Chris Bateman

Game design is conditioned by the practice, both formal and informal, of drawing from previous designs as a source of knowledge and inspiration. Innovation in game design is thus often the result of old ideas recombined in novel ways. We propose the concept of the game design lineage as a framework for tracing, analyzing, understanding, and explaining the historical significance of specific design elements in games. In addition to game design elements, a design lineage should consider a game’s socio-cultural context, including the design and player practices of its creators, and the relationship between these and the prevailing player practices of the time. We contrast this with approaches that consider individual games as their unit of analysis – e.g. comparing different games with each other and establishing connections between them without considering the historical context of their player practices. We feel this approach, while insightful for understanding changes between games that are superficially similar, risks implying a strict Linnaean-style inheritance pattern (inheritance by genre), and thus struggle to account for games with a diversity of design elements that originate elsewhere. We argue that the flow of influences in game design is typically fluid and heterogeneous, and not constrained by genre. Key to this concept of a game design lineage is the role of player practices; i.e. how players receive, perceive, and interact with games, and the ways these have shaped the ideas that are then implemented. We illustrate the game design lineage approach with an analysis of Minecraft’s inventory system, tracing its different elements across multiple games, genres, designers, and player practices

The discourses around games have tended to focus upon either their artefactual qualities or the phenomenological experience of play. In both cases, games are primarily to be understood singularly. An alternative approach, related to Foucault’s archaeological methods, is to focus upon the manner in which games share player practices with earlier games. This technique can be applied to all eras of games, and is not merely restricted to videogames – indeed, a significant proportion of the player practices of videogames descend directly from the player practices of tabletop games, especially in terms of the progenitive role of tabletop role-playing games for contemporary digital entertainment.
Such player practices can be broadly understood in terms of interface (how the player engages with the game), world (what the player imagines is happening), or the agency practices that connect the interface and the world.
Three propositions concerning the relationships between fictional setting and designed rule systems within games are explored, the last of which stresses the idea that ‘no-one plays alone’ i.e. that all play entails continuity of its practices over and above variation of those practices. These propositions are used to demonstrate three aesthetic flaws that are peculiar to, or particularly relevant for, videogames. This in turn leads to a discussion of the ways that commercially successful games have always proceeded by leveraging the existing networks of practice. The result is an alternative perspective for game design, game scholarship, or game critique, one that foregrounds the role of player practices.

The term ‘hard science fiction’ is used to demarcate a subgenre within science fiction which focuses on scientific or technical detail, or scientific accuracy.
However, science fiction is ultimately a form of fantasy and since (as Kuhn and others have demonstrated) the instruments and beliefs of scientists are in a constant state of adaptation to the needs of the culture they are situated within, ‘hard science fiction’ cannot denote anything objective. Preference for this subgenre appears to coincide with conservative physicalist beliefs, which may border on the doctrinaire.
Charles Segal coined the term megatext to refer to the Greek myths when taken collectively to imply a single fictional world, and this term is now used to apply to science fiction and fantasy settings of various kinds (e.g. Star Trek, Marvel Comics). Science fiction as a whole may also be recognised as a megatext, and ‘hard science fiction’ constitutes a subset of this megatext. In the context of religion, constraints placed on a mythological megatext is often specified by the term ‘orthodox’; in a similar manner, ‘hard science fiction’ can be understood as orthodox science fiction – a doctrinal constraint placed on a mythological megatext accreting around technical rather than spiritual themes.
The philosopher Charles Taylor observes that Western culture is currently experiencing a phenomenal diversification of belief, the two polar extremes of which are orthodox religion and orthodox physicalism. Most individuals lie in middle ground, affected (consciously or otherwise) by the cultural influence of both poles. The fictional worlds of the former are expressed in the mythology contained in certain sacred texts; the fictional worlds of the latter are expressed in science fiction. Orthodoxy in science fiction thus mirrors orthodoxy in religious stories, and can be understood via comparative mythology in the style of Joseph Campbell as making both ethical and metaphysical assertions.