Design by Subtraction

Every so often someone gets in touch with me to ask for an easily cited reference to a concept Ken or I at one time or another floated on the podcast. Even more occasionally I remember to create such a reference here so I’ll have something to point to. Please join us for another thrilling installment of Ken and/or Robin Promote Easy Citation.

In Episode 676, Ken spoke about design by subtraction.

The term first came into use in the video game sphere. As is typical when concepts migrate between related forms, its coiner, designer Fumito Ueda, meant something different than Ken does when he applies it to tabletop roleplaying games. Ueda’s game Ico expresses a minimalism considered remarkable when it came out in the early oughts. Ico stripped away standard elements of video game play to concentrate on a simply told and animated boy meets girl exploration and escape narrative. (It takes visual inspiration from noted Dreamhound Giorgio de Chirico and may function as an entryway into the surrealist Dreamlands but that’s another story entirely.)

When Ken talks about design by subtraction he refers to the process of surveying the catalog of subsystems that already exist for the game engine you’re using and cutting away the elements not needed for your game’s core activity. He mentions GURPS as a game you absolutely have to do this with. Ken designed Night’s Black Agents in this way, with GUMSHOE’s much smaller archive of design components to pore through. For example he imported the treatment of combat tactics from The Esoterror Fact Book.

In his metaphor, you start with a block of marble and carve away everything that doesn’t look like the subject of your sculpture, where the block of marble is an inventory of already created rpg subsystems.

If design by subtraction is a thing, its opposite, design by addition, surely exists as well. And yes, this is what I did when I first created GUMSHOE for The Esoterrorists. I started with nothing and built the elements I needed, skipping the ones I didn’t. In this case the starting point was the system’s original brief, supplied by publisher Simon Rogers: invent a system that handles the problem of scenarios that stall when failed rolls prevent characters from gaining the information needed to move deeper into the story. I started with the no-roll investigative ability system and added the other subsystems needed to support its play style, and then stopped.

In an irony that often arises when defining or adapting critical or process terms, it looks to me like Fumito Ueda’s design by subtraction is my design by addition. He didn’t literally start with every possible play element in video games and carve away the superfluous ones until he had Ico. Rather he came up with a simple story and play style and added only the elements he needed, leaving out the ones he didn’t.

At any rate: the Ken and Robin tabletop game definitions of the terms are, for the record:

design by addition: creating a new game from scratch by building only the sub-systems you need to fit your core activity and design goals

design by subtraction: creating a game from an existing engine by looking at its existing corpus of sub-systems and taking only those that fit your core activity and design goals

GUMSHOE is the groundbreaking investigative roleplaying system by Robin D. Laws that shifts the focus of play away from finding clues (or worse, not finding them), and toward interpreting clues, solving mysteries and moving the action forward. GUMSHOE powers many Pelgrane Press games, including The Yellow King Roleplaying Game, Trail of Cthulhu, Night’s Black Agents, Esoterrorists, Ashen Stars, and Mutant City Blues. Learn more about how to run GUMSHOE games, and download the GUMSHOE System Reference Document to make your own GUMSHOE products under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Unported License.