Category: my publications

Should a good game have an easy interface, but difficult gameplay? How can we tell the difference between the two, between interface and gameplay?

“Easy to Use and Incredibly Difficult: On the Mythical Border between Interface and Gameplay” is a paper I co-wrote with Marleigh Norton and which we presented at the Foundations of Digital Games Conference in April 2009.

The paper is meant as an in-depth examination of the common argument that the interface of a game should be easy-to-use. We argue that this is not necessarily the case.

In the paper we make the case that first of all, there is no way to clearly distinguish between interface and gameplay. Secondly, even when we can identify the interface in a given game, a difficult-to-use interface may very well be part of the core challenge of the game. In other words, no: good game does not equal easy interface + difficult gameplay.

For example, Street Fighter II has an interface that makes it easier to move your character than the interface of Toribash does, but that does not mean that it is a better game. It simply means that Toribash places part of its challenge in the basic movement of the character.

Street Fighter II

Toribash

Paper abstract:

In video game literature and video game reviews, video games are often divided into two distinct parts: interface and gameplay. Good video games, it is assumed, have easy to use interfaces, but they also provide difficult gameplay challenges to the player. But must a good game follow this pattern, and what is the difference between interface and gameplay? When does the easy-to-use interface stop, and when does the challenging gameplay begin? By analyzing a number of games, the paper argues that it is rare to find a clear-cut border between interface and gameplay and that the fluidity of this border characterizes games in general. While this border is unclear, we also analyze a number of games where the challenge is unambiguously located in the interface, thereby demonstrating that “easy interface and challenging gameplay” is neither universal nor a requirement for game quality. Finally, the paper argues, the lack of a clear distinction between easy interface and challenging gameplay is due to the fact that games are fundamentally designed not to accomplish something through an activity, but to provide an activity that is pleasurable in itself.

I’m a little late to blogging this, but here is the list of the top 10 Game Studies findings, presented at the Game Developers Conference by Ian Bogost, Mia Consalvo and Jane McGonigal.

The audience voted on the papers in order of importance, and my own Fear of Failing came in at #5.

The session slides are here.

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10. Stewart Woods: “(Play) Ground rules: The social contract and the magic circle”.

9. Jose Zagal and Amy Bruckman: “Novices, gamers, and scholars: Exploring the challenges of teaching about games”.

8. Karen Collins: “Game sound: An introduction to the history, theory, and practice of video game music and sound design”.

7. Charlie Breindahl: “Play to win or win to play? The material culture of gaming”.

6. Gareth Schott: “Relating the pleasures of violent game texts”.

5. Jesper Juul: “Fear of failing: The many meanings of difficulty in video games”.

4. Matt Barton: “How’s the weather: Simulating weather in virtual environments”.

3. Betsy James DiSalvo, Kevin Crowley and Roy Norwood: “Learning in context: Digital games and young black men”.

2. Michael Nitsche: “Video game spaces: Image, play, and structure in 3D worlds”.

1. Susana Tosca & Lisbeth Klastrup: “Because it just looks cool!’ Fashion as character performance—the case of WoW”. 

Just finished my Game Developers 2009 conference talk, Beyond Balancing: Using Five Elements of Failure Design to Enhance Player Experiences.

Good questions afterward, so it seemed to go well. The slides can be downloaded here.

For your theory pleasure, the Conference Proceedings of The Philosophy of Computer Games 2008 have now been published, edited by Stephan Günzel, Michael Liebe and Dieter Mersch, with the editorial cooperation of Sebastian Möring. Download it here.

I discussed my own contribution in the previous post, here is the table of contents.

