Beyond Rules and Fiction: A Diagnostic Tool for Debugging Engagement
Find where the loop breaks and the rewards falter
The game’s core loops that activate the brain should, as I have mentioned earlier in the series, help game masters develop techniques and approaches, help game designers understand how experiences emerge in the mind, and help roleplayers consider how their own actions can make the game more enjoyable for others.
However, it can also be used as an analytical tool to more easily identify where the loop breaks down.
Killing monsters and gaining XP to defeat larger monsters is a typical loop. But when a game designer introduces mechanical rewards for things other than mechanical progression, the loop breaks. For example: “XP for good roleplaying.”
Mechanical progression does not actually make someone roleplay better. Instead, the player should receive more relationships with people in the game world, creating opportunities for deeper character acting. In a detective adventure, the reward should not necessarily be gaining XP for discovering clues. Instead, the clues themselves should be the response to what the players do. The reward is getting feedback and tell the players they are on the right path. To acknowledge their contributions.
A game master who feels that a session lacks engagement can ask themselves what the players’ motivations are and try to improve their ability to create loops that make it easier for players to find their engagement. If the group is new or looking for a different kind of experience, motivations are something worth discussing during a session zero.
Fail forward mechanics have become popular in recent years because designers have identified that a failed roll can bring the story to a halt. Instead of failure simply stopping the action, failed rolls should create consequences that creates a way forward.
However, another solution to the players coming to a halt is to always provide enough ways to begin with. Fail forward is a fallback if this haven’t been done.
The important part of a conflict is not the conflict itself, but what the outcome produces: the players cause something to happen, and that creates an effect. Thinking in terms of effects rather than resolution opens up new ways of rewarding players:
making them feel that they contribute to the world,
providing information about the setting,
revealing clues,
creating connections,
opening new opportunities for interaction with the game world,
encouraging players to reflect on their character’s identity,
challenging the players’ own identities and perspectives,
and much more.
Roleplaying games do not consist of rules and fiction alone. They consist of signals, structures, and situations, from which the player’s brain creates meaning, expectations, identity, and emotional responses.
A “dark corridor,” for example, is interpreted based on the game master’s and the roleplaying game’s previous adventures, genre conventions, and all the horror films the player has experienced.Roleplaying games, therefore, consist of external stimuli (effects produced by the game’s reality) that players translate into internal representations through their previous experiences, motivations, and interpretations.
Engagement emerges when these representations become self-sustaining and continue to be updated through interaction.
Fiction is a result of creating meaning. It happens in the present moment, but it also occurs through retrospective reconstruction in each participant’s mind as they place new information into context: the process of creating memories.
We do not need to create fiction directly. We need to create structures that generate interpretations.
In this series:
Beyond Rules and Fiction: What Makes Games Different From Stories
Beyond Rules and Fiction: A Diagnostic Tool for Debugging Engagement
Beyond Rules and Fiction: The Future of Roleplaying Game Design