Theory of Fun for Game Design (24 page)

Gender differences
: Two books that provide differing surveys of the field are
Sex on the Brain: The Biological Differences Between Men and Women
by Deborah Blum and
Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women
by Anne Moir and David Jessel. For an amusing demonstration of how gender differences can manifest even in simple quizzes, check out the gender test at
http://community.sparknotes.com/gender/
. Based on accumulating the statistics of millions of test-takers, the test manages to provide a fairly accurate guess at the test-taker’s gender.

Spatial rotation
: A study in Norway found that differences in spatial rotation ability across genders manifest even in a society that has worked very hard to have gender equality. You can read the study at
www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2294/is_n11-12_v38/ai_21109782
. There are no conclusions yet in the scientific community as to why exactly this is so, though of course various evolutionary reasons have been proposed.

Language proficiency in boys
: It is worth pointing out again that it is only on average that boys do worse in language proficiency; biological determinism alone does not doom a given individual. In some studies, boys have been shown to have a greater variable range in various skills than girls; for example, both the higher and lower ends of the IQ range tend to be populated with more males than females. There is also evidence, at least in older kids, that coeducational settings cause kids of both genders to shy away from the subjects that are supposed to be better suited to the opposite gender.

Permanent changes in rotation ability
: To quote Skip Rizzo of USC, from the transcript of his presentation at the Annenberg Center’s conference “Entertainment in the Interactive Age” in 2001: “On the paper and pencil test [of spatial rotation ability], men did much better than women. But when we replicated the test involving an integrated immersive interactive approach [e.g., with a video game], we found women performed as well as men.…the important finding was that we found that when we administered the paper and pencil test afterwards, that men and women’s scores were no longer significantly different.” This is not a shocking result; it has also been seen among deaf kids, who typically suffer from problems in spatial rotation as well. See
www.passig.com/pic/CognitiveIntervention(1).htm
.

Simon Baron-Cohen
: Baron-Cohen’s theory, elucidated in his book
The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain
, is controversial, although it echoes earlier theories about Thinking and Feeling brains. Baron-Cohen is an autism researcher, so he didn’t come to this conclusion solely from gender research; boys suffer disproportionately from autism and Asperger’s, and his hypothesis is that these are malfunctions of the “extreme systematizing brain.” There are some tests online that you can take to arrive at your “systematizing quotient” and “empathizing quotient.” They can be found at
www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/page/0,12983,937443,00.html
.

Asperger’s syndrome
: Commonly called “high-functioning autism,” this syndrome is characterized by difficulty with social interactions and reading emotions.

Learning styles
: Sheri Graner Ray’s
Gender Inclusive Game Design
is an excellent book covering learning styles as they apply specifically to game design.

Kiersey Temperament Sorter
: A derivation of the Myers-Briggs personality type that uses a slightly different organizing metaphor based on the Hippocratic temperaments.

Myers-Briggs personality type
: Based on the theories of Carl Jung, this psychometric tool measures a subject’s preference for one side or another of 4 different dichotomies. The results can be read as classifying an individual into one of 16 personality types, but in psychology they are intended to indicate preference for given approaches to problem-solving.

Enneagrams
: Another personality classification system, enneagrams have nine different types into which people can fall. Each type has two subsidiary characteristics as well; the enneagram is diagrammed on a circle, so the “wings” or secondary types are therefore the neighbors on the circle. Enneagrams are not based on empirical study or psychological theory so much as they are based on the seven deadly sins and numerology.

Hormone effects on personality
: Many hormones have been implicated in personality differences, but there are no clear-cut answers as to why exactly this happens, nor can it be usefully used as a predictor. That said, as testosterone decreases in males over their lives, they tend toward reduced aggression. Men convicted of violent crimes show higher levels of testosterone than noncriminal men or men convicted of nonviolent crimes.

Book purchases
: The statistic on the ages of women book purchasers comes from the U.S. Census Bureau. For an impressive statistic regarding book purchases by women, consider that romance novels account for almost half of all paperback sales in America. Ninety-three percent of them sell to women.

Female preferences in games
: The most popular game genres among women are puzzle and parlor games. This preference is so marked that despite a low penetration of single-player games into the female market, women playing games online make up 51 percent of the online marketplace. The bulk of this large audience is playing puzzle games.

Hardcore players of different genders
: The population of women in online role-playing games varies from 15 percent to 50 percent, depending on the game. In comparison, the female market for traditional single-player games sold in traditional channels is more like 5 percent.

Aging game players
: Nick Yee was able to graph the differences in male and female behavior across ages after surveying a few thousand players of massively multiplayer online games. Younger males tended toward the more violent activities in the game, and older males tended to more closely match the behavior of females. The percentage of the respondents who were of a given gender showed markedly different distributions across age; there was a huge spike in younger males, whereas the number of females tended to remain relatively even across ages. Yee’s Daedalus Project can be found at
www.nickyee.com/daedalus/
. We should not equate this to the theory of “dedifferentiation,” which asserted that as we age, our cognitive strengths and weaknesses get “smoothed out.” In 2003, the APA issued a press release about dedifferentiation stating that longitudinal studies had disproven it.

