What Is a Game? (2018)
magic.wizards.com
magic.wizards.com
This strikes at the heart of the pernicious trend 'gamification of all the things.' Those tools have nothing to do with games and everything to do with dark patterns.
> part of playing a game is taking on a responsibility that you weren't required to take.
Gamification is the opposite - pulling you into an engagement you wouldn't otherwise choose (for better or for worse).
I often find that a task that I put off for a while turns out to be fun and gamelike once I get into flow and find that the problem has interesting structure to learn.
In general, finding an appropriate level of challenge is usually the limiting factor in making a good game. Our brains love learning new patterns and making new discoveries. But most tasks are either too mundane to provide any challenge, or too difficult that we can't make progress. Even games that start out as very fun generally become boring once we master the easily learned patterns and our skill plateaus.
This is where most attempts at gamification fall flat. The problem is not that the goals are meaningful to our lives, the problem is that there's just not any interesting structure to learn, so the game feels hollow.
Games are tools that humans use to learn about reality by performing pattern recognition to optimize in an artificially constrained environment. This can include your own arbitrary personal constraints. Gamification of things is putting arbitrary rewards and restrictions on activities. Involvement with reality (eg Pokemon Go) is orthogonal.
I believe there are actual whitepapers on this subject (what is a game?) from decades ago.
Please explain the usefulness of a taxonomy that has "game", "activity", "event", and "toy" as discrete entities.
Anyway, if they were genuinely exactly the same concept, why would we have so many different words for it? Synonyms pretty much never carry exactly the same meaning as each other; they have different colour or shades or whatever.
> Now that I was making games, I shared Richard [Garfield]'s belief that I needed to have a working idea of what exactly constituted a game.
> Even if you're just a game player and have no interest in designing games, I think having a working idea of what you think a game is will shape how you think of games and help you further engage in the hobby. I want to stress that I don't believe it's important that everyone have the same definition of games… but I do believe it's important for each gamer to have a definition that works for them. Today's column is about my definition.
This is an article about how a game designer thinks about games.
Of course the properties are not orthogonal, but that's not to say the words aren't gesturing towards slightly different parts of concept-space. The words certainly don't cleanly demarcate disjoint chunks of concept-space, but Rosewater's article nevertheless does have some content.
In other words, if we have generally good advice about how to make a game fun, and you know that advice is predicated on a certain definition of "game", it is easier to figure out whether or not that advice applies to the thing you're building.
Rosewater's categorization of Minecraft as a toy rather than a game is a really good example:
If you're a game designer, and you think of Minecraft as a game, there are a lot of game rules that Minecraft breaks. Its progression system is wack. It has a lot of design elements that don't really feed into its core loop well. And part of understanding why those "flaws" don't matter is understanding that Minecraft is working under a completely different set of design rules than a game like Doom.
So one of the things we do as designers is we add distinctions between different types of experiences that allow us to make rules that are more consistent and predictable. If you're able to split computer experiences into different categories and say, "Minecraft and Doom are fundamentally different", then it's easier to come up with rules around flow, and progression systems, and difficulty curves, and unity of theme.
As to why we need those rules in the first place? Because we want to make good games. Without narrowing a design space or coming up with heuristics to filter out good and bad ideas, designing games is just too stinking hard. There are always going to be exceptions to those rules, and that's fine. But the goal is still to give us mechanisms that in most cases allow us to talk about why an idea does or doesn't work.
This is the same reason why games build player archetypes. Basically no one fits into a single player archetype, and there's heavy overlap between them, and there are players that defy all of the archetypes we come up with. That does not mean that player archetypes aren't extremely useful as design tools. People think about classification systems like they're some kind of moral or philosophical separation between objects. They're not, classification systems are entirely pragmatic, practical tools.
All categorizations are wrong. No maps are completely accurate. But game design is an extremely fuzzy field, and it's hard to figure out what makes "good" design when your subject is so broad that literally every rule you come up with has exceptions. As a designer, I have multiple classification systems that I use for games and players, and some of them outright contradict each other. But all of them are useful lenses that I look through when I need to think about design decisions.
