Years ago, a more experienced game designer I worked with told me that I was still developing my “game design aesthetic”. I didn’t really understand. Questions lingered in my mind: What does it mean for an artist to have a personal aesthetic? Why is it so hard to develop one? Why is it important? And what is this strange gravity that they exert over us?
With this article series, I’m here to offer some answers—though maybe not the answers—to my younger self.
Let’s begin with a basic building block, one of our simplest functional units of game design: design patterns. This concept is borrowed from architecture, coined by architect Christopher Alexander and popularized in his landmark 1977 book, A Pattern Language. Alexander wanted to articulate, describe, and harness the dynamics that allowed architectural styles and forms to naturally evolve and respond to the life of their inhabitants and builders.
In the process he found a general-purpose way to describe a given art or design style from any context, not just architecture.
Article Series:
- A Game Designer’s Brushstrokes
- A Game Designer’s Genres
- A Game Designer’s Choices
- A Game Designer’s Aesthetic
- A Game Team’s Aesthetic (Coming soon!)
Ok, so what is a “pattern”?
Put simply, a design pattern is a known solution to a design problem, or a known way to achieve a design goal. In A Pattern Language for Game Design, Chris Barney defines them as “a generalized solution to a design problem found by examining many existing examples.” A pattern can simply be a description of a goal and a way to achieve it, or a cause and effect, or a statement describing a dynamic that occurs within the game or the player.
Some examples:
- “Environments are distinct because spaces have thresholds.”
- “The player can maintain orientation because they see landmarks in the environment.”
- “The player feels invested in a place because they have agency over it.”
- “Zooming the camera out at key moments makes the player feel smaller.”
You can describe any part of a game, or the player’s experience, using small statements of cause-and-effect like these. Patterns can exist at small, detailed scales (“The player knows where to find rewards because chests are marked on their map”), or at large scales (“The player enjoys exploration because environments have a sense of place”).
Patterns can have a hierarchy, or relate to each other. Here is an example from a pattern-mapping project of mine, where each pattern describes an impact, and the supporting patterns are ways to help achieve that impact:
A note on formal pattern definitions
Christopher Alexander went to great lengths to define the elements of a pattern, and how they should be “discovered”, verified, documented and interrelated. True Alexandrian patterns require a lot more detail than the examples I gave above. For this article series these small statements are sufficient.
Pattern Languages
When Alexander defined the concept of a pattern, he had a greater goal: to articulate and communicate what he called a “pattern language”. A pattern language is built out of patterns and their hierarchical connections. The term “language” works well because patterns and the way they are connected:
- Evolve over time.
- Can express many different things when combined in different ways or towards different goals.
- Each person has their own vocabulary on a given topic or discipline. He described this as each individual having their own pattern language
Furthermore, he thought that when every individual in a given society has their own language, the overlap and commonalities define a language for their society.
What patterns are not
When people first learn about patterns and pattern languages, there are some easy misconceptions to fall into. To head that off, let me say that design patterns are not:
- Laws or rules
- A way to turn art into an exacting and objective science
- A blueprint to guarantee a successful game
- Objective truths
Game design patterns in practice
So, to summarize:
- A pattern is a known solution to a design problem
- Patterns exist at every scale
- Patterns can support or enable each other in a hierarchical or symbiotic way
- A complex web of interconnected patterns form a “pattern language”
What do we do with all this? Is this usable in our day-to-day lives as designers?
To my eyes, a pattern language is very similar to a collection of norms, conventions, and shortcuts–the kind of stuff that we rely on to quickly make the many decisions we face every day in design roles. It is also very similar to a genre, or at least the way a genre comes to be, just through a different lens. (More on genres in the next article).
We are all already using patterns and sets of patterns, subconsciously. Thinking of these norms and conventions as patterns is one lens to help us understand our work, our thinking, and our art. As designers, we have to solve problems or achieve goals many times every day. For example:
- We need to make the player look in a certain direction, so we put directional audio and brighter lighting over there.
- We need the player to learn how to use a mechanic, so we place a simple version of that mechanic in a bottleneck, and then gradually introduce more complex iterations.
- We need to make sure the player knows the mechanics of a damage-over-time effect, so we call it “poison” and color-code it green and make VFX and SFX feedback pulse in time to the damage ticks.
These are all game design patterns. They are the brushstrokes of our art, and we all have a huge library of them in our heads. Even players do! When a player tries to anticipate where the designer may have placed a chest, or hidden a Korok, or which way is the side passage vs the golden path, they, too, are dipping into their vocabulary of game design patterns.
I have found patterns to be most useful as a method of analysis, to help me articulate how and why things work in games. There’s a reason I wrote about patterns first: they give me language I can use to describe the other topics in this series
Article Series:
- A Game Designer’s Brushstrokes
- A Game Designer’s Genres
- A Game Designer’s Choices
- A Game Designer’s Aesthetic
- A Game Team’s Aesthetic (Coming soon!)