| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| Rules, Play and Culture | |
| Eric Zimmerman | |
I'm a game designer, and I've come to you today to talk about play and about games and about game design as a discipline. Now, as opposed to other design disciplines like architecture or graphic design, game design really doesn't have a codified language, speaking about the process and the products even among the communities of people that create games (and of course with computer games that's a huge industry nowadays!). What I'm looking for as a game designer in trying to develop this discourse are those qualities that are intrinsic to games. Those things that games contain and other things don't contain. A lot of critical writing, and thinking about games and video games in particular, is done sort of over-the-shoulder, of game players, rather than looking at the actual play of the games themselves. So I'm not interested in the spectacle necessarily of a game, in and of itself, except that the spectacle itself is a decision that is made by the player and the player's participation with the dynamic system that constitutes the game. There's been a lot of interesting thinking about games and play that has occurred over the course of the 20th century. Simon Vinkenoog, the poet that spoke first, mentioned Huizinga. He did some interesting work about playing, moving from him to Calais, a French thinker and to more contemporary stuff as well. I also want to say that in thinking about games, of course computer games are the most prominent manifestation of the phenomenon of games in the world today, but there are thousands of years of interactive design and game design to look back on for thinking about game design, so actually most of the examples that we are using, come from non-digital games. Let's have the first slide please. This is from Roger Calais that I mentioned. He has this book called Men Playing Games published, I think, in English in the early Seventies. He is talking about games, he talks about four types of games, there's agon games about competition; alea games about chance, gambling, lotteries; mimicry games that are about simulation and disguise, secrecy; games about ilinx and vertigo. We've already seen lots of examples of these, just this morning. In Ricksville (Rick Prelinger) when that little kid was jumping on the side of the couch, and doing it again - that's a great example of play as vertigo. For the physical sensation of play. As a game designer, what I'm interested in is figuring out what games are, in and of themselves, and you know a lot of people come up with ideas or words like interactivity or narrative or games or play, so ultimately the value of these kinds of terms is in the utility, it's not in their scientific accuracy. So for my purpose this is an extremely broad definition of games. These are really for me aspects of play, they're not defining what is a bona fide game and how is that different than other games. And in fact Calais, for those of you that know this will know that I'm also really simplifying it, acts as a two dimensional grid. He places games on this grid so a game is in this category, or that category. We think about a lot of games that don't easily fit into Calais' categories. Quake for example. For those of you that don't know Doom or Quake, it's a genre of computer game, where you have a screen and there's a big phallus sticking out of the bottom of the screen - that's your gun. And you're moving through three-dimensional space shooting things. Now that game has a lot of competition or skill involved, there's a lot of lack of focus to that game because there's not much light, there's a lot of simulation of a 3D space, there's representation of the player through a character, and there's also a lot of vertigo too, to a kind of kinesthesis - the fact that you get moving through a simulated space. So that doesn't actually fit neatly within one of these (categories of game). Next slide. This comes from a book called The Study of Games published in 1978. This is a great definition of a game, and the one I use: 'Games are an exercise of voluntary control systems' - the emphasis is mine by the way, voluntary; they’re freely entered into - 'In which there's a contest between powers'. So there's conflict in games. Games are inherently about conflict, they're models of conflict or occasions for conflict. At its best, however, the conflict of games is productive conflict and at the same time that games are inherently competitive, games are also inherently co-operative, they represent a kind of very specialised, totally artificial stylised discourse. In order to enter the game, the players all sort of agreed to speak the same language of the game. In that sense, they represent a sort of self-enclosed occasion for this productive conflict. So in my opinion, games are inherently co-operative - even as they are also inherently conflictual. You also have games that are co-operative as well, in which there's still some sort of a conflict even between all the players and some kind of puzzle or system that they are attempting to overcome. 