When pushed, I usually say that my specialist field of game design lies in systems of interaction. One of the few subjects I found really interesting during my Economics degree was game theory, covering topics like contract design, social bargaining, signalling games, strategies for imperfect information, and so on. To really dig deep into the subject (to ‘solve’ Chess, for example) requires too much algebra for my liking, but I think I have a good grasp of the principles.

Mathematical analysis is one of the main things I think about when playing a game. Don’t laugh. You do it too, probably without realising it:

  • When playing a typical RTS game, you wouldn’t spend all your money on building power plants. This is just logical – without some kind of offensive force, it would be impossible to achieve your objectives.

  • When playing an FPS game, you generally wouldn’t camp an empty corridor on the edge of the map. This is a question of behavioural modelling – when preparing an ambush, you need to consider which locations your opponents are likely to travel through.

  • When playing an RPG, most people will remember the location of monsters that drop lucrative loot. This is about meta-gaming the in-game economy – maximising the financial return on your labour, so you don’t have to spend hours saving up to buy things.

These examples may all seem like common sense, but that’s just because society has taught you to play these simple games of optimisation. Life is short and resources are limited, so efficiency is – generally speaking – A Good Thing. It’s a message embedded into everyday life.

The important thing to understand in relation to videogames is that the process of optimisation can be fun, but to be fully optimised is generally quite boring. If, hypothetically, you calculated the single most perfect strategy for playing Street Fighter, you would win every game you played but you wouldn’t feel very satisfied.

You can experience a similar sense of dissatisfaction by watching the film Equilibrium. It’s explained at the start of the film that Christian Bale’s character is a master of the ‘gun kata’, a mathematically-optimised sequence of moves designed to win a statistically-modelled gunfight. The result is that, no matter how many bad guys shoot at him, you never feel like there’s any real risk of him getting hurt, giving the action sequences an especially dull sense of inevitability.

Getting back to the point, you can theoretically express any game as a group of mathematical functions and variables. The CPUs that lie at the heart of all consoles and PCs can only perform mathematical operations, and so these are the building blocks that all games are made of. The problem is that every purely mathematical puzzle has some kind of solution, and solutions are boring. Very few games are ever truly solved, of course, but optimised strategies always evolve from sheer trial and error – a million players will play a billion games, and discuss the results in pubs, forums and cafeterias the world over.

Therefore, one of my big aims in game design is to develop systems that integrate the logical processing power of computers with the emotive processing power of human players – in short, cyborg processing systems. To get an idea of how this can work, simply picture a traditional game of Dungeons & Dragons. There are well-defined mathematical systems that model combat, fatigue and so on, using dice rolls to simulate probability, but also a human ‘Game Master’ with a sense of emotion and intuition to match the players’.

You can get a sense of what a difference a human mind can make just by playing a multiplayer game. I’m a big fan of beat-em-ups and fast-paced deathmatch games because they require you to second-guess your opponent and react immediately to changing circumstances. As well as learning the maths of damage rates, move priorities and so on, there’s a strong degree of psychology involved – while studying your opponent and deciding what to do, you must also consider your own actions from your opponent’s perspective. Are you becoming predictable? Did your last attack scare your opponent? Will they single you out for revenge later? Do your allies think you are being selfish?

I believe these kinds of questions make games much more relevant to real life. They encourage a bit of social empathy, teaching players to consider the effects on their actions on other people. And this is all very nice, but I would like to take things a bit further! Playing Quake Live against other humans makes your opponents behave more realistically, but you’re still locked in a very mathematical battle of reaction functions – grenades arc according to server-defined gravity, armour spawns at particular co-ordinates, railguns do a certain amount of damage, etc. All your psychological modelling just boils down to finding the most effective way to do more damage and score more points. Doesn’t that seem a little dry?

I would like to see games that draw on players to actually process game rules. One example I’ve been thinking about for years now is a competitive game based on photography. Players would have ten minutes to run around a large map and take photos of things, selecting their favourite two or three photos to submit at the end of the round. After the time limit is reached, the submitted photos are collected up by the game and flashed up in pairs on each player’s screen. Players simply select which photo they prefer from each pair, and the game tallies up votes and calculates which photo is the most popular. In this way, the winner is determined by the artistic qualities of their work, rather than the efficiency of their strategy.

That’s a pretty simple example, of course – directly confronting players with a series of obligatory value judgements is rather blunt. But with a bit of development, I think you could integrate these ideas more elegantly – perhaps by monitoring smaller interactions? I play quite a lot of Animal Crossing, but I find the simple AI of my neighbours to be quite off-putting. Instead, imagine a system in which an central Animal Crossing analysis hub monitors players’ reactions to different gifts, for example, and uses this to model ‘realistic’ reactions among your own villagers. It would involve a lot more network connectivity than Nintendo would ever agree to, but it would also endow your neighbours with much more human behaviour. Or instead of the Happy Room Academy rating your room based on ‘feng shui’, it could simply be propagated out into other players’ games for them to react to naturally.

This is all still more of a general design principle than a concrete system, but assuming I get a job in game design at some point, it’s something I’d like to develop. Hopefully, we’ll be able to determine a framework of fundamental points that can be integrated into different game systems.