What Games Are: Game Design, Development, Publishing, Marketing and Art

Games and Meaning

What does meaning really mean? Generally it translates as resonant, illuminating, symbolic or significant. In some cases all of the above. A meaningful song might evoke the history of a revolution for the listener, so that even though she does not know the facts she feels a connection to it. The same is true of novels, movies and art. 

Games incorporate agency and so many of the events that happen within them are of a player's making. An action causes change in the game world, and can therefore be significant, but not necessarily resonant, symbolic or illuminating. The question for games is really whether they can incorporate other kinds of meaning too. 

I think they can. 

The Joys of Gaming [Game Design]

You need a good yarn to weave a dream (to steal a quote from Paul), and in a game you need solid fun to weave a world. However fun opens the door to many other joys.

Triple Town is about matching objects, but also the joy of city building. Rez is about targeting and shooting objects, but also the joy of synesthesia and uncovering a story. The Sims is about organising time and space, but also the joys and frustrations of living. 

Fun is merely where we start. What could we build on top of it?

Primer terms used in this post: Action, Art Brain, Boredom, Creative Constant, Dynamic, Fantasy, Fun, Lever, Lizard Brain, Meta-Game, Narrative, Numina, Play Brain, Rule, Storysense, Thauma, Toyplay, Traction

What Dear Esther Is Not...

… is a game. Although there are plenty of equivocations doing the rounds to redefine the term ‘game’ in order to include it in the club, Dear Esther (much like The Stanley Parable) is not a game. It’s a virtual promenade, a gallery of ideas mediated by walking. It’s really quite interesting as a thing in its own right, and I recommend you see it much as I would recommend you go visit the Tate Modern.

But I think the folks trying to mix this and game are doing both a disservice. A game is not defined simply by the ability to walk, but to cause meaningful change within it. Virtual promenades are aiming more for the artistry of the interactive gallery or the amusement ride (depending on their flavour) where the choices are there to simply trigger scripted events.

Some will disagree, or assail the meaning of ‘game’ as a way to characterise my position as limited. With respect, if that’s your takeaway from this post then you’re probably not grasping what I mean.

The Narrative vs Mechanics Circus

Last month I contracted what seemed to be a simple cold which progressed into a bronchial infection combined with asthma that knocked me out for three weeks.

It was really bad timing because around the same time, Raph Koster posted a blog bombshell when he said ‘Narrative is not a game mechanic’. A fair few commenters arose in support or ire. Posts flew about whether the meaning of narrative was too broad or limited, whether this was really about a limited formal view of games versus their possibilities, and so on. Exciting stuff, but I couldn’t really get into it.

I’m still recovering, but being ill has given me the chance to reflect and remember that there’s a reason that I don’t normally use the phrase ‘mechanics’. There's also a reason why I tend to dismiss broad narrativism. It’s because both of them are part of a pretend debate over correctness, and each – in their own way – is just circular flame-bait, an ever-burning meme that goes nowhere.

Tolstoy, Art, Divided Brains and Roleplaying Games

I had the pleasure of attending a talk by the founders of Bioware at BAFTA. It was about whether games are an art and if so, how. Starting with a definition from Tolstoy, they explained that the ability to create key choices and moments within games to evoke emotion is what they consider art. They then invited members of the audience to share their own emotional play experiences.

However something bothered me about the definition and its application. Both speakers and audience were equating art with player emotion, beauty and experience and that’s not really what Tolstoy meant. It can’t be denied that many players of roleplaying games feel that their play experience should be regarded as art, but is it? Or are they actually searching for validation?

This is a post about definitions of art, emotional validation, the duality of play, Iain McGilchrist and whether roleplaying really is what its proponents think it is.

Interactivity Means Doing Stuff [Narrativism]

In discussing some of my older posts on players, characters and stories, I often come across a logic that says stories are interactive, games are also interactive, and therefore games are stories. Which makes sense except for one crucial detail: Stories are not interactive.

Interactivity is not how you react to what you see. It is how you change what you see. To be interactive, a game (or any art) needs to be capable of being intentionally altered by the viewer’s actions. It may sound obvious, but games are about the doing, not the viewing.

The Law of Fascination [Game Design]

It don’t mean a thing if it aint got that swing.

Duke Ellington’s point was simple: Across all genres and eras, music needs to swing. It’s a creative constant. I make a similar point about fun, arguing that it too is a creative constant and a game is not a game if it lacks the joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics.

But some kinds of fun are more appealing than others. Some are innately fascinating and inspire the play brain to play, where others just don’t. I call it the law of fascination.

Belief Engines [Thauma]

Martin Robinson of Eurogamer writes about how the greatest game story he has ever experienced came from playing Pro Evolution Soccer 6. He and two friends elaborated their game around a particular team way past the point of obsession into outright fantasy. It’s an experience, he notes, that more sophisticated football games never managed to capture for all their glitz.

The characterisation of this experience as ‘storytelling’ is wrong but forgivable because we still tend to legitimise the art of games in terms of other arts. What he’s actually describing is a brilliant example of what I call thauma.

Adventure Games Deserved To Die [Narrativism]

Perhaps the greatest lament of all is the one about why the adventure game died. Once hugely popular, adventure games started to fall out of favour in the mid 90s and by the turn of the millennium were essentially dead. However they did not die because of a grand conspiracy on the part of publishers to kill them (as is often asserted).

Adventure games contributed hugely to the development of the video game as an art form, but there’s a basic reason why they went away: They were bad games.

All Good Games Are Tests, But Not Vice Versa

You might call it challenge, difficulty or a scenario, but a universal trait of great games is that they test players in some way. Games have a learning value (as Raph Koster so memorably chronicled) and a huge part of their fun comes from mastering them. From the simplex crossword to the massive complexity of Battlefield 3, games push the player to be better in some way. Even creative games like the Sims are test driven.

Yet it is a major fallacy to conclude that all types of test consequently make for good games. They don’t, and there are good reasons as to why. The psychology of play and boredom gets in the way, the lack of clarity in some kinds of test makes them frustrating and the overall opacity of their results leave players nonplussed.

This is an essay about optimality, the play brain and why successful games need to be far more abstract than they might appear.