Why do we like games? Because they are fun of course, but what is fun? Game Designer Jesse Schell defined fun as "pleasure with surprise." Satoru Iwata, the late CEO of Nintendo, said that Nintendo tried to "shock people, in a good way" with their games. So maybe surprise is important to the idea of fun, even if we loosely define surprise.
The first person to attempt to write a treatise on computer game design was designer Chris Crawford, in his book The Art of Computer Game Design. Here, Crawford doesn’t attempt to define fun. Instead, Crawford attempts to break down games into core components. Foremost is something called representation. A game is a closed system that subjectively represents a subset of reality. Think of how a war game might want to represent battles in World War II, or a fantasy game wants to represent an elven village. For Crawford, the task of the game designer is to create the necessary components to support the player’s fantasy.
If we have some basic understanding, however limited, of what fun might be, then the next question becomes: what is a game? German board game designer Wolfgang Kramer developed a definition for board games:
A game always has components and rules.
Every game has a goal.
The course of the game is never the same.
Competition.
Common Experience
Equality.
Freedom.
Playing means being active.
Diving into the world of the game.
Are there games that you can think of that don't follow this definition? Does this mean they are something else?
An enduring element of games is something called the “Magic Circle.” This idea comes from Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, in his work Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. In this work, he says that all play moves within a consecrated spot, a temporary world within the real world (Huizinga, 1955, p. 10). Here, rules are followed, even if it is easy to simply ignore them. Consider that when you play a game of cards with your friends, you can simply walk behind them and look to see what their cards are. And so can your friends! Yet, if this happens, the very rules and structure that make a game fun break down, and a game becomes chaos.
Another version of this phenomenon is cheat codes in video games. You might get an initial rush of excitement and then... boredom. The rules of the game were violated. The consecrated space of the game’s intended code and operations was ruined.
What about hacking in multiplayer games or microtransactions? Does cheating or cheat codes always break the magic circle?
Let’s take a look at some basic ludology (study of games). Expanding on the work of Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois published Man, Play and Games in 1961. Caillois attempts to group games into four different categories of play:
Agon, or competition. Any game in which players compete and try to achieve mastery of a certain set of rules. Agon governs games as diverse as chess and Call of Duty.
Alea, or chance. Games played with dice, or any game in which random chance plays a role.
Mimicry. Games with mimicry allow players to pretend to be something else. This is a powerful element of video games, even when games were primarily text with no graphics!
Ilinx. Ilinx is vertigo, the sensation of being out of control. Think about riding a roller-coaster. Part of the thrill is Ilinx. Ilinx is a powerful component of games—consider racing games or parts of video games you have played that have had a particularly fast-moving, hard-to-control section. This “on the edge” feeling is very exciting!
Additionally, Caillois states that games tend to be on a spectrum between being ordered and being chaotic. Ordered games are considered Ludus, while spontaneous play is called Paidia (Caillois, 2001, p. 14).
Now that we have taken a look at game history and game studies we need to take the disparate knowledge and distill it into practical applications. We can use it to become better game designers. Looking back at the game we created in the beginning of class, how would we classify your game? How can we make it more fun/interesting?