Living in the Relational Playworld

On the rise of the "Relational Playworld" as a better way of incorporating games into our lives, as opposed to the "Product Playworld"

Tama River near Seiseki-Sakuragaoka Station in Tokyo. May 2024

In a recent essay, game designer Sylvie writes:

Many players have a critical mindset, and will try to come to a conclusion about whether they think the game is "well designed" or "poorly designed". This is the kind of conversation I'm not really interested in.

The context of the quote is an essay on games being a kind of dialogue between a player and designer. Recently, I've been wondering - how do players incorporate games into their lives - and how does this connect to the relations between players, designers and games?

People who play games tend to equate 'good and bad design' with 'I did or did not like this.' What this feels like is when someone says something is bad design, it reflects how they wish to see the world. To state something is bad design is to hold a conviction of what kind of game design should live or die.

But it's okay to hold opinions. However, on a systemic level, the tendency to classify stuff as bad produces an emergent conservatism that affects what kind of games get made. This is the problem of "legacy taste": the idea that what you liked in the past has a huge effect on what you tend to like now - and what you classify as ‘too hard to approach’ vs. ‘very easy to understand.’ Collectively, since popular hits of the past were what more people grew up with, legacy taste confines what gets made today.

As a visible example, conventions established by Harvest Moon - raising chickens and cows, planting vegetables in square fields you water once per day - exist mostly unchallenged to this day, culminating in what some call a ‘perfection of the genre,' Stardew Valley. Because of this legacy taste, if you were to try and create a farming game then anything it did would be measured against Stardew Valley or some Harvest Moon game. This is a bizarre dynamic given the diversity and breadth of farming history and practices around the world.

Personally, I've felt this happen in 3D Platformers… we did something new with Sephonie, but because it's something new, people play it and read it as clunky or hard to control - because of their legacy taste in 3D platformers like Mario 64. But anything new takes time to adjust to. Look at how complex any given CRPG (Baldur's Gate 3) or FPS (Fortnite) is. There's nothing 'naturally intuitive' about their systems, people just decided that they would be willing to learn them. I think there’s a tendency to view games as things that should immediately acquiesce to the player’s legacy taste, and if it doesn’t, something is wrong with the game.

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The Playworld

The way we live with and play games - and think about and form tastes for them - can be conceptualized as a "Playworld".

A Playworld is an abstraction, not an actual place. I call it a Playworld because, like our real world, we're born into it, and it establishes our initial expectations around games. Where we learn how to play, how to understand and interact with games, how to assign value to them. Like how the environment we grow up affects our political beliefs, a Playworld influences how we eventually live with games. A Playworld is roughly a set of principles that guide how we relate to games, how we value them, how we incorporate them into our lives. At the same time, we can exist in multiple Playworlds at once (I'll talk about the "Relational Playworld" soon).

By default I think anyone playing games mainly lives within the Product Playworld. In this Playworld, games are things we buy and sell, and use to entertain ourselves. They are things that need to be criticized or rated, to be understood as "bad" or "good", as having "bad game design" or "good game design." They serve a formulaic function: to kill time or regulate mood and stress.

Perhaps there's a value to this "Product Playworld". I suppose it's through the machinations of capital that we've gained tools like "Unity 3D": powerful software that allows game developers like me to accomplish the work of what may have needed 10 people in the '90s. But the downsides of the Product Playworld are well documented: look to any industry criticism, the layoffs, the hate movements, the mountains of bland games and the people who have to make precariously make them, the constant delusional fanfares about auteur creators that lead people down grindset lifestyles…

How could games continue on as long as they have if people only lived and breathed in this Product Playworld? It's as if there has to be some other kind of Playworld, sitting on the sidelines.

A parallel image comes to mind: another Playworld, one that acts as a foil, a lifeforce, the animating force behind the Product Playworld. One that isn't always given the light of day, but grows in the shadows - and increasingly so in recent years.

Relational Playworld

By Relational I mean that games, players and designers are "things connected by relations". A song in a game is created by a designer influenced by a particular song. A player builds a personal connection with a level they played with their childhood friend. A designer draws on their personal favorite architecture in creating their game's 3D levels.

The Relational Playworld tries to foreground this - viewing games more as a kind of ‘bag of experiences and relations’ created by the player and designer, rather than just a product you play.

