Collaboration

Work/Life has taken its toll of late and Mesh Dream keeps expanding in scope. The project was originally something to do while Bandit Country percolates through my subconscious and finds traction. It has become so much more than that.
Mesh Dream is very ambitious. On a scale that I can't really reveal because that would ruin the whole point. The game is a playable mystery and the reveal is... a revelation.
This requires some intricate design and writing. For it to be anything more than a game with a plot-point campaign or a playable story- arc there are obstacles that must be considered and resolved.
Mesh Dream is a traditional game in that it has a GM (called the Architect), Players, dice and characters. The role of the Architect transforms as the game proceeds. Initially it is that of a GM like in most RPGs. As the players gain a sense of what the game is and begin to learn and use the strengths and weaknesses of their Characters, the GM becomes more of a Curator. They hold the mystery of the game and the ideas that it represents and decide how to give them form as a gallery for the Players to observe and interact with. In the final stages of the game the Curator becomes the Architect, the game has become a plan, a composition, and at the very end, the Players are faced by a decision.
The obstacles that I face to complete Mesh Dream are mostly in the form of successfully translating the concepts of the game into a format that empowers utility for the Architect. In many ways, the art of writing a successful pen and paper RPG is all about recruiting the GM. The GM is the first customer and if drawn to the game, will sell it to the Players. (I am talking here about the exchange of ideas). All games need this buy-in because they are a group activity. Mesh Dream needs it even more because the game is intended to arrive at an ultimate moment and will only get there if the GM is an actively enthusiastic guide who wants to prepare and present this moment for the Players to discover.
To bring it all together (and to get to the point of this post!) I have been searching outside my own head for solutions. Three things that I am quite proud of and excited by have all come together recently. They are all the result of collaboration; being an active participant in, but not an owner, of a creative endeavor.

 Firstly, my work on Cubicle 7's Trail of the Scorpion for Rocket Age is soon to be released. I am the minnow in the pool of talent involved and I am looking forward to seeing the completed book. Rocket Age is a young property but thanks to the tireless work of Ken Spencer (and everyone else involved) has a very strong sense of self. Professionally writing for a property that you don't own is a great way to grow your talents because you have to bring your A game and you don't get to choose the narrative limits. 
Secondly, I discovered the Golden Cobra Challenge. I started working on a game and realized that my time is just too limited at the moment. Then on rpg.net I came across Rickard Elimää's entry: Imagine (Click Here for final version). We started chatting and I drew a flowchart (as is my wont) and before I knew it I was immersed in the Kishōtenketsu narrative structure.
Thirdly, I got in touch with Jeff Moore, prolific game creator who wrote 5x5, a game that I have admired in previous posts whilst bemoaning the jargon and complexity of roleplaying games and the barrier to entry that they offer new participants. Jeff is one of those rare creatives who not only create and innovate but can then iterate and refine. He is working on a version of this game for Super Heroes and it is absolute genius. Fortunately for me he was open to my ideas and I am attempting to hammer two disparate mechanics into a consolidated flip state mechanic (that I will then have to sell him on!)
My creative stream has always benefited from harvesting insights from multiple simultaneous projects. On one hand Rickard's game is minimalist to the point that it slaughters many of the cows sacred to gaming, nearly the entire herd. It eschews a GM, random challenge resolution, character reward/ challenge loops, character acting and even conflict. I told him that some people would (wrongly) argue that it isn't even a game. Jeff's game is all about character acting, challenges and in comics, everything is conflict. The games are poles apart and it has been a fantastic experience collaborating on them.
I expect that this will change Mesh Dream which, considering what it is, is entirely to be expected. I now have a flowchart for the core gameplay loop and that goes a long way towards implementing the methods by which the later stages of the game will subvert it. I will post this soon along with a glimpse of the Mesh Dream palette.

MESH DREAM: Character Sheet

Click here for MESH DREAM Character Sheet

I am working on the next version of Mesh Dream and will post it when I have completed my next round of playtesting.

>EDIT>
I updated the sheet to fix a typo.

