Center for Design Innovation
Tuesday, May 20, 5:30-7:00pm
BACKGROUND
If one were to invent a game by today's standards, what would it look like? Probably it would be bounded by time (that is, it would have a clock), it would set a goal for its players, it would represent a self-contained world (a game board, an island, a castle, a grid), and it would have a short set of rules. The latter is explained by the need to make the game easy to understand by the largest possible audience. Another contemporary standard is to design games with lots of color, preferably set in a 3D-like environment, and either irrepressibly cute (as the writers of Wired magazine define it) or drearily literal (as exemplified by technically sophisticated "immersive" games replete with surface details).
Progress within a game is typically marked by an accumulation of points, dollars, or similar signs of wealth. Sometimes these are substituted by the earning of additional powers or abilities. In any case, most casual games rely on players "getting things". The more stuff you have, the closer you are to winning. Players are regularly reminded of the connection between performance and wealth. For most casual games, the prevailing approach is to generously reward even a player's very small achievements but to penalize sparingly. The object is to minimize a player's negative experience while overstating the positives. Hence, points and units of currency are doled out in the thousands and final scores counted in the millions even for below average play.
The game would also have to be fun, a word of early English origin with a modern usage that (I have read) doesn't have a simple equivalent in other languages. Fun is not mere pleasure, delight or enjoyment — words that don't convey the social dimension of fun. To explain the element of fun in games is to unravel its complexity. Wholesome fun occurs in the presence of others. Private fun implies something darkly obsessive, even perverse.
Undoubtedly the experience has something to do with choice but a game cannot pose too many because then it starts to resemble the confusion and difficulty the player experiences in the real world (see Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice). For many players a game with many choices is stressful and unpleasant. But if the choices are too few, then the result is that other modern malady, boredom. Somewhere between complexity and boredom is fun — getting just the right number of choices in front of a player at the point she must decide. Unsurprisingly, games can be contrived so as to increase her odds of guessing correctly, minimizing unpleasant experiences while holding her in suspense. There are additional ways of guiding her to make correct choices, in effect driving her to a predetermined outcome, in effect giving her the illusion of skill. (See Gary Rivlin’s NY Times Sunday Magazine story from May 9, 2004, The Chrome-Shiny, Lights-Flashing, Wheel-Spinning, Touch-Screened, Drew-Carey-Wisecracking, Video-Playing, ‘Sound Events’-Packed, Pulse Quickening Bandit).
One game that would not be invented today is chess. It takes too long to play. Its rules are complicated. Its design is too abstract. Its reputation as an “intellectual” game puts it beyond consideration for most seeking fun, making chess the negative model for game design by today’s standards. Texas Hold ’Em, a poker variant, is another example of a complicated game that seemingly wouldn’t make today’s cut but has proven wildly popular due to a number of cable TV programs and online tutorial sites. It’s noteworthy that poker is often discounted as a game, considered a vice, is played for high stakes, etc.
(See the Overview for this presentation.)
