Expressionist Games and Subtextual Mechanics

This piece was made possible with editing and feedback from Matt Fennell and Omivel. Thank you.

Jay Dragon’s Expressionist Games Manifesto is out, and everybody’s talking about it. The response to it surprised me, because my response to it was, honestly, not that strong. To my eye, it’s a solid roadmap to the kind of games she’s talking about and some easy-to-understand elements that anyone could utilize in their practice. Great workup, good stuff, this is gonna be useful to a lot of people. So what’s all this fuss about? It seemed like a lot of people had never encountered the concepts set forth in the manifesto at all, and the newness of the ideas was engendering a lot of the joy of discovery as well as the expected reactionary responses. Once I realized that it surprised other people but not me, it prompted me to ask myself what in my life or my artistic practice would have primed me or prepared me for the structures Dragon laid out. This piece will primarily be engaging with the following features of expressionist games as Dragon has phrased them:

• “The rules cannot dictate the inner worlds of these characters.”

• “The rules are mediated through friction between the text and the players.”

• “Every character possesses a rich and complex inner world.”

• “An inability to resolve the tension within the rules of the game, requiring players to break the rules to have any chance to achieve their player goals.”

Firstly, let’s be clear that the questions of the Expressionist Games Manifesto are not new; the manifesto does the necessary work of organizing them and laying them out in a digestible fashion. There was a conversation in, I think, the Gem Room Games discord not long ago where we talked explicitly about how a game truly about rebellion would likely have rules that, as written, prevented you from actually playing, and I certainly don’t think that’s the first time anyone’s ever had THAT little conversation. Pursuant to that definition, as Nael Fox notes, Paranoia’s been doing expressionism for the last forty years. I would say that Dragon Reactor has some clear notes of expressionist design, and I’ve got a couple of wips that lean into the approach even harder. But I think there’s a more interesting answer to the question of what made me comfortable with the manifesto’s claims, and that is theater.

When you do work with a script, regardless of your role in the production, you’re in the business of interpretation, and that means you’re in the business of text versus subtext. Almost the entire point of writing a play is to say precisely half of what you want said, so that the rest can be discovered or revealed by those behind each individual production. Consider the fact that characters lie. To themselves, to the other characters, to the audience. Lying is perhaps the easiest-to-understand form of subtext: What’s being said is not true, but the truth is still present. The subtext informs the text, and the text informs the subtext. When a character tells a lie, it can land in a few ways:

• The audience knows the truth already, and so can tell immediately that it’s a lie if they’ve been paying attention. This causes the audience to ask themselves “why is this character lying?” Sometimes that answer is straightforward - they’re evil, selfish, scared. Sometimes the answer is less clear, and that can lead to even more questions.

• The audience does not know the truth now, but will learn the truth later. This is a powerful tool for letting the audience connect with the characters that have been lied to. They feel that betrayal alongside them, and will mistrust the lying character for, likely, the rest of the show.

• The audience does not know the truth now and they never will. It is never explicitly revealed whether or not this line is a lie, whether through the text of the script or through the text of the performance (body language, vocal delivery, facial expression, etc). While this may appear to be a decision that has no impact on its surface, decisions like these are what fuel active and engaged inner lives onstage, and have knock-on effects and interrelations with the choices that actor, the other actors, and the director make all throughout the show. Background scaffolding, the truly invisible subtext, is just as impactful and important as the stuff that we can see. It’s present.

I spend this time on the simple example of how lying creates subtext to set up an allegory with the ways that a game text or game object can do the exact same thing with rules and mechanics. Mechanics can and have always been squirreled away into subtext. Allow me to share Nael Fox’s example of the INT stat, and how that mechanic smuggles in multiple layers of subtext both diegetic and nondiegetic with genuine impacts on potential gameplay situations. Consider that, in D&D, Orcs have poor INT stats and therefore are bad at magic according to the rules of the game. Zedeck Siew and Zak E, quoted in Fox’s article, explore this and discover that if you play the game by the rules to its logical conclusion, this makes you ask some very interesting questions regarding what the relationship between the rules and the world actually is. As Zak asks, “why does God believe in IQ?” Binary responds with a brilliant deduction: “[IQ is] a measure of what a very specifically ordered society might want out of someone ‘intelligent[.]’” And this reveals to us a mechanic lurking in the subtext of the game: that the statistics reflect a socialized perception of your character more than the truth of them, and that perception has a viewpoint and a bias. This is subtext in the art itself, the game object itself, but it also bleeds and reaches into the fiction of the game as well as the mechanics and the inflection points between the fiction space and the game space. The subtext exists on all levels simultaneously, nearly unchanged between each one. It’s sort of dizzying to consider. And that’s subtext that wasn’t even intentionally designed. So what happens when you do this on purpose? What happens when you do it on purpose with things that are completely core to the intended game experience? That’s what the expressionist games manifesto is all about, to me. It is a manifesto about writing your games with the important parts left in the subtext.

Some may look at an expressionist game and consider it to be incomplete. It doesn’t give you the tools to play it. It has some rules that only ever come into effect after you’ve broken or ignored other rules. Something’s missing. Except it isn’t. If Rule B only comes into effect after breaking Rule A, then breaking Rule A is a mechanic of the game. The game expects, predicts, possibly even demands that you break Rule A, and if the game does these things, how can you possibly claim that’s not part of the game?

Just because something isn’t written plainly and clearly into the text doesn’t mean hasn’t been designed into the text all the same. Lying in wait between the lines, trusting that you are both clever and bold enough to prove it right. Designing subtextual mechanics, just like with any piece of context- and subtext-heavy art, is a practice of faith: Faith that your audience is paying close attention. Faith that they are not only present with your work, not only mentally engaged with it, but are actively impressing themselves upon it, seeking its pain points and hitches, critiquing it as they explore it, immersing themselves in each and every detail. There’s a reason theater is so much fun to make, and it lies in making a zillion decisions that are based on the text while not being explicitly of the text. How do I make a scene feel this way to the audience? What are the tools at my disposal that are not words? How do I weaponize and instrumentalize lighting, sound, costume, and staging to make it clear to the audience how these characters feel about each other, how the world feels about them?

So, as a game designer, how do I use the space between words? How do I make players directly think about and interface with the friction between how their characters see themselves and how the game sees them? How do I present players with mechanical obstacles they are intended to break down instead of avoid? Or, put in a more abstract and widely applicable sense, how do I set up inconsistencies and challenges that help my players to have the actual experience I want? Because just telling them what I want them to do isn’t going to do the job. Everyone knows that. If that’s how game design worked, we’d only have to write the premise of a game: “You should feel cool.” And that would be the whole game. But no, you have to carefully position and arrange hurdles and contraptions and gizmos that, when navigated, produce the sort of experience you’re hoping for. Building from that foundation, one potential definition of expressionist games is that they are games where the experience they’re hoping for cannot be directly communicated to you if they’re going to work properly. Which is why I think that the expressionist games manifesto may also be considered a manifesto of subtext. I think all of its various pieces are aimed at trying to help - or, in some cases, force - players to work with games and work with their text and work with the subtext. An expressionist game is a game that not only places mechanics in the subtext, but makes subtext itself a mechanic.