What are Design Overlaps?

Oftentimes when creating a design, there will be some or many aspects that coincides with another design. When these overlaps occur and are beneficial to its audience, this can be known as a synergistic or resonant design. When the overlap creates friction or dissatisfaction, this can be referred to as a frictional or dissonant design.

These overlaps can occur between vastly different designs and between vastly different implementations. An explicit example would be designs that benefit from a player taking a certain action coupled with mechanics that allow players to take that action more times than usual. While a bit of a stretch, a more subtle example would be designs that benefit from players taking a certain action and a mechanic that gives resources needed to perform that action.

The existence of these overlaps are great for players for a myriad of reasons. They reward and incentivize players to experiment and get a deeper understanding of how different game pieces interact with each other while also being something for players to naturally discover and utilize. On the designer side of things, overlaps are an efficient tool for exploring design space and doing more with less. To summarize, overlaps in designs are COOL.

To be clear, design overlaps are not necessarily the pinnacle of a game nor are they necessary for a player’s enjoyment or in-game success. They are one avenue of expression that can be explored and tinkered with. There are plenty of great designs that exist as standalones. Like many topics we explore in these blogs, this concept is just one of many in a design ecosystem. Whether it should be given more or less emphasis is entirely dependent on the designer’s vision and the project’s goals.

Kinds of Design Overlaps

For our language today, “design” is going to mean “something that is created for a game”. This means that I can describe something like a combat system as a design. Similarly, an individual card would also be a design. There are three types of designs I’d like to cover, all of which are explored a bit more thoroughly in my “Giving Space to Design Space” article.

Individual mechanics/cards: These are individual aspects that are basic ways to interface with the game. For brevity’s sake, individual game actions a player can take (mechanics) and individual cards are lumped together.
Groups: These are multiple mechanics or cards that can be categorized with each other. For example, any mechanic or effects that allows players to draw cards would be in a group of “card draw”. Factions or archetypes are also classic examples of groups of cards.
Systems: These are webs of mechanics that form foundational structures of the game. In a sense, they are larger and more granular groups.

Overlapping Individuals and Individuals

To start, individual designs can overlap with other individual designs. This is often the most direct type of overlap that requires the least amount of abstraction. Inputs, outputs, conditions, and costs will often be explicitly referenced. For example, one design takes cards from your discard pile and puts them in your hand while another design takes cards from your discard pile and puts them in your deck. These designs both utilize the discard pile as an input.

Overlapping Groups and Groups

Overlaps between different group designs start to get more abstract. Different groups can care about the same thing, such as dealing lots of damage through non-combat means, but do so in different ways. For example, one might proactively deal damage through spells while another does so reactively through reflection abilities.

Different groups can also care about different things but use the same methods. As an example, one group wants to use spells to deal damage while another group wants to use spells to protect themselves.

Overlapping Individuals and Groups

Overlapping individual designs and group designs often manifests as the individual designs being an “honorary” member of the group. In fact, many times, the individual design might eventually be fully adopted into the group by the audience or designers. The evolution of the “Domain” deck in Magic: The Gathering’s standard format from the last few years is probably the best example of this. Up the Beanstalk reinvigorated the deck due to its synergy with the deck’s high-cost bombs and synergy with Leyline Binding. Recent iterations with the likes of Duskmourne’s impending overlords also allowed Zur, Eternal Schemer to become a key component of the deck.

Credit: Wizards of the Coast // images sourced from Scryfall

Overlapping Systems and Systems

System overlaps are definitely the trickiest and abstract form of design overlaps. In fact, I’ll admit that any example I could think of is a stretch at best. But for the sake of exploring the concept, let’s suspend our disbelief for a brief moment. Systems have broad intentions and methods of implementations. Thus, overlaps in systems are characterized by those intentions and implementations coinciding. For example, playing a card requires having cards to play or otherwise pay costs such as needing to discard some. How the “card acquisition system” functions and is designed around will directly impact how much fuel is given to players for playing cards. Design choices such as whether players get a card draw every turn, how much they’re drawing at a baseline, and when they draw the cards will also affect how playing cards feels.

Overlapping Individuals, Groups, and Systems

To cover our bases: Individual and group designs do overlap with systems. However, I think this granularity isn’t particularly helpful since those designs probably manifested specifically to do something with an aspect of some system. A more productive framing of this is probably taking the opportunity to recognize what aspect of the system could use more individual or group designs to flesh out a project. And to stretch things a bit, try to figure out how overlapping with one part of the system also overlaps with another. For example, a design that causes a player to gain life overlaps with life point systems. Rather than stop there, this could inspire a design that cares about life point differences between players or one that cares about reaching thresholds of life point totals.

