Nothing Ever Goes According to Plan (For Business Purposes, This is a Hyperbole)

I need to establish the subtitle of this one right at the top: And In A Way, That’s The Point.

I’ll start this entire series off by sharing one of my favorite things I learned in theatre school. This’ll be a bit off the beaten path and somewhat abstract, so bear with me as I tie it all together.

Without further ado, presenting - a priori and a posteriori metatexts.

Apart from posteriori being a funny word, what do either of these two terms mean? I can’t just expect you to be on board with what all that means, so let’s wander off the trail a bit.?

First of all, what the heck is a metatext? A metatext is that strange, nebulous object that both IS a text and what the text becomes beyond itself. It’s not only the text, it’s also its iterations, its construction, its… well, EVERYTHING. It’s the physical thing itself, and it is also everything that results from the physical thing. You can think of it as the process to create the final object or desired outcome - in the case of theatre, the performance itself.

It’s a cerebral abstraction of several structured steps of production and performance, but I believe that the philosophical, ephemeral aspects of creation - when you put a magnifying glass to them - are just as inspiring, if not more so, than the “proper” procedural renditions. You ever get caught up in a daydream and find that those stray thoughts live with you way longer than they should for being something so removed from physical reality? pshhhhyeahmeneither

Let’s work through this idea of a metatext with a theoretical production of, let’s say, Henry IV Part Two.

Before we even talk about the process of creating the performance, the artistic director, creative director, director, and designers get together to discuss the season ahead of them. What shows are they putting on? Someone wants to work on Henry IV Part Two, and everyone loves the idea of adding it to the list - they grab the script.

At this stage, some questions are answered. What’s the goal, what’s the take that everyone wants to bring? Did the company produce Part One - maybe we should do that first? Oh, we did? Then yeah, Part Two it is!?

(for the record, I don’t think anyone would just… forget they produced Henry IV Part One, but it’s totally fine let’s just let that plothole exist for the sake of the narrative)

Now we get to work. The director and the designers align on the artistic elements of the production, the actors get cast, rehearsals begin, and the result - the performance - begins to get built.?

This can be absolute chaos, but in the best way. The discoveries and choices made as an ensemble, the creation of the set, the various run throughs and line flubs, the stretch of constructive purgatory that tech runs inevitably become on some days, all the way up until the line. Each aspect is mutable to a point, as a polished performance finds its way into life.

The best performances are those that come from pure collaboration and support. And to see all the elements come together over time? To be inspired again and again by each new development that builds on top of itself? Absolute joy, and the most beautiful of creations.

And NONE OF IT IS TRULY PREPARED FOR. Sure, there’s structure amidst it all, and yes, there are artistic visions that become realized, but each individual has a different relationship with the text and the growth of the performance. It’s the relationship to the work, it’s the series of events, the accidents, the flubs, the stumbling blocks, all the way to the end.

And this entire time, right until the day - until the moment of the first performance - you’re building up a record. A record of blocking adjustments and changes, the compiled notes of the director and actors, the constant shifting and development of the physical craft of design. All of those pieces come together in collaboration and evolution until you have the thing that the performance is. And that combination of all those pieces, all of them in a blustering, chaotic swirl of creativity and growth?

That’s your a priori metatext - the metatext that comes into being as a result of crafting a performance.

“Wait, that was all a priori?” you might be wondering. “Then what’s a posteriori? (Hah. Posteriori.)”

A posteriori describes the metatext resulting from each performance. We’ve taken the performance that a priori toiled away to create, and we now have new information that marks each new performance. But here, we’re not talking about a single metatext like a priori. You see, each individual performance becomes its own a posteriori metatext - because each performance is never truly the same as the last.

Was it raining that day, and an actor got caught in traffic, becoming a blur of anxiety until they hit the stage right on time to deliver the first line of the show? That’s definitely going to be a different performance than the one where everyone carpooled together with an hour to spare so they could run lines before the call to places. (hey it’s me again here to shatter the illusion! that car story pretty much never happens - that’s why there are understudies and alternates)

When people describe shows they see, they might recall details about the performance - their own interpretations, maybe, or the sudden chaos of a dead stagelight changing the performance on stage. Actors might recall the feeling of a scene being more distant from what they knew in rehearsals and their recollection of the performance, or the lighting designer might realize that the dead light was somehow a better outcome than their initial fear made them believe it to be, and now each performance from that point on will not have that single lighting cue.

That entire collection of a shared experience of a single performance - just one - can be stuffed into that greater collective of a metatext, that singular a posteriori metatext, of which there are as many as there are performances.

And of course - it’s never according to plan. People will react with incredible divergence, all on a case-by-case basis. Critic reviews could be far from what a casual theatregoer might experience, and friends and family might have their own separate takes. But regardless of its cohesion to a perceived “plan” or a personal expectation, it’s a way to share an experience.

Who could have planned for the infinite like that?

So now you know what a priori and a posteriori metatexts are.

“But Pranshu,” I hear you ask, “what does this have to do with game design? I drew no parallels at all from those words, you must be talking out of your posteriori.”

First, I see you’ve stumbled upon the peak use of a posteriori humor, well done. Second, I’ll explain, because it’s neat.

In the case of our game development parallel to this analogy, what would you say our text to create our metatexts would be?

How about a design document? Definitely NOT an entire GDD, but something pertaining to a feature, or an element of gameplay. In general, this would be something at a smaller scale. For this example, let’s say the feature of double jumping.

Before work even begins, we take a look at the requirements for the feature. How necessary is the feature? What is the amount of work that it will need? Did we forget any other requirements that will need to be its own slate of work? For example, can the player single jump at all in this game yet? (I TOLD YOU Henry IV Part One WAS GONNA MATTER)

What also matters here is what stage of development we’re at. Are we just working with capsule placeholders for our characters? How deep into level design and creating the physical language of the game are we? How does this change our gameplay flow? What are we laying the groundwork for while also building out this feature? This is where we start to plant the seeds for other features - more texts to work with in what would be the equivalent of a future season of theatre productions.

And of course - with everything - no amount of planning can truly remove the chaos that is game development. Engineering might find that double jumping in the current build crashes the entire game, and code might halt on the feature for days until that problem is solved. Maybe textures take on a strange distortion around the character during a double jump, and no one across disciplines knows why - until tech art finds something innocuous.

No plan survives first contact. But each dev does, and each dev learns and grows with each new hurdle. Never wasted time, but time spent with the project, building their own record of their own metatext, until the feature is ready.

If the work building up the feature is the a priori, the completed feature is the performance, then what would we call the a posteriori?

Here’s what I love about this comparison - it’s open-ended. Is it each new build that follows? Is it the takeaways from QA and team playtests? Is it tweaks to the feature, increasing the height or speed of the jumps?

Here’s my interpretation: I think it’s the way the player uses the feature that’s meaningful to them. In this example of double jumping, it could be the act of completing a platforming puzzle with a double jump that feels satisfying, or it could be using a double jump to weave into a movement hack - like perhaps traversing the length of the space at an unintended speed.?

What sticks in the mind of the player? What becomes their own experience of the feature? Is it any different if the impact was foreseen or completely removed from expectations? Or does it get absolutely destroyed because speedrunners and exploiters go absolutely rabid? Was any of this ever a part of the plan for the feature? Are those “bad” metatexts?

You tell me.

See you next week.