For everyone that doesn't think Minecraft is a game there are a bunch of people making, playing and talking about Sandbox Games.
One thing I try to get across to people when I'm talking about this is that not only are no taxonomies "official", but they even sometimes contradict each other, and that doesn't diminish their usefulness.
All models are at best approximations of reality, all taxonomies are based on somewhat arbitrary distinctions. The point is what the model/taxonomy can do for you. So if you have two models that give different results when fed the same input, that doesn't necessarily mean that one of them is broken. It might mean they're optimizing for accuracy in different directions, and that you need to think about which model is more applicable to the current situation you're in.
The game vs toy debate seems to get people more upset, I suspect in part because that was a debate used by some people who wanted to diminish the artistic value of Walking Simulators or other more experimental genres.
But while I'm here... Minecraft is a quintessential roguelike game. You arrive, naked and alone, on a hostile world. You then build yourself up by the skin of whatever. You mine and farm and build, and you acquire food and clothes for yourself. The only rule Minecraft broke is the one that says you can't code a financially viable game in Java.
(I guess there's no ascension, but at that point you've built heaven on earth anyway, so there's no reason to leave.)
> As to why we need those rules in the first place? Because we want to make good games.
I'm sorry, but super no. No game designer has ever feared that they would end up with a good toy, or a great activity, rather than making bank on Steam.
> All categorizations are wrong. No maps are completely accurate.
That's right! "All models are wrong, but some are useful." I was merely wondering what the use of the model presented by GP was.
For my money it's just a clarity of thought thing. The author and people that like his model can use it to guide their work. Similar to using design pillars but at a higher level.
For clarity of thought I mean if you decide to make a game you might want to work out what a game is to you. Like a mission statement that you can use as a razor to judge your subsequent ideas.
Design pillars are similar but about specific aspects of a game. A set of principles you can use to guide development.
In a classic roguelike (Rogue, Moria, Angband, Hack, NetHack, etc.), everything you do is in service to the singular goal of delivering the killing blow to Morgoth or picking up the Amulet of Yendor. That's the whole game. Everything else is just a stepping stone to reach the turn that declares you winner. There are no real "side" quests because the whole point of everything is to acquire the equipment, consumables, and experience needed to survive the final battle.
Minecraft is the exact opposite. It takes about five minutes to build enough of a base to survive indefinitely. After that, you've essentially "won". For many years, Minecraft didn't have the End Dragon or anything approaching and "final boss". Even after adding it, in the culture of Minecraft, many players don't consider that the goal of the game. The game itself does not end after you've beaten the End Dragon. In fact, doing so gives you new items which implies there are useful play actions to do after killing the End Dragon.
Classic roguelikes are a game where most players don't really get to define what it means to win. The game explicitly says what your goal is. Minecraft is more like a play space that gives you a number of options to explore but it's mostly up to you to decide what kind of game you wish to play in there. I've played Minecraft for years and I've never been to the End, even though I almost exclusively play in survival mode.
You can play roguelikes like they're Minecraft (I used to carry a pet slime mold for fun in Angband) and you can play Minecraft like a roguelike (kill the End Dragon as efficiently as possible and then declare it over), but the games-as-artifacts themselves don't push you in the same direction.
If you want to make Minecraft, make Minecraft. If you want to make Doom, make Doom. These categories are not about validating or condemning either experience.
The point of the categorization isn't to say, "I can't do this because I would be making a toy instead of a game." The point is to say, "I want to make a game/toy, and because of that, I know that there are certain design heuristics that I need to pay attention to."
> The only rule Minecraft broke is the one that says you can't code a financially viable game in Java.
And the lack of permadeath for most players, and the general lack of resource scarcity, and the lack of difficulty increase as gameplay progresses, and the lack of a narrative justification for the world, and the lack of a single clear goal (ascend), and the lack of any kind of scoring system, and the blurring between cosmetic and gameplay rewards, and a bunch of other things.
