Developing a New Major

a line of stuff about fun runs thru the book, a lot about games and why we play, talks about flow (end of ch5), players (ch6), some design ideas, 8 kinds of fun, lazzrro’s ideas on emotion and games

fun about mental mastery – mostly about practicing and learning to reach mastery (lots of other definitions but this is the one he comes back to over and over – other things like aesthetic appreciation, visceral reactions, social status maneuvers can be fun/can feel good but htey don’t ahve to be – can’t lump them all together), brain gives us endorphins when we master things and that feels good – a reward, his definition is on p. 40 – “a source of enjoyment”, “fun is all about our brains feeling good – the release of endorphins into our system”, flow and hard fun aren’t always fun – can have flow in lots of situations that aren’t fun (mostly because you get flow more often once you’rve mastered something and don’t have to think about it anymore)

“fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension. It is the act of solving puzzles that make games fun…. with games, learning is the drug” (p. 40) and when it stops teaching we get bored, we want cognitive challenge – new data to add to and build out existing patterns, wholely new patterns are hard to deal with = we have to think about them. – games have to exist between sensory overload and boredom

game definitions – lots of them, some very complex (on p. 12, 14) -Juul: rule-based formal system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, consequences of hte activity are optional and negotiable; Crawford: subset of entertainment limited to conflicts in which players work to foil each other’s goals; Koster’s first take on the definition: exceptionally tasty patterns to eat up (he was talking about pac man) and games are puzzles to solve (survival based puzzles but the stakes are lower than in reality), exercises for our brains (if games cease to provide exercise then they’re boring)

here’s something that comes up a couple of places – game designers don’t really change – they make more complex, add more of the same but all within the same genre/game type (games changed when we added a weapon – now we just add more weapons) – see the p. on p. 127 – kitchen sink design – just keep throwing in stuff from different genres – and games get too complex for newcomers to pick up -entry barrier is too high, don’t want there to be a “priesthood” of players who know games

people are excellent pattern recognizers and good at ignoring irrelevant info – mind creates chunks (?schemas in other theories) and acts on teh chunks without too much conscious thought, tries to apply things learned from previous exposure to similar situations – and if it doesn’t behave the way we think then we get upset and have to think about it and conscious thought is slow and reaction times are slow

games teach us things that we need for survival (or needed in the past) – once we learn it (mastery) it’s not as much fun unless we can create our own games (like go fastest thru the space, or collect all the treausre)

noise is a pattern we don’t understand yet and it frustrates us and we give up, “people dislike chaos. We like order – not regimented order, but order wiht a lbit of texture or variation to it” (P. 24), but once we learn a pattern we want more

we practice to get to mastery – we like getting better, don’t have to physically  practice, can think about the skill, mentally rehearse it, goal is to not have to think about it when ya really need it – once we get it tho we stop playing the game – something designers have to remember – eventually people are going to get your game and it will cease to be fun

games are formal abstract systems with few variables – “the more formally constructed your game i, the more limited it swill be. To make games more long-lasting, they need to integrate more variables (and less predictable ones) such as human psychology, physics, and so on” (P. 38) – games aren’t pure abstractions tho (p. 80), usually wrapped in some fiction (the story?), since games are meant to train patterns so they train us to ignore the fiction (makes it sound like the story is tissue wrapping to get the game sold – look at cartoon on p. 87, to help make it worth playing when there are so many other games just like it, teaching hte same patterns – he says on p. 86 the people don’t play games because of the stories, most stories are about power and control since that’s what most games are about and these kinds of stories are often underdeveloped and juvenile – “The stories in most videogames serve the same purpose as calling the uber-checker a “king”. It adds interesting shading to hte game but hte game at its core is unchanged.” (P. 86))

p. 44 – example of trying to be more accurate, more descriptive about why we don’t like something – not enough to say we’re bored or we like something – need to think about what we really mean – p. 44 is lots of ways to really explain boredom – if we catch on too fast and then the game is trivial, if we master all the patterns, player can’t see any patterns and noise is boring… – get boredom plus frustration, boredom + mastery

good game = “one that teaches everything it has to offer before the player stops playing” (p. 46)

“fun is just another word for learning” (p. 46)

most games now a days are teaching us caveman lifeskills – how to survive in a harsh environment about estimating odds, how to predict events, about POWER and status (with a hint of violence), how to examine the space around us, spatial relationships, classification & taxonomy, collating, how the space will react to changes, memory (gotta remember where things are int he space), newer games add survival skills like how to aim accurately (think horseshoes), assess weakness of opponent, tactics, when to attack (think jacks), reaction times but more importantly team work (which can be more dangerous than shooting) – all things we needed to know in the past to survive and some still today

games can adapt to changing environments (changing needed skills) but htey change slowly and some disappear completely – games could model much more complex situations with their rules (games like diplomacy (?)) – advice to game designers – we need games for adults that teach new needed skills – dont drink the pretty blue liquid under the sink (even tho the blue looks clean it’s poison), need games that don’t demonize the opponent, that dont teach that ruthlessness is the only way to survive/win – as society gets more interdependent those skills are counter productive

“If anything, the question to ask might be why the most popular games are the ones that teach obsolete skills while the more sophisticated ones that teach subtler skills tend to reach smaller audiences?” (p. 72) – (we’ve seen that in class – people like apples to apples, don’t want to read the instructions for the more complex games)

game tactics – do things faster (time tactics), do things thoroughly (get all the treasure, visit all the rooms)

