 In his book, The Art of Game Design, Jesse Schell composes a list of over 100 different lenses through which we can view the craft of designing games. Inspired by Christopher Alexander's pattern language, it aims to devise a vocabulary for the many ways designers approach their craft. For example, Lens 1 tells us to understand the emotional experience we are trying to build for a player and then craft a game around this. When Subnautica was being developed, the designers explicitly used this lens to shift the game towards a horror one because the core emotions of scavenging in the seas is one of abject terror. The most prolific exponent of this lens is Jenova Chen, whose emotional perspective on design has led to the creation of games like Flower and Journey. This insight about emotions isn't intuitive, as historically we have built games around mechanics and fun, an understanding of which we have stumbled on over the history of games. Space Invaders introduce difficulty modulation by accident, and this phenomena maps onto Lens 21, Flow Theory, Pac-Man popularized power-ups and AI state machines, Lens 28 if you were curious, which gets us to think in the context of new mechanics and objects being introduced to a game. However, both Space Invaders and Pac-Man converged in Shigeru Miyamoto's revolutionary game Super Mario Bros., which combined difficulty escalation, power-ups, and mechanics into his design philosophy of putting the player first. He was an engineer of fun, which happens to be Lens 5, but also insisted games need to just be joyful to play. These insights have been formalized in books like Steve Sweeney's Game Feel, and Raph Koster's book A Theory of Fun. If we step far enough away though, regardless of whether you start with mechanics, themes, or emotions, most designers emphasize how they need to be tightly aligned, which happens to be the lens of unification. We now have a whole suite of theories that reinforce this claim. The mechanics-dynamics-aesthetics framework tells us to think about the reasons people play games and craft an experience around this. Lens 30 is the lens of emergence, which asks us to think of games as systemic devices that generate strategic or narrative possibilities, and lenses 26 through 33 outline the relationship between mechanics and emergence, and how simple objects can be combined to create something that is more than the sum of its parts. This is expanded on in the books Game Mechanics, Advanced Game Design, and Advanced Game Design-a-Systems approach, formalizing the many-way systems interact in games. The utility of shifting design lenses is it gives us a way of challenging our assumptions, and perhaps guiding us when we go astray, whatever the medium of creativity you are in. It's an earnest attempt at crafting vocabulary for game design, something many suggest games are in need of. However, what if these design lenses converge at a high enough level, suggesting an even deeper purpose to the design of games? In his GDC talk, The Nature of Order and Game Narrative, Schell explains how inspiration for his book came from Christopher Alexander's Apatone language, which similarly presents a series of lenses through which to view architecture. A few of them even have powerful utility when it comes to game design. Lens 68 is called Connected Play, which asks architects to create environments that encourage children to interact with each other, something cooperative designers and multiplayer designers can learn from. Another is called Pats and Goals, which is about leading players through an environment using conveyances and signifiers. However, what really binds Christopher Alexander's work is the suggestion that all these lenses are pointing towards something a little more abstract, ethereal and universal. It remains elusive to Christopher for the duration of these books, but in his later work, he finally came up with the name for this intangible objective for design, something he calls Life. What is Life? Christopher is not defining life in the formal sense, but as an aesthetic property that transcends the sum of its parts. He states, It is a case of understanding the interaction of man and nature and making a harmony out of that interaction, which has the beauty of nature and the zest of life. In essence, life is some intangible property that we assign with the label's truth, beauty and wisdom. It's something that speaks to all of us and is contained in all the great works of science, art and design. Anything, even decidedly dead things, can have life, and that means that we can, through our own creative capacities, bring life into the world. He states, Intuitively the beauty of a building, its life, and its capacity to sport life, comes from the fact that it works as a whole. Wholeness is a property of integration, of unity or purpose, of life. For example, he heralds the design of Tofukaji Temple, which is somehow both cultivated and overgrown, reconciling nature and humanity, and has a clearly designed path that is integrated harmoniously with its environment. He shows how the space is designed so impeccably that insects and animals coordinate with the rhythms of the person walking through, mobilizing nature into a synchronized dance. How do we detect this ethereal force, though? This is where Christopher lays out an additional 15 principles, and Shell takes this and translates it into our understanding of games. Alexander argues that these properties exist inherently in nature, and it's up to us to intuit these principles and apply them in design. He shows examples of this in the context of architecture, like how the Musk of Cairo one shows the principles of strong centers, or how the Alhambra has beautiful instances of scale and local symmetry. Since we are focusing on game design, though, we can illustrate these through Shell's interpretations of these principles. Scale is a property that reveals beauty at multiple resolutions, and can be seen in the layered design of Pac-Man, to the quest you embark on in Shadow of the