Minecraft is brilliant. And if Notch had sat down and looked at Rogue and said, "this is where I'll get my design ideas", then Minecraft wouldn't have been brilliant. It's a fundamentally different experience than something like Rogue, or even Rogue-lites in the vein of Enter the Gungeon. It's fundamentally different even from other crafting/building games like Terraria, which have much more traditional game-elements like difficulty curves and general progression systems.
It doesn't really matter whether or not you want to call Minecraft a game. But it is useful to look at a game like Minecraft and to be able to say, "yes, I know that Minecraft decouples resource rarity from resource value, but that's because Minecraft is doing something different than other games, and in most games that would be a bad idea."
Game design is about filtering ideas. There are an infinite number of things a game can do, so a tool that lets us zero in on which ideas are likely to be good or are likely to be bad is extremely valuable.
You're right that the mark of a great designer is not in religiously sticking to a certain category. However, it often is the mark of a great designer that when presented with 7 or 8 ideas, they can quickly pick out, "this idea is worth implementing, and this one isn't". Categorizations help with that.
I have seen many designers look at very outside-the-box games like Minecraft or Animal Crossing and say, "well, I can reuse any design decision from those games." But the only reason those atypical design decisions work in those games is because they are atypical games that commit to a consistent philosophy. Understanding the core of that philosophy is what allows a designer to intuit whether or not two design decisions work together.
Making a good toy or great activity is awesome. But if you make a weird hybrid between a game and a toy with discordant design elements that contradict each other, that's just a bad experience in general, no matter what you want to call it. Categories allow us to group design elements that work well together and exclude design elements that are discordant. Understanding common categories allows us to predict when we might be falling into the trap of including discordant mechanics in our games.
I think there is a simpler definition that subsumes the first three points. When I clicked to this definition, I think it gave me a better understanding of not just games, but many of the pursuits humans choose to sink time into:
A game is a thing with bounded consequences.
"Consequences" means you can make choices and those choices matter. Relatively good and bad things can happen in response to them. Good things subsumes Mark's "goals", bad things covers the "restrictions", and "agency" is implicit that in order to have consequences, you must have actions.
But the part that makes games games is that the scope of those consequences has an upper. Bad things can happen, but they can only be so bad. And, importantly, you have a good understanding of how bad they can be before you make the choice.
The reason we actively seek out and play games is because we know the average result of our choices in the game is significantly better than the worst possible result. Therefore, it's a safe experience to opt into. This is what makes games feel like games. It's the sensation of a free lottery ticket.
Looking at games in these terms raises some interesting questions around the fringes. A stock trading simulation where you invest and win fake money is clearly a game. Trading your actual retirement savings on the stock market is clearly not a game. What about a "game" that trades using virtual money but lets you convert that to real money afterwards? What if you have to buy in with real money to play that game? What about trading on the real market but starting with a small enough fixed pool that you can safely afford to lose?
What if you are a professional poker player who needs to win in order to pay your bills? Conversely, what does it mean to hold a regular job with performance reviews if you happen to already be independently wealthy? Is your job now a game? What if you sink thousands of hours into an MMO in order to gain some powerful item only if you beat a dragon. Given the large opportunity cost of that time, is that boss fight still a game?
My claim is that the structure of the activity itself doesn't tell you whether or not it's a game. You need to know the context of the player because that's what determines the severity of the consequences. Chutes and ladders is a game. Chutes and ladders with a mob boss who will murder your family if you lose is not.
Something I've observed in my own life is that when it feels like too many things are not fun, it's often because I'm in a place where the negative consequences of them are too severe, or at least I perceive them to be. In particular, when I'm really pressed for time, then few recreational pursuits feel fun because the lost time itself is too high of a consequence.
Hans Moravec goes over similar territory here:
>If simulation simply opens windows into Platonic realities, and robots and humans, no less than books, movies, or computer models, are only images of those essences, then it should be no worse to mistreat a human, an animal or a feeling robot than to choose a cruel action in a video game or an interactive book: in all cases you are simply viewing preexisting realities. But choices do have consequences for the person making them because of the mysterious contrivance of physical law and conscious interpretation that produces single threads of consciousness with unseen futures and unalterable pasts. By our choices, we each thread our own separate way through the maze of possible worlds, bypassing equally real alternatives with equally real versions of ourselves and others, selecting the world we must then live in.
