Everyone seems to be talking about and planning for the H1N1 virus these days. My university, for example, sent out a memo to encourage us to plan for extended absences due to the virus as we plan our classes for the fall semester. Now we can all participate in world-wide planning for the potential pandemic, thanks to a group of researchers from Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. They have created a new Flash game called The Great Flu that allows the player to try to stop the spread of a virus. The consequences of the player’s actions can be surprising, as when I isolated victims of the virus in China and Japan which caused “chaos”. This game is an example of a serious game, that is, a game with a serious purpose such as education or advocacy. There are so many examples of serious games that the category constitutes a subfield of game studies with organizations and conferences dedicated to it. Don’t let the name of the category fool you, though. Serious games can be fun too. The Great Flu is pretty good and I learned quite a bit about public policy implementation for virus containment. Who would have thought swine flu could be fun? Give the game a try here. The game also contains quite a bit of humor. At some point, as the deaths from the flu rose in Central and North America, one of the global events that occurred was that “No Virus” t-shirts began to be sold. That sounds about right. 
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m chairing a panel at NeMLA in April about using Web 2.0 technologies to play. Because of this panel, I’ve spent much of my summer playing and thinking about playing online. Yes, I recognize that I have a great job!
The game that has captured my online attention this summer is Scrabble on FaceBook. There are a few people (Liz, Scott, Ann) that I’m playing with regularly, multiple games at a time. There are also a couple of people (Sally, Carrie) with whom I seem to constantly have one game going. And then there are a few people (Gary, Cathrine, Kate) that I play with occasionally. I even sometimes play with strangers, although I find those games less engaging, probably because the social aspect of the game, which I’ve also written about before, is lacking.
One of the things I really like about Scrabble on FaceBook is that it will not let you play an invalid word. So the game is completely about pattern recognition. When I play the game in person, nothing stops me from playing an invalid word and so I am unlikely to take a chance on a word that I am unsure about. If my opponent challenges me in the real life game and I have played an invalid word, I lose a turn. In the online version of Scrabble, I can’t lose a turn for playing an invalid word. As a result, I’m likely to try letter combinations that I would never have tried in real life. I’ve learned lots of new words by just trying out letter combinations. What is “zax” for example? Or “tranqs”? And I’ve learned many, many two letter words whose meanings I’m sure I’ll never know. Anyone know what “za” is? Or “xu”? Or “ka”?
Lots of other FaceBook games have come to my attention and not captured it this summer. I’ve tried Farkle and Rummikub, both of which I love in the real world. Many of my friends have been playing Farmtown and so I’ve created my own farm but I haven’t visited it for days. And Mafia Wars. And Bejeweled. Well, to be honest, I won’t allow myself to really play Bejeweled because it is exactly the kind of game that I could become addicted to and I don’t really want to be addicted to a game right now.
But the kind of play I’ve been most interested in this summer has not been play that is associated with games. I’m really interested in play as a way of practicing and expressing parts of one’s identity that is difficult to practice or express in the real world.
My FaceBook friends seem to do a lot of quizzes. They want to find out which philosopher most closely represents them and how well they know their Princess Bride quote trivia. They want the rest of us to know five places they’ve lived and five jobs they’ve had and five cars they’ve owned. For some reason, I have resisted these quizzes although I’ve been thinking a lot about what people get out of taking them. And what I’ve come to realize is that these quizzes are a way to reveal one’s identity, either your real one or the one you wish you had. This came to me the other night as I was engaging in non-gaming online play of my own. I like to play with memes that come in the form of lists of questions that you answer in a note on your FaceBook profile. A meme is a cultural idea that is transmitted from one mind to another, in this case, via FaceBook. There are lots of memes running around FaceBook. Most of these memes allow users to reveal things about themselves (or not), helping to construct a kind of online identity that supplements (or perhaps alters) one’s identity in the real world.