MESH DREAM v 040

Check out the latest version of Mesh Dream: Click Here

I think it is well on the way to supporting my first two Pillars. The final two Pillars are more about the setting and the experience of Play but I hope to refine more of them into the Rules and Instructions as I go.

Meanwhile; Avoid the Renovators, beware the Mal.

Where are the Dark Patterns?

Deception is one of my favourite things. It is the defining human behaviour. It can be used for favourable actions; concealing the Normandy landings or dastardly deeds; misdirecting the public over mass internet surveillance. Deception is one of the ways we manage Trust or, to be explicit, to circumvent Trust.

Here we come to Games. Games have rules. Games have rules to prevent players from taking advantage of other players through Deception. And Games have rules to set a template for the kinds of Deception permitted by the Game. These rules establish the base Trust. Everything else is fair game.

There are plenty of examples of unintentional flaws within games that allow player advantage. Murphy's Rules, a one panel comic published by SJG chronicled humorous examples of this. But what if the Game rules were actually a kind of Deception? This is a Dark Pattern.

"A dark pattern is a user interface carefully crafted to trick users into doing things they might not otherwise do"

Dark Patterns are something that you don't see in games because we put a lot of stock in Trust and prefer to place boundaries on Deception whilst in civil society. Consider the effort spent balancing Game Rules to ensure fairness no matter what choices the players make. Dungeons and Dragons 5e has just been released after years of development. It didn't take years to write the rules. It took years to test them to the point that it was considered fair to the exacting degree expected by the players. Most of the cost of developing the game was invested in precise management of the economy of Trust.

Is there a fun alternative that includes Dark Patterns? Magic in RPGs is ripe for Dark Patterns and is therefore one of the most rules intensive components. In other words, Magic rules are usually pumped full of Trust to limit Deception. This stops it from being fantastic because Deception is a creative act.

Try this one out: Magic introduces new things into the Cosmos. Once introduced, it becomes part of the natural order and can be utilised by anyone. Seasoned GMs are shaking their heads, that would ruin the game in about 5 minutes. And that is the point. Consequences of Dark Patterns are unpredictable for the Players and the GM. If the heroes ruin the world with magic there is still a story to be told in this ruined world, perhaps even an apologue.

Most RPGs assume that the Players are all equal shareholders in the Trust that is authorised by rules of the Game. A true Dark Pattern is about the Game deceiving the Player. It is not just a matter of making a choice and getting more than you bargained for. It is a matter of making a choice and then discovering the choices and consequences that follow are different than expected, it is about their role in the economy of Trust.

I find the idea of Dark Patterns fascinating. I think that they can introduce a tension into the economy of Trust within a Game that can improve the experience of play, if done well. Let me know what you think; would you use a Dark Pattern or do you consider Trust a basic and inviolate commodity?

Post Thaumatic

In the words of Tadhg Kelly and preformed as an introduction to a fantastic series of microtalks at GDC 2014. I encourage you to watch them all.
If you design games or write for them do you feel that exhilarating  rush of wonder?

Thauma by Tadhg Kelly

Leo Tolstoy once wrote that artists evoke a feeling in themselves and then - by means of expression - evoke the same feeling in others.
This, he said, was the activity of art.
Games also evoke feelings by means of expression.
I use the word thauma to describe how.

Thauma derives from Greek, meaning a wonder or marvel.
Thaumaturgy is the ability of a magician to work miracles.
As we describe the sensation of powerful story as dramatic.
I describe the sensation of powerful play as thaumatic.

There is an experience unique to games.
An enchantment that steals over us.
As we play, as we watch and as we retell the story of play it comes back to us.
We feel transferred to a different context of being.
We are here, yet we also feel elsewhere.

Where?
On a race track, pulling incredible turns.
On a tennis court, trying to score.
On a battlefield. In a city. In a haunted house.
A childlike landscape. A long forgotten shore.
An abstract space. An infinite plane.

Our journeys vary.
In some games we appreciate individual qualities.
But they don’t transport us.
Some games transport us but we don’t tarry long.
For each of us the criteria of thauma is different.
The nature of evoked feelings unique.