So is there no difference between being cruel to characters in interactive books or video games and people one meets in the street? Books or games act on a reader's future only via the mind, and actions within them are mostly reversed if the experience is forgotten. Physical actions, by contrast, have greater significance because their consequences spread irreversibly. If past physical events could be easily altered, as in some time-travel stories, if one could go back to prevent evil or unfortunate deeds, real life would acquire the moral significance of a video game. A more disturbing implication is that any sealed-off activity, whose goings on can be forgotten, may be in the video game category. Creators of hyperrealistic simulations---or even secure physical enclosures---containing individuals writhing in pain are not necessarily more wicked than authors of fiction with distressed characters, or myself, composing this sentence vaguely alluding to them. The suffering preexists in the underlying Platonic worlds; authors merely look on. The significance of running such simulations is limited to their effect on viewers, possibly warped by the experience, and by the possibility of ``escapees''---tortured minds that could, in principle, leak out to haunt the world in data networks or physical bodies. Potential plagues of angry demons surely count as a moral consequence. In this light, mistreating people, intelligent robots, or individuals in high-resolution simulations has greater moral significance than doing the same at low resolution or in works of fiction not because the suffering individuals are more real---they are not---but because the probability of undesirable consequences in our own future is greater.
https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles...
Thanks for articulating this idea that I so often experience and wasn't aware of.
Even after figuring it out, I still struggle with it. Because it is, obviously, important to unwind and do things just for fun. But doing so now requires me to as an act of will decide to treat my time as less precious, which is really hard to do.
So I'm in 100% agreement with you. Things are fun when you feel safe about the possibility of losing and not being harmed by it.
It was actually kind of a shattering moment, realizing there was no magic. After that, every game I played with friends, I struggled to enjoy the magic because all I could think about was "holding this button is just increasing or decreasing a number".
I stumbled upon this moment of realization by accidentally opening a debug overlay in what was probably a NES emulator. Naturally I had a look around and stumbled across a set of numbers that consistently changed as I moved my character on the screen.
- What's the dividing line between a game and a task?
This comes up a lot nowadays due to the 2010-era explosion of "skinner box" games on mobile platforms e.g. Candy Crush, or presumably Farmville and Clash of Clans.
I saw a lot of people around me get addicted to these games, and seeing how much time they put into them made me pro-actively avoid them at all costs. I figured there was a good chance whatever psychology at play captured their attention would likely capture mine as well, and it didn't seem like a fulfilling use of my life. Later, I generalized this to quickly identify any games that felt more like a "task" than a "game". An example of one that I played for awhile but then identified as such is "Link the Dot"[0] (a classic "Pipe drawing, connect the dots" game).
I started getting somewhat worried about the validity and generalization of my mental scheme (game vs. task, avoid tasks) when I realized that some "good" games end up being mostly task-based. I played through Monument Valley all the way through. At first it felt very game-like, but after the first 2-4 levels, I had fully grasped the concept. After the learning phase, the rest of the dozens of levels were essentially just performing rote tasks again. As both the Pipes game and Monument Valley are at their heart "puzzle games", I started to wonder if all puzzle games could be construed as "tasks", hidden behind varying layers of obfuscation. That didn't sit well with me, and I felt something may be off about the "task vs. game" model.
Over the next several years of paying attention to this, I started noticing that so many games that I love at least have some aspect of "task". In Starcraft (Gold/Plat/Diamond), the first 2-4 minutes of every game is essentially just completing a rote series of tasks according to a rigid flowchart - and success is greatly determined by how precisely you execute those tasks for 2-4 minutes.
4x games like Civilization become exceedingly bogged down in tasks in the late game. Space Trader games like Escape Velocity have me flying cargo back and forth for hours between two systems dozens of times to farm enough gold to buy a good ship/weapons.
