Politics of Arithmetic and Terminology
image is the Japanese cover for Dragon Quest 1, Painted by Akira Toriyama.
Prelude
Why are the numbers in my game what they are? They aren't refined enough for any distinguished game designer to ever even snort disapprovingly at me across the hall at GDC. Nor are they flamboyantly big enough to give anyone a mathematically swollen sense of self-worth.
In case I haven't yet had the chance to corner you in a dark alley and explain the intricate and quite provocatively ingenious ideas behind my game while I gut you like a fish đ , allow me: The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit is about winning small, cutely violent battles against demonic rabbits, by manipulating them using your magics and your knowledge of the rabbits' behaviour.
While making the game, I started to ponder the numbers. They'd been picked without too much forethought, and it seemed like it was finally time to think about what the right numbers were for representing the Player's health, how much damage the enemies dealt, and various other, mechanically interesting but irrelevant to the story, details. From here is the processed, GMO-filled version of those thoughts.
Arithmetic
Have you heard of a perfect information game? Like Chess. You are aware of all your options, and all your opponents' options, and stats, and immediate ramifications at all times. It's very clean, beautiful even. Everything is laid bare, and the only gambling is whether one of the players falters or takes a bait.
It's design-by-practicality really. It's easier to make a game if all the rules can be contained inherently in the pieces. It would require a lot more resources to have each element contain additional data, like numbers to describe wellness, physical strength or, most outlandishly, personal history (lol).
A lot of complicated video games like to have bigger and more numbers. Stats that indicate minute attributes, and values so big that an increase in power becomes almost tangible. It's been like a kid in a candy store: "you like data and games? Here's a machine that can let you play games and handle all the data you could possibly want." Some might disagree, but it isn't even a bad thing. I love these games, and I think they would be absolutely tedious if I had to manage all the data myself. Consider Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which doesn't include the option to store combinations of equipment into reusable sets, or filter on the Materia items according to type, or store the loadout of Materia in sets. Itâs a drag to pause this thrilling adventure every five minutes in a late stage of the game, to fiddle with an incredibly, and increasingly, long list of arcane jelly beans. I'm not sure the pieces in Chess would have had living equipment, whose own lived experience would be tracked individually, had the creators had the choice, but on the other hand, we sure didn't have digital games for a long time before Vagrant Story happened.
I've seen an opposing line of thought in strategic and tactical games by developers less tied to the whims of popularity (so much so that that line of thought feels like it has become the zeitgeist): integers should be small. One to five, never eleven. Humans cannot comprehend such voluminous digits, they say. Theyâre inspired by European board games, and really, it makes sense. Thinking this way is a tool to achieve a lot of interesting choices. The argument is that choosing between âAttackâ and âFire Spellâ is an almost superficial choice, even if the result of this choice, is built on the back of a monstrous calculation and/or algorithm. Rather sensically, the belief is that each choice should have interesting results and allow for new interesting choices. I seem to remember a talk by Jonathan Blow about how games that didnât provide anything, by his definition of course, worthwhile, were akin to unethical in that they robbed players of their life. The âby his definitionâ has become quite important to me. I like Blowâs ideas and creations, but he and I donât like the same games. In fact, I very much enjoy a lot of games he would find unethical in their design. By his definition, I cannot deny what he says, but thatâs the thing: if you get to decide the definition of something, you can win any argument. Thatâs where this âsmaller numbers, interesting choices, worthwhile investmentâ sort of breaks down. It leaves room for people to like certain games for their stories, but insists that the game design of them is something one must trudge through to enjoy the only worthwhile aspect. It denies the value of good tactility, of spectacular results, of freedom from consequence, of familiarity.
That list of, letâs call them, virtues, isnât part of what is normally discussed when discussing game design in the English-speaking world. Maybe it isnât anywhere. Sure, making stuff feel good to interact with is important in all interfaces and surely in the UX world as well, but it isnât normally something that in game design, is seen as equivalent to âinteresting choicesâ.
This leads me to an odd situation, where most expressed thoughts around game design, are trying extremely hard to define, almost on an atomic scale, what is what in games, and at the same time, are arriving at conclusions that completely dismiss a great many of the games Iâve enjoyed over the years. If they arenât outright dismissed as inherently poor design, they are disregarded for anything but their stories, and in the last ten year especially, these stories too, are dismissed out of hand as either offensive in an increasingly prudish culture, or too fantastical in a subculture that is constantly trying to prove how worthwhile it is (this is an idiotâs way of saying he likes anime tits and buttholes, and Japanese game design).
The odd situation becomes clear when I try to design something of my own, inspired by the works that I like, and I wish to draw on the theories of my peers, but realise, my peers are vehemently opposed to the design in the works I enjoy and reflect upon. My own game, The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit, has evolved over the years, and currently (hopefully finally) arrived at being sort of a Japanese Role-Playing Game. Except⌠it doesnât have experience points, levels, equipment (in a traditional sense) or a plethora of throwaway battles. You have a very limited number of actions, everything is defined in low integers, and all the battles (so far at least) are designed. It has a bunch of inter-connected systems, and none of your (very few) moves have similar effects. It doesnât sound very much like a Japanese RPG, when I put it like that. Yet I have no desire to create a game of hard, tactical choices. I rather like how a player who isnât very engaged with the systems, can find theyâre own enjoyment in JRPGs, while the dedicated player can show their prowess through their knowledge of (and sometimes dedication to) the systems.
Hopefully I don't make it sound like I'm under the impression that all non-digital games don't require a lot of data management. Many data heavy and data management heavy games exist, and it's worth remembering that Dungeons & Dragons, the genre-defining game itself, sprang from a more data-laden branch of strategy games.
