what is a game?

During class we discussed what a game was and came up with these guidelines:

-it must have a goal

-it must have rules that make players take a route towards the goal that is not the most efficient one

-the game must also have an air of triviality, if at any time it looses this it stops being a game.

-finally the game must be fun for everyone involved.

I feel that this definition for a game is close, however these qualities cause a few paradoxes. For one, because of the rule of triviality the same activity done by two different people can be both a game and not a game. For instance if I were to choose to play baseball, it would be a game, however to professionals the game becomes serious. If they do not play well, they get fired, and therefore it becomes not a game. So what happens when the activity to one person is a game and is not to another? Or what happens when over the course of the game, a person loses that sense of triviality and then regains it. Is the activity a game or is it not? Is a game a state of mind and not an activity? What then is a person who is playing a game too seriously doing?

The second paradox is the paradox of efficiency. It is true that a game's rules prohibit the most efficient method of achieving the goal of the game, however people who are playing the game are often trying to find the most efficient way to use the rules in order to achieve the game's goal. If the game is chess, and you have a possible checkmate move, every expert will advise that you make said move, because then you win the game. This is clearly the most efficient method that the rules allow. Work environments do this too. For example the goal of every business is to make money. Now the most efficient method of doing this is to just print out money, seconded closely by stealing it. However unless a person works at the mint, they do not do this. They take an inefficient route to making money. Thus unless we want to include society itself in the definition of a game, seeing as though some people take their lives trivially, we need a better definition that separates games from work.

So what should the definition of a game be? I propose that a game is any activity meant to add structure to play. This way we can differentiate games from work, due to the fact that the difference between work and play is that work is not taken with an attitude of triviality. This also differentiates play from games, as a game is play with additional structure. Finally this definition works around both paradoxes presented as efficiency is not mentioned and the game is meant to evoke triviality. Definition-wise the game does not care whether it succeeds or not.

When Play Becomes Serious

One would assume that since play is a relaxing state, and that we do it voluntarily, that playful competition only comes in one flavor. However, living in a world of play, I have come to realize that “casual” is not the only way to play. So what happens when competition becomes serious business? And how do we know when it is? What things change between casual competition and serious competition? And is there any blurring of the line?

In order to try and answer these questions I looked for the fastest way to make a game serious, by making it so that the outcome of the competition affects the world beyond the bubble of play. To do this I proceeded to bet with pool players in the college lounge. The times I bet I played for dollar games and for a meal pass.(if I won I'd get a guest pass, if they won they'd get $6) My first discovery from doing this was that I was a much worse pool player when something was on the line. I played a casual game with my opponent before we played a real one and found that we were of about even skill, however when it came to betting I ended 3 balls behind, a result that cannot be chalked up to luck. I could feel myself over analyzing my shots and thus making worse ones than normal. However since we had played pool before, the competition did not need an extended clarification of rules. This is because there are already a set of working rules for games at the lounge that both of us knew and had agreed upon in prior games.

The second time I attempted playing for money, we played for a dollar game. Since the stake was much less, I felt calmer, but still pretty nervous. The student had just come back from Dublin and was unfamiliar with the pool house rules. This time there was a huge clarification process before the game started .This was to make sure that everyone was playing on the same page. This would have been slightly different in a casual game, with the rules being explained as they come up instead of all at the beginning. Trying the rule as you go approach in the betting game would have led to arguments because one competitor would not be able to trust that the other was unbiased. I won the second game of pool, however I still feel I did worse than in a casual game as the game was very close.

After doing these experiments I was reminded of the games of Magic: the gathering, that I play often and found some similarities to the seriousness scale. Most casual games come with some house rules, one in particular is a “friendly mulligan”, or one free redrawing of their hand, to make sure that there are more quality games played and less one sided matches. This banks on the fact that someone in a casual game will not try to mulligan in order to get the one card they need to make the game one sided, but will work with the hand they are given if it's not terrible. However, when I was testing a deck for a tournament with a friend, we switched play styles immediately. We stopped handing out the friendly mulligans and started to use normal mulligan rules. And we used them as a resource so we could get that one card we needed to win the game. Coincidentally once we were done testing the decks we even switched them out because neither one was fun to play casually. Both would win in a tournament, but it was agreed that they were not very fun to play due to their serious nature. The weird thing here is that I consistently made better plays when the competition was serious than when it was casual, because magic rewards extended thinking. In fact I asked a nearby “impartial judge” to evaluate whether or not some plays would work before I played them. This is in contrast to casual play where I would be very likely to just assume the plays work, and wait to be corrected.

Thus when playing a serious game the players will usually play with more strict rules, think more about their plays and discuss rules beforehand, rather than as they appear. While I personally prefer casual play to serious play, I realize that some people find excitement in having a game dictate an aspect of their lives, and become very good at playing under pressure. In fact many of my friends who attend these tournaments end up making money on their hobby instead of dumping money into it. As for pool, there are people who play professionally and people who bet on it often, however I know that I am not cut out to do either.  

Interaction and interface of games

Games were made to be immersive. Through storyline, graphics, compelling characters and more they took you to a world that was not your own. However two things that are often overlooked for immersion in gaming are the interaction and the interface. The interaction between human and controller is what made the Wii the platform it is today and a good interface can make a game's setting come to life. So where have we come from in this front? And where are we going? How has interaction and interface made games what they are today? And what could they do better?

