I just read an interesting essay by ludologist Jesper Juul.
He set out to find the answers to two questions:
- What is the role of failure in video games?
- Do players prefer games where they do not feel responsible for failing?
He built game prototypes to examine different types of failure (loss of lives vs ‘energy’ loss) and used Attribution Theory to frame player interpretation of the reasons for failure.
Players were also asked to rate the game out of 10 and he mapped player performance (and attribution of failure) against their ratings.
Interestingly (and consistent with some other work that I can’t recall at this point) he found that players who failed sometimes found the game more fun.
players who fail sometimes enjoy the game more
Funnily enough, players are more likely to attribute failure to the game rather than their performance whereas with success, they are more likely to take responsibility.
Also, it seems that players did not view chance as being responsible for failure. Either the game was too hard or they made a mistake.
Jull concludes by discussing the apparent contradiction between the observations that players want to win and yet they seem to prefer games where they lose sometimes. He raises the seemingly oppositional considerations.
- The player does not want to fail (makes player sad, feels inadequate).
- Failing makes the player reconsider his/her strategy (which makes the game more interesting).
- Winning provides gratification.
- Winning without failing leads to dissatisfaction.
Which he suggests can be understood by viewing games through two frames of reference.
Aesthetic vs Goal Oriented frames of consideration
So gamers do want to win the game and that is their goal, but they also have an appreciation of the game from another perspective where they appreciate the challenge.
The article essay covers some other interesting ideas regarding casual games and the reasons for their success or failure but I thought these findings were interesting on their own.
This week I carried out a playtest of the e-Bug Platform Game that targets 9-11 year old pupils. In the previous playtest, they had unlimited lives and there was no real way to lose the game. Players expressed that they enjoyed the game but that it was too easy.
I had another problem with some players completely ignoring instructions and running to the end of the level without reading instructions. Because the level design didn’t allow players to get back to the beggining, those who did this had not achieved the level objectives and as such, were stuck at the closed exit point.
To fix both of these issues, I implemented the concept of player life loss through contact with bad microbes. They player was always able to be hurt by these microbes but there was no consequence to life loss and the player didn’t have to restart when lives < 0. I also added a fairly generous timer to each level which caused the player to restart the level if s/he got stuck.
The playtest group seemed to enjoy having to restart the level upon death. They exchanged banter “that one killed me!” “I died there too” and the timer achieved its objective in one situation where a player was in a situation where objective completion was impossible.
However, as the session continued, things went pair shaped. Players seemed to exhibit very little sense of self preservation. They threw soap at microbes to wash them away but the still ran straight into them before they were ‘killed’. By 20 minutes into the session, every player was stuck in an endless cycle of restart, play, die which was painful to watch.
So by the end of the playtest, only one of the six testers had actually made it past that level.
It seems that in an effort to increase difficulty, I swung the pendulum too far to the difficult side.
Rules of Play
I’ve started reading Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s book “Rules of Play“. It picked up a fair bit of blog buzz when it came out so I thought I’d give it a look.
So far, I have almost finished the first of 4 sections. I had to talk about the book this week for Journal Club (despite it not being a journal) so these are my notes.
The real meat of the book is in units 2-4 but so far I’m very impressed by the thoroughness of the first unit, “Core Concepts”.
Formal definitions are a key aspect of academia (as my boss is always telling me) and over the first 90 pages or so, Salen and Zimmerman do a fantastic literature search on each of their Core Concepts, combining and synthesising these to create very sensible and reasonable definitions on which the rest of the book will be built.
They start with a new (to me at least) concept of “Meaningful Play” stating:
“The goal of successful game design is meaningful play.”
But what is Meaningful Play?
They define meaningful play in two ways, descriptive and evaluative.
Descriptively:
“Meaningful Play in a game emerges from the relationship between player action and system outcome.”
“The meaning of an action in a game resides in the relationship between action and outcome.”
In other words, there should be intent and expectation when a player performs an action and the action should have a result that has some relevance or significance.
