FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
The Essential Elements of a Game
The essential elements of a game are play, pretending, a goal, and rules. The definition refers to each of these elements and includes some additional conditions as well. In the next few sections, we'll look at each of these elements and their significance in the definition more closely.
Play is a participatory form of entertainment, whereas books, films, and theater are presentational forms. When you read a book, the author entertains you; when you play, you entertain yourself. A book doesn't change, no matter how often you read it, but when you play, you make choices that affect the course of events.
Theoreticians of literature and drama often argue that reading or watching is a conscious, active process and that the audience is an active participant in those forms of entertainment. The theoreticians have a point, but the issue here is with the actual content and not the interpretation of the content. With the rare exception of some experimental works, the audience does not actually create or change the content of a book or a play, even if their comprehension or interpretation does change over time. Reading a book or watching a play is not passive, but it is not interactive in the sense of modifying the text.
In contrast, each time you play a game, you can make different choices and have a different experience. Play ultimately includes the freedom to act and the freedom to choose how you act. This freedom is not unlimited, however. Your choices are constrained by the rules, and this requires you to be clever, imaginative, or skillful in your play.
This book will continue to use the term play despite the fact that you can play games for a serious purpose such as learning or research.
David: Is this a game, or is it real?
Joshua: What's the difference?
—Exchange between a boy and his computer from the movie WarGames
Pretending is the act of creating a notional reality in the mind, which is one element of our definition of a game. Another name for the reality created by pretending is the magic circle. This is an idea that Dutch historian Johan Huizinga originally identified in his book Homo Ludens (Huizinga, 1971) and expanded upon at some length in later theories of play. The magic circle is related to the concept of imaginary worlds in fiction and drama, and Huizinga also felt that it was connected to ceremonial, spiritual, legal, and other activities. For our purposes,
however, the magic circle simply refers to the boundary that divides ideas and activities that are meaningful in the game from those that are meaningful in the real world. In other words, it defines the boundary between reality and make-believe.
THE MAGIC CIRCLE____________________________________
Huizinga did not use the term magic circle as a generic name for the concept. His text actually refers to the play-ground, or a physical space for play, of which he considers the tennis court, the court of law, the stage, the magic circle (a sacred outdoor space for worship in “primitive” religions), the temple, and many others to be examples. However, theoreticians of play have since adopted the term magic circle to refer to the mental universe established when a player pretends. That is the sense that this book uses.
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Players can even pretend things in the magic circle that are impossible in the real world (for example, "Let's pretend that I'm moving at the speed of light."). Figure 1.1 illustrates the magic circle.
The definition of a game used the term pretended reality rather than magic circle because the former is self-explanatory and the latter is not. However, from now on, we'll refer to the magic circle because it is the more widely accepted term.
In single-player games, the player establishes the magic circle simply by choosing to play. In multiplayer games, players agree upon a convention, which in turn establishes the magic circle. In other words, they all pretend together, and more important, they all agree to pretend the same things; that is, to accept the same rules. Although the pretended reality can seem very real to a deeply immersed player, it is still only a convention and can be renounced by the player refusing to play.
At first glance, you might not think much pretending is involved in a physical game like soccer. After all, the players aren't pretending to be someone else, and their actions are real-world actions. Even so, the players assign artificial significance to the situations and events in the game, and this is an act of pretending. Figure 1.2 illustrates the idea. In the real world, kicking a ball into a net is meaningless, but
for the duration of a soccer game, the players (and spectators) pretend that kicking the ball into the net is a good thing to do and that it benefits the team that successfully achieves it. Accepting and abiding by the rules is part of the pretending we do when we play a game.
The distinction between the real world and the pretended reality is not always clear. If the events in the game are also meaningful in the real world, the magic circle becomes blurred. For example, various Mesoamerican Indian peoples used to participate in the ball-court game, a public activity that was superficially similar to basketball. From carvings that depict the game, it appears that the losers may have been ritually sacrificed to the gods. If so, the game was literally a matter of life and death—a matter of great importance in the real world. In spite of this, the ball-court game was not just a raw struggle for survival; it was played according to rules.
Gambling, too, blurs the magic circle because when you gamble, you bet real money on the outcome of a game. The process of gambling may or may not be an intrinsic part of the game itself. On the one hand, you can choose to play dominoes for money, but you can also play for matchsticks, or nothing at all. On the other hand, betting money in craps is an intrinsic part of the game; if you don't place a bet, you're not participating.
