Platforms in Game Design

Bethesda’s Todd Howard said, “if install base really mattered, we’d all make board games, because there are a lot of tables.”

There sure are a lot of tables, and more board games are being made than ever before. But there’s something even more compelling about this line of thinking.

When we talk about install base in game development it’s often used to mean the number of potential customers our software can reach based on the hardware that can run it. A game that is platform exclusive has a smaller install base, for example, since fewer machines are capable of installing your game.

Another term we often use is platform. The platform a game runs on can sometimes be used synonymously to install base–e.g., the Xbox platform–while, at other times, platform is viewed in broader terms. Steam, PSN, and the Epic Games Store, then also become “platforms.”

But, in game design, it helps to instead look at platform as synonymous to the interface you are designing the player’s experience for and completely ignoring the install base side of things. In other words, PlayStation and Xbox are both controller platforms, since their modern incarnations both use wireless dual-stick controllers. In this context, Todd Howard is completely on point–install base isn’t what you are designing for.

So which platforms are there, and what consequences do they have for your game designs? What are the strengths and potential weaknesses of each type of game design platform?

I’m glad you asked! Here comes my unnecessarily long answer.

People

Before talking about gameplay interfaces as physical things, let’s talk about the least common denominator: human beings.

Social interactions can often feel like games in their own right, whether settling business deals or just grocery shopping. With a complex range of dynamics going from subtlety through to deception, persuasion, and even seduction, conversations and negotiations are an important and always relevant gameplay interface.

Even when we interact with computers, we may still read it as human interaction. From event games like Watch the Skies! to boardgaming around a physical table, and then online multiplayer, human interaction remains a source of emotional variation that’s almost impossible to match.

It’s the interface you must judge all other interfaces by.

Dice

Probably the oldest and historically most prevalent form of gameplay interface. Shake them, throw them, gamble your fortunes away, or see if you can score a Full House in Yatzy (or King of Tokyo). You may even throw dice with the Mesopotamians if you feel like it.

Dice have one job and one job only: as they land, their alignment will change their outcome. Six dots up, you rolled a six. The Marshland symbol up, you can take one step through the marshland. The arrows on the top of the dice point to your friend and not to you, then they need to do the embarassing thing and you don’t. This simple randomization is so powerful that we have invented whole game genres around it. From the aforementioned Yatzy, to looter shooters.

In fact, a single six-sided die can change your life.

Cards

Between occultists dabbling in fortune telling and soldiers gambling their cigarettes away in the trenches, decks of cards are another historical gameplay interface. They cater to our secretive nature by allowing us to keep information away from other players. Bluffing. They also handle the Gambler’s Fallacy that gets to most dice rollers, since each card normally only exists once per deck: you will know that the next card you draw after a four of clubs won’t be another four of clubs. If you do, something is wrong, or someone is cheating.

Cards can also be used to parcel out information in an exception-based game design. Like how rules exceptions in the game Terraforming Mars can be described directly on each card. Their highly tactile nature also translate nearly perfectly between physical and digital forms–as evidenced in the shuffling, drawing, and discarding we do in everything from Hearthstone to Inscryption.

Cards are great in every way. They’re to game designers what post-it notes are to producers.

Pawns and Tokens

Beyond randomization we find representation. In the oldest games, stones and beads were probably used. The farther we move into the present day, this gameplay interface becomes a whole other thing, steeped in aesthetic decadence.

Though the word “pawn” is used to describe this interface, representation can take almost any form you can imagine. You may gamble with clay chips, stack real coins on top of each other, fumble cardboard tokens around with tweezers, or delve into collecting and painting detailed plastic miniatures.

As gameplay interfaces, pawns provide context and visual representation of the depicted action. A kind of what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) layer over the dice and cards. Can my little soldier see your little soldier and make the shot? Can it fly with those wings? How much gold have I collected? How many soldiers are guarding the gates?

Some games, like Blood Red Skies, provide more information. In that game, by using the tilt of the miniature airplanes to show whether they are ascending or descending. Other games may display strengths, weapons, or other information directly on the pawn itself. But pawns can also be mere decoration, with the game’s mechanical functions controlled through other means.

Boards

If one of the core aspects of game design is to communicate information, and the amount of information increases steadily through time, it stands to reason that it eventually won’t be enough to have just cards, dice, and pawns. This is where game boards come to the rescue!

Be they maps, cloth, cardboard, paper, or even a tic tac toe grid drawn in beach sand, game boards provide a spatial representation of game activities and a modicum of narrative context in what’s usually an abstract activity. You’re no longer merely rolling higher or drawing a Royal Straight Flush; you’re now invading cities, buying streets, and saving the world from Cthulhu.

Whether the territorial savagery of Risk, or the diegetic criticism against capitalism in Monopoly, some boards have become so iconic in their own right that they’ve become cultural phenomena.

