Parallels between the MDA framework and the revision process.

(The pictures in this post are intended to break up my wall of text and also to illustrate an aesthetic conflict between my intended meaning and your experience reading this post)

The MDA framework is used as a lens to view the process of creating games, but I’m also interested in using it to view examine the process of creating writing, specifically revision. Since this post will consider a shared framework between games and writing, I’m considering it on-topic. This idea was inspired by Corvus Elrod’s post, “Mechanics are to Grammar as Dynamics are to…”, which I recommend.

The MDA framework breaks down games into three components: mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. I think the framework probably relates more easily to the later stages of revision, when a writer is trying to fine-tune the mechanics of a story so that the aesthetics of the piece are supporting the meaning or experience that’s intended, but I want to look at some interesting parallels with the beginning of the revision process. In a previous post, I talked about revision and included a link to my work-in-progress “Revision Procedure”.

After a draft is completed, it’s important for a writer to figure out what the intended meaning of the story actually is. The initial idea for a story and it’s meaning after a first draft is completed are rarely the same. (You can see this distortion taking place in many of my blog posts, where the initial idea for the post is lost in whatever new tangent I’ve discovered. It happens on other blogs too, I’m watching!) What is the writer trying to convey to the reader? The second draft is important because it allows the writer to experiment with drastic changes to the story in order to make that meaning more apparent. The dynamics of the story will change, sometimes significantly, in order to focus the story on the fleshed-out idea the writer comes up with in the first draft.

The MDA has an example of its framework in use: a series of “passes” regarding a Babysitting game. The example shows how the mechanics of a game and its intended audience can completely change the way it plays. The aesthetic goals for each “pass” change the Babysitting game in a fundamental way. As I mentioned above, the MDA framework doesn’t directly relate to the early stages of revision, but I’m interested in these fundamental changes.

Once a writer has a precise written summary of what he or she wants to accomplish, they can experiment with changing the elements of the story in order to align the aesthetics with the meaning or goal. For example, in a story I’m working on now, about a mother and son relationship, I intitially chose a psychiatric hospital as the setting. The story is about the complex emotions, guilt, frustration, etc. that this mother feels toward her schizophrenic son. I realized while looking at the completed first draft that the setting conflicted with the goals I had for the story. If I’m examining the relationship between a mother and son, a better setting would be the son’s apartment, where I can reference their past organically through objects in the room. I wasn’t writing a story about the effects of a psychiatric hospital on a patient, or a mother’s distress over her son’s treatment.

The change in setting had a dramatic effect on the writing as well as my understanding of the characters and their relationship. Other elements of the story need to be examined as well, such as perspective (would the story work better in a 1st/third/omniscient POV? should it be told from the son’s perspective?), narrative distance (up close to focus on the mother’s experience, or backed further away to encompass both mother and son?), time period (how old is this conflict? how long has it been developing? is this the first time the mother/son have encountered these emotions?), etc.

The MDA framework’s example shows three games with a common theme, but each of them is different because of their mechanics and the dynamics that are created. To understand the revision process, a writer has to understand how the mechanics of writing work to create dynamics that lead to an aesthetic experience for the reader, from which they extract the meaning of the story (does this make any sense or am I just dropping MDA words into a sentence? .

The framework helps me, as a writer, to understand that every choice I make in a story has a direct consequence on the final aesthetic experience, and unless I’ve thought about how I’m creating the dynamics in my story in regards to my final intended meaning, then I failed and probably created unintentional conflict between my intended meaning and the reader’s experience of the story.