STORYTELLING - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 186

The complexity of a game's system still matters a great deal. Tic-tac-toe can be played by two
human beings but has a simple and easily mastered system that becomes very predictable. It
produces few if any novel emergent stories for anyone who's played more than a handful of
games. When players push into a complex system with many possibilities and potential strate-
gies, however, they can surprise each other and (hopefully) even the game's creators.
The presence of other humans in the space of play can be inspiring for our creativity and inge-
nuity. When we're motivated to beat a human opponent in a competitive game, we're aware
that our own unpredictability can be an asset. Especially in games of head-to-head competi-
tion, where our way of playing can negatively or positively affect our competition, the element
of surprise can be crucial. As a result, we experiment, coming up with new things to try out and
throw at our opponent.
At the same time, we try to envision what our opponent is thinking, what they understand
about the game and how they'll act. (This attempt to read the opponent's mind is sometimes
described with the Japanese word yomi. ) On top of that, multiple players engage in this mental
maneuvering at the same time; you're trying to guess what the other players are planning while
knowing that they know that you know the possibilities they might be planning. Frank Lantz, an
eminent game designer and theorist, calls this tangle of complexity donkey space , and it creates
the most beautifully human aspects of unpredictability in games—qualities that really can't be
replicated with computer code.
The playing of multiplayer games, whether cooperative or competitive, is also an inherently
social act. We're never just making moves in a game system that we share with another human
player; we're also saying something to the other player, even without words. Skilled players
of a complex game can wordlessly express many things in how they use the verbs of game:
wariness, mercy, the aggression of a quick onslaught, even ideas like “I'm just toying with you”
or “Let's get this over with.” The conversational nature of games becomes even clearer when
there's more than one live participant in the conversation, using the structure and tools that the
creator of the game, the facilitator of the conversation, has provided.
The emergent stories of a great game session can be immensely powerful: stories about an
unexpected turnaround, a clever move that wasn't anticipated by the opponent. In these
stories, the players are protagonists, and the feelings we see on their faces in the exultation of
victory or the agony of defeat are real feelings of other human beings. That may be why they're
told again and again and why the authored story of a game like Tek ken (1994), which features
many unusual and memorable characters struggling with their own fictional conflicts in a
global fighting championship, is often eclipsed for Tek ken 's community of players by the emer-
gent stories that are created by one human player struggling against and defeating another.