Notes on Games

Lost Garden’s system of gameplay notation, as it is posted on the blog, is derived from musical notation. Incorrectly derived. Musical notation has a different purpose, it is used to simplify the execution, but the music itself is not dependant on notation. It simply “IS”. Notation is just notation, nothing more than a tool to “note down” music, not to design it. The design is done in the musician’s head, or the game designer’s head in this case. It has certainly helped the development of more complex forms of music, but assuming that “good” music is the one with complex notation, of a dozens musicians executing different notes at the same time sounds like a shallow statement.

Listener experience can’t be “noted”. We don’t note down “reward” in music, we note down elements of the musical system, notes. Why should we use a model that is not meant to evaluate or note reward in such purpose? It’s clearly not understanding the actual use of musical notation. What made musical notation useful to composing “great musical pieces” (classical music) was that composers had an intimate knowledge of the result in interaction between notes. The Rules of music. A fifth grade creates tension here, a second grade dissipates it, etc. This rules are based on a predesigned set of interactions, in other words, the physical rules of sound, waves, etc. Here comes the idea that games, different from any other activity, are free from predestination: they are systems which don’t depend on prefixed rules, such as the rules of nature. When we build a game we are creating those rules, we create interaction and we mold it in the way we want, we have no immediate barriers, other than technology. All this last sentences are a part of the greater idea that music, and therefore musical notation, can’t be compared to game, and so ludic notation.

Now, there’s another angle to this argument. There’s the underlying idea to this whole theoretical approach that reminds me of conductism. How so? Well, first of all let’s note something. The study of games in general could be divided into two major fields: the study of the game itself and the study of the player. The study of the game is claimed by ludologists and other amateurs (I’ll include myself in this category). But on the other hand, the study of players well…has already been claimed. What do we study if we focus on player experience, player reaction, etc.? Conduct. More specifically, human conduct. But why would we study human conduct without referring to the research of psychology, anthropology and sociology! The study of player experience between a game is an interdisciplinary one, so embarking on such task from the perspective of game design alone is, by far, a narrow and useless approach. Lost Garden’s model of gameplay notation includes several concepts that would be included in the branch of “Player Experience” fields and that:
a) Have not been seriously thought out,
b) Are derived from outdated theories of the study of conduct

Conductism is the clearest example. The idea behind Lost Garden’s gameplay notation system is that we can measure “player experience” by admitting that a gratifying experience emerges from rewards, that too many rewards quickly become boring, that rewards must be conceived in a linear way, even though the “layer” system could pail this view of Lost Garden’s approach. But on a more basic level, that the study of player experience should be done by admitting the universal concept of Action-Reaction (an action in the game implies a reaction in the player, such as an action in the player implies an action in the game) and applying the idea of “meaning” or “gratification” to it: reward emerges from Action-Reaction (from interactivity), so by “noting down” interactivity (Action-reaction units) we can get feedback from player experience. But human reactions can’t be measured, quantified or qualified (at least not universally). The reward that for some people work, may not work for others; in other words, what I enjoy of a game is not necessarily what others enjoy of the same game. The idea behind Action-Reaction theories cannot be applied to the study of player experience (if it can, at all, be studied, at least aside from anthropology or psychology), because human reactions, unlike game reactions, can’t be predicted in any way. They can be categorized, but this would imply a judgement of value, rather than a verifiable statement. In other words, we can’t produce a game design notational system if we conceive it as a way to measure player experience. The reaction of a player to a stimuli can’t be induced from the observation of previous experience and from logging “Reward” curves on a multi-layered time line. The first answer in Lost Garden’s blog said it before anyone else did: “Sensors could track pulse, overall body temperature, and even brain activity (in a very realistic sense - not recording their thoughts, so much, but the amount of activity in which area of the brain) and then based on the data, the game developer could increase or decrease the amount of time between major plot”. It’s not surprising that the first published reaction to the whole idea behind Lost Garden’s notational system refers to a conductist-like experiment in which the idea is that we can somehow determine player reactions and build “better games” by analyzing how “Reward” impacts our players, which rewards work better, which do not, which are overlapping or too far, etc. The ONLY thing that we could obtain from player study is a statistic reference on what games work better and for which purpose, but this must be done considering the greater context of humanity. We are thinking the interactions between players and games as those between two predetermined structures, when actually one of them’s nature is, by definition, unpredictable.

Summing up, player experience is not to be studied isolated from greater human interactions with the environment and inside the larger and precedent context of conduct and general human studies of psychology, sociology and anthropology. What we can do is study that other structure, the one that can be determined and that, different from every other object of study, can be completely molded. Games.

First of all we should review some basic notions. We think the defining quality of games is interactivity: Structure A interacts with Structure B. Human players interact with Games. This interaction is one of negative-reciprocity in one level: Games serve human, but games don’t earn anything from players. Games only “give”, players only “take”, in terms of gratification or “meaning”. If we were to represent the idea of interactivity in games graphically, we would normally consider that a binary system would be enough:

GAME <--> PLAYER

The arrows, ßà, would represent interactivity. But we need to make two remarks on this: first, that interaction should not be represented as of positive reciprocity; so the correct scheme would have to be:
“GAME ->-> PLAYER”

But this diagram is still incomplete, bringing us to the second point: before and after every interaction there is an action from a player. This means that everything in a game follows a player’s action, because games are artificial structures designed to interact and not interacting naturally. Humans interact naturally, plants interact naturally, humans and plants interact naturally and so we could continue enumerating interactions in nature. So every representation of interaction should contain three elements:

PLAYER --> GAME --> PLAYER

When we design a game we are basically outlining interaction, we are determining it. To determine interaction we have only to restrict: we give senseless actions a “meaning” in the context of an artificial system. We restrict possibilities, which were previously undetermined, back when the game was merely an indiscernible blob of possibility. Before rules, there could not have existed reward or loss, gratification or frustration. So designing is imposing form where only existed indetermination. It is a creative process comparable to the creative process of writing a poem, it is no different from painting on a canvas. Is it then art? This is something worth a lot of discussion, but my first impression is that considering games as art is not productive to the field of game design, at least not for the moment. Mainly because everything can potentially be art and considering games as art doesn’t add anything but status quo to the discipline of game design. It’s a way of praising ourselves. But someone can always say “Doom 3 is not art” and we would end up in pointless/endless discussions on what art really is only to “agree to disagree” on its definition.

What is important in game design is the creative process by which rules are conceived. So the focus of game studies should be not on the “Rules of Design” but on the “Design of Rules” in a comprehensive way. But we should avoid the idea that some rules are “universally” more effective than others, and that this can be measured: in other terms, meaningful experiences are quantifiable and can serve evaluative purposes. This would fall under the same category of Lost Garden’s approach. It focuses on human reaction, on the PLAYER component of the Interaction Scheme, rather than the GAME component. Instead, we need to study existing game structures from a different perspective.

And this is where my whole rant falls to pieces and gets stepped on by all the readers, because I’m about to accept that I don’t have a clear idea on how can this be done. But I have faith that the answers will appear, eventually, from discussion and experimentation.

I’m sorry for any grammar/spelling awkwardness. English is not my language. I will post a revised version as soon as possible and I will accept gratefully any critics, both on the grammatical and ideological level.

Thanks

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planeo retomar con el tiempo los problemas que se dejan planteados al final. comenzar esa búsqueda de respuestas. Por otro lado creo que es muy importante comenzar a dar a la disciplina, a los estudios sobre juegos, un perimetro y un área de acción dentro de las ciencias.

kick off!

Notes on Games

martes, 19 de diciembre de 2006

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