Girls breaking out of traditional gender roles
: Reuters reported in September 2004 on a study performed at Penn State that showed that the games played by kids at age 10 had a significant correlation with their academic performance years later. Girls who played sports at age 10 became more interested in math at age 12 than girls who didn’t do sports. Girls who spent time on “girly” activities such as knitting, reading, dancing, and playing with dolls tended to perform better later in subjects such as English.

Cheating during a soccer match
: On the flip side, if the referee fails to see that we are offside, we’ll take it and often say, “Them’s the breaks.” It is technically just as bad a violation of the rules, but since the ref (who is part of the formal construct) is fallible, we accept the violation.

You don’t get to change the rules
: There does exist a game, called
Nomic
, whose rules you rewrite as you play; it’s part of the game. It too has limits; you bump up against the physics of reality if you try to change too much. In
Nomic
’s case, the changing rules are themselves part of the pattern—but declaring atoms to be the size of Jupiter, or pulling out a gun and shooting another player, are still off-limits even if you make a rule allowing it.
Nomic
was designed by Peter Suber of the Philosophy Department at Earlham College.

Ludemes
: A concept developed by Ben Cousins, a video game designer. An article about the concept appeared in the October 2004 issue of
Develop Magazine
. Ben has renamed the concept “primary elements,” but I like “ludemes” better even though the word is already in use in a different context. The idea also has a lot in common with the “choice molecules” described by Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen in
Rules of Play
.

Games incorporate the following elements
: This material on basic elements of games is based on a forthcoming talk of mine at the 2005 Game Developers Conference, entitled “An Atomic Theory of Game Design.”

The Mastery Problem
: This can be summarized as “the rich get richer.” It is an expression of iterative zero-sum games—games in which the winner ends up in a better position than the loser. If a high-level player can reinforce their position by repeatedly defeating easy targets, then eventually their position will become unassailable. This is not in itself a problem—it simply leads to victory. The problem arises when a novice coming to the game cannot possibly succeed.

Opportunity cost
: Since games are always sequences of challenges, the fact that you made a bad choice cannot simply be undone. At the very least, the fact that you could have chosen to do something else allows your opponent to make their own choice. In playing games, we only give “take-backs” to young children, and there exist a plethora of rules dictating when moves become irrevocable in board games (for example, you commit to a move in chess when you let go of the piece).

Red Queen’s Race
: In Lewis Carroll’s classic book
Through the Looking Glass
, Alice runs alongside the Red Queen in a landscape that is moving very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that they have to run to stand still. This situation has become known as the Red Queen’s Race.

Emergence
: The concept of emergence recurs in fields like chaos theory, artificial life, and cellular automata, which are all mathematical systems in which very simple rules lead to behavior that is realistic or unpredictable. Steven Johnson’s book
Emergence
covers this topic fairly thoroughly.

Less able to learn as we age
: In general, psychological studies have shown that inductive reasoning and information processing (so-called “fluid intelligence”) decrease as we age. However, verbal abilities and other forms of “crystallized intelligence” tend to remain constant.

Choose the same characters to play
: The tendency of players to repeatedly choose similar characters in online RPGs is verified in my own research.

Cross-gender role-play
: There have been many papers written about cross-gender role-play. Males tend to do it far more often than females do, and given the choice, males will rarely choose a gender-neutral presentation, whereas females are more willing. Cross-gender role-play in online games is not an indicator of gender dysphoria in real life.

Apollonian and Dionysian
: Another way to think about the distinction between the two styles is that Apollonian periods are often about the medium
as
a medium and Dionysian periods are about what could be
said
with that medium. Modernism, with its focus on formal characteristics of a medium, was an Apollonian movement; the Dionysian rebellion immediately after included populist art forms such as science fiction and other genres of pulp fiction; the rise of swing, blues, and jazz; and the flowering of the comic strip.

Historical trajectory of new game genres
: Many game genres have exhibited the arc towards greater complexity. Of course, often the genre is reinvented with a populist take on the game style, whereupon the curve is reset. There are many genres of game where the complexity has reached a point where only a very few play the games; among them are war games, simulators, and algorithmic games such as
CoreWars
, which required a high degree of programming knowledge in the first place.

The jargon factor
: An increase in jargon is also a clear sign that a medium has reached the level of maturity where it can be taught formally rather than through apprenticeship and where the field has enough self-awareness to have examined itself critically. In film, for example, this developed fairly rapidly as film theory was defined. Unfortunately, games are laggards in this respect.

Twonky
: The original story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore was published under the pseudonym of Lewis Padgett and filmed in 1953. In it, a device from the future arrives in the past. Its owners cannot cope with it (even though one is a professor), so they get zapped. Even more apropos is their story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” in which toys from an alien dimension arrive on Earth. Adults cannot cope with them, but the children can—and eventually, they learn enough to open an interdimensional door and go elsewhere, having transcended humanity. So far, nobody has teleported as a result of playing video games, but we can hope.

Mod or modding
: Many video games are constructed in a way that permits players to create variants on the rules, alter the artwork, or even create whole new games using the game’s software. This has led to large “mod communities” of player-contributed games and content. This is similar to “house rules” for board games.

Lord Jim
: A novel by Joseph Conrad. It is not a cheery book, and the ending is fatalistic at best and grim at worst.