“games have these characteristics” they present us with models of real things – often highly abstrated. They are genreally quantified or enev quantized models. They primarily teach us things that we can absorb into the unconscious as opposed to things designed to be tackled by the conscious, logical mind. They mostly teach us things that are fairly primitive behaviors, but they don’t HAVE to.” (p. 76) – it’s the formal abstract mathematical part that is least understood by game designers – the part that we can chunk up – and we have to get better at these chunky parts to improve games

“algorithm for innovation: find a new dimension to add to the gameplay…If we really wanted to inovate on puzzle games, how about exploring puzzle games based on time rather than space, for example?” (p. 78) – look at the evolution of hte 2d shooter on pl. 79 – watch how just one element changes at a time – DeathRace really just pacman – instead of dots to eat there are people to run over, goal is to get them all in both games

play predates story he says, games are not stories and shouldn’t try to become like stories – games are experiential, they’re about actions (not emotions)

fun is contextual – to get fun out of an activity depends on teh reason you’re doing it, being able to have fun is an evolutionary bonus (he says like opposable thumbs) because without it we wouldn’t have any motivation to learn new things and we’d just be like animals – “fun is about learning in a context where there is no pressure, and that is why games matter.” (P. 98)

ch6 talks about players (starts on p. 100) – not all games can be popular with all people – and you can’t make a game that would be popular with all, lots of different kinds of intelligences, kills – verbal, logical, spatial, musical… – and those different people like different kinds of games because they can solve different kinds of puzzles; personality types also explain game preferences, past experiences (past info chunks, past puzzle solving skills) – young men like abstract systems because their brains are wired to be able to solve them, thinking skills change over time which expalins why game preferences different between different ages – people play games also because they prefer different types of solutions – solutions we’re good at

people should play games that they’re not good at because they can learn new things but we usually don’t because it’s hard and we try to avoid hard and thinking, we want to be able to take shortcuts, we want to take the “optimal path” to a solution, and that means people are willing to cheat to get there – cheating makes sense evolutionarily

weird – we dislike tedium but we also want predictability – want controlled unpredictability

the destiny of game sis to become boring, to end up not being fun

p. 118 talks about rewards in games – rewards are the advantages for doing something – ben cousins uses term ludemes (no citaton – arggh) = basic units of game play – some examples = visit everywhere, get to the other side (no details!!) – update after Raph Koster’s comment (Thanks for the info, Raph): Ben Cousin has a web site with his articles listed including some discussing the ludeme idea so I”ll go check those out and make more notes (and clean up my typing/spelling in case other people look at the blog<G>)

p. 120 – 6 elements that successful games seem to all have – preparation (by the player), a sense of psace, solid core mechanic (the puzzle to solve, interesting rules), severa challenges (content that operattes within the rules), player needs a range of abilities, player needs some skill in using the abilities and if you use them badly you fail

p. 122 has 3 features that help a game teach whatever it wanted to teach – variable feedback (outcomes shouldn’t be predictable), have to deal with “the mastery problem” – you need to force more skilled players into more challenging spots or they will feed off the unskilled players who will never get to advance (match ups should be even)

“Your sole responsibility is to know what the game is about and to ensure that the game teaches that thing. That one thing, the theme, the core, the heart of the game might require many systems or it might require few. But no system should be in the game that does not contribute toward that lesson….In the end, that is both the glory of learning nad its fundamental  problem: once you learn something, it’s over. You don’t get to learn it again.” (p. 126), and there must be a cost to failure – no do overs, have different skills/abilities the next time you come into a game (how does this work with save points?)

“not requiring skill from a player should be considered a cardinal sin in game design. At the same time, designers of games need to be careful not to make the game demand too much skill. They must keep in mind that players are always tryign to reduce the difficulty of a task. The easiest way to do that is not to play.” (p.; 124)

games have to encourage player to move on, to quit and play other games, not games job to make player feel good, games have to keep offering challenges and have real problems

designers don’t finish playing games as often as other people – they figure out the patterns fastern, no challenge — but also end up making a lot of derivative games because htey base game on their past game play experiences – - good new kinds of games come from “cross-pollination” – new ideas, not others ways of saying old ideas, get a bigger context so games can be respected and so we have whole new world of ideas to draw on – xy grid (constructive, experiential, deconstructive) and (collaborative, competitive, solo)

I like this idea – “no other artistic medium defines itself around an intended effect onthe user, such as fun. They all embrace a wider array of emotional impact” (p. 152) – gotta learne the strengths of games as an artistic medium and what kinds of messages/lessons are best conveyed by it — we can’t design or control the player experience -t hey bring too much to the table that we can’t control

we need more and better ludemes – not just better set dressing (he says it’s the dressing that we’ve been focused on) – “The best test of a game’s fun in the strict sense will therefore be playing the game with no graphics, no music, no sound, no story, no nothing. If that is fun, then everything else will serve to focus, refine, empower, and magnify.” — (reasons to test early and often – like scrum?)

need more complex problems, more complex stories, more complex sex and violence – stuff now is shallow – “games do need to illuminate aspects of ourselves that we did not understand fully” (p. 186

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