Game Design Musings #1 - Minimalist Music and the Game Loop

The purpose of the Musings posts is to explore thoughts on game design, and the philosophical connections games can have with other artforms, systems, and the world in general.

I have written elsewhere about how games often remind me of musical composition. My background is a PhD in contemporary music composition so it is natural to see both as time-based designs, and both usually have some kind of dramatic arc.

In designing Meadowvale, I had the challenge of trying to portray ecological richness through a simple tile placement loop. This often brought me back to Minimalist music, especially the music of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass. In their earliest and purest Minimalist pieces, these composers often used very limited material, sometimes just a single musical motif, which was then subjected to a process. The process created the new material.

Reich’s Clapping Music uses a phasing technique where the rhythm is played by two performers. Every so often, one performer moves ahead by a beat, creating new cross-rhythms each time this happens. Philip Glass would repeat a melodic cell and then add a note, then another note, so the string of notes would become longer and longer. As this happens, the listener starts to create their own phrase structures as they listen.

Terry Riley’s In C was a very early piece that helped lead to other composers adopting a simplification of harmony, rhythm, and structure. In C consists of a steady crotchet pulse on the note C, played on a piano, and a set of musical motifs for any number of performers. Each performer starts with the first pattern and repeats it. When each performer wants to, they can move on to the next motif. But they must not move too far ahead, or fall too far behind. So the performers move through the motifs at their own pace, and the result is a gradual cloud of shifting relationships created by the ruleset. The actual piece of music is never written down note for note.

In Meadowvale, there is also a pulse: the core loop of placing two tiles and placing one animal. This is there to ensure that the board grows, and that wildlife continually seeds the landscape.

This core loop is fixed, but players move through the implications of that loop at different speeds.

At first, players are completing individual Nature Cards. Then they begin collecting icons. Then a Species Token appears, and suddenly there is a richness to the possibilities created by that same core loop. A player is no longer just placing an animal. They may be creating a future scoring relationship. They may be investing in a Species Card. They may be setting up a moment where another player’s animal becomes important. The loop is the same, but the player’s position within the design has shifted. The game ends when the two tiles placement loop ends (runs out of tiles)

That is all well and good, but what has been really interesting is trying to design within that loop. There is no flexibility, the loop cant be disrupted or the whole tempo and endgame trigger is disrupted. So it has been about introducing different elements and the seeing how the 'motifs' blend and combine, and sometimes things emerge that you didn't expect.

So whilst I did not set out to emulate music in this design, it strikes me that systems in music have a lot in common with some game mechanics. Both can use a small amount of material, repeated and transformed over time, to create something that feels much richer than the rules or notes on the page.