Source: Making Deep Games (Rusch, 2017)
Source metadata
- Type: Textbook
- Author: Doris C. Rusch
- Full title: Making Deep Games: Designing Games with Meaning and Purpose
- Publisher: CRC Press / Focal Press
- Year: 2017
Key takeaways
- Rusch defines deep games as games designed to make salient parts of human experience (emotional, psychological or existential) tangible and explorable through play. Rusch sees them as transformative experiences that do more than entertain.
- Her core mechanism is the experiential metaphor: an analogy between how the gameplay feels from moment to moment and how an abstract real-life experience such as grief, addiction, depression or love feels. The player acts the metaphor out instead of watching it.
- Drawing on Lakoff and Johnson, and on Johnson alone, she describes an experiential gestalt as the abstract structure under any experience: its participants, parts, stages, linear sequence and purpose. The designer maps that structure from a source domain (the real experience) onto a target domain (the gameplay).
- She separates “how it works” from “what it feels like”. Rod Humble’s The Marriage models how a marriage works, but Rusch argues that a deep game also has to convey what the experience feels like.
- She identifies three allegorical approaches. Metaphor as mystery leaves the theme open, metaphor as message states it clearly and metaphor as muse uses it as a creative starting point. All three are valid, and the right one depends on what the designer wants to communicate.
- Her communicative goals are self-expression, awareness-raising, an object to think with, behaviour change and “what you do is what you get” (procedural rhetoric). Each goal calls for different design choices.
- The Nine Questions framework (Ch. 6) is a practical preproduction checklist for purposeful game design. It covers identifying the source system, the core mechanic, validating the experiential metaphor, player–avatar alignment and more.
- Player–avatar alignment means designing so that the player feels what the avatar goes through. Rusch argues this has to come from the mechanics, since fiction on its own can’t do it.
- In participatory deep game design, people with lived experience of the subject (trauma survivors or people with disabilities, for example) join the team as co-designers. The For the Records case study shows how this works.
- Rusch also describes game design as a creative arts therapy, in which the therapeutic value lies in the design process and not the finished game. She compares it with dance and movement therapy: turning an internal experience into a game structure is itself therapeutic.
- In her representational hierarchy, rules are the main carrier of meaning in a game and fiction comes second. She cites Juul’s “half-real” (games as real rules plus fictional worlds) and Frasca’s “simauthor”.
- Procedural expression, or procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2007), is the practice of making statements and arguments through rules. Games with an agenda use their mechanics to persuade or provoke.
- The beat chart is Minority Media’s preproduction method for mapping the emotional states the team wants onto specific moments in the game. It gives emotional design a concrete tool.
- Rusch proposes the hero’s journey (Campbell, Vogler) as a structural template for allegorical games, with the protagonist’s transformation mirroring the experience arc intended for the player.
Notable claims
Close paraphrases of Rusch’s points in Making Deep Games, not verbatim quotations (check the private authoring archive before quoting any of them directly):
- Deep games … make aspects of the human experience tangible and explorable. They allow players to gain a deeper understanding of themselves, other people or the world they live in.
- The ‘experiential metaphor’ describes the analogy between what it feels like to play a game and what it feels like to have a real-life experience.
- If games are an expressive medium, and if you want to use them expressively, you need to understand how they communicate and create meaning.
- It is not enough for a game to model how something works; it must also convey what it feels like.
- Rules are the primary vehicle for meaning in games. Fiction is secondary.
- The Beat Chart [is] a road map for the emotional experience the game is supposed to create.
- Participatory design with people with lived experience isn’t just ethically preferable — it is epistemically necessary for deep games about that experience.
Relevance
Rusch is the main source for deep-games and experiential-metaphor, and the book reaches into several neighbouring pages:
- deep-games: the central concept, with Rusch’s definition and framework
- experiential-metaphor: the theory and case studies in Ch. 3–4
- transformational-game-design: communicative goals, the Nine Questions and participatory design (Ch. 5–6)
- narrative-design: allegorical design approaches, with metaphor as mystery, message or muse
- player-agency: player–avatar alignment, and how agency can serve emotional communication
- game-feel: the experiential gestalt, and moment-to-moment feel as a carrier of meaning
- systems-thinking: identifying the source system, and games as models of systems
- internal-economy: procedural expression and how rule systems carry meaning
Open questions raised
- Can an experiential metaphor work in competitive or multiplayer games, or does it need a single-player, fairly linear structure?
- What happens when a player resists or rejects the intended metaphor? Does the frame break, or does the player still benefit?
- Is the therapy-through-design model backed by empirical evidence, or does it rest mainly on practitioner testimony?
- How does the beat chart cope with systemic or emergent gameplay? Can you beat-chart a sandbox?
- Where is the line between a game built on an experiential metaphor and one that merely has a theme?