'Games are an exercise of voluntary control systems in which there's a contest between powers confined by rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome' That's a really interesting and important idea: disequilibrial outcome, that means that this is often what distinguishes a game from other forms of more open play activity, like the kid jumping from the part of the couch onto the other part of the couch. That doesn't really necessarily mean that there's a single winner, but it does mean that there's a difference between the beginning state of the game and the end state of the game, or the players. Now we're coming on to some of my own work and I want to credit Frank Lance who is the creative director at RGA Interactive in New York, with whom I team-teach, part time at New York University. I credit him because most of the ideas that you're hearing were co-developed with him. We have sort of three part structures when thinking about games. This is designed for designers as a tool that might or might not be used for thinking about games. Thinking of games as dynamic systems, games are quite literally systems of parts in which local elements combine to form a whole. The game of chess is a great example of that small elements, combining and recombining together to form something larger, than the sum of the parts. Rules Now the pre-emptive caveat again: this is not a scientific definition of what a game is. Like any sort of theoretical structure, there are moments it breaks down and it's fuzzy and things don't fit, but it’s still useful. What I mean by rules is that games have a formal structure. Now this is one of the things that differentiates games from other kind of cultural production. Think of a poem - does a poem have a formal structure ? Well, how do you want to frame it? You could frame it as the rhyme and meter of the poem, the rhythm of the language, the grammar of the language in which it's written, the visual arrangement of the type on the page and the margins and the font and the ink and the paper. All of those I think are valid ways of framing the formal structure of a poem. Games have an abstract, mathematical system that's knowable, that can be extracted. Does everyone know the game Tic-Tac-Toe? I think in Dutch it's called eggs, butter and beer or milk or something like that (ed: 'boter kaas en eieren'). It's a game where you have a grid like this and you draw X’s and O’s and X’s and O’s. So what are the rules of this game? You tell me - shout them out… Three in a row wins, somebody said. Players alternate turns. You don't cheat You place them at one at a time. Anyone? Players alternate placing marks on a three by three grid. So there's a three-by-three grid, players alternate placing their marks... Maybe it's more of an implicit rule. We're getting there, Just to speed things along, can I have the next slide please? We're almost there. This is the formal system of Tic-Tac-Toe. You guys are very close, you missed the last rule about the draw and the fact that you have to mark in an empty square is important. Otherwise this is really interesting. Think about how many millions and millions of hours over I don't know how many dozens or hundreds of years have been taken up by this system right here. So here's an interesting thing about games: it's almost a kind of Platonic idea of what a game is. There's this formal system from which are derived in the real world all of the actual instances of Tic-Tac-Toe that occur between players. Here's a really, really interesting thing about games: what does it mean to play a game? What does it mean to interact with this formal system? I'm gonna get to the Play and Culture in a second. Deciding to play a game you are essentially limiting your behaviour. The formal structure of a game is closed. If you're playing a board game, where you're moving pieces along the track and there's a space on the board that's not defined in the rules, then you can't play the game. In other words, games, in a classical way of thinking, admit no ambiguity. Its almost a fascistic idea about what a game is: you enter the game, you don't cheat as you said, you follow the rules and you limit your behaviour to the structure of the game. Now at the same time that games represent this kind of utterly closed system, they represent the opposite of that because when human participants enter into these closed systems, what results as play, and play is the opposite of rules. Play isn't confined and limited and structured, play is improvisational, play is creative, play is free. This is one of the things that continues to fascinate me as a game designer, this intrinsic relationship between rules and play that constitutes games, and constitutes play in a general sense, perhaps to a lesser extent because most form of play doesn't have such a rigid structure as a game. Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens talks of the ‘magic circle of a game’. So deciding to enter a game is entering this magic circle, an artificial context in which you decide to limit your behaviour and you behave in different ways. Play The second aspect of games that I mentioned is Play. Rules are the formal system of game, play is a social system of a game, it's what happens to the minds and bodies of the players during play. Now how does play emerge, how can it erupt? It can erupt in a lot of different ways, it can erupt through a form of complexity. Next slide please… So let's compare Chess to Go. Play can occur in a lot of ways, and there are interesting differences between Chess and Go on a formal level, the way the interaction of rules can create a complexity in a emergent way is as similar to the process of the software strategies of artificial life, for example. Next slide please… But play doesn't have to also occur from the formal and strategic complexities of a game. Play is the sort of creative bubbling-over of a system, that experience of the system that happens in this rigid, formal structure when participants enter the game. Twister is a little self-explanatory. There's a spinner, you put your hands on different parts of it. The goal is to stay up as long as you can. The spinner is telling you what to do with the parts of your body. Now, where's the play in Twister? It's certainly not in the formal system of the game. If you would create a model of Twister which is a little board, little small board, you know pipe cleaners are to clean up pipes, if you created little people with that, put them on the board, and play the game of Twister with those little people, That they could go here, and they could go there, and they could put their foot there, that would be banal, you know, what's the fun in that? The fun of the game of Twister is not in this formal structure. It's in the physical skill required to play the game, it's in the sort of strange social and kind of proto-sexual proximity that you have again. You step into that magic circle and things change, not just formally but in terms of your experience, the social experience, the way that you relate to the other players. So the play of Twister emerges on a whole variety of levels as you play the game. Culture The third level of games, a way of framing games, experiences, rules, formal systems, play, social system and culture. That's really an acknowledgement, that I think as pointed out in the introduction, that games are parts of larger cultural systems. There's any way to frame a game like Monopoly as parts of cultural systems or representations of cultural systems. The goal of the game is to bankrupt all of the other players. Extremely American. You can look at Monopoly as part of the history of the board game industry in the United States. Parker Brothers acquired a game called Easy Money that turned into Monopoly, and it was really the growth of an industry in the mid-20th century. The iconography of the board, the graphic design, all of these aesthetic concerns, now these all contribute of course to the overall experience of the game. I think that as we can see in Rick's film about the two girls playing with dolls and a boy sneaking around playing with them in a different way, even though that wasn't a bona fide game that they were playing, clearly they're all kinds of other aspects of play and culture that impact the play of a game, from a cultural identity and language to gender. Again as a game designer, those first two elements - rules and play - exist strictly-speaking within that magic circle of the game. What happens within a game. Thinking about a game as culture is really about transgressing that boundary, which is I think perfectly valid too. I think games are proper subjects of study for the whole range of the humanities, literary studies, history and anthropology. Since I was able to blow through everything I had to say very quickly, the last thought that I want to leave you with is this: It's really about the challenge of interactive design and game design in general. Again speaking mostly to designers, a model of games that's about, or things created on a computer, it's sort of a multi-media model. You create assets over here, the visuals and sounds and beautiful lush things, some more over here and some more over here. So then, how to you get from here to here? Well I don't know - what do you do? You click, you wait for the computer, you scroll over. You move from here to here and then how do you get from here to here? Well, you know, do something and you get over there… What I want to say is that the challenge of game design, interactive design, designing participatory experiences, whether on a computer or not, is not here and here and here, it's here, it's the activity of interactive. It's the activity of participation where I think the real design challenges lie, the design challenges that are intrinsic to the media. And that as a structure of meaning, games can be thought of as a kind of linguistic model, in which there are lots and lots of relationships between all of the complex parts. What makes a game play meaningful? Well, in addition to the kind of cultural and representative aspects of games and play there's another also more formal aspect, that renders games and play meaningful. I am talking about the actual navigation of the space, what the participant is doing from moment to moment by themselves or with other people. And creating a meaningful set of actual activities that they're doing and the way that those activities are put together over time, and build up to create a larger overall experience is what I think the challenge of interactive design is. One of the great things is that it still is a wide open field that can be approached both on the computer and off the computer. Hopefully we'll see some of the amazing things that people are doing in this field through the rest of the conference. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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