Colossus. Strong centers are about having a strong central theme, idea or sense of orientation, seen with clarity in the opening of The Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild. Boundaries establish the beginning and end of an experience, alternating repetition is expressed in games' tension modulation, positive space is about articulating space clearly, good shape about drawing objects with intent, local symmetries can be seen in level design, deep interlock about integration, and contrast roughness echoes non-separateness and simplicity, reflect a bevy of different aesthetic lenses we see in art, design, and animation. To manage this complexity, there seems to be commonalities between a few of them that might allow us to group them together. Simplicity, non-separateness, and boundaries all seem to be speaking to what we identified earlier as emergence, where a series of interconnected parts that are discreet but interacting combine to create something that transcends the sum of its parts. Games like Go are viewed as both simple and complex, because a handful of rules somehow generates a game with a ridiculous array of strategic decisions. Scale, alternating repetition and gradients map onto the many things we spoke about in terms of the flow channel, general pacing, and having a game that works at multiple levels of resolution. Strong centers, positive space, contrast, interlock, and symmetry all speak to spatial and temporal design constraints that designers always implicitly invoke, whether it be how the mountain in the distance and journey draws the player to the horizon, how negative space is a powerful reason why levels like facing worlds is as popular as it is, or how having juxtaposing elements can be seen in everything from Undertale's invocation of humor and tragedy to the intentional dissonant shadow of the colossus users to subvert the traditional hero's journey. Once more though, the divisions between these categories eventually breaks down, giving way to something more intangible. Echoes is about how all parts of a system echo one another, and Shell says this happens when you get a match between gameplay and story, as well as having the themes of a game present at all levels. A fascinating example he uses is that of Cuphead, where the frenetic gameplay of jumping into the fray is paralleled by a story that is about the same thing. Also, the idea of two ambitious young upstarts making a deal with the devil, in his mind, parallels how the two brothers who developed the game made a deal with Microsoft for the game as well. The concept of the void is analogized to the stage in the hero's journey, called the belly of the whale, where our hero reflects and recuperates from a failure of some kind, but this is also indicative of alternating repetition and pacing. Shell argues Go exhibits deep interlock because the decisions you make are predicated on the decisions of your opponent, but the game Echo also exhibits this principle by using its mechanics to reinforce its story about love and companionship. Shape can refer to space, whether it be level design or characters, or it can refer to the shape of a story, how it is structured and the beats that constitute its primary conflict. Whether it be spatially, temporally, or psychologically, and whether mediated by the impulse for play or story, these principles seem to pervade design in some form or another. Christopher Alexander, however popular he may be, is not without his critics. Many argue that his obsessive invocation of objective standards for beauty actually stifles creativity, and others suggest that not everything needs to be built with the explicit objective of life in mind. We have works of art that are intentionally disjointed, rife with dissonance, and profoundly unpleasant to experience, as well as design sensibilities from different cultures that may have different standards for what constitutes beauty. I'm not here to answer the question of whether Chris or his detractors are correct, but to use this dispute as an opportunity to explore a new vision for design. The question remains though, why does Chris think this way? The first few pages of his book, The Nature of Order, can help clarify this question. He states, This book is about a more realistic conception of the world and of the universe, which comes into existence, and can come into existence only when we acknowledge to a very large degree that we are all the same. Sometimes, I think of it as a mass psychosis of unprecedented dimension, in which the people of Earth have created a form of architecture which is against life, in name, image-ridden, and hollow. Harsh words, perhaps, but not without merit. His argument boils down to the fact that our hyper-reductionist conception of the world, in conjunction with the continued commodification of artistic products, has destroyed our perception of beauty, and hence, the artifacts we now produce are completely devoid of higher purpose. One misunderstanding that needs to be clarified is that Chris is not advocating for a top-down imposition of beauty standards, but saying that if we allow art to manifest from an authentic creative place, it will naturally converge on something more objective. In his talk entitled The Medium Is The Message, Jonathan Blow outlines how he thinks the craft of design has been impacted by commercial and cultural forces. He starts by outlining how the kinds of works being produced by television radically changed owing to the structure of the medium. sitcoms had to be built around the needs of advertisers, and long-form content could not be explored. This means the pacing and storytelling chops of artists in the field were severely impeded by these constraints, and hence why television of the early era was generally terrible. With the introduction of serialized content thanks to new platforms, this gave way to the golden age of television, where creators could push the boundaries and tell seasonal long stories. When we turn to video games, Blow applies this logic to