversation. The visuals depict their venues throughout the evening and mainly show images of the pair talking. The main mechanic in this chapter is completing puzzles by dragging individual pieces to fill out a wordless speech bubble, signifying the next line in their conversation. Figure 2: The puzzle progression in Florence, Chapter Five “First Dates”. Although the central drag-and-drop mechanic does not change as the chapter progresses, the number of puzzle pieces comprising their dialog gradually decreases.