Belief in the System, Part 2

I'm assuming the first post didn't really make sense unless you have an intuitive understanding of what I'm talking about in the first place.

The system is the underlying engine that enables the game to be played.

Depending on how the engine is designed or what engine is used, very natural laws fall out, and these shape the entire game as a whole.

Example 2: Cards

Let's take a deck of standard playing cards. Take any game that uses a deck of cards.

What would be the common thread between them?

For any game, you know there is exactly 13 types of cards with 4 suits. Because each game uses the same deck, naturally, card counting possibilities become possible.

The strategy behind hearts or poker or bridge comes from guessing which cards are in the opponent's hands based on what cards you have.

Now think about it, whoever was creating Hearts, Poker or Bridge could have specified that they use a special deck of cards. But because they chose to use a standard deck of playing cards, it is a natural consequence that there is only one type of any card.

Those complex strategies of elimination are a natural fallout of the base system engine used.

Of course, how does this apply to game design in general? Core design principles at the base of the engine or system used have ridiculous effects on the game as a whole...

Example 3: 3D vs. 2D

This is the most obvious example of how the initial decision affects everything in the game.

A 3d game has multiple axis' of freedom and a richer environmental sense as well as improved realism... *but* it brings about the problems of camera control, complex math during collision detection as well as an increased expectation from the user for those things.

A 2d game on the other hand has fewer axis' of freedom along with a more restricted environment to explore in but it also has simpler controls, simpler collision detection and has no problems with shoddy cameras, since you control the view at any given time.

Some games can work extremely well in both 3D and 2D, consider how different the Mario franchises when they made the leap from 2D to 3D or fighting games in general with the Soulcalibur series.

However, some games suffer in a 3d sense. Tetris would be inconceivable in a 3d state, as would any other puzzle game; The decision to have a third degree of freedom adds so much positional complexity that they quickly become untenable.

Consider.. what is the correct base for the game design that you have? A game implemented on top of a system that fights with the design of the game itself can only bring pain. Adding a third dimension to Tetris would introduce problems of being able to view the entire space at once, as well as occluding certain areas of the playing field in such a way that it would almost completely undermine the open information that the player needs to make his decisions.