
What Is a Game? (2018) - Smaug123
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/what-game-2018-06-04
======
masona
> A game is something that you opt into doing because you want the experience
> of playing it. Labeling every obstacle you run into in life, a game quickly
> robs the term of any meaning.

This strikes at the heart of the pernicious trend 'gamification of all the
things.' Those tools have nothing to do with games and everything to do with
dark patterns.

> part of playing a game is taking on a responsibility that you weren't
> required to take.

Gamification is the opposite - pulling you into an engagement you wouldn't
otherwise choose (for better or for worse).

~~~
highfrequency
I disagree that voluntariness and lack of real-world relevance are very
central for games.

I often find that a task that I put off for a while turns out to be fun and
gamelike once I get into flow and find that the problem has interesting
structure to learn.

In general, finding an _appropriate level of challenge_ is usually the
limiting factor in making a good game. Our brains love learning new patterns
and making new discoveries. But most tasks are either too mundane to provide
any challenge, or too difficult that we can't make progress. Even games that
start out as very fun generally become boring once we master the easily
learned patterns and our skill plateaus.

This is where most attempts at gamification fall flat. The problem is not that
the goals are meaningful to our lives, the problem is that there's just not
any interesting structure to learn, so the game feels hollow.

~~~
Supermancho
It's useful to remember that this story is a blog posting.

Games are tools that humans use to learn about reality by performing pattern
recognition to optimize in an artificially constrained environment. This can
include your own arbitrary personal constraints. Gamification of things is
putting arbitrary rewards and restrictions on activities. Involvement with
reality (eg Pokemon Go) is orthogonal.

I believe there are actual whitepapers on this subject (what is a game?) from
decades ago.

------
Smaug123
This is Mark Rosewater talking about a useful model for what it means for
something to be a "game", as distinct from an "activity", an "event", or a
"toy". Rosewater is a chief designer of Magic: the Gathering, and has a lot of
great stuff to say about game design.

~~~
dmit
> a useful model

Please explain the usefulness of a taxonomy that has "game", "activity",
"event", and "toy" as discrete entities.

~~~
Smaug123
Rosewater is a game designer; it's his job to distinguish fine details in his
area of expertise. I find it interesting to hear an expert dive deep into
things, especially into things which I'm familiar with as a complete layman
(like games).

Anyway, if they were genuinely exactly the same concept, why would we have so
many different words for it? Synonyms pretty much never carry exactly the same
meaning as each other; they have different colour or shades or whatever.

~~~
dmit
I'm not arguing that all of them are the same thing. I'm 1) wondering why we
need to distinguish between them in the first place; and 2) saying there's way
to much overlap between the concepts for them to be presented as distinct.

~~~
danShumway
The point isn't to build categories for their own sake, the point is that
categories allow us to group and exclude concepts based on whether they have
similar "rules" or "feels". If you're designing a new thing or analyzing an
old thing, it's useful to be able to sort through which heuristics and rules
will likely apply to the thing you're examining.

In other words, if we have generally good advice about how to make a game fun,
and you know that advice is predicated on a certain definition of "game", it
is easier to figure out whether or not that advice applies to the thing you're
building.

Rosewater's categorization of Minecraft as a toy rather than a game is a
really good example:

If you're a game designer, and you think of Minecraft as a game, there are a
lot of game rules that Minecraft breaks. Its progression system is wack. It
has a lot of design elements that don't really feed into its core loop well.
And part of understanding why those "flaws" don't matter is understanding that
Minecraft is working under a completely different set of design rules than a
game like Doom.

So one of the things we do as designers is we add distinctions between
different types of experiences that allow us to make rules that are more
consistent and predictable. If you're able to split computer experiences into
different categories and say, "Minecraft and Doom are fundamentally
different", then it's easier to come up with rules around flow, and
progression systems, and difficulty curves, and unity of theme.

As to why we need those rules in the first place? Because we want to make good
games. Without narrowing a design space or coming up with heuristics to filter
out good and bad ideas, designing games is just too stinking hard. There are
always going to be exceptions to those rules, and that's fine. But the goal is
still to give us mechanisms that in most cases allow us to talk about why an
idea does or doesn't work.

This is the same reason why games build player archetypes. Basically no one
fits into a single player archetype, and there's heavy overlap between them,
and there are players that defy all of the archetypes we come up with. That
does not mean that player archetypes aren't extremely useful as design tools.
People think about classification systems like they're some kind of moral or
philosophical separation between objects. They're not, classification systems
are entirely pragmatic, practical tools.