Games can be a way for a game designer to engage in a dialogue with a player. They can be a way for a player to experience things a designer has created based on their life experience. They can be a way for a writer to connect their personal life to the game. In the Relational Playworld, games could be played and viewed as something more complex, that lets us cherish our relations to other humans and their interests and influences.

The ideas of the Relational Playworld have come to prominence in the recent 10 years, although they are by no means new. Merely, I think more of us seem to be engaging with games in a manner compatible with the Relational Playworld.

Theoretical Detour

From Arturo Escobar's Designs for the Pluriverse: (2017, page 63-4)

"… The center of attention is now an entire range of aspects that were largely bypassed by the social and human sciences as a whole. The category that perhaps most aptly captures these diverse tendencies is the ontological turn; it has become salient in geography, anthropology, and political theory during the past decade. What defines this turn is the attention to a host of factors that deeply shape what we come to know as reality but that social theory has rarely tackled - factors like objects and things, nonhumans, matter and materiality (soil, energy, infrastructures, weather, bytes), emotions, spirituality, feelings, and so forth. What brings together these very disparate items is the attempt to break away from the normative divides, central to the modern regime of truth, between subject and object, mind and body, reason and emotion, living and inanimate, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, and so forth. [What we are witnessing is] the forceful emergence of the subordinated and often feminized and racialized side of all the above binaries."

To me, this "ontological turn" (to paraphrase, I think it roughly means "a change in the way we perceive our relations to each other and other things") - can be captured in the field of games as a sort of "migration" from the Product Playworld to the Relational Playworld.

What is the purpose of a game's existence? To accumulate sales and act as a "marketing funnel" to mass-produced plastic merch sales? To entertain for an afternoon and be forgotten? To be streamed for 10 hours a day, 5 days a week? To represent the 'cutting edge of technology?' Much of 'why games exist' has been defined by the Product Playworld.

The Relational Playworld tries to "break away from the normative divides" that have defined games for decades: "good graphics," "good game design" - notions that are generally just results of legacy taste. The Relational Playworld encourages the "forceful emergence" of alternate ways of creating and playing games.

Where is the "Relational Playworld"?

I want to emphasize that the concept of the Playworld is complicated in the sense that games, people, etc., are not in one Playworld or the Other. Rather, I think it's more helpful to think of oneself or something as aligning with the principles of the Playworlds to various degrees. That is, even something like a very addictive/compulsive game could resonate with the Relational Playworld. A gacha game could feature references to real-world cultures, or have characters based on real-world sexual fetishes or fashions.

Whether or not all these things are merely in service of getting people to roll on characters and spend free time and life potential on a single game's world is up to debate, but I bring up this example to say that it's not like a "game exists in one Playworld or the other." Rather, the idea of Playworlds should be helpful in bringing to light what a game is doing, what designers are doing, what players are doing.

The Designer and the Relational Playworld

To quote from Sylvie's essay again:

I want players to understand me. If they like the game, I want them to feel energized about finding someone who shares their passions. Or perhaps the game gave them a new passion they'd never considered. To paraphrase Void Stranger, I want to reach players who feel the same longing that I do. I love feeling a connection to another person through their work, and I want to create those connections myself.

If someone doesn't like my game, that's not ideal, but I want it to be clear that it was created by a person who cared about it, and that the elements they don't like might have been important to me. I want them to reflect on why someone would care about those things, and maybe gain a new understanding of them.

When you play one of my games, say Sephonie (a game about three Taiwanese-ancestry scientists stuck on an island), on a base level you might be connected to imagery I thought was neat, or gameplay ideas I liked. On a deeper level maybe you are now thinking about your relationship (or lack of one) to Taiwan.

Within the Relational Playworld, a Game exists for the player to come away feeling more connected to the world they inhabit - not estranged.

To quote Escobar again, the world has a "damage inflicted by the ontology of disconnection and oppression." (65) Product Playworld-aligned games, at times, seem to foreclose a brighter future by saying "you should spend all your time here, forever." “The world will never improve, so spend tons of time in this game and never do anything else.”

The problem I see in games that consume lives is that they foster disconnection within the player - by getting them too into a single game's world. But also, they foster a disconnection between that player and social relations: highly streamable games act as a magnet for streaming personalities, which then act as magnets for people to spend time building parasocial relations.

When someone plays my games, or when someone plays any games, I would like it if they come away feeling like the game has acted like a "bridge builder and reweaver of relationality." (Escobar, 65, paraphrasing Gloria Anzaldúa (2002)). Both designer and players can act to be these 'reweavers.' To speak more concretely, I don’t want someone to feel compelled to see or do everything in my games, I just want them to resonate with something in my game, or be reminded of something in their life.

