Metaphysical structures in game design. What are they? Why are they important?

I'm writing a book that teaches the reader how to use specific philosophical tools to deconstruct games and design better games, ten moves on to playtesting and publishing your game. Following is an excerpt from the first chapter titled, "Metaphysical structures in game design. What are they? Why are they important?"...

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the “first principles” of things. What are first principles? Philosophically, this refers to the origin or source of a thing. Metaphysics includes abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space. A core metaphysical question is: “What is the nature of reality?”

How does this relate to game design? When you make a game, you’re creating a simulation. You’re building a little world. The decisions you make and the rules you create define the reality of that world. You’re deciding how everything in that world behaves and interacts. When you do this, you’re making metaphysical decisions about how your world works. The rules and effects you set up are the metaphysical structures that define the world you’re creating.

Your rules define what you can and can not do in the game. This (obviously) has a big impact on the way players play your game, but there are other choices that are as important (if not more so). What could be as important than the rules for the game? The components for the game – the board, cards, and dice you use. Obviously, the components you choose are the tangible manifestation of your game’s world, but they also carry hidden meanings that you may not be aware of. The components you choose carry, convey, and enforce implicit assumptions about the nature of how your game world works.

Let’s start with a simple core component: Randomizers. Players rate games on many criteria, including how the game stands up to multiple plays (replayability). If a game plays the same every time you play it, it has very little replay value and people won’t want to play it more than a few times. An easy way to increase a game’s replayability is to put one or more random elements in it. Virtually every game you design will include a randomizer. (Heck, I’ll assert that every game uses a randomizer of some sort - even if that randomizing element is simply the other player. A game without randomizers isn’t a game. It’s a puzzle. That’s a discussion for a different book, and it’s one that many other writers have already discussed at length such as (NAME’s) book (TITLE).)

If you need a randomizer for a game, what springs to mind first? Dice, right? But what other options are there?

A deck of cards,
spinners,
a bag of tokens,
secret player decisions,
very precise timers...

There are lots of options. Many of these options are capable of returning the same range of results, but not all randomizers are the same. Each one imparts its own unique metaphysical meaning to the game you create. Now that’s a tricky phrase: “...unique metaphysical meaning...” What does that mean? I’m saying that the randomizer you select is laden with specific implications about how your game world works. It says things about:

the nature of what is and is not possible,
the existence and power of Fate and/or Destiny,
the ability to make predictions about – or even know – the future, and
the “fairness” or “equitable distribution” of possible events.

This is heavy abstract stuff. Here’s a concrete example...

Dice:
What happens when you roll a die? What do we know about how a die behaves? Let’s break it down:
Each time you roll a die, it returns a single value from a range of known values. If you roll a die marked with a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, you know you’re going to get one of those numbers. You’re not going to get a 0 or a 7; it just can’t happen.

Each time you roll a die, each face on the die has an equal chance of resolving. If each face is different from every other face (as on a standard Craps die), each result has an equal chance of resolving.

Every time you roll a die, it will give you a new value from the same range of results on the die. Each roll is independent; the current result is not affected by past results and has no effect on future results. When you roll a standard six-sided die, you’re as likely to get a one as a six. This is true even if you’ve rolled three ones in a row, regardless of what your personal gaming superstitions are.

Metaphysically, this models a limited, independent, inexhaustible universe with an indeterminate future.

Limited: The results are constrained to a set range of effects (the results on the die).
Independent: Each result is equally likely on any given die roll.
Inexhaustible: Each result can occur an unlimited number of times.
Indeterminate: The future sequence of results is unknowable.

(Note that we’re assuming a die that is a regular, platonic solid with a unique result on each face. If you change the die so its faces are different shapes or multiple faces have the same result, you’ll change the metaphysical model accordingly.)

“Limited, independent, inexhaustible, and indeterminate,” sounds really fancy, but what does it mean? What does knowing this help us do? It helps us understand what we’d want to use die rolls as a randomizer for. You’d use a die roll as a randomizer when you’re trying to generate an effect within a known range of effects, where you always have the same, “fair” chance of getting any one of those effects, but no specific effect is guaranteed to occur. (Knowing this not only empowers us to apply dice when appropriate, but also helps us craft game mechanics that deliberately flout the implicit metaphysical structures that the die imposes. Suppose our game uses d6es to resolve combat, with the high roll winning. Combat results are always between 1 and 6, with 6 being the maximum possible combat result. It is not possible (in our game world) to roll a 7. If we let players obtain a thing that adds +1 to their combat result, up to a possible total of 7, we’ve broken the metaphysical paradigm. The maximum possible result was 6, but now it goes up to 7. (“But *this one* goes up to 11...”) This doesn’t meant that the game is broken. It’s perfectly fine. It just means that you have to figure out how it fits in your universe. If the +1 comes from a magic sword, divine favor, or advanced technology, it’s okay. “6” is the normal absolute maximum, but magic (or divinity, or technology) makes it possible to do impossible things (like rolling a 7 on a six-sided die). If you know what your randomizer’s metaphysical implications are, it’s easier for you to augment and “break” it in ways that make sense in the context of the game.)

Consider how Hasbro’s game Sorry!™ would be different if it used a twelve-sided die (Actually, you’d need a 13-sided die for the numbers 1 to 12 and the eponymous “Sorry!” effect.) to move instead of a deck of cards. Instead of having four “Sorry!” cards appear every time you went through the deck, you could have a game without a single Sorry!, or a game with 100 Sorry! events. A deck of cards models completely different rules for the relationship between randomly-generate events, how many times a random event can occur, and whether future outcomes are predictable or knowable or not. That’s why the die traits of, “independent, inexhaustible, and indeterminate,” are important. We’ll discuss this in more detail later, when we talk about card decks as randomizers.

Note that a die can do more than provide numeric results. A die can have icons that represent actions or short phrases. PSI’s Dragon Dice™ and Eagle Games’ Roll Through The Ages by Matt Leacock are two excellent examples of dice games that use icons (instead of numbers) in tandem with contextual rules to great effect.
Also note that flipping a coin is just like rolling a two-sided die. Along that line, pennies are ubiquitous and cheap, and there are a lot of fun things you can do with randomly-charted, branching, tree-like paths. [This could be a good spot for a digression and chart on this - an exploration of using this mechanic in a game.]
Pro Tip: Simulating a die when you don’t have dice:
You can use a very precise timer as a die-like randomizer. A stopwatch that measures 1/100ths of a second makes a good substitute for a 10-sided die. Start the watch at the start of the game. When you need a result, press the lap button and read the 100ths of a second digit. Tah-dah! Note that this is not a perfectly fair randomizer, as a person could theoretically be able to time something so accurately as to be able to “force” specific results from a stopwatch. But this is very unlikely. Nonetheless, it does have interesting metaphysical implications about the nature of fate, implying that fate requires our direct involvement and that we could control it if we possessed enough skill to do so.