Designing For Genre

"Live out the adventurers of Farfhd and the Grey Mouser!" (Barbarians of Lemuria)

"Be the last hope of the rebellion!" (Star Wars Saga Edition)

"It's like Twilight or True Blood except that all of the messy dysfunctional relationships are treated as messy and dysfunctional instead of romantic." (Monsterhearts)

"Yeah, it's kind of like Lord of the Rings, except a lot bloodier." (Burning Wheel)

Whether appropriate or not for the game in question, we as designers and gamers often pitch games based on comparisons to media, usually to a well known movie or series of books that fit into the same genre. Such comparisons give other people an idea of whether or not they'll like the game, as well as giving us a hook to recruit new gamers into the fold who might not know a d10 from a hole in the ground but who are die-hard fans of Firefly, or Lord of the Rings, or Pokemon (hey don't judge) or what have you.

When we as designers make games, we do the exact same thing when brainstorming a new game: we start with what we like about various media and try to distill that into game mechanics for others to enjoy. The difficulty comes in the transition from the thought "I like Firefly's tight-knit band of outcast smugglers and their adventures on the frontier of space" to "Here's mechanics x, y, and z that help give the feel of the Firefly universe". What to do, beyond Netflix binging on content you enjoy and hoping for a revelation?

Well consuming content of the genre that you want to emulate in your design is important. More important than raw consumption though, is pattern recognition. What types of characters make up the main cast? What sorts of antagonists and obstacles do the protagonists struggle with?  How are the obstacles that the main cast faces resolved most of the time (by violence, by intrigue, because of dumb luck, by combining the powers or talents of the main cast, through the power of friendship)? What motivates the protagonists (love, money, duty, saving their hides, loyalty to each other)?

Take a moment, and type these questions or similar questions of your own design out, with plenty of white space in between them. Print it out, and grab a notebook or notepad, then sit your butt down at your desk or on your couch and get ready to watch a bit of tv. Pick a tv series that you enjoy, and that belongs to a genre or tone that you're trying to design towards. It's time to binge yes, but this isn't the undirected binging of an addict. This is consumption with a purpose.

Via Netflix or Hulu or whatever on-demand tv service you subscribe to (or have a free trial with), bring up season 3 of the show you're using as your inspiration. If the tv show you selected didn't make it to season 3 for whatever reason, pick an episode from halfway into the show's run and start from there. This is important. Seasons 1 and 2 of a series are usually all about establishing stuff: the setting, the characters, the antagonists. By season 3 (or it's equivalent in a shorter-run series), the director has settled on a particular "voice", the characters have been established, and at least one narrative arc has been resolved with room hints of bigger stuff to come. It's when a show starts to show it's true colors, and before a change of direction in later seasons (often called "jumping the shark") has a chance to change what the show is about.

Now watch the entirety of season 3, the middle of the show's run if it didn't make it that far. After each episode, write down a brief summary-who the antagonists were, what the main characters did, who the characters focused on in the episode were, and how the episode's story got resolved (or if it didn't, then how the stakes were raised). Once you do this for each episode in the season, patterns should emerge.

Maybe every monster of the week the characters fight is a symbol of or a reflection of the main cast's problems (Supernatural and Buffy). Maybe the characters are a constant-bickering band of misfits who always manage to put their baggage to the side at the last minute to get one over on their opponents (Firefly and Agents of Shield). Maybe the power of acceptance and friendship always wins the day (My Little Pony, Pokemon). List any such commonalities that you notice in your notepad or notebook.

At this point you have a hodge-podge of observations written down from the "meat" of the show in question. Now pick 1 observation that has to do with who the main characters are, 1 observation that has to do with who the antagonists are, 1 observation that has to do with how the main characters deal with their problems, 1 observation about the tone of the action, and 1 observation of your choice.

These five observations are your blueprint, the design specs for your putative game. Every mechanic you design, every concept that makes it into your notes, every doodad you're tempted to throw into the system because "wouldn't it be cool if...?", should be weighed against how many of your the observations you've listed your mechanic encourages, reinforces, or enables.

How to do that? That's a subject for my next post: Mechanics are Tools, which will cover how to design specific mechanics to make your list of media-inspired observations (and your other design goals) a reality when your game is played.