Ramifications of Overlaps

Beyond creating combos and nonbos, overlaps do have a meaningful impact on projects as a whole. To generalize, overlaps will manifest in a few ways.

Overlaps will signpost that designs interact with each other in a meaningful way.

Generally, how each design interacts with each other is not immediately obvious to every person. But people are pattern recognition machines and overlaps in all their forms are meaningful patterns. This is a bit of an extreme example, but let’s say there are two designs with exactly matching aesthetics. This overlap is likely to make people think they are a pair or at least work together in some capacity. However, if none of their other qualities overlap in a meaningful way, that expectation is dashed.
An artsy individual may not see an issue in this scenario, but, for designers that want to curate expectations and experiences for their audience, this scenario is of grave importance. Overlaps are more than just a cool or weird thing that can happen; they set expectations and they can succeed or fail in meeting them. Of course, not all scenarios are so direct and extreme. In fact, wading through this process and creating heuristics for recognizing and utilizing these types of interactions is the allure of many games.

Overlaps will reveal biases in the project.

Biases, or the lack of them, will amplify as the overlaps become more prevalent. Follow me on a little goose trip.

A singular goose in a bar denotes that it may just be passing by. A group of geese shows that it’s a fairly comfortable setting for geese. Multiple groups, especially large ones, show that geese are welcome, one and all. And a bar full of geese shows that geese run the joint.

Credit: “A gaggle of geese going ‘gwak’” by David Evers

Just like the density of a gaggle implicitly conveys the dominion of geese, the prevalence of an overlap — through frequency or importance — can implicitly convey what is the accepted standard for a project. If more designs overlap in “dealing damage” compared to designs overlapping in “gaining health”, there is a clear bias being displayed.

Of course, biases will exist in any project with personal stakes in it. But in this situation, recognizing overlaps is a great skill to feel out how these biases are cropping up. Knowing this information allows designers to make better informed decisions on whether to continue along the same path or change things up.

Overlap with enough frequency and designs will start to lose their individuality.

To be clear, this is not a meritorious or ethical judgment in any capacity. However, you should understand that, definitionally, overlapping designs become less unique since they are sharing qualities with other designs. Just know that patterns, groups, and heuristics have their own appeal and benefits just like novelty and individuality does.

Group designs such as factions and archetypes are an excellent example of this aspect. Love them or hate them, it’s tough to think about individual designs without considering others from the group that they are in. Another avenue of this are multi-faction or hybrid designs — individual designs that are part of multiple groups. These designs tend to be a smash hit with a huge demographic of gamers across many genres. However, I think that these designs aren’t necessarily losing individuality; they’re instead adopting a new type based on a multi-faceted identity.

On the other end of things, there are standalone designs that can’t compare to a combined might of a group and will lack relevancy as a result. Despite this, some designs that remain novel and unique with few or no peers also tend to create their own legends. “Lone wolf” characters and designs can be cool and valuable to any project.

Last, this does mean that any changes that affect an overlapping design will reverberate on the designs they are associated with. Changes in this scenario could be anything from new designs that exploit a shared weakness or rules changes that affect the efficacy of a strategy through empowerment or nerfs.

Synergistic and Frictional Overlaps

The most common representation of overlapping designs are overlaps that are explicitly synergistic or resonant. These types of net positive experiences are great incentives for players and provide guidance towards specific play patterns. For a brief example: A passive skill that increases a character’s magic damage output and a skill that regenerates more health when they deal more magic damage.

Let’s briefly cover some basic examples of synergistic overlaps:

A design whose effect satisfies the restriction of another design.
A design which covers the weaknesses of another design.
A design whose effect makes the resolution of another design’s effect more powerful.

On the other hand, it’s also very possible to overlap designs in a manner that instead creates friction. If a player has to decide between a skill that improves their physical damage or a skill that improves their magic damage, this creates a friction between the skills and the stats: The player can’t choose both so the damage output of one style will suffer as a result. In a vacuum, this seems to effectively be a net negative, so why include this scenario as a possibility? The manifestations and benefits of these experiences are similar to synergies, but a bit more nuanced in my opinion.

Before we get into it, let’s also cover brief examples of frictional overlaps:

Designs that utilize the same type of a very scarce resource.
A design whose effect makes fulfilling the restriction of another design more difficult.
A design that makes the weakness of another design more exploitable.

The presence of frictional overlaps are mostly emergent and subtler challenges for the audience. At a baseline, opting into these challenges is a form of expression and agency. In a lot of scenarios, the stacking of drawbacks and dissonant overlaps usually means there’s a reward for toughing it out. Of course, there are also players that are most engaged when they’re figuring out how to reduce the effects of drawbacks.