suggest that the free-to-play model is fundamentally broken, in that it is constrained by commercial forces in such a way so as to make designers employ predatory practices. Additionally, if we look at the general structure of our medium, we see large corporations having the lion's share of control when it comes to production, and unfortunately, the need to meet a corporate bottom line stifles innovation from the outset. Recently though, we are seeing the blossoming of the indie space, where although budgets are lower, innovation continues to come in spades because creators are not held back by arbitrary forces. In light of this, Christopher Alexander's points become more powerful because although the constraints that impose themselves on architecture are different to that of game design, the fundamental point is that it is outside forces mediating design, not our actual creative instincts. However, games and architecture do have a connection that may not seem apparent on the surface. In her talk, Architecture and Level Design, Claire Hosking illustrates how architecture can inform game design. She shows how works like Peter Zomther's Booter Chapel inspired games like Journey with its monolithic structures, sense of isolation and dark interior, or how the material and decor used in Bioshock and Mirror's Edge create completely different atmospheres of oppression or emancipation. We see architecture give way to city building in the beautifully realized cities of the Assassin's Creed franchise, and these cities are adapted for the purposes of player interaction and engagement. However, the objectives and purpose of architecture, although overlapping in many respects, are slightly different to that of game design, and so it requires we take the spirit of Christopher Alexander's argument and adapt it to video games. According to Christopher Alexander, the division between form and function is an illusory one. He states, In nature, there is essentially nothing that can be identified as a pure ornament without function. There is essentially no system that can be identified as functional, which is not also beautiful in an ornamental sense. Today, we have function as a mechanistic concept, an ornament as a superficial and stylistic one. In essence, beauty in nature always has a function, whether it be the fact that the beauty of flowers is meant to entice insects, or how the peacock's plumage exists to impress mates. Furthermore, if we look at the principles that underlie even the most functional of nature's creations, there is an austere beauty there. To go back to flowers, petals exist in precise mathematical ratios to one another, and symmetry of all types permeates every kingdom of the tree of life. As Bertrand Russell said about mathematics, mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere, like that of great sculpture. Alexander continues by saying, because of our still prevailing 20th century viewpoint, students are convinced that beauty comes about as a result of the concern with practical efficiency. If a thing gets its nature from its field of centers which help each other, then form is function. In essence, if we listen to the process of authentic creation, the forms that arise out of this will be intrinsically beautiful, reconciling the divide that splits many of the arts to this day. Forget the debate, form is function. Alexander suggests the function of architecture is the production and cultivation of life, to enliven and create communities that bring out our better angels. Architecture is one of those fields where form and function seem more tightly coupled, as the work of art always exists in a social context, and has to, presumably, fill the function of providing someone a home. Perhaps other art forms can be more subversive and deviate from life, because they don't have a social or functional role to play in the persistence of our species. One of the most famous game designers in our medium, Shigeru Miyamoto, argues that form should follow function, and the function of a game is to be engaging and fun. He argues that an avatar should just feel great, independent of a world, that we should use a staggered level design that rams things up incrementally after introducing players to abilities, and that we should use signifiers or conveyances to build our levels, so players implicitly know how to play. The first level of Super Mario Bros. exemplifies this perfectly. These design principles overlap with Don Norman's ideas of affordances, and human-centric design, introducing a real science to the construction of games. However, let's take another designer who contrasts this ethos. Fumita Weda uses a design philosophy he calls Design by Subtraction, where he strips away anything that does not reinforce the core theme, tone, or story he is going for. Instead of starting with the principles of fun, engagement, or game feel, he starts with an emotion or idea, and hones every facet of his game to realize this vision. In E.C.O., you play a disempowered and persecuted kid, so you stumble around and are hard to control, and the fact that you have to protect Yorda simulates love, intimacy, and selflessness. Both of these designers are seen as revolutionary, but for seemingly opposite reasons. To preserve the continuity between architecture and game design, Miyamoto and Oeda fundamentally defer even on that dimension. Miyamoto has spoken about the importance of building levels that accommodate the avatar you are playing to craft an engaging experience, again emphasizing how the function of the player experience should dictate the world's design. On the other hand, for me to way to have spoken about how his approach to architecture is that of creating a world that seems to exist independent of you, reinforcing his themes of isolation and disempowerment, and enhancing the immersive trance of his games. What does this duality about the divide between form and function tell us about our medium, though? Brilliant games can be conjured either by starting with a purely functional