have more people than workplaces.”įIjak’s initial (ill-fated) solution was to put pressure on the player’s Hope and Discontent meters (see the screenshot below) by having amputees die by suicide. “But as time progressed, we found out that the amount of people that the player has to distribute among workforces is not a problem. That should be a strong incentive to heat all the workplaces,” Fijak explained. “The systemic idea behind that was when an amputation happens, that little human in Frostpunk is taken away from the workforce, so the player has less resources on that side. If workers aren’t sufficiently heated, they might get sick and, without treatment, may experience adverse effects like amputation or, worst case, end up dead. As Frostpunk’s arctic dystopia gets colder and colder, players must manage heat across living and work spaces. Its city-building/survival mechanics are meant to create a tightly balanced, tense experience.īut those mechanics (which Fijak worked on!) raised some incredibly thorny ethical challenges during the game’s design period.įrostpunk’s core question to players is anchored around the question “what will you sacrifice for survival?” Drilling into this question, Fijak used the example of the game’s heating system. It’s a game where player interactions can dramatically shift how the game experience proceeds, but the outcomes are more limited than say, a session of Dwarf Fortress. Fijak’s next step was to separate these games on an X-Y axis, creating a rough grid diving each based on how much player choice impacts the experienced story, along with the variety of different outcomes those interactions can create:įrostpunk lives in the lower right-hand side. They don’t manifest as directly as in writing or visual arts, but it means a game system’s “states” still flow from the designer who created them.īut of course, that definition of games covers everything from chess, to Uncharted, to Frostpunk. “In my opinion, authorial voice manifests in all states generated by mechanic,” she asserted. Chess’ creators (whoever they were) set boundaries for what those states could be by creating rules for movement, capturing pieces, victory conditions, etc. Every movement of a piece in chess creates a different board state, to the point that those board states are now memorized formations used by professional players. A cold mindsetįijak’s talk hinged on a definition of game design from Brian Upton’s book Aesthetics of Play: “game design is creating free movement within a system of constraints.” It’s an approach that looks at games as a set of states, and those states are created by rules engineered by designers.Ī simple example, of course, is chess. In one chilling example from Frostpunk’s development, Fijak showed how designers trying to solve balancing problems might stumble into expressing certain worldviews, whether they intend to or not. ![]() ![]() In her GDC 2021 talk, former Frostpunk game designer Marta Fijak (now creative director at Anshar Studios) broke down another vector for game designers to express authorial intent: system design.įijak’s talk both showed how designers can apply self-expression when designing their games’ systems, but also was a cautionary tale for those assuming their systems are being designed free of bias. The author of the text has an idea, and can convey that with varying degrees of subtlety using dialogue, visuals, tone, or other clearly expressed “ideas”. When talking about writing or top-level game design, “authorial intent” is an easy sentence to understand.
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