Terminology
Just for those that arrived late, let's recount that early video games like Ultima and Wizardry took their inspirations from D&D, and that the original and quintessential Japanese Role-Playing Game, Dragon Quest, which spawned its own sub-genre (in our mind, I'll get to that) was specifically inspired by Ultima and its ilk. In the most sci-fi nerdy sense, we have a case of branching timelines here people! What the Japanese people call an RPG diverted from what we call an RPG, at such an early stage, that appending "Japanese" in front of it, only makes it less grokkable. I'll dig into it later, but the gist is that the two types of RPGs are so unrelated that we seem to comprehend very little of what is the design theory behind RPGs in Japan, since we always refer back to how we've formulated our own understanding of RPGs. Outside Japan, RPGs would be defined by their meticulousness to details surrounding personal character development, and by how involved the player would be allowed to be in the outcome of the narrative. Surely I've enjoyed the battles in these games, but I must admit, it's often a bit trite. Complex spells in Baldur's Gate 2, and the occasional usage of the environment in some games alleviated this. It's actually kind of curious that the genre isn't called Fantasy Simulation Games. These elements didnât just become the defining traits, but also virtues to uphold and strive for.
Compared to this, Japanese RPGs are focused stories, where the battles continue to be abstractions of the idea of battles, and over time a focus on adding and removing interesting, but very real-world-unrelated, sub-systems to the battles, and how the player characters evolve over the course of the playtime became more important. As the player improves their understanding of the game, they not only get access to new abilities, but often reach an understanding of what is already there, so that they may tackle even greater threats. Often though, they donât have to do this, in order to participate in the story. Put in the terms that people use outside Japan, the RPG genre in Japan is a mix of what is often called an adventure game (a linear, character-driven story, perhaps with puzzles to solve), a strategy game (in that the battles become strategically difficult if you choose to invest in this area, not that the battles are like those of the games of StarCraft or similar (although that has also happened a few times)) and to a smaller extent an RPG (in that your characters evolve over time according to your choosing, based on a subsystem that controls this).
This detour is meant to illustrate the reason as to why I might have been looking at the reasoning for the numbers in my game incorrectly. Without realising it, I had created a game where numbers should be small, for a few good reasons. The implicit result of small numbers was that each choice had to matter, like in strategy games, like Into the Breach. The problem was that I was creating a game that was most closely related to an RPG in the Japanese sense, and theyâve created a gameplay aesthetic where choices CAN matter, depending on your level of investment, but they donât have to.
When framing Japanese RPGs as a sub-genre, they are misconstrued, and every design choice ends up seeming like an oddity in comparison to what an RPG ought to be, and in game design these choices run counter to some (rather dogmatic) principles. Look, it's fine. Many of those that wrote down their design ideals in the last 10-20 years, did so while saying (kinda): "this is based partly on what I like, and trying to understand why I like it" (like what I'm doing now). They've become almost textbook (I guess sometimes actual textbook) definitions of what should be considered best practice in game design.
I thought it'd be elegant if I could unify the many elements in my game design, so that mechanics were tied to each other through reasoning and likewise gave rise to the numbers. As I contemplated and tweaked the numbers, I encountered this conflict between what small, discreet numbers culturally indicated, and what my intentions for my game were. One day I made a canteen of coffee and rode my bike into the forest. In the early autumn beech forest, I climbed a small hill and found a nice spot where I could overlook both the nearby trail and even the ocean. Sipping on my coffee and a sourdough bun I'd bought a few minutes earlier, it started to dawn on me: sure, I needed to reconfigure my game. At the same time, I should start realising that I wasn't making an arcade-like version of a strategy game. At heart, my game was a miniature Japanese RPG, and thirty years of genre conflation had made it difficult to arrive at the legitimacy of this conclusion.
Getting Out of The Water
There's this fantastic conversation between Shigeru Miyamoto, Satoru Iwata, and Shigesato Itoi where they discuss why Mother 3 had to be cancelled for the Nintendo 64. Of the numerous thoughtful observations, among them is Itoi saying "An RPG is a system where symbols come together, and something happens which is portrayed in even more symbols."(here) While the point of that part of the conversation is very much about how Mario games make concretisations of what would be abstract in a Japanese RPG, the flipside is that Japanese RPGs of that era were able to represent vast and complex narrative structures and game design, within simple symbols of storytelling. It's not a concise genre definition, but I think it distinguishes this bifurcated genre quite clearly.
This text was initially meant to be about my ponderings on my game, in an effort to understand certain aspects of my game design. As I worked on it, and my own misunderstandings became clear to me, I feel like I achieved this understanding, that is about which genre The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit actually tried to be part of. Unfortunately I also realised that the Japanese RPG isn't really well understood from a modern, English-language game design perspective. As I was going over whether or not this text was achieving what it was meant to, and what I needed to write to do this, it became apparent that this side-effect of understanding is bigger than I'm ready to take on right now. It'll take more observations, research, analysis, and discussions. It's as simple as "what is the Japanese RPG", but I can't settle for a banal enumeration of characteristic traits. Itoi's observation is certainly good, yet even it requires a bit of contemplation, and doesn't answer other questions I feel fit into this topic, like how Animal Crossing doesn't fit the genre of "Japanese RPG" yet it feels right calling it quintessentially Japanese and simultaneously an RPG. Genre-breaking traits like warfare simulation in Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings or action combat in Final Fantasy 7 Remake also muddle the issue. I fear to even bring up Giftpia or Bloodborne.
At a certain point, it almost becomes a question of what is it for a game to be Japanese, and not specifically an RPG from the Japanese game design heritage. By then, I'm right back at what I was writing about in university ten years ago.
These are all thoughts for the future. For now, I got the answers I was looking for, and the rest I chip away at some other day.