But to Tolstoy art was not mere beauty.
Or the expression of energy or emotions or pleasure.
He considered art not to be about how you feel.
Or who you are. Or if you cried.
But about what feelings the artist intended to generate.
And was she successful.

There are four schools of thaumatic design.
The school of mechanism, formal and elegant.
The school of simulation, complex and authentic.
The school of behavior, guided and rewarding.
The school of narrative, directed and emotive.
Each is valid.

As designers of thauma we add and remove.
We make giants of puny humans or gnats of fearsome egos.
We empower players with roles and fairness and resonance.
We toy with them and set the terms of their existence.
From these beginnings feeling is evoked.

Thauma is the holistic pot of fun, grokking, mastery,
skill atoms, veracity, flow, reward, action
meaning, narrative, magic circles, winning, losing
persuasion, immersion and ludonarrative resonance.
It is the feeling that a game world matters.

Thauma has many components.
That sense that a game must be fun.
That tendency of the mind to abstract.
That need to learn and grow.
Imperfection. Physicality. Time. Profit,
For some these are pillars. For others, boundaries.

Some games like to play with boundaries.
They should, particularly for criticism.
Yet the thaumatic experience rarely succeeds when only critical.
Or clever.
Especially if intended to be played for long.
Successful thauma is often grounded in rules.

In the elsewhere we know the rules.
We equate action with power.
In sports and board games rules make the world smaller and more focused.
In tabletop roleplaying they do the opposite.
The world grows larger.
In videogames?
Both at the same time.

Some would argue otherwise.
Why does a game have to be fun?
Must all roads lead to multiplayer?
Must all avatars have the same identity?
Is a player really a hero?
Is a game really a game?
These debates should show you how games are art.
But do you see it that way?

Or are you stuck on what games are meant to be?
That some games are art and some are problems?
That games will be an art one day?
That games must be destroyed so they can flourish?
That games must go beyond fun?
Are you frustrated by the present?

Future addiction gets depressing.
It’s fun to consider where games might go.
But as a group we get hung up on saying they have to go there.
And advocating that they have to change.
Or else be doomed.
Perhaps games are what they are today.
Warts and all.

Silly games with flapping birds are thaumatic.
Nagging games about making words are thaumatic.
Bewitching games about plants and zombies are thaumatic.
Cinematic games about solving murders are thaumatic.
Personal games about identity are thaumatic.
Ours is a broad church.

Arguments about “should” are a distraction.
The real argument is not about game versus story
or fun versus art
or future versus past
It’s about function versus institution.
The thing itself versus its place in the cosmos.
It’s about legitimacy.

Gamers often feel like outsiders.
So they co-opt the language of other arts and say “games are these too”.
And eventually get to “games should move on”.
Or they prefer to be outsiders.
They demean some voices to make them shut the fuck up.
For fear that they will “ruin games”.

Who Looks Outside Dreams.
Who Looks Inside Awakens.
We all already know that thaumatic feeling.
But we compromise it by only speaking to its future.
Or demeaning the present experiences of others.
We should own that feeling on its own terms.

We are neither scientists nor dramatists, psychologists nor economists.
We are thaumatists.
Our art of powerful spaces generating feelings is an art on its own terms.
It always has been.
In whatever form we choose to express them, this is what games are.
Thank you.

Horse or Rider: Plot Vs Character?

A recent talk at Games Developer Conference really got me thinking about writing for tabletop RPGs. Titled Death to the Three Act structure it proposes an alternate approach to delivering story to Players. This link, you will notice, is to the slides from the talk because there is no video or transcript of the talk in the public realm. To gain more context check out this video from IGN and this post at Gamasutra. This MS power point file includes the slides and the discussion notes of the talk, well worth it if you have the time.

The short version is that there is a mystery that the multi-billion dollar video game industry is trying to solve:

Why do so few players complete a game?

