Fun Inc. (6 page)

Here, in its simplest form, is gaming’s most fundamental point: what satisfies us most may be easy to grasp, but it must not be easy to master or complete. And the perfect way to produce this moment-by-moment level of complexity is the constant feedback and interaction that a game environment can give; something that is almost like a living thing in its shifting, ceaseless demands on our attention.

Complexity is only part of the
Tetris
equation. There’s also what Pajitnov himself called the ‘emotional dynamic’ of the game – the rhythmic, visual pleasure that arises, with practice, as you successfully slot piece after piece into place. It’s a sensation lodged somewhere between auto-hypnosis and an almost preternaturally satisfying kind of comprehension, a state combining immersion and responsiveness that was given a name in the 1970s by the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that’s used to this day. He called it ‘flow’.

Flow, Csikszentmihalyi argued, was the kind of mental state that was experienced by a top athlete executing a perfect sequence of manoeuvres or a musician losing themselves completely in the performance of a piece; a way of acting in response to constant, shifting stimuli that represented ‘optimal experience’. It’s a state of harmony to which most forms of play aspire, and in many ways provides a perfect metaphor for the balance of rules, actions and consequences that all video game designers hope to build into their virtual worlds – a state that itself evidences our absorption and pleasure.

All of which may begin to sound more than a little mystical – and more than a little odd too, in the context of a medium whose every component is demonstrably either a zero or a one lodged somewhere in the matrix of a machine’s memory. And yet, if you actually talk to anyone about why they play video games, it won’t be long before notions of escape, wonder, self-expression and narrative immersion begin to float to the surface. As I discovered in my very first encounter with the text-based world of the most primitive games of the 1980s, my mind was very quick to project itself – and a version of me – imaginatively into the other world of the machine. It was like falling down a rabbit hole, or stepping out of the back of an ordinary wardrobe into a winter forest. And this combination of projection and wonder is something that many students of game design take extremely seriously.

Intriguingly, the standard term now used to describe a person’s presence within a video game is one borrowed not from narratives (i.e. a ‘character’ or ‘protagonist’) but from mythology: an
avatar
. The word is taken directly from Sanskrit, and features prominently in Hindu mythology. Its translation in English is usually ‘incarnation’ but, more literally, it means ‘descent’, and implies the process by which a higher spiritual being takes on mortal flesh. It is a word that historically has been used to describe the great heroes of Indian myth and legend, for instance Rama, hero of the epic
Ramayana
, or Krishna, hero of the
Bbagavad Gita
and
Bhagavata Purana
.

This may sound a thousand miles away from what happens when you start to play on a computer. And yet in many ways it’s hard to find a more evocative description of one central aspect of the game-playing experience than this notion of embodi-ment. It’s also something that has recently been highlighted by James Cameron’s $200 million film
Avatar
(2009). In this science fiction epic an injured US marine is given new life in an alien world by the transference of his mind into a specially bred alien body. It’s a futuristic fantasy that’s very much of our time, exploring the degree to which technology promises not only the enhancement of our existing lives, but the possibility of entirely new kinds of existence, and even of entirely new worlds.

Avatar
is a fable about the fascination these possibilities exert, and the degree to which embodying a person in a separate avatar can blur their sense of reality and of what it means to be human. The central character, Jake, ends up shifting his allegiance from the humanity of his original body to the alien race whose planet he finds himself on. It’s also, incidentally, a film whose creative process itself embodied a blurring of real and fictional worlds, thanks to the use of a ‘virtual camera’, which allowed the director to see in real time the digitally constructed characters and environments that his real actors’ performances were being modelled onto. As Cameron put it in an interview with the
New York Times
, ‘It’s like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature.’

Such blurring has long been a reality in the world of video gaming, which itself draws deeply on the realms of science fiction and fantasy for inspiration. Between 1978 and 1980, a two-man team designed the first true virtual world – the very first ‘place’ hosted on a machine within which multiple people could interact. It was, for them, a natural enough decision to make it a place corresponding to the established universe of fantasy role-playing games – of swords, sorcery, dark forests and mysterious caves. This is the place from which almost all modern virtual worlds descend, and in many ways the very familiarity of its details is liable to overshadow the radicalism of its conception.

