Last week, we looked directly at the invention and influence of the Adventurer Shop. Now, we turn to another key play experience of early videogames: space trading.

The imaginative practices of Dungeons & Dragons, which allowed a group of players to create dramatic stories around a tabletop using dice to resolve combat and certain tasks, immediately spawned successors – both in fantasy settings like Chaosium’s 1978 classic RuneQuest, and in all kinds of other fictional worlds. There were many early attempts at a science fiction tabletop RPG but none of them stuck until 1977’s Traveller, created by Marc Miller and published by his company Game Designer’s Workshop. Whereas Michael Scott’s Space Patrol (also published in 1977) took a great deal of influence from Star Trek,  Traveller’s influence was far more obscure, but as Michael Andre-Driussi patiently deciphered, a great deal of the concept for the setting (including the name) was inspired by E.C. Tubbs sprawling Dumarest of Terra books. This series was structured around the idea of the protagonist, Earl Dumarest, arriving on a new planet and having to earn enough money to buy passage to the next world, and it provided a name for the people who live like this: travelers (using the US spelling, modified to the UK spelling for the game). This core idea alone was more than enough to adapt the D&D adventurer into space.

Traveller itself was to immediately spawn successors, most notably Fantasy Games Unlimited’s Space Opera (pictured above), which shares with its predecessor a sprawling character generation system that was a game in itself (I too was influenced by this in my first science fiction RPG design, Outlands, which had its definitive edition in 1995, and the cover to Wikipedia Knows Nothing is also a tribute to the minimalist cover of Marc Miller’s game). Space Opera had its fans and its critics: co-authored by Edward E. Simbalist, who had also worked on the complex fantasy RPG Chivalry & Sorcery, no-one could call Space Opera easy to play, but what it offered was an immense wealth of different game systems for simulating a vast variety of science fiction elements. These did not fit together particularly well – perhaps in part because unlike Traveller this was not a rulebook recording the player practices of a gaming group since the designers had worked remotely via correspondence. It was thus up to players to synthesise Space Opera into coherent practices – but then, this was how tabletop RPGs tended to work anyway, since written rules are never a perfect translation of what is played, and it was always up to the players to ‘fill in the gaps’.

These two sci-fi games, Traveller and Space Opera, were to go on to inspire one of the most influential videogames of all time: 1984’s Elite, created by Cambridge University students David Braben and Ian Bell. A space trading game, its play consisted primarily of buying goods at one space station, and flying them to another station while enduring pirate attacks en route. It offered the player tremendous freedom of choice within its world, supporting everything from asteroid mining to bounty hunting with little more than a tight and flexible design – a design that descends directly from the early science fiction tabletop RPGs. This connection is frequently overlooked, most likely because of the tendency to ignore the relationship between early videogames and the tabletop games that lead to them – Francis Spufford offers a detailed account of the Elite design process in his book Backroom Boys, yet never mentions tabletop role-playing games at all and, writing for the Telegraph, Adam Lusher dubs Elite “the game that changed the world” but once again fails to understand how this came about as the conservation of player practices from tabletop role-playing games. Consider these remarks in Lusher’s article:

Elite was different. It was…, as that mesmerised eight-year-old discovered, “the first game that did not feel or behave like a game. It was much bigger. You were immersed in this world and it literally became reality for the time you were playing it. It was fun, but carried all the other characteristics of reality, like intensity and drama, too”.

Players also had more autonomy – including moral autonomy – than ever before. They could either plod along trading in legitimate goods, or try drug and slave running for high-risk, high returns. They helped decide what the story should be – and they didn’t have to start again from scratch each time they “died”; they could save their position, slowly progressing through a narrative partly of their own making.

