FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Things That a Game Is Not
Note that the definition of a game does not mention competition or conflict. Formal game theory (a branch of mathematics) requires that there be a conflict of interest among the players: that is, that one or more of them is trying to oppose the activities of one or more of the others as they try to achieve their goal while preventing the others from achieving theirs. For example, Rules of Play (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003, p. 80) describes a game as an "artificial conflict." Although this concept is essential to game theory, it's too restrictive a definition for our purposes because it excludes creative games and purely cooperative games. The "Competition and Cooperation" section later in this chapter addresses those issues; for now, be aware that games require achievement but not necessarily the opposition of forces.
As a game designer, you should take a broad view of games. Think of a game as an activity rather than as a system of rules, as some theorists do. Although all games require rules, rules alone do not make a game. For a game to exist, it must be played; otherwise it is simply a theoretical abstraction. If you think of a game as an activity, it focuses your attention on the player—the person for whom the game is made—rather than on the rules.
Note also that the definition does not refer to entertainment or recreation. People most often play games for entertainment, but they sometimes play games for study, practice, or training in a serious subject. In this context, the definition of play becomes a bit vague because your boss can require that you "play" a game as part of your "work" (and if you're being paid to design games, you certainly should).
In any case, clearly people don't play games only for entertainment.
Finally, the definition doesn't say anything about fun. Good games are fun and bad games are not, generally speaking, but fun is an emotional response to playing a game, not intrinsic to the game itself. Just because a game is not fun doesn't mean that it's not a game. In any case, as you will see later in this chapter, fun is too narrow a concept to encompass all that games can do for the player.
Many have tried to define what gameplay is over the years. Game designer Sid Meier's famous definition in Game Architecture and Design is "a series of interesting choices" (Rollings and Morris, 2003, p. 61). Another designer, Dino Dini, defines it as "interaction that entertains" (Dini, 2004, p. 31). Although neither of these is obviously wrong, these definitions are too general for practical use and not much
help as you learn how to design a game. Again, this book uses a nonrigorous definition that might not cover all possible cases but that provides a basis for thinking about game design. The definition hinges on challenges and actions, so we look at them first.
A challenge is any task set for the player that is nontrivial to accomplish. Overcoming a challenge must require either mental or physical effort. Challenges can be as simple as getting a ball through a hoop or as complex as making a business profitable. Challenges can be unique, recurring, or continuing. In action video games, players frequently face a recurring challenge to defeat a number of identical enemies, and then having done so, they must overcome a unique challenge to defeat a particular boss enemy. In a combat flight simulator, shooting down enemy planes is a recurring challenge, whereas avoiding being hit by them is a continuing challenge. The players must do both at once to be successful.
You can also define a challenge in terms of other, smaller challenges. For example, you can give your player an overall challenge of completing an obstacle course, and you can set up the obstacle course in terms of smaller challenges such as climbing over a fence, crawling under a barrier, jumping across a gap, and so on. The largest challenge of all in a game is to achieve its goal, but unless the game is extremely simple (such as tic-tac-toe), the players always have to surmount other challenges along the way.
Most challenges in a game are direct obstacles to achieving the goal, although games might include optional challenges as well. You can include optional challenges to help the player practice or simply to provide more things for the player to do. In sports games, a team needs only to score more goals than its opponent(s) to win the game, but the team may consider an optional challenge to prevent the opposing team from ever scoring at all.
The challenges in a game are established by the rules, although the rules don't always specify them precisely. In some cases, the players must figure out what the challenges are by thinking logically about the rules or by playing the game a few times. For example, the rules of Othello (Reversi) state only how pieces are converted from one color to another and that the object of the game is to have the most pieces of your own color when the board is filled. As you play the game, however, you discover that the corner spaces on the board are extremely valuable because they can never be converted to your opponent's color. Gaining control of a corner space is one of the major challenges of the game, but it's not spelled out explicitly in the rules.
A challenge must be nontrivial, but that doesn't mean that it must be difficult. Young children and inexperienced players often prefer to play games with easy challenges.
The rules specify what actions the players may take to overcome the challenges and achieve the goal of the game. The rules define not only what actions are allowed but also which ones are prohibited and which ones are required and under what circumstances. Games also permit optional actions that are not required to surmount a challenge but add to the player's enjoyment in other ways. For example, in the Grand Theft Auto games, you can listen to the radio in the car.
Many conventional games allow any action that is not prohibited by the rules. For example, in paintball, you may run, jump, crouch, crawl, climb, or make any other movement that you can think of to take enemy ground. Because video games are implemented by computer software, however, they can allow only actions that are built into the game. A video game offers a player a fixed suite of actions to choose from, which limits the number of ways in which a player can attack a challenge.
Combining the concepts of challenges and actions produces the following definition: GAMEPLAY Gameplay consists of:
■ The challenges that a player must face to arrive at the object of the game.
■ The actions that the player is permitted to take to address those challenges.
This definition lies at the heart of game design. Gameplay consists of challenges and actions, and you will see this idea continually throughout the rest of the book. As a designer, you must create them both together. It's not enough to invent interesting challenges without the actions that will surmount them, nor is it enough to think of exciting actions without the challenges that they are intended to address. Games do sometimes permit additional actions that are not intended to solve a challenge, but the essence of gameplay is the challenge/action relationship.
Fantasy and imagination play an important role in entertaining the player, and some designers consider them to be elements of gameplay; in other words, the act of pretending that you are a pilot or a princess is an explicit part of the gameplay. However, these elements unnecessarily complicate the definition of gameplay. A challenge might imply a fantasy role (if you're trying to fly a plane, you must be a pilot), but you should define the player's fantasy independently of the gameplay for reasons that the next chapter explains.
Generally speaking, players expect that the rules will guarantee that the game is fair. Different societies, and indeed individual players, have varying notions of what is and is not fair. Fairness is not an essential element of a game but a culturally constructed notion that lies outside the magic circle. It is, in fact, a social
metarule that the players can use to pass judgment on the rules themselves. Players sometimes spontaneously decide to change the rules of a game during play if they perceive that the rules are unfair or that the rules are permitting unfair behavior. For all the players to enjoy a game, they must all be in general agreement about what constitutes fair play.
CHANGING THE RULES
Whether the rules can be changed during play is usually determined by an often-unwritten social convention, but in some cases, the rules themselves describe the procedure for changing the rules. Games in which rules can be changed usually define two types of rules: the mutable (changeable) and the immutable. The immutable rules include instructions about when and how the mutable rules may be changed. Nomic, created by philosopher Peter Suber, is such a game.
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It is particularly important that the players perceive a video game to be fair because, unlike conventional games, video games seldom give the players any way to change the rules if the players don't like them. One widely accepted definition of fairness is that all the players in a multiplayer game must have an equal chance of winning at the beginning of the game. The simplest way to achieve this is to make the game symmetric, as you'll see in the next section. In single-player video games, fairness is a complex issue that has to do with balance and with meeting players' expectations. Chapter 11, "Game Balancing," discusses this at much greater length.
