re: games & numbers
Tags: gamedev, writing
Published: 2023-12-24 16:22:11

---
title: re: games & numbers
published: true
date: 2023-12-16 00:00:00 UTC
tags: [ 'gamedev', 'writing' ]
canonical_url: https://onwriting.games/daily/20231216-1051-re-games-numbers/
---

Fellow list member Guillaume Ardaud wrote (shared with permission, edited for brevity):

> One topic I didn’t get to ask you about that I’d be curious to hear your take on is that of the relationship between games, and the numbers they use to represent properties. It doesn’t matter if it’s your character’s health, how fast you move, how much damage your sword causes, your reputation with a faction in a RPG - it all boils down to a number in the system representing that property.

> Most games show you the numbers as they are. If your character has 75 life points, you see the number 75 on the screen.

> Very few things in reality work this way. The way my friends, coworkers, etc feel about me isn’t a -100 to +100 “sentiment” number - it’s a complex combination of myriad factors.

> Some games will push those boundaries a little bit. It’s become popular in FPS games to not display any health related metric, but when the internal number gets too low, the character starts breathing heavily and the peripheral vision goes dark.

> Another twist is to have numbers with little indication as to what they do - some RPGs will have a “luck” or “miracle” stat that you can increase, but without knowing precisely what it will improve.

> If you have lots of numbers that aggregate to a single metric, you can have deeper, finer grained behavior - for instance, Dwarf Fortress doesn’t have a single “health” counter for dwarves; how healthy a dwarf is a complex combination of all the numbers that represent the state of its organs, etc, which interlocks nicely with lots of other mechanics.

> I’m curious as to how you see that intersecting with your work around narrative design. Does having obvious, simplistic numbers (like “health”, or “reputation”) break narrative immersion?

> Is there a point to hiding the numbers and their interactions if the players just end up figuring out how to read the game to tell what the underlying numbers are, and go to a wiki to make up for the game’s lack of transparency in the interactions between its numbers?

I appreciate this email as it touches a topic I haven't talked about here and it's a point of constant conflict I have with most game designers.

There is a trend in game design, which I believe gained strong momentum with the game Journey, that places great value on communicating things to players without text, or through the use of diegetic indicators.

I'm going to be harsh: I think it's poor design to hold this opinion.

Why? Because I believe that designers, both narrative and game designers, should be open to exploring all possible spaces and find the best way to communicate and create ideas in the player's mind.

There are many games where it's unclear what's happening due to pretentious design that fails to communicate, but succeeds in inflating the designer's ego.

I prefer to focus on finding the best way to communicate, and the best way is to try all possible methods during playtesting.

Playtesting will tell you if a number is breaking immersion or not, and in general, in my experience, it's more the mental constructs of "gameplay" rather than the numbers on the screen that break the illusion.

I know this is an answer that isn't an answer, so I apologize, Guillaume, but at the same time I believe you've touched on a topic that doesn't have an answer.

Each case is unique, and again, playtesting will tell you if, on average, a design decision is good or bad.

The important thing is to create concrete experiments to validate (or invalidate) those decisions.

playtest! playtest! playtest!

**PS:** [Bahnsen Knights](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1933190/Bahnsen_Knights/) is out, and it's very good! ❤️ Thanks Nico Saraintaris for another great game.

**PPS:** This is not sponsored, I just like his work so much!