sinful.games

Category: Game Design

  • Engaging with the Mechanics 2: White space and Green space

    Engaging with the Mechanics 2: White space and Green space

    This is part 2 of my series about making mechanics easier for players to engage with. For the previous part, check out part 1: Cognitive Load

    A few years ago, I sat down with to run Masks: A New Generation with a new group for the first time. After introducing the players to the basic mechanics and making characters, we got started. As things kept rolling along, the hero team confronted a giant robot terrorizing a city park, and I noticed one of the players, a veteran of Dungeons and Dragons, had barely spoken up in the fight. Shifting the spotlight, I asked them directly what they wanted to do to try to stop the robot. They looked at their sheet, at the list of, moves, and back at me, and said:

    “I don’t know. What can I do?”

    This is a difficult spot as both a GM and a player. If you have ever asked your players “what do you do next?” only to get blank stares, you know how this feels. “Anything you want,” is not a helpful answer. In a Dungeons and Dragons style of game, players might have an explicit list of skills and abilities.

    But in a Powered by the Apocalypse game like Masks, your choices are left totally open. Instead, the moves are written to trigger based on the narrative situation within the game. You can’t simply choose from a list, you have to invent a course of action, and then see what move, if any, is most relevant. And to a player used to a more constrained set of options, this wide-open decision space was paralyzing!

    I’ve grown a lot as a game master since then, and in hindsight, I could have done a better job presenting courses of action (the robot is about to stomp on an ice-cream truck! A building nearby is in danger of collapsing!) But this experience is what lead me to recognize a critical difference in design philosophy that has shaped how I design and run games ever since.

    What is white space?

    This space was left blank on purpose

    White space in design is, quite simply, where there is nothing written. Not just blank space on the page (though this may be the case), but also where there are gaps in the rules or setting. You can see this most clearly in any well-written setting book or adventure module. If the designer knows what they’re doing, they’ll intentionally leave gaps for the players (the GM is also a player) to make it their own at the table.

    But in designing rules and systems, it can be a bit harder to notice.

    Out-of-scope whitespace

    There are a few places you can spot white space in a design. The most obvious is around the edges, outside the scope of what the game is about. Because a game or an adventure is finite, there will always be things left out. Deciding what to leave unwritten can be easy: You don’t need sailing rules in a game set in a desert. You don’t need to explain what’s on a continent across the sea in a module set in a single city.

    Sometimes, though, a designer will leave a gap in the design that is surrounded by content. A space where something should be, but there is nothing. And those decisions can be much more difficult, and much harder to use effectively.

    So why do we do it? And why is it so important?

    Why leave it blank on purpose?

    We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable

    Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell, chapter 11

    The high-minded philosophical reason

    When designing a game, it’s easy to take on the view that the rules are the game. That the players at the table will execute on the rules, and in so doing, experience the game as intended. But there’s something fundamental missing from that perspective.

    I mentioned previously that white space lets players tune a setting or a game to their individual group and preferences. But that’s something of an understatement: White space is what is unique about tabletop role-playing games. Without it, you have not created a tabletop role-playing game; You’ve created a board game. It may have random elements, or choices to make, but every option would be proscribed.

    Rules in TTRPGs are different from rules in a board game. Rules are generally clear and rigid, but TTRPGs are flexible and open to interpretation by design. It’s not the rules that are the game, it’s what happens in-between the rules. It’s the conversation.

    The rules in a TTRPG are not a merely set of steps to execute, they are sturdy skeleton that supports the wobbly organic bits in-between. They are a vessel that shapes and contains the fluid conversation that pours out of the players.

    The blank space you leave within your game is what defines the shape of the game. The part of the game that is not written in the book is the part that is played. And discovering what fills that empty space is a large part of why we play.

    Your job as a designer is to structure the conversation so that engaging with it will create the experience that you’re inspired to share

    Nathan D. Paoletta, RPG Design Zine

    Example: Character sheets

    For a concrete example, think of the spaces that are blank on a character sheet:

    The official Dungeons and Dragons 5e character sheet.
    Look how much of this sheet is just lined paper

    The name, stats, abilities, these are all degrees of freedom in the design of a character because they are left blank on the sheet. But even there, there are rules for how those are to be filled in. But look closer on many sheets and you will see something that doesn’t have rules associated with it: a box with lines for notes, character details, backstory, personality, and so on. Things that go beyond and between the rules to explain why and how this character is the way they are.

