Meaningful Mechanics - Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design - page 279

lot more work remains invisible to the casual observer—all the software engineer-
ing, tuning, and testing that filmmakers don't have to do. Games are interactive
devices and must accommodate different scenes and different endings. Unlike films,
games are not just signals; they are machines designed to create the signal that must
deliver your message.
How Mechanics Send Messages
Good games, serious games included, don't lecture or preach. To use a game to com-
municate, you don't just produce a clever signal to convey your message. Instead,
you construct a machine—the game's mechanics—that produces the signal for you.
Figure 12.4 illustrates the idea. This isn't as efficient as simply telling people things,
but for some messages it is a better way of creating understanding and acceptance in
your receiver. People infer your message by interacting with the game and observing
its output.
FIGURe 12.4
communicating
via games
It may not seem obvious how game mechanics send messages, especially when, in
video games, the mechanics are mostly hidden and observable only through their
outputs on the screen and their reactions to a player's inputs. We've provided two
examples to show how the process works: SimCity and PeaceMaker .
In the original SimCity, the player could set the property tax rate and decide what
to spend the revenue on. The game included a mechanic that caused businesses to
leave town if the player raised taxes too high. Some people interpreted this to mean
that the game had a pro-business, capitalist agenda. But it also included a mechanic
whereby the player could increase the citizens' happiness by spending tax money
on civic amenities like sports stadiums and public parks—indeed, in the game, the
citizens demand them. Some people interpreted that to mean that the game had a
socialist agenda. Both the right and the left read political messages into the internal
economy of SimCity. In fact, the game was a well-balanced simulation of a medium-
sized American town. Both messages were intentional but never stated in the form
of an explicit assertion. Instead, the players discovered them through gameplay. If
you tried to play the game either as a high-tax socialist or as a low-tax libertarian,
you would lose. The former would drive the businesses out of town, and the latter