Games: As basic to culture as language or strictly for children?
“For hundreds of years, the field of game design has drifted along under the radar of culture, producing timeless masterpieces and masterful time-wasters without drawing much attention to itself…” – Frank Lantz, foreword of Rules of Play
Let’s start this off on the wrong foot; I find it bizarrely irritating when people discuss games as if games begin and end with digital (i.e. video) games. There is a cultural conversation that has been going on for years now about video games and their effect on people’s lives as if this is a media that somehow sprung whole cloth out of nowhere in the last 30 years. It didn’t. Gaming is a cultural constant for humans. Find me a culture, any culture, that actually exists or existed that didn’t play games. It’s impossible. And not just because someone on the internet said so.
But that’s (mostly) not what I want to talk to you about today. What I want to talk to you is about what games can do and what we (Simon, myself, and Enchanted Beard Press as an otherworldly entity that has taken residence in our minds) want to do with our games. That first point I’m going to get to today, the second point we’ll come back to next time.
Games are about learning. In the book, A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster he posits that the fun part of games is the part where you’re learning. That’s not the only place, of course, it comes from the competition (in most cases), the collaboration (in a few cases), and the temporary community or relationship created by a game. But a lot of the fun of a game is in the learning. Koster says that when your brain begins to master something, making the task easier, that’s what feels so good and fun. The growing sense of mastery, then, is what makes a game fun. Mastery of what? Of a system. Of a skill. Because games are systems that require skills to master.
And this is a great thing. Of course, it’s also like saying, “water is wet” because it’s something everyone knows instinctively even if no one states it directly. People have been experiencing this for hundreds of years. It’s what has turned chess amateurs into chess masters. To some extent it’s gaming’s own fault that it’s got the public perception that it has these days because it’s such a powerful medium and it’s been used in such a limited scope. Jane McGonigal (author of, Reality is Broken, and a game designer) refines this point of Koster’s in an interesting way. If we can learn things from games, and learning things from games is fun, then shouldn’t we be using games to learn things we need to know? The answer, of course, is yes.
“‘Things we need to know’ is a pretty broad category. What does McGonigal mean by that and why does Benjamin think it’s important?” That’s my impression of what you’re thinking.
Things we need to know can mean a lot of things. It could mean very rudimentary and obvious skills, like mathematics or reading. Games get used for that a lot, actually. It could also mean a more ethereal skill like planning or collaborating with others. Plenty of games are good at building those skills even if they aren’t advertised that way. It could even mean really complex skills like learning how to communicate effectively and be emotionally honest. These tier of skills may only be touched on infrequently by games currently but that doesn’t mean it has to be that way or that it always will. McGonigal advocates for people taking an honest look at the skills they would or need to develop and using games to help them do that. Seems like a really great idea.
If you’re interested in hearing more about game design I recommend looking into, Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (as well as that text’s companion, the Game Design Reader), A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster, and Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal (as well as various radio and television interviews she has done recently). Rules of Play is very heavy reading and quite an expensive text (as is the companion) because it is meant to be used as a game design textbook. A Theory of Fun is much more accessible at the cost of Rule’s of Play‘s more expansive attempt at exploring game design as a field. Finally, I have not yet read Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken but I have been very impressed with her interviews. If you are the instant gratification type you can hear an interview she did with KQED here and you can see her giving a spiel about her views on gaming on TEDtalks here. I would love to have posted her interview with Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report but I can’t find it! This internet’s so hard!
I’ll be posting again soon to discuss how this conversation relates to Simon and I’s will-bending master, Enchanted Beard Press, and its cthonic wishes for us to put forth its world-shattering new dawn of gaming.
- Beardjamin
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