A few weeks ago, for example, I revealed to my friends the fifteen books that I’ve read that have stuck with me. The idea is that you list these books without thinking too much about them, presumably so you can’t make yourself seem cooler than you actually are. My list contained books that I’d talked recently with Ann about (Disgrace and The Road) as well as books that I’d seen on other people’s lists (To Kill a Mockingbird and The Color Purple). The list also really did contain books that popped into my head because they were memorable and important to me in some way (A Separate Peace, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Sing, Gone to Soldiers and The Mists of Avalon). But I rejected a number of books from my list just because I didn’t think I’d want to reveal them (Valley of the Dolls, The Other and The Group). And I rejected some just because they didn’t send the message that I wanted to send (Heart of Darkness and Carrie). As I reflected afterward on the books that I put on my list, I started to think about identity management again, that is, how I present myself to the world, the FaceBook world in this case.
What does this have to do with play? The other night, the two concepts merged for me. I was playing with another of these memes, called My Life According to … . The note contains a series of questions that you are supposed to answer using the song titles from one artist or band. I chose the Indigo Girls so my note was called My Life According to the Indigo Girls. Here’s what I wrote:
Several people have tagged me with this–I won’t tag anyone. Play if you want to. Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to 15 people you like and include me (presuming I’m someone you like). You can’t use the band I used. Try not to repeat a song title. Repost as “my life according to (band name)
Are you a male or female:
“The Girl With The Weight Of The World In Her Hands”
Describe yourself:
“Trouble”
How do you feel:
“Closer To Fine”
Describe where you currently live:
“Get Out the Map”
If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
“Perfect World”
Your favorite form of transportation:
“Midnight Train to Georgia”
Your best friend?
“She’s Saving Me”
You and your best friends:
“Devotion”
What’s the weather like:
“Watershed”
Favorite time of day:
“I Don’t Wanna Know”
If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:
“Lay My Head Down”
What is life to you:
“Pendulum”
Your relationship:
“Moment of Forgiveness”
Your fear:
“Kid Fears”
What is the best advice you have to give:
“Don’t Give that Girl a Gun”
Thought for the Day:
“I’ll Change”
How I would like to die:
“Joking”
My soul’s present condition:
“Cold Beer and Remote Control”
My motto:
“It’s Alright”
A friend of mine recently posted a list of board games that she had as a kid (and wished she had never gotten rid of). She had quite an interesting list. So I decided to go check out the site that she linked to and discovered a game that I think I’m going to have to buy. The game is called THE AMAZING DUNNINGER MIND READING GAME. Here’s a quote from the web site that describes the game.
Based on extensive research, Dunninger has developed the Mind Reading Game, to prove that anyone can read a thought! Not a game of chance, the Mind Reading Game provides an experiment to demonstrate that a coincidental thought can be gained by two persons without the aid of recognized communication to a degree that precludes the possibility of chance.
The game includes a “receiver board with built-in temples.” I really want to know what that means. This game combines my interest in games with my interest in weird beliefs. What more could I ask for?
I have recently been playing Mob Wars on FB. I started because Ann and Liz both invited me to be part of their mobs. I nearly stopped playing after Thanksgiving but Scott begged me not to uninstall the application because he wanted me to stay in the mob. As a result of these friends playing, I have continued. But I have to echo Liz when I say, “It’s no Parking Wars.” So why doesn’t Mob Wars stack up well against Parking Wars? To understand why Parking Wars is a better game, I think we have to understand a little bit about how to play each game.
Mob Wars is a game in which the player plays a mob boss. Each mob boss has a number of characteristics, represented by numbers. The characteristics include health (with a starting maximum value of 100), energy (starting maximum value of 20), stamina (starting maximum value of 3), attack (starting maximum value of 3) and defense (starting maximum value of 3). In addition, each mob boss has a stockpile of weapons and vehicles, an amount of cash and experience points. The goal of the game is to move up the levels (called leveling up) by gaining experience points. Experience points are gained in a number of ways.
