JP, the topic header confused me until I saw your response to Aubrey as “Depth.” My first question would then be what are the three (or more) aspects of Game Design? If one is Depth – the different ways I can use a tool, such as a gun; and one is Breadth – many ways to accomplish the same (or different goals) by companionship, enrichment, and reasoning – then what is the third? Secondly, I’d like to mention “System Shock Two” as an example of a game with potential Breadth and definite Depth. SS2 immediately sprung to my mind when Aubrey mentioned the many uses of a gun because SS2 did not have many uses for one tool, but did have many different tools. These tools were not available to everyone every play – if you choose to be great in guns, you were only okay in other areas and vice versa – and so created at least one session of replayability if not more. The variety of how you could deal with problems created that replayability: should I be invisible and sneak through? What about not taking any computer skills? There could be a dozen different personal scenarios to run yourself through and see how difficult you could make it.

A co-worker at a bookstore of mine did the same with BioShock but there is where I’d like to say the comparison ends. System Shock 2 was a playground with a definite entrance and a definite exit. There were definitely places I had to go but how I got there and what order I did them in was fairly loose. In many cases, I had to go back to former levels to acquire items I had no access to. This made an environment I was always paying attention to rather than forgetting once I had made it the next step further. A city to explore rather than burning a bridge behind me.

BioShock was, is, beautiful. The story and writing, but for a few places, were gorgeous and brilliant. The artwork, set design, level design, costume, modeling, was incredible. I could go on for a while about how visually appealing it looked but that would be exhaustive. It did. BioShock also had a variety of weapons and powers to choose from and the earlier mentioned co-worker played the game three times with different challenges for him to beat the game. The key differences in my mind, what cost it “Depth” if I’m using my metaphors properly, is that the world was railroad and everyone – for the most part – got everything. By the time I was finished playing BioShock the first time, with a healthy dose of information (read: unfair advantage) from other people I was actually at a loss of what to do with my Adam and cash by the end. I had everything, every power, every upgrade, maximum ammunition, everything. It was an incredible experience getting there and I have played it through again, but I still had everything. BioShock did not force me to make power related choices. Moral choices, yes. Capital Yes. But not strictly game mechanic choices. If I kill all non-entities, I will receive mostly maximum power now. If I do not kill these non-entities, I will receive slightly more power later. If I choose somewhere in the middle, I will fall somewhere in the middle. System Shock 2 completely cut you off from an entire range of abilities. You were either zero to useless in psionics, or zero to useless in big guns, or zero to useless in hacking. Very distinct, very different, none required to win the game, but all very useful in their own way.

If the above is a correct assessment of “Depth” or “different paths up the same mountain”, I’m afraid I don’t entirely understand “Breadth” unless you mean it is different paths leading to completely different mountains. Hopefully it doesn’t kill or alter a thing to define it, but how do I make a game with “Depth” and “Breadth.” And what is the third measurement if there is one?

But of course there are frontiers deep down in the established mechanics as well, that are just as important to explore. After all, 2D shmups became artful only years after the mainstream industry had abandoned them.

I think what will get us there is a commitment to excellence in game design in the established styles – low level things that get surprisingly short shrift in most games.

Speaking of transgressive, around then I noticed a new gameplay verb/emotion that a few games have since included, but few have really leveraged consciously as a main basis — voyeurism. Stealth can include this, but only when the designers go the extra mile to give you interesting/private things to listen/look at. Thief’s famous “Goin’ to the Bear Pits” dialogue was an early, if somewhat basic example of this.

Jordan Mechner’s The Last Express had a *lot* of voyeurism, even though it had fairly little stealth, per se. You could overhear conversations in the diner cars, you could go into people’s private cars when they weren’t there, and read their intimate diaries. Similarly, the logs and ghost scenes in the Shock games can give you a sense of seeing things that were intended to be private, even though they have no stealth at all.

The feeling of successfully prying into someone else’s private affairs is quite potent. Like “shooting in the face”, it’s a socially frowned-upon activity which most of us don’t get to indulge in in our real lives — but which is inherently pleasurable at a deep level. Games are a great way to satisfy those transgressive urges.

“I don’t think we as developers can continue holding our breath and waiting for games that revolve around shooting, driving, running and jumping to someday make a great leap into expressing all kinds of things they were heretofore incapable of.”