One of these men was Roy Trubshaw, a graduate student at the University of Essex; the other was Richard Bartle, a fellow student one year Trubshaw’s junior, and now a professor himself at Essex. The virtual world itself was a text-only zone they called MUD (for Multi-User Dungeon) and, as Bartle explained to me, the motivation behind its creation was unapologetically ambitious. ‘What I wanted to do was make worlds. I wanted to make places that people could visit. Because when you visit a place that isn’t in the real world you can be yourself in ways you can’t in the real world.’

Here was a logical next step beyond the thought-experiments that the last hundred years had so far been conjuring in fiction, from H G Wells to J G Ballard via J R R Tolkien: putting real people into a make-believe place, and seeing what stories they themselves would enact. It was a development, Bartle noted, that took some getting used to, and required a little ingenuity on his part to draw out his student volunteers. ‘I introduced a female character into the game, to give them the idea of pretending. She was played by me. It wasn’t that I was pretending to be a woman: I was just playing a character who was female. And other people then began to realise that they could pretend to be what they were not. And the idea was that, eventually, they might then realise that they themselves were someone who they might not otherwise have realised they could be.’

It’s here that the semi-mystical idea of embodiment begins to come into its own. As Bartle explained, the underlying notion of what people want from a ‘true’ virtual world is something that closely mirrors an anthropological idea known as the ‘hero’s journey’. It’s a phrase taken from the work of the twentieth-century American mythologist Joseph Campbell who, from his studies of comparative mythology, formulated a pattern that he saw as the fundamental structure of almost every heroic myth through history from around the world. The details of the pattern are complex, but in outline it’s simple enough. The hero is called to adventure; he or she crosses the threshold from the mundane world into the world of adventure; is given knowledge, then is tested and tempted; confronts a nemesis; and then journeys back to the old world once again, transformed by experience. In modern times,
Star Wars
conforms pretty perfectly to the pattern – and, indeed, George Lucas drew explicitly on Campbell’s work while writing the screenplays.

The hero’s journey is a pattern Bartle believes video games aspire to, and for reasons that are in essence mythic, or at least related to a human hunger for particular imaginative forms and kinds of experience. ‘The virtual world you go to is this strange new place you must discover. And the first thing you have is this road of trials where you try to find your feet. Then you gain knowledge; you are tempted and tested; and so on, until at the end players gradually stop because the realm has lost its mystical significance. And this corresponds to the end of the plot.’ It’s a strange, poetic idea, and yet it gets to the heart of something quietly radical about gaming as a medium: its hold on the human imagination, and its ability to make you into the hero of any number of astounding – or modest – stories. The appeal is the sense of wonder that is conjured, but also the need for a kind of security; for, like any myth, the well-designed game always works out in the end, and will always remain there should you feel the urge to return.

The idea of game-playing as a journey is also telling in another sense: because it allows us to think about player motivations in a remarkably precise way. According to Bartle, it’s possible to model a player’s basic motivations according to a four-part scheme, one divided into the fairly self-explanatory categories of Killer, Achiever, Explorer and Socialiser. These labels describe people’s attitude towards both the virtual world and the people and objects within it. A killer is motivated by the urge to act on other characters, violently. An explorer likes to interact with the game world itself, trying to unravel all its secrets. An achiever is driven by the desire to improve their own character and identity, trying to garner as much power, reputation and wealth as possible. And a socialiser interacts with other characters, trying to gain social capital above all.

Nobody is just one thing, of course; and Bartle’s system has gained sufficient global weight and reputation that it’s now not unheard of for gamers to talk about their ‘Bartle quotient’, which rates a player on a scale of zero to 100 in each of Bartle’s four categories (and isn’t allowed to total over two hundred). It may sound bizarre, yet one version of the ‘Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology’ maintained by the site gamerDNA has now been taken by almost 600,000 people worldwide. My own results class me as 87 per cent achiever, 53 per cent killer, 40 per cent explorer and just 20 per cent socialiser – and are an uncannily accurate snapshot of my gaming style, given my distinctly combat-and-acquisition-orientated methods in most of the titles I play.

