Theory of Fun for Game Design (17 page)

And yet, the choreographer is not the ultimate arbiter in a dance. There are far too many other variables. There’s a reason, for example, why the prima ballerina is such an important figure. The dancer makes the dance, just as the actor makes the lines. A poor delivery means that the experience is ruined—in fact, if the delivery is poor enough, the
sense
may be ruined, just as bad handwriting obscures the meaning of a word.

Swan Lake
staged on the shore of a lake is a different experience from
Swan Lake
on a bare stage. There’s a recognized profession there too—the set designer. And there’s the lighting, the casting, the costuming, the performance of the music…. The choreographer may be the person who creates the dance, but in the end, there’s probably a director who creates the
dance
.

Games are the same way. We could probably use new terminology for games. Often in large projects, we make the distinction between game system designers, content designers, the lead designer or creative director (a problematic term because it means something else in different disciplines, such as in graphic design), writers, level designers, world builders, and who knows what else. If we consider games to be solely the design of the formal abstract systems, then only the system designer is properly a game designer. If we come up with a new term for the formal core of games, comparable to “choreography,” then we’d give this person a title derived from that term instead.

All of this implies that a mismatch between the core of a game—the ludemes—and the dressing can result in serious problems for the user experience. It also means that the right choice of dressing and fictional theme can strongly reinforce the overall experience and make the learning experience more direct for players.

The bare mechanics of a game may indeed carry semantic freighting, but odds are that it will be fairly abstract. A game about aiming is a game about aiming, and there’s no getting around that. It’s hard to conceive of a game about aiming that isn’t about shooting, but it has been done—there are several games where instead of shooting bullets with a gun, you are instead shooting pictures with a camera.

For games to really develop as a medium, they need to further develop the ludemes, not just the dressing. By and large, however, the industry has spent its time improving the dressing. We have better and better graphics, better back stories, better plots, better sound effects, better music, more fidelity in the environments, more types of content, and more systems within each game. But the systems themselves tend to see fairly little innovation.

It’s not that progress along these other axes isn’t merited—it’s just
easy
relative to the true challenge, which is developing the formal structure of games themselves. Often these new developments improve the overall experience, but that’s comparable to saying that the development of the 16-track recorder revolutionized songwriting. It didn’t; it revolutionized arranging and production, but the demo versions of songs are still usually one person with a piano or a guitar.

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. But all the dressing in the world can’t change iceberg lettuce into roast turkey.

This means the question of ethical responsibility rears its head. The ethical questions surrounding games as murder simulators, games as misogyny, games as undermining of traditional values, and so on are
not aimed at games themselves
. They are aimed at the
dressing
.

To the designer of formal abstract systems, these complaints are always going to seem misguided. A vector of force and a marker of territory have no cultural agenda. At the least, the complaints are misdirected—they
ought
to go to the equivalent of the director, the person who is making the call on the overall user experience.

Directing these complaints to the director is the standard. It’s the standard to which we hold the writers of fiction, the makers of films, the directors of dances, and the painters of paintings. The cultural debate over the acceptable limits of content is a valid one. We all know that there is a difference in experience caused by presentation. If we consider the art of the dance to be the sum of choreography plus direction plus costuming and so on, then we must consider the art of the game to be the ludemes plus direction plus artwork and so on.

The bare mechanics of the game do not determine its semantic freight. Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s picture a mass murder game wherein there is a gas chamber shaped like a well. You the player are dropping innocent victims down into the gas chamber, and they come in all shapes and sizes. There are old ones and young ones, fat ones and tall ones. As they fall to the bottom, they grab onto each other and try to form human pyramids to get to the top of the well. Should they manage to get out, the game is over and you lose. But if you pack them in tightly enough, the ones on the bottom succumb to the gas and die.

I do not want to play this game. Do you? Yet it is
Tetris
. You could have well-proven, stellar game design mechanics applied toward a quite repugnant premise. To those who say the art of the game is purely that of the mechanics, I say that film is not solely the art of cinematography or scriptwriting or directing or acting. The art of the game is the whole.

This does not mean that the art of the cinematographer (or ludemographer) is less; in truth, the very fact that the art of the film fails if
any
of its constituent arts fail elevates each and every one to primacy.

The danger is philistinism. If we continue to regard games as trivial entertainments, then we will regard games that transgress social norms as obscene. Our litmus test for obscenity centers on redeeming social value, after all. There is no doubt that the dressing of games may or may not have any redeeming social value. But it is important to understand that the ludemes themselves can have social value. By that standard, all good games should pass the litmus test regardless of their dressing.

Creators in all media have a social obligation to be responsible with their creations. Consider the recent development of “hate crime shooters,” where the enemies represent an ethnic or religious group that the creators dislike. The game mechanic is old and tired and offers nothing new in this case. We can safely consider this game to be hate speech, as it was almost certainly intended.

The problematic case is a game that contains both brilliant gameplay and offensive content. The commonest defense is to argue that games do not exert significant influence on their players. This is untrue.
All
media exert influence on their audiences. But it is almost always the
core
of the medium that exerts the most influence because the rest is, well, dressing.

All artistic media have influence, and free will also has a say in what people say and do. Games right now seem to have a very narrow palette of expression. But let them grow. Society should not do something stupid like the Comics Code, which stunted the development of the comics medium severely for decades. Not all artists and critics agree that art has a social responsibility. If there was such agreement, there wouldn’t be the debates about the ethics of locking up Ezra Pound, about the validity of propagandistic art, about whether one should respect artists who were scoundrels and scum in their private lives. It’s not surprising that we wonder whether games or TV or movies have a social responsibility—once upon a time we asked the same thing about poetry. Nobody really ever agreed on an answer.

The constructive thing to do is to push the boundary gently so that it doesn’t backfire. That’s how we got
Lolita
and
Catcher in the Rye
, how we got
Apocalypse Now
. As a medium, we have to earn the right to be taken seriously.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about how games intersect the human condition. I think there is an important distinction to be drawn, however. In other media, we frequently speak of how a given work is revelatory of the human condition. By this, we mean that the work is a good portrayal of the human condition—it is something that gives us insight into ourselves. As the Greeks put it,
gnothi seauton
—know thyself. It’s perhaps the greatest challenge we as humans face, and in many ways, it may be the greatest threat to our survival.

Many of the things that I have discussed in this book, such as theories of cognition, understanding of gender, learning styles, chaos theory, graph theory, and literary criticism, are fairly recent developments in human history. Humanity is engaged in a grand project of self-understanding, and most of the tools we have used in the past were imprecise at best. Over time we have developed better tools at a glacial pace in the quest to understand ourselves better.

It’s an important endeavor because other humans have typically been our greatest predator. Today we have come to realize how interrelated we all are even though the left continent doesn’t know what the right continent is doing. We have come to realize that actions we undertake often have far-reaching consequences that we never anticipated. Some, such as James Lovelock, have gone so far as to call us all one giant organism.