A Theory of Fun for Game Design - Page 2

Essentially, games provide us with patterns or puzzles to solve. They may teach skills related to survival, but they are all about the pattern (though he says that "Many things we have fun at doing are in fact training us to be better cavemen"). Koster struggles with the fact that so many modern games feature what he calls "antiquated survival skills" such as swordsmanship or the like. For those of us living in our modern cocoon, the lure of something new, or foreign, is quite beguiling – and those sorts of games can provide that desired counterpoint. Candidly, I'd have to say that his proposed game of "Custody Battle 3" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "Age of Empires 3," even if it might teach "survival skills" more applicable to modern culture.

I was very intrigued by his exploration of the whole mental process associated with game playing. It really helped to see games as essentially a series of similar patterns turned or shifted slightly into a new shape or form. And I was also very interested in his acknowledgement of the complexity surrounding game content (which might more properly be regarded as the "dressing" of the underlying conceptual play involved). At one point, he writes:

I don't think debates about the suitability of violence in the media will disappear. Much evidence shows that media have some effect on how we act. If media didn't have an effect, we wouldn't spend so much effort on using at as teaching tools. But evidence also shows that media aren't mind-control devices (of course they aren't, or else we'd all behave like the people we read about in the children's stories we read in elementary school."

According to Koster, the principle reason game designers and games reject the idea that games are necessarily "damaging" to children is that on a conceptual level a game isn't "about" the "dressing," whether it takes the form of running over pedestrians or eating little dots. On the most basic level, games are about an abstract process of effort and reward – the true underpinnings may be very different than the metaphors used in the game's imagery. As Koster puts it, "Deathrace does not teach you to run over pedestrians any more than Pac-Man teaches you to eat dots and be scared of ghosts."

However, he also contends that "the art of the game" is more than just the underlying mechanics of chasing something around on a screen (or a board). In this regard, I tend to agree with his sentiment that "film is not solely the art of cinematography or scriptwriting or directing or acting. The art of the game is the whole." As a result, no matter what the conceptual design of a game is in the abstract, there remains a place to review its "semantic freight." For example, he writes:

Let's picture a mass murder game wherein there is a gas chamber shaped like a well. You the player are dropping innocent victims down into the gas chamber, and they come in all shapes and sizes. There are old ones and young ones, fat ones and tall ones. As they fall to the bottom, they grab onto each other and try to form human pyramids to get to the top of the well. Should they manage to get out, the game is over and you lose. But if you pack them in tightly enough, the ones on the bottom succumb to the gas and die.

Much like Koster, "I do not want to play this game." One has to admit that from a conceptual level, the game would play essentially like Tetris. But that's the funny thing about the metaphorical side of games. It isn't the packing of shapes in a well that is the problem (even though that is the essence of the game); it is the dressing surrounding the game. For Koster, that doesn't alter the fact that "creators in all media have a social obligation to be responsible with their creations."

Article Author: Bill Wallo

Bill Wallo is a book and movie junkie.

Visit Bill Wallo's author page — Bill Wallo's Blog