Symplexy
Symplexy
noun.
calque of the Greek Symplexi, meaning “bound together”, “interwoven”.
The experience of a system and its participants feeling the same thing.
Obviously I made this up. Because when I’m designing games, it’s all I think about, and I needed a word to encapsulate the concept.
What makes a game fun is how well it rewards a player for mentally exploring the space it defines within its rules. Play, after all, is the expression of fluid interaction, the ability to move between points of interactivity without intervention by outside rules, between the interconnected elements of a game’s systems - an extension of our ability to learn by doing, which makes a game simply a set of rules imported into human behaviour.
More fun is the way some games overlap their interior space into itself, so that by exploring one part of it you learn more about other parts. Like standing atop an elevated point in nature allows us to develop a greater sense of our surroundings.
This is even more true for RPGs, which overlap in such a way that they become contiguous; mentally navigable like the real world. The fictional world is in service of the arguably unique goal of the roleplaying game. In playing, we are defined by the experience of learning and then mastering that world from the perspective of our character.
The designer often gives themselves the task of simulating the world as realistic to that scale as a character interacts with it. Through them, the effort the player is able to exert within the boundaries of the rules. What dimensions they choose to simulate can be anything from physical matter, to psychology, to the political, to the metaphysical.
But when a game binds itself to containing eccentric internal models of its navigable area, it removes a key factor of stimulating play. The internal structure is no longer contiguous, and this can leave players frustrated, or more often confused as they lack instruction from within the game itself - the game is now “incomplete” until it returns to interconnectivity.
The ideal system lacks the need for intervention, subsisting entirely on its own products. The one product I can be sure of when working with human beings is their self awareness. With this, the emotions, thoughts, and experiences of players become valuable mechanical elements in allowing them to “pick up” the game. Imagine how any person can “pick up” the principles of football with the recognition that they count as one member of their team. Likewise, a person who recognises what emotions the game is instilling in them through interaction with its interconnected subsystems, feeling the flow of one mechanic to another, is necessarily engaged in play with the holistic system.
When I design a game, I think about how people will always think about how they’re playing games, and how they feel about it from moment to moment. This too is play.