Some of our industry’s most beloved games make precious little sense. Why, for example, do players battle the trolls, goblins, and skeletons of Puzzle Quest by challenging them to a two-player version of Bejewelled? Similarly, success in Professor Layton’s world seems to revolves disproportionately around one’s ability to solve classic logic and deduction puzzles, no matter the reason.

Game stories have fared no better. Mario’s canonical plot sounds like nonsense from Lewis Carroll – the plumber punches bricks to find magic mushrooms that double his size, so that he can battle an evil turtle who has kidnapped the kingdom’s princess. The less said about the Metal Gear Solid franchise’s various twists and turns – including the infamous possession of Revolver Ocelot’s mind by Liquid Snake’s old arm – the better.

However, games have their own internal logic that is more important than whether the game’s story makes sense, or even whether the game’s mechanics hold together logically, without bizarre juxtapositions like in Puzzle Quest. The traditional concepts of levels, lives, and respawns are ultimately constructs that support a designer’s vision, whether or not they have any logical real-world parallel or thematic metaphor.

Why, for example, should players respawn – coming back to life – after being killed in a team-based shooter? Shouldn’t players expect that their dead character stay dead after being killed? The reason is that the respawn mechanic matches the inviting tone the game’s designer wishes to strike. By softening the blow of death, gamers are free to play aggressively, which rewards risk and even experimentation.

A place exists for games which do not allow respawning – Counter-Strike being the most successful example – but the designer chooses this mechanic not in pursuit of realism, but to strike a different tone. When characters stay dead, players feel more tension during the match, which encourages them to play more carefully and with greater precision. Thus, games without respawns simply occupy a different location on the play spectrum.

Be True to the Game

Sometimes, these imaginary design constructs are necessary for the existence of entire genres. The classic real-time strategy design pattern, with peons, base-building, and rush/turtle/boom dynamics, little resembles actual warfare, even when ignoring the common fantastical themes. In what type of war does each side construct army barracks to train troops – and even research labs to discover technologies – on the very field of battle? Indeed, why is every scientific breakthrough forgotten between each scenario of a fictional campaign?

Ultimately, these questions are subsumed by the genre’s needs. Strategy games work because players are forced to make tough choices between a number of options, each with its own set of tradeoffs. Although the environments of most real-time strategy battle often contain nonsensical elements, such as economic infrastructure and research facilities, these elements each create important mechanics that increase strategic depth.

Creating infrastructure gives the player an actual location on the map to defend – without it, armies could roam freely across the map with no consequences for abandoning a certain location. Discovering technologies creates short-vs-long-term tradeoffs for the player to balance – should resources be invested in science for a long-term payoff of stronger units or spent on new units to attack the enemy and press an early advantage?

These tradeoffs make sense in a fundamental way – players understand that location should matter and that making long-term investments should succeed under the right circumstances. Therefore, the gameplay itself makes sense even if the game’s world does not, with workers planting farms within sight of a pitched battle.

Too Much Consistency

Indeed, designers who worry too much about a consistent world can often hamstring their own work. In StarCraft, the designers had no qualms allowing Terran players to team up with the Zerg in multiplayer, even if fighting against other Terrans. However, Company of Heroes only allows matches with the Axis on one side and the Allies on the other. Clearly, this decision makes sense thematically, but does it make sense that the players never get to pit identical sets of virtual army men against each other?

Assassin’s Creed famously went to great lengths to cover up as many standard game conventions as possible. A frame story put the player in the shoes not of a 12th-century Middle Eastern assassin (as the game’s advertisements featured) but of his 21st-century descendant who is somehow reliving the former’s life with advanced memory reconstruction technology.

This conceit aims to explain a number of typical design constructs. Discrete game levels are simply different memories while all character deaths must be false memories. The assassin’s movements are mapped to a physical gamepad because he is actually the puppet of a latter-day character trying to relive his memories.

Did these rationales broaden the game’s appeal by explaining supposedly arbitrary gaming cliches? Or did they unnecessarily burden the game’s narrative with a convoluted and unnecessary frame story that distanced players from the fantasy of becoming a medieval assassin? Surely, the average console owner would not be surprised that the game required controlling the character with a gamepad.

Indeed, the early arcade industry was a font of creativity largely because the games were not expected to make any sense – think of the dot-eating Pac-Man or the cube-jumping Q*Bert or the ray-running Tempest. As graphics became more realistic, almost all arcade cabinets were ghettoized into just a few concrete categories – racing, fighting, shooting – because the higher resolutions discouraged bizarre, abstract games. Only now that downloadable, mobile, and Web-based gaming have brought back lower resolutions is the old eccentric energy returning.

Go Your Own Way

Sometimes, manipulating a game’s story to paper over unusual design concepts can work. Certainly, the Dagger of Time’s ability to rewind time for a few seconds in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was an elegant way to integrate a quick-save system into the game’s core functionality. In the recent Torchlight, the character’s pet can run back to town to sell loot, nicely shortening a time-consuming element of most action-RPG’s while also staying within the game’s fiction.

