Dexter's Mechanics and Flavor
Monday, February 1, 2010 at 8:38PM 
A year or so ago I read up on various critics' top 10 lists of TV shows. One show that came up often was Dexter. I have to say that it's incredible and it fully deserves all the praise it gets. I've been thinking about the show from the point of view of a game designer.
Mechanics Matching Flavor
Game designers are often faced with the challenge of matching mechanics with flavor. What I mean by that is on the one hand, we have to create a system of rules that actually works, but on the other hand, the experience these rules create has to be aesthetically pleasing somehow.
As a simple example, let's take Rook in the card game Yomi. We have to balance Rook so that he's fair against other characters. Rook has lots of slow moves so making them faster would be a way to increase his power if we found him to be too weak. This solution isn't aesthetically pleasing though, because it violates his flavor. He's supposed to be a big stone golem so he probably shouldn't have fast moves. Instead, we need some sort of solution to make him fair (the mechanics), but that fits the experience you're supposed to have while playing Rook (the flavor).
As you can see, the solution I chose is Rock Armor, also know as "super armor" in many fighting games. He has slow attacks, but unlike other characters, he has a way to continue his attack even he gets hit by a faster attack from the enemy. The mechanics and flavor work together here, and there's even another level to it. Rook's card game incarnation has a mechanic (super armor) that's familiar to fighting game players. He'll probably have that same mechanic when he appears in an actual fighting game someday. So not only does Rock Armor make sense inside the card game, but it also helps the entire card game's flavor match the experience of playing a fighting game.
Plot vs Character
Fiction writers face a similar type of challenge. They have to deal with "mechanics" too, though they usually