All categorizations are wrong. No maps are completely accurate. But game
design is an extremely fuzzy field, and it's hard to figure out what makes
"good" design when your subject is so broad that literally every rule you come
up with has exceptions. As a designer, I have multiple classification systems
that I use for games and players, and some of them outright contradict each
other. But all of them are useful lenses that I look through when I need to
think about design decisions.

~~~
dmit
Thank you for the elaborate reply! There's a lot of room for thought there!

But while I'm here... Minecraft is a quintessential roguelike game. You
arrive, naked and alone, on a hostile world. You then build yourself up by the
skin of whatever. You mine and farm and build, and you acquire food and
clothes for yourself. The only rule Minecraft broke is the one that says you
can't code a financially viable game in Java.

(I guess there's no ascension, but at that point you've built heaven on earth
anyway, so there's no reason to leave.)

> As to why we need those rules in the first place? Because we want to make
> good games.

I'm sorry, but super no. No game designer has ever feared that they would end
up with a good toy, or a great activity, rather than making bank on Steam.

> All categorizations are wrong. No maps are completely accurate.

That's right! "All models are wrong, but some are useful." I was merely
wondering what the use of the model presented by GP was.

~~~
meheleventyone
> I was merely wondering what the use of the model presented by GP was.

For my money it's just a clarity of thought thing. The author and people that
like his model can use it to guide their work. Similar to using design pillars
but at a higher level.

~~~
dmit
I'm sorry, but that means nothing to me. I have no idea what "clarity of
thought" means in this particular instance. Same for "design pillars",
regardless of whether it's used at a high or low level.

~~~
meheleventyone
Sorry.

For clarity of thought I mean if you decide to make a game you might want to
work out what a game is to you. Like a mission statement that you can use as a
razor to judge your subsequent ideas.

Design pillars are similar but about specific aspects of a game. A set of
principles you can use to guide development.

------
munificent
_> A game is a thing with a goal (or goals), restrictions, agency, and a lack
of real-world relevance._

I think there is a simpler definition that subsumes the first three points.
When I clicked to this definition, I think it gave me a better understanding
of not just games, but many of the pursuits humans choose to sink time into:

A game is a thing with _bounded consequences_.

"Consequences" means you can make choices and those choices matter. Relatively
good and bad things can happen in response to them. Good things subsumes
Mark's "goals", bad things covers the "restrictions", and "agency" is implicit
that in order to have consequences, you must have actions.

But the part that makes games _games_ is that the scope of those consequences
has an upper. Bad things can happen, but they can only be _so_ bad. And,
importantly, you have a good understanding of how bad they can be _before_ you
make the choice.

The reason we actively seek out and play games is because we know the average
result of our choices in the game is significantly better than the worst
possible result. Therefore, it's a safe experience to opt into. This is what
makes games _feel_ like games. It's the sensation of a free lottery ticket.

Looking at games in these terms raises some interesting questions around the
fringes. A stock trading simulation where you invest and win fake money is
clearly a game. Trading your actual retirement savings on the stock market is
clearly not a game. What about a "game" that trades using virtual money but
lets you convert that to real money afterwards? What if you have to buy in
with real money to play that game? What about trading on the real market but
starting with a small enough fixed pool that you can safely afford to lose?

What if you are a professional poker player who needs to win in order to pay
your bills? Conversely, what does it mean to hold a regular job with
performance reviews if you happen to already be independently wealthy? Is your
job now a game? What if you sink thousands of hours into an MMO in order to
gain some powerful item only if you beat a dragon. Given the large opportunity
cost of that time, is that boss fight still a game?

My claim is that the structure of the activity itself doesn't tell you whether
or not it's a game. You need to know the context of the player because that's
what determines the severity of the consequences. Chutes and ladders is a
game. Chutes and ladders with a mob boss who will murder your family if you
lose is not.

Something I've observed in my own life is that when it feels like too many
things are not fun, it's often because I'm in a place where the negative
consequences of them are too severe, or at least I perceive them to be. In
particular, when I'm really pressed for time, then few recreational pursuits
feel fun because the lost time itself is too high of a consequence.

~~~
waynesonfire
> In particular, when I'm really pressed for time, then few recreational
> pursuits feel fun because the lost time itself is too high of a consequence.

Thanks for articulating this idea that I so often experience and wasn't aware
of.