For now, I've decided that the "game" part of any game are the novel aspects of it. This can change over time. Tic-tac-toe is a competitive game when players are naive about strategy, but becomes a task once you learn its rules and nuance. Creativity and freedom of thought is the essence of something being "play", and IMO the requirement for being a game. But what is a game to one person can easily be a task to someone else, or even to the same person after they learn enough about the game.
I also now believe that shallow time- and grind/diligence- domain tasks exist in otherwise deep games to hook into human psychology to provide a heightened sense of accomplishment. This may be a necessary aspect for many games, for example open-world RPG's. It may very well be an essential part of good, honest game design to include some aspects of skinner-box mechanics as part of a much larger universe. If so, maybe that's driven by the imperfection of the human brain, and is somewhat of a constraint for game design. Or it may be that it's purely a crutch for imperfect game design - maybe games really can achieve high accomplishment through creativity of play alone and eschew all monotonous tasks. I think there's TONS of room for future games to utilize advanced AI's like AlphaStar to enhance gameplay by removing 99% of the non-intellectual actions - and this is one of the most exciting developments I see coming in the eventual future.
I came across this article[1] which explores some of the relationship between skinner boxing and game design, and thought I'd link it here. It also goes into some of the pitfalls of overly classifying everything as a skinner box.
I also have some thoughts on Factorio, Cities: Skyline, fighting games, and twitch FPS games as well that I don't have very well structured yet. Loot boxes certainly are another aspect lately which may not directly lie on this continuum but may be another dimension.
So for me:
>the difference between a plaything and a tool? when do you play with tools versus when do you work with tools?
My answer is that it's a spectrum from full creativity of thought to a purely rote repetition. Likely all things lie somewhere between the extremes.
0: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gookindone... 1: http://keithburgun.net/why-skinner-box-is-a-useful-distincti...
It's interesting to look at those games from a business/economic perspective.
Imagine you create a mobile game called "Data Entry Crush" where the game would send players an image of a document and they would carefully type in the text for it. You give the game to players for free. On the backend, you sell this as a service to companies needing data entry where they pay you to turn their images into text.
In other words, like Mechanical Turk, without paying the Turks.
Of course, this would never fly because people don't find data entry very fun and it's pretty obvious to them that they are being had. They know they are providing something of value to you and won't do it for free.
What Candy Crush and friends did was find an exploitable loophole in human pyschology. It's hard to get people to do something that clearly looks like valuable work for free. But it turns out people aren't good at realizing their own attention itself has value. So what do you do? Make a game that's a little fun to play to keep people going, and then pepper it with ads. Those ads take some of the player's attention but since humans seem to undervalue that resource, the players allow it to happen without getting irate or expecting compensation.
And then, as before, you make all your money on the back end. You let companies pay you to put those ads in front of people. It's like an arbitrage opportunity where human attention is more valuable to (A) companies than it is to (B) the individuals who have it, so you take it from B, sell it to A, and keep the profit.
But you’ve sort of just rediscovered the business model of all advertising? All kinds of media are in the business of attracting attention. Then, if you want, you can sell that attention to someone else in the form of advertising. The trick with candy crush etc is that the content attracting attention doesn’t actually have to be “good” in the way that honest creators intend, just addictive.
"Most of these games are all marketing."
That is, if you look at the art, and look at the back of the box bullet points, you'll see something like "Go on an epic journey", or "Choose who lives or dies", or "Build an empire to stand the test of time".
To the extent that these games express these things, it's through clever rearrangements of stock tropes: Your typical murderering and looting game protagonist, able only to communicate down the barrel of a gun, is now justified through the plot and given many new backdrops so as to make the journey "epic". A scripted choice is added here and there, but not everywhere, to make "choosing who lives or dies" feel consequential, but without ascribing particular meaning to the choice either(since all choices should be gratifying for marketing purposes). Empire-building is signalled through various reports of legible progress in gaining territory and developing cities and armies, but nothing resembling the actual political structure or dynamics of an empire - the fantasy is simply one of a "rise and further rise".
