Last time, I explained a core mantra of mine when it comes to understanding video games as an art form - Story is context, gameplay is story. I thought the best next step is to dive into how mechanics can be crafted to actually be art, and to do so I thought I'd first go over some case studies; one to better explain what it means to not follow that through, and another to compare how slight differences in mechanics fundamentally change a message.

Without further ado;

Hardspace Shipbreaker

Hardspace Shipbreaker is a job simulator like Truck Simulator or Powerwashing Simulator, with the caveat that its setting is (IMO) more interesting - it puts the player in the shoes of a "shipbreaker," industrial reclamation and salvage workers for an space-based manufacturing company.

The gameplay is solely focused on the job. You break down ships and recycle them. By doing well, you reduce the massive debt burden you labor under and can unlock new tools. Eventually the ships you break down become more involved, with various hazards you must deal with in order to safely dispose of them.

The context of the game is that the corporation that owns you is - surprise! - abusive. It placed you under a massive debt burden, killed your original body, and cloned you. It charges you for everything that you do, even the air that you breathe. There is a growing unionist movement that wants to fight for fair working conditions, slowly gathering supporters. You are invited to the union yourself.

So far, so good. This is shaping up to be a decent story about the importance of class solidarity and the greatness of communism in fighting back against the bourgeois owners of capital. It's not exactly a novel concept, but there's some meat on those bones.

The company doesn't like the existence of the union and appoints an annoying middle manager to oversee operations. He complains about how some people aren't as efficient as he would like. He pushes them to work faster. He punishes other people arbitrarily. No one likes him, and they often interrupt your game to rant about how much they don't like this pencil-pusher.

And then, the writing just collapses.

Somehow, the manager finds out that the character who used her corporate computer to send pro-unionist newsletters featuring an interview with herself on the corporate intranet is, in fact, a unionist! What terrible things are they going to do to this person, millions of miles away from any governmental or societal protection to stand with her?

They send her home to her parents and tell everyone the union's closed, go home.

The climax of the story - spoilers, by the way - is that you and a few others take part in a destructive strike by destroying a ship set to be salvaged. You know, the kind of thing you could have done at any point without any story consequence because you're not really penalized for doing a bad job salvaging things. There are literally zero negative consequences at every point prior to this for throwing entire ships into the incinerator.

This is such a powerful message that the manager freaks out, incriminating himself and the company at large for actually being super evil. The unionists capture his spoken confession and send it to the mass media, who solves all the problems by turning public sentiment against the company (no explanation for why this matters at all) and then the company and the union sit down at the negotiating table and figure out a fair compromise.

...

Did you see any problems here? Of... a few that I can think of, there's almost no interaction between the mechanics and the context of those mechanics. The debt that you labor under? It has no mechanical relevance. The ships that you salvage? Selected from a menu, without any regard to what's going on contextually. The player's performance? No one says a word about it, either in praise or opprobrium. You can literally clear your entire debt by pushing every ship you claim onto a barge, practically untouched, and it won't change a thing about what happens with other characters or your playthrough.

This is... disappointing, to say the least. Due in great part to how the mechanics of the game could have been used, even in the limited set of mechanics offered, to reinforce the message that the developers wanted to tell. If they wanted to do so, they could have made the following changes relatively painlessly;

• Make the debt meaningful; if it increases to too high a level, the player loses the game. They are fired by the company for being ineffectual and return to the hellhole that is Earth. Without consequences for failure, everything else is meaningless.
• Charge the player for ships that they salvage. Ships that are more complex have a higher expected return and higher claim fee. But to capitalize on those returns, the player must learn how to efficiently break the ships down. Force the player to engage and understand the mechanics to advance in the game.
• Have the antagonist act against the player. The actual antagonist in the game is toothless. The player is never truly inconvenienced by his demands or actions. If said antagonist made the game more difficult for the player and therefore provided a mechanical challenge - by decreasing shift time, reducing the player's options in which ships they could salvage, requiring them to do others' work (a common event in real resource-starved or abusive work environments), charging more for tools they used, or in general altering some element of the gameplay to inconvenience the player - the player is more motivated to dislike them and support the message of the union and therefore the developer. Influence the player's emotions through gameplay, not context.

Though I have not played them, from my understanding there is a ludic example of the differences I'm talking about; Stardew Valley and Grimshire. In both you are (nominally, at least) a farmer. Both games have themes of community bonding against external forces. In one of them, your choices matter. Mechanically, in the strongest terms. Again, I haven't played it, and the latter game is still in Early Access, but what I hear is very promising.

Recettear and Potionomics

In both of these games, your character is the proprietor of a store and needs to acquire, craft, and sell various items to townsfolk to stay afloat. I wanted to contrast a specific mechanic in each of them - namely, the actual process of selling an item - because the differences between them are illustrative of what a difference small changes in mechanics make to the meaning of player choices.

Also I just want to talk more about Recettear, which is in my opinion the best item shop game for reasons that hopefully will become clear.

First, Potionomics. After creating a potion, Sylvia can set it up for sale in her store. The game tells you what the potion is worth, and when a customer comes in, you begin a card battle minigame with them to increase the price, using high-pressure sales tactics to manipulate them into paying more than what the item was advertised for. Sylvia acquire new sales tactics (i.e. cards) by forging bonds with the other characters in the game.

You need to pressure them into sales quickly, because Sylvia gets stressed out by this kind of social interaction, and continued haggling wears on the customer's patience. Patience and stress are both shown on the UI. If her stress maxes out, or their patience runs out, the sale fails and Sylvia destroys the potion¹. There's no other consequence from making the sale or failing it.