Table of contents

Petra Müller: Preface

Patrick Coppock: Introduction

Stephan Günzel, Michael Liebe and Dieter Mersch: Editor’s Note

Keynotes
Ian Bogost: The Phenomenology of Videogames

Richard Bartle: When Openness Closes. The Line between Play and Design

Jesper Juul: The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece

Ethics and Politics
Anders Sundnes Løvlie: The Rhetoric of Persuasive Games. Freedom and Discipline in America’s Army

Kirsten Pohl: Ethical Reflection and Emotional Involvement in Computer Games

Niklas Schrape: Playing with Information. How Political Games Encourage the Player to Cross the Magic Circle

Christian Hoffstadt/Michael Nagenborg: The Concept of War in the World of Warcraft

Action | Space
Bjarke Liboriussen: The Landscape Aesthetics of Computer Games

Betty Li Meldgaard: Perception, Action, and Game Space

Stephan Günzel: The Space-Image. Interactivity and Spatiality of Computer Games

Mattias Ljungström: Remarks on Digital Play Spaces

Charlene Jennett/Anna L. Cox/Paul Cairns: Being ‘In The Game’

Souvik Mukherjee: Gameplay in the ‘Zone of Becoming’. Locating Action in the Computer Game

Dan Pinchbeck: Trigens Can’t Swim. Intelligence and Intentionality in First Person Game Worlds

Robert Glashüttner: The Perception of Video Games. From Visual Power to Immersive Interaction

The Magic Circle
Britta Neitzel: Metacommunicative Circles

Yara Mitsuishi: Différance at Play. Unfolding Identities Through Difference in Videogame Play

Eduardo H. Calvillo-Gámez and Paul Cairns: Pulling the Strings.
A Theory of Puppetry for the Gaming Experience

Michael Liebe: There is no Magic Circle. On the Difference
between Computer Games and Traditional Games

My keynote presentation from the 2008 Philosophy of Computer Games conference can now be downloaded here: The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece.

This is my attempt at giving some nuance to recent discussions about the magic circle of games. Abstract:

In a common description, to play a game is to step inside a concrete or metaphorical magic circle where special rules apply. In video game studies, this description has received an inordinate amount of criticism which the paper argues has two primary sources: 1. a misreading of the basic concept of the magic circle and 2. a somewhat rushed application of traditional theoretical concerns onto games. The paper argues that games studies must move beyond conventional criticisms of binary distinctions and rather look at the details of how games are played. Finally, the paper proposes an alternative metaphor for game-playing, the puzzle piece.

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Postscript

With The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece I had been hoping to create a paper as balanced as my old Games Telling Stories? paper, wherein I would elaborate the merits of pro and con arguments concerning the magic circle.

What I found was that in hindsight, the games vs. stories discussion was the easy one: The participants agree that there exists something called games, and that we can discuss whether or not these can be considered stories.

The discussion of the magic circle is much harder because the participants fundamentally disagree about the terms of the discussion: Proponents of the magic circle metaphor consider it interesting to examine to what extent a game session is or isn’t separate from something outside that game session. Critics of the magic circle, on the other hand, have objections to the question itself because they assume that the metaphor is fundamentally problematic for various historical and theoretical reasons that I mention in the paper.

In other words, the magic circle discussion has not happened so far. In the paper, I hope to have opened a tiny hole in the wall through which future conversations can take place.

My article Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games made it to the “shadow list” of this year’s Game Studies Download session at the Game Developers Conference.

I’ll quote the shadow list description of the paper:

Juul, Jesper. “Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games.” Artifact journal, Volume 2, 2007. Also available at http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/swapadjacent/.

Games discussed: Tetris, Centipede, Puzzle Bobble, Zuma, Luxor, many others

Country: Denmark

The casual games marketplace puts conflicting pressures on game developers: Innovate enough to differentiate, but make the game sufficiently like other games that players find it easy to pick up and play. When player picks up a game, they are also using their conception of video game history to understand the new game.

The article presents a history of matching tiles games, including a complex family tree of influence and innovation. Categories in the family tree include timed vs. non-timed, methods of tile manipulation, and criteria for matching.

Innovation in casual games is incremental, and based on combinations of mechanics from existing games. This creates a somewhat schizophrenic environment of cutthroat competition between developers simultaneously trying to out-innovate and out-clone each other.

The basic development method has been analyzing existing games, identifying their basic components, and then creating prototypes that combined elements in new ways in order to create a moderately innovative matching tile game.

Takeaway: The key finding here for our audience is that the actual historical origins and influences of casual games developers are less important than the ones that the players come to the game with. The innovations that will be legible to these players depend strongly on their experience with specific previous games.