The last point made here – the role of save games – is unique to videogames, and in no way relates to the tabletop RPGs, which all operated on the principle that eventually became dubbed ‘permadeath’, but which was at the time simply called ‘dying’ (a terminology that points to the extent to which save games disrupted this aspect of the player practices of the tabletops). But the sense of autonomy and moral autonomy, and the carving out of a narrative that the players themselves crafted, these are the definitive player practices of tabletop role-playing games. As technically innovative as Elite was, it existed against a backdrop of games that already achieved what it is remembered for – Braben and Bell’s accomplishment was in finding ways to make the immense agency of tabletop RPGs function in the immensely limited resources of 1980s computers.

Players of Traveller immediately suspected a connection between the two games – for a start, the default character in Elite is called Commander Jameson, while the default character in Traveller is named Jamison. But the connection continued to be brushed under the carpet, in part because David Braben downplayed it. For instance, in a reader-contributed interview run by Alec Meer, he was asked directly about a connection with Traveller:

RPS: @glowingslab asks “How much was Elite influenced by the Traveller RPG?”

David Braben: Not at all. It was influenced by RPGs, because there were quite a few around and I had played a few, but not influenced at all by Traveller. I think Ian played Traveller a little bit, but I’d played Fantasy Trip which is essentially men in tights fantasy, there was Space Opera, there were lots around. They from people like Steve Jackson, who went on to do GURPS, although that wasn’t released at that time, and all sorts of others.

Konrad Lischka managed to complete this story by asking Bell about it:

I used to play Traveller. David played Space Opera. So the Elite Trade Goods at least are more Space Opera than Traveller. Maybe the Planet Govt types too. Jameson is definitely a nod to Traveller though, I changed the i to e to make it a little less blatant, and also reference the whisky.

The significance of the tabletop RPG connection here should not be understated or ignored (as Spufford and Lusher do) because the way in which Elite goes on to have its influence is precisely in the imaginative practices that it had inherited from the tabletops, namely the provision of autonomy. As Braben notes in an interview with Logan Booker, Gary Penn (producer of the Elite sequel Frontier) was to go on to work at DMA Design on Grand Theft Auto, which he called “Elite in a city”. This influence was also confirmed by DMA developers Matthew Smith (in an interview with Dean Takahashi) and Sam Houser (talking to Ben Mckelvey). The open world game, of which Elite and its contemporaries The Lords of Midnight, Mercenary: Escape from Targ, and Paradroid are the prototypes, can trace its lineage back to tabletop role-playing games, which are the most truly ‘open’ games imaginable, precisely because of Elite – although the lack of tabletop influence in these other games is a sign that this inheritance was circumstantial rather than inevitable. That said, it cannot be ignored that Elite’s influence outstrips that of its contemporaries.

What GTA and its sequels achieved through scale of content, Elite had to achieve through very limited resources. Indeed, material constraints are an important part of the story of this game – and the reason why money is key to understanding Elite’s design. With tight hardware limitations, it is impossible to give players anything like the choices they face with a live Games Master to moderate decisions. Elite circumvented this through adapting two of the key elements that had made tabletop role-playing games function as flexible narrative systems: maps and shops. In Elite’s case the two were fused together, since the innovative Fibonacci-inspired procedural generation Bell had developed with Braben supplied qualities to each star system – qualities that drew against the material drafted for Space Opera – that in turn set the prices for commodities in each space station. This provided the basic engine for space trading (the initial source of money for all Elite players).

To deliver the high illusion of agency, the game needed to provide ways for players to choose alternative paths – and the only practical option was a shop. Players could buy mining lasers and fuel scoops and become an asteroid miner, or choose powerful weapons and turn to piracy or go hunt down pirates for a bounty. In practice, these four choices are the only ways to play Elite – as space trader, miner, pirate, or bounty hunter, although the trading also allowed agency since some goods (like slaves) were illegal in certain systems. But the game never presents any of these options as an explicit choice: they are merely offered a shop, form which different choices of equipment are purchased. The fact that the choices are concealed in this way did much to cultivate the impression of ‘go anywhere, do anything’ that became the hallmark of the open world genre. The shop design in Elite – quite unlike the shops of tabletop RPGs – became the engine of player autonomy. This was entirely the product of creator vision overcoming material constraints.

