This is a deep dive into how and why I designed the experimental video game "Disobedient". You can play it here: https://taylorritenour.itch.io/disobedient

"You see, this is why I don't want to have children"

This is what one play tester told me after experiencing the game early in development. I was awestruck by the depth of honesty that it evoked, and mind you, I hadn't explained the game to them at all yet.

This quote solidified in my mind that I was on the right track. It showed me that the procedural rhetoric I was trying to convey about control, patience, and letting go was getting through in its own way. Their response was a surprising extrapolation from my original intentions, but I think that's part of the beauty of it all.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. What on earth do I mean by "Procedural Rhetoric"?

A while back, I read an amazing book called "Persuasive Games" by Ian Bogost. In it, he develops the idea of "Procedural Rhetoric" which, if I were to put into my own words, is the process of conveying a nuanced message with rule-based systems and mechanics.

Essentially, rather than expressing ideas through the written word like in books, or through visual storytelling like in movies, video games as an art form have the unique ability to talk about the world through their mechanics and the emergent properties of those mechanics.

Personally, I see it as an underutilized method of artistic expression within games.

Bogost argues throughout the book that there's certain inherent biases to the fictional worlds we create, whether we are aware of it or not. Certain actions are implicitly encouraged, while others discouraged, and the player is constantly examining these systems holistically to determine what works.

As he puts plainly: "Video games teach biased perspectives about how things work".

The challenge, then, is to be mindful of what these mechanics are saying, and deliberately craft their message to say what one actually intends, following a methodology of "just think about the choices you have to take to win, and consider what they say about you".

As an ambitious nobody in the game dev world, I decided to focus on mounting a specific procedural rhetoric as the central goal around which everything in my game orbits.

I wanted to take this idea to a logical extreme, and experience the challenges first hand that come from committing to a lofty vision of the meaning behind mechanics.

It was an incredibly satisfying creative challenge which forced me to confront basic assumptions about game design head on. With this post, I hope to explain in detail what I was trying to say with the systems of "Disobedient".

Before I begin, let me quickly explain that I'm a fan of the idea of "Death of the Author" and think that ultimately all that matters is what one takes from a work.

Ideally, I shouldn't have to explain it.

Yet at the same time, I'm not sure that games are often framed in a way that is conducive to seeing the meaning behind mechanics.

I view this post as an interesting explanation of my thought process and intentions, which may or may not be divorced from the way others experience the game, its subjective quality, or anything else for that matter. That's okay.

The original spark of inspiration for this game came  when I was reading the profane and brilliant book "Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope" by Mark Manson and noted that I wanted to make a "game about the thinking and feeling brain driving".

What does that mean? You might ask.

This is an analogy in the book that models a helpful way to conceptualize self-control.

Manson describes the mind as having two competing entities driving the "car" of one's body: the emotional, intuitive "feeling brain" and the rational, calculating "thinking brain". The feeling brain is at the wheel, driving you through life while the thinking brain, which we normally like to think of as in control, merely checks maps and makes suggestions from the passenger's seat.

This analogy can help explain a lot of the counter intuitive ways that humans can deceive themselves, the way that bias and ideologies work, how motivation and self-control work, etc. I certainly won't do the idea justice in this explanation and that's not exactly what I'm trying to do here.

If this idea is interesting to you, I recommend you to check that book out. It's hilarious and eye-opening.

And if you are interested in a staggeringly deep dive into the idea, Daniel Kahneman's book, "Thinking Fast and Slow" is the gold standard.

What I wanted to do, at its core, was mount a procedural rhetoric about this model of self-control. The idea was to make a game that is explicitly out of the player's direct control, while giving them a degree of indirect control should they let go of expectations and just roll with it.

I wanted to express this fundamental disconnect between what you consciously want to do, and what you actually do via game mechanics. The player would need to trust their intuition and summon the fortitude to discover how to overcome this divide.

Expressing this sense of indirect control with a game felt particularly relevant considering that having control is one of the primary differentiators video games have as opposed to other artistic mediums.

The thesis of the game that I focused on throughout development could be summarized with the proverb, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink".

According to commercial game design, this is clearly a Bad Idea™ in the sense that the game would be frustrating to play. It would be the exact opposite of "responsive controls" or "good game feel".

But I decided that personally, I'm not a fan of the idea that a game must be "fun" or else it's invalid. Conventional wisdom is that a game must be enjoyable and stimulating. The player is, after all, choosing to use their time and money to experience your game. Why would they choose to do something that is fundamentally designed to be frustrating?

But I think this line of thinking is far too limiting. There are entire spectrums of experiences that we would dismiss out of hand if we take the dogma of fun too seriously. In my mind, it's very similar to arguments made about painting long ago (and even today!) that it must be "realistic" or else it's bad.

I wanted to take this opportunity to design a game with an entirely different goal in mind.

I figure that the loss of direct control for the player is going to be inherently frustrating regardless of how I slice it, so if I'm going to mount this lofty procedural rhetoric about control, I may as well lean into the frustration.

Maybe I'm naive (and I probably am), but I think that "fun" is deeply relative and subjective. In my opinion, if an idea is executed sufficiently well, "fun finds a way".

Part of my conviction that this blatantly frustrating game idea could end up being fun anyway was due to my to my experiences tutoring math. I knew firsthand how interesting it was to view guiding my students as a subtle game that I could master.

Now, I know that this may sound like a bizarre leap in logic. First I'm saying the game is about self-control and brains driving, the next I'm saying its about tutoring, what's going on? Bear with me.