~~~
munificent
It took me a _long_ time to realize that this is what was going on in my head.

Even after figuring it out, I still struggle with it. Because it is,
obviously, important to unwind and do things just for fun. But doing so now
requires me to as an act of will decide to treat my time as less precious,
which is _really_ hard to do.

------
jonny383
I'll never forget the moment of realization I experienced when I was about
fourteen, and it clicked in my head that all video games were essentially just
sets of cartesian coordinates being drawn on the screen, and pressing the
controls was just changing numbers.

It was actually kind of a shattering moment, realizing there was no magic.
After that, every game I played with friends, I struggled to enjoy the magic
because all I could think about was "holding this button is just increasing or
decreasing a number".

I stumbled upon this moment of realization by accidentally opening a debug
overlay in what was probably a NES emulator. Naturally I had a look around and
stumbled across a set of numbers that consistently changed as I moved my
character on the screen.

~~~
Smaug123
"If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives will be empty indeed."

------
jes5199
a friend of mine recently asked a related question: what's the difference
between a plaything and a tool? when do you play with tools versus when do you
work with tools? what's the line there - and has anyone written philosophy
about this

~~~
rckoepke
I love this question, and will spend quite a lot of time thinking about the
ramifications. An adjacent question that I wrestle with a lot is:

\- What's the dividing line between a game and a task?

This comes up a lot nowadays due to the 2010-era explosion of "skinner box"
games on mobile platforms e.g. Candy Crush, or presumably Farmville and Clash
of Clans.

I saw a lot of people around me get addicted to these games, and seeing how
much time they put into them made me pro-actively avoid them at all costs. I
figured there was a good chance whatever psychology at play captured their
attention would likely capture mine as well, and it didn't seem like a
fulfilling use of my life. Later, I generalized this to quickly identify any
games that felt more like a "task" than a "game". An example of one that I
played for awhile but then identified as such is "Link the Dot"[0] (a classic
"Pipe drawing, connect the dots" game).

I started getting somewhat worried about the validity and generalization of my
mental scheme (game vs. task, avoid tasks) when I realized that some "good"
games end up being mostly task-based. I played through Monument Valley all the
way through. At first it felt very game-like, but after the first 2-4 levels,
I had fully grasped the concept. After the learning phase, the rest of the
dozens of levels were essentially just performing rote tasks again. As both
the Pipes game and Monument Valley are at their heart "puzzle games", I
started to wonder if all puzzle games could be construed as "tasks", hidden
behind varying layers of obfuscation. That didn't sit well with me, and I felt
something may be off about the "task vs. game" model.

Over the next several years of paying attention to this, I started noticing
that so many games that I love at least have some aspect of "task". In
Starcraft (Gold/Plat/Diamond), the first 2-4 minutes of every game is
essentially just completing a rote series of tasks according to a rigid
flowchart - and success is greatly determined by how precisely you execute
those tasks for 2-4 minutes.

4x games like Civilization become exceedingly bogged down in tasks in the late
game. Space Trader games like Escape Velocity have me flying cargo back and
forth for hours between two systems dozens of times to farm enough gold to buy
a good ship/weapons.

For now, I've decided that the "game" part of any game are the novel aspects
of it. This can change over time. Tic-tac-toe is a competitive game when
players are naive about strategy, but becomes a task once you learn its rules
and nuance. Creativity and freedom of thought is the essence of something
being "play", and IMO the requirement for being a game. But what is a game to
one person can easily be a task to someone else, or even to the same person
after they learn enough about the game.

I also now believe that shallow time- and grind/diligence- domain tasks exist
in otherwise deep games to hook into human psychology to provide a heightened
sense of accomplishment. This may be a necessary aspect for many games, for
example open-world RPG's. It may very well be an essential part of good,
honest game design to include some aspects of skinner-box mechanics as part of
a much larger universe. If so, maybe that's driven by the imperfection of the
human brain, and is somewhat of a constraint for game design. Or it may be
that it's purely a crutch for imperfect game design - maybe games really can
achieve high accomplishment through creativity of play alone and eschew all
monotonous tasks. I think there's TONS of room for future games to utilize
advanced AI's like AlphaStar to enhance gameplay by removing 99% of the non-
intellectual actions - and this is one of the most exciting developments I see
coming in the eventual future.