Elite was by no means the first game to feature trade – they had been well established since at least 1944’s SHOC, a share trading game run with two decks of cards, one of which represents shares, the other being used to randomly adjust share prices. (My family owned a copy of this game when I was growing up, which was much more enjoyable than its simplistic design suggests.) Even in videogames, there was 1982’s Taipan! as a precursor – but Braben and Bell hadn’t played this, or indeed many other early videogames. They were not influenced by videogame practices at all, and that made it far easier to innovate in their own game, creating a fictional world with a blend of combat and trading that would go on to inspire Federation of Free Traders, Wing Commander: Privateer (also influenced by Steve Jackson’s Car Wars), X: Beyond the Frontier, Freelancer, , EVE Online, and Sunless Sea.

This last example may raise another possibility: were other naval trading games influenced by Elite? Here, once again, we run up against the problem that the ‘game’ of money (and the practices of trade) are something we are all embedded within, and so despite the tendency for influences to be passed down in the conservation of player practices, there is always the possibility of it spontaneously recurring. This appears to be the case with 1987’s Sid Meier’s Pirates!, which might have been Elite in the Caribbean were it not for the inconvenient fact that Meier was completely unaware of Braben and Bell’s masterwork, as an interview in Rolling Stone makes abundantly clear:

Today, we kind of package things into these genres that have well-defined boundaries, and you can build your game inside this box. But we didn't have genres. Pirates! was probably the second open-world game after Seven Cities of Gold. It was like, “Let’s toss in some role-playing and some action and some storytelling and adventuring.” So it was really about the fun of breaking new ground, or exploring a new territory, creating a design territory. It was a time when we were really experimenting and trying new things.

Seven Cities of Gold was released in 1984, the same year as Elite and The Lords of Midnight (which arguably make a stronger claim to being the first open world games), and one year before Mercenary and Paradroid. All four of these latter games were British-made, which may suggest Meier’s game knowledge was limited to the US, but more likely reflects that he was playing games on a PC and missed out on all the home computer games that had such great influence in the early days of videogames. He did, however, have knowledge of British boardgames, as one of his key influences outside of videogames appears to have been the tabletop strategy games of Francis Tresham, particularly Civilisation, which invented a player practice Meier was to have the most influence in spreading: the technology tree.

One strange aspect of the story of these early open world games is that they each had their own ways of elevating the player’s agency. Elite, Seven Cities of Gold, and Pirates! mixed trading and combat. Mike Singleton’s The Lords of Midnight used recruiting military commanders and parallel adventure and strategy elements (inspired, like Dungeons & Dragons, by Tolkien). Paul Woakes’ Mercenary and Andrew Braybrook’s Paradroid had stealing ships or taking over robots (foreshadowing a core aspect of GTA’s play). Only the first three of these games seem to have been influenced by the tabletop games (although the lack of interviews with Paul Woakes makes Mercenary’s influence hard to judge), and only the first three games provide a key role for the shop. Whether this is circumstantial or an artefact of the key role money played in tabletop games, we can only speculate. What is clear, however, is that in the way the history of games actually unfolded, it was those games that conserved the imaginative practices of tabletop role-playing games that went on to have greater influence.

Next week, the final part: Arms Dealers

If you’re anything like me, you've spent a rather disturbing amount of your life in videogame shops, making purchasing decisions or selling the piles of weapons looted from the corpses of your imaginary enemies. This three-part serial traces game design lineages for videogame money and shops, focussing on the key titles that established shopping as a central feature in contemporary videogame play.

The two key lineages in the early days of videogames are the arcade games and the descendants of TSR’s hugely influential Dungeons & Dragons. The player practices of the arcade, however, being based around fast-paced play that ended suddenly to encourage further coin drops, rarely involved shopping – although Atari’s 1986 top-down racer Super Sprint is a notable exception. Tracing the lineages of money and shops in games always suffers from the general problem that the imaginative practices of money are something we are all embedded within every day, and thus game shops could appear anywhere, in any kind of game, with no clear influence of a preceding game. Nonetheless, even with game money and shops, the conservation of player practices remains the norm, even if our everyday money is not considered a game (which could certainly be argued: we are required, after all, to imagine the value of objects that have no value apart from what we collectively imagine).

