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.

Choose Fairness Over Balance [Game Design]

 

If a game feels unfair then few players want to play it.

What players see happening in the game and how they interpret it can often be at odds with what the game maker knows goes on under the hood. Fairness is subjective: a game is only fair if its players believe it to be so. To the player it really doesn't matter how the game engine does what it does, whether it's actually balanced or full of hacks that break balance in their favour. They only know what they see and what they think they see. That can be very hard for the maker to understand. 

Designing for fairness sounds like a simple principle, but because it's about feelings rather than facts it's actually very complicated. Particularly for multiplayer games.

Great Story, Bad Game: Should The Walking Dead Be Nodal?

The Walking Dead is superbly written, well-voiced and complex. Its characters all have hidden sides. Its sombre music adds a quiet but persistent sense to the horror of its setting. It is beautifully animated, soulful and occasionally very sad. And it uses the fact that it is episodic well, foreshadowing events that might happen and taking account of different branches in the story that you may have chosen.

It’s really great. Until, that is, I play it for a little while.

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.)

Podcast: Are Games Made of Games

As an experiment, I've created an audio podcast of yesterday's post on recursion and chaos theory. Let me know what you think.

 

Are Games Made of Games?

You can also grab the MP3 from here:

Link

 

Are Games Made of Games?

Games usually consist of interconnected and repeating patterns of play which group together to form larger movements. Some designers take this idea further by saying that smaller and larger patterns have much the same shape. So a loop generated from a single action such as hitting an opponent and a movement of play (such as killing a boss) are basically the same thing. One is just a larger version of the other. 

So, they say, games are made of games. Are they?

(Click here for the podcast of this post)

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 Draw Something Is...

… is a game.

In contrast to the Dear Esther ‘is it a game?’ question of two weeks ago (answer: no), the question arises whether Draw Something is a game. To some it doesn’t feel like one because it is creative and based on user collaboration, but like charades or Pictionary this does not disqualify it:

A game is a simplified, fair, fascinating, empowering and enclosed world whose purpose is to provide structured play through moderated yet unscripted actions and learnable dynamics, with the goal of winning through victory or achievement.

Most people who read this definition seem to fail to notice ‘achievement’ and only see ‘victory’, thus assuming that I’m equating games with competition. That’s simply not the case. Games are much broader.

The key qualities of a game are structured play, moderated yet unscripted actions (especially of the kind that lead to meaningful change) and learnable dynamics. Draw Something has all of those qualities. Dear Esther does not.

 

(Primer References: achievement, action, empowerment, enclosure, fairness, game, victory, win)

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.

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.