Of course, in the digital space we insist on calling them levels or worlds, but they’re still just game boards by another name.

Charts and Tables

Once academia got its hands on game design, it was only a matter of time before we got charts and tables. They’re an interesting information platform, because they coexist quite effectively with dice and cards and they help provide depth, variety, and context, among other things.

Some game types are synonymous with charts and tables still to this day, including wargaming. Many have joked about Advanced Squad Leader‘s Kindling Table, and the incredible complexity its mere existence hints at. But given how these games are played, a special table for specific things helps communicate the game’s rules. Particularly for games that came out long before anyone had a multi-core computer in their pocket.

By checking the right column and row you can make sure that only information that is relevant in the moment is being referenced in play. All other information is still there, but reserved for when it’s needed.

We should stop making fun of charts and tables and instead realize how fantastic they are. And while we’re at it, we might as well admit that they’re still everywhere in games. From loot tables to difficulty charts to color grading lookup tables (LUTs). It’s just that we’ve relegated their use to the computer hardware.

Sheets

If charts and tables come from academia, then maybe form-fillable sheets are a staple from government agencies. No one really knows. But they are incredibly handy interfaces.

First of all, they tell you what you need to do by providing clear spaces where you must do it. They also remind you of the same thing if you’ve been away from the game for some time, and they serve to inspire you by having your creative synapses fire from very limited information. Many times, all we need to get started creatively is that the page we’re supposed to write on isn’t blank. The blank page scares us. A form-fillable sheet guides the way.

Strength is just a word, and 18 is just a number. But Strength 18 means something. It’s the highest roll you can get on 3d6. Strength 18!? Who is your character, that has such physical fortitude? A muscled barbarian, or a stout dwarf? Maybe a scrawny-looking farmer with thews capable of strangling a bear?

Sheets of wargame army lists, role-playing game characters, and strange play testing questionnaires, are with us forever. A structured way to make choices is also still with us, in everything from inventory screens to settings menus.

Mind’s Eye

Some argue that we’ve lost the spark of tabletop role-playing imagination to consumerism. That the increased drive to sell books made us turn to official canon rather than let our imaginations run wild from the minimalistic rules the hobby came from.

I personally agree with this notion, but it’s not terribly important. The mind’s eye–the power to imagine anything–is still very much open, and as a gameplay interface it’s always there. It may take on other forms, like connecting dots between unrelated events in the MMORPG you play, or taking the offenses of a digital NPC personally. But it’s definitely there. We haven’t lost our imagination. Far from it.

In fact, as game designers, we must conjure the vision from our mind’s eye all the time, by imagining that we’re playing our finished game in a polished form sometimes years before the game is actually playable.

Binders

We’ve moved on from mere gameplay interfaces by now and into the territory of meta gaming, where games become the focal points for whole communities. The binder will represent this space, with Magic: The Gathering and its tens of thousands of printed cards collected on gamer shelves across the world. But the meta gaming platform is much much bigger than just Magic.

Being able to bring out your collection and sift through it, thinking both about the things you have collected and the things you haven’t, triggers something primal in our minds. The hunter-gatherer instinct. The Pokémon instinct. The Diablo instinct. The one-armed bandit instinct, even.

As an interface, with its empty slots beckoning you to collect the remaining cards, the binder is incredible. Gamification in its purest form. And when you think of it, you realize that almost every digital game today has some variation of a binder in its design.

Live Action

Live Action Role-Playing, or LARP, is a whole range of hobbies rolled into one. Arts and crafts, costume design, historical reenactment, amateur theater, improvised acting, creative writing; and more. It’s a form of in-depth make believe that empowers its players in ways that can be hard to understand without experiencing it yourself.

As an interface, few things beat the real world. Experiencing the life of a World War 1 soldier by literally living the life of one. Minus the risk of dying, of course. Maybe feigning that you are chased by otherworldly monsters, or pretending to be a Middle-earth orc.

It’s maybe the most experiential form of play there is but also requires that every participant is willing to aid the experience for everyone else. If there is as much as a single “griefer,” to use the parlance of multiplayer games, the experience can be ruined for everyone. This way, it goes back to the first interface–people. But it also demonstrates that players are often willing to help each other enjoy play.

Keyboard

When computers enter the stage, the keyboard interface is soon to follow. Glorified typewriters gradually become mechanical monstrosities with glaring LEDs. (For some reason, there are few computer parts without LEDs, these days.)

Beyond writing free text in many early games–from text adventures to multi-user dungeons (MUDs)–keyboards also allow more complex play experiences. Anything that can be reasonably mapped to keys can be believably emulated using a keyboard. A modern keyboard has just over 100 keys, and though game schemes tend to gravitate towards the WASD keys, there is nothing stopping you from mapping inputs to every single key.

