Review: Situational Game Design by Brian Upton

Book: Situational Game Design
Author: Brian Upton, game designer
Year: 2018

Summary: This is a short but dense theory book focusing on player-centric design, and is particularly concerned with how playfulness emerges as a factor of how an individual player (and their unique set of experiences and motivations) intersects with a game system.

I scanned my bookshelf for the shortest game design book that I hadn’t read yet with the intent on making it easy to start doing reviews again, which is how Situational Game Design – a book that only clocks in at 115 pages – ended up in my lap. And honestly, I probably couldn’t have picked a better book to start with. I found that the topic resonated really strongly with me, and it’s hard not to like a book that is telling you things you already agree with.

Situational Game Design is a short book – only 115 pages – but it’s very dense. It’s written by Brian Upton, who’s been a game designer for about 25 years and clearly has a very solid design theory background to pair with his practical experience. Upton also has another book – The Aesthetic of Play, about games, stories, and meaning – that I have been meaning to read for a long time and heard positive things about. He gave a GDC talk titled “An Introduction to Situational Game Design” that might help you decide if this book is relevant to your interests.

I feel like this book would be at home among more academic textbooks on game design but avoids the trap of being inaccessible to practicing game designers. Generally I think this is a book I’d mainly recommend to senior designers. I think the reason I got so much out of it is that I could tie the concepts to practical experiences, but if I had read it earlier in my career I might have found it impractical (especially before I had much opportunity to help direct the design or vision of a game). However, I think it might also do well among more advanced students, especially if you’ve already got a handle on other design game design theory books like Characteristics of Games or Rules of Play. And though I just compared this book to those, I want to be clear: this book explicitly does not take a formalist approach.

So to dig into the topic: “situational design” as a concept has a number of definitions in the book, but generally you can understand it as player-centric design that encompasses a wider range of motivations and factors than are typical in a game-centric design model. Instead of starting with the components that make up an abstract game system or defining game rules, it starts with looking at the player’s (subjective, constantly changing) experience and prioritizes that in the design.

Situational game design is particularly concerned with situations in which a player is not interacting with the game and not attempting to reach a win condition – both elements that tend to be key starting points for most game design theory. It doesn’t ignore winning or interaction, but rather tries to fold them into a broader understanding of what’s happening in the player’s head and how their experience changes even when they aren’t pressing buttons or following the explicit goals set by the game rules.

It looks at games as a series of situations (a moment in which a player makes a choice), moves (the set of actions a player can make), and constraints (which limit and inform their potential moves). There’s a lot of other terminology throughout the book, but I found these three the most important, and I’ll dive a bit more into constraints and moves after my summary of the review because I found some of the thoughts around them particularly interesting.

For a short book it covers a lot of ground, though it never deviates from its thesis regarding player-centric design and emphasis on the dynamic player experience that comes from situations and constraints. One of the chapters defines the playfulness of a system (choice, variety, predictability, consequence, uncertainty, and satisfaction), and much later there’s a chapter on narrative that discusses how reading a book can be playful by using the same heuristics, and that because you can evaluate and design gameplay and narrative under the same framework they aren’t truly separate. There’s a chapter that digs into goals with a nice attempt to describe play that involves making moves that aren’t about winning but are about performing a role, or trying to explore how wide the play space of the game is, or to gain closure by wrapping up a plot line. The final chapter of the book – “Meaning” – is probably the most dense as it tries to define a kind of ludic semiosis, where meaning is not read from the game but rather actively constructed by the player over the course of play.

Overall I think this is one of my favorite game design books. My own personal design philosophy is heavily player-centric, and I design from the player’s experience first. As a player (and as a designer) I am largely unconcerned about playing to win (and generally eschew systems that involve mechanical balancing), and far more concerned with playing to explore, experiment, and perform a role. This book helps give language and structure to that kind of design thinking, and presents it from an angle I was previously unfamiliar with. That means that I can more easily fold it into my own mental model.

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So as I mentioned earlier, I found a lot of the information in the book related to constraints and moves particularly interesting – not because these are entirely new concepts, but because of how they are built, framed, and used within situational game design. There’s a couple lessons I wanted to draw out and highlight.