Let me give a more concrete example of all these scenarios at once: Games with a mana resource and cards that need that mana resource to function. Effectively, all 1-cost cards are competing against other 1-cost cards in terms of opportunity cost. Similarly, they are also competing with 2-cost cards, 3-cost cards, 4-cost cards, etc. Experimentation and theorycrafting is how the “mana curve” was conceived and exploring the best cards to slot into that mana curve is a never-ending project (especially for games which receive many expansions). How a player models their deck’s mana curve can be highly variable and personal, there are several risks they can take with their mana curve, and tinkering with it can be a brewer’s paradise.

Of course, sometimes a negative is just a negative. Stack enough dissonance in an overlap and now there’s a signal for players to avoid doing certain things. Designs that use health as a cost directly hinders designs that want to keep a high amount of health. Both want health gain to enable their costs or restrictions, but using one makes using the other more difficult. Take this a step further and it’s possible that the friction outright prevents certain designs from working with each other. A design might convert any instance of health gain into a set amount… Which in turns makes a design that multiplies any health gain virtually useless since it would be converted into a set amount. Both are designs that improve sparse health gain into something better, but they cannot coexist without one being invalidated. While going too far in this aspect creates overtly xenophobic design, this could instead be a method of establishing clear identities when used sparingly.

Designing Overlaps in Design

There are several parts of a design that can overlap and many ways they can do so. In fact, a lot of different overlaps overlap with each other. But before semantic satiation kicks in, let’s cover different types of overlaps.

Overlapping Method

This is when the procedures or actions involved with a design are similar (maybe even exactly the same) as another design. For example, context-sensitive actions in RPGs such as using the same button for initiating conversation or picking up items. In this scenario, the basic method of interacting with the world is the same — have your character close to an interactable object and press a button. As a synergy, this can create a sense of intuitive game feel when events happen intuitively. Used in the context of friction, suspension of disbelief could break or there is bad game feel when, for example, the exact range for the action to become an option doesn’t feel correct.

Let’s look at a more concrete example: Jumping and movement mechanics in general. The most basic aspect of movement is traveling from point A to point B. But as it turns out, avoiding attacks, repositioning for tactical reasons, and exploration also use moving as their primary method.

Overlapping Outcome

Some designs will produce similar or exactly the same outcome as others. For example, swinging a weapon at an enemy deals damage to it while shooting a projectile at it also deals damage. Overlapping outcomes have a variety of ramifications. The first is that it can promote a diversity of methods and inputs. As per the previous example, the player can adopt different playstyles depending on preference or strategic needs.

Depending on how the outcomes specifically overlap, a variety of scenarios may occur. If the same output happening multiple times is beneficial, this can be a synergy or consistency boost and promote the usage of designs with similar outputs. If the same output happening multiple times is redundant or negligible, this can cause friction or dissuade players from seeking similar outputs.

Overlapping Goal

This is a broader view of “overlapping outcome”. Rather than overlap on a very specific result, this concept is about overlapping results that are also methods towards a larger cause. This example is a bit abstract but bear with me: Shooting games often have recoil — a mechanic where shooting multiple times in succession bumps up your line of sight — and spread — the concept of projectiles having a bit of randomness within a certain area of its targeting reticle. If a player is able to change one of these stats in a beneficial way through modifications or skills, they can make the weapon easier to handle and, by extension, more accurate. However, being able to do both has stacking effects; a mod that lowers their recoil and another mod tightening the spread works in tandem to make the weapon more accurate in a way that may be more efficient than being all-in on just one method.

Overlapping Restrictions & Conditions

In this context, restrictions and conditions are situations in which a design is enabled or best thrives in. While it might be reductive to say any resource cost is a condition and that creates an overlap, there is some merit to it. Finite resources do lead to decision making if different options are viable. However, I instead want to engage this concept with more abstract restrictions and conditions.

Threshold conditions such as “you must have X number of Y” can be difficult to achieve. However, if many designs share that same condition, you only have to satisfy that condition once before all of those designs are active… Now that’s synergy! Of course, it’s also possible that some conditions are not exactly the same but are somewhat similar. “You must have at least 5 cards in your discard” and “you must have 3 different card types in your discard,” are similar enough that satisfying one either satisfies the other or makes a lot of progress in doing so.

Of course, friction can occur depending on what exactly the restriction or condition is. For example: “You may only have one card of this type in play”. Suddenly, having too many cards with this condition can lead to unusable game pieces depending on the game state!