So why does this matter for tabletop games? The longevity of your favorite campaign is all about engagement. If you can't engage your players you will not sustain your campaign. It really is that simple. But figuring out how to engage your players - that's the hard part.

The short version of the talk, contextualized to RPGs, is that successful story telling is all about Characters. Your Plot, no matter how clever it is, will always take a back seat to the Characters. The Player Characters and the Non Player Characters. Ten years later, if your Players remember the campaign at all,they will remember it in terms of the Characters they played and the characters they interacted with. Microsoft spent a bunch of money to prove this, see Slide 21. Players have a hard time explaining the plot of a game compared to explaining the plot of a film or book. They have invested in the Character not the Plot. The following slide provides the four key findings of the study and they are quite telling. 

All the Old School and Sandbox GMs out there are wondering why their eyes are rolling because they definitely don't read this blog. A sandbox GM would claim that Plot arises from encounters and encounters are driven by characters. They are not impressed by any of this and confirm that introducing film narrative structure to RPGs was something that they ignored because it has nothing to contribute to the sandbox or hexcrawl style of play.

For the rest of us, pretty much all of the GM advice printed in a game since 1990 suggests some variation of the Three Act Structure as the proven method for creating and presenting content to your Players. It is one of those `best practice' things that is presented without question. The research within video games (and I see no compelling reason why it isn't equally valuable for RPGs) is that this structure does not mesh with Players. Are we emulating a structure that does not resonate for our chosen medium?

The writers Richard Rouse III and Tom Abernathy end with three points to steer or reconcile Character and Plot.

1. Focus on character first; align character motivations with player motivation.
2. Align your narrative with the structural needs of your game's user experience, learn-practice-master loop, and level/mission design.
3. Use that information to inform your narrative structure – build your story’s dramatic rhythms around those needs.

The first point is interesting to me because tabletop RPGs don't consider the relationship of needs between the player and the player character to anywhere near the depth that video games do. Maybe that needs to change and if so does it gift the GM greater utility?

The second point is one that I think RPGs often do better than video games is not so much a lesson that GMs really need to hear. Your narrative is being told within a game; respect that.

The final point ties back to points made earlier in the talk. If you have an agenda ie; a story that you want to deliver through play, figure out the story before you decide how to tell it. Ideally, don't decide how to tell it, tell it through the characters that the Player Characters encounter both directly and incidentally. 

If, at the conclusion of play, a player can list all the key characters that they interacted with and by telling the story of heir interactions with those characters they tell the story as a whole, you have successfully created a narrative without a three act structure. Imagine that!

An Interview with Tadhg Kelly of `What Games Are'

One of the key goals of this blog is to learn from and draw context by examining the design idioms of the video game industry, its right up there on the blog banner. I firmly believe that my tabletop roleplaying game design and writing has improved as a result of this and I hope that it is useful for you too.

I have quoted Tadhg Kelly in previous posts and referred to his excellent blog What Games Are. If you are unfamiliar with his blog and you are interested in game design you are in for a treat. I especially encourage you to read through the Glossary. I recently posted some questions to Tadhg and he has replied. 

QTE: In your  What Games Are posts you frequently refer to the Fun Boson and the futility of the hunt to capture it. Is this hunt purely a tool for securing investment or do you believe that there is more to it than that?

Tadhg: No it’s actually mostly genuine. Personally I think the urge to think this way is more to do with general attitudes toward risk and fear of failure. It is also a great story for investors (because they tend to be risk averse by nature) and so they line up. But if it were just about that then you would see most of the companies who preach the method then ignore it, which they don’t.
One of the ways in which games are unique as a medium is that they can be measured. Another is that there are a lot of people both in and around the medium who fundamentally believe that game design is an undiscovered science, a problem to be solved. And once it is solved, they think, it can be replicated. We see this idea manifest repeatedly in many gaming markets, from social through to mobile, and a considerable amount of cloning is similarly driven by trying unlock the boson. And it fails over and over because - like any entertainment medium - the audience’s tastes are always informed by what it saw before and therefore what is considered fun, cool, delightful or entertaining in context.

