I've been doing game design for a while. And on an otherwise typical day, as I lay typing away and squiting through screen glare, the open office nemesis I was sneaking in to get my melanin fix, I suddenly decided to take a bit of distance on processes I'd taken for granted.

I lowered the blinds to the familiar mixed chorus of palpable relief and pleading enquiry, went out to bask a bit, and let my thoughts wander to places a bit more macro than anticipated. And as one of the easiest way I've found to make sense is to show my process to people, here something I also hope you find useful!

On art...

A painting shows you the world from the perspective of someone who's spent his or her whole life learning to see it one very special way. He or she specialised, learned more about how to best represent that which was sensed and, desperate for connection, the work is actively teaching its audience so that you at last share the author's vocabulary.

All art does is literally move you away from your definitions to show you other ones, if done well in a way you can work with. If too close to your approximations the work is judged boring, and if taken too far then nothing can be transmitted and both the work and the author are judged crazy; the ever lonely ones. The reward, then, from being able to work through the shift, from learning these new symbols, is the only point for both the maker and his or her audience. A direct path to the rare and beautiful.

As this shift happens, the artist's and your own fixation grows, the art becoming social and, ideally, ultimately pointless when fully shared; a dictionary of a language you've mastered is only a bit more useful than you'd think.

This is the first basic notion: Art translates the simulation that is our perception of the world into symbols, so we can work outside phenomenon into internal values.

To illustrate, I am in the above sentence simplifying a process into what I consider its most important factor. Were I a better artist, and your existing symbols closer to mine, I could have started with details, wouldn't have had to even mention this, and could have gone directly on to tools, or games themselves. Experience, however, is evermore than we can share, and you might today be sensing in fields so specific you actually value and need unicolored paintings to explain "blue", or static to highlight "noise". Modern art indeed.

...and tools...

By tried and true association, tools are art's very natural opposite: means to bring our symbols into the world. The better the tools, the less loss in translation.

We go from art to tool constantly, using art to shape tools that shape our art, often in the same practice: I'm currently using writing to transmit the symbol of arts and tools. This is only as faithful a representation as my tool allows. This can only be as poignant as my specialisation has made these symbols important to me. And this writing will only be as gratifying as the change it brings in the people it's supposed to be for (myself included, thanks for asking).

And as subjective perfection is ever changing and our world dead set on being infinitely complex, all people wanting to share something (that's everyone, by the way) keep being frustrated by the very limitations that help art and tools grow. Well, so long as there's food on the table anyways.

...in games and video games.

As I'm sure you've seen coming given the title, I believe art and tools are the only two things one worries about when making any game, consciously or otherwise; from playground pirate scuffles to tentacular, 10000 people strong, worldwide production houses.

A game is a simplification of reality, and as such what rewards one gets from mastering a specific game is as limited as its curated symbols. Allowing the manipulation of fictive universes (on a board or a computer), games are amazing in that they are both indirect tool and limited art. They are the best (and at the top of my head only) means of truly manipulating symbols that someone else chose.

Given that the symbols are few, precise and introduced over time (through trial and error or granular guidance), the art is very abstract, and the tools hardly ever applicable to the real world without added complexity thrown in. But the practise is often safe enough and, most importantly, if the model is built from the right abstractions, games are the best experimental teachers of fictive and by extension real phenomena.

That, more than anything, are games’ singular strength. The capacity in a medium for adaptation, done by checking its player's progress. Through trial and error and by starting with basic, familiar symbols and tools, a game can start adding complexity and association to end with completely new sets of both, having taught each to the player along the way. A movie cannot give you methods and time to help you come to grasp with something you're seeing. A painting can only be still, and thereby cannot guide you through a learning process; it is limited in what it can afford to show you so you don't get lost, and most often assumes you have deep existing knowledge to help in analysing what’s shown.

Games, technically at least, suffer no such limits: a game can in theory make ANY symbol become the players, no matter how far he was from it when starting the game. From addiction via slot machines or a mobile game’s mechanics, to complex world building or real character bonding in games whose formats allow this type of progression. Either way and everywhere in between, games can be simply the most approachable medium. That’s why children, with limited but constantly growing number of symbols, favor them so much over other media, regardless of their actual form (digital or physical, solo or in groups).

And if, throughout, the symbols shown (narrative, social, visual and otherwise) fit the means used to make progress (rules of the game, means of control, number of players, etc), then the game is a good one, for it adapted and allowed adaptation.

To sum up, art and tools are the two pillars that make a game. One gives it meaning, the other a way to grasp and ultimately master the meaning.

Interesting as a side not is that, as a result, if a game focuses too much on its art it’s left with no way to teach its message, and ends up less efficient than mediums that specialise in presenting, not manipulating (via techniques such as jump cuts through space and time, frame focus, panels, encapsulation, verses...you get the idea).

And if a game is only about manipulation of its allowed tools, it's actually a sport. Like every game that has seen its symbols fully accepted by a society, all that's left open to appreciation is the mastery of the tool. The player fully becomes an artist, using the game as a tool only. The symbols taught through the immersion become unimportant. Personally, socially, and therefore to the game being played.

This doesn't denigrate e-sports or walking simulators; they're great at the spectrum they've limited themselves to, either to fit within their budgets or target a specific demographic that wants more of what they know. But extrapolating in those directions won't amount to much: on one extreme you'd get games that become ever better at playing in the same ways, and on the other games that'd try their hardest to present without letting people manipulate, and would become at best the equivalent of a half-decent book, movie or comic. They by definition can't be innovative without becoming more of a game on one end, and less of a sport on the other.

Again, there’s always progress to be made in any niche, by tuning a presentation or a mechanic, so I’m not really saying either extreme’s a bad way to go about making games if those are your inclinations. Virtual reality will also certainly extend the life of both the most, as the new input could give a tool to the story driven game, and an ever more viceral input for at least shooters (once nausea isn't an issue I'd imagine). But if you're trying for something new there's only so many directions one can go from a core, and the generation that grew up with games as pivots to their construction are now enough in number (and growing) to have validated the pursuit of games. As something they can learn and enjoy sharing, and eager for interesting ways to familiarise with whatever's thrown at them.

Since any media is only as dumb as its audience is believed to be, I'm lead to think that there's a market for what games are: guides, for better and worse, to most symbols. And I believe as creators there's no downside to framing the symbols we transmit with tools that work to this effect.

A.