The first way to gain experience points is to complete jobs. Every job requires some amount of energy as well as some tools (weapons, vehicles, mobsters, other items such as bottles of liquor) and, upon successful completion, pays cash within a certain range. Another way to gain experience points is to fight other mobs (and beat them). Once an appropriate number of experience points is gained, the player is alloted 3 skill points that she can distribute among her many characteristics (such as maximum health, maximum energy and so on).
These are just the beginning of the MANY decisions that need to be made while playing Mob Wars. As I’ve written before, decision-making is a very important factor in determining whether a game is engaging. In general, the more meaningful the decisions that need to be made in a game, the more engaging the game is. A meaningful decision is one that allows the player to delineate a strategy for winning the game. In other words, for a decision to be meaningful, there must be multiple choices, each of which may lead to a winning strategy, each of which has advantages and disadvantages. Mob Wars requires the player to make a series of meaningful decisions. For example, my stamina in Mob Wars is currently set to 9. Each time a player chooses to fight some other mob (hoping to gain experience points and take some of that mob’s money), the player’s stamina is reduced by 1. In other words, I can engage in 9 fights with other mobs in a row without waiting for my stamina to be replenished. For me, however, this value rarely comes into play because of other choices that I have made. In order to win a fight, I must spend my money on weapons and vehicles. Instead, I have chosen to spend my money on properties within the city which allows me to earn more money at a faster rate (without having to fight). Because I don’t have as many weapons and vehicles as other mobs, I lose a lot of fights which decreases my stamina without gaining me anything. Until I purchase more weapons and vehicles, it doesn’t make sense for me to add more stamina to my mobster. This is just one meaningful decision among many that I must make.
Parking Wars, on the other hand, has relatively few meaningful decisions. There are basically two. First, the player must decide on whose streets she is going to park her cars. She is allowed to park her cars on her friends’ streets as well as those of three anonymous strangers’ streets. Second, once she earns a certain amount of money, she must decide which specialized car she is going to purchase (if any). That’s it! There are no other meaningful decisions.
Therefore, according to Costikyan (one of the game theorists that I make my students read), because Mob Wars has more interesting meaningful decisions than Parking Wars, Mob Wars should be a more engaging game than Parking Wars. But it isn’t. And here’s why I think that’s the case.
Both games are played on FaceBook, a social networking tool that is all about connecting with people. Parking Wars involves more interesting social interaction than Mob Wars and since the context of playing the two games is a social interaction site, Parking Wars is more interesting. In Parking Wars, a player parks on her friends’ streets and has her friends park on her streets. She is able to ticket her friends when they park illegally and send them messages on those tickets. She begins to learn her friends’ patterns–when they check their streets, whether they give tickets at low values or wait until the tickets become more valuable, and so on. In addition, there is the possibility of creating alliance with certain friends, agreeing not to ticket that friend’s illegally parked cars. Noticing and commenting on these alliances is also engaging. In fact, Nick created a group called Parkaholics Anonymous in which he explicitly commented on my alliance with Ann. All of this is part of the engagement of Parking Wars.
On the surface, Mob Wars has similar social possibilities via the “mob” aspect of the game. That is, the members of a player’s mob are her friends. The fact that a player is in the same mob as one of her friends does not impact on her playing of the game, however. She cannot explicitly take advantage of the fact that she has friends with certain characteristics in her mob. This is a missed opportunity and, I think, the main reason Mob Wars is not as engaging as Parking Wars.
I believe this goes to show that there is not a single reason for playing a game. Game designers would be well advised to pay attention to the context of a game and why players might be interested in playing as they design the interactions and decisions involved in playing their games.
Earlier this month, I was out for drinks with colleagues. Most of us are friends on FaceBook as well as in real life. A new colleague, Marylena, mentioned that one of her favorite things to do on FaceBook is play Parking Wars. Her sheepish description of the game was not particularly intriguing but because I’m always interested in the games people play, I decide that I would check it out. And once I had played for a few days, I invited some other friends to play as well. Now I’m addicted.