    Even on sheets that don’t have this feature, (Powered by the Apocalypse games are frequently guilty of this), I’ll see players adding notes into margins, the back of the sheet, or even a separate page that explain the details of their character that aren’t enforced or even supported by any game system.

    This blank space is what lets a player feel they own and inhabit a character. Even games have characters already defined for you, like Yazeeba’s Bed and Breakfast, have blank space to fill in as you explore the characters through play.

    The Practical Reasons

    Well-crafted white space is in ttrpg design has very practical benefits:

    White space allows for customization. While choosing from a list is quick and easy, there’s nothing that provides more freedom in a design than allowing a player to make up whatever they want (within reason & the bounds of the game) to fill a space. Like with character sheets and settings as described above, when something is left unwritten by the designer, it falls to the players to write it. And the players at the table can often (but not always) come up with an answer that is better for their specific table than a designer trying to make an answer that works for every table could.

    White space gets buy-in. When you’ve had the chance to create part of a character, the world, or part of the game system, you naturally feel a sense of ownership over it. You’re intimately familiar with that part of the game because you had a hand in creating it. You feel authority to make decisions about that part of the game. You feel invested in seeing what happens to it next. This is why collaborative worldbuilding at the start of an RPG is so powerful, but it can work the same magic in so many other places.

    White space gets you thinking. There’s something compelling about the space on the map that just says “here there be monsters.” The thrill of curiosity and discovery is a huge part of what drives people to play TTRPGs. Just like I mentioned about customization above, the blank space naturally prompts players to imagine what could fill that space. What could possibly explain everything surrounding that gap? To use Blades in the Dark as an example, Lord Scurlock is presented as a mysterious, seemingly-immortal figure whose personal influence is so powerful that he is on an even playing field with some of the most powerful factions in the city. But exactly what he is or what he wants is left totally ambiguous. As a result, the players almost always want to find out, and the GM gets to have fun crafting his sinister plot. As a result, everyone at the table is engaged.

    Putting it all together

    There’s a rule in horror that the moment you show a monster to the audience, it instantly loses its emotional power over them. When you can’t see it, you’re forced to imagine what it could be. And what each individual imagines is going to be more powerful than anything a writer could come up with or an artist could create.

    As long as the space is left blank, the audience/player is compelled to engage, to imagine what could be there. Everyone has their own monster, and the monster can be different every time. That’s the magic of white space.

    The Catch

    Unfortunately, there’s a big problem with white space. It turns out, can sometimes be really hard to think of an idea on the spot that’s as cool and interesting as you’d like. Sometimes, it feels like breathing. There’s an obvious answer, or, even better, one that violates expectations in an exciting way. But sometimes it feels like being thrust into the spotlight on stage without knowing any of the lines. Like sitting down for test without studying.

    Experience helps, but the experience is still highly variable even for the most skilled improvisers. So why is it sometimes so stressful, but sometimes it feels so natural?

    Planting seeds: How make white space green

    The secret to making white space work is planting seeds. Prompting players so that by the time they’re asked a question, they already have ideas for the answer. Immersing them in the vibes of the game. Showing them the shape of the gap in the puzzle so they know how to craft the missing piece.

    This is green space. Rather than a barren field, the blank space is crafted into fertile soil for ideas to grow. What might look like an empty field actually has seeds of ideas already planted under the surface.

    Example: For the Queen

    The best example of this I’ve ever seen is For the Queen, by Alex Roberts. For the Queen takes the form of a set of cards, each of which has a simple prompt. It begins with the players being told “The queen has chosen you for this mission because she knows you love her.” Players take turns going around the table drawing a card and answering the prompt on it. At the end of the game, everyone responds to the prompt: “The queen is under attack. Do you defend her?”

    I was deeply skeptical of this game when I first heard that premise. Surely, I thought, if the cards are the same, even in a different order, the game would play out largely the same way every time! But I could not have been more wrong. Even though the seeds planted by the designer are the same every time the players sit down to play, they will grow differently every game.

    I had overlooked an important part of the game. I hadn’t noticed what was missing: For the Queen has zero character creation. The characters are completely blank at the start of the game. Even the eponymous Queen, though you may have a piece of art to inspire you, is a totally blank slate. As I said in a earlier, the part of the game that is unwritten is what part that is played. The characters are left blank, so the game is about discovering who they characters are.

    But how does this work? How could you create a character from a completely blank slate with no rules to guide you? When designing the prompts, Alex Roberts had the mantra: “Tell them something they don’t know, then ask them a question about it.” That simple mantra is an incredibly powerful tool for game design, and it’s the secret to making white space into green space.