QTE: A frequent theme in your writing is critical or at least quizzical towards constant industry trends to measure and metricize player experience. If there is no value in solving player experience as an input to iterative design, do you think that by doing so a designer is unintentionally limiting their ability to reach their audience?

Tadhg: Absolutely. A friend of mine likens it baking a cake. When you’re in the middle of baking a cake the dough tastes like a mush of egg and flour, not at all nice (well maybe for a few people). It’s in a protoplasmic state that needs to be brought up to a certain standard of production (baked) before the intended audience can see what it is. Once baked the whole of the mixture has transformed and become something else, something that the individual ingredients would not have predicted.

It’s the same with games. You go into metric and measure and assessment too early and all that happens is you get a lot of people who tell you they don’t like dough mixture. You get a lot of people who complain that it isn’t fun, and also a lot of people who want to tell you how to fix it (often in the cheapest way possible) to get to their idea of what a fun game should be. This fundamentally leads to a fatalist kind of design that ends up simply replicating what seemed to work before because it’s impossible to let yourself think beyond the numbers.

I’ve experienced the result of that kind of thinking far too often in my career to find anything but fault with it. People literally spook themselves out of being creative by not letting themselves just get on with the baking, with iterating for themselves and using their own expert eye to assess what is and isn’t working. Then they lose their nerve and become cloners just like everyone else.

QTE: This final question is more of a Devils Advocate. Imagine that someone, however briefly, captured the Fun Boson and intentionally and deliberately used this knowledge to design an absolutely fantastic game. There was no coincidence or lucky intersection of emergent market trends. How did they do it?

Tadhg: Oh probably through a combination of trial, error, inspiration and contemplation. But there isn’t a boson so it’s a rather redundant hypothesis. 

There’s a reason why most game designers actually only have one or two successes in their entire career. The best games never come about because of a formula, they tend to emerge over time according to rules that we can’t quite decode. To give you an example, I recently played quite a lot of Cards Against Humanity. This is a game that I wish I had conceived of myself because when you look at it it’s just so darned simple, but at the same time has a rhyme and reason to it that belie real game design smarts. You look at Flappy Bird even and it’s the same. 

QTE (*Bonus Question!*): The Story Vs Game debate is heating up again. I find it fascinating because I can't think of any other creative medium that seriously doubts that it can meld or at least reconcile both. Is Story Vs Game an Identity Crisis for video games or is there more to it than that? 

Tadhg: It’s more a battle of perspectives. In an article I wrote a couple of years ago (The Four Lenses of Game Making) I argued that dualities are easy to digest but rarely have any real truth to them, and really games are better analyzed through a quadrant graph structure of frame/fantasy and emergence/experience. Sure, mechanically driven games are a part of that as are narrative-driven games. But so too are simulations (which are neither) or behavioral games (likewise). Thought of in those terms the variations of what kind of game is popular in the moment tend to make more sense and be more easily mapped.

Does it say a lot about the legitimacy of the form? Yes. I personally believe that one of the hard truths of the video game form is that it is very poor at telling narrated stories (as in the manner of a movie or book) because player agency is part of the package, and players are unreliable. Take that away and you have simply linear media with dressed-up page turning, or a kind of interactive artifice which the player doesn’t really affect. Yet many of us still cleave to the idea that games are supposed to somehow be better than movies.

I believe games are an art form, up and down the line, but I also believe that that art form is about state and place and urgency and moment and dynamism and the sense of story rather than the telling of a story. I think game makers from all quadrants essentially sense that too, that the art of games lies somewhere in the middle of these polar opposites, and that the unique capacity of games to pull us in and make us believe in their space is connected to that. 

I think that the legitimacy issues come more from being looked down upon by the outside world, and so sometimes we try to mould ourselves to look at sound more like what the outside world considers “art” (such as co-opting the language of drama, say) but really it’s a problem to be solved internally. Games are an art as they are and we should use language of our own derivation to describe them, and to hell with what the rest of the world thinks.