Still, designers should feel comfortable going their own way if a mechanics makes sense for the game they want to make. Shiren the Wanderer is a roguelike dungeon crawler, which means that all character deaths are permanent as progress cannot be saved. Roguelikes are meant to be played repeatedly, with the player improving purely through increased knowledge of the game’s rules.

However, Shiren does allow a very unusual type of progress by letting the player stash loot – including powerful weapons and armor – in various caches found throughout the game that have persistence between sessions. Thus, although a character might die an unlucky death, he still contributes to advancing the game by leaving a supply of potions for the next character’s playthrough.

This strange mechanic, where most, but not all, of the world resets on death, has few parallels either inside or outside of gaming, and the story makes no attempt to explain it. Truly, no explanation is necessary because the game is being true to itself; the designers wanted a game that combined the tense atmosphere of permadeath with a touch of power progression from a traditional RPG.

BioShock is another game which gave no explanation for an absurd element – the audio diaries which are littered about the underwater city of Rapture. These bits of recorded speech from the game’s main characters provide important backstory for this Objectivist dystopia. Still, what type of person would, after putting their personal thoughts onto tape, decide to break up the tape into pieces and then scatter those pieces around the world like junk?

That the player discovers these scattered bits of audio in roughly linear order allows the designer to tell the story without relying on stodgy cutscenes, but their placement in the world simply doesn’t make sense. However, this problem doesn’t mean that the designers made the wrong choice; perhaps a more elegant solution was possible, but better allowing a little inelegance than turning the player into a non-interactive viewer who must be force-fed the story.

The Perfect Theme

One great advantage of not worrying about a game making sense is that designers are free to use the theme which best matches the game’s mechanics. The tower defense genre emerged from user-created scenarios designed for real-time strategy games like StarCraft and WarCraft III.

The limitations of these platforms gave the genre a distinct set of conventions – stationary defenses vs. mobile “creeps” – which had little narrative justification. Why must all defenses be static? Why are the creeps so slow and mindless? If only a thematic environment existed which matched this set of game mechanics.

In fact, one did, but the designers just needed the confidence to pull it out of thin air. What type of life-form can grow but can’t move? Plants! What type shambles along slowly in a straight line without a brain? Zombies! Naturally, the answer was to pit these two groups against each other.

With Plants vs. Zombies, PopCap found the perfect theme for a tower defense game. The fact that it completely defied common sense – why are players battling zombies with mutant plants, after all? – was beside the point. The important thing is that even someone not familiar with the tower defense genre would have an intuitive understanding of what to expect simply from the game’s title – all because the designer wasn’t afraid to stop making sense.

“The procedure is actually quite simple. First, you arrange things into different groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities, then that is the next step. Otherwise, you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things; that is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many. In the short run, this may not seem important, but complications can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. At first, the whole procedure will seem complicated. Soon, however, it will just become another facet of life.”

Did the paragraph make any sense, or did it seem like a string of nonsense? Most likely, it was the latter, and the reason is that the text is completely devoid of context. Now, try reading the paragraph again, but think of this simple phrase first: “dirty laundry.”

Now, the information should read completely different and actually mean something. The text is simply a set of instruction about how to wash one’s laundry. In fact, now that context has been established, reading the paragraph again without thinking about clothes is probably impossible.

Schema Theory

This transformation is an example of schema theory, which tries to explain how our brains categorizes the world. Essentially, a schema is a mental framework centering on a specific theme, helping us process and classify new information.

For example, a schema for dogs include information about their bodies (four legs, hair, tail), their behavior (barking, drooling, cat chasing), and even their breeds (collies, spaniels, poodles). Further, the dog schema can contain traits from higher-level schemas, such as for mammals (warm-blooded, vertebrates, live births) and pets (domesticated, loyal, house-trained). Thus, when encountering a dog, our pre-existing schema brings with it a wealth of information that informs us on what to expect from the animal.

However, schemas are only useful if they are activated. The original paragraph was meaningless until the appropriate schema was triggered in the reader’s mind by the simple phrase “dirty laundry.” The text itself is useless without the schema, which is an important consideration for an author who wants to communicate effectively.

Games and Schemas

Game designers also need to communicate something effectively – a set of rules and mechanics that the player must learn and master. This education process is one of the biggest challenges game developers face, and many games with fun systems have failed simply because few players get past the learning curve. Many tools exist for solving this problem – well-paced tutorials, helpful tooltips, accessible UI – but perhaps the simplest approach is to activate one of the player’s pre-existing schemas that is well matched with the game’s underlying mechanics.

For example, the board game Agricola activates the player’s farming schema to teach a fairly complex economic engine. Players already understand the order of plowing a field, planting seeds, harvesting wheat, baking bread, and feeding one’s family, which makes the complex interactions between the resources, fields, improvements, and actions easier to learn. Thus, one of the most important jobs of a game’s theme is to help the player understand and remember the mechanics, which is another reason why a game’s theme and mechanics should be well matched.

Another good example of the power of schemas comes from the related board games Coloretto and Zooloretto. Both games use the same underlying game mechanic of set collection with penalties for acquiring too many different types of items. For example, in Coloretto players gather cards of seven different colors, but only the player’s three largest sets score positively; all other color sets score negatively.