Overlapping “Negative Space”

It’s important to recognize that a design is first and foremost an instrument for the audience to engage with. While not always self-evident, designs, at a base level, simply are. Matches can be lit, pens can be used to draw, and cards can be played and create a specific result in a game state. But it’s also important to recognize that designs also are not. A match is not designed to freeze something, a pen will find it difficult to erase markings, and cards don’t do things that aren’t listed in its rules text.

While the philosophical nature of this gnaws at your brain, let me explain why I bring up this concept. Designs are able to overlap in what they’re missing. In many cases, this will manifest in games as a shared weakness. From the perspective of a designer, this can be something for players to strategically exploit. Maybe it’s a dare or a challenge to players. From the perspective of a player, this negative space can be something they try to mitigate, ignore, or wholly lean into. This concept does not necessarily have to be contextualized around weaknesses. The absence of a quality can be an appeal all its own and open up different avenues of interacting with designs that share that absence.

This is fairly abstract so let’s examine more concrete examples:

A player adopts several skills that improve their defensive prowess. A noticeable “negative space” is that none of these skills improve their damage output (yes, there’s a school of thought that higher survivability means more opportunities to deal damage but that is beside the point).
A player might want to load their kit with a ton of skills that deal high amounts of damage. However, the negative space that these loadout shares among its skills are none of these skills improve their survivability through defensive bonuses or health gain.

Whether any of these avenues are viable for a game obviously depends on the designer’s goals and player’s tolerance for any potential drawbacks. Maybe the high defense loadout can be useful with non-obvious add-ons like a damage-over-time skill. Maybe the high-damage build remains untouched because its high-risk nature is deemed to be enough of a drawback. Regardless, these types of decisions are better informed by understanding the overlap of “negative space”.

Credit: Several “Fadeaway Girl” illustrations by Coles Phillips

Overlapping Appeal

Beyond what a design does or means, how it engages the audience is an extremely important aspect. For our purposes, “appeal” is a shorthand for an aesthetic that draws favor from the audience. Dinosaurs are cool, primal beasts and cutesy-wutesy mammalians are just huggin’ adorable. Maybe it could be high-tech cybernetic beings darting across cityscapes right under the nose of authoritarian despots, wizards preparing meticulously crafted magic formulas, or, of course, just a dude with a bat who could go toe-to-toe against any of these fantastical ideations.

Beyond this type of appeal, there are also demographics who are drawn to more abstract sensibilities: They enjoy playing a role such as a general of an army or they enjoy specific gameplay patterns like playing cards and having them return to their hand so they can be played again. These are just a few of the several axes that make up a design’s appeal.

At the base level, overlapping appeal manifests as “more of a good thing” and “too much of a thing”. However, I’d like to express that there are layers to this. For example, a contrast of appeal could be the main appeal! An army of cuddly pigs being headlined by an arch-demon of terror that brings forth thunder upon foes is a wonderful imagery to behold. A hodge-podge of random equipment that are fashionably mismatched but grant cohesive bonuses is a staple of role-playing adventure games.

Beyond the Overlap

That took a while but we’ve finally covered the makings of “overlap” as a design concept. However, there are still some related topics that I’d like to go over.

Including Overlaps

Overlaps are a great tool for introducing depth and complexity to a project. At minimum, they are little bits and pieces the audience can discover beneath a surface-level view. Taken a bit further, they become a set of evolving puzzle pieces that morph as perspectives change and experience is gained. Discovering that a design has entirely new sides to it when viewed in relation to another design is a great boon for both players and designers. Not only does it introduce novelty, but it makes each unique design that much more efficient in both production costs and space taken up.

When it comes to including overlaps, it mostly concerns evaluating different parts of a design and changing or adding things to make it relate with another. For example, if a design makes a character run faster, another design could also make the character run faster. But to avoid simply duplicating the design, introducing a small twist, such as a conditional activation, and you’re off to the races.

Of course, things get more nuanced very quickly. Even games with simple components often interact in a number of ways. Give those components more complexity, such as conditional abilities or unique mechanics, and the number of possibilities balloons very quickly. Introducing changes to interject a design into those possibilities can be tough, but it’s not impossible by any means. Let’s take our earlier example of two skills that improve run speed and craft a third skill that overlaps with the pair.

Basic skill that increases run speed.
Skill that increases run speed but has a conditional activation… Let’s say the condition is “every time the character jumps over an obstacle”.
This third skill can take inspiration from a number of things. Does it care about run speed? Maybe it improves the faster the character is running or requires a run speed threshold to be met before activating. Another direction to go is caring about the condition of the second skill. Maybe it makes it easier to jump over obstacles or creates obstacles so the second skill can be activated regardless of the environment.

