Game Musings - Squishy and crunchy

A beautiful spectrum

“Squishy” and “crunchy” are two words I use a lot and hear used a lot when discussing games with other designers. It’s a useful way of understanding the structure of games, so I wanted to talk about what they mean to me.

“Crunchiness” emerges when games use smaller or fewer numbers, have fewer pieces in general, and have a more limited set of interactions. “Squishiness” describes the opposite, when games have broader possibilities, with lots of fluidity and amorphousness. For example, you could think about a complex strategy game like X-COM or Starcraft, with lots of moving creatures and structures and stats and numbers to keep track of (squishy), as opposed to Chess, which all takes place on a tiny 8x8 grid and every piece dies in just one hit (crunchy).

Early in my career, I internalized that “crunchy” games were strictly better, and that the way to improve a game design was to cut down on elements and make the numbers smaller until I found the purest, simplest expression of that game idea. With experience I’ve come to feel that neither is better, but both offer useful pathways to refine a game. Crunchy games tend to be more concise and satisfying, whereas squishiness lends itself to experiences that are open-ended and surprising. I’m also starting to feel that in general, squishier games actually have more mass appeal than crunchy games. That’s one way to characterize why expansive, squishy, open-world titles like Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild wound up being such standout successes for long-running franchises that had previously been much crunchier.

The flipside to this is that squishier games are much, much harder to make. This works against some intuition; you’d expect it to be easier to work in game genres that organically create tons of squishy permutations and interactions (roguelikes, card games, fighting games, open world games…) because there’s so many cool things that can happen, that even if there isn’t designed intention behind every interaction, players are sure to find something fun in there. But when a game is full of ideas that aren’t thought through, it tends to produce a lot of mediocrity, which colors players’ perception of the experience, even if there are really cool ideas in there too. Lots of “noise” in a game can drown out the underlying structure and make it harder for players to keep track of what they’re supposed to pay attention to or what the point is.

I think squishy games tend to succeed when designers put an enormously greater amount of intention and thought into them, so that what parses as “squishiness” in the final game is actually a superstructure of tiny, crunchy design decisions. I think this has some parallels with my previous post on how I always aim to have the smallest wordcount I can. Even when something is jam-packed full of ideas, it’s most worthwhile when all those ideas are fully thought through.

There is a fine balance here, because to make something that feels squishy you actually need there to be undesigned space where things can interact unpredictably. Crafting larger games like this always falls into a difficult conversation of “what do I actually design, and what do I leave open?” Ultimately there’s no true right answer, which is what makes it such a difficult problem. Often you can only arrive at your game’s answer through a slow process of addition, subtraction and testing. But when something in my game feels too linear, simple or predictable then I know it probably needs more squishiness… and when it’s all feeling samey, murky, or amorphous then I start looking for ways to crunch it down.

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