A game design lineage is a historical tracing of an element within games that shows both the conservation of player practices (which give us the patterns that become labelled as genres) and the hallmarks of creator vision, which subverts those player practices to create variations on the established patterns, often conditioned by the material constraints applying to games at the time of their creation. These lineages can spread beyond games: plenty of book and film influences create imaginative patterns that are then sustained in the fictional worlds of games – from the utter dependence of Halo: Combat Evolved upon James Cameron’s Aliens to the massive debt Dungeons & Dragons owes to Tolkien, Moorcock, and the other twentieth century fantasy writers.

However, the Adventurer Shop seems to be purely the invention of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson for Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. The preceding rules, Chainmail, designed by Jeff Perrin and given a fantasy supplement by Gygax, were purely a wargame – and this martial theme carried over into D&D’s preoccupation with ethnically cleansing goblins, kobolds and such from underground lairs for money and experience. What the monsters did with the coins they were hoarding is never made entirely clear, and no D&D module has a weapon shop purely for the enemies (which, logically, would be an excellent place for belligerent players to attack, since it would hold both money and weaponry). Adventurer shops, however, are present from the beginning, most notably in the scenario that shipped with boxed versions of the game from 1979, Dungeon Module B2: The Keep on the Borderlands, which already shows the division of the game world into a village with shops (the keep), a wilderness (the overworld in CRPGs), and a dungeon (the Caves of the Unknown).

In addition to the Adventurer Shop, D&D also creates a vast range of coins to give out as loot. While the Gold Piece (or GP) is presented as the standard currency, treasure tables for the original tabletop role-playing game specified rewards in Copper Pieces, Silver Pieces, Electrum Pieces, and at the top of the scale Platinum Pieces. This final currency eventually got a starring role as currency in 1999’s pioneering (and rough around the edges) MMORPG EverQuest, although historically platinum currency was generally worth less than silver (when the Spanish invaded South America and found it in use there, it was largely considered a nuisance as it got in the way of their obsessive search for gold). Mostly, these different currencies merely tied players up in conversions into Gold Pieces, although in campaigns where encumbrance was enforced (mostly in the later Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules) it also led to incidents of ‘treasure dumping’, as players discarded that pile of Silver Pieces they had pilfered to make room for better coins they found later. Regardless of what was found out in the dungeons, shopping prices remained set in Gold Pieces, which remains the primary currency in Dungeons & Dragons even now. 

While it is Tolkien’s Moria that gives D&D its dungeon template, the act of shopping never directly appears in the stories of his legendarium, and neither does it appear in Moorcock’s Eternal Champion stories, although Fritz Leiber does have a shop of magical treasures in the 1963 Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser short story, Bazaar of the Bizarre. Even this case, however, doesn’t parallel the Adventurer Shop concept, since it is more a source of adventure than a means of supplying the expedition. Horses and supplies do feature in stories by Moorcock and Tolkien, especially in The Hobbit where the company of dwarves never manage to hold onto their food and ponies for more than a few pages, but buying weaponry, wooden poles, and near-endless yards of rope is not a part of any fantasy story prior to D&D’s publication, and no shopkeeper gets even one line of dialogue outside of Leiber. Even in D&D, the shop was mostly elided into backstory – part of kitting out ‘heroes’ (I use this term reluctantly in this case) with weapons and armour before setting off on the next cash-earning pogrom.