    Why are some others at the royal court jealous of your relationship with the queen?
    A sample card from For the Queen

    For example, the prompt on this card might look totally open-ended at first, but it actually tells you a great deal: You have a special relationship with the queen, it is known to others, and those others are envious of that relationship, so it must be worthy of envy. But it doesn’t tell you anything about what that relationship is.

    The card above brilliantly hides the prompt within a question. It buries the seed, making the hand of the designer invisible while constraining the space of answers to the question. The player no longer has to decide if the relationship is good or bad, or if it’s secret or public. The prompt feels completely open. But when the player starts to answer that question, their answer will naturally fall within the constraints created by the premise of the question. The result will feel as though it is completely their idea.

    And yet the player is never alone in crafting their answer to the prompt. They’re guided by the prompt, by the previous answers they’ve given, and by the very premise of the game (the Queen chose you because she knows you love her, after all).

    Consider the alternative cases:

    • What is your relationship with the queen?
    • Some others at the royal court are jealous of your relationship with the queen.

    In the first case, the question feels absolutely impossible to answer, especially if it’s the first card you draw! It’s so wide open, there’s nothing to latch on to. There’s no seed crystal to grow your idea off of.

    But in the second case, a player would likely feel they’re being dictated to. This is the way it is- no room for debate! Simply accept the premise and move on.

    But when both are put together, the magic happens.

    The takeaway: Ask leading questions

    The secret is leading questions. I was first introduced to the power of this idea at a seminar at GenCon, and it’s totally changed the way I GM. Whenever you have the chance to ask an open-ended question, you can gently constrain the answers to prompt the other players with ideas for how to answer. If you practice this skill, it will make your a better designer and a better game master.

    This instantly fixes the “what do you do next?” problem. To steal an example from that GenCon seminar, instead of asking “what do you do next” until the plot advances, decide on something that would advance the plot, and ask the players a question about that.

    Instead of “what do you do before the party,” ask “How long do you wait before arriving at the party? How do you get there?” Is this railroading? No. Because players love to be contrarian, and just as easily as it might prompt the players to answer the question you asked, it might prompt them to say “what if we don’t show up at all?” But that answer still moves the narrative forward.

    In the Masks example I gave right at the start, I might have said: “The robot is barreling out of control towards a group of civilians. What do you do to stop it?” The player might choose to prioritize something else, but by doing so they are making a major decision about the direction of the narrative.

    No matter the situation, tell them something they don’t know, then ask them a question about it.

    Expert mode: Begging the question

    A leading question doesn’t necessarily have to be a literal question. In fact, the most challenging but rewarding way to make this happen is to get the players to ask the question themselves. To make this work, you have to beg the question.

    To make this work, you need two things:

    Craft a compelling hook. Present the players with something so compelling and mysterious that they simply must engage with it. Enough details that they can easily imagine what might go there. This is the seed that the players’ ideas will grow from

    Then, resist the urge to explain. It’s so challenging as a designer to leave those spaces blank because we get pulled by our curiosity to fill it in just as strongly as the players, if not more. But you need to leave enough blank space to fit a wide variety of options.

    For example, in Wanderhome, by Jay Dragon, one of the items the Ragamuffin could start with is “The Heavenblade, lost after slaying the Slobbering God, that you would never use to hurt another soul.” This immediately prompts questions: What is the Heavenblade? What was the Slobbering God? How did you of all people end up with it?

    If you fill your game with interesting hooks, but leave them unexplained, like the horror movie monster, players will be compelled to imagine what fills that space. And whatever they come up with will be better for them in that moment than anything you could write.

    This is how you plant seeds. This is what makes your white space into green space.

  • Engaging with the Mechanics part 1: Cognitive load

    Recently in a game I was running, I had an amazing combat planned. The players were confronting a villain from their past- a pyromancer who used to lead a gang the players had wiped out. I made some really fun stat blocks and mechanics for tracking the burning buildings as the fire spread. The combat went without a hitch. The players had fun, I had a great time running the enemy, but then at the end, one of the players looked at me and asked “so who was that?”

    In that moment, I realized I had completely forgotten to sprinkle in the lines of dialog I’d written that would remind the players of who she was. We rolled back and did some flashbacks to the banter that I had wanted to happen, and it worked out ok, but I was frustrated that I’d completely forgotten an important part of the encounter that could have made it so much more impactful.