Keys are great, and though their input may be binary (pressed or not pressed), the variety is almost limitless. Particularly when you add hold time, multi-presses, and key combinations to the mix. E.g., SHIFT+W, CTRL+ALT+DEL, and so on. Not to mention that the keyboard remains the superior writing instrument, even if we write way too much using touch interfaces these days.

Joysticks

Arcade cabinets bring digital play in style. But it’s not long (late 70s) until we have home consoles too–Pong machines, I bet. I’m not old enough to know.

Joysticks translate physical movement to movement on-screen. It’s a very direct and engaging interface and one that’s been with us ever since. Before gaming, they were prominently used in airplanes and other more expensive pieces of equipment.

As a gameplay interface, a joystick is more than just input. It also represents a fiction. You’re pretending to be a pilot, acting out the role of a MechWarrior, or diving deep into the postapocalyptic seas in your submarine.

Mouse

As a Swede, do I take some pride in the mouse having been invented by a Swede? No. I think nationalism is nonsense; and also, Håkan Lans didn’t invent the mouse at all.

But as a game designer, I have huge respect for the mouse. The mouse almost single-handedly defines 80s and 90s gaming. Whole genres exist because of computer mice. Action role-playing games (ARGPs), like Diablo, where incessant violent clicking probably killed many a computer mouse in the name of hoarding better loot. Point-and-click adventure games, like Day of the Tentacle and Ron Gilbert’s and Tim Schafer’s other ventures.

One genre that comes out of this is also the so-called Hidden Object genre of games, that’s bigger today than it’s ever been. Games like the classic Myst, or one of many other puzzle, investigation or mystery games.

The cool thing a mouse does is that it provides a direct connection between a player’s intent and what happens on-screen. This allows the mouse to show you hover hints and other contextual information exactly when and where you need it. The way it maps naturally to the screen also allows fairly high precision, which has given rise to terms like “pixel-hunting,” as has the rapid pace of wrist-flicking motions given us expressions like “twitch gaming.”

Such a lovely and completely uncontroversial thing, the computer mouse.

Mouse AND Keyboard

Sorry, did I say uncontroversial? On the contrary, the mouse–when combined with a keyboard–turns people into Gamers, capital G. It seems to do something to our brains.

Games of course combined mouse and keyboard from fairly early on, but there will be whole game genres that grow out of this combination when it starts gaining real momentum. We’re now up to about the mid to late 90s.

As a gameplay interface, the combination of mouse and keyboard provides both the myriad keys of the keyboard and the increased precision of the mouse. A combination that fits incredibly well with the growing genre of first-person shooters that owe their existence to Doom, Quake, Half-Life, and their kin.

This interface is what also gives us competitive gaming. Not just first-person shooters, but also real-time strategy games, and eventually multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs).

It’s one of those things that can be considered greater than the sum of its parts, depending on which side of the PC Master Race fence you’re standing.

Controllers

Late 70s/early 80s, the dedicated gaming controller makes its home entrance in a big way. At first, they’re very simple, with clear directional pads (d-pads) using arrows in cardinal directions only, and just a few other buttons. But as time moves on, their buttons multiply and sizes fluctuate.

With gaming as a hobby thriving on innovation in hardware, there are many experiments made along the way. From having your memory card integrated with a mini-screen on the DreamCast to making the whole controller a screen in its own right with the WiiU; and more.

As a gameplay interface, controllers have mostly normalized to a dual-stick dual-trigger standard with 10-12 buttons. They’re excellent for all couch-potato gaming in front of a TV, and surprisingly often, gamers will say they work best for third-person games. Exactly why this is boggles my mind. Functionally, third-person is just first-person but with the viewpoint gun replaced with a character’s back.

But there’s no arguing with gamers!

Handhelds

The Nintendo DS sits at #2 on the list of best-selling consoles of all time. Playing games on the train, standing in line, or locked in your room while the TV was occupied with broadcasting awful 90s game shows into the brains of your family. This is a compelling offering.

Portable devices invite everything from social gaming (as with Pokémon Go) to gaming in contexts where gaming isn’t standard. The Nintendo DS has many features for handshaking with other console owners, sending gifts, and engaging beyond the games themselves. In today’s landscape, smartphones bring this even further, almost into ubiquity. Probably part of why traditional handhelds don’t sell as well anymore–everyone usually already has one.

It’s hard to overstate how important portability is. Or even integration into everyday social activities. As a gameplay interface, the handheld form factor makes a big difference. Not to mention other factors of the off-and-on format, such as the ability to suspend play and instantly resume it again when you have an opportunity to do so. No more long loading times, just suspend and unsuspend.

This last portability feature is how the Switch and Steam Deck have become my personal favorite gaming devices–it lets me get some gaming in at a moment’s notice, where a console or PC wouldn’t even have time to boot up and finish updating.

