Deep Games

Summary

A deep game is a game designed to make salient aspects of the human experience — emotional, psychological, existential, social — tangible and explorable through its mechanics and systems. Deep games aim to create genuine insight, empathy, or transformation in the player. The term is used by Doris C. Rusch in Making Deep Games (2017) to describe games that go beyond entertainment to offer players a way of understanding themselves, other people, or the world (Rusch, Making Deep Games, see source-making-deep-games).

Deep games are not defined by their production values, genre, or subject matter, but by their communicative intent and structural design: the game’s rules and moment-to-moment feel must embody the meaning, not merely illustrate it through story.

Key ideas

• Meaning through mechanics. In deep games, the rules themselves carry the argument or emotional truth. A game about grief where the player cannot hold onto items communicates loss more powerfully than a cutscene about the same theme. Rules are the primary expressive vehicle; fiction is secondary (Rusch, Making Deep Games, see source-making-deep-games).
• Simulation of the human experience. Deep games model some aspect of real or imagined human life — a psychological state, a social relationship, an existential condition — and let the player explore it from the inside.
• Transformation, not just entertainment. Deep games aim to leave the player changed: with new understanding, new empathy, or new self-knowledge. This is distinct from games that are merely serious in subject matter (so-called “serious games”) without achieving genuine insight.
• Emotional specificity. Deep games do not gesture vaguely at “emotion” — they target specific experiences (depression, addiction, grief, marginalisation) and design mechanics to embody them precisely.
• The experiential metaphor. The core mechanism of deep games is the experiential-metaphor: an analogy between what the gameplay feels like moment-to-moment and what the target real-life experience feels like. This is not narrative allegory but embodied enactment.
• Rules over fiction. Rusch cites Juul’s “half-real” concept: games exist as real rules enacted in a fictional world. The rules are non-optional and constitute the primary reality of play; fiction can be ignored or disbelieved, but rules cannot. Therefore, if you want to make a true claim about human experience, it must be encoded in the rules.
• Not a genre. Deep games cut across genres: Journey (adventure), Depression Quest (text/interactive fiction), Elude (platformer), Papo & Yo (puzzle-platformer), Akrasia (action), Passage (arcade). What unifies them is intent and structure, not form.

In practice

Designing a deep game begins with identifying what Rusch calls the source system — the real-world experience or abstract concept you want the game to model. This requires deep, often first-hand understanding of the subject.

From the source system, you derive an experiential metaphor: a mapping between the abstract experience and concrete gameplay actions. The question to ask is not “what does this experience look like?” but “what does this experience feel like, and what game action produces that same feeling?”

Practical steps (drawn from Rusch’s transformational-game-design framework):

1. Identify the source system and your communicative goal (self-expression, awareness-raising, behaviour change, etc.).
2. Articulate the experiential gestalt of the source experience: its participants, parts, stages, causal sequence, and purpose.
3. Design a core mechanic that produces an analogous gestalt in the player.
4. Test the metaphor: does the moment-to-moment feel match? Does it illuminate the source experience or distort it?
5. Align player–avatar emotionally: the player should feel what the avatar feels, not just watch it.
6. Use a beat chart to map target emotional states to specific game moments. This keeps the design accountable to its intentions.
7. Where possible, involve subject-matter experts with lived experience as co-designers (participatory deep game design).

Evidence

Rusch offers several case studies:

• Passage (Jason Rohrer, 2007) — A five-minute game modelling the arc of a human life. Time pressure, limited space, and a disappearing partner embody mortality and relationship more directly than any cutscene could.
• Journey (thatgamecompany, 2012) — An allegorical game structurally following the hero’s journey; wordless co-op conveys solidarity and transience.
• Papo & Yo (Minority Media, 2012) — Based on designer Vander Caballero’s childhood with an alcoholic father. The monster mechanic embodies the unpredictable transformation of a loved one under addiction.
• Elude (MIT Gambit, 2010) — Designed to communicate the experience of depression to family members of sufferers. Vertical movement between zones (flow, ordinary life, depression) embodies the non-linear, gravity-like pull of depressive states.
• Spirits of Spring (Minority Media, 2014) — Addresses bullying and resilience. Uses the beat chart method: emotional targets for each level were specified before mechanics were designed.
• Akrasia (Rusch) — Designed to model the experience of weakness of will; the player is punished for acting against their stated intentions.
• Silent Hill 2 — Cited as a game where the monster design directly embodies the protagonist’s guilt and psychological state; monsters as externalised psychology.
• Depression Quest (Zoe Quinn, 2013) — Greyed-out choices (options visible but unavailable) mechanically embody the narrowing of perceived possibility under depression.

(Rusch, Making Deep Games, see source-making-deep-games)

Implications

• Communicative intent must come first. If you cannot articulate what experience or insight you want the player to take away, you cannot design the mechanics to produce it.
• Emotional design is structural. You cannot add depth to a game in post-production through story or art alone; the mechanics must be designed for it from the outset.
• Lived experience matters. Games about specific human experiences (trauma, disability, mental illness) are epistemically richer — and more respectful — when their designers have that experience or work closely with those who do.
• Deep games can be short. Passage takes five minutes. Depth is not a function of playtime.
• Deep games may not be fun. Rusch explicitly argues that the goal of deep games is not entertainment but insight; “fun” may be irrelevant or even counterproductive for some communicative goals.

Open questions

• Is deep game design applicable to competitive or multiplayer games, or does it require single-player experiences with controlled emotional arcs?
• Can procedurally generated or emergent systems carry deep experiential metaphors, or does depth require authored structure?
• How do players who resist or actively dislike a game’s intended metaphor experience it — is the frame broken, or does some residue remain?
• What is the relationship between deep games and therapeutic game design? Are all deep games therapeutic in some sense?

Related

• experiential-metaphor — the core mechanism through which deep games communicate
• transformational-game-design — Rusch’s framework for designing purposefully
• narrative-design — allegorical approaches; story as secondary vehicle
• game-feel — moment-to-moment feel as meaning-carrier
• player-agency — how player choice and constraint encode meaning
• systems-thinking — source system identification; games as models
• internal-economy — rule systems as expressive structures
• flow — deep games may intentionally disrupt flow to make a point