The Packbats' Weblog

(Feel free to skip this first section if you're already familiar with the MDA framework - it's mostly just recapping the concept.)

The point here is: if you remember that you want the player's sensations to be delightful, it changes how you do the low-level work. Likewise, if you want the player's attempts to overcome a challenge to be rewarding, it changes how you do the low-level work; if you want the player's efforts to discover what's in the world to be satisfying, it changes how you do the low-level work; if you want the player's experience of the game's fantasy to be engrossing, it changes how you do the low-level work. And so on for the other four aesthetics on the list in the original MDA framework paper: Fellowship, Expression, Submission (i.e. zoning out), and...

It's not controversial to say that writing in games is better when it's not treated as separate from everything else, but I think that goes deeper than just saying that. It's not just that the game mechanics and the writing both tell stories, it is that the game mechanics and its story both create aesthetics of play. And that changes how you do the low-level work.

We've been pretty interested in game design's Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics framework for a while, but today for reasons we decided to take the idea of "the list of aesthetics isn't fixed, these are just the ones we, the authors of this paper, thought of" and extend that to making a list of aesthetics for traditional non-game fiction.

Edit: To sum up very quickly: one of the ideas of the MDA framework is that players engage with videogames to enjoy particular aesthetics, and serving their aesthetics successfully is a big part of making effective games. So, it's not that, say, challenges of execution are what makes games good, but if that's what you play a particular game for, then how well it does that is part of what might make that game good. Or bad.

What we (mostly Packdragon, I think) came up with, with a bit of help from someone on one of our group chats:

Setting:

The vividness and interest of the world in which the story takes place.

Allegory:

The political, moral, or similar implications of the fiction for the world outside the fiction.

Simulation:

The care with which plausible connections of cause and consequence are represented.

Identification:

The establishment of affection for characters within the story whose success is desired by the audience.

Character Development:

The representation of change within characters as they progress through the story.

Interplay:

The dynamics formed between characters who interact within the story.

Mystery:

The establishment and subsequent resolution of curiosity about elements within the world.

Spectacle (or Sensation, to borrow from the original list):

Moments and scenes which are delightful to behold.

It was a really delightful exercise, and looking back at the original list, I think it shows a substantial weakness in the idea of isolating "Narrative" as a separate aesthetic of play: we would analyze narrative as a dynamic which can serve many other aesthetics, not as an aesthetic in and of itself.

(...the fact that, to the authors of the paper, 'Narrative' felt like a self-contained aesthetic separate from the creation of a fictional world, the exploration of a creative work, and the overcoming of challenge by the player? Feels of a kind with the phenomenon of incoherent game design that inspired the coining of 'ludonarrative dissonance' as a term.)

(Those were sure some long sentences. Oh well.)

I think this was a really good exercise. It'd be interesting to do the same thing with other artistic media, like music or visual art.