Including a Strict Division

Of course, there are benefits to more individualistic designs that do not overlap. At its extreme, it does mean there is less complexity and nuance which boosts other forms of appeal. When somebody doesn’t have to figure out how or why something works the way it does, it lets them think about how cool that thing is.

Notably, projects with fewer overlapping designs are easier to manage in many ways. Fewer potential interactions means fewer unexpected combinations that lead to unintended (read: BROKEN) scenarios. It’s tough to consider everything, everywhere, at every time. But there can be a great sense of relief when a design does its thing and does not do a different thing regardless of its environment, what it does to other things, or what other things do to it.

Another important aspect is that overlaps tend to mean more complex or novel designs are being used. Our earlier example about run speed skills introduced a fair amount of unique concepts to include those overlaps. Not caring about those types of overlaps does mean each design can retain their simpler base selves.

Reducing the number of overlaps between designs is a tougher thing to do than one might expect. Not because it’s difficult to conceptualize or implement, but because removing aspects of a design will often cut away what made its initial ideation appealing in the first place. In most circumstances, I’d advise to instead remove a design fully if it can’t be adjusted easily or introduce strict guidelines prior to making designs so that overlaps will mostly happen in a relatively controlled state.

Presenting Overlaps

I’ve mentioned previously that overlaps are a great thing for players (and designers) to discover. To briefly recap, uncovering new facets in a design when it interacts with something introduces novel and emergent scenarios. Given enough possibilities and dynamic environments, it can be impossible to foresee every situation and that is an excellent opportunity for pleasant surprises.

However, an important part of designing fun and cool interactive experiences is helping your audience reach it. There is a time and place for Easter eggs and planned esotericism, but that is beside the point. On a broader level, designing some cool stuff that people will love then hiding it from the world at large is mostly self-defeating. So let’s cover some ways of presenting overlaps.

Label them. Keyword mechanics and repetition are common signals within games. Similarly, using an exact phrase multiple times over different designs can be a great signal. Shared subtypes in typal strategies and naming conventions like “X of the Archetype Name” are also examples of exactly this.
Have overlapping designs within proximity of each other. This is mostly seen on a product-level; preconstructed decks are a great opportunity to force multiple designs to be seen together. Of course, metaphorical and abstract proximity can also be a thing though this will require a bit of stretching. For example, there could be effects with subtle differences but will mostly be a clean overlap. Effects that trigger when starting an attack and effects that trigger after an attack finishes are technically different. However, there are definitely scenarios where they are functionally similar.
Use a more immediately obvious overlap to “trick” people into discovering more subtle ones. For example, a group of dragon cards might have a subtle overlap in their effects that would be skipped over by many players. However, people are going to jam a bunch of dragon cards in their deck because they are cool. In the process of playing the cards, they will run into scenarios where those overlaps are meaningful events and discover them.

Overlaps Are Not Just Circles

I have largely been speaking about overlaps as venn diagrams or A + B combos. But in projects with a sprawling trove of designs and dynamic states, A will often overlap with more than just B. Not only that, but overlaps will inevitably cover more than just the relationship between two things. A + B is real, but so is A + C + F and B + C + G. The lists and permutations only expand as more overlapping designs are introduced.

Similarly, why two designs overlap with each other might not be the exact reason one of those designs overlaps with a third design. You need only look at the “running skills” exercise I did in the “Including Overlaps” section for an example. There’s a good chance that a fourth skill that overlaps with only the first and third can be conceptualized. Then a fifth skill that overlaps with the second and third skill will be made.

Credit: Fig. 3 from “FusionScan: accurate prediction of fusion genes from RNA-Seq data” by Pora Kim, Ye Eun Jang, & Sanghyuk Lee

When you combine a strong understanding of design space and different overlap types, the number of possibilities explodes. In fact, trying to keep it mentally organized will probably explode most people’s heads. I don’t have any heuristics or strategies for keeping track of this myself.

However, I bring this up because it is a useful axis of design to keep in mind. Overlaps really are an exercise in exploring design space and figuring out ways to recontextualize different aspects of a design through relationships. And understanding that these different aspects can and will exceed preconceptions can be vitally important for thinking outside of the box.

The Final Lap

With that, I am pretty much over this topic. I hope that this blog has illuminated why some designs work and don’t work with each other in excruciating detail as well as given you tools and knowledge necessary to make those scenarios with a bit of intentionality.

Ciao,
blobspike

blogspike

Mulling Over Overlaps