recently, i was chatting with my good friend violet about game design. this happens frequently—we’re both philosophically inclined and we’ve both spent thousands of hours playing games. in particular, violet, known better online as ocre, was one of the best players in the world at racing in the game Crypt of the NecroDancer, a singleplayer rogue-like rhythm game known for its fiendish difficulty.
(for those unfamiliar with the term “rogue-like”: each time you play NecroDancer, you’ll encounter a new, randomly generated dungeon, and be tasked with reaching the final boss on the deepest floor. games with these properties are called “rogue-likes” after their ‘80s inspiration, Rogue.)
violet said something that stuck out to me during this discussion—as you might have gleaned from this post’s title—but before i explain that, i have to explain NecroDancer racing.
you see, NecroDancer had a small but vibrant competitive racing scene, where two players will start playing the same ‘seed’ at the same time, ensuring that the randomly generated dungeons they encounter will be the same, and race to beat the final boss in the least possible time. it’s an entirely new layer of strategy that was added by the community on top of an already challenging, nuanced game.
inside the world of NecroDancer racing, countless strategies were viable, and it was unclear even to top players which was ’best’. should you progress through the early levels of the dungeon as quickly as possible, giving yourself a head start into the later, more difficult levels, but with less equipment to quickly dispatch those challenges? or should you collect the items on the early levels, losing time there only to gain it back by breezing through the difficult endgame? should you commit wholly to neither strategy, choosing your path on the fly based on which items the random dungeon will give you this time? it was a nontrivial decision, and people won tournaments in many different ways.
(if you’re interested in hearing more than that, you should listen to an expert, not me; fortunately, violet’s made a youtube video detailing this strategy further, which is a good watch)
so, NecroDancer is a singleplayer game, which was transformed by the community into a multiplayer offshoot of that game, adding new, emergent layers of strategy.
as you would expect if you’re familiar with the communities around multiplayer competitive games, while exact agreement on how to play a NecroDancer race wasn’t forthcoming, the community quickly came to have a general sense of approximately the right way to play—what gamers refer to as a “meta” emerged, short for “metagame”, since the decision about the “best” strategy happens outside of individual matches.
what you might not expect is that, actually, two communities came to different beliefs about the meta. the English-speaking community converged around one set of strategies, and the Japanese-speaking community converged in interestingly different ways. While the English-speaking community gradually came to believe that collecting items more was effective, because the ability to look at your opponent’s screen meant you could know what future areas would look like, then catch up to them with superior items and take the advantage in the endgame, the Japanese-speaking community continued optimizing for immediate speed, collecting fewer items and relying on mechanical skill to get them through the endgame.
lots of games have something like this happen—high-level competition in first-person shooter games often involves different metas becoming dominant in different regions.
however, in shooter games, the actual competition is separated between regions, because low latency is so critical to a fair competitive experience. this meant that teams would play internationally only rarely. so, there, the divergent metas can be explained purely by that siloing of competition: because of the nature of live competition, strategies aren’t just “worse” or “better” than others—any given strategy could be advantaged against some strategies, but worse against others, and whether that strategy is good depends on what other people are playing. the meta, then, is generated by what C. Thi Nguyen describes as “an emergent, complicated form of second-guessing, like rock-paper-scissors with a doctoral degree”.
all this to say: if you separate competitors into groups, it stands to reason that different strategies would succeed in different groups, the linguistic factor aside.
in NecroDancer, though, the linguistic difference was the only one. since latency didn’t matter as much, everyone was competing in the same tournaments. you’d think, then, that the actual experience of competition between these regions’ distinct strategies would cause them to normalize into an equilibrium where the competitively optimal strategy was.
but that’s not what happened. instead, the distinct communities settled into different strategic spaces, despite nothing “in the game” separating them. from the perspective of analyzing games, this makes no sense.
unless, of course, you view “what the game is” as something that also encompasses the discussions of strategy that take place in and around matches. if you take that viewpoint, it makes perfect sense—the linguistic barrier limits discussion of strategy, and actually talking about strategy communicates it much more quickly than simply playing against it and watching it back later. since the strategy is, obviously, part of the game, it partly stands to reason that discussion of strategy is, too.
this chafes against lots of intuitions about games. explicitly in games philosophy, and implicitly in other places, there’s a belief in a “magic circle” around the game context, where when you are in the game, you are wholly under the sway of game motivations (“inside the magic circle”), and when you aren’t, the game motivations have no hold over you. if “talking with your friends about strategy” is part of what constitutes the game, which side of the magic circle is that on, exactly?
C. Thi Nguyen, mentioned earlier, has an answer for us in his excellent book Games: Agency as Art. in its sixth chapter, he considers the question of what features of games we’re meant to regard as “part of” the game—what aesthetic philosophers refer to as the “prescriptive frame” of the game. he concludes that games, in their design, can communicate to us what features were designed with the intention of being engaged with, and therefore we can understand what is ‘part of’ a game by looking at how the game designers act so that we will pay attention to those things.
analyzing trading card games like Magic: The Gathering, he recognizes that the game’s design itself is constructed with an eye towards the meta. trading card games involve the frequent printing of new cards, and usually feature the removal of old cards from competitive play, and banning of cards that are problematically powerful. these features, he argues, demonstrate that the game designers are working with an eye towards the meta, and therefore that the meta itself is part of the game.
returning to NecroDancer racing, it’s clear that the community members setting the rules for racing were attending to the meta as well. for example, when the ‘axe’ weapon produced uninteresting gameplay by simply being stronger than everything else, to the point where picking up an axe made the mechanical challenge of the rest of the race simply nonexistent, it was banned: the axe made for a ‘bad’ meta.
to that end, by Nguyen’s suggestion, we ought to observe the meta as part of the game of NecroDancer racing, and since that meta is dependent on language, in at least some sense, the Japanese-speaking NecroDancer racers and the English-speaking ones might have been playing different games, even as they faced off in tournament matches.
i mean, is this all that surprising? this language is used colloquially in sports all the time! when strategic revolutions upend how a game is played, it’s changing the game, it’s a whole new game, the team doing it is playing a different game than everyone else. all i’m saying here is that that’s, maybe, a little more literally true than we’re accustomed to giving it credit for.
game design is a broad and fascinating field to me, and while the kinds of “making games” that everyone recognizes as such are interesting, i often find myself most fascinated by game design that just happens. speedrunning, new metas, racing at NecroDancer—they all fundamentally change what a game is, but in a way that often doesn’t seem to have a “designer”.
there’s this thing—the game we started with, that was designed on purpose—and if we just slightly shift the prescriptive frame, we have another game, that no one designed, but it still exists, constraints and challenges not subject to testing or balance but simply emerging out of possibility space.
it plays at the lines between structured and unstructured play in a way that i find, honestly, beautiful. there are rules here, but they weren’t made with this goal in mind. regardless, our cognitive flexibility in finding immersion in games lets us interact with these author-less amalgams all the same—
and sometimes, they also turn out to be really good games.
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