What Games Are

The Four Lenses of Game Making

For years it’s been apparent that interpreting games and their makers through the opposed lenses of gameplay or story is inadequate. Such a one-dimensional spectrum breeds false oppositions (fun-or-art?) while either ignoring many games that don’t fit or reinterpreting them so they fit badly. The spectrum is too reductive and, while it is easy to summarise, it leaves out too much context.

Rather than talking about games in terms of two lenses, I use four (potentially five, but I’ll come back to that). Each represents a common set of assumptions and predispositions that I often see in makers, and there are correlations between them which makes for an interesting (though perhaps deceptively symmetric) diagram.

This post is long, but I’d like to take you through each in turn. I think you’ll find it useful.

Worlds in Motion [Game Design]

Game worlds are a subset of all kinds of worlds, defined by a specific quality that other worlds lack. There is a problem to be solved, an area to be explored, a reward to be earned or a contest to be won. There is a kind of pressure when playing in a game, and a sense of risk. There is change, death, rebirth and a state of flux.

So in a sense the difference between a game world and a virtual world is one of motion. Game worlds are built for movement.

Do Your Players Know Their Role? [Game Design]

Some games are made of smaller games, like Wii Sports or the Total War games. Other separations are softer. Vehicle play in Grand Theft Auto feels quite different from on-foot, and GTA is essentially two games which link strongly.

When games mix they can create exciting new experiences, but many mixes just don’t work. Rather than being enhanced by their interaction, these games pull on each other, leaving the overall experience to be one of dysnergy, the opposite of synergy.

Perhaps the game design has forgotten the importance of the player’s role. Role is not a marketing issue. It is how players understand your game and why it's awesome

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.

Techthulhu [Games and Future Fantasy]

"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." - H.P. Lovecraft

A common meme surrounding games is that they are supposedly in their infancy, that the reason game stories don't really work very well, or that players don't really participate in games as heroes is a problem of technology and technique.

What the meme is actually trying to say is that games should be unlimited and that they should not accept constraints because one day the tools and techniques will exist to craft the perfect world. This ideality will offer meaning and gameplay, players will become heroes, and finally games will take their rightful place at the head of all media tables.

In his house at R'lyeh, dead Techthulhu waits dreaming. The meme is beautiful. It's also wrong.