The game is an advertisement for an A&E channel show, also called Parking Wars. I have never seen the show and playing the game doesn’t make me want to go watch the show. So although I think the game is successful as a game, I’m not so sure it’s successful as an advertisement.
Here’s how the game is played. The premise is that you are in charge of a street with five spaces on it. Some of the five spaces do not allow parking. Some allow parking for only cars of a certain color. And some might allow parking for cars of any color. The arrangement of these five spaces changes at random. In addition, you have some cars of your own that you need to park. You can’t park them on your own streets. Instead, you have to park them on the streets of your friends (of course, only those friends who have also installed the Parking Wars application) and two strangers. For every minute that your car is parked on a particular street, the car gains monetary value. When you move the car from one spot to another, you earn the value of that car at that moment. You also earn money if you catch someone parked illegally on your street–you ticket them and you earn the amount that the car is worth at the time of ticketing. Of course, if it is your car that is ticketed, you lose the amount that the car is worth at the time of ticketing.
When I first started playing Parking Wars, my only FaceBook friend who was playing was Marylena. So I could park on her street and on the streets of two strangers. I installed the application, parked my two cars and then promptly forgot about the application. A few days later, I received a FaceBook message from Marylena telling me that there were cars parked illegally on my street just waiting for me to ticket them. I’ve been hooked on the game ever since. I went to the game, ticketed Marylena, got the money from those tickets and became a Parking Pro (I had been a Parking Amateur up to that point). I also was able to purchase a third car, which allowed me to start earning more money. That act of altruism on Marylena’s part stuck with me because it hooked me on the game. After playing for a few days with only three streets to park on, I realized that the game would be much more fun if I had more streets to choose from. So I invited my closest FaceBook friends (who are my closest friends in real life–go figure) to play the game. Within hours, I had seven streets to park on and the game was even more fun.
As my friends became acquainted with Parking Wars, I watched them move from Parking Amateurs to Parking Pros. I explained how the game worked. And I engaged in the same sort of altruism with them that Marylena had shown toward me. I parked illegally on their streets, simply so they could earn some money and thus, become hooked on the game.
Today, I was explaining this game to Evelyn. I mentioned the altruism because I had been somewhat uncomfortable with the part of the game that tempts you to park illegally if you can get away with it. I thought the altruism redeemed this troubling aspect of the game somewhat. Evelyn pointed out to me that the altruism sounded like the kind of altruism that heroin dealers show to potential new clients. They give away a taste of the heroin for free, hoping to capture their new clients in addiction so that they become lifelong customers. She’s absolutely right in making this comparison. I was trying to get my friends addicted to the game by giving them a taste of what the game has to offer. Their long-term addiction was worth the short-term hit to my current cash level because in the long run, it’s good to have more people to play with.
So games really are like drugs! They both give us the same little jolt of pleasure in our brains.
Back in the late 1980’s, I worked as a volunteer on a running race. Because I had a background in computer science, one of my tasks was to set up a database of all the race entrants and then to enter their finishing positions after the race so that we could publish the results in the local paper. A friend of mine had an Apple II computer with a database management program on it. I think the database program was AppleWorks. In any case, the database management program had a primitive copy protection mechanism, a scheme for ensuring that users of the software did not give copies of it to their friends. Each time I started the program, I had to answer a question from the user manual. The question might be something like: On page 37 of the manual, what is the fourth word in the third paragraph? This was in the days before copy machines were widely available so the thinking was that the software would not be very useful if you didn’t also have a copy of the user manual. It was a very primitive way of trying to prevent users from giving the software to all of their friends, of trying to protect what the software developers felt was their right to limit the copying of their software. Of course, this mechanism would not work today since it’s extremely easy to copy user manuals. But even back then, the critique of this protection mechanism was that it was easy to circumvent if you were determined to do so but it was simply an inconvenience for legitimate users. What if you lost your user manual, for example?
