All Games Are Played To Win [Design]

(thanks David)

‘Win’ is a loaded term. It seems of the past, about bullying and other gloating behaviour. To say that games are all about winning seems to detract from their potential as an art and their role as a medium for grown-ups. This is unfortunate, because I think no game design really functions well without incorporating winning.

 

What is a Win?

The prospect of winning is why players learn to overcome or master a game. A successful game needs to understand and use the concept of winning rather than pretend it doesn’t exist.

To win does not, however, mean that someone else has to lose. To win a game of Monopoly, a player has to make every other player bankrupt, and to win at football one team has to defeat another. However to win single player Halo means overcoming the challenges set by the game itself in order to complete it. To play co-operatively means you and some friends get to do that together.

There are co-operative wins, single player wins, little wins, epic wins and others that are all positive and empowering reasons to play games. Winning is simply the accomplishing of something significant in a game.

There are essentially two categories of win.

The first is victory. Victories are won by overcoming formal challenges. They break play up into segments, and when a player fails to attain a victory, the result is defeat. If you fail to beat the boss, you start the level again. If you concede a goal, you have to score two to win. Defeat has consequences.

Conditions of victory are explicit and derived from the game rather than the player. The rules of fencing dictate how victory is determined, as do the rules of Counter Strike. Single player or co-operative games set challenges for victory in terms of level or mission completion, which result in the player replaying the mission if they are defeated. Multiplayer competitive games set up rules that bring players into conflict with each other, and the resulting score defines who is the victor.

The second kind of win is achievement. Achievements are more personal than victories, more creative and less formal. An achievement is laying out your restaurant according to your liking in Restaurant City, or pulling off a tricky turn in a racing game. They are usually smaller than victories and so they occur during play rather than segmenting it.

Conditions of achievement usually come from the player rather than the game, and they do not result in defeat if they are not attained. Some games monitor for achievements and congratulate the player on attaining them. Other achievements are purely personal. Achievements are thus more subtle, but fulfilling, than victories.

Some games are almost wholly based on victories, and some are based on achievement. Minecraft is 100% achievement-driven, for example, while Guitar Hero is largely based on victory. Most games are somewhere in the middle.

 

Fair Play

Games are compelling because they feel fair.

A game is a world in which the player is empowered. The levers of play within that world are simpler than reality, and so the path to accomplishment is clearer than reality. The player therefore feels she has a fair chance of winning in a game in a way that she does not get in life.

Jane McGonigal’s book (Reality is Broken) says that the reason gamers prefer game worlds to the real world is that game worlds are more exciting and engaging. Reality, she concludes, is dull compared to the excitement and chosen work of games. I agree, and would add that fairness is the differentiating factor that games have which real life does not.

Real life is hard to understand, arbitrary and often unfair. A person in real life is rarely empowered, frequently feeling as though their life is purposeless and essentially at the mercy of the fates. But a game is fair. You can play it, you can get better at it, and if you do then you will accomplish. You will plant that virtual garden, save a princess or score a triple word score because of your own ability and nothing else. You will win.

While the study of rewards suggests that perception of fairness sometimes matters more than actual fairness, the principle of rewarding play is that the win must feel fair. Games that seem entirely based on luck are not that interesting (unless they involve money stakes as in gambling), while charity in games makes players feel incompetent. For a reward to feel like a win, it must feel as though the player worked for it.

 

It’s Not About the Taking Part

In the opening section of her book, McGonigal declares that games are not about winning. Citing examples such as Scrabble (where she says the goal is to spell interesting words) and Tetris (which she calls unwinnable) she comes down on the side of game playing actually being about the taking part.

In my opinion she’s wrong.

Scrabble is not actually played to spell interesting words, it’s played for points and position. The compressed murder mystery game Werewolf assigns characters and roles to players as a part of a village, but the goal is not the playing of those roles. It’s about finding the werewolves before they kill the villagers. I.e. to win.

Tetris is not unwinnable. Players figure out how to place blocks strategically and set up careful arrangements to create canyons so that they can slot in the long tetromino and clear four rows at once. Why? Because the mere achievement of doing that is difficult (a little win), because it earns bonus points (a bigger win) and contributes toward the goal of beating the previous best high score (a big win).

