“When the Way is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is law.
Law is the husk of true faith, the beginning of chaos.”
–Dao de Jing, ch. 38
Whether you mean to or not, as a game developer, you will find yourself embedded in contracts with your players, of both explicit and implicit varieties. All across the lifecycle of your game — from pre-release promotion to post-release community management — players will be primed to read into the signifiers you put out and draw conclusions about what you owe them. How do you navigate from this position?
But first, what are contracts and why should we talk about them? We could easily pull from the suite of other terms to describe the dynamics of anticipation between developers and players, terms like promises, player fantasies, and genre expectations. Indeed, these are all lenses into the same phenomenon. We choose contracts as a point of focus because — especially when they are implicit and slanted toward a single party — they are uncomfortable. Contracts cast expectations in an unforgiving light. The hard edges of their terms are also outlines for the shape of failure to meet those terms, and so they carry with them entitlement and its concomitant emotions, disappointment, offence, and anger. In this report, we look to identify why contracts feel like such an accurate framing for player and developer relations and how to soften their edges and wriggle out to a more comfortable pasture.
Contracts exist to mediate relations between two parties with potentially conflicting interests. This tension between parties is what the contract captures and codifies, in order to hold the relationship in live suspense and keep each party accountable. They are, fundamentally, a tool for managing low-trust relationships where contention is at play. But why might players and developers be in contention? What is priming us to assume a defensive posture versus our players, and our players an offensive one versus us?
Games are a type of art, and thus produce a relationship between artist and art-experiencer. But, due to the conditions in which they are now commonly created, encountered, and consumed, they are also a type of product. They thus produce a second relationship, between seller and buyer. Platforms such as Steam are commercial instruments meant to facilitate exchange between sellers and buyers at hyper-efficient rates, and so they sharply cast developers and players into these roles.
The New & Trending tab in the Steam client. Player-buyers are submersed in metrics (like price and review score) meant to reduce games to commodities with quantifiable value.
Orthogonal spaces such as games criticism websites, where the artist/art-experiencer relationship is the one that’s accentuated, are struggling to survive in our current iteration of industry collapse. Thus, in discussions about games and how the world relates to them, the buyer-seller frame wins out. Games are understood through the lens of value; discussion is pivoted around terms like game length, price, review score, and comparables. In this framework, where player-buyers are browsing a market for good deals, contractual language becomes salient. What’s the value here? How much playtime am I getting per dollar? How much better is Hades than Consume Me? What are you offering? What am I owed?
Of course, this framework is insufficient for assessing the experience of playing a game. Art cannot be reduced to sets of quantities. Gameplay friction introduced by a designer may disrupt the smooth algorithms of valuation developed by platforms like Steam, but they may also encode expression and meaning that enrich the lives of those who experience them in less quantifiable ways. As developers, we hold this fuller picture of the art and craft of design inside our heads. We recognize the difficulty in communicating with players strictly in the language of what is owed and what is withheld. The contract is the husk of the sacred art.
In this report, we’ll explore how contract relations pivot around legibility — the known categories that we use to understand games as products — and its counterpart illegibility — the ways that games’ more exploratory features elude this classification. We will survey all the failures modes and implications of maneuvering between these two poles. Understanding and managing the spectrum of legibility is key to reformulating player-developer relations in favorable terms.
Describing the spheres of economics and sociality that surround the cultivation of the rare matsutake mushroom, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, “[Trust] is a form of entanglement with reciprocal obligations; as long as the matsutake are embedded in it, they are not fully alienated commodities. The exchange of matsutake in the small town requires the recognition of appropriate social roles. It is only in the mushroom markets of the larger towns that the mushrooms break free, becoming fully alienated creatures of exchange.”
While maneuvering in a low-trust, high-legibility, contract-driven framework is sometimes necessary, it is best when we can maneuver out of it altogether and into the “small town” of trusted relationships. Building trust with players softens the edges of perceived obligation and gives room for the more nuanced negotiation between artist and art-experiencer, where the illegibility of novel designs can thrive. The prospect for players becomes less about quantifiable terms of expectation and more about how expectations give context to new game experiences, whether the game is meeting or subverting them.