When early commercial computer role-playing games come onto the market in 1979-1980, the Adventurer Shop was part of the design because it was also part of D&D’s design, and the creators of these games were inspired by the practices of the tabletop game when putting their software together. Both 1979’s Akalabeth and its 1981 successor Ultima have a shop for buying food and weapons, with Ultima splitting up the full list of items for sale such that each shop has half of the total items on offer. 1980’s Wizardry goes as far to give its shop a name – Boltoc’s Trading Post – and adds to buying and selling the capacity to identify magical items and remove curses. In all these cases the player practices of D&D are conserved, with only minor tweaks. The ambiguous qualities of magical items, for instance, was a part of D&D’s original play, and paying someone to identify items (since they could be cursed...) is a simple twist on this, which also has a role in Rogue, from the same year of release as Wizardry.

In all these games, including D&D, the shop is rapidly superseded in practical terms by the magical treasure looted from the poor unfortunate denizens of the depths. Getting better weapons through accumulating money is not part of the Western RPG lineage at all. It is when early CRPGs like Ultima and Wizardry spread their player practices to Japan (which had almost no experience of D&D) that we get the idea of later shops holding better weapons. Both Dragon Quest in 1986 and Final Fantasy in 1987 – the latter inheriting Wizardry’s D&D-style multi-character parties, the former copying Ultima’s lone adventurer – have a series of shops, each offering better armaments and armour than the last. This concept, along with the episodic, chapter-based storytelling that facilitate it, became foundational to the Japanese RPG lineage, because their creators were riffing off fantasy adventure stories for inspiration and not D&D’s imaginative practices of player agency, where letting the players seem to be in charge of what is happening was an important part of the appeal. (The cultural biases of Western individualism versus Eastern collectivism must surely be another factor here, however difficult it might be to adequately expose such influences in any tangible manner).

Thus videogames took a player practice that formed just a small, peripheral role in tabletop RPGs and transformed it into a central, structural conceit for the Japanese CRPG lineage. Equivalently, the Western CRPG created a variation of D&D’s practices where the player becomes, as former International Hobo stalwart Ernest Adams quipped, an “itinerant second-hand arms dealer” – since in the absence of encumbrance rules (largely not inherited from tabletops into CRPGs) looting and selling weaponry became more of an in-game business model than simply stealing the supply of coins monsters had been squirrelling away for their never-to-be-attained retirement. Partly this is a consequence of inheriting the treasure table design from Dungeons & Dragons, but accelerating the rate of play such that fighting is happening every minute rather than (say) every half hour of play – this produced so much treasure that players from the 70’s might have to consider almost all the Western CRPG games that followed a ‘Monty Haul’. 

It is worth remarking that the Adventurer Shop can only be an invention of the tabletop RPG, because the adventurer itself has its origins there, despite the evident and acknowledged influence of the aforementioned authors. Having developed from tabletop wargames, combat was baked into the player practices of role-playing games from the outset, but the move towards narrative meant playing until victory ceased to be the basis of game structure and became supplanted with the gradual accumulation of power, the first step of which was going to a shop to acquire weaponry. It is worth noting that in a historical Medieval, Bronze or Iron Age context, weapons were not sold as over-the-counter goods, but either made as required by a village blacksmith or produced in large numbers for a nobleman’s armory. It is back projecting our contemporary shopping practices into a simulacrum of such historical worlds that makes sense of the idea of killing monsters to take their money and buy weapons to kill yet more monsters. It is patent nonsense. Yet, at the same time, it is tremendously entertaining.

Next week: Space Trading

Last year, I published my first paper with José Zagal, entitled Game Design Lineages: Minecraft’s Inventory. This is the finest academic games work I’ve been involved in, or (as I remarked to José) “the game studies paper I want to be buried with”. But what is a game design lineage and what does it have to do with game design? This piece explains my interest in the lineages of games and how it has informed, in some small but significant way, my professional work as a game designer and writer who will hit fifty published games this year.

Since at least 2011, I have been interested in improving historical research into game design – motivated by my own desire to continuously improve my game design skills, and also to contribute to the academic discussion that has grown up around games. Game studies, the field that engages with games as something worthy of research, has suffered from a number of problems in this regard including a widespread ignorance of the importance of history for understanding games as a creative form, and long standing prejudices that favour videogames over other forms of game. Indeed, until recently ‘game studies’ was a term that has primarily meant videogame studies. As a field, it tends to suffer from a widely held (but rarely spoken) conviction that it ought to be engaged in scientific research, and therefore history is a second class citizen in the academic games world. Yet no media studies field is a science, the methods of the sciences generally produce lacklustre results when applied to games, and historically-grounded discourse about games is arguably the pinnacle of scholarship in game studies right now – whether its focus is aesthetics, tracing relationships between games, or examining hardware constraints.

