What is a Game, Anyway?
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by admin on 08-01-2010
So, as a followup to the thing I posted the other day about what a game designer does, it’s helpful to answer a more fundamental question: What *is* a game?
This is one of those things that gets bounced around a lot, because it’s one of those things, like “What is art?” that there’s not a really iron-clad and definite single answer to.
That said, it’s not like a lot of people haven’t taken a stab at answering it.
What do *you* think a game is? Is it something with points? That you play on a screen? Does it have a story? Does it have a goal? An end? Do you use a controller? Is there conflict, or challenge? Competition? There are certain aspects of gaming that people take for granted, but in the end, the best a lot of people can manage is, “I know it when I see it.” Or more appropriately, “I know it when I play it.”
Of course, a lot of professional game designers have spent a little more time trying to refine their definitions.
Chris Crawford’s view on what a game is can be found here. It’s a bit of a read, but worthwhile.
Eric Zimmerman and Katie Saleen define a game as follows: “a system of artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.”
Some people have paraphrased Sid Meier, creator of landmark games like Civilization, as saying that a game is a “series of interesting choices.”
They’re all good ways of thinking about the game, but just as any artist comes to their own definition of what art is, I think all game designers build an understanding of what, in their experience, a game actually is.
For me, I’m going to post something here I wrote at the end of ‘08. I was thinking about writing a book on game design, and this was one of the first bits I wrote.
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Let’s start with the easy question. If this is “A Practical Guide to Designing Videogames” (the working title of the book I was writing), what is a videogame? Ask a dozen people, and you’ll get a dozen different answers. Pretty much everyone will agree that video is somehow involved, though you might be stymied by something like Real Sound, a videogame that came out around 2000 that had no graphics, and was only sound. There’s a whole genre of “sound novels” in Japan, and they’re widely considered to be videogames, simply because they’re played on videogame consoles.
So the easiest, most obvious part of the definition - the “video” in the title - can’t even be relied upon to form part of the basic definition. Graphics, surely, are a part of *most* games, right? Sure. Same goes for audio. And a controller - some way to interface with the thing is critical. Does it need a story? Fans of Final Fantasy would argue that it’s critical, while fans of Tetris would probably raise the point that Tetris has no built-in story.
There are such a wide variety of games out there that it’s hard to find a good definition of what a game is. What are the similarities between Madden, Gears of War, Civilization, Grim Fandango, the Sims, Tetris, Rock Band, and Zork? There are a huge number of arguments you could make, and for each of those arguments, there are a small handful of exceptions. A definition of what a game is has to include those things.
Heck, why even limit ourselves to videogames? Why not include other things, like card games or board games? Or games in general, like wrestling, or cops and robbers? There have been dozens, if not hundreds of attempts to define what a videogame is over the years, and most of those discussions have been totally fruitless. So I’ll just cut to the chase:
A game is when a user is presented with a compelling choice that allows him or her to make an informed decision that has consequence.
I hear you asking yourself, “That’s it?” Yeah. That’s it. There’s nothing in there directly relating to story or character or shooting or graphics or controllers or epicness or saving the world or preteen androgynous adolescents or anthropomorphic cats or anything of the sort. However, that doesn’t mean they’re not in there. The definition has three key words:
- Compelling
- Informed
- Consequence
Heck, you could probably reduce the definition to only those three words, and you’d have at least a passable definition for what a game is. Still, since that’s pretty reductionist, let’s take another stab at it.
The basic gist of it is pretty simple. The thing that separates games from all other media is interactivity. That means that the player has the ability to interact with the game. That, in itself, isn’t enough. If, for instance, I’m watching a movie and it pauses itself, and requires that I unpause it to continue - that’s not a game. That’s just annoying.
The issue with interactivity isn’t simply the base interaction - it’s that the interaction has to have some sort of consequence. But again, if I unpause the movie, that’s a consequence - the movie continues to play. Fine - so the interaction has to have some sort of meaning. You have to have a choice, with consequence.
Okay, well, let’s take the same argument. I’m watching a movie. Halfway through, a screen pops up and says “Choice A or Choice B?” and that’s it. Nothing else. How do I make that decision? Normally, when faced with the choice between two options, you weigh the options to see which might have a better outcome. What is the risk involved with picking one over the other? What is the reward? Without any information as to what Choice A or Choice B is, there’s simply no *point* in selecting one over the other. The decision is totally arbitrary, and my personal interaction with it is meaningless - I might as well be an Eenie Meenie Miney Moe-bot. That’s not a game.
So the choice has to have consequence, but there has to be some ability to understand how to make the choice. The player has to be empowered to make an informed decision. Great. So let’s say the movie presents me with a character, Bob, and I can decide whether he takes a job at the box factory, or the paper mill. The movie’s informed me that Bob is a bland, boring guy or no particular consequence. He’s got no love for either boxes or paper, and he’ll be pretty much happy at either one, though maybe a little more creatively fulfilled in one job, and a little more financially stable in the other.
Whoop-de-doo.