Building and maintaining trust is hard work. In addition to identifying the signifiers that get read as rigid terms in the contractual frame, this report aims to survey strategies for maneuvering outside that frame by building and maintaining trust with your player communities.
We can’t opt out of contracts. The moment a developer puts a game on a storefront, posts a project to socials, or mentions it pretty much anywhere, they are negotiating expectations. The central tension at the heart of this negotiation is the conflict between legibility — defined in our introduction as the familiar, product-driven categories we use to understand and categorize games — and illegibility, or wonder — the unclassified explorations into novel spaces that can turn games into art. Trust comes from delivering against legible promises, and trust creates an openness to the magic of illegibility.
To navigate this contractual frame, we must understand how legibility and illegibility both reinforce and undermine one another.
Most players need reliable indicators to feel grounded and engaged. These indicators may be the most clearly defined, legible parts of the contract: control schemes, genre conventions, familiar characters, or explicit content promises. They are often symbols that activate an implicit pre-existing mental schema players have accumulated via cultural exposure or past experience. Prior to launch, these indicators create the scaffolding for anticipation, excitement, and player advocacy. They help players maintain interest over the course of development, and feel confident about eventually spending money at launch. For example, when FromSoftware released a sequel to their hit Dark Souls, they made the promise that it would have a specific set of narrative, pacing, and difficulty features that were familiar to their existing fans. The mental schema was “This is a game like Dark Souls. If I enjoyed Dark Souls, I’ll enjoy this one too.”
The payoff for meeting established expectations is the slow accumulation of trust. When a developer sets player expectations, then delivers (or over-delivers) on them, they build social capital with their audience. In an attention-scarce marketplace, trust is one of the most valuable currencies a developer can accumulate.
Trust can also become self-reinforcing: players give the benefit of the doubt during early access, forgive minor bugs, defend creative choices, and evangelize to their friends. This trust is what allows developers to maneuver and change course as the needs of development shift; it helps them avoid the rigidity of the contractual frame.
FromSoftware later released several increasingly deviant experiments in the form of Elden Ring (open-world Dark Souls) and Nightreign (co-op Dark Souls). Players embraced these new ideas despite their divergence from genre convention.
Legibility tends to sell games, but illegibility is what makes players fall in love with them. From Minecraft’s redstone engineering to Morrowind’s environmental storytelling, the most enduring aspects of games may never be explicitly promised in a roadmap. Illegiblility means the most magical elements of a game are discovered rather than delivered. They allow room for players to act as co-creators and feel ownership over the experience because the outcome is not fully predetermined. While legibility creates the potential to build trust at every stage, illegibility fuels creativity, possibility, hype, and community engagement.
The tension arises because it’s often legibility that creates the conditions for illegibility. Players need structure and clarity in order to feel empowered to experiment, push boundaries, and discover the unexpected. Meanwhile, illegibility — and the new forms it generates — may eventually crystallize into new conventions, mechanics, and genres. These gel over time, and become new forms of legibility. Battle royales, MOBAs, and extraction shooters began as mods, then later became genres with their own tropes, conventions, and defining features. In the same vein, some of the greatest tabletop roleplaying games started off as “hacks” to pre-existing systems or pushbacks against older systems that did not give players what they were looking for.
There are several failure modes that come up through the mismanagement of legibility and the unintentional brokering of player contracts.
Broken contracts and the erosion of trust: The single most common failure state is a mismatch between what a game promises and what the player feels like the game actually delivers.
A game promises a particular experience, such as being “the ultimate Battle Royale”. But when players actually experience the game, they see it as buggy and lacking content. It is not what was promised. The contract is broken.
At this point, trust shatters. Players use social censure to berate the game developer or publisher in hopes of forcing them to deliver on the contract. Often there are difficult realities behind the shortfall, ranging from budget, schedule, team skills or larger corporate politics. But none of these things matter to the players. They are experiencing social betrayal and executing an ancient, emotionally-driven response that maps to how humans deal with trust breakdown with other individuals.
Trust, once broken, returns slowly only after the repetition of many small, successful interactions. When trust in broken, expect players to be wary for years.