Since that time, digital rights management has come of age. DRM is a hot topic with owners of digital content claiming that their rights cover all sorts of things, allowing them to do all sorts of things to our computers without our consent. And yet, it is virtually impossible to use technology to prevent the copying of software and other digital content. So DRM is typically criticized for not actually protecting against illegitimate copying while making the lives of legitimate users very difficult. A number of stories about DRM have been in the news recently.
What is digital rights management? According to Wikipedia, it is a generic term that refers to any scheme that a hardware manufacturer or copyright holder implements to prevent illegimate use of their hardware or copyrighted materials. In 1998, the United States passed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) which among other things, made the circumvention of any digital right management mechanism a crime. In other words, if a company used the DRM mechanism that I described above (asking users to answer questions from a user manual), then copying the manual and giving it to a friend would violate the DMCA. But the situation for users of digital content is even more dire than that. DRM mechanisms today are wide-ranging, claiming all kinds of rights for the owners of digital copyrights, at the expense of your right to control what happens on your own computer.
I have been thinking about the DMCA since its passage because of its immediate impact on the research of computer scientists. Soon after the passage of the DMCA, the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) ran a contest that challenged researchers to break their latest digital watermarking scheme. Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton, chose not to sign any of the confidentiality agreements that would qualify him for the monetary prize of the contest. Within three weeks, he and his team had broken the watermarking scheme and wrote a scientific paper that described the techniques they used. When the SDMI and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) found out that the team was planning to present this paper at a conference, they threatened to sue, citing violation of the DMCA, specifically the portion of the act that makes it illegal to circumvent DRM schemes (of which the digital watermarking scheme was one). Felten withdrew the paper but also sued the SDMI and the RIAA and sought a ruling that presenting the original paper should actually have been allowed. Because Felten had not actually been sued and therefore had not been harmed, his case against the SDMI and the RIAA was dismissed on the grounds that he lacked standing to sue. Since then, the Justice Department has said that any threatened legal action against researchers such as Felten under the DMCA is invalid. But this judgment has not yet been tested in a court of law. And in the meantime, content providers have gotten bolder in their uses of DRM technologies.
In early 2007, Sony BMG Music Entertainment agreed to settle with the Federal Trade Commission after it was discovered that music CDs from the company contained software that was secretly installed on any computer on which the CDs were played. This software “limited the devices on which the music could be played, restricted the number of copies that could be made, and contained technology that monitored their listening habits to send them marketing messages.” Because the software gave access to users’ computers to Sony BMG, it also opened up holes on those computers to any intruder who knew about them. In addition, the software, once discovered, was unreasonably difficult to remove. The Federal Trade Commission said that this secret installation of software violated federal law. The settlement was a financial and public relations disaster for Sony BMG and should have put that kind of DRM technology out of business forever.
But the long-awaited release of Will Wright’s new game, Spore, from Electronic Arts earlier this month shows that DRM is alive and kicking. The reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly negative due to the existence of SecuROM, a particularly nasty implementation of DRM. This software was developed by Sony DADC, does not announce that it is installing itself, limits the user to 3 installations of the game (even if it has been uninstalled), and is very difficult to uninstall, even if the game is uninstalled. It remains to be seen what kinds of security risks are opened up on the computers that have SecuROM on them. The biggest complaint seems to be about the limit of three installations because of how strict this limit is. Apparently, changes in hardware make the software believe that a new installation has occurred. So if a user upgrades her video card, she may use up one of her Spore installations. This software sounds very similar to the software that Sony BMG got slapped down for using so I can only imagine what is going to happen as these thousands of disgruntled gamers make their dissatisfaction known. Of course, the developers of Spore claim they are just trying to stop piracy. The problem with this argument is that the DRM scheme was broken before the game was released so anyone intent on pirating the game will be able to do so. Only legitimate users of the game will be harmed by SecuROM.