Constraints are the set of restrictions imposed on the player that limits what types of moves they can make. Constraints can come from game rules (how chess pieces move on the board), but can also come from the physical world (the physics of a ball in baseball, the limits of human physiology in sports), prior experiences in the genre (I’ve played shooters before, so I have certain expectations about what I can and cannot do), recognition from the real world (If I see a wall in the game, I expect I can’t walk through it). Other constraints might be picking moves that will lead toward winning (and discarding options that lead me away from that goal), or – my favorite – self-imposed constraints, such as social norms (spawn-camping is unfair), or deciding to play a particular role (i.e. a lawful good paladin who never lies).

These factors all limit and narrow down the possibility space of moves a player believes they can make in the game. And I think that’s a key concept: that the set of possible moves is really a subjective evaluation by an individual player. Players have a wide variety of motivations and experiences that have led them to include or exclude different moves from that list or weigh their value differently. Sometimes this is because a player misunderstands some part of the game or is still learning what’s possible, or because they don’t have enough experience to make good strategic decisions that look ahead multiple moves. But sometimes it’s just because a player has imposed a rule on themselves, and they find it interesting or playful to follow that constraint through.

As the book puts it, there is a gap between Game as Designed (the formal game system) and Game as Understood (the model a player holds in their head of what the game is), and this Game as Understood can actually be significantly different for each player. This Game-as-Designed vs. Game-as-Understood model helps de-emphasize the formal game system and shift that emphasis to the player experience, and how that experience changes as they change their mental model of the game.

After constraints comes moves, which feels self-explanatory – it’s an action or choice the player takes. Except that I think we’re very used to thinking of a ‘move’ as an explicit action, like a button press, that leads to a change in the game state. But the book expands this definition heavily and talks a lot about anticipatory play and interpretive play. These are key concepts that I love, and will try to summarize them but I feel the book does them better justice that I could.

Situational game design proposes there’s two main types of play: immediate play (with moment-to-moment interactions, like in a shooter or racing game, requiring a series of quick moves and decision-making) and anticipatory play (where players can take their time, and the action is happening in their head). An example of the latter might be a horror game: a lot of the joy of playing horror is the anticipation that occurs in the player’s mind as they are evaluating the environment for potential threats.

One of the forms of anticipatory play is interpretive play. I won’t get too deep into it, but it basically tries to capture what’s going on in a player’s mind when they are trying to make sense of the narrative of the game and guess what will happen next. I think, after reading this, that environmental storytelling is actually a great example of interpretive play. If you’ve ever played a walking sim or slow-paced adventure game or a detective game, most of the play consists of looking at the world and thinking about it. You’re trying to piece together what’s going on, figure out what might happen next, develop theories that will either pay off or be falsified over the course of play.

When the player settles into an interpretation, they are actually making a move. They go from having multiple possible interpretations to picking one. Backing up to anticipatory play, they might be anticipating all kinds of potential dangers or rewards that might appear around the proverbial corner but often a player will settle on a guess and then see if they are right. These types of moves are not much different than settling on a move in chess, or making tactical choices in a shooter. Once a player decides, “I think there’s a monster in that closet”, their behavior actually changes: they’ve adopted a new set of constraints (moves that lead them to the closet are bad).

Anticipatory and interpretive play really resonate with me as someone who enjoys the process of figuring out a game, and often pushes for moments of “stillness” (as the author puts it) so players have space to consider their thoughts. You can see interpretive play happening in real time for this streamer during her play of Unpacking (minor spoilers) – she even subtitles what was going on in her mind (the interpretive moves she was making). I guarantee that after this, the choices she made about where she placed items changed based on a new set of constraints, informed by this new interpretation.

I don’t think these are new concepts, but I found the way they were presented in the book more applicable to game design practice than I’ve seen in other sources. The idea that interpretation is a form of interaction in narrative is familiar, but I think framing it in terms of moves helped make it click better than than other media studies framing I’ve seen. Similarly, constraints aren’t new to me, but when I think of moves I tend to think in terms of “affordances that add to the possible play space” rather than “constraints that prune from the possible play space”. This reframing of a familiar concept but from the opposite angle is the sort of thing I tend to find useful.