Contacts as a cloud of expectations: Often a game will present a highly legible contract in its promotional materials. This early legibility can be amplified by community members, streamers, and social media looking to share and make sense of this new possibility you’ve presented. Inevitably, complex messaging is compressed and meme-ified to become easier to understand and transmit. At this point it is common for the development team to lose control of the message as it is turned into a set of easy-to-understand sound bites.
What complicates this process is the fact that a game developer does not make a contract with a single partner. Instead, they make a cloud of contracts with a population of players, each with their own unique set of existing mental schema. The low-nuance sound bites enter into the players’ minds and players fill in the gaps with their own experiences and expectations. And this audience is broad; a full spectrum of the best and worst of humanity.
The result is that your game will almost always break an implicit contract with someone, somewhere. In the best of worlds, this manifests as an occasional forum post. At worst, a large percentage of the population feels betrayed and their concerns become the dominant narrative, amplified and simplified by the same mass sense-making machinery that fed them the low-context information in the first place.
For No Man’s Sky, the critical context of “indie space game by small team that is currently deep in development” was lost and dreams of an infinite space game took hold. As of 2025, the developers have released over 35 free updates across the last decade of ongoing development. Nevertheless, there are still an aggrieved population of No Man’s Sky players who feel betrayed and insulted by early marketing efforts. Trust, once broken, returns slowly. And for a small percentage of players who exist on the far edge of the hater’s bellcurve, it may never return.
Over-legibility and the lack of wonder: When every feature is described, every interaction is telegraphed, and every possibility spelled out, the magic can collapse and the game will seem closer to a simple product. This kind of consistency is of course appealing to big companies, who value predictable, annualized returns, especially for franchise games with big budgets and large supporting teams. At this scale, corporations will eagerly trade magic for consistency.
The downsides of over-legibility aren’t limited to big-budget projects, however. Crowdfunded projects often attract investment by offering a lot of upfront contractual specificity. “We will make this game, of this length, with this many levels, and support for these platforms.” Developers list features to sell the product, but the same legible rigidity that excited backers can strip the creators of the flexibility to pivot towards the unexpected magic that may spring up during development (or to gracefully handle unanticipated setbacks).
Over-legibility can also show up within the game itself. In AAA open-world design, over-legibility might manifest as map markers and objective lists. In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, a hint system highlights assassination targets, bypassing a satisfyingly high friction detection-loop meticulously built into the world. Instead, players make a beeline for the highly legible blue dots. By trying to eliminate player confusion, developers inadvertently eliminate the illegibility required for discovery.
Under-legibility and lack of comprehension: By contrast, the risks of too little legibility are often simple and brutal. If the product-side of the equation is too vague, the game may simply never attract an interested audience. Even when you do find interest, if players don’t know what to expect, or when to expect it, this puts a strain on trust. When players cannot find their footing with basic mechanics, when scope creeps unpredictably, when promised features never materialize, the relationship breaks down. Early access titles that remain perpetually “in development” with shifting roadmaps exemplify this failure mode. Players who felt initial wonder may become resentful when the illegibility starts feeling like evasion rather than possibility.
Illegibility may also become the direct enemy of many risk averse sub-disciplines within product development. Illegible systems often result in player churn, which drives down short-term retention. This kind of retention is a highly legible business metric beloved by bean counters, who will cut your game in a heartbeat if your metrics are not “viable”. Often UX practitioners, trained in application development and not game development, are deployed to explicitly reduce friction by increasing legibility. When pressed, they acknowledge there is a time and a place for illegibility, but each time a battle must be fought against a philosophy that defaults to high legibility and driving measurable business metrics.
Beyond mismaneuvers through the legibility spectrum, establishing and maintaining a contract with your players can have surprising costs, especially in the following scenarios:
Here are some specific contract costs that burden the game development process.
Suppose a crowdfunded project makes a relatively clear and legible promise of “12 levels of platforming mayhem!” Under adversarial, low-trust conditions, rather than serving as a basis for confidence, every promise now becomes a potential liability.