Granted. At the same time, there’s a lot of expression space available to the player which most games don’t (but potentially could) acknowledge. Some of these expressions are only percievable/accessible to the well versed (appreciation of good blocking and combos in StreetFighter 4). Other expressions could be siezed on by the game, and represented in a form more appreciable to the lay person (when a “6 hit combo” notifier pops up) who might otherwise not notice the significance of what just happened.

The closer the representation of these subtleties gets to the affordance/typical reaction to the verb itself, the more naturally interpretable the “finesse” of the expression is to the lay person (i.e. crowds cheering in the background when a technically impressive feat goes off).

Unfortunately, chucking “+10 XP” on the screen is way cheaper than providing the full gamut of possible reactions to a scene. We tend to have to use short-hand to get “finess” across, and it’s something the lay person just can’t quite be bothered to learn to translate.

There are loads of little promising ways we already do this, as you say. Some examples from me: Threatening enemies by pointing a gun in their face as opposed to simply shooting (in GTA:3 you can make people raise their hands or flee in fear); in Assassin’s Creed, doing a multi-kill combo in open combat with the hidden blade actually causes guards to run away due to your show of prowess, rather than chucking up an abstract (and possibly “gaudy”) “MMMMM MEGA KILL x 8″ popup.

Any verb with a varied expression space can be used to trigger more subtle outcomes than its prime affordance: “your target is dead!”, “you jumped that gap!”, “you drove faster than another fastcar!”. Well versed gamers, of course, will appreciate the finesse in a gun shot the same way a ballet afficianado understands the meaning being articulated through interpretive dance.

In order to allow a wider appreciation of these subtleties, typically, we’re seeing “finesse” translated into the old fallback of “score” (i.e. The Club with its myriad of shooting style bonuses, or Skate and its ilk codifying style into score*). This is mostly because it’s the most practical solution on a limited budget (or plain love of retro tropes). We could, instead, create the natural responses we’d expect in the real world (but it’s more expensive, and harderer. And simulation is not necessarily a games’ target).

More could be done in this vein, adding weight and meaning to the tropey verbs we’ve become accustomed to. A gun no longer becomes just a killing too, but also a bargaining chip (we can buy, sell, and trade it for other goods or services), a symbol of power (in the kindom of the unarmed, the one gunned man is king), a threatening device (point, but don’t click), a last resort in a conversation (I live in brixton), or a piece of evidence after a killing (don’t get caught with a murder weapon – it’s a hot potato). We use something we know to be a good gaming “launch pad” to approach something closer to a more dramatic narrative element, in the storytelling sense.

But as I say, the amount of cost and effort involved in setting up decent core game play for a shooty, racey, jumpey game, and its frighteningly expensive (and often rigidifying) shiney vaneer means there’s little room to experiment with these subtle, but immersive ideas. Games which try to before the groundwork is laid often come off half cocked (not having time to fully flesh out their mechanics) or unpolished (though I thouroughly appreciate every game which tries).

Normally, I’d say “Yay for homebrew, the indie scene, and modding for being cheap enough to pick up the torch, and experiment!”, but for the most part, they’re up against the exact same problem. Their strength lies in experimenting with very base core mechanics, rather than supporting ones (no bad thing). They too need a core mechanic before they can start adding these supporting mechanics, which only really serve the game properly when put ontop of a solid frame work (Braid is successful here: without time-fucking it would be a vanilla platform game. Time fuckery is given its full due, and it’s an excellent game because of it. Contrarywise, FarCry 2 had lots of wonderful high level ideas, but no time to explore their full implications.
Civilization etc. stand a better chance of trying out social mechanics because they aren’t about technologically involved/costly core mechanics, and are free to play around with the design at that high level.)

Really, it goes back to creativity being a product of restriction. Within a limited production cycle, what mechanics are you going to choose, what story are you going to weave, and what are you going to say with them all together? There is a world of interesting, accessible things TO be said by more complex games (with solid cores, but enough supplemental depth/high level mechanics to create the necessary interactive richness for certain messages), but those more complex games rarely have the chance to exist, almost purely due to their impracticality.

*Which, yar, is a subjective application of seemingly objective values – a lot like review scores.