Every game begins with an agreement.
We press start, load in, pick a class, and without realising it, we sign something. Not in writing, just with trust. Trust that the system will behave as advertised and that the effort you put in will be rewarded. Trust that what’s happening on screen obeys rules, even if we haven’t read them yet.
That’s what I call the invisible contract. It’s the unspoken deal between player and system that governs everything else.
And when it’s designed well, you don’t notice it. But when it breaks, even slightly, you feel it in your gut.
This post isn’t about a particular game. It’s a theoretical unpacking of how design reflects culture, control, and consequence. About what games teach us, not through plot, but through systems. And how those lessons often stick with us, whether we notice them or not.
Mechanics Are Moral
Every mechanic encodes values. Not intentionally, perhaps. But values slip in anyway, through scarcity, progression, punishment, collaboration. Systems reflect the mindset of their creators, whether those creators admit it or not.
A game that lets you grind for 80 hours to unlock a single cosmetic item isn’t just stingy, it’s broadcasting a worldview: that time is currency, and joy must be earned. A system that punishes failure with permadeath, but rewards success with exponential power, tells you: risk is absolute, but reward compounds.
You don’t need a narrator to explain this. The system already did.
We absorb these messages whether we want to or not. Sometimes we even carry them out into the real world. The idea that progress is linear. That efficiency is moral. That collaboration is slower than solo play.
Design shapes belief. Quietly. Permanently.
Systems Demand Obedience
Most games are closed systems. You’re handed a world, given a set of rules, and expected to behave accordingly.
Try playing outside those lines, refusing a quest, helping an NPC the game wants you to kill, or using a “wrong” solution, and you’ll quickly meet resistance. The dialogue loops. The objective resets. The game tries to steer you back. This isn’t a bug. It’s control by design.
And again: that says something.
When a system only supports intended behaviour, it reflects a worldview that values obedience over experimentation. Systems that allow deviance, creative play, or emergent storytelling signal the opposite: that agency has value even when it breaks the model.
Most modern games lean toward the former. Predictable. Contained. Safe. It makes sense from a technical perspective. But from a philosophical one? It raises questions.
What kind of players are we training people to be?
Feedback Loops
The most powerful systems are the ones that generate their own feedback.
In games, we call this looping, the way small actions (resource gathering, XP gain, skill upgrades) reinforce bigger actions (boss fights, area control, narrative beats). It’s addictive, but more importantly, it’s structural. It creates a rhythm that the player can’t easily step out of.
We see the same thing IRL
Social media’s engagement mechanics. Corporate productivity gamification. Even education, in some forms, loops effort and output until deviation feels dangerous.
When players (or people) begin to internalise these loops, they stop questioning the system itself. They start optimising instead. Grinding. Min-maxing. Playing correctly.
And if the system is flawed? They’ll likely never notice.
That’s the brilliance and the danger of good design. It can teach without ever stating what it’s teaching.
Design Is Never Neutral
There’s a temptation, especially in games criticism, to separate “mechanics” from “message.” To say, “It’s just how the game works.” But that’s lazy thinking.
Design is architecture. And architecture always reflects intention, even if that intention was unconscious.
If your game rewards speed over patience, you’ve said something. If it punishes diplomacy and rewards violence, you’ve said something. If the only way to win is to become powerful alone, that’s not just a design choice, it’s a worldview with collision detection.
Design is ideology, mapped into player movement.
And the more we play, the more those systems shape us.
So What Do We Do With That?
This isn’t a call to cancel mechanics. It’s a call to understand them.
The next time you play, ask the following:
- What is this system rewarding me for?
- What happens when I play the “wrong” way?
- What assumptions does this design make about who I am, and what I value?
Because games aren’t just games. They’re simulations of belief. And every click, every skill tree, every loot table is part of a story you’re being told, one loop at a time.
The question is whether you agree to it.
That’s the contract.
And it’s always running in the background.