Even if the developer feels they’ve met the “12 levels” obligation, unhappy fans may still find fault with the size, quality, or content-density of some levels and conclude that the promise was not fulfilled. Articulating exactly what is promised is difficult and will undoubtedly still leave some players feeling unsatisfied.
Specifying very precisely what is to be expected can be a potentially unbounded amount of work, is orthogonal to the actual development, and may still achieve a poor result. This is draining on developers, and can rob the project of the enthusiasm needed to fuel creative inspiration.
At its worst, this can spiral into developers retreating to a defensive crouch, where communication starts to look more like carefully constructed legalese rather than a conversation among friends. Posts are vetted, defensive, and often reveal as little as possible, as developers fear that saying anything might make things worse.
No Man’s Sky (2016) is a clear case study. In order to introduce players to their new game, co-founder Sean Murray gave multiple marketing interviews where he tried to build excitement. Hello Games was an unknown indie studio and players knew nothing about their unique take on an expansive, procedurally-generated space exploration game. This put the team in an awkward situation. They needed to repeatedly and legibly articulate promises about a game that was unfinished to an audience that did not know or trust them.
When the game finally came out, this high articulation, high legibility contract was visibly not fulfilled in the eyes of many players. The most bitter among these players lawyered up and began posting point-by-point grievances amidst calls for personal retribution. For years.
For developers, it is impossible to rebut each point, and attempts to do so will eat all available time and energy. First, the original marketing language was (intentionally!) too legible. There’s little to no room for a more friendly interpretation. Second, you are fighting the internet in all its vastness. There is a seemingly infinite stream of angry people willing to argue with you. This gets worse in the age of LLMs and scripts. Finally, the root of the issue is emotional, not logical. Players use legalese-like rhetoric, but logic and reason will never convince them. They were betrayed. Emotional wounds require emotional fixes.
Hello Games‘ eventual redemption came not through more words or better roadmaps, but through action: big updates, over years, that did effectively deliver on prior promises. Notably, their post-launch communication became less specific and promissory, focusing on what was immediately deliverable.
Just coming up with rules of a contract can be hard work, but following through and enforcing that contract can also be tough. In an effort to deliver on the implicit contract of a fun, non-toxic play environment, League of Legends launched the Tribunal system. This was a community-driven moderation system where players reviewed real match reports and voted on whether someone deserved punishment. Riot built it hoping that crowdsourced judgment would scale with the game’s growth and create a sense of shared responsibility.
The Review Cases tab in the League of Legends Tribunal System (2013).
In practice, however, the number of toxic interactions and reports increased much faster than the number of players, so the Tribunal’s ability to review cases grew more slowly than its workload. As the game got bigger, bad behavior multiplied, noise overwhelmed signals, and cases piled up. The human volunteers couldn’t keep pace, so by the time reviews eventually came through, the feedback was too late to matter. In simple terms: a small team of humans can’t control a problem that explodes faster than they can look at it, so the system becomes slow, inconsistent, and eventually useless. By underestimating the enforcement costs of their contract, Riot was eventually forced to replace the Tribunal with automated moderation that was less personal and nuanced, but scaled with the size of the challenge.
These tensions manifest differently across team sizes, but no scale is immune.
Solo developers and small teams often struggle with over-promising from enthusiasm, naivety, or funding necessity. The Kickstarter era demonstrated how crowdfunding platforms incentivize contractual specificity. Backers want to know exactly what they’re funding, but this process can also restrict the natural surprises and illegibility of creative work. Mighty No. 9 promised spiritual succession to Mega Man, setting specific expectations it couldn’t meet. Meanwhile, Hollow Knight under-promised and massively over-delivered, building goodwill that sustained Team Cherry through the extended development of Silksong.
Mid-size studios face the challenge of maintaining flexibility while coordinating more complex production. As teams grow, internal communication requires more formalization, which can inadvertently make external commitments more rigid. Studios at this scale often struggle most with community management. They are large enough to have vocal fanbases, but not resourced for dedicated communication infrastructure.
Large studios tend toward over-legibility by institutional necessity. AAA development timelines, budgets, and stakeholder management require extensive planning and documentation. This internal need for contractual clarity often extends to player-facing communication, creating detailed roadmaps, specified content drops, and explicit feature lists. While this builds certain kinds of trust, it can also constrain creative responsiveness and eliminate opportunities for surprise.
