a friend of mine recently asked a related question: what's the difference between a plaything and a tool? when do you play with tools versus when do you work with tools? what's the line there - and has anyone written philosophy about this
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.
- 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.