What Games Are

The Win Imperative [TechCrunch]

This week on TechCrunch I wrote about one of the common themes of What Games Are: the precept that all games are played to win. Using this theme as a basis my latest article talks about the role of rewards in games and how reward by itself is often boring without the spark of a win to guide it. 

As usual, you can read more here.

Everything You'll Ever Need To Know About Gamification [TechCrunch]

As I wrote a while ago, gamification is much simpler than some folks would like it to be. It's also balder in its practise than in its ambitions. My most recent post on TechCrunch continues in this vein and offers some simple rules and how-to to puncture the myths and be pragmatic. By all means gamify. Just don't lose your head in the clouds while doing so. 

Read the full article here.

On Player Characters and Self Expression [Game Design]

"There is no such thing as a player character" is the kind of tagline that gets me into trouble in some places. So is "the emotional connection between player and character that many game makers believe exists in fact does not". Both contain a powerful subtext, questioning everything from a player's sense of identity to the validity of their experiences. Read the wrong way, they can seem to say that all the emotion you feel in playing games is made up. 

Of course that's not my intent. When I say "there is no such thing as a player character" I don't mean that there is nothing. When I say play occurs through "dolls", likewise. My intent is to reinterpret the emotional experience of play within a game-native context, and so derive useful insight that could apply to all games. In otherwords, the emotions are real but our way of talking about them is broken.

This is an essay to fully explain this concept, to set what's really going on when most players play games in context, about the importance of identity and self expression. (Warning: this article is over 8000 words in length.)

Games Are Not Experiences

E3, trailers and previews mostly sell games based on potential experience. Look at the haunting graphics of Journey or listen to a podcast about the epic scope of Skyrim, and the promise of experience is there. Come into our worlds, they say, they are thaumatic.

Sometimes they are, however those worlds which are successfully so are based on more than just experiences. Experient design’s goal may be to take the player on an emotional journey, but it’s the games that pay attention to what happens in between emotional events that truly are magical. Experiential highs are just one tool in the making of games, not what they are. 

The Perils of Franchise Fatigue [Single Franchise Publishing]

Q: What’s the biggest mistake that a successful studio can make?
A: Walking away from its key franchise.

Q: Why would a studio do that?
A: Because the staff get bored.

Q: Why is it a mistake?
A: Well…

The Little Deck of Game Design [Project]

In 1975, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt published a deck of cards named Oblique Strategies. Their idea was to give creators a tool to help them get unstuck or see differently. I want to develop a similar kind of deck for game designers. 

Would you like to help?

The Ding Economy [Art]

Some will frame the work of Steve Jobs as showmanship, hoodwinking millions in the quest for power and money. Those same people will roll their eyes in disbelief at fans who left flowers or memorials at Apple stores, or think of it as evidence of just how clever at branding this man was. That cynicism is what prevents ambition or achieving anything of worth and is why most people live what Thoreau called ‘lives of quiet desperation’.

Jobs once said that his ambition was to put a ding in the universe. He did it through being a businessman and artist rather than one or the other. It’s a way of working which inspires loyalty, which social media amplifies. It’s no accident that art-and-business companies like Apple and Nintendo have dominated their respective fields over the last decade, or why James Dyson can charge more than competitors for state of the art vacuum cleaners and yet still win.

The 21st century economy belongs to business artists. It is a creative economy where dings spread like viruses and create huge profits. It’s also the economy where commodity jobs get devalued down toward near zero. I’m not saying you need to be Steve Jobs. I am saying you need to find your own ding and then create it. What does your ding in the universe look like?

(Today’s image comes from Scalar Scopes.)

Find the New Positive [Motivation]

Making games is so tough that most makers do not stay beyond half a decade. Frustration, stress and uncertainty nip at them while bad management and poor practises sap their will. This tension is common to all of the arts and it breeds very negative creative cultures. Failed actors, alcoholic pulp novelists and game makers who develop liver damage from stress are all the same breed. They want to make people laugh or cry, or maybe just to make a generous living, and when neither happens they grow resentful.

The only real solution is to find a new source of positivity.

Fun: Simple to Explain, Hard to Accept [Constants]

Game developers ask ‘what is fun?’ and academics often answer that fun is seemingly simple but actually fiendishly hard to explain. Everything is potentially fun and trying to encompass it all in one statement is impossible.

When any debate becomes so wide, the intent of the original question is lost. Developers are not really asking ‘what is fun?'’ in the universal sense. They’re asking why does their game suck. Pragmatically then, fun is:

The joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics.

However the idea that fun can be reduced to 9 little words is just the sort of thinking that makes some people angry, because it sounds like (and is) a hard limit on what games can be.

Your Rage Is Pointless [Motivation]

Network is my favourite film. It tells the stories of Howard Beale, and more broadly of network news itself, as Beale goes insane on air and taps into the rage of a generation. “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!” he cries, and the whole nation cries with him.

Sometimes it’s like that in games. Consider how many developers hate Zynga, Ian Bogost’s declaration that gamification is bull, or a recent thread on Facebook asking whether Angry Birds is really that good, to be met with a torrent of acidic responses. Consider many of the threads in forums like The Chaos Engine where shared misery is a state of being.

Resentment, anger, begrudgery, disappointment and so on are common in any creative field. Yet they serve no purpose and can sap your enthusiasm for trying to do something awesome if you let them.