Escaping the Heliosheath: Story Vs Game

I have been following a debate that is raging within video game circles currently that is interesting because it does not have an analog in tabletop games. Specifically: Game Vs Story.
Greg Costikyan wrote about the competitive tensions between Game and Story. This is a must read for anyone interested in game design. During his time at West End Games Greg wrote the Star Wars RPG and co-authored Paranoia. Both of these games are significant waypoints in the history/ evolution of tabletop RPG design. His argument is that (video) games are not inherently a story telling medium. He posits that Story and Game are repellent objectives so that the more of one, the less of the other. Any attempt to reconcile this results in discordance in the play experience and a poor design. He writes that "story is the antithesis of game".
My first reaction to this is to reject his thesis because it denies the core goals of my design brain that wants to reconcile the Art Brain and the Play Brain. I don't want it to be so. But I think he makes a compelling point and the fact that I have no counter argument instructs me that he illuminates a key tension in game design. I have fielded a question raised by Greg's article to a games theorist who I greatly respect and hope to publish his reply soon.
A reply to the Game Vs Story issue can be found here stating that games are about participating in a story, not producing a story. It also points to story being irrespective of quality or scope, meaning that the shell story of Mario rescuing the Lady from Donkey Kong is as much a story as the tale of Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us. They are both Stories and they are both Games. This is a neat reply and it chips away at the inconvenient and jarring points that Greg makes but it doesn't address the core tension.
What does all of this mean for tabletop RPGs? Is it a thing to think about when designing or writing for RPGs? Is it just an identity crisis for video games, growing pains that will be surpassed as they shift from being a discrete activity to an incorporated experience in day to day life? One of the frequent comments about my recent game Acceptance: A Game about Winning, Losing and why it Matters is to question whether it is actually a game or a group story sharing activity. It is basically all story and no game. Of course, my plan is to build game elements into it as I iterate but the point is valid. 
I feel that Story Vs Game is a compelling tension in Game design. It is as important for tabletop games because otherwise the responsibility for dealing with it is shifted to the GM. Maybe that is for the best? I plan to write more about this in the future.

Thauma and Louise

Forget about  Louise, today's post is all about Thauma! A sense of wonder and marvel that can arise during gameplay. Thauma is largely engendered by the GM-player relationship and somehow exists in a niche from which it will only emerge if the right conditions are met.

Experiencing Thauma in play and the desire to experience it again is a potent motivator. A recent post on reddit asked what readers want in a RPG blog. A common reply was actual play reports, often specifying that they want the rules interactions minimised. Why? Readers want to share the experience of the gameplay, they want to harvest the Thauma.

Considering that Thauma emerges from the group experience of play, can a designer encourage or enable it in the game itself? I think that the answer is `yes'. I also think that the answer is more complicated than that. Follow the link above and read more about Thauma at What Games Are. Check out the crosslinks on the Thauma page. If you agree that the answer is yes, tell me why?

The Words that ward the paths we tread

Roleplaying is verbal communication. Sure, you can have your maps, minis, diaramas, your sketches, screen shares and printouts. These are all vehicles that can only be animated verbally and translated into the theatre of the mind, the arena and destination for role playing.
So words are important. The words you use when you play and the words you use when you think about how you play.
I bring to your attention; the Glossary You can use it as a guide to help you find your way to the arena. Gathered and corralled by Tadhg Kelly, legendary video game designer and writer. Check it out and learn from the best.

Decisions< Emotional Attachment< Fun.

Yesterday's blog was inspired by this article. The writer, David Hom, finds that mobile game designers expect analytics to explain how to successfully monetise their game. They think Player behaviour will tell them how to get player buy in. He goes on to endorse his theory of emotional monetisation.
The argument stands for tabletop RPGs too. If you are designing content, designing a game or running one as the GM, how do you achieve Player buy-in? 
To quote from the article:
"You need to establish an emotional connection with your players through engaging gameplay and amazing design. By definition, games are series of decisions, designed to create emotional attachment and be fun. Art and science become a game when a developer constructs game mechanics that allows gamers to make their own decisions with skill, strength or luck."
This quote sets the course for my design work on Bandit Country. I look forward to revealing how I have subverted David's advice to achieve my own goals.  