mechanic, or by starting with an aesthetic or theme, suggesting form and function are interchangeably useful when it comes to our priorities in design. In my humble estimation, the principles of emergent design alter based on the function of the art form and question, and hence, we need to adapt Christopher Alexander's framework in light of the utility of play. Play is and always has been a pluralistic notion, articulated in Brian Sutton Smith's seminal book, The Ambiguity of Play. As we explored earlier, there are different aesthetics of play, different kinds of players, and different competencies and predilections that games of every type engage. So having a general theory of the utility of play will always seemingly fall short. In his book, he outlines how the culture we are a part of frames the function and purpose of play. Smith delineates seven metrics of play that have been used to explain and privilege certain forms of play, including progress, fate, power, community, identity, imaginary, self, and frivolity. Owing to this incredible array of purposes for play, having a discrete series of lenses through which to view design might actually lead us towards a different destination than the singular one Christopher Alexander proposed. You could say that ultimately all forms of play are in some sense about perpetuating humanity, what Thomas Henrich argues as the purpose of play, self-realization, about realizing ourselves in a social context and becoming integrated beings. So we've established that there can be many functions of play, but what is the form that exists alongside this? The idea that Christopher Alexander put forth is that by the gradual synthesis of coherent principles, we can build towards great design from the bottom up. First we can go back to Blo's point about creating an industry context that actually allows artists to express their creative voice. The question here then becomes how do we configure the industry and its business practices in such a way that the authentic drive of creators can see the light? However, to properly abstract Christopher Alexander's points about form and function and adapting it to video games, my guess is that the principles of great design, whatever shape they take, are ultimately instrumental towards the realization of a particular purpose. Purposeful design is what both Christopher Alexander and Jesse Shell advocate for, a design sensibility that understands what kind of experience you want to create, and then using the many tools we have at our disposal to realize this vision. As intangible as life is as an overarching goal, there are some interesting ways it expresses itself in the context of games. Games are inherently systemic constructs that emerge out of a substrate of rules, similar to how life emerges out of the interaction of a few chemical elements. In Fritjof Kapra's book The Web of Life, and Stuart Kaufman's book At Home in the Universe, each argue for the idea that life is intrinsic to our universe, because elements can naturally generate the required feedback loops to produce life. Life is emergent much like games are emergent. In John Conway's Game of Life, we see how a simple set of rules can generate self-replicating patterns, life of a kind. Emergence in the context of game design can help us analyze and see systems of life, whether it be the arc of history and civilization, the dynamics of urban decay in SimCity, or the evolution of life itself in Spore, The combination of existing elements in novel ways is what Douglas Hofstadter argues as the origin of creative thought, so life can be seen in how patterns, analogies, and metaphors can be repurposed to create something new. Thinkers like Daniel Dennett argue consciousness itself arises out of the recombination of symbolic patterns in our head, such that the agent it arises from can exercise metacognition of being self-aware. To reinforce this point, artificial intelligence research has already devised systems that can actually be musically creative using the recombination of discrete elements, suggesting creativity itself is emergent and is in some sense derivative. We also now have systems like Angelina that have attempted to create games, although the results are slightly less convincing. Jesse Shell even speculates that it might be Christopher Alexander's heuristics for life that imbue artificial intelligence with this creative spark, making these rules for life instrumental in a new genesis. In my estimation, perhaps instead of continuing to call ourselves wise, homo sapiens, we should defer to Johan Huazinga's term, homoludans, we are a playful species, we exist in a universe at play and perhaps we should rethink our understanding of games in light of this. However, to bring things back to Earth, truly getting at what the art of game design entails, at least from Christopher Alexander's perspective, comes from a quote in the closing chapter in his book. He says, living structure is the substrate which provides us with our freedom, with the ability to be free in ourselves. Maybe instead of thinking of the art of game design from an end product perspective, we should view it as the life contained in the process. Life in design can be seen as the capacity to truly express one's creative voice, not a product that necessarily creates it. The expressionist movement altered the artistic lens from painter to painter, observing the process of creation as what makes art art. When Blow was lamenting the encroachment of extrinsic factors in game design, my sense is that he is fearful that artists are designing with something other than what they want to make in mind. The lenses that Shell and Alexander present us with allow us to get in touch with that inner voice that might be led astray when considerations other than our vision come to the forefront. This is my interpretation of the art of game design, or if the design of anything really, creating a medium that allows designers to make what they want to make, or in Chris's words, to be free in ourselves.