Oracles in the Main Frame

A Minimal Definition of Games

Games consists of two things: oracles, which determine "what happens next?", and one or more players, who determine "how do I feel about that?". If players act, they begin playing; some of these acts trigger or consist of negotiation of/with an oracle, others may not; some portion of playing is role-playing. The output of this system is work and feelings.

Collapsing the Diegetic Frame

Acts by the players can be framed as diegetic or non-diegetic, where diegetic is within the fictional world of the game. Using TTRPGs as an example, in-charactar speech by the players is diegetic if in the same language as spoken. Expansions of what is included in the fiction allows introduction of other acts: description of character actions if the fiction is a narrative about the fictional world instead of a representation; questions for the referee if the fiction includes access to character interiority where such doubts can be represented as internal dialogue; game mechanics if the fiction includes the acts of players playing a game about the world. This collapse of frames allows the same simple model to represent an audience watching a game, where the audience becomes the players of a new "audience game" and the original game becomes the oracle.

The Main Frame

No frame is preferred, but we want to examine frames which minimise the number of expansions and maximise the mapping of player acts to diegetic acts: we call the frame that balances these two quantities in an aesthetically appealing way the main frame. How close, how frequent and how sustained the mappings in the main frame are will vary from medium to medium and game sessions to game session. Examples of close mappings include VR games with motion controls, immersive LARPs and role-playing sessions where the oracles are in-character problem-solving, consensus-building and rhetorical effectiveness.

Oracles in the Main Frame

Many negotiations with oracles have the awkward property that they are not diegetic in the main frame. A game controller can only rarely represent a human body in motion. However through repeated play, the human brain is highly capable of internalising these acts so that negotiating of/with the oracle feels like the diegetic act it represents. While more research is needed, it seems likely that the easiest to internalise negotiations are interacted with tactilely, in clear and unambiguous ways to allow other players to recognise them and which don't require players ask for permission or clarifications before doing so; such as moving miniatures in an I-go/you-go grid-based environment.

Simulation and Oracles

Oracles which simulate the game world have the advantage that conversations about them can be diegetic. A map board with armies on it can be talked about as if the players talking were generals planning an attack. Likewise if the acts required to negotiate with an oracle are named after diegetic acts, even if the acts themselves are not diegetic.

Utility in Practise

Theory can be unhelpful to a practitioner if it lacks applications. In addition to highlighting important game design 101 concepts (the primacy of verbs and what you want players to feel in the design process), this theory provides 4 concrete approaches to improving the main frame beyond just "design things better": 

1. Give players verbs which map closely to diegetic acts.
2. Help players internalise non-diegetic acts.
3. Use simulation and naming to allow diegetic table talk.
4. Reframe the fiction. See e.g. DIE

Towards Assigning Meaning to Language

A while ago on a private discord I spent some time articulating one of the central concepts of intuitive game design: that you enter into a dialog with the game you are creating, and this conversation guides and shapes the design. While I believed at the time, that the dialog was essential with a mental construct of the game that you held in your mind and therefore just an example of self-talk, it occurred to me today that the game design process met the conditions needed for a game design to be a language and therefore had more external agency than I had previously thought.

What do I mean by "conditions needed to be a language". Gödel aside, many game systems may appear language-like, but are ultimately just symbol processing: a language requires self-referentiality. Human communication has existed for some 2 million years, but it was only the evolution of recursive elements some 70,000 years ago that enabled what we recognise today as languages (see The Romulus and Remes hypothesis). A designer's ability to alter the game design is similarly self-referential, the addition and change of game rules are the kind of metaphoric extensions that we see occurring in natural languages.

My realisation today is that by considering a game design to be a natural languaage, the design in turn influences the designer's perception (the weak Sapir-Worf hypothesis) in ways that are not under the control of the designer.

Why are games so good at assigning meaning to symbols -- a 4 kilobyte roguelike can give layers of meaning to a single ASCII symbol ----, while much more complex and process intensive systems like LLMs fail so miserably at this? I now suspect that it's this linguistic design layer that the game grows itself from that gives games much of this power.