Escobar brings up these following concepts, which I found have some relation to the games industry / culture:

The understanding of the world is much broader than the Western understanding of the world. (68)

The OWW (One-world world) - the world that has arrogated for itself the right to be "the" world, subjecting all other worlds to its own terms or, worse, to nonexistence.

I take the "Western understanding" of the world not to mean "games made by Americans," but more the kind of Western-led focus on productivity/efficiency/valuing of science (over humanities) (which has partly led us to the global problems we find ourselves in - although, I suppose at least with video games).

The idea of 'something being relegated to nonexistence' is how games are only made legitimate when they make enough money. No one makes documentaries about brilliant game designers who make no money. But if one lucky person puts out a hit then suddenly they must have deep insights into the medium! (If we pull this idea further away from just games, it connects to how countries, people, that don't 'measure up' are considered inferior. )

Or in other words, the only valuable game design knowledge is knowledge produced by someone or something that made a lot of money. This is similar to the logic of the Product Playworld. This is exactly why designs that make a lot of money seem to find themselves reproducing like viruses: the Product Playworld equates money with good design, and so such designs continue to prosper. People will invent logic to justify that the game they are making are good.

Under the Product Playworld, games aren’t really made for some ideals of expression or game design, but for maximizing someone or something’s money.

What's happening in the Relational Playworld

The way the Relational Playworld is rising is through individuals! People now really know that it's people who are making games. Writers write of personal experiences playing games, YouTube commenters tell moving short stories of a how a game's song intersected with an important moment in their life.

People find ways of connecting the histories of various games, showing their findings through video essays or essays. Players dig for old games and write short reviews of them, informed by a sense of giving respect to its history and developers.

Organizers try to make curated releases of free games that don't aim to be viewed as marketable products. Academics make connections between seemingly disparate games, or look at subsets of games from new angles.

They may not always overlap, but these activities all enrich the lives of anyone who comes into contact with them. Sure, sometimes points or opinions could be misguided, certain arguments could be ahistorical, but a lot of good is happening compared to 10 years ago, by my measure.

Games are one of the most consumed mediums on Earth: no matter their content, games and the way in which they are promoted are having some psychological effect on humans the world over. The details of that effect are beyond the scope of my post, but I want people to take seriously what effect games might have and be having on the world, and the ways we can change that through our collective actions, suited for whatever community of the world we inhabit.

What's the Relational Playworld aligns with

Here's a short list.

• The ability to bond with another person over a game

• The ability to relate a game to something in a player's own life

• The ability to make historical connections between a game and other games

• The ability for a player to feel they're engaging in a dialogue with a designer

• People resonating with games they may have overlooked otherwise

• Games that get people excited about their own lives

• The ability to help people more deeply relate to games

• Making games that communicate things the world

• Games, ways of playing and talking about games, that expand our horizons - not foreclose them

• "Local" (as in specific to a country, digital or physical community) ways of creating and living with games beyond the ones prescribed by The Industry

If we were to assign star ratings to things with a Relational Playworld point of view, then perhaps games that feel like they're simply trying to hold our attention or build unhealthy relationships would gain 1-star reviews. Games that try to get us to obsess with a single fictional universe, games that teach us to view other people and the world in narrower, close-minded terms.

Rather than engage with a game as a thing to be evaluated by category, the Relational Playworld might have someone consider a game from "ground zero". As a black box that we slowly understand through the first note or song… to quote David Kanaga, composer/designer of the (personally deeply influential) Oikospiel :

The essential meanings in games (in play), function at a lower level. If we start from an understanding of games as musical objects/spaces, instruments for self-exploration, our intrinsic attraction to explicit goals (as boundaries that describe ways of playing) diminishes, and we see that we can (must, even) start from nothing, from chaos. From here, we search and listen, and if our love of a system compels us to teach others particular ways of playing via artificial boundaries (rules, which can be broken-- the more fundamental boundaries cannot, they can just be pushed), then we should act accordingly. These goals emerge from love. Archive Link

We can live with games in different ways, and we can influence others to live with games in different ways. Rather than negativity, giving up and throwing our hands in the air, all it takes is a little push from you or me.

Thanks for reading! This essay was mostly written in April but various work-related things came up. With a little breathing room thanks to releasing Angeline Era’s demo, I’m happy to have a little more time to write.