    I can’t count how many times as a player I’ve looked at my sheet at the end of a session and realized I’d completely forgotten a spell or piece of gear that could have solved a problem two hours ago. It’s infuriating and disappointing and can dampen a moment that should be fun to know that it could have been better if only I’d remembered.

    As a game master, I think a lot about how to help my players have fun, and as a player, I get frustrated when I’m not having as much fun with a game or system as I could. There are a lot of things that can get in the way of that. As a designer, we try to build systems that will help everyone at the table find the fun and create the type of experience we want, but the systems only work as intended if the players (and the game master is also a player) actually engage with it.

    So, what can stop a player from engaging with part of a game? Well, the first step is just remembering that it exists.

    This is part 1 of a series where I’ll talk about what can prevent players from using the mechanics you build, with a focus on the various solutions to each problem as deployed in the games that inspire me.

    Cognitive load

    What is cognitive load?

    When designing or reading a game, it can be easy to hold all the systems in your head because you’re only dealing with the system at a mechanical level. However, at the table there’s a lot more going on- tracking social dynamics, spotlight management, narrative flow, role-playing, and maintaining the game state all add cognitive burdens that will cause things to slip. These all add to the cognitive load of the game.

    “Cognitive load” is a term that describes how much mental effort it takes to learn something or perform a task, including memory and problem-solving. Basically, everyone has a finite amount of things they can hold in their brain at a time, and so we have to prioritize. In tabletop games, every mechanic adds to the cognitive load of a game, and if a mechanic isn’t important, frequently used, and memorable, it’s going to slip off the plate.

    Cognitive load is often broken down into three categories:

    Intrinsic load

    How difficult is it to understand the new information?

    Germane load

    How difficult is it to integrate the new information into our existing knowledge?

    Extraneous load

    How much junk is there getting in the way?

    Infographic showing the different types of cognitive load described above
    Graphic from www.barefootteflteacher.com

    Why does cognitive load matter?

    Cognitive load has been on my mind a lot recently. There are certain things I enjoy a lot as a game master, and things that I struggle with. I have a hard time inventing NPCs to fill the world, and no amount of random tables or prepared characters seem to help. But the history, politics, and geography of the world is as easy as breathing for me, even where I’ve left blank space to fill in later. Running complex mechanics in bespoke puzzle combats is thrilling and engaging, but I get so focused on them I forget to slot in the narrative beats I’d planned to make the story tick.

    It’s frustratingly easy for the parts of a game that are more challenging for me to take up the majority of my cognitive bandwidth at the table. They just take up more space. The things that are fun seem to happen automatically because they require less conscious effort, but they still demand mental resources.

    When all my bandwidth is dedicated to parts of the game that are heavier on my mental scales, the fun parts start to slip away from me. Conversely, when I’m too sucked into the fun parts of the game in the moment, I’ll forget to employ important mechanics that will keep it fun long-term. I want to be able to do everything! But with a finite amount of resources, the brain prioritizes, and it doesn’t always prioritize the way I prefer.

    As a game master and a designer, I want to get more of what I enjoy in a game by reducing the cognitive load of the parts I don’t.

    So how can we help people remember?

    Solution 1: Reference sheets.

    I can’t tell you how often in a game a player knows there’s a mechanic for something but can’t remember the specifics. In a lot of games, this either means digging through the book to find the official rule, or making a ruling on the spot (and I almost always recommend the latter). With a reference sheet, though, players can look down at what’s already on the table and see it’s right there.

    A reference sheet for Scenes from Far Lands, including Weather, Exploration, Discovery, Challenge, Look ahead, and Camping, arranged in a circle.
    A prototype of the “Scenes” reference sheet from my game Far Lands

    Reference sheets are important for any game. They reduce the extraneous load of the game by presenting the information you need free of surrounding clutter. The simplified language of a reference sheet can also reduce the intrinsic load.

    But most importantly to me, It frees up space to remember other things. When a player knows they can look down at the sheet when they need that mechanic, they don’t have to keep it in their active memory at all times. This means players only have to remember the rule when it’s relevant and can get refreshers as-needed by checking the reference sheet.

    At a practical level here are varying degrees of how close-to-hand a mechanic can be: it could be on a shorter “quick play” document, a one or two page list of mechanics like you might see in a PBTA game, or even written on the character sheet in front of every player. Many games have even taken the approach of putting character mechanics on individual cards: Daggerheart, Ironsworn, and 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons all take this approach. The cards mean players can keep only the relevant parts of their character visible and hide irrelevant cards, reducing the extraneous load even further.