If we take the idea that there are two cooperating entities in the mind with distinct perspectives working towards a similar goal seriously, then one might begin to draw comparisons to the "thinking brain" as a tutor and the "feeling brain" as a student.

In this dynamic, the tutor ultimately does not control the outcome, i.e., the student getting better grades. Only the student has control over this, much like how the "feeling brain" is the part of our mind that is in the driver's seat while the "thinking brain" assists, according to Manson's analogy.

I took heavy inspiration from these teaching experiences and modeled the game mechanics to reflect my view of how one should conduct themselves to be a productive tutor. I found, that it has less to do with how well you know the information, and more to do with how you approach expressing it. One could be the world's foremost academic on a given subject, but if they can't meet students where they are at, they won't be able to teach it effectively.

If you've ever tried it, you would know that you can't simply ask the student what they have trouble with in class and trust that their answer is the true root cause. They will offer symptoms and helpful clues to guide you, but these are merely the starting points to work with. The true fundamentals that your student lacks are almost always deeper than they appear. If your student could accurately articulate the root cause of their issues in class, they probably didn't need you in the first place.

Even when you do understand what the student needs to work on, by and large, I found that simply asserting your will, and drilling the student to master certain concepts tends to backfire.

One must simultaneously determine what the student understands while patiently offering advice, criticism, and encouragement in a way that pushes them in the right direction without insulting or annoying them. This is far more challenging and subtle than it may seem.

I drew constant comparisons to both the aforementioned model of self-control and my experiences with tutoring when vetting the mechanics. I sought to bring the two together into a cohesive whole that could be understood intuitively through the game's systems.

So how exactly does this game work and why?

Warning: This is huge spoiler territory. 

I'm about to explain how "Disobedient" works under the covers and why. I think a big part of the appeal of the game comes from figuring it out for yourself, but if you played the game already or don't mind spoilers, don't let me stop you.

"Disobedient" is a seemingly simple matter of guiding a blindfolded cat from A to B. You recommend the direction that she should go, but the catch is that she acts in a fundamentally random way, often choosing to disobey, hence the title.

The game functions with two gauges: trust and annoyance. Trust, which is shown with the green hearts, determines the likelihood that Alice (the cat) would listen to the player's recommendation. If you run out of trust, you lose. Annoyance, which is shown by Alice's red tint, acts as a negative outcomes multiplier. It doesn't directly lower trust, but when bad things happen (which they inevitably will), the negative outcomes get weighed exponentially worse.

There are many different "interpretations" in the game. These are internal rules for how Alice will respond to what the player has chosen. They take into account your history of moves and are designed to reflect a certain degree of emotional truth about dealing with another person (or one's own ego).

Two critical rules are known internally as "Yes And" and its opposite "No But". "Yes And" is a rule of thumb in improv comedy that one should take what others have said, confirm them, and build upon those ideas. By doing this, a scene can grow naturally.

For example, if someone opens an improv scene with "where have you been? I've been waiting all day", one could "Yes And" this with something along the lines of "I'm sorry, honey, I just got wrapped up in the game". There's an implicit confirmation and world-building that happens in this exchange. As opposed to a response like "Take me to your leader", which ignores the previous statement and substitutes your own reality. The later response could work in improv mind you, but it's not recommended.

Alice doesn't like to be told to refute her previous move (No But) and enjoys when you confirm her choice by reinforcing it (Yes And) even if it's in the wrong direction.

She also doesn't like to be nagged, which is triggered when the player tells her to go in the same direction too many times within the last several moves. This ends up being a key factor as the game has a long corridor in the middle coupled with the fact that the general path one must take contains several long stretches of the same direction.

There are tons of other tiny rules that give the game flavor, for example if she doesn't listen and hits a wall, this reinforces in her mind that maybe she should listen more (Disobey Failure). Or If she listens too much, she starts to want to rebel (Obey Attrition).

The key move that one must understand however, is that fact that you can simply do nothing at all. After 3 seconds, Alice will move on her own. After all, you aren't really controlling her, only offering suggestions. This particular move doesn't do much directly in terms of trust or annoyance meters, but its existence allows one to break out of the death spiral effects of the nagging and obey attrition interpretations.

The game is explicitly designed such that you cannot win if you always enforce your will. The annoyance will inevitably build to a point that you can't keep the trust up even with otherwise sound moves.

This is really the essence of what I wanted this game's procedural rhetoric to express: the necessity of doing nothing. You must let go and allow Alice to make mistakes from time to time if you ever hope to successfully guide her.

I hope this adequately explains the basics of what I was intending to express with "Disobedient".

Rather than try and create a game that would be commercial viable, I took a step back, and focused on an entirely different goal of expressing a distinct artistic experience with game mechanics.

How successfully the game does so is up to interpretation, and I'm sure somewhere down the line I will look back upon it appalled at all the ways that it could have been better (I certainly do already to some degree).

But I think the game is elegant in a way when its purpose is laid bare. It manages to encapsulate a wide spectrum of ideas that a player can experience in a visceral way should they take it seriously enough.

I'd like to thank Ian Bogost for inspiring me with this way of framing game development. I encourage those who find the idea of procedural rhetoric intriguing to look into the book "Persuasive Games" mentioned earlier.

There's so much that I still want to say, but I'm over 2,500 words deep into this blog post, and think its probably best to split that up into a separate post.

Next, I want to explain many of the game design decisions I made throughout the process, the challenges of designing for procedural rhetoric, what went wrong, what went right, and so on.

But until then, thank you so much for reading!