Late last year, three of us Happymakers developed a theory of game-making that forced us to confront our own unique problems and propensities. Our work in the past had suffered from technological ratholing, over-simulation, and other ills. We also wanted to situate this theory within a context: the early history of video games, the indies of the 1980s, the bedroom programmers. This manifesto can be seen as a companion piece to a yet-unpublished paper written by Joe that relates sculptural and painterly minimalism—specifically the viewer’s involvement in meaning-making—to procedural abstraction in games.

The New Dumb Manifesto

Or: How to Be Dumb When You Are Smart

A Helpful Lobotomy in Five Acts

David Mershon, Joe Osborn, Mike Sennott

I. Consider this Riddle of the Ages

“If a tree falls in the forest and no player sees it, did it need to fall?”

II. The Rise of the Smart

Until recently, games could not exceed a certain level of complexity. Board games, card games, and sports that rely on human arbitration needed easily comprehensible rules that could be evaluated while playing. Early digital game designers bound by primitive hardware and memory constraints faced similar limitations. Digital games in the arcade era were developed in mere months by handfuls of creators (or fewer!), and many became enduring classics.

From the early 1990s onwards, development teams ballooned to dozens, then hundreds of specialists. The aesthetic of game programming shifted, too: where programmers once had to relentlessly optimize for fun per byte, they now valued extensibility, readability, reusability, and robustness. Designers, insulated from the constraints of hardware, proposed games based on complex simulations, hiding the underlying mechanisms from players in the name of immersion. Modern games take many times longer to make, but are not many times more fun.

A strong independent game-making scene is now emerging. These small-scale creators have inherited the limitations of their 8-bit predecessors, but they often fail to see how those limitations can help them focus their efforts on what really matters. If independent game developers wish to seize the burning torch of innovation from the festering corpse of a decadent and stagnant industry, they will have to rediscover the power of the dumb.

III. The New Dumb

New Dumb is a movement to design games from the outside in. The game that the player sees and responds to is the only game that matters, and behind-the-scenes complexity is likely to be overlooked and unappreciated. The new dumb philosophy can be practiced by observing the following principles:

Front-to-back design.

Begin by thinking about inputs and outputs and do only what is necessary to connect them. Add complexity to a simulation only if player experience proves it necessary. Start with a placebo, then make a simulation.

The myth of replayability.

Ask yourself: “Will this game be played more than once?” If so, how many times? How long is each playthrough? Replayability does not always require robust simulation, and limited choices can be easier to author than generative processes. Even if replayability is a future goal, one-off prototypes can help designers avoid costly and time-consuming cul-de-sacs.

The game is not the source code.

Games should be fun to play, not to program. Don’t be afraid to write bad code. The only purpose of the program is to support the game—any aesthetics or functionality beyond that is meaningless.

Games should be dumber than people.

Paper prototyping encourages us to omit excessive complexity and be dumber: if the rules are too complex for a person to arbitrate they may be to complicated for a player to perceive.

Adopt more constraints.

Game Jams help us reclaim the helpful limitations of early digital games. They are ideal for kinesthetic games which may not respond well to paper prototyping.

Content is important.

Even a process-heavy game contains writing and potentially art and sound, and those pieces of content can be good or bad. Infinite boring content is worse than finite, interesting content.

Show your work.

Agency requires that a simulation supports a decision and that the player understands a choice is available. Emphasize the latter, not the former. Guide players from cause to effect—if a pattern is too complex, it will seem random.

IV. The Benefits of Being Dumb

Motivation has a brief half-life. From the moment she thinks of a game idea, the skeptical designer’s enthusiasm wanes. The interest of peers and early implementation successes can stave off the inevitable for a time, but one or two weeks without player feedback can turn excitement into despair. The designer is sick of her game. A half-working new economic system rendered shops useless for a week; three days of collision bugs stymied playtesting of vehicles; four days were spent writing, then throwing away a system for generating trees on-the-fly.

Smart simulations are difficult to design. Even worse: before they are finished these systems often produce nonsense or prevent the game from running. The relentless pursuit of correctness and emergence can lead a designer down a rabbit hole for days or weeks, only to throw away the system when tests show that it lacks appeal or interest for players. If our designer had hard-coded initial economic values and activities, she could have tested player responses the same day. If vehicle behaviors were not physically modeled, the collision code could be far simpler. If an artist made a few trees, the designer could have scattered them about and seen if players noticed the difference.

A New Dumb developer will make more games faster. Some will be good and some will be bad, but none will be over-engineered. Since players can only understand a game through its reactions to their inputs, players can’t easily tell if a game is dumb or smart; this is the strongest argument imaginable for writing dumber games.