The earliest piece of mine to voice these views was The Constraint Histories of Digital Games, back in October 2011. It makes the following still-relevant observation about a key issue in historical research for games:

Attempts to provide a taxonomy of game genres founder on the lack of consistent criteria, and usually have to be arbitrarily assigned. Connecting ‘shooters’ into a lineage suggests scrolling shooters were direct influences on first person shooters, for instance. But there's no evidence suggesting Zaxxon has any connection with the design of DOOM, or that Space Invaders inspired Zaxxon. As a historical tool, genre categories can provide some useful connections – DOOM certainly did influence GoldenEye 007, for example – but genre cannot be used as a unifying framework for game history because the genre lineages are narrowly valid and do not constitute a complete description of game history.

In the six years since I wrote this, I can now strengthen this claim: Zaxxon belongs within the various arcade lineages of the late twentieth century that have tremendous influence upon games but that are radically distinct from the lineages that descend from tabletop role-playing games, which proliferated in the wake of 1974’s Dungeons & Dragons. Surprisingly, DOOM is a descendant of this latter lineage and not any of the arcade lineages, since it comes about from modifying the early dungeon crawler form typified by 1987’s seminal Dungeon Master, a form that inspired John Carmack to make Catacomb 3D (pictured above) and from this, mostly by raising the pace of play and switching fantasy weapons for guns, creating the FPS form as we now understand it.

In August 2016, I produced my most complete piece of historical work on games to date, a historical investigation of game inventories – the first part of which touches upon the roots of the FPS in the early dungeon crawlers that converted the dungeon adventures D&D had invented into digital forms. Last year, I worked with my good and excellent academic friend José Zagal to adapt this material into a paper, which we presented at DiGRA UK, just a short distance up the road from me at MediaCity in Salford. The paper contracts some of the historical detail in my original blog serial, but with José’s assistance the general method I was pursuing became more robust and clearly stated. The resulting paper, Game Design Lineages: Minecraft’s Inventory, is not yet included in DiGRA’s digital library but I have made it available in ResearchGate in the meantime (it is also headed to DiGRA’s Transactions journal at some point in the near future). This term ‘game design lineages’ is José’s suggested description for my general method. Here’s an explanation of the term from the paper:

In the context of game studies and game design we feel that little work has been done to explore how best to provide rich and deep insight such that game design knowledge can be understood, communicated, and possibly used, without losing the essential relationships required to make sense of the games in question. We offer the notion of the game design lineage as a means to partially address this challenge by contextualizing game systems within the player practices that provided both the environment that guided their implementation, and the background of understanding against which the game was encountered by its original players.

A game design lineage is rich description of the networks of connections between common designed elements… that is situated within an understanding of the context that conditioned the original design decisions that led to them, understood in terms of player practices. This perspective is important not only in terms of more accurately investigating the historical connectivity of games and their designs, but also because insights from the past remain useful in the future, and can explain problems that are currently misunderstood or taken for granted.

The paper focuses on three specific contexts by which lineages can be traced. Firstly, player practices, which as I have been uncovering through patient investigation (and more than a touch of philosophical influence) are the bedrock of the game design process and the origin of the interrelations between games that give us the genre terms that are themselves too vague to build historical accounts from (as discussed above). Player practices, and not rules as such, are fundamental to games, as I argue in Are Videogames Made of Rules?, since rules are better understood as a means of capturing such practices in words and specifying them more precisely. Material constraints include the kind of hardware issues that Ian Bogost and Nick Monfort engaged with in with Racing the Beam, as well as significant commercial considerations that I discuss often as a consultant but which the academic community around games has largely ignored. Finally, creator vision marks the ways that game designers and development teams subvert player practices and adapt to material constraints in new and innovative ways while still remaining embedded within the conservation of player practices. 

