The Ludologist

Robin Hunicke recently posted the Mechanics – Dynamics – Aesthetics: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research paper that was used as part of the game tuning workshop at GDC. It’s a co-authored thing by Robin herself, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek.

It’s a very precise description of a few of the most basic issues with games: The relation between the rules of the game [mechanics] and what actually happens [dynamics] (sometimes even referred to as emergence), and the experience of the player [aesthetics].
This is the kind of thing that people (myself included) have often gotten tangled into – are games open or closed? Is a game even interactive? Why talk about the game itself when games are really experiences? … and so on.
The MDA framework is a pretty good way of escaping such problems:

Mechanics describes the particular components of the game, at the level of data representation and algorithms.
Dynamics describes the run-time behavior of the mechanics acting on player inputs and each others’ outputs over time.
Aesthetics describes the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when she interacts with the game system.

Short and sweet.

P.S. Ever the ingrate, I do miss two things in the paper: 1) It’s very system-oriented – it would be nice to see how the mechanics connect to fiction. 2) The paper describes the player and the designer as working from opposite ends – the designer creates mechanics that lead to dynamics that lead to aeshetics, the player works the other way. I think the player experiences the game a bit more like a multi-layered package of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics – the aesthetic experience can even arise from watching the relation between the mechanics and the dynamics.

I’m giving a talk at the IT University this Friday at 16:15 with the above title.

“The past few years has seen the emergence of a number of new games that in many ways change our ideas about what a game is. Recent hits such as Grand Theft Auto 3, Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, EverQuest, and The Sims may seem like very different games, but they all share the fact that the player is free to perform other actions than simply striving towards a game goal.
In the talk, I will examine how the weakening of the game goal works both as a way of opening up a game for different styles of playing and for expanding the audience for video games.”

This is a talk where I draw lines between the entirely general “what is a game”-questions and specific game design issues. (Which is something I want to do.)

Our DiAC department at the IT University doing field work this Thursday:

The game was the cryptically titled “ST? Game”, that Gonzalo and I had designed. Basically a simultaneous turn-based combat game with red and blue teams (distinguished by the color of their office binders) battling to steal student credits from each other by way of paper planes, crumbled paper balls and “daggers” (postit-notes).

The game was a reasonable success even though there were some balancing issues that needed attention:
-It turned out that it was much easier to revive other people than anticipated, and hence the game had a tendency to reach an equilibrium between the two teams.
-The crumbled paper balls were way more useful than other weapons, so their strength should probably be downgraded.
-The amount of student credits in the game was constant, so the more players were dead, the harder it was to kill the remaining players.

Emergent gameplay:
We had given players office binders to keep track of teams and to help them carry all their items. A popular unanticipated tactic was to collect as many paper balls as you could in your binder, and then simply pour them onto other players.

Today is my first day as an assistant professor at the IT University’s Center for Computer Games Research. Lots of new colleagues that I think I’ve seen somewhere before …

The plan is then simply to produce lots of research and teaching in the time to come.

Strangely, this is also the first “real job” I have ever had, I am not sure how that happened.

The Game Design Research Symposium and Workshop on May 7th-8th in Copenhagen arranged by Staffan Bj?rk, Interactive Institute, Sweden; Aki J?rvinen, Veikkaus, The Finnish National Lottery; Jussi Holopainen, Nokia Research Center, Finland; Steffen P. Walz, University for Art, Media and Design Zurich; Espen Aarseth, IT-University of Copenhagen.

I was asked how many game developers attended the event, and it’s hard to answer because no count was made, but: The attendance had been set to a max of 25 people, and 25 people attended. As a whole, about 1/3 of the attendees appeared to have been involved in commercial game development in some form, but with only a few full-time developers present. (Perhaps the full-time developers were developing games full-time?)

I will not attempt a complete recap of the event, but rather point to a few recurring themes that connect with my personal work.

The question of content
Gonzalo Frasca presented a position statement on political game design. In a nutshell: Games that don’t want to be just entertaining. And Gonzalo went against 4 things:
-Against virtuality (all games have consequences, anger, and so on).
-Against immersion (immersion removes the critical attitude of the player – this is the Brechtian theme in Gonzalo’s work).
-Against gameplay (great gameplay renders the rules invisible – same problem as before).
-Against fun (games are real pain and real suffering; all great games have boring sessions

Somehow at odds with the last point above, Craig Lindley presented a follow-up to his presentation at the Tampere conference in 2002. Being both a formal description of games and a normative suggestion for how to make games, Lindley discussed how to use a three-act model for recursively analyzing games (well, read the paper). Truth be told, since the Tampere conference I have always pointed to Craig Lindley as the “narratologist” whenever I needed to name one. As I interpret it, part of Lindley’s work focuses on making games that are always interesting, and I agree with Gonzalo Frasca that games are by virtue also partly boring and unsatisfying.

If Lindley’s presentation had formal aspects, it was by far outdone by Stefan Gruenvogel’s presentation on using mathematical models for understanding games. I confess that this isn’t quite my field, but it centered on state spaces, mappings, and formal analysis of games.

