When I talk to people about designing Middleware, one idea that I bring forward and try to reinforce is respecting the player. Now, in game design there’s a lot of ways that you can disrespect the player, and when people often talk about ‘respecting the player’s intelligence’ it’s often in terms of making rules that humans interpret. Dungeons and Dragons arguments often circled the idea of disrepecting players, where rules that were tightly defined and clear was somehow failing to respect a player’s ability to interpret rules and balance clearly and well themselves.
That’s not what I’m here for – personally, I feel that you can make games with flexible rules, or tight rules, and that’s not an issue of player respect.
Another thing that this topic could be about is what themes and ideas we put into the game. Respecting players can be about presenting the players with challenging ideas, being willing to include in the narrative of the game, or the game’s themes, elements that you might sometimes shy from showing. In Middleware, there are themes like youth rights, nonbinary gender, the cool dismissal of capitalism to anything that isn’t profitable, but those things aren’t really there because I respect players per se. I know I put some of these things in the game to try and induce people who wouldn’t think about it to think about it. Hopefully, in playing this game, some player might realise what it’s like to struggle under the demands of people who don’t respect your medical or social needs.
But
What I think of when I think of Middleware and respect, is that games are physical objects. A lot of board games treat their boxes and books as a form of advertisement – they want to present to customers on shelves, standing out, being large and vibrant. That is nice, it can get attention – but once a player has bought them, these things have to live in the space of the player, and they have to be carried around to places they can be played.
Middleware, ideally, is going to be a 120-card stack of cards that sit in one box. You can take Middleware with you, almost anywhere, very conveniently. It’s not a tiny game – just a small game. I don’t need to make you keep a huge pile of things, or make the game box into an advertisement for my product. I want to make sure that I don’t go into that space. People have limited storage space, and I want to respect that. I want the game to have as few extra or remarkable weird parts, because while those bits can be cool, everything I demand a player does to make my game work is disrespecting their time. Making a game that takes a long time, that draws itself out just for its own sake isn’t respecting player time, either.
The game is also written and structured such that players need to respect one another to play together. It’s a cooperative game, but it’s one where I’ve been doing small things to try and make quarterbacking hard – players have simultaneous turns, meaning you don’t have a lot of time to work on other people’s stuff. And ultimately, as a cooperative game, people are hopefully going to be focused on trying to work together rather than trying to play the game for one another.
I think a lot about these things when I’m designing games. I don’t want to make a game that encourages players to be jerks to each other. I don’t want to make a game that treats my players, the people who are trying to enjoy what I make, as less important than advertising my brand. I don’t want to make a game that takes issues that matter to me and makes it easy for people to ignore them.