The platform itself also matters. Live service games require ongoing relationship maintenance, making the legibility/illegibility balance more dynamic and consequential. Fortnite‘s success partly derives from managing this well: clear seasonal structure and content roadmaps (legibility) combined with map evolution, surprise collaborations, and meta-events (illegibility).
The ideal development pattern is to maintain a relationship of high trust with your audience that supports flexible and imaginative development. Some specific framing strategies to help achieve this include:
Ideally, legibility and illegibility aren’t simply opposing forces to be balanced, but complementary ones that amplify each other when properly orchestrated. They build trust through reliability while preserving wonder through restraint, knowing that the most memorable moments often arise from the spaces between what was promised and what became possible. Ultimately, the challenge is not to eliminate the tension between the product (built on legible contracts) and the art (built on illegible wonder), but to surf it skillfully. Developers’ work must be legible enough to sell, but illegible enough to be loved.
If trust is the antidote to the rigidity of contracts and the key to maneuvering through the spectrum of legibility, then question becomes: how do you build trust with your players?
From the moment you share any aspect of your game with the world, you are establishing a relationship with potential players. This relationship will be defined by what you share and how you share it, combined with players’ own expectations based not only on the provided information but their previous experiences, desires, genre expectations, and a myriad of other aspects.
It may be tempting for developers to communicate with as much detail as possible, with the goal of achieving a high-trust environment with players. However, this method of communication can paradoxically establish the very contractual framing that produces a low-trust environment and an adversarial relationship with players.
Building trust takes time and effort. The good news is, a lot of the work that is necessary to build trust you already need to do in order to market and develop your game. Considering these actions with the additional objective of escaping the contractual frame may help you achieve more satisfying and successful outcomes for your game and its players.
Sharing information about your game is the primary method to build trust and can take many forms, including: screenshots, video clips, and GIFs posted to social media, blogs, vlogs, e-newsletters. You can also share your game by participating in events (online and live), panels, interviews, podcasts, and by posting on forums. The more information about your game that is available to potential players before launch, the better they are able to discern whether or not their interests will align with it. Signifiers such as genre, graphical style and tone help players establish expectations, while more granular details about your game and how it hews to or departs from generic signifiers can help manage those expectations.
However, the kind of information that is shared should be carefully considered. Making specific promises such as “there will be 15 levels in this game” or “this game contains 20 hours of gameplay” may not end up being true for any number of reasons, particularly with something as subjective as gameplay time. There is little to be gained by meeting this expectation, and much more may be lost with players’ trust and goodwill if you fail to deliver on it. Beyond paying attention to what you share with your players, be conscious of the language used to convey the messages. As mentioned at the end of the previous section, provisional language and mindfully protecting mystery in your game are valuable tactics.
A potential avenue for building player trust is to be featured in showcases, articles, videos, podcasts, streams, and/or reviews from sources that potential players already frequent, sources that have earned reputations for curating quality content. While it’s best when this happens organically, that certainly can’t be relied upon. The likelihood of this can be increased by building community connections, especially via social platforms, as well as sharing and boosting posts of the outlets you admire. In this way, marketing your game consistently and well may yield peripheral benefits beyond directly building trust with your players.
Tabletop roleplaying games share some similar avenues. Due to the size of its industry spaces, there is a higher expectation for indie developers to have direct engagement with both their peers and their potential players. Actual Plays have proven to be a great tool for discoverability, and game jams on platforms like itch.io have facilitated the growth of many designer spaces. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, playtest servers have proliferated on Discord. While a handful of them are designer-facing, a number welcome players who want to see what’s out there and speak to the designers behind the games they are interested in playing.
Tabletop roleplaying game designers may also want to consider the structure of their book even before they develop the game itself. The “What is an RPG?” section has the potential to serve multiple purposes: a game design manifesto, an introduction to the designer’s presumed player base, and an invitation to potential players. In revealing your intent, and describing what you believe an RPG is, what play is for you, and what your game is all about, you are creating a space for imagination and also committing to some explicit promises of delivery.
