Electronic Arts LA's Randy Smith discusses how game designers tackle the “what do you do for a living?” question – “craft possibility spaces and give simulations an opinion” isn’t easy for the general population to digest.

In the bulky (read: could easily serve double duty as a yacht anchor) user manual that came with 1990’s SimEarth, Will Wright included a section entitled Simulation Limitations and Biases in which he took pains to explain that the theories around which the game were based weren’t necessarily accepted scientific fact. Whenever I think back on reading that manual as a sheltered farm boy, I remember concluding that the developers were warning me that their simulation had an opinion. How can a simulation have an opinion, and why might anyone care?

Here’s a fun one to answer at a party: “What do you do for a living?” which, when not dodged, invariably leads to the following: “You mean you make the graphics?” “Oh, then you write the story?” “Must be you do the programming?” “So, what do you DO?”

Game designers craft possibility spaces. Well, we do a lot of things, like draw top-down maps, and tune properties on virtual objects, and present diagrams in PowerPoint that are alternately too detailed or too abstract to explain much, and email each other links to really funny and astonishing YouTube videos. But when we are engaged in the act of editing a videogame’s design towards an aesthetic target, we are crafting possibility spaces. This is the accurate answer, although in practice it does little to conclude those party conversations expediently and with an air of satisfied closure.

‘Possibility space’ isn’t exactly a term at the forefront of public consciousness. Fox News doesn’t even exhibit reliable command over the specifics of whether Mass Effect drenches players in a relentless fire hose of full-frontal alien nudity and interactive graphic sex from a selection on the main menu called Corrupt Your Children, or whether the situation is a little more nuanced than that. So it’s hardly a surprise that a technical design term in limited circulation has failed to elucidate widely. ‘Possibility space’ refers to the full range of experience the game affords, from the obvious button pushes all the way out to the furthest frontiers of multiple rare events coinciding unexpectedly. What is possible in the game world and how can the player interact with it?

Marc LeBlanc (Google ‘8 kinds of fun’) pioneered the MDA Framework, which describes some seminal concepts on how possibility spaces are created and modified. Mechanics (M) are the static rules of the game world, such as ‘when the leader is knocked out, the rest of the pack scatters’. When the software is running, the Mechanics lead to Dynamics (D), such as ‘players often attempt to knock out the leader as quickly as possible’, and those Dynamics produce Aesthetic (A) responses such as ‘I feel like a calculating hunter trying to identify and take down the leader in a quick surgical strike’. As designers, if that’s not quite the aesthetic we were hoping for, we follow the chain back and adjust the mechanics. How would it be different if there were no way to identify the leader until the pack responds to his defeat? What dynamics would that produce and how would it feel?

It’s important that this control exists. In my last column I argued that games are art because they have aesthetic qualities, but so do sunsets. It seals the deal to demonstrate that the designer has the power to make changes on his end of the connection which produce desired aesthetic results on the player’s end. Few people would argue that designers deliberately change videogames, so if you buy all that sentimental stuff from last time about how a well-designed game captures and shares expressions about human experience, then you’re sold.

If anything, people usually have trouble believing that a possibility space can contain an aesthetic, because a possibility space describes not one fixed play experience but many possible ones. If the designers do not know exactly what players are experiencing, how can they have made an aesthetic statement? The answer is that a well-crafted possibility space constrains experiences to within an understood range. As the player explores by playing, the fixed shape, structure and boundaries of the possibility space emerge. Imagine a game in which every friendship you begin eventually collapses after one of you feels forced into being dishonest. As you spot the pattern and struggle unsuccessfully to break it, you realize the designer has made a grim comment about human relationships by describing what is possible in their game, what range of stories can be expressed through the players’ choices and actions.

In SimEarth, I explored a simulation of not only the planetary and human forces that shape Earth but their inherent interconnectedness. It cemented my fascination with nature and sold me on the theory that these normally self-regulating systems could be thrown out of equilibrium by human activity. Long before An Inconvenient Truth, and without ever stating a political opinion, SimEarth was capable of turning farm boys into the kind of raging environmentalists that Republicans and oil barons find especially hateful.

Randy Smith is a lead game designer at EA’s LA Studio. His current project is a collaboration with Steven Spielberg.