Analogue Sticks

It’s somewhat hard to think of consoles without analogue thumb sticks. But for the most part, they haven’t had them. Since they harken back to the joysticks of old, they’re of course nothing new. But the form factor makes all the difference.

Now, dual analogue sticks are not nearly as intuitive as you may think. What actually happens with these controls is that they alienate many potential gamers. The simplicity of the controllers of the past is suddenly gone and you introduce a much higher threshold to climb over–one that gamers have long-since forgotten.

“But it’s so simple!” will be your gut reaction. But having seen kids and better halves attempt to get into dual-stick games, I can tell you that it’s not. It’s a learned skill, much like using a computer mouse.

But for console gamers, these sticks are what they live for.

Touch

If you’re a non-luddite parent, you’ve seen the incredible effect of touch interfaces on children. The direct connection between the thing on your screen and the use of your fingers is so simple to understand that you don’t have to demonstrate anything. Kids just go right ahead. Even the ubiquitous computer mouse isn’t this intuitive, due to the indirect connection between the device and the on-screen cursor.

Touch has of course visited “hardcore” gamer concepts like first-person shooters, trying to map gamers’ games to gestures. But much of touch input gaming actually thrives on having your fingers and hand stay away from the screen. Just picture how you flick your angry bird off into the distance to do violence on impact–and then you watch the violence happen as a passive observer.

When you use input on a touch device, your fingers and/or hand will also obscure the screen, making the passive observation mode a perfect fit. This is the humble genius of Angry Birds.

Hardware

If you are unfamiliar with the economics of toys, plastic is really cheap and you can add almost any markup you want if you have the right brand or nische. The downside is that there’s a fairly big chunk of money that must be sunk into it before it can make those big bucks for you, and the logistics chain that comes with the territory means that you need volume, warehousing, and distribution, before you can make money.

The minute details of this logic eludes me–and is way above my paygrade to begin with–but whatever you do at scale will always have a much bigger potential to make money. What it also means is that there has been countless attempts to monetize plastic peripherals at scale; some more successful than others.

From Guitar Hero to Skylanders, each success has been contrasted by at least one massive failure, and there are many smaller-scale attempts as well.

If you want to do the next longsword peripheral, or bluetooth-pen assisted miniatures game; don’t let anyone stop you. But be aware that the money won’t come until you’re massively successful. Though you may be able to provide an experience that no one has had before, you’re also going into territory that’s very expensive and highly competitive.

In the words of someone (not myself) who was sitting on a warehouse full of suddenly deprecated product; “that’s a good way to lose a few million dollars.”

Virtual Reality

Speaking of physical goods made of plastic, virtual reality headsets have been part of the gaming landscape for quite some time by now without truly taking off. There are some game developers who cling to VR in the hopes that it will pay off some day, but the truth is that many of them make their money by selling the same games through digital stores without the VR. Games like Demeo.

But VR does have tremendous appeal and is a unique kind of game experience. The tactile and experiential nature of playing something like Resident Evil 4 in VR, combined with the physical presence, promises experiences that will be something more than what games can be while played on a flat screen.

As a game designer, you need to always allow players to move their head, and you can’t take away control or arbitrarily move the camera unless you want your player to vomit. This makes the cinematic experiences we’ve gotten used to in AAA gaming much harder to do and forces games into a more player-centric design space. One that I personally want us to explore in game design overall–not just in VR. So this reinforcement of systemics is excellent, from my perspective.

When VR gaming shines, it’s some of the most immersive gaming you can experience. But there have been way too few steps in this direction, so far.

Community

It felt good to end this rambling monologue full circle. Multiplayer is what happens when we tap into the potential of people in our games. Whether gathered a whole day for a vicious session of Diplomacy, planning to raid Queen Azshara with your guild, or engaging in the deep lore of our favorite RPG by writing fan fiction and speculating on character motivations, community adds an extra dimension on top of a game. An interface that’s hard to plan for, but worth much more than can even be measured.

The sense of community built in a digital world is very special. Players can gather to watch the servers close down in their favorite game, or do all the hard work to keep a game going even after the developer goes bankrupt or moves on. They can invent narrative explanations that the developers never intended, or fix bugs that the developers never had the time to fix.

Community can also mean other things. The in-game level building tools in Halo, or the many game modes that were invented entirely through social contract and verbal agreement before a match started in Halo 2. Modding, and its nearly infinite permutations from having sex with Keanu Reeves to remaking entire games inside other games. Playing the same game together for decades to find easter eggs–in that case, a single-player game with a dedicated online community.

Some players in the modern gaming landscape won’t even play your game. They will watch it streamed by the popular streamers of their day and they will share stories about the game. A part of the gaming community that didn’t exist mere decades ago.

People matter most, and if we let them engage with our games at this level, there’s infinite potential.