Bartle believes that players generally remain dominated by one type of motivation throughout their gaming lives. Yet it’s possible to trace the path of a player’s development through the shifting balance of these motivations over time in a trajectory that mirrors the hero’s journey. ‘We noticed early on that people follow certain patterns when they start to play. They might first try to kill each other; then they would go off and try to explore the area; then they would spend ages getting points and progressing; and then they would start to spend their time sitting around chatting.’ Underlying this is something that combines the imaginative projection of myth with the intense immersion of a sporting or musical performance. As Bartle puts it, ‘If you play an MMO, you are the hero. It’s not vicarious, it is actually you. By playing the game, you don’t want to have to conform to other people’s notions in the real world.’

Bartle’s model of player motivations is a powerful way of describing the essential ways that people tend to interact with games worlds – and how, in a well-made game, these priorities shift over time. Similarly, Raph Koster’s emphasis on the fundamental relationship between learning, fun and the human mind illuminates some of the biggest ‘whys’ of gaming with persuasive clarity. When it comes to being bluntly empirical, however, there is perhaps no one better to turn to than Nicole Lazzaro, the founder and president of the player experience and research company XEODesign and a woman with almost twenty years of experience advising everyone from Electronic Arts to the Cartoon Network about how exactly one can describe what’s going on in the mind of someone playing a video game.

Lazzaro’s research focuses on what she calls the ‘role of emotion in games’ and, in particular, on those emotions unique to the gaming experience. One of the most important studies her company has undertaken was in 2004, when they took thirty adult gamers and collected three types of data from them based on a gaming session of 90 to 120 minutes. The data consisted of forty-five hours’ worth of video recordings, detailed player questionnaires, and a record of thousands of verbal and nonverbal emotional cues (such as facial expressions) recorded during play. What it revealed was a scheme she describes as the ‘Four Keys to releasing emotions during play’.

Like Bartle, Lazzaro notes that ‘both players and games vary in how important each key is to having fun’. Yet, she continues, the best-selling games – and the best-made games, which are very often the ones selling the most copies – almost all provide substantial emotion in at least three of the four key areas within her scheme, a sure sign that what most satisfies when it comes to gaming is a layering of very particular complexities (and that, when it comes to fun, it’s extremely difficult to pull the wool over consumers’ eyes).

First among these four key areas is what Lazzaro calls ‘hard fun’. This is, in essence, the overcoming of obstacles: the pursuit of a goal, the rewarding of progress and the presence of compelling challenges that demand sophisticated strategies. As you might expect, then, the second key is what’s called ‘easy fun’, which she summarises as ‘the sheer enjoyment of experiencing the game’, feeding into a player’s curiosity, sense of awe and appetite for mystery. This is about a world being engrossing and rich, enticing a player into thinking about it as more than merely an abstract sequence of challenges and propositions. Here, interestingly, even the driest of games like
Tetris
appeared to benefit hugely from subtle details: music, sound effects, distinctive graphical and design features. Immersion, Lazzaro emphasises, is not so much about building meticulous three-dimensional worlds as about surprising and delighting players with the sense of a well-crafted environment with an element of ambiguity and tantalising incompleteness to it.

Then there’s the third key, known as ‘altered states’, formulated in response to players’ repeated reports that they enjoyed the way that playing a video game could change how they felt inside. In particular, this relates to how the best games’ brand of ‘flow’ could clear the mind, banish boredom and impart a sense of achievement. And finally, the fourth key comes under the broadest and arguably the most important heading of all, ‘the people factor’. A large number of gamers, Lazzaro noted, talk specifically about the enjoyment of playing with others both inside and outside the game. Moreover, she noted, ‘what surprised us most was the dramatic contrast in emotional displays between one versus several people playing together. Players in groups emote more frequently and with more intensity than those who play on their own. Group play adds new behaviours, rituals and emotions.’ And, of course, the same applies again in a somewhat different manner to the complexities of remote play with others – especially when, as is increasingly the case, these remote interactions take place through microphones, speakers and realtime conversation as well as in-game interactions.