Extension of actions in a game provide new ways for the player to win, and loops and dynamics pace out those moments and make them worthwhile. Playing Werewolf repeatedly allows players to develop better social strategies to win, and Scrabble teaches you to watch the positioning of key squares on the board as much as realising you have awesome letters.

Winning focuses a player’s mind on the task at hand and encourages her to try and play better. The prospect of winning encourages optimality. That is to say, players work to try to find the optimal actions that will lead them to a win.

 

The Spirit of the Game

However most players like to play within the spirit of the game. Negative wins occur when a player is playing according to what the rules allow, but somehow the tactic that they use feels unfair.

Most of my friends refuse to play Scrabble with me because I have the reputation for being a negative player. I often block off sections of the board with small words if I can’t see a way toward a bonus square myself. Strategically what I’m doing is trying to win, and this means I deny other players the chance to make interesting words. However to some people that feels as though it’s not really in the spirit of the game. While my play style is technically correct, the problem is that it robs other players of their small wins.

In StarCraft, the same often happens when experienced players use early rush tactics to defeat more junior players. Junior players like to have some fun building a base before engaging in the proper business of war, but a rush interrupts that and destroys all their efforts almost as soon as the game gets started. Friends who play StarCraft sometimes have house rules where they agree not to rush, or minimum time limits before attacking, because it feels more in the spirit of the game.

Online competitive games are both the poison and the cure for this kind of behaviour. Players are faceless to one another, and so there is no social repercussion for playing purely to win. Such games tend to form sub-cultures that have no interest in the spirit of the game, resulting in very competitive elites.

 

Hollow Wins

I played Transport Tycoon many years ago and found it an engaging and complex challenge. I was hooked on getting my train lines built between towns, figuring out the best cargo to transport, and worrying about whether I was falling behind the AI players.

Then one day I discovered an exploit.

I could not remove any stations or train lines that had been laid by the AI players, but I realised I could remove their roads. Furthermore, while any player could lay a rail junction across a pre-existing section of road, they could not build a road across a pre-existing section of rail. I realised that if I broke all of the roads between the towns on the map and just laid large strips of useless rail between them, the AI players would no longer be able to set up road or rail links.

At first I was very pleased with myself. I broke all the roads, littered the landscape with redundant sections of track, and watched the AI struggle. My earnings started to soar while theirs went fallow, and I had effectively won the game. Then I realised I couldn’t play the game any more because I knew that I could win it at any time of my choosing. My exploit had effectively robbed me of any reason to play the game because the wins within now felt hollow.

An investment of time, creativity and skill to bring forth a win is the primary reason why players have picked up the gun. When they don’t need to try any more the game becomes boring and the wins feel hollow. Hollow wins always breed the same result:

Players walk away.

 

Conclusion

Winning is positive. It is creative, optimal, encourages insight and productive play. Without the prospect of achievement or victory, a game is not really a game at all. It does not mean that games need to be competitive and brash. But it does mean that the game needs to have purpose and challenge, whether of skill, smarts or patience, so that the end result is the attainment of things that matter.

When we win we achieve and become better players (and people) for it. We enjoy accomplishment in a fair world when our real world frequently denies us this sensation. That’s why all games are played to win.

But mostly in good spirit.

Comments

[Pete]

I think you're both wrong*.

For me, if a game has been a positive use of time, I'm happy**. Overall, I don't care whether I win or lose, or do or don't, or proceed or not; I just care that I've been entertained for a while.

*: although, in your Loops article, you imply that hitting a note in Guitar Hero is a win. That being the case, I enjoy 'winning' individual notes in Guitar Hero, but I don't play it to win tracks.

**: unless I'm playing Fight Night with my best buddy. In that case, if my mini Tyson is repeatedly forced to go to sleep, I do gradually get less and less happy.

[Gary Penn]

Another thoughtful piece, Mr Kelly.

I also disagree with Jane. Of course games are about winning (well, overcoming challenges). There is no game without challenge otherwise it's just play.

Play in itself can be rewarding but you need challenges to make play compelling. Challenges can be primary (the big win), secondary (supporting the big win) or tertiary (no effect on the big win). Challenges create friction and friction means drama and emotional stimulation. Freytag's triangle/pyramid applies just as much to games as it does good stories.