Legitimate users of Yahoo Music recently learned the lesson that purchasing DRM-protected content is actually like renting, rather than purchasing, that content. Yahoo Music Store will close its virtual doors at the end of this month. If you are one of the unlucky legitimate customers who bought your music through this store, you will no longer have access to your music because of Yahoo’s DRM scheme. When the store closes, the DRM license key servers will shut down. If you can’t get a DRM license key, you can no longer listen to music that you legitimately purchased. Meanwhile, those who pirated that same music will continue to enjoy what they pirated.
Content providers need to stop creating roadblocks for their legitimate users. These roadblocks do nothing to protect content.
More proof of Ian Bogost’s brilliance comes in the form of an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It describes his new game Honorarium.
One of the aspects of game analysis that my students struggle with has to do with the dramatic elements of a game. According to the text that I use in my Creating Games class (Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton, Chris Swain and Steven Hoffman), dramatic elements are those elements of the game that help to keep the players engaged in the game. There are five dramatic elements but the ones that my students struggle with are premise and story.
The text says that premise sets the stage for the action that will propel the game forward while story has to do with actual plot points in a narrative being told by the game. For example, the premise in Monopoly is that the player is a real estate mogul. But there is no story in Monopoly because there is no action that moves from point to point as determined by the author of the game. Fullerton and her co-authors say, “Plays, movies, and television are all media that involve storytelling and linear narratives. When an audience participates in these media, they experience a story that progresses from one point to the next as determined by an author. The audience is not an interactive participant in these media and cannot change the outcome of the story.” They go on to say that games are different in that the audience (the game player) interacts with a game and can (in fact, must be able to) change the outcome of the game. So traditional storytelling methods will not work in a game system because the player will not have enough of a sense of control if she cannot change the outcome of the game. The game will feel “fixed” or “random” which will result in an unsatisfying game-playing experience. Because of this need to have the player feel that she is in control of the progress of the game, very few games incorporate story as a dramatic element. Instead, most games use some sort of premise. Of course, some premises are more elaborate than others. When a premise gets to be very elaborate, it is called a backstory. Confused yet? Obviously, the boundary between premise and story is blurry.
I’ve been thinking about the word story a lot lately because of FaceBook. Every change that is made to your profile is called a story. So, for example, every time I change my status, a story is posted to my mini-feed as well as to the newsfeed for each of my friends. And then I can look at all my status stories. In fact, here are my status stories:
Saying that each of these items is a story is confusing to me. If you were to say that together these items make a story, each item being a plot point developed by me, the author, then I would understand why the word story is used. But how is each of these items a story by itself? I think this is yet another example of FaceBook coopting a word and changing its meaning.
Sit10 commented on my last entry that a friend had once told her that there is a difference between what men and women find funny. Men laugh because they think, “That’s so ridiculous.” Women laugh because they think, “That’s so true.” She then asked what I thought of that and how it might be related to game design.
The first thing that I wondered after getting Sit10’s comment is whether it really is true that men and women find different things funny. Sit10 pointed out that many more men than women find The Three Stooges funny and I have to agree with that observation. On the other hand, I’ve observed that it is often the case that opposite gendered siblings find similar things funny. So what role does gender play in what we find funny?
It turns out that there is a large body of literature that examines gender differences and humor. According to Thorson and Powell, an individual’s sense of humor is made of the following elements: 1. recognition of oneself as a humorous person; 2. recognition of others’ humor; 3. appreciation of humor; 4. laughing; 5. perspective (which is the idea of a personal outlook on life that is consistent with being good-humored); and, 6. coping humor. An individual sense of humor is comprised of varying levels of each of these elements. Most of the older studies that I found suggested that women were much less likely to be creators of humor but were more likely to use humor as a coping mechanism. More recent work has suggested that the results of these older studies were biased by the methods and materials used in the experiments and that, in fact, there is no difference between men and women in terms of their ability to create or to appreciate humor. A study from 2006, however, showed that there are gender differences in the kind of sense of humor desired in a partner. The typical man wants a woman who is able to appreciate the humor he creates and is not attracted to a woman who is herself very funny. The typical woman, on the other hand, values humor creation and apprecation equally in a partner.