The question of players
Hanna Wirman & Rika Nakamura (University of Lapland) presented the enigmatically titled paper “Opportunities and Disadvantages of Feminine Strategies in Computer Games”.
This was a refreshing piece in that it didn’t do what was expected of it: First of all, from a number of sources (such as “From Barbie to Mortal Kombat”), they had created a list of 11 strategies that “women like”. Here they are:

Co-operation, relationships, caring, realistic characters, female characters, player as protagonist, changing into something magical, non-violence, control of pace, own goals, realistic settings.

The surprising thing was that everybody in the audience expected them to start criticizing this as stereotyping, social constructions and so on, but that they didn’t.
Rather, they did something which I hadn’t seen explicitly performed in a paper, namely to look at whether these 11 strategies were viable strategies in The Sims, Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, and Warcraft III. As you might imagine, the Sims was the game were most of these “feminine” strategies worked (exception co-operation), the strategies worked the least in Warcraft III, and Arcanarum was somewhere in between.

After this, the presenters challenged the universality of the list by admitting to liking Warcraft III very much. Discussion ensued as to whether these weren’t stereotypes that should be challenged rather than accepted.

Following the presentations of John Salisbury (Middlesex University) and Laura Ermi & Frans M?yr? (Hypermedia Lab), discussion ensued on the issue of how to use players and designers in research. Can we ask players what they like and take it at face (or some other) value?
For example Richard Rouse III states that “Players don’t know what they want, but they want it when they see it.” I’ve also heard Mark Cerny make statements along the same lines.

Andrew J. Stapleton (Swinburne University of Technology) posed the question whether research through design can be justified within the scientific method – and answered this with a no, saying other models are needed.

Research and the game industry
Heather Kelly: What game developers need from game design research, even if they don’t know that they need it.
This was an informal discussion on the relation between developers and game design research. Heather asked for the following things:
-How to create more emotional involvement?
-Do people have different learning styles?
-More analysis and critique that’s not just journalism
-Better vocabulary for discussing games.
-More interesting interface technologies.
-How to create games that discuss moral issues; present the players with moral choices?
-How to preserve the history of games.

What is game design?
Eric Zimmerman presented a dynamic view of what game design is based on the more general framework from Salen & Zimmerman’s book Rules of Play.
Here’s the big quote:
Game designers create experiences, but only indirectly. The designer creates structures that the players meet. Game design is a second order design problem.
As the in-between person who game industry people often think of as academic and academics think of as a game developer, Eric explains game design research as both practically applicable and more general ways of framing games conceptually.
Much of his presentation was based on several iterations of a game design that ended up being four of the participants cast in the role of hungry sisters, picking numbers in order to race towards Heather Kelly who had food for them.
Also, we got a behind-the-scenes peek of the design process of the catch-the-butterflies-game Loop.

Research through design / for design / into design
The second day centered on three perspectives on game design, research through design, research for (the sake of design), and research into the design process.

Three (again) frameworks were presented for designing and understanding games, each of which was applied to Mario Kart: Double Dash.

Staffan Bjork and Jussi Holopainen presented the Game design patterns framework. This structural framework aims at identifying different design choices in games. For example: Powerups, boss monster. role reversals.

Steffen Walz presented his own Game Design Figures project, which aims to use rhetoric to classify if not patterns, then recurring elements of games. The goal is to collect 1000 figures. For example, Mario Kart: Double Dash contains peristasis – the showing of adversaries, diastole – lengthening gameplay by way of unlockables.

Aki J?rvinen presented a part of his Ph.D. project where he tries to connect the actual game mechanics of a game with the pleasures that the players can get from them. As can be seen on his web site, he has an elaborate scheme for describing games as procedures / components / goals / environment / interface / players / context. What makes this interesting is that he tries to connect this with a list of pleasures. The number 11 resurfaced:

Challenge, masochism, intellect, discovery, sensation, fantasy, sadism, luck, narrative, fellowship, expression.

Different pleasures cater for different tastes and player types.

Finally, the participants where split into four groups, one playing Tetris, one playing GTA3: Vice City, and two playing the board game Carcassonne. After two hours of playing, the groups had to present the game to the whole symposium, preferably by having analyzed it with one or more of the three frameworks presented.

At the end of the day, dinner, and lots of suggestions for how to structure the second game design symposium, which hopefully will take place in less than a year.

News.com article on the revenue model for online games predicts a move away from subscriptions to micro-payment. It makes sense, but is not without problems – In virtual worlds, I suppose the danger is always that users who have worked hard to get a nice big sword will feel cheated when someone else simply buys that sword.

Incidentally, the graphical chatworld I have been working on lately, Højhuset, has been selling users in-game objects and avatar customization for real money the past 6 months (using text messaging). And users seem to be pretty happy with it.

Hmm. I think the major objection to the selling of virtual objects for real money is that it blurs some of the boundary between in-game and out-of-game and makes the playing-field uneven.

But perhaps this actually fits virtual worlds pretty well. They tend to allow for different playing styles anyway, and using real money to get the big sword is simply another playing style (that just happens to create income for the game provider). Perhaps it’s like getting a new kitchen: You can build it yourself and be happy with your accomplishment, or you can pay someone to build it and be happy about the time you saved. The fact that the rich/busy people paid someone else to build it doesn’t make the DIY people less proud of their own accomplishment.

That’s the psychological reason why selling virtual objects for real money will not turn users away from a game.

[Update: Terra Nova has a discussion on the same issue.]