The same mechanic is at play with Zooloretto but with herding animals of the same species into pens instead of gathering identical colors. This difference gives the game a strong theme that activates the player’s zoo schema, which actually justifies the scoring system. New Coloretto players need to be told explicitly that every color past their third will hurt them while new Zooloretto players can see clearly from the board that they only have so many pens available – extra animals will remain useless in the barn. The zoo schema matters because the players’ pre-existing knowledge about zoos – that animals of different species are placed into separate pens – makes the game easier to learn.

Furthermore, some themes will activate a player’s schemas easier than others. In particular, historical or contemporary themes have more resonant schemas than sci-fi or fantasy themes. Players can more easily guess how Age of Empire’s knights and archers function than how StarCraft’s mutalisks or dark templars do. Indeed, most fantasy-based games tend to follow very well-established tropes (elves, goblins, dwarves) with which the player is already familiar. Those games which color outside the lines – such as the Kohan series which based its fantasy world on Persian mythology – often fall flat because players cannot use their pre-existing Tolkein schema.

Realism vs. Fun

Using schemas as a tool to give players a window into a game system raises the question of realism because the rules also need to accurately mirror the assumptions the players bring with them. If a baseball game gave the player four outs instead of three, the use of the baseball schema would not just be useless but actually counter-productive because players would be constantly mixing up the exact rules.

Thus, realism matters and is an important tool for designers. However, realism has earned a bad name among game developers. For instance, fans who nitpick over small historical details that a game gets wrong are called “rivet counters.” Indeed, Sid Meier famously said that “when fun and realism clash, fun wins.”

However, in many ways, this choice is a false one. Realism that gives the player an easier learning curve makes a game more fun, not less. The danger from an over-zealous pursuit of realism comes when the designer expects the player to bring significant outside knowledge to the game, limiting the potential audience. If a WWII game contains realistic ratings for different flavors of German panzers, that’s fine, but if the game expects the player to already know these ratings by heart, without in-game help, that’s a problem.

Further, perceived reality is more important than actual reality. The most important question is how the player’s schema is pre-built before starting the game. If a common misperception is widespread enough, better to support the players’ expectations than to subvert them (unless, of course, the design itself has an educational goal).

For example, Sid Meier primarily based Pirates! not on exhaustive historical records, but on pirates movies, Hollywood’s version of the era. Therefore, every pirate has a long-lost sister held captive by an evil Spaniard, and each tavern holds a mysterious stranger who might have a key piece of a treasure map. Similarly, Will Wright based The Sims not on actual domestic life but on a stylized sit-com version of it.

Genre Schemas

Schemas do not need to exist entirely separate from the world of games itself. Gaming veterans will eventually develop their own schemas for which designers must accommodate. More specifically, players will develop schemas related to how a genre is “supposed” to work – a schema for first-person shooters, for platformers, for fighting games, and even for rogue-likes.

Just as people who encounters a new dog expect certain behaviors based on their dog schemas, players who pick up new real-time strategy game come with their own sizable RTS schemas into which they expect the game to fit. The players might expect a God-level view, control of mutliple units, a peon-based economy, base-building for military and technology, a high-level boom/turtle/rush game balance, and so on.

Game which eschew too many of these features can hopefully become critical darlings (Majesty, Sacrifice, Dragonshard) but almost never achieve commercial success. Consumers are generally conservative when dropping $60 on a new game, and the better they can understand a game before purchasing it – often by fitting it squarely into the framework of a genre schema – the more comfortable they will feel. Thus, genre schemas have a significant chilling effect on innovation within the industry.

Perhaps the best way to overcome the limitations of genre schemas is by providing the consumer a different yet stronger schema via the game’s actual theme. For example, Nintendogs did not fit well into a successful commercial genre but the game’s theme – taking care of a pet dog – activated the schemas of consumers with so many clear possibilities that the title became one of the best-selling games of all time. The game sold itself to players primarily on the basis of what they already knew about dogs.

Making Sense

A certain breed of player does exist that is unafraid to dive into unfamiliar territory, such as the early adopters of iconoclastic cult games like Dwarf Fortress and the Dominions series. Most players, however, need to understand what a game is about before they even touch a controller. A schema hook is required, either via the game’s visible theme or some well-established genre conventions.

However, while the latter can successfully sell a gaming to faithful core gamers, only the former can expand gaming to a mainstream audience. Certainly, the Nintendo Wii was the greatest example of this fact during the current console generation. Besides the accessibility of the controls, many of the best-selling games – such as Wii Fit, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, Just Dance, and – yes – even the oft-derided Carnival Games – all have very clear themes that easily activate consumers’ schemas and expectations. Games about space marines and evil wizards do not have this advantage.

Still, finding a resonant theme is only half the battle; a game’s mechanics must match the theme as well. The old “fun beats realism” saw has become such dogma that designers can easily fray the connections between a game’s theme and its mechanics in the very subjective pursuit of fun. Starting a new game is always a leap of faith, and players have a right to expect their games to start making sense.

(Credit for the laundry schema example belongs to the How to Play Podcast.)