And so in playing these games, you get an aesthetic impression, but not something with a solid grounding to it that you would spend time thinking about afterwards or relating to your real-world experiences. When a speedrunner sets out to conquer these sorts of games they look for software vulnerabilities that short-circuit the impression of what is going on and attack the underlying data model and logic.
In that way, video games have been pushed through industrialized practice quite a ways away from the natural state of games as a tradition, which is to fully and honestly explore simple concepts. You can't speedrun basketball, because you're playing within the laws of nature and against opponents who do the same. But if you go to market a basketball video game, you are trading on the impression of basketball, not its reality: and so licenses for professional players, superlative simulation techniques, etc. come to the fore.
So as I see it, games like Candy Crush are further extensions of industrialization: The game concept is simply a tool for the marketing framework, which in this case has been designed towards metrics-optimized microtransactions and customer retention. If a particular level is failing to retain players or to induce a purchase, it gets reworked until the metrics line up.
Despite all this, good work in games does tend to shine through. Nintendo's franchises, for example, are all built on "honest explorations" of their basic themes, and the play concepts tend to have something intrinsically interesting going on. And the breakthrough indie hits usually have this quality, too. The games that get buried, in contrast, usually aren't achieving the same degree of cohesiveness and direction - even if they're huge AAA productions.
When I open my text editor and write code for work, it's a tool. At the end of the day, when I use that same text editor to work on a hobby programming project or write a store, it transmutes into a plaything.
Is a hammer a tool or a plaything? Depends on if you're asking a roofer or a weekend woodworker.
I strongly disagree. (even though he relativates it a bit) And rather think the opposite. All games ultimately have real world relevance, by training a certain or many skills, useful for the real world. (some games of course more, than others)
Or they even have direct realworld relevance, as the winner in a competition, for example the olympic games, gets real fame and reward. (also in e-sports)
But for example the olympic games were created, to get the young greek people to train certain skills, so they would be better warriors in a real fight.
Now, most computer or card games, do not have that intention, they are intended to be fun.
And why are they fun?
Because they provide a challenge and everyone enjoys mastering a challenge. Because that is pro evolution. And we as a species, we were very successfull, because we could adopt to very different challenges. And traditionally trained for that as childs with various games, like "catch". A game that trained many important skills for hunting or fleeing from a predator. (reflexes, speed, evade, sneak, timing...) Not so important anymore, in civilized, policed rich societys, still important in poorer areas.
So the traditional idea of a game is, training a real world scenario in controlled and save setting. But theory is dull, so kids do it, because "it is fun". (and it is fun, because of various success during the game, that makes the brain releas happy hormones, along with other hormones from the movement itself)
Now sadly, that idea got messed up along the way and games today are often played for compensation for lack of joy at boring jobs, which do not give the rewarding feeling, or as time killing for those who lack a meaningful occupation. So quite some games train a not so relevant skillset. They trick the brain in thinking what it is doing is pro evolution (you get more powerful, you evolve, you make friends, join a strong tribe, you slain powerful enemies, ...), while in reality, it is not. At least not doing it as a main purpose, which many addicted gamers do. (Apart from that, also hardcore gaming can of course lead to real world benefits, making real friends, learning organizing skills, time management, communicate effectivly, using the right tools, etc. but I am talking about addiction here. When the game becomes the purpose and the gamer exists for the game and not the other way around.)
So ... games are awesome. They can teach you various things. They can take you to other worlds, inspire your creativity, let you find people you lack in "real live", blow of steam, finding reward - but they are bad, if they become your main purpose of existence.
Anyway, I believe, much more of learning in schools etc. should be in the form of games. When you play being a roman soldier, (wheter it be in a computer game, or theater, or reenactment) you will much more understand about that time, than reading facts in a textbook. If you can play with a lego mindstorm robot in class, you will understand much more about robotic, than reading about it. And so on ..
Is there ever a situation that you'll have to deal with where a matter of life-and-death hinges on a definitional absurdity like this? Is there a situation where anything at all hinges on this, except someone says "let's play a game" and you suggest Legos and they say "technically that's not a game" and then you stop talking to that person?
> I want to stress that I don't believe it's important that everyone have the same definition of games…