Game of Design

My friend Tim points out a great game Questionaut and says exactly the right things about it.  A game that’s made for educating kids but fun in it’s own right.  Short, simple, and sweet.  Working in the 5-year plan of game design is feeling sillier and sillier these days, with games like this.

I posted about this article on the scientific study of childhood play a while back, but wanted to take some time out to comment. It now appears that the most obvious interpretation of play - that it trains important skills in a safe environment - is wrong. The next theory up to bat is that we play to train our entire brains, not just specific muscles or parts of our brain. I find the correlation with ADHD study particularly interestingly - that ADHD is a symptom of a lack of brain development, and play may be a cure. Play is fundamental to our development.

So what does this mean for games? I find it fascinatingly parallel with my theory that games resemble life more then stories. Games represent systems to be broken down, analyzed, and even conquered. Our interactions are physical and immediate. Our thoughts on games come after we’ve finished with play. Games require looking forward, not reflecting back. What does that imply about the parts of brain we’re training, and how we should design for it? I’m not a neuroscientist, but I am a game designer, and I’d like to speculate.

I find the fiction of games is frequently separate from the mechanics, even when they are heavily connected. In fact, while some mechanics reflect the flavor, others (appropriately) act against flavor. Pushing a button has little in common with the flavor of swinging a sword. Many of the “art” games I love I only play for 15-30 minutes, while I’m sure my World of Warcraft account lists weeks of playing. Is the “analyze” part of the brain separate from the “imagination” part of our brain, with only weak relation between? Are the feelings that Lazzaro cites at the heart of games specific to this “analyze” area? If this area didn’t exist, then we’d expect art games to engross us. Instead, games are even more powerful motivators then museums, concerts, and even books. This area of the brain seems to exist, and our motivation to play suggest it’s important to us. And games seem to be experts at targeting and training this part of the brain.

If so, what does this mean about this mean about how we design games? First of all, clearly the core and focus of our work in games should be on these systems for the brain to break down, comprehend, and analyze. For a while now, we’ve known that flavor is not the core of game design, and that story is problematic. We should not then be surprised if our traditional games are deeper and more interactive then art games, while art games focus more on the post-play reflection and discussion then a traditional game. The artist is trying to communicate something to the player, while the designer is trying to trying to let the user communicate with him. “What do you want to do with my door? You want to open it? Let me help you.”

But evidence also suggests that we should can use these artistic elements to make a well rounded experience, just as movies use music, engaging as much of our brain as possible. These elements just impact a different part of the experience, this reflection part, that occurs afterwards.

The current theory thus seems to expand on what we’ve suspected all along. Reflective mediums like painting, books, and movies are bad models for games. Sports and children’s play are good models. And we shouldn’t expect a particular game to help us hunt prey or do our homework. The act of play appears to make us stronger as a whole. Counter-Strike makes me a deeper thinker, not just a better gun aimer, and that appears to be a very good thing. But there are even higher heights to strive for. The best art games, just like the best games, create an interesting system that when reflected upon highlights new meaning, awakening both of these aspects of the brain. We may ultimately find ourselves having to play artist and designer together.

I have a theory that there have been 3 eras of game design. They overlap, but I claim you can see game design grow specifically where we’ve transitioned between these phases. I’m going to get a bit futurist here, so bear with me.

The first era was characterized by the “what” of game design. What can we make that is fun? What creates pictures? What creates sound? What is a camera? What is a game mechanic? This was approximately the 1980s to the mid-1990s. Spacewars and Wolfenstein 3d are great examples of these kinds of game.

The second era was characterized by the “how” of game design. How can we make this fun, using our “what” tools? How can we use game mechanics? Mario 64 answered how can we make 3d cameras fun. Starcraft answered how we can make an RTS fun. This is roughly the mid-1990s to the present.

The third era is characterized by the “why” of game design. Why should we make things fun? Why should games be fun rather then serious, or artistic? Why can’t games do more? I think this stage is just starting up, and will likely continue through the next decade. America’s Army and Passage both represent this period for me.

These categories are super rough, and the conceptual metaphor is a bit weak, but I think the eras of game design history actually hold up quite well. It’s important to point out that all 3 of these stages are interwoven. We are developing physics technology today, just as the military has been trying to use war games for decades. But the goals of the designers in each era were radically different. One can’t confuse being on one type of project from being on another. And the core of the gaming medium has shifted over time through these stages, and I feel it subtly shifting now.

I get a lot of flak for agreeing with Jonathan Blow and Jason Rohrer, but I think this progression symbolizes why he’s important. They are the heralds of the third act. I think there is little question that now coincides with the mass exposure of video games. My question now is whether this third experience driven stage will define the era, or be merely the foreword starving-artist fringe that has characterized the mature Renaissance arts for centuries.

If gaming is more like movies, then we would expect our second stage “action movie”-type games to be our most successfully, with our third stage Sundance games relegated to the word-of-mouth screening. If gaming is more like life, as I have theorized, then I would expect the opposite. Entertainment is only one facet of life, and games might then have many other facets that are equally valuable. The most significant evidence of this that comes to mind is the success of Brain Age among the elderly in Japan for mental acuity training and The Sims as a story telling and creation/expression tool. Of course, for every Sims there’s a Halo or Portal or Bioshock. We’ll see where this goes!