How do you make players resonate with your game’s meaning?

You want to do it without boring players and avoid turning your game experience into a void speech without substance. To properly make a Meaningful Game Experience, you must encode your Message into your game. If you do it correctly, your players will resonate with your game and understand the attention to details you put into the experience.

This week I’ll show you 4 tips that none tell you to integrate a Message into your game experience to turn it into a meaningful one. If you need a refresher about the difference between Themes & Messages, you can read this.

When players resonate, your game goes beyond your design.

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Here's what you need to effectively design a Meaningful Game Experience:

• The Gameplay Must Symbolizes The Message
• Make "Every Element" Coherent With The Message
• Metaphorical Approach Over Literal Approach
• Show The Message's Different Points Of View

Without further ado, let's jump right in.

#1: The Gameplay Must Symbolizes The Message

Gameplay is the most essential element of the game.

I mean… a game must have gameplay (even a tiny one) to be called such. But if this is true overall, it gets “more true” when designing a meaningful game experience.

Good gameplay is inherently repetitive because it leverages itself by reusing its elements in different situations. This makes it the activity the player performs most throughout the game.

So it’s the perfect game element to convey a Message for 3 reasons:

• For effective communication, repetition is key
• Interactivity makes situations memorable
• Situations vary enough to avoid boredom

This means leveraging the uniqueness of the game art form.

But how do you concretely apply this?

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Make gameplay metaphorically represent the Message.

What you're searching for is meaning (represented by your Message or part of it). A gameplay action has no intrinsic meaning because it depends on the context.

So you have 3 elements: a gameplay action, a context, and a meaning. To link them all together, you need to use a metaphor. Meaning that the action performed in that specific context metaphorically represents the meaning you want to convey. Let's see a couple of real-world examples.

Take Ico (2001), where you can grab Princess Yorda's hand (action) while fleeing from the castle (context) to represent intimacy and connection (meaning). Or take Catherine (2011), where you solve time-based puzzles (action) in the character's dreams (context) to represent the struggle he's experiencing (meaning).

I'm sure you can cite many more examples where gameplay is a means to convey a meaningful concept.

#2: Make “Every Element” Coherent With The Message

A meaningful game experience has an intrinsic harmony of its element.

As we said 2 episodes ago, coherence is the base of aesthetics. In a perfect world, every game element is linked to the game’s Message.

Unfortunately, it’s not always possible, so we often must compromise. However, it remains true that the more elements you metaphorically link to the Message, the better. This is part of the intrinsic difficulties of designing games, but it’s what makes players resonate with them. As we’ll see in the future, making “everything” coherent with a Message 100% deletes the problems of “Ludonarrative Dissonance”.

But let’s see how to check if this coherence exists.

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Check if the game elements’ meaning fits with the Message.

Here it’s all a matter of analyzing and asking questions. We can use the same Action-Context-Meaning model we’ve seen before but with a slight change.

Instead of the “action”, consider any game element (gameplay, level, art, narrative, balancing, etc.). Now pick one to analyze, consider its context (other game elements), and give an interpretation of it. Check if the meaning you generated from the analysis fits well enough in the Message you want to communicate. You’re asking yourself, “What meaning is this game element conveying?”.

You can also check the metaphor’s quality by making sure it’s not forced, otherwise, players will catch that artificial feeling of the experience. As we said, it’s ok sometimes to have some purely functional elements, but make sure the majority metaphorically links to a meaning.

“Making every element coherent” is an ideal you must point at, knowing it’s hard to reach.

#3: Metaphorical Approach Over Literal Approach

Metaphors intrinsically trigger thinking.

We’ve talked about metaphors enough you can sense they’re important. But why not say the meaning loud and clear?

Because metaphors automatically make you think. You can’t hear a symbolic statement and understand it right away. You need to think about and interpret it based on many factors, like context and your knowledge. Take this sentence: “That athlete is a machine”.

The statement is false (athletes are human beings, not machines), but you understand what I meant. To make sense of that statement, you need to link the properties of those 2 concepts (athlete and machine), so they resemble one another in a context.

While doing this, you must think about those concepts more deeply (sometimes even changing perspective).

This is why metaphors are powerful and stand at the core of any artistic experience.

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Limit the Literal Approach to game elements to the minimum.

The opposite of using metaphors is the Literal Approach. In a game could be a simple dialogue (maybe after the narrative climax) that explains the game’s Message.

There are 2 main problems with the Literal Approach:

• Your game experience becomes a “moralistic sermon”
• Your game’s persuasive effect vanishes

Both are big problems that anyone should avoid.

A “sermon”, by definition, doesn’t include others; you’re supposed to absorb and not think. The player will immediately understand the Message (cause you’re saying it out loud), and the rest of the game will fall flat. On the other hand, persuasiveness is essential in any art form since you’re exploring and spreading an idea. So you need to explain it, uncovering its arguments, contradictions, and pros and cons.

This does not mean you cannot have literal approaches in your game, but avoid them being the majority and too obvious.

A Metaphorical Approach makes people curious and eager to learn more; a Literal Approach does the opposite.

#4: Show The Message's Different Points Of View

A good Meaningful Game Experience communicates a Message, a great one explores it.

The Message is the statement the whole game orbits around. And, as counterintuitive as it can be, pointing directly to it is not a good choice.

You don’t need to convince people and make them do something (like propaganda, for example). You want to show the player a point of view on something and make him think about it. To do this, you need to put the Message you want to communicate in different contexts and explore it from many perspectives. Remember that the purpose is making the player think, so you don’t want to be clear-cut and dry in your Message.

But how do you do it?

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Show the Message in all its facets through the game.

A Message is a clear statement (like “Love is stronger than Hate”). Like any argument, you need to explain yourself.

And the best way to explain something is to show:

• Opposite perspectives (Hate can beat Love)
• Popular objections (Blind Love leads to bad choices)
• Exceptions (Sometimes Hate is justified)
• Etc.

By showing these situations throughout the game, you make your Message stronger.

The goal is to explore the Message in all its nuances to lead the player to think about the Theme and draw his interpretation. To do this, you, of course, need a good understanding of the Theme, but research is also part of your job as a Game Designer.

A Meaningful Game Experience results from an intentional effort to explore an idea.

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Key Takeaways:

• Make Gameplay metaphorically represent the Message.
• Check if the game elements’ meaning fits with the Message.
• Limit the Literal Approach to game elements to the minimum.
• Show the Message in all its facets through the game.