On Quality, Care, and Progression Gates
What Lao-tzu, Christopher Alexander, and art games have in common
This newsletter is about an indie game in development under the working title "Memex". I'm building in public as part of the process of bringing these ideas to life.
The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.
Opening of "The Tao-te Ching" by Lao-tzu
When I started this blog, I didn't expect to want to start a post with the opening line of The Tao-te Ching, but it turns out that's precisely where I need to go in my exploration of game development and designing a my game.
Another quote, this time from architect Christopher Alexander's "The Timeless Way of Building", which might as well be an adaptation of The Tao-te Ching but for architecture:
“It is easy to see why people believe so firmly that there is no single, solid basis for the difference between good buildings and bad.
It happens because the single central quality which makes the difference cannot be named.”
To Alexander, the reason it cannot be named is because this quality is too precise - that words fail to capture it, because when we set out to describe what makes something good, we end up with things like je ne sais quois, or saying that something is crisp or that a design pops, but if it pops too much it becomes garish and so perhaps it is understated.
In other words, the context and setting and use of a thing in a static moment in time, while describable, only captures a snapshot of the thing, and not the essence of what makes it good. In this way, it is the living process of a thing and its situation within a context over time, with repair and revision going into it, that makes it into something with life and meaning.
This somewhat leans into natural selection & evolutionary forces: It is this quality of attracting ongoing attention and maintenance that naturally selects good things from not good things over time. The Mona Lisa, in a way, could be considered good art, in part, because enough people care about it to take care of it, to protect it, to preserve it, and to share it. Of course, some of the greatest art is that which is sought to be suppressed or censored, so again - it's not enough for something to attract this sort of longevity in order for it to be good, and thus it is part of this quality that cannot be named.
Okay, but what about game design?
Enough rambling about philosophical architecture - what does this mean for game design?
For one thing, it highlights that good involves care. It could be that I'm the only one that cares about it, or it could mean that it resonates with many people, in line with the definition of art that art inspires emotion in the viewer. By evoking that emotion, our audience cares about the piece in some way or another. It's not lukewarm.
One of the things I've learned about almost all of the timeless games I've enjoyed and wanted to emulate - from chess and sudoku to Mario Kart and Tunic - is that there is gated progression, and this progression is woven together with an emotional experience incorporating tension and stakes.
Great games do this through progressive unlocks. The lock and key vary, however, in each game. In chess, for example, you don't collect new pieces that grant you greater power on the chess board, unlike perhaps a collector of Pokémon cards. A chess board and its pieces are all the same for every game, from the novice to the greatest players of all time.
Many games have progress gates that are explicitly tied to items: You can't get the double jump cape if you haven't already gotten the magnetic gloves, and you can't get those if you haven't already gotten the boomerang. This creates a progress through the game that is both controlled and precise. Secondary puzzles often employ the same thing: get item A so you can trade it for item B, and so on.
The same thing is going on with games that require you to grind for stats: in order to defeat the final boss, you will need certain stat levels earned from playing through other parts of the game. This is a sort of middle ground between collecting items and collecting out-of-game experience or knowledge.
These knowledge unlocks underpin games and other art that seem to have an outsized influence on shaping culture: the game is beautiful to look at, listen to, it feels interesting and responsive as you play with it in your hand as a well-crafted object, and it presents progressive achievement by changing your personal perspective.
Jonathan Blow's The Witness comes to mind here, where the game mechanics progressively unfold until you have an experience with epistemology as a whole. Tunic as well is designed such that the progress gates are knowledge based more than item based.
Tying it all together
From all of this, I've got a few observations to bring together:
Quality is, in part, about care.
This care must run through and across each of the senses involved in an experience:
Gameplay feedback (responsiveness, haptics)
Mechanics
Storytelling
Visual arts
Sound & Music
Quality is a holistic value that, as it inspires care in an audience, leads to changes in the audience - and that is the goal of the kind of art I am looking at creating.
Progress through a game involves reaching and crossing various gates
Passing gates requires acquiring something inside or outside the game: skills, items, knowledge
Acquiring secret knowledge is an appealing solution to these problems for many games
Getting the hang of how this could work for Memex is still something that's under development for me: "What happens when you can hold a memory in your hand?" Depending on how you view the item, does that change the knowledge that you have and can use elsewhere in the game?