Theory of Fun for Game Design (4 page)

People dislike chaos. We like order—not regimented order, but order with a bit of
texture
or variation to it. For example, there’s a long tradition in art history of observing that many paintings use a system of order called
the golden section
, which is basically just a way of dividing up the space on the painting into boxes of different proportions. It turns out that doing so makes the painting appear “prettier” to us.

This isn’t exactly a revelation to anyone in the arts. Excess chaos just doesn’t have pop appeal. We call it “noise,” “ugly,” or “formless.” My music teacher in college said, “Music is ordered sound and silence.” “Ordered” is a pretty important word in that sentence.

There’s some highly ordered music that doesn’t appeal to most of us either. A lot of folks say that the strain of jazz known as bebop is just noise. But I’m going to offer up an alternate definition of noise:
Noise is any pattern we don’t understand
.

Even static has patterns to it. If the little black and white dots are the output of random numbers, they have the pattern of the output of random number generators—a complex pattern, but a pattern nonetheless. If you happen to know the algorithm used to generate the number, and the seed from which the algorithm started, you could exactly replicate that static. There’s really next to nothing in the visible universe that is patternless. If we perceive something as noise, it’s most likely a failure in ourselves, not a failure in the universe.

The first time you hear jazz it may sound weird to you, especially if you’ve been reared on good old-fashioned “three chords and the truth” rock ‘n’ roll. It’ll be “devil music,” to borrow a term from countless exasperated parents who railed against their kids’ choice of music.

If you get past your initial distaste (which may last only a fraction of a second), you may come to see the patterns inherent in it. For example, you’ll spot the flattened fifth that is so important to a jazzy sound. You’ll start drumming your fingers to the expected 4/4 beat and find to your dismay that it’s actually 7/8 or some other meter. You’ll be at sea for a bit, but you may experience a little thrill of delight once you
get it
and experience a moment of discovery, of joy.

If jazz happens to interest you, you’ll sink into these patterns and come to expect them. If you get really into it, you may come to feel that a musical style such as alternating-bass folk music is hopelessly “square.”

Congratulations, you just chunked up jazz. (Hmm, I hope that doesn’t sound too disgusting!)

That doesn’t mean you are done with jazz, though. There’s a long way to go between intellectual understanding, intuitive understanding, and grokking something.

“Grok” is a really useful word. Robert Heinlein coined it in his novel
Stranger in a Strange Land
. It means that you understand something so thoroughly that you have become one with it and even
love
it. It’s a profound understanding beyond intuition or empathy (though those are required steps on the way).

“Grokking” has a lot in common with what we call “muscle memory.” Some writers on cognition describe the brain as functioning on three levels. The first level is what we call conscious thought. It’s logical and works on a basically mathematical level, assigning values and making lists. It’s kind of slow, even in those genius IQ types. This is the sort of mind we measure when we take IQ tests.

The second level of the brain is really slow. It’s integrative, associative, and intuitive. It links things that don’t make much sense. This is the part of the brain that packages things up and chunks them. This part of how we think isn’t something we can access directly—it doesn’t use words. It’s also frequently wrong. It’s the source of “common sense” which is often self-contradictory (“look before you leap, but he who hesitates is lost”). It’s the thing that builds approximations of reality.

The last kind of thinking is
not
thinking. When you stick your finger in fire, you snatch it back
before
your brain has time to think about it (seriously, it’s been measured).

Calling this “muscle memory” is a lie. Muscles don’t really have memory. They’re just big ol’ springs that coil and uncoil when you run electrical current through them. It’s really all about nerves. There’s a very large part of your body that works based on the
autonomic nervous system
, which is a fancy way of saying that it makes its own decisions. Some of it is stuff you can learn to bring under more conscious control, like your heart rate. Some of it is reflexes, like snatching your fingers out of the fire. And some of it is stuff you train your body to do.

There’s an old joke about a crowd gathered at the bottom of a burning building. Up at the top countless people jump from windows to be caught by the firemen. There’s one mother who is unwilling to toss her baby to the waiting rescuers. Finally, one guy at the bottom says, “I can catch the kid, ma’am, I’m a famous football player.” So the mother tosses the baby to the football player.

It’s a bad toss, so he has to run a little ways. He dives to catch the little tyke, and rolls on the ground in a perfect tumble, and finally stands, holding the baby up to a cheering crowd. Everyone is amazed.

Then he drop-kicks the baby.

OK, sick joke aside, it illustrates that we’re not just talking about muscle memory, but about whole sets of decisions we make instinctively.

Take the example of playing a musical instrument. I play the guitar—mostly acoustic guitar. I’ve also dabbled in piano and keyboards, and I’ve had enough musical training that I can fake my way through a banjo or mountain dulcimer.

My wife gave me a mandolin for my birthday this year. Mandolins have a different scale than a guitar—they’re tuned like a violin. The frets are closer together. The chords are all different. There are a handful of techniques that just aren’t used on the guitar. The notes sustain less. The musical vocabulary is different. And yet, I’m not finding it that hard to get basic competence.

The reason isn’t just muscle memory; that just accounts for
some
of my ability to move my fingers quickly along the fingerboard, but not all. For example, the distances I move my fingers are very different and the places I move them to are different too. What is really going on is that because I have been playing guitar for over a decade, I have grokked enough about stringed instruments to create a library of chunked knowledge to apply. When I was playing the guitar all those years, I was also working on more obscure stuff, deepening my knowledge of the intervals between notes, mastering rhythm, understanding harmonic progression.

Building up this library is what we call “practice.” Studies have shown that you don’t even have to do it physically. You can just
think
about doing it and it’ll get you much of the way there. This is strong evidence that the brain is doing the work, not muscles.

When our brain is
really
into practicing something, we’ll dream about it. This is the intuitive part of the brain burning neural pathways into our brain, working on turning newly grasped patterns into something that fits within the context of everything else we know. The ultimate goal is to turn it into a routine. Frankly, my impression is that the brain doesn’t particularly want to have to deal with it again.

Which brings us, finally, to games.

If you review those definitions of “game” I presented earlier, you’ll see that they have some elements in common. They all present games as if they exist within a world of their own. They describe games as a simulation, a formal system, or as Huizinga put it, a “magic circle” that is disconnected from reality. They all talk about how choices or rules are important, as well as conflict. Finally, a lot of them define games as objects that aren’t real, things for pretending with.

But games are very real to me. Games might seem abstracted from reality because they are iconic depictions of patterns in the world. They have more in common with how our brain visualizes things than they do with how reality is actually formed. Since our perception of reality is basically abstractions anyway, I call it a wash.

The pattern depicted may or may not exist in reality. Nobody is claiming that tic-tac-toe is a decent mimicry of warfare, for example. But the rules we perceive—what I’ll call the pattern—get processed exactly the same way we process very real things like “fire burns” and “how cars move forward.”

Games are puzzles to solve, just like everything else we encounter in life. They are on the same order as learning to drive a car, or picking up the mandolin, or learning your multiplication tables. We learn the underlying patterns, grok them fully, and file them away so that they can be rerun as needed. The only real difference between games and reality is that the stakes are lower with games.