A study done by Mary Crawford and Diane Gressley tested the hypothesis that men and women find different things funny. Using factor analysis to analyze the results of a humor questionaire, they discovered that there are ten dimensions of humor and that there are gender differences in four of the ten of them, which the authors of the study say shows that “women and men are more alike than different.” Men scored higher on hostile humor, jokes (which is defined as the telling of “formulaic jokes”) and slapstick while women scored higher on anecdotal humor. It seems that this study probably supports Sit10’s comments about what men and women find funny.
So what does this have to do with game design? One of the reasons that people play games is because they find them to be “fun.” If we can figure out what we mean by “fun”, then we can design games that people want to play. And if there are differences between what men and women think about “fun”, we might be able to figure out how to design more games that appeal to women.
One of the difficulties in writing about this topic has to do with the word fun. It seems that fun is kind of like pornography–it’s difficult to define but we know it when we see it. We each know when we’re having fun but can we identify the common features in our fun experiences? For example, I have fun when I play poker with my friends. But I also have fun when I go to an Indigo Girls concert and when I discuss literary criticism with Ann and when a class that I’ve planned goes really well. Of course, not all of these situations involve game playing but I think they illustrate the idea that fun is not just one thing. Any theory of fun (even one that we want to apply to game playing only) will have to take into account that there are different kinds of fun.
Several researchers have attempted to delineate different kinds of fun. Probably the most famous taxonomy of fun comes from Marc LeBlanc (no relation to me even though my brother’s name is Mark LeBlanc). He created an approach (called the Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics approach) to examining, testing and designing games. Ambiguous concepts such as fun fall into the Aesthetics category and he has identified eight different types of fun. Each game uses some combination of these eight types of fun. The eight types are: 1. sensation, in which the game functions as an art object and has some sort of beauty; 2. fantasy, in which the game functions as a vehicle for make believe; 3. narrative, in which the game tells a story that unfolds over time; 4. challenge, in which the game presents the player with obstacles to overcome; 5. fellowship, in which the game provides a social context for interaction; 6. discovery, in which the game presents uncharted territory for the player to explore and master; 7. expression, in which the game allows the player to express herself (for example, via choices in avatar); and, 8. submission, in which the game is simply a mindless pastime that provides pleasure. LeBlanc says that these categories provide a vocabulary for play aesthetics so that as we design a new game, we can identify which type of fun we want and then create a list of criteria that will provide a yardstick for that type of fun in our game.
There is some evidence from a variety of studies (as well as a lot of anecdotal evidence) that men and women in general like different types of games. For example, one study found that women’s preferences for games include lots of opportunities for social interaction (even if only with a virtual character within the game), a non-sexualized role for the female protagonist, and content that is not aggressive. These findings sound similar to the findings about humor and also show why many popular contemporary video games are not very appealing to women.
From a game design standpoint, the lesson from this study is similar to the lesson I take from the popularity of the Wii. Much of the progress in game design and development has been focused on the visual aspect of games–more realistic rendering of the game environment. This means that we can have more realistic visual renderings of in-game characters, including sexualized female characters, as well as more realistic game physics that allow fighting and violence to feel more real. Increases in these areas seem to appeal mostly to hardcore gamers, most of whom are men. To appeal to more women (as well as casual gamers and non-gamers), the game development community should focus on improving other aspects of the game. The Wii shows us that innovative interaction possibilities between the player and the game environment are appealing to a broad new audience. I think the studies I’ve mentioned here show that focusing on artificial intelligence (to create more realistic character behavior within the game) and on facilitating social interactions among players within the game will result in games that more women find to be fun. I hope the success of the Wii means that the game development community will start paying attention to more of these kinds of things. Of course, the number of movies whose humor is aimed at adolescent boys mitigates my hope somewhat.
