MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research

MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics) – A formal approach to understanding games, attempts to bridge the gap between game design and development, criticism, and technical game research.

Design methodologies guide the creative thought process in all steams of development and help to ensure quality work. Iterative, qualitative and quantitative analysis helps in two ways; to analyse the end result, which allows you to refine the implementation which in turn allows you to refine the result. Using both allows you to consider a wider range of possibilities. This is especially important in computer/video games, where interactions between subsystems create complex and sometimes sporadic behaviour.

Game design and authorship happen at many levels, there are many different roles and fields in game research and development, however all must at some point consider issues outside their area’ base mechanisms, design goals, gameplay etc. No discipline or role is acceptation to this rule, if one element becomes ignorant, the whole game may suffer.

Games differ from other media sources as their consumption is unpredictable; the events that occur in gameplay and the outcome of those events are unknown at the time the product is finished.

MDA framework formalizes the consumption of games and breaks them down into distinct components:

Rules   >   System   >   Fun

It also establishes their counterparts:

Mechanics describes the particular components of the game, at the level of data representation and algorithms. 

Dynamics describes the run-time behaviour of the mechanics acting on player inputs and each other’s outputs over time.

Aesthetics describes the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when she interacts with the game system

Fundamental to understanding this framework is the idea games are artifacts, more so than media. This is because the content of a game is its behaviour, not the media that streams out towards a player, in other words it comes down to an experience unique to the player themselves, that is created by them, unlike films for example that portray a specific, scripted story with certain emotions plotted and weaved within it. In lamens terms; games build behaviour via interaction.

MDA identifies that the player and the designers perspectives are reversed; a designer identifies the mechanics which give rise to a dynamic system behaviour which in turn leads to aesthetic experiences. However the player sees it as aesthetics setting the tone, which is born out in dynamics and eventually mechanics. It’s important to always remember the player’s perspective in order to avoid falling into feature-driven design traps, when you should really be aiming for experience-driven design.

Aesthetics:

It’s important to move away from generic terms like fun and gameplay, so let’s move towards a more directed vocabulary, here are some examples;

·         Sensation - Game as sense-pleasure

·         Fantasy - Game as make-believe

·         Narrative - Game as drama

·         Challenge - Game as obstacle course

·         Fellowship - Game as social framework

·         Discovery - Game as uncharted territory

·         Expression - Game as self-discovery

·         Submission - Game as pastime

Examples:

Quake: Challenge, Sensation, Competition, Fantasy

Charades: Fellowship, Expression, Challenge.

Different games require different elements to take priority, for example Quake centres its main element as challenge, while fantasy is important too, it isn’t the core point of Quake, and the fantasy is simply a supporting element to the challenge of the game. Something such as Final Fantasy however will rely heavily on the fantasy as the element, and while challenge would still be important, it isn’t as important. There is no key golden rule to element focus, it’s all dependent upon the game itself and many different outcomes can lead to the fun factor.

These aesthetic definitions must then be refined and used as the foundation of aesthetic models, in simplistic terms its basically expanding upon the feature and how it is incorporated in the game. For example Quake incorporates Competition by pitting teams of players against each other.

Dynamics models work to create aesthetic experiences, for example challenge is made through things such as opponent play, where as fellowship can be encourage through things such as sharing information. Through these models we can create and identify feedback systems within gameplay to determine how particular states or changes affect the gameplay overall.

Mechanics

Various actions, behaviours and control mechanisms afforded to players within a game context. These can be things such as shuffling, betting, weapons, spawns etc.

Adjusting the mechanics of a game helps us fine tune a games overall dynamic. For example allowing a player who has been killed 3 times in a row to see their opponent through a wall might help to keep the losing player immersed and having fun, if the person knows that inevitably they have no chance and will lose, the dynamic fails, and players lose interest.

This involves tuning, tuning are the steps we take to slowly iterate new mechanics and change the overall gameplay, it’s important to record changes one at a time and make sure they have a beneficial effect upon the overall experience. In short the whole process is about prioritising the core feature on the first pass, and then as you go through each pass afterwards you should be adding more features to add depth to the game. The areas of choice could range between gameplay, story etc.

In an overall conclusion; MDA supports formal iteration approaches to design and tuning, in allows up to reason logically about design goals and to review and analyse the impacts of different features and aspects of the framework and implementations. Using the three levels of abstraction we can conceptualize the dynamic behaviour of game systems, understanding the game in dynamic systems form helps us develop techniques for iterative design and improvement over time. This in turn gives us control over the outcomes and allows us to tune the product to achieve desired behaviour. This also allows us to make informed decisions about gameplay impact upon the end users experience and we are then able to decompose these experiences effectively and use them tio fuel new designs, methods, research and criticism.