Part of the problem is that on top of having the choice and understanding the consequence, the player has to actually give a damn about the choice they’re making. If two beasts are bearing down on me - a chihuahua and an angry grizzly bear, and I have only one bullet to try and stop one, I care because if I pick wrong, the bear will eat me for lunch. I’m informed by the physical stature of the beasts, the choice is compelling because really, it’s either the bear or the harmless teacup-dog and I only have a limited time to make the selection, and the consequence is life or death.
So creating compelling situations where players make informed choices, and those informed choices have meaningful consequence is what makes up a game? The game exists in the continual risk-reward balancing act in the player’s mind. You’ve given them the playground, the game is letting them churn through the possibilities.
To expand a bit on those keywords, though:
- Compelling: Narrative, Risk
- Informed: Presentation, Systematic Consistency
- Consequence: Progression, Reward
How do you make something compelling? Seems like a black art, really. Mechanically, a lot of what makes a decision compelling is the balance between risk and reward. The part that makes the choice compelling is setting the stakes - putting something valuable on the line. The narrative aspect is where story elements come in, because the things that you risk need to have some value. There can be mechanical value to those things - you might wager credits, or in-game objects - but in many games, your choices are balanced on narrative mechanics - do I risk my life to save the world? How far am I willing to go to save a character who means something to me?
In a game like Tetris, compulsion is built entirely on risk - do I wait for the long block to get a Tetris, or do I place another shape to clear some lines now? In a game like the old Lucasarts adventures, where death was impossible, the compulsion was built entirely on the narrative - the desire for progression. Those games had almost no way to even incur risk at all! Most games balance the two - the risks you take have both mechanical and narrative value - your teammates’ lives in squad-based shooters, for instance.
Information is nominally pretty straightforward. If you want to inform a player about the decisions they’re faced with, there are a pretty wide variety of ways to do it.
You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
Those lines should be instantly familiar to anyone who played the original Zork. Text is a pretty clear way to inform the player of the parameters of the decision they have to make. Graphics, too. The simple image of an angry bear and a chihuahua is probably enough to communicate to you the risks involved if you make a decision a particular way. So by “presentation,” I suppose what I really mean is some combination of graphics or text. The visual content of a piece in Tetris, combined with the gaps in the placed pieces - that’s enough to inform a player what they should or shouldn’t do.
The second piece in that puzzle is Systematic Consistency. Taking the Bear-Chihuahua example again, the information the player’s given are that the potential targets are a bear - a large beast known for mauling humans, and a Chihuahua, a tiny, maybe yappy, but mostly harmless dog. If one were to take the Monty Python approach, perhaps the bear is a friendly kind animal, and the little dog is a psychotic killing machine, but that undermines the consistency of the imagery in the real world, and prevents the player from making an informed decision! Sure, sometimes upending someone’s expectations can have good results, but you do so at the risk of breaking the mechanics of the game.
For the bear-Chihuahua example, for instance, if you wanted to keep the integrity of the informed decision, you might spatter the little dog in blood, and have scraps of human flesh hanging from its rabid jaws. And the bear might be in a tutu. That way, rather than upending the player’s expectations in a way that’s unexpected and frustrating, players will see that there were clues, they just had to look past their initial gut reaction.
Consequence is pretty straightforward. Something should happen when the decision is made. If you shoot the bear, the Chihuahua comes up and licks your face happily. If you shoot the Chihuahua, the bear eats you. That’s a pretty straightforward reward. It’s immediate, provides clear feedback on the player’s actions, and can be clearly causally linked to what the player did.
The second part of Consequence is the idea of progression. This is a little more nebulous, because it’s more on the dividing line between good games and bad games, rather than games or not games. Sure, you could repeat the same mechanics, over and over and over again. You could, in some bizarre iteration of Halo, have players enter the same room, encounter the same enemies with the same behaviors, and fight them with the same weapons. Over and over again. You could probably make a strong argument that that’s exactly what happened in the Library levels in the middle of Halo 1 - it was still a game, but it wasn’t interesting or fun, and failed to engage people.
Progression really is about keeping people engaged. Games aren’t progressions of an infinite variety of mechanics. Most games - card, real-world, or video - are about a very small set of contained mechanics, repeated over and over again. There’s a discussion to be had here that games are intentionally a smaller subset of all possible interactions, because originally, games were training mechanisms that allowed people to practice small chunks of real world interactions in a relatively safe environment until they were mastered.
But modern games are constrained more by practical considerations - developing an experience based on a limited set of interactions is possible, while developing an infinitely variable set of interactions is not. Most games are a handful of mechanics that evolve over the course of the game. If the game’s about fighting, you fight more or stronger enemies, you learn new techniques, and in addition to building your personal skills, your character grows in skill and magnifies your ability to succeed.
The fact that the game changes over time is really important, because it ensures that the player is constantly surprised, challenged, and that complete mastery takes a long time. Boredom sets in quickly with repetition - without progression, people will lose interest quickly.
The reason that Progression is contained within the definition of a game isn’t because it’s really critical to defining what a game is, but because I have no interest in talking about bad games, and Progression is absolute vital to the next topic, the Core Cycle.
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So, that was one chapter, more or less. The Core Cycle’s a pretty simple concept. If people are interested, I can post that, as well. 