On Word of Mouth today on NHPR, I heard an interview with Jim Holt, the author of Stop Me if You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes. His book is short, only 160 pages, for a history of jokes. The fact that it contains history and philosophy makes me even more suspicious about how much coverage he could possibly have included in the book. But I was intrigued by the philosophy part of what he had to say. He discussed several theories about why people find some jokes funny and I think these theories can illuminate why people find some things fun.
The description of the interview on the Word of Mouth web site says, “Humor lives in the moment and the more you take it apart, the less humorous it becomes.” I think I disagree with this statement–the reason I say “I think I disagree” is because I haven’t thought about this kind of comment in relation to humor but I have heard similar comments about other phenomena and I disagree with those comments. An acquaintance once said to me that she doesn’t want to know too much about astronomy because that knowledge would take away from the beauty of the stars. I completely disagree with this statement. In fact, Richard Dawkins wrote a book called Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder in which he argues that the more you know about how the world works, the more wondrous the world becomes. In other words, ignorance is NOT bliss! I also hear comments like this when it comes to talking about games. Students often want to begin and end their analysis of a game with the statement: “It was (or wasn’t) fun.” But if I press them to articulate why it was fun, they often complain that doing so takes the fun out of the game. Clearly, I disagree with that idea. Otherwise, I wouldn’t teach game design and analysis. So I think I disagree with the statement that trying to figure out how humor works makes the humor disappear. But I do acknowledge that it is possible that humor is somehow different than these other phenomena.
Anyway, Holt discussed several theories about what we find funny and why. I think at least one of these theories can help us to understand what we find fun and why. Humans have probably been telling jokes since before they could speak (if you consider slap-stick a kind of joke). The oldest known joke book is called The Philolegos, or Laughter Lover, which is a Greek anthology from the fourth or fifth century a.d.
The theory of why we laugh at jokes that I found most interesting (and useful for thinking about game design) is the incongruity theory (which is actually about the resolution of incongruity). We perceive an inconsistency of some sort–two things that don’t normally go together or a sentence that seems irrelevant to the story being told. Inconsistencies heighten our attention–an inconsistency in our world might signal the presence of a predator and if we don’t pay attention, we might end up as someone’s lunch. With our attention (and anxieties) heightened, we try to resolve the incongruity. When the resolution finally comes, we realize that the incongruity was actually harmless and we laugh with relief.
The incongruity theory is useful for us in trying to understand why games are fun. Like Michael Shermer, I believe that we are “pattern-seeking” animals. We have evolved to look for patterns in our world–those ancestors who were good at finding patterns were good at seeing the predator hiding in the trees and so survived while those that missed such patterns ended up as lunch. As Steven Johnson reported in Discover magazine, when we find a pattern, we get a little jolt of pleasure in our brains. Games present patterns for us to discover and it’s pleasurable for us to find those patterns. I’m sure it’s one of the reasons I’m addicted to Dr Mario Online Rx. I get a little jolt of pleasure every time I resolve the inconsistency of the active viruses by manipulating the falling pills. So at least one way to put fun into games is to focus on patterns. The patterns have to present an incongruity that can be resolved by the player, but not too easily. If the player doesn’t recognize the incongruity or the incongruity cannot resolved in a recognizable way, the player will be frustrated. If the incongruity is too easily resolved, the player will be bored.
The use of incongruities in games is related to what the authors of the text that I use in Creating Games (Game Design Workshop) call challenge. In order to make a game more fun, the authors say, a game designer can focus on the dramatic elements of the game, one of which is challenge. By focusing on making the challenge appropriate to the level of skill of the player, the game designer can avoid frustration and boredom, both of which are antithetical to fun. When the level of challenge presented to the player closely matches her skill level, she enters a state called flow, in which the player “is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.” Entering the flow state, being completely immersed in what you’re doing, is pleasurable. As game designers, our ultimate goal is allow someone to enter the flow state while playing our games.