    The problem with reference sheets, however, is also one of cognitive load. There are diminishing returns to how useful a reference sheet is as you add more and more to it. Every item added to a reference sheet means it will take longer to search it for what you need and increases the visual clutter- adding to the extraneous load. Multiple pages of reference sheets means physical work flipping through them. So a reference sheet needs to be limited to just the systems that are used very frequently (so that players don’t have to keep it in their memory at all times), or the systems used infrequently but which are very important to the experience (to reduce lookups in the book).

    For examples, look at just about any PBTA game, but let’s look at the reference sheet from Masks: A New Generation for a specific example:

    The moves reference sheet from Masks: A New Generation
    The moves reference sheet from Masks: A New Generation

    It presents only the most important moves, laid out in simple language with clear headings and emphasis on important text. The basic moves will be used constantly, and while veteran players may come to know them by heart, new players will have to re-read them every time because each move is quite complex and unique.

    The adult moves, by contrast, are going to be used very rarely- but are very important when they are! They have a significant impact on the narrative so forgetting to use them or how to use them would be deeply unfortunate. I personally take issue with putting the adult moves first on the reference sheet, since a brand new character will not have access to any of them, however having them on the reference sheet is very important for long-form play because players may have so little interaction with those moves they would not have a point of reference for them.

    Solution 2: Separation of responsibilities

    Another way to reduce cognitive load is to divide it up between players. The most common way this is done is splitting up responsibilities between players and the GM. Using a traditional fantasy RPG as an example, the players don’t need to know how enemy stat blocks work. The GM doesn’t need to remember how every spell the players use works. Each player doesn’t need to know how other players’ character’s mechanics work.

    But there’s a fatal flaw:

    If you read through the rules of many of these games, you will see nowhere that this separation is written in stone. It’s just a best practice that tables have adopted because it is necessary to run the game at a high level. the more inexperienced the players are, the more of that cognitive load shifts onto the GM to keep the game running, and that leaves the GM with less cognitive bandwidth for tasks like storytelling, role-playing, and spotlight management. It leads to GM burnout and takes away some of the most fun parts of being a game master.

    GM-ful games

    However, there are games that make this explicit. Belonging Outside Belonging is an awesome example, where responsibility for certain parts of the game are divided between players. Seven Part Pact takes this to the logical extreme, giving each player a full set of unique rules that they are in charge of. These games have been called “GM-ful,” as a contrast to “GM-less,” as they give every player some part of the traditional “game master” responsibilities.

    For an example, check out Masks of the Masks, a much darker superhero game inspired by Watchmen. This brilliant game breaks down the responsibilities of the game master into “pillars” that each have responsibility for running a different part of the game:

    A graphic of the four pillars from Masks of the Masks: The Cirty, the Authorities, the Enigma, and the Doom.
    The four pillars of Masks of the Masks

    I love superhero games, but I have always struggled to run them. I have tried to run Masks: a New Generation many times, but I inevitably have burned myself out trying to manage everything I want to do in the game. It’s a goal of mine to figure out a system that lets me run Masks: A New Generation at the level I want without pushing myself too hard. But Masks of the Masks takes a GMful approach. One player runs the day-to-day people of the city. One person runs the government and the law. One person runs the mystery. And one person runs the inevitably-approaching Doom. Each player is game master for the other players, but nobody has to take on the role alone.

    Even in a GM’d game, responsibilities can be delegated to players from an overwhelmed GM. Too busy setting up stat blocks to draw interesting terrain? Ask the players to draw the map! Forgetting to track health totals? Give each player some enemies to track health for. In fact, giving players authorship of some parts of the game and the world can help develop buy-in and engagement (I’ll talk about this more in a later post!) and give players something to do in games with strict spotlight management when it’s not their turn (I will also talk about spotlight management in a later post!)

    Solution 3: Simplify

    This is the hardest but most important as a designer. If players hare having a hard time remembering a mechanic, maybe you have too many. Maybe the systems are too unique and should be combined. If you see players in playtests struggling to remember a mechanic or forgetting to use it, consider if you need it at all.

    This is really the core of the problem. The only guaranteed way to reduce cognitive load is to reduce the amount of information. Rules that are too complex increase intrinsic load. Rules that are too unique increase germane load. Rules that are optional or unnecessary increase extraneous load.