I came across this article[1] which explores some of the relationship between
skinner boxing and game design, and thought I'd link it here. It also goes
into some of the pitfalls of overly classifying everything as a skinner box.

I also have some thoughts on Factorio, Cities: Skyline, fighting games, and
twitch FPS games as well that I don't have very well structured yet. Loot
boxes certainly are another aspect lately which may not directly lie on this
continuum but may be another dimension.

So for me:

>the difference between a plaything and a tool? when do you play with tools
versus when do you work with tools?

My answer is that it's a spectrum from full creativity of thought to a purely
rote repetition. Likely all things lie somewhere between the extremes.

0:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gookindone...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gookindonesia.linkthedot)
1: [http://keithburgun.net/why-skinner-box-is-a-useful-
distincti...](http://keithburgun.net/why-skinner-box-is-a-useful-distinction/)

~~~
munificent
_> This comes up a lot nowadays due to the 2010-era explosion of "skinner box"
games on mobile platforms e.g. Candy Crush, or presumably Farmville and Clash
of Clans. I saw a lot of people around me get addicted to these games, and
seeing how much time they put into them made me pro-actively avoid them at all
costs._

It's interesting to look at those games from a business/economic perspective.

Imagine you create a mobile game called "Data Entry Crush" where the game
would send players an image of a document and they would carefully type in the
text for it. You give the game to players for free. On the backend, you sell
this as a service to companies needing data entry where they pay you to turn
their images into text.

In other words, like Mechanical Turk, without paying the Turks.

Of course, this would never fly because people don't find data entry very fun
and it's pretty obvious to them that they are being had. They know they are
providing something of value to you and won't do it for free.

What Candy Crush and friends did was find an exploitable loophole in human
pyschology. It's hard to get people to do something that clearly looks like
valuable work for free. But it turns out people aren't good at realizing
_their own attention itself has value_. So what do you do? Make a game that's
a little fun to play to keep people going, and then pepper it with ads. Those
ads take some of the player's attention but since humans seem to undervalue
that resource, the players allow it to happen without getting irate or
expecting compensation.

And then, as before, you make all your money on the back end. You let
companies pay you to put those ads in front of people. It's like an arbitrage
opportunity where human attention is more valuable to (A) companies than it is
to (B) the individuals who have it, so you take it from B, sell it to A, and
keep the profit.

~~~
smogcutter
This reminds me of an episode of the old Clerks cartoon show. They were
playing an arcade game about pushing blocks around to build a pyramid, which
turned out to be a Last Starfighter type qualification exam. Except, of
course, what winning qualified you to do was be enslaved and forced to push
actual stone blocks to build a pyramid.

But you’ve sort of just rediscovered the business model of all advertising?
All kinds of media are in the business of attracting attention. Then, if you
want, you can sell that attention to someone else in the form of advertising.
The trick with candy crush etc is that the content attracting attention
doesn’t actually have to be “good” in the way that honest creators intend,
just addictive.

~~~
mntmoss
Some time ago I realized, while standing in the midst of the Oakland Museum of
Art and Digital Entertainment, surrounded by old game boxes, this:

"Most of these games are all marketing."

That is, if you look at the art, and look at the back of the box bullet
points, you'll see something like "Go on an epic journey", or "Choose who
lives or dies", or "Build an empire to stand the test of time".

To the extent that these games express these things, it's through clever
rearrangements of stock tropes: Your typical murderering and looting game
protagonist, able only to communicate down the barrel of a gun, is now
justified through the plot and given many new backdrops so as to make the
journey "epic". A scripted choice is added here and there, but not everywhere,
to make "choosing who lives or dies" feel consequential, but without ascribing
particular meaning to the choice either(since all choices should be gratifying
for marketing purposes). Empire-building is signalled through various reports
of legible progress in gaining territory and developing cities and armies, but
nothing resembling the actual political structure or dynamics of an empire -
the fantasy is simply one of a "rise and further rise".

And so in playing these games, you get an aesthetic impression, but not
something with a solid grounding to it that you would spend time thinking
about afterwards or relating to your real-world experiences. When a
speedrunner sets out to conquer these sorts of games they look for software
vulnerabilities that short-circuit the impression of what is going on and
attack the underlying data model and logic.

In that way, video games have been pushed through industrialized practice
quite a ways away from the natural state of games as a tradition, which is to
fully and honestly explore simple concepts. You can't speedrun basketball,
because you're playing within the laws of nature and against opponents who do
the same. But if you go to market a basketball video game, you are trading on
the impression of basketball, not its reality: and so licenses for
professional players, superlative simulation techniques, etc. come to the
fore.

So as I see it, games like Candy Crush are further extensions of
industrialization: The game concept is simply a tool for the marketing
framework, which in this case has been designed towards metrics-optimized
microtransactions and customer retention. If a particular level is failing to
retain players or to induce a purchase, it gets reworked until the metrics
line up.

Despite all this, good work in games does tend to shine through. Nintendo's
franchises, for example, are all built on "honest explorations" of their basic
themes, and the play concepts tend to have something intrinsically interesting
going on. And the breakthrough indie hits usually have this quality, too. The
games that get buried, in contrast, usually aren't achieving the same degree
of cohesiveness and direction - even if they're huge AAA productions.

------
ragona
Ha I think every game team I was on debated this at some point. It’s almost a
running joke. Navel gazing is not part of the industry that I miss.

------
przemub
I lost.