In Recettear, Recette doesn't mark any price on items when she puts them up for sale in her store. Instead, the customer sees an item they like and brings it to her. You're told the typical market value, and then you start the haggling process. You present a price. They either accept it, or demur. You can try again, lowering the price. If you try too many times, they are disappointed and leave, though the item remains in your stock - Recette is a lot more careful of a store owner than Sylvia, apparently, and never just smashes her stock into the ground in frustration. However, you don't have a clear indicator of how many attempts you have left; every counteroffer you make is a gamble that they're not about to leave.

What determines the price a customer will accept, you may ask. Strangely enough, the "market value" of the item itself is only one part of the equation. There are different types of customer; children, old men, young women, and adventurers of all types from the town. Each of them has their own budget - a child only has a bit of pocket money, so if you're only selling high end furniture or weapons, they likely won't be able to afford any price you'd be willing to accept. On the other hand, your rival has deep pockets and very little business sense. Her walking into the store is a cause for celebration.

Why might that matter? Well, you get bonus experience if you secure a sale without haggling - that is, if the customer is happy with the first price you present them. You get more for giving a price that matches what the customer expects is a "fair" market value, which is not dependent on their budget. If you do so consistently, their trust in you actually grows as a result, meaning that they become more willing to spend higher amounts of money at your store. If you quote outrageous prices or haggle every transaction to the absolute limits, their trust in you actually decreases.

Greater experience allows you to do more things with your store, like redecorating to attract different sorts of customers or offering new services such as advance orders or buying from the customers rather than selling to them.

Finally, recall that I mentioned adventurers buying from your store. If you sell equipment to them, they will keep it and use it when hunting for raw ingredients that you can sell; by underpricing these goods, you essentially upgrade your associates and you both benefit. Remember this for later.

Despite the relative simplicity of it's item sales mechanics, Recettear achieves engagement by presenting the players with a dichotomy. You have to carefully balance maximizing immediate profits or being a trustworthy merchant in your community - a decision made more difficult by the debt you are buried under (the debt plotline also exists in Potionomics but it's resolved through a mechanic other than directly selling merchandise).

I think Recettear has the most positive, wholesome conceptualization of capitalism of any of the shop-keeper games I've played (ironic, considering that the story starts with the main character, who is a starving orphan, saddled with the outrageous debts of the father who abandoned her and threatened with eviction by a predatory loan shark). This is where I get a little more... editorial.

It's easy at first to judge Recette's on-the-fly adjustment of prices as crooked. Charging different prices depending on customers' willingness to pay is anathema to the formalized, sterilized, and impersonal nature of modern capitalism. It's also how trading was done for many, many years. It's how prices are handled everywhere haggling is the norm. The "price" on labels in a bazaar are a suggestion; there is a cultural expectation that you negotiate with the store owner to find a price acceptable to both of you.

In Potionomics, you are given a price for an item (does this represent fair market price? Cost price? It factors in item popularity and magical enchantments on your shop to make customers willing to pay higher prices so it's unclear) and try to raise the price when people get to the counter. To do so, Sylvia has the option of using high-pressure sales tactics or manipulating their emotions. Just read some of the card names; "Take It or Leave It," "Pander," "Emotional Minefield," "Mass Misdirection." You have no objective other than to raise their interest in the price as high as possible before their patience runs out - a process that is helped immensely by the fact that the game explicitly shows you how many more rounds of haggling they will endure.

You are therefore incentivized to be the sleaziest used car salesman you can be. The only price you can charge is the maximum that the customer is willing to pay, and your only objective is to raise their interest in the item through whatever means you have available, to the limits of their patience. Imagine being Sylvia's customer; even if the player only uses cards that indicate more benign interactions - "Casual Conversation" or "Enthusiasm" for example - you are still being guided to pay as much as you can, held in the transaction until the moment before you decide to just leave.

In Potionomics' world, customers and store owners are antagonistic forces. Haggling is framed as combat, each side manipulating the other to change the price through any means possible until one of them accepts the current deal, loses patience, or breaks down from stress.

In Recettear, haggling is central to selling. It's ironically the much more sophisticated model of the economy. It understands that goods don't have objective value and their price is simply what one party will sell it to another for. The shopkeeper values it less than the price that is being paid, whereas the customer values it more. Otherwise, no transaction would actually take place.

The mechanic is not a problem to solve, not a matter of optimizing a deck or figuring out a fixed number. It's a dilemma. Maximizing short-term gain loses you trust. Maximizing trust might lead to game loss through inability to pay debt. The player is forced to juggle multiple competing desires to engage in optimal play. Again speaking editorially, that's what good game design feels like².

In Recettear's world, shopkeepers and customers are part of the same community and it is to all their benefit to work together to find acceptable prices. They are collaborative, and any shopkeeper who disregards that will have a much harder time trying to remain profitable.

Potionomics and Recettear form an interesting contrast. Both have themes of becoming part of a community and befriending the people within it, but the former has mechanics that seriously undermine that messaging while the latter implicitly supports it³. That definitely wasn't the intention of the developer, but it's very easy for mechanics to convey different messaging than the context of your game would imply.

Conclusion

It's hard to synchronize mechanics with context. It's hard to guide players indirectly through gameplay to have them engage with your themes both emotionally and intellectually. But done well, it's a deeper and more resonant connection than can be achieved through passive media. Game designers who want to create art need to think of their players as partners in what is being made, rather than mere audience members. To do that, they need to offer reasons for the players to care about what they do in the game (the context) and ways for the players to influence what happens (the gameplay), without reducing the mechanics to mere problem-solving⁴.