KICKING A • BALL INTO THE NET
THE REAL WORLD
A game must have a goal (or object; these terms are used interchangeably throughout the book), and it can have more than one. As observed previously, goalless play is not the same as game play. Even creative, noncompetitive play still has a goal: creation. Others take this requirement for a goal even further. For example, in Rules of Play, Salen and Zimmerman (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003, p. 80) require that a game have a "quantifiable outcome." This definition is too restrictive. Consider an activity in which the participants collaborate to make a drawing of a scene in a limited time, with each one holding a crayon of a different color. This activity is clearly a game—it includes rules, a goal, play, and pretending, and the results vary depending on the decisions of the players—but its outcome is not quantifiable. Similarly, the object of SimCity is to build and manage a city without going bankrupt, and as long as the player does not go bankrupt, the game continues indefinitely without any outcome. In fact, the object of a game need not even be achievable, so long as
the players try to achieve it. Most early arcade games, such as Space Invaders and Breakout, gave the players an unachievable goal.
The goal of the game is defined by the rules and is arbitrary because the game designers can define it any way they like. The goal of the children's card game Go Fish is to obtain books—collections of four cards of the same suit—but the definition of what is to be collected could be changed by changing the rules. A book has no intrinsic real-world importance; it's just a particular collection of cards. But within the context of a game of Go Fish, a book has a symbolic importance because the rules state that assembling it is a goal on the way to victory. The goal must be nontrivial because a game must include some element of challenge. Even in a game of pure chance such as craps or roulette, the players must learn to understand the odds and place bets that will most likely benefit them. Similarly, in a creative game, creation itself challenges the players. To do well requires skill. If the object can be achieved in a single moment, without either physical or mental effort, then the activity is not really a game. For example, children sometimes do a rudimentary form of gambling called Odds and Evens. Each flips a coin of identical value. If the results are odd (don't match), one child takes both coins; if they are even (do match), the other does. The odds are exactly 50 percent and there is no way to improve them; in fact, there is no decision-making at all. This does not qualify as a game under the definition because it does not include a challenge. The object is trivial and the process momentary. It is a form of betting, but not a game.
The rules of a game frequently characterize the game's goal as a victory condition— an unambiguous situation within the game at which point one or more of the players are declared the winners. For example, the victory condition for chess states that the first player to checkmate his opponent's king (an unambiguous situation) is the winner. In timed sports such as basketball, the victory condition states that when time runs out (the unambiguous situation), whichever team has the most points wins the game and the other team loses. Game designers can also establish additional rules about ties and tie-breaking mechanisms if they think it is important to have a clear winner.
The rule that determines when the game is over is called the termination condition. In two-player games, the termination condition is usually taken for granted: The game ends when one player achieves victory. Note that the victory condition does not necessarily end the game, however. In a game with more than two players, play can continue to determine who comes in second, third, and so on. A foot race (which is a game according to the definition) does not end when the first runner crosses the finish line; it continues until the last runner does.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
—Joshua, in the movie WarGames
Not all games include a victory condition. Some establish only a loss condition, a situation that indicates the end of the game by specifying which player has lost. such a game can never be won, only abandoned. The RollerCoaster Tycoon game is a good
example: You can lose the game by running out of money and having your theme park collapse, but you cannot win it.
The rules and the goal of a game are entirely contained within the magic circle, but the concept of winning and losing transcends it to affect the real world as well. Winning is perceived as a meritorious achievement, and after the game is over, players take pride in having won. Winning can also earn real-world benefits such as material rewards. But you don't have to include the ideas of victory and defeat in a game. They're optional elements that make the game more exciting and meaningful to the players.
Rules are definitions and instructions that the players agree to accept for the duration of the game. Every game has rules, even if these rules are unwritten or taken for granted.
Rules serve several functions. They establish the object of the game and the meanings of the different activities and events that take place within the magic circle. They also create a contextual framework that enables the players to know which activities are permitted and to evaluate which course of action will best help them achieve their goal. Among the things that the rules define are the following:
■ The semiotics of the game are the meanings and relationships of the various symbols that the game employs. Some symbols, such as innings and outs in baseball, are purely abstract. Others, such as armies in Risk, have a parallel in the real world that helps us to understand them. This book won't go into the theory of game semiotics in detail. It is a complex issue and the subject of ongoing research, but it is beyond the scope of an introductory work.
■ The gameplay consists of the challenges and actions the game offers the player.
■ The sequence of play is the progression of activities that make up the game.
■ The goal(s) of the game is also known as the objective of the game and is defined by the rules.
■ The termination condition, as described in the previous section, is the condition that ends the game (if it has one).
■ Metarules are rules about the rules. These might indicate under what circumstances the rules can change or when exceptions to them are allowed.
As a designer, the main thing that you need to know is that rules are definitions and instructions that have meaning within the magic circle and that you are free to invent abstract symbols and concepts as necessary to create a game. You must, however, make them comprehensible to the players!
The only permanent rule in Calvinball is that you can't play it the same way twice!
—Calvin, in Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
The rules need not be especially orderly; they are, after all, arbitrary. However, they should be unambiguous to avoid arguments over interpretation, and they should be coherent with no conflicts among them. If it is possible for conflicts to arise, the rules should include a metarule for determining which rule prevails. Ambiguous or conflicting rules are a sign of bad game design.