So let's start with the history of the HUD, or heads up display, a feature in most games nowadays that stores information away from the action. The HUD is what tells you how much gas your race car has, and how many more attacks it'll take to beat your opponent into oblivion. The HUD started with pong when it noted the score and has lived humbly in the background since. The HUD is the games way of talking back to us, and nowadays it's getting replaced more and more with in-game elements. This is because some TVs get burns in them when a persistent image is left on screen. So how do the HUDs of today function? They integrate the information into the section on screen. Where you used to have an ammunition counter in a first person shooter, today the ammo is listed on the gun. Instead of the hit point counter decreasing when being hit, the screen will flash red.

Today when it is necessary to have a HUD it is made to fit the flavor of the world. For instance compare the HUDs in Oblivion and Fallout 3, both 3^rd person/ 1^st person role playing games. The HUDs look completely different while still conveying the same information. In oblivion hit points are measured with a bright red bar, conveying blood, and the compass is the largest piece of it. In Fallout hit points are measured through ticks which lead the player to assume any hits they take are either dodged, dealt as damage to clothing or finally dealt as wounds. This is because the fallout world is more realistic, actual wounds would be much more fatal in the fallout world than in oblivion. The fallout HUD is much more streamlined, sectioning off each piece of information while the oblivion HUD is more free form. Both HUDs only display essential information, next to no numbers (besides ammunition in Fallout), and are tucked neatly out of the way where you wouldn't normally look. More detailed information can be called up with a button.

So where will the future for HUDs be? Will they speak to us and tell us the info we need? Or will they become smaller and smaller? I think that the trend will go towards less visual cues, however sound will be less used than the article implies. This is because talking HUDs would get annoying quickly. Instead we will have HUDs that provide feedback in other ways. For instance with the new motion controls it would be easy to program a game that makes you less accurate when wounds are sustained. This coupled with the screen tinting red would provide a realistic feel to taking damage. As the article implies there will be more HUD-less games in the future and more games will have the integrated elements. In the future the HUD will fade into the background being even more behind the scenes than it ever was, but enhancing games all the more.

Where interfaces will become more invisible, Interaction will come to the forefront of games. Game interaction design started out with the joystick of the Atari and arcade games, which in addition would have a button or two. These were simple, but did not feel special or very comfortable. The first leap toward making interaction part of immersion was with the flight simulator games. These games required a joystick, which made the experience. It was like flying a real plane, every aspect felt that way, mostly because of the joystick controls. If the mouse was used or even worse if ti was controlled though the w a s and d keys the game wouldn't have had half the impact it actually did. The next important leap was with controllers that were crafted to be comfortable to hold. The boxes and ovals of the NES and super Nintendo were traded out for the Playstation, Xbox and Gamecube controllers. These were vastly superior to their predecessors because you could play for longer periods of time, and the controls felt natural. This was augmented by the fact that the controllers were easy to use with all the buttons being mapped out to which fingers would press them and how the controller would be held. Finally came the Wii, Xbox Kinect and Playstation motion controllers. These interactive devices make games even more immersive. This is because they can feed back through the controller. The Wii, being the older model, is the best of the three because it has the most practice using the controls in games. Want to play golf? Swing the controller like a club. Want to play fishing? The controller can do that too. Every conceivable interaction can be programed to feel right using the Wii controls. The Kinect goes one step further, removing the controller entirely. I think that this will be one of the many possible futures for gaming interaction. The downside I see is that there is no way for the game to provide tactile feedback, something gaming has had since the rumble feature. How will we feel getting hit without a shaking controller? Or the jolt of turbulence as we try to land a plane? I feel that removing the controller removes one way for the game designers to speak to their players, and takes a whole sense out of the equation of gaming and as such is a mistake. I do however see great promise in the Emotiv. The Emotiv is a device that lets you control a computer using your thoughts, by mapping when you are thinking what. So if you think “move back” the computer will map that and the next time you have similar brain patterns the emotive will read it as you telling it to “move back” This device will be revolutionary in the production of games once it can be paired with some sort of tactile feedback. This is because there will be nothing in between you and the machine, no buttons to not hit, no awkward controls, just you and the computer. Imagine Games where you play a telepath, or a wizard brought to life and more immersive than ever. Imagine fighting games where you control the character as a puppet, and have to make the muscle movements to do the moves. Imagine being able to point to the screen and have your finger be the mouse. This is why I see the Emotiv as the future of game interaction, and of computer interaction in the next twenty years. All it takes is for developers to start seeing it's true power.

Emotiv - Brain Computer Interface Technology. Web. 31 Jan. 2011. <http://www.emotiv.com/>.

Kelly, Martin C. "Historical Reflections on Victorian Data Processing." Viewpoints Oct. 2010. Print.

Mastin, Kirk. "Interface and Video Game Design: 7 Examples. « Through the Looking Glass." Through the Looking Glass. 9 Oct. 2008. Web. 31 Jan. 2011. <http://kmastin.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/interface-and-video-game-design-7-examples/>.

Moggridge, Bill. Designing Interactions. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007. Print.

Wilson, Greg. "Gamasutra - Features - Off With Their HUDs!: Rethinking the Heads-Up Display in Console Game Design." Gamasutra - The Art & Business of Making Games. Gamasutra, 3 Feb. 2006. Web. 31 Jan. 2011. <http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2538/off_with_their_huds_rethinking_.php?page=1>.

Images required

http://ve3dmedia.ign.com/images/00/79/7969_the-elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion-20060405093901532_normal.jpg

http://www.ngohq.com/attachments/screenshots/1426d1227440416-fallout-3-screenshots-fo3033.jpg

http://www.emotiv.com/