Consistent communication is difficult to achieve, especially for smaller teams. But allocating time to communicate with your players (and potential players) can pay dividends, particularly in the long term. Continue this practice during and after launching your game, with revised road maps, updates, and delivering on promised bug fixes and design tweaks in a timely manner. A strong commitment to building and maintaining trust lays the foundation for a strong player community and more leeway in the future.
Tarn Adams discusses the importance of building trust during the lengthy (and ongoing) development of Dwarf Fortress on the 2025 GDC panel “What Even is 1.0?: Indefinite Early Access and Live Development”. He shares his experiences with making and keeping promises and practicing what he calls “anti-hype”:
“We go and find misconceptions that people have about [our] releases, even if it’s something that’s really talking up an upcoming feature, making it sound better than it is. We want to tamp it down to avoid backlash and to maintain trust.”
The more strongly potential players feel aligned with your game, and feel that the game is coming from a trustworthy, reliable source, the more naturally a community can form around its development. These types of communities are healthy for both developers and players because they allow for a less contentious relationship where trust and mutual understanding facilitate anticipation instead of expectation.
Fostering two-way lines of communication with your players is a valuable way to build trust. Feedback helps developers understand which parts of their game may be confusing, ill-defined, or failing to resonate. The earlier this occurs in a game’s life cycle, the easier it will be to modify, pivot, eliminate, or enhance aspects of the design. Responsiveness to feedback makes players feel valued and heard. However, while following suggestions or fixing bugs is ideal, doing this may not always be viable in the endless matrix of tradeoffs that come with game development. In cases like these, acknowledging player concerns, versus giving players the impression you are sweeping problems under the rug, spells a world of difference when it comes to building and maintaining player trust.
Sharing the game development process isn’t always an available option, particularly within larger studios and corporate structures. When possible, it provides insight into the decisions that are made, generates empathy, and educates players on the incredible amount of work involved in making a game at any scale. It can also enhance the dialogue between you and your players by providing another avenue for constructive feedback and discussion.
We note that for a huge swathe of indie game developers in the analog sphere, it is entirely possible to communicate to your players through posting works in progress on social media platforms of choice, engaging in forum spaces like Reddit, participation in Discord communities (or creating your own!), or sharing development logs. However, this can be a rife space, as this places the burden of self-promotion and marketing on the developers themselves.
Livestreaming is not only a great way to share the development process, it’s a highly effective line of communication. Viewers gain insight into your game and how it works and can provide valuable (and instant) feedback. They may then feel involved in the process, evolving the developer-player relationship towards a more collaborative and less contentious state. The context of livestreaming can also be humanizing and help frame the game as something crafted by real people who care deeply. It lets players know you are aiming to create a meaningful experience, not a product manufactured by a faceless corporate entity bent on extracting profit.
Developer Julia Minamata started livestreaming The Crimson Diamond’s process in early 2020. Regularly scheduled livestreaming over the past five years has allowed her to not only slowly build a viewership but also provide a space for people to chat and contribute their thoughts on the current work. Most of the game’s soundtrack was composed live on Twitch with musician Dan Policar. Viewers were able to participate in the process, suggesting instruments, tempo, and chords. Opening up the development of the game this way provided multiple benefits: productivity, community building, collaboration, and networking.
Screenshots of Minamata’s livestream showing a video thumbnail for the VOD (video on demand: trimmed versions of livestreams posted to a Youtube archive) and the collaborative process of music production.
Twitch is an especially good livestreaming platform for discoverability and for connecting with content creators who might be interested in sharing your game with their communities on launch. Watching streamers play your game and share it with their viewers is another valuable source of feedback, either one-way (by not participating in the discussion) or two-way (being an active participant and answering questions about the game). Both approaches have their benefits.
Additionally, Minamata was able to find and connect with streamers who played games similar to the one she was making, who then livestreamed her game when it was released, thus boosting visibility at a critical time. This was another example of how building trust and marketing can occur simultaneously.