~~~
elwell
I didn't until I saw your comment.

------
hutzlibu
"Lacks real-world relevance"

I strongly disagree. (even though he relativates it a bit) And rather think
the opposite. All games ultimately have real world relevance, by training a
certain or many skills, useful for the real world. (some games of course more,
than others)

Or they even have direct realworld relevance, as the winner in a competition,
for example the olympic games, gets real fame and reward. (also in e-sports)

But for example the olympic games were created, to get the young greek people
to train certain skills, so they would be better warriors in a real fight.

Now, most computer or card games, do not have that intention, they are
intended to be fun.

And why are they fun?

Because they provide a challenge and everyone enjoys mastering a challenge.
Because that is pro evolution. And we as a species, we were very successfull,
because we could adopt to very different challenges. And traditionally trained
for that as childs with various games, like "catch". A game that trained many
important skills for hunting or fleeing from a predator. (reflexes, speed,
evade, sneak, timing...) Not so important anymore, in civilized, policed rich
societys, still important in poorer areas.

So the traditional idea of a game is, training a real world scenario in
controlled and save setting. But theory is dull, so kids do it, because "it is
fun". (and it is fun, because of various success during the game, that makes
the brain releas happy hormones, along with other hormones from the movement
itself)

Now sadly, that idea got messed up along the way and games today are often
played for compensation for lack of joy at boring jobs, which do not give the
rewarding feeling, or as time killing for those who lack a meaningful
occupation. So quite some games train a not so relevant skillset. They trick
the brain in thinking what it is doing is pro evolution (you get more
powerful, you evolve, you make friends, join a strong tribe, you slain
powerful enemies, ...), while in reality, it is not. At least not doing it as
a main purpose, which many addicted gamers do. (Apart from that, also hardcore
gaming can of course lead to real world benefits, making real friends,
learning organizing skills, time management, communicate effectivly, using the
right tools, etc. but I am talking about addiction here. When the game becomes
the purpose and the gamer exists for the game and not the other way around.)

So ... games are awesome. They can teach you various things. They can take you
to other worlds, inspire your creativity, let you find people you lack in
"real live", blow of steam, finding reward - but they are bad, if they become
your main purpose of existence.

Anyway, I believe, much more of learning in schools etc. should be in the form
of games. When you play being a roman soldier, (wheter it be in a computer
game, or theater, or reenactment) you will much more understand about that
time, than reading facts in a textbook. If you can play with a lego mindstorm
robot in class, you will understand much more about robotic, than reading
about it. And so on ..

------
andrewla
Save me from prescriptivists in all things. We should just accept that all
taxonomies have weak boundaries and move on with our life. "I know it when I
see it" is a fine answer for something like this.

Is there ever a situation that you'll have to deal with where a matter of
life-and-death hinges on a definitional absurdity like this? Is there a
situation where anything at all hinges on this, except someone says "let's
play a game" and you suggest Legos and they say "technically that's not a
game" and then you stop talking to that person?

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
The seems specifically to be an exercise in descriptivism. The point seems to
be to build a vocabulary, not to draw hard boundaries.

~~~
andrewla
There is no reference here to common usage or to any sort of establishment of
standard practices, etc. This is just naval-gazing to put hard boundaries on
something that is intrinsically not well-defined. In particular, all of the
things that are explicitly excluded from "games" are things that some people
would argue are games, that the author is arguing is not, which is an
explicitly prescriptive practice.