Your Transport Tycoon example shows how the lack of drama can undermine a game (the exploit killed the friction).

I don't think it's as simple as perceived fairness. It's more a matter of feeling like you can make the difference and a sense of 'fair play' is part of that - but, as we see with sports and many card and board games, luck can play just a big a role (but too great a dependency on luck is a bad thing).

Tetris tends to lack explicit challenges so there's nothing formal to win. But I agree that if you set yourself the challenge of, say, beating a score then it's perfectly wintastic. (As an aside, I find most versions of Tetris are inadequate games because they lack formal challenges so I'm forced to make my own entertainment.)

Your comments about Scrabble remind me of the value of opponents who are out not to win necessarily but to make sure you have the best fun.

http://garypenn.tumblr.com/post/105961840/love-frustration

Such opponents are seldom human so there's enormous scope for improving artificial player performances (and most people have no idea if they are playing real or artificial players online anyway).

[Pete]

Ooh, make that a third person I disagree with, then. Playing without challenge isn't 'just play'. In the traditional way of talking about them, toys seem to differ from games in two respects: games have challenge, and games have rules.

You take challenge away (the bit that you two think is important), and you're arguing you're not left with a game. I think one *is* left with a game. Entertainment with rules is where it's at.

Plants vs Zombies is the most obvious example I can think of at the moment. It's rarely challenging, but it is a staggering amount of fun. I'd still enjoy it if there weren't a win/lose state, or different zombie types, or anything. It wouldn't be 'just' play (for which I read 'unstructured play'), but it'd still be ace fun. For me, at least.

(And yes, you could still argue that there's still some level of challenge (if you didn't bother doing anything, you'd certainly 'lose'), but it's not really my point.)

Maybe it's all terminology, but to boil down to games being 'just' about challenge – which everyone seems to be doing at the moment – is, I think, doing the medium a disservice.

[Tadhg]

I think it's more that games rest on a bedrock of challenge. Taking PvZ Unlimited Mode (as you've described it) there's still a challenge there in keeping things organised.

A good example for me is Rez. Rez has a mode in it called Travelling where the player is able to zip through the levels and shoot stuff, with absolutely no fear of losing lives etc.

It's completely without threat or challenge in any real sense. It's also pretty boring though.

[Pete]

Come to think of it, this discussion touches on one of the earlier things in McGonigal's book that I disagree with. She defines the four things that games have to have: goals, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.

Whilst I'd find the second and fourth difficult to argue with, I certainly don't believe that games have to have goals (in the traditional sense), and I certainly don't believe that game have to have feedback systems (at least not in the traditional sense).

For an example of the former, we're into Thought Experiment time. One could easily imagine a version of Tetris that doesn't ramp up in difficulty, or have scoring, or anything like that (things that games 'need'). I reckon that a lot of people that like Tetris would happily spend an hour or two with this version of Tetris, even though there's no goal (other than spending one's time engaged in positive rules-based play, but that's a goal of the person, not a defined goal of the game). I'd expect that it would be more likely to appeal to people for whom traditional games don't.

On to feedback systems. In Reality is Broken, feedback systems are defined as things that tell the player how close they are to achieving the goal. Again, you can have a game (according to my rules) without a feedback system. I'd say that something that tells you after play whether you've won or not could be useful - but note that that falls outside McGonigal's definition.

Example: Foursquare. I don't earn badges on purpose, but when I'm told I've got one, my happiness increases accordingly. Note that the feedback is post-goal, not pre-, thus falling outside the definition.

I'd posit that one could play Chromaroma for a while without getting feedback, as well. You'd still know you were playing the game, but not in a goal-driven way, and without relying (or wanting) feedback telling you how close you were to whatever goal you're not interested in achieving.

[Gary Penn]

There are degrees of challenge, for sure (and Farmville's even thinner than Plants Versus Zombies in that regard). I can have fun playing with the Plants Versus Zombies toys with their natural rules (that govern the microcosm) and even supernatural rules (that govern how to play) but it's still only play (and I say "only" with great respect for the power of play) but ONLY when a challenge - that unique combination of goal and threat of failure - is introduced do I feel there's a game to be played.