Players form skills and social norms around existing game mechanics, and these rapidly calcify into implicit contracts. What are game rules, if not a contract? If a particular dominant strategy lingers in the game for any extended period of time, players assume that this is the way that the game is intended to be played.
Yet game development is highly iterative. Necessary balance changes or the addition of new features shifts the meta of the game, invalidating existing player skills and triggering feelings of betrayal.
One trust building technique is to focus on the larger goals. Players engage with a game not due to a specific tactical skill, but because it fulfils some core motivation or need. If communication can re-center the conversation on the heart of why people enjoy the game, they’ll give the team more leeway to make smaller changes.
In the alpha test of Spry Fox’s cozy MMO Spirit Crossing, players were given a free-build mode in early releases. They could build forever with little penalty. This attracted a strong community of decoration-motivated players. In a subsequent update, a feature called Storms was added that caused damage and decay to erode existing buildings.
The response was dismay. The rules had changed in a seemingly arbitrary way that made the game distinctly worse. Discord threads spun up and there was clear risk of trust collapse. A designer quickly posted a response framing the challenge as one of allowing players to continue building when the limited space filled up. All the harvesting, crafting, and building loops fail if there’s no free space. Storms were framed as a solution to this challenge.
Giving players a clear official reason for a change serves two purposes. It has a chance of ameliorating the concerns of the original posters. But more importantly, it gives allies within the discussion materials to work with as the inevitable point and counterpoint play out. By empowering your community to have healthy, balanced discussion in your stead, you free up the development team to build the game.
The two-way communication mentioned above was also critical. The first version of Storms was horribly broken. If you are faced with a similar situation, there’s no need to be defensive. Admit your mistakes, remind people that this is all necessary iteration and that the game will slowly, haltingly improve. In a long term, trusting relationship, the most important belief is not that each party is perfect, but that they are willing to put in the work to improve.
The aim of this report is light a path for developers to move away from contractual language and its hard expectations. We hope to contribute to the reframing of games as artistic experiences and not strictly products to be transacted. Expectations for what constitutes a satisfactory artistic experience are much more abstract and open-ended than the expectations for a commodified product. Products are manufactured with stringent standards to fulfill highly specific needs or desires. If a product doesn’t meet expectations, if it doesn’t deliver on a set of explicit promises, then it is a failure. Games, as expressive artifacts, deserve a richer evaluation. In spite of the quantifying pressures of storefronts, we can maneuver out of the contractual frame by understanding the forces at play.
The negotiation between developers and players can be understood through the lens of legibility, where the expectations of genre and form both impinge on and make room for explorations that cannot be as easily categorized. In order to understand the alchemy of how our signifiers, both intended and unintended, get read and processed as implicit contract terms, developers must think through what it is about their games that is legible versus illegible. Do these things occur in the right balance? This may require an artistic self-evaluation: what are the goals for this experience? What do we want the player to feel, wonder, and ponder when experiencing it? What are we trying to express? Is there a core emotion, memory, belief, or theme that we want to convey to the player? What excites you about this? First we understand the answers, and then we can develop a legibility-informed strategy for communicating in authenticity. If the we’re asking too little or too much of players beyond what the trust we’ve developed permits, we may need to go back and revise the answers.
Trust is the key resource, then, to enabling a relationship that is more forgiving and fulfilling than a contract can encode. We build trust by sharing information and processes, establishing and maintaining dialogue, and connecting human faces and voices with our game’s development. These strategies mitigate the tensions inherent in low-trust environments that risk developing into adversarial relationships. Developers need the ability to truthfully describe a game’s creative aspirations, its setbacks and struggles, and why a stated goal or promise was recalibrated or eliminated altogether in service of its overarching goals. These ongoing conversations help position the game as a holistic experience, greater than the sum of its parts, as opposed to a product for which a promised feature has been eliminated to the detriment of the consumer. At their best, they dovetail with and double as marketing strategies that get our values and intentions across alongside the game features themselves.
We cannot opt out of contracts simply by intending something other than what was perceived by a playerbase. But with awareness of how the flows of information distort around what is legible versus not, and through the hard-earned accrual of trust, we can smooth down the sharp, adversarial edges of contracts and reframe the developer-player relationship.