I had previously been discussing lineages in terms of Foucault’s work, especially The Archaeology of Knowledge, since his method and mine substantially overlap. I wrote about this in the ‘tin anniversary’ dual serials for my blogs, Foucault’s Archaeology and Player Practices. Disappointingly, Foucault scholars have blocked my attempts to turn this into a paper, requiring me to talk about power (the late Foucault’s obsession), and forcing me to withdraw from using Foucault as a reference at all. To be clear, Foucault’s methods in The Archaeology of Knowledge and mine overlap… I thought it prudent to draw attention to that, the academic community had other ideas, and I don’t have the patience or desire to persist with such a trivial aspect of my work. Easier all around to leave Foucault to the Foucauldians.

Dan Golding has had more success drawing on this angle without being required to talk about power, perhaps by getting at Foucault’s ideas indirectly via film historian Thomas Elsaesser. Dan presented his paper Lineages: Historicising the Videogame at the joint DiGRA-FDG conference in Dundee back in 2016, the same conference that I presented No-one Plays Alone, which has also not made it into the DiGRA library yet but had appeared in their Transactions (linked here). This is the paper that begins to develop the player practices concept, within which game design lineages has been conceived. I view Dan’s work as allied to mine (although he may not), and my means of combining the two methods goes via Walton’s prop theory, which I deployed in Imaginary Games (to very little influence in game studies). At the very least, Dan and I share a perception of the importance of history in understanding games and play, and agree that films and literature are part of the network of relations that have made videogames what they are.

The game design lineages method is the most viable historical research tool I’ve yet encountered for examining games and videogames, although it is only a part of the wider research project into player practices that I have been pursuing for much of the last decade. It began with Imaginary Games, applying Walton’s concept of props that prescribe certain imaginings to games, and then asking about the key props for videogames – such as inventories, maps, and save games, all of which condition the play of videogames in highly significant ways. This also brought out how videogames were dominated by two particular props – guns and goals – leading me to suggest (back in 2011) that authentic artistic innovation in these media would have to subvert the player practices surrounding these props, as Dear Esther, Proteus, and everything by Tale of Tales does to great effect.

As a commercial game designer, I have not had the luxury to explore such artistically-motivated concerns, but my player practices work has had another key influence upon me: it has united the otherwise disparate domains of marketing and game design. When I first pursued the research into play styles that became my book with Richard Boon, 21st Century Game Design, it was because of the recognition that marketing was valued more than game design – and with good cause (despite the abysmal state of understanding in games marketing departments...) since marketing expenditure is a much better predictor of eventual sales than anything else. That was why the original pamphlet for this research, which I gave out to (amongst other people) Eiji Aonuma, was subtitled How to Make Game Design as Important as Marketing. The point here is straightforward, but easily ignored: the conditions into which every game appears are set by the games that are already being played, and when this isn’t taken into account, there is a tendency to produce games that – whatever their merits – acquire no audience because they are either too hard to learn or do not offer an imaginative fantasy players will pay for. The conservation of player practices is the dominant flow of the commercial games market, and it is the major forks in this river that become labelled with genre terms.

When I started to give talks about the history of games, I began to see how interconnected their lineages were, and how genre emerges as a symptom of the conservation of player practices, which provides the bedrock for the craft of game design. We game designers do not build games from game-mechanical Lego bricks but from player practices we have learned by playing other games, often expressed in terms of rules or systems because we nerds are trained to think in such terms. Yet when you think about design in terms of player practices, game design lineages become not just a tool for historical investigations but yet another method for creating games, one that is informed by the knowledge that no-one plays alone. It is both these projects – historical research and creative game design – that I continue to vigorously pursue.

For further reading, please check out the papers Game Design Lineages: Minecraft’s Inventory and its predecessor No-one Plays Alone.