So we’ve discussed loops. It’s time to talk about game dynamics. A great game dynamic is at the heart of most successful video games because it structures the individual actions that the player takes, and the reactions of the game (the loop) into something more significant. They are a huge part of what game design is about, but they are also hard to express in conceptual form and difficult to understand.
Hopefully this post will help you do both.
Describing Game Dynamics
It’s easy to understand what a game action is: I push a button, I shoot my gun. I click a plot of land, I plant a strawberry. I pull the right trigger, my car accelerates. A loop is also fairly straightforward. I take an action, the game or another player reacts, and the process repeats in a loop until I win or lose. So I drive my car, an enemy car sideswipes at me, I steer and avoid a crash. I plant my strawberry, I add water, and I harvest my strawberry later.
Game dynamics are the next level of complexity, and describing them is much harder. For four decades, game designers have struggled to write documents that convey dynamics, but they are almost impossible to capture in text form. Diagrams help, as do maps and spreadsheets, but the fact remains that the actual dynamic often remains elusive. It needs to be prototyped before anyone (including the people working on it) has the realisation that its working or not.
Some designers try to avoid describing a game dynamic altogether and instead spec a game purely in terms of actions and reactions. This can work very well, but it requires a lot of trust on the part of the development team that the designer has all the pieces working in his head. Many people are not really able to extend that trust because it starts to sound like a Field of Dreams.
What Is A Game Dynamic?
Here’s my attempt at describing a game dynamic:
A game dynamic is a pattern of loops that turns them into a large sequence of play.
It may be linear (like Space Invaders), player driven (like Animal Crossing), or somewhere between those two extremes. In Space Invaders, the game dynamic is the continuing increase of challenge as the enemies proceed down the screen and get faster. In Animal Crossing the loop is the receipt of a task and the actions to complete that task, but the dynamic is the further branching of more tasks across days or weeks. In Halo, the main game dynamic is its famous 30-seconds-of-fun, while in God of War it is where single exchanges of sword blows mesh into complicated battles with multiple enemies.
Game dynamics are larger than individual loops, but smaller than segments (commonly called levels or chapters) in terms of time and size. I call them dynamics rather than the more traditional mechanics because in videogames especially they tend to involve the movement of several parts of the game in real time. They are dynamic systems, like a sport rather than a board game, with expected norms and outlier effects, so it makes more sense to label them as such.
It’s complicated to express game dynamics but they have a you know it when you feel it quality. They can’t have a one-size fits all shape, so they need to be iterated. Iteration on game dynamics is not a matter of production values, so it is usually low cost in nature. However what it does need is time in order to allow game makers to play and test their ideas in a software environment. Fun is found, not dictated.
Finding a great game dynamic is hard, but among the most rewarding things that a game designer can ever achieve. Whole careers and fortunes have been made off the back of a great dynamic.
Primary And Secondary Dynamics
Most games are based around just one dynamic. Practically all casual games, and many indie games, are and so too are many big-budget games. Great games with a single well-executed dynamic are often linear in structure, and they work hard to execute and extended the dynamic while concealing it a little using smoke and mirrors. World of Goo is an example of a game that does this brilliantly.
In some games, however, there are more than one dynamic. In the Total War strategy games, for example, the player is engaged in two kinds of strategy. One is the quasi-turn based overview of national strategy, troop management and resource allocation. The other is a zoomed-in mode onto individual battlefields where the player actively engages in ordering his troops in real time.
Deus Ex is another game that has several dynamics. In the stretch to create as many variable scenarios for the player as possible, the game has many sub-systems (for example e-mail hacking and the managing of inventory) that are effectively separate modes in which to play.
In games that use multiple dynamics in this fashion, a multi-modal structure is often employed. This structure usually sets one of the dynamics as the primary, and the others become secondary. The separation between the two might be formal (as in Total War) or more informal (entering vehicle mode in Halo) and they may be totally separated or have some commonality. But one of the modes is generally intended to be the main mode, while the other is either an offshoot or a sub-system.
Games that feature lots of mini-games take this to the extreme. Wii Sports has one very generalised dynamic of improvement and achievement of scores, but almost the entire of the rest of the game actually consists of many self-enclosed secondary dynamics. Wario Ware is the same. These secondary dynamics share passing resemblances to each other, but none of them are individually deep enough to sustain long term play.
Tension and Dynamics
Multiple game dynamics may work well together, but they often cause a great deal of tension. Tension occurs when two dynamics pull on each other, reducing the individual quality of each and resulting in a feeling that neither is fun. This often happens in games that place a very wide array of available actions at the player’s fingertips.
Roleplaying games like Mass Effect and Fable are good examples of games that have a lot of dynamic tension, as indeed is the roleplaying genre in general. Such games often end up becoming very complicated in their interface (creating opacity) and the various elements and loops that the game juggles sit uncomfortably alongside each other in parallel. This results in poor execution of individual dynamics, and a high proneness to exploits.
Poor execution might mean something like a combat system that doesn’t work particularly well, or a poorly thought-out consequence of one dynamic crossing into the path of another. A common criticism of the first Mass Effect, for example, was that the combat system was cumbersome to actually use because the player needed to call up the menu system frequently in the middle of the action.
When smart players realise that they can play a game in a specific way such that they will always win, they have discovered an exploit. Exploits often happen when a game’s dynamics become so complicated that it is impossible for the developer to anticipate all of the negative consequences. In the first Fable, for example, although the player had many classes available to him, it became quickly apparent from playing that the magic class was inordinately powered compared to the others. This meant there really was no reason to play anything else.
When players discover an exploit they often ruin the game experience for themselves (unintentionally) because the exploit becomes a uni-strategy. They just keep repeating their winning combination of actions through the game, achieving maximum mastery all too quickly and then stopping through boredom.
Parallel dynamics can work without tension, and making them work together is one of the most interesting challenges there is. But it’s pretty hard and not for the impatient.
Rhythm and Tone
Game dynamics set the tone of a game. While the cut-scenes or backdrop art might set the scene, dynamics do more than anything else to reinforce the tone. Actions, loops and dynamics all serve to empower and constrain the player in specific ways, and the results can be very engaging.
Game dynamics govern the breadth of actions, the pace of activity, and the speed of the game. They establish rhythm and tone, which if done well can give the game a unique signature. The balance of dynamics in Mario 64 are unique, for example, even though there are many games that use the same actions and world structure. That uniqueness comes from the rhythm and tone set by the game dynamics.
Prior to Resident Evil 4, the franchise was famous for creating very scary but slow games. The game world was ghoulish, blood soaked and horrible, but what made it scary was the restricted controls. The player moved slowly and awkwardly, often couldn’t escape horrors quickly enough, and so they felt frightened. Like a teenage girl tripping over while running away from a maniac in a high school slasher film, the Resident Evil game dynamic made the player feel incompetent, vulnerable and afraid.
And then came Resident Evil 4 on the Gamecube. It handed the player a shotgun, ammunition, and the ability to move and kill enemies quickly. It felt like a completely different game, in fact it was a completely different game, but with the added thaumatic layer of association from the rest of the franchise. Players felt empowered, with the ability to strike back that they had never had before. It went on to be hailed as a design classic, and rightly so.
There is much more to say about game dynamics than one post can cover. I hope this gives you a start however. Dynamics are integral to successful videogame making, no matter what platform you are developing for, and they form the machine core of what games are. Understanding and learning to use them is at the heart of what we do, and when done well they can power whole franchises.