    Reducing intrinsic load

    Make your rules less complex! After your early drafts of the game, make a box that you have to fit your rule into. Then make the box smaller and re-write the rule in that box (without changing the text formatting). Then do it again. This forces you to strip out the least necessary parts of the rule- the exceptions, the qualifiers, the redundancy. Compress it into its most compact form. I promise, the rule will still work.

    Reducing germane load

    This one requires reading.

    One thing you need to make sure your game has is consistency. Create a language for your game and stick to it. Go read other games and pay close attention to the language people use when writing game rules. What games have the most memorable rules? How do they template things?

    Magic: the Gathering is an amazing example of this- it uses a lot of phrases like “at the beginning of each upkeep” or “whenever a player draws a card” that are very well standardized (at least, in modern cards). This sort of language has been refined over decades to make it as easy as possible for players to fit a new card into a system they already understand. Compare to Yu-Gi-Oh, where each card uses much more natural language. There may be less work to learn the basic rules (lower intrinsic complexity), but each unique card is much more difficult to understand because they’re so unique (high germane complexity).

    Draw Steel is another phenomenal example for this. The game is extremely complex, with a lot of terms to learn like in Magic: the Gathering, but once you learn the language, everything is so well standardized, it becomes very easy to read a new ability and understand what it means, and the language they use is designed to be similar to other games which it follows in the footsteps of.

    An example of an ability from Draw Steel
    An example of an ability from Draw Steel

    But also: steal. Find other games in the genre of game you’re trying to make and see what they do. Chances are, other people have tried to solve the same problems you have, and come to different solutions. This isn’t to say you should steal ideas from other games (though you absolutely should), but rather that the more similar your game is to other games people have played before, the easier it will be to remember the parts that are different. If there’s part of the game that isn’t important to the theme but is required to make it function, you should see if you can get away with cutting it altogether, but if you can’t, make it similar to what people who have played other games will be familiar with.

    If the puzzle-piece edges of your game match up what’s already in the players’ brain, it will fit in without a problem.

    Reducing extraneous load

    Extraneous load comes in two forms: visual clutter, and mechanical clutter. The first is a design problem that you can approach in a similar way to reducing intrinsic load: Just fit the game into a smaller space. But you can also help by formatting the rules cleanly.

    Reducing mechanical clutter is another beast entirely. As a designer, it can be really hard to kill your darlings. We can develop blind spots for things that have been in the game from the beginning but don’t serve it anymore. Remember that none of those ideas are gone forever. Start an ideas document you where you catalog the mechanics that don’t make the cut. Those things may have been necessary scaffolding to get the game to where it is now, but are no longer holding anything up, and you can pack them up to deploy them elsewhere.

    To reduce your mechanical clutter, perform an “ablation test.” Pick one mechanic and see what happens to the game if you remove it completely. Repeat this for every mechanic, even the ones you think are critical. If you have to, replace them with the most bare-bones patch you can think of that will let the rest of the game function. Sometimes you’ll be surprised how well the game still works without something you thought was critical.

    The bottom line

    Every system is going to have a very different shape, and every person has a different shape of brain for all the pieces to fit into. Where some systems might heavily mechanize combat, some might have mechanics for social interactions, for exploration, for puzzle-solving, for crafting narrative arcs. The parts that come naturally to one person will be very different from another. Where one player might struggle to remember tactical options in combat, another player might struggle to remember how to engage an NPC in witty banter.

    This comes down to the match between the kinds of fun a player prefers vs what the game provides, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different players (I will definitely write more about this in the future). At a psychological level, it has to do with the points of reference a player has. The more a person has encountered similar things in the past, the more work they’ve already done to make space for that type of thing in their brain, because it can be put together with things they already remember (“XYZ is like YZ, but with the addition of X”). This is at the heart of germane load.

    As designers, we know our games by heart, so it can be hard to see what other folks will struggle with. We build the games we want to play, the games that fit well into our own uniquely-shaped memory. So don’t build just for yourself, but for the player who wants to engage with your system but just can’t remember the parts that you know by heart.

    Now I just need to remember to apply all this advice myself.

    For more on cognitive load, check out this awesome video by Chubby Funster on youtube.

    What’s next?

    While it might seem like a simpler “rules-lite” game might have less cognitive load, for some players, those games are considerably more difficult because of the difficulty of knowing what to do next. The lack of direction, the blank page, can leave players less experienced with improvising feeling paralyzed. I’ll talk about this in my next post where I’ll go over the difference between and importance of “white space” and “green space” in game design.