Theory of Fun for Game Design (20 page)

They deserve more than just another jumping puzzle. We have to believe, as game designers, that we can deliver that, and we have to believe that we
should
.

To which I say, I believe.

Last, it means that everyone else—the people like my grandfather—need to come to understand the valuable role we play in society. We’re not geeks in the basement rolling funny-shaped dice. We’re also the teachers of your children. We’re not irresponsible 14-year-old boys (well, not all of us)—we’re parents too. We’re not splattering gore and sex on TV screens across the world merely for the sake of titillation.

Games deserve respect. We as creators must respect them, and do right by their potential. And the rest of the world must respect them and grant them the scope to become what they can and must.

So my answer is, yes, what we do is worthy of respect.

It may be that even after everything I’ve said, everything all the other people working with games have said, society will continue to react in a knee-jerk fashion to the unfamiliar.

It may be that the current flowering of academic programs in game studies, and the fledging field of ludology, are an aberration and a frivolity.

But painting was once a blasphemous act that robbed reality of its essence. Dance was seen as wantonness incapable of expressing any higher emotions. The novel was self-indulgent gothic nonsense for cooped-up housewives. Film was once trashy kinetoscopes at the penny arcade, unworthy of adult attention. Jazz was devil music that would lead young lives astray. Rock ‘n’ roll was destroying the fabric of our country.

And Shakespeare himself was no more than a bit player and sometime scribbler for a theater in the bad part of town. Proper women weren’t allowed because their reputations would be ruined, and their stepping on the stage was unthinkable.

We learned better.

It’s still possible that this time we won’t…

in which case we should pack up all the chess sets…

gather up the balls and the nets and the tops…

collect the dolls and the toy cars…

put them in that chest, the one at the top of the stairs…

the one we carry up to the attic…

to sit closed, hasp flipped but not locked, under the window…

We should put away the things of childhood and step into a world where the young, and the young at heart, are seen and not heard.

To which I say,

No.

Because I’d hate to pass up that look of joy and wonder in my children’s eyes.

Cognates
: Words that derive from a common root and are similar in meaning even though they are in a different language. Languages frequently borrow words from one another and thus similar words in different languages can be found. Often, the meaning, pronunciation, or spelling can diverge to the point of being unrecognized.

Deaf children in Nicaragua
: Many articles have been written on Nicaraguan Sign Language, also called NSL or ISN (after the initials of the phrase in Spanish). Deaf children in Nicaragua did not have access to each other, nor to training in sign language, until 1979, when schools for the deaf began to be opened. Over a few generations, the children developed a fully functional sign language that enabled them to communicate. This is believed to be the first time in history that scientists have been able to observe a language spontaneously created (as opposed to created intentionally like Esperanto). A good overview of the story can be found at
www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19991024mag-sign-language.html
.

Tic-tac-toe
: Also known as noughts and crosses. Tic-tac-toe, and its cousins go-moku (a game where the board is variously 13x13 or 15x15 and you have to get 5 in a row) and
Qubic
(a 4x4x4 cube) are all amenable to mathematical analysis. Tictac-toe in particular is fairly trivial since there only 125,168 possible games. If both players employ the optimal strategy, the game will always end in a draw.

NP-hard and NP-complete
: These are terms from complexity theory, the field of mathematics that studies how hard it is to solve a given problem (as opposed to whether it can be solved at all, which is called “computability theory”). Other types of complexity include P, NP, PSPACE-complete, and EXPTIME-complete. Many abstract board games are classifiable as terms of their mathematical complexity in this way; for example, checkers is EXPTIME-complete, and
Othello
is PSPACE-complete. Rendering games obsolete is a favorite pastime of mathematicians. They have proven that for optimal players, the first player to move will always win tictac-toe and also games such as
Connect Four
and
Pentominoes
.

Sisyphean task
: Sisyphus was condemned to roll a heavy stone uphill in Hell. Every time he got it to the top, it would roll back down again and he’d have to do it over. In modern video games, this is called “restoring a save.”

Mentally challenging games and Alzheimer’s
: A study in the
New England Journal of Medicine
in June 2003 indicated that mental challenges such as games retarded the development of Alzheimer’s. Games weren’t the only mental challenge studied; playing musical instruments, learning new languages, and dancing also had similar effects.

Mu ha ha ha
: A common gloat heard in Internet gaming.

Games as vertices
: Many games that require you to place one piece adjacent to another can be expressed as problems in graph theory, a field of mathematics that studies points and links between them. Each node is called a
vertex
, and each link is called an
edge
. Analyzing games in this highly abstract way can reveal many fundamental characteristics about how to play them well.

Game theory
: A field of mathematics that studies decision making in formal models. Most games can be interpreted as formal models, but game theory tends to run afoul of real-world data when the mathematical hypotheses are tested, largely because game theory is based on optimal strategies. Most people aren’t optimal all the time. Game theory doesn’t help you design a better game, but it can help explain why people make certain choices in a game.

Roger Caillois
: An anthropologist who wrote a book called
Man, Play and Games
in 1958. In it, he also categorized games into four types based on chance, competition, make-believe or pretense, and vertigo. He saw games primarily as tools of acculturation.

Johan Huizinga
: Author of
Homo Ludens
(1938), a book primarily focusing on the importance of play in human culture. Huizinga defines the concept of the “magic circle” within which play takes place as a protected and even sacred space that must not be violated.

Jesper Juul
: An academic who is a leader of the relatively recent “ludology” movement. His website is
www.jesperjuul.dk/
.

Chris Crawford
: One of the grand old men of computer game design, his seminal works include
Eastern Front 1941
and
Balance of Power
. Crawford has long advocated games as art and has also been a major proponent of interactive storytelling. His book
The Art of Computer Game Design
is considered a classic.

Sid Meier
: One of the most highly regarded computer game designers working today, Meier has been responsible for
Civilization
(the computer version, not the board game version, although there is now a board game version of the computer game),
Pirates!
, and
Gettysburg
.

Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design
: This book was published by New Riders in 2003. It is a solid “howto” book covering a variety of game genres as well as general game design principles. Disclaimer: I helped write the chapter on online games, so I am biased.

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman and Rules of Play: Rules of Play
is one of the most important recent books on what games are and how they work. It was published by the MIT Press in 2003. The authors are academics at NYU and also game designers in their own right.

Recognizing faces
: The part of the brain that recognizes faces is called the
fusiform face area
, and it’s actually used for recognizing individuals of a given class (as opposed to the parts of the brain that recognize classes of things). When people get brain damage in this part of the brain, they become unable to recognize the photographs of famous people, even though they can still classify them as women, men, blondes, young, or old. The fusiform face area has to be trained; most people are expert in other people, so they recognize individuals easily and read their emotions easily. Autistics show reduced functioning of the fusiform face area when examined via MRI. Birdwatchers and car experts show activation of the fusiform face area when they are identifying particular birds or cars.