I'm in two minds about the need for a feedback system to make a game; it can help, certainly, but you could just as easily (artistically) choose not to provide any feedback - even any acknowledgement of what needs to be done and your status. Feedback seems more about enrichment.

Feedback contributes to fulfilling a pillar of "Alive" (attentive and informative) - and how you do that - the extent to which you do that - is down to author preference. (There's arguably more merit to a game with no feedback than one with too much.)

If there's no formal clarification of challenge then it has to be self-generated - but that's still a challenge to overcome: a game to be won. Any feedback'd also be generated by yourself.

With the example of Foursquare, only with feedback do you know there's a challenge completed - whether you were driven to complete that challenge or not. There again, you could just've easily set that challenge (made the game) yourself. Foursquare fulfils a pillar of "Convenience" in that it tracks statistics you'd otherwise have to track yourself (and that could involve near-implausible effort) - information you can use to determine a challenge and its degree of completion.

There's definitely a degree of semantics involved. It's a matter of whatever works - a degree of repeatable pragmatism - otherwise it's no more than rhetoric, no matter how entertaining :)

[Tadhg]

I don't think unchanging Tetris would really do it for people. Even the arguably much less vicious Bejewelled doesn't actually stand still, nor comparatively 'easy' games like Peggle. Pure monotone interaction like that is really not that interesting, so I think players would play it for minutes, not hours.

On the definition of what is a game, I think Jane's definition is a bit lacking. Voluntary participation is a bit woolly, as there's voluntary participation in sitting in a movie watching a scary film as much as there is in picking up a controller to play Halo.

Goals I get. Rules, however, is very vague.

I'm blogging a series on this at the moment, but the basic gist of it is that there are actions (what I do), constants (the global rules of the world), rules (specific arbitrary limits), conditions (for completing victories), loops (reactions to actions), dynamics (informal groups of loops) and segments (formal groups of dynamics).

I think feedback is important too though. The thing about the passive play of Foursquare and ChromaRoma is that they are so passive that I barely remember I#'m playing them. This means they're a distraction (from the engagement hierarchy) and have no real way of doing anything deeper with me other than acting as Gamificating Air Miles. I think passive play isn't really that interesting when you get right down to it, because by definition there's not much work involved.

[Karl Bunyan]

Reiner Knizia (about the most successful board game designer there is) has a very good quote: "When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning."

[Tadhg]

Nicely put.

[Eolirin]

I think this is pretty much right in the context of games as a specific subset of interactive media, but I'd only point out that not everything that gets called a game actually *is*. By these definitions, many art games are not games, even though they're often placed under that banner. Interactive works can involve a lack of a win condition for purposes of expression, commentary, or narrative and this is entirely legitimate, if not necessary. As you point out, having a way to win leads to optimizing for the mechanical rule set, and as long as that is the focus of behavior, emotional response will be difficult to inspire (though, that removal does not need to necessarily be done by the designer - a moment that suddenly causes the player to shift perspective away from winning is sufficient. See: Train). People have a hard time getting attached to rules: I'm not going to blink about sacrificing a game piece if I'm optimizing for a victory condition; I will hesistate before sacrificing a character that I enjoy the *experience* of being around though.

@Pete, I think if you view things somewhat more atomically, you'll find that those four things are indeed necessary in all games. Even your unramping tetris game has a goal; not to let the blocks fill up the screen, that is, not to lose.

And a game without feedback is not playable. In tetris, the block falling down the screen is feedback, having the block move when you push a button is feedback, the button actually depressing when you push it is feedback even, an so on. You just plain can't have interactivity without feedback; only static, unchanging media can get away without feedback mechanisms, without it you have no way of entering an input. Certainly you can have bad feedback, or fuzzy feed back, but if there's nothing there, there is no way to interact with anything. If you were to try to construct a game with the least possible amount of feedback possible, it would essentially be something that at seemingly random simply shouted out "You win!" but even that is a form of feedback, and given enough time with said game, assuming there was an underlying mechanic for making the game go "You win!" people would be able to work out the rules of the game and eventually master it by optimizing for the "You Win!" conditions.