Is D&D the language of emotion?

One of the spectacular things about D&D is that it shifts people into a kind of emotional super-cruise. There have been Edition Wars, OSR resurgence, the Splintering of the Base. D&D has become a thing that demands an opinion or at least a stance before you can even approach it. It fields a cluttered orbit of clones, heartbreakers and offshoots so dense they often obscure the original heartland from sight. 
All this anger and emulation, factionalism, jealousy, brilliant insight and recurring humour. It speaks one thing to me.
Love.
All those stat blocks, setting guides, conversion notes and rules tweaks out there are like screwed up love letters in the school yard. And we keep writing them.

Class + Reward = Fun?

I have said before that the most interesting things that I read that influence how I Design are being written about video games, thus the name of this Blog.
Classifying player types was all the rage a few years ago and usually creeps into the GM advice section of games that haven't realised that it is pointlessly academic.
Except in the case of video games where monetarisation is the wicked drug that is luring good designers from their safe cubes and out into Indi-armageddon.
This article on Gamasutra is worth a read if you are having a hard time linking Players and Rewards in a way that results in a fun game.

Why? Because it's your...

Recently at GDC  the writer and art director for Destiny, the next big thing from Bungie, spoke about their approach to building the world, characters and opponents.

http://gdcvault.com/play/1017789/Brave-New-World-New-Bungie

I have quite a library of RPG world building guides. In 50 minutes (forget the q&a at the end) this video rocketed to the most useful resource to date.

Breaking it Down
So you don't have a spare 50 minutes.

Start with a lofty, inclusive and ambitious GOAL
Theirs:
"Let's build a world where we can tell any great story we want. A place millions of people will want to visit again and again, for the next 10 years - and more."

Establish the PILLARS that will support this goal
Theirs:

1. The world needs to be Hopeful and Inviting. Players have to want to spend time there.
2. Idealised Reality. Grounded in the familiar but capable of accommodating any crazy / genre bending ideas that the devs want to include.
3. Filled with mystery and adventure.Reasons to keep coming back.
4. Players can become legends. The players can leave a mark.

POSTCARDS
Use images to develop and define your Pillars. Build a portfolio of images until you have an image or group of images that define each Pillar. These are your Postcards. Think of them as photographs taken within your world.
"They are rare and powerful because they set fire to your imagination. They ask a ton of important questions."
If your world is a collaborative effort or will be published, your Postcards are the most effective way of communicating the essential elements to your collaborators / artists.

PALETTE
Your Postcards will be an anchor for the themes / tropes you will express in your work. You can take enormous advantage of this. In the video they talk about Palette, it is a video game existing in the visual realm. Palette informs the player, preloading the essential consistencies of the world into their brains. Tabletop games inhabit the theater of the mind but Palette is still an effective device for building a style guide to your world. Even better, you can build regional style guides to differentiate your locations.
See these timestamps in the video for more:- 21:05 Palette and 30:55 for the Opponent Mood Board.

FOCUS - Shifting to Production
At this point you have defined your Goal and supported it via your Pillars and based it on a unifying Palette / regional style guide. You have a series of Postcards that communicate all of the above. This is your core World Bible.
If the words you write are a love letter to your world, these words are written on the back of your Postcards and sent to your audience.

REFINE
33:00 "When you are building a new world you do not want to put arbitrary genre rules around what is possible and what is not possible. For a long time you need to make everything possible."
As you build this world, whether you use a  Big to Small or Small to Big methodology,   your Postcards and Style Guide will direct you. The above quote recedes in value as you proceed. You will have ideas that don't fit. Either trust that and save them for your next project or reconsider your Postcards.

CONCLUSION
My key goal in this post was to establish that video game development media has value for the tabletop roleplaying game writer/ user. I also felt compelled to use this video as a starter because it slammed some serious gold into my game development brain. Hopefully, while watching it, you heard the same `kachings' as I did.