The other definition can be used to evaluate or gauge the success of (elements of?) a game design.
“Meaningful play is what occurs when the relationships between actions and outcomes in a game are both discernible and integrated into the larger context of the game.”
In this statement, “discernible” means that “the player can perceive the immediate outcome of an action” and “integrated” means that “the outcome of an action is woven into the game system as a whole.”
In my current project, I have designed two games, one of which is a platform game with a game show. I use the game show for pre and post evaluation of player learning. The learning (hopefully) happens during the platform game.
One of the least satisfying elements of the game is that during the ‘pre’ gameshow round, the player is not given the answers to the questions. This is so that I don’t bias my results. However, the ‘blind question round’ fails the evaluative definition, probably on both accounts. The player’s action isn’t really discernible because they don’t know if they got the answer right. The action isn’t really integrated because their answer here has no impact on the rest of the game. It’s an important part of my requirements as a researcher (I need the data) but it certainly harms the play experience.
e-Bug Junior Game Quiz Show Question
Salen and Zimmerman go on to offer further definitions:
“Design is the process by which a designer creates a context to be encountered by a participant, from which meaning emerges.”
This seems to be a somewhat unwieldy definition but makes sense when you view it in the light of semiotics (also satisfactorily described in the chapter).
As said above, I haven’t got to the ‘meat’ of the book yet, but Salen and Zimmerman’s big idea is viewing games with an aesthetic perspective similar to how we relate to other fields such as architecture, literature or film. When creating or evaluating these media, we do so with different perspectives. They advocate a similar approach to reading games.
In order to understand the frames through which they view games, we need to understand systems.
They define a system as having:
- Objects which are “the parts, elements, or variables within the system.”
- Attributes which are “the qualities or properties of the system and its objects”
- Internal Relationships which are “the relations among the objects”
- Environment which is “the context that surrounds the system”.
Using a systemic frame to define a game allows them to consider the same game in widely varying ways.
“Formally” (closed system), a game is a collection of rules - I find that left alone, I tend to design thinking this way, looking for interesting relationships to embed in the game design. With the e-Bug platform game, I looked for ways to embed the learning outcomes in the game mechanics. I did this thinking largely how to represent the learning outcomes through rules and relationships. Although I tried to keep the target player in mind, I was imagining how the system would work more than how it would be experienced.
“Experientially” (open or closed system), the game is considered more through the play experience of the player. The game isn’t just a series of rules, it is also the experience of the person playing, their psychology, their previous game and life encounters etc. I think I became consciously aware of this way of thinking about games (even without having a term for it) when I was doing focus groups on the e-Bug platform game with school children. Seeing their interactions, the way the got stuck, didn’t understand something, or blatantly ignored instruction was a bit of a shock at first and shows how a game design really has to include the player at core. The experience of playing the game wasn’t necessarily as good as the design of the rules (if that makes any sense).
“Culturally” (open system), a game includes its place in society. With my game, pupils are likely to perceive and engage differently if they consider it an ‘educational game’ instead of a ‘flash game’ or a ‘platform game’. In the bigger picture, societal factors come into play when you view a game culturally. For example, I was surprised to be questioned as to why our “good microbes” where light skinned and our “bad microbes” dark skinned. It certainly wasn’t deliberate in a racial sense. The artist used ’standard’ tropes such as evil eyes and teeth, but it was true that all the good bugs were a light shade of green and all the bad bugs were a murky, almost brown shade of green. It doesn’t feel racist to me but the fact that it’s debatable shows again, how you need to consider all of the ways games can be interpreted when designing. The N’Gai Croal krfuffle about the Resident Evil 5 trailer is a similar example. The designers of that game didn’t consider their game properly in a cultural frame.
There is a really useful example of how chess can be viewed through each frame in the chapter but I won’t repeat it here.
This systemic approach: Formal, Experiential, and Cultural is a really interesting way to view games and I look forward to the rest of the book to see how they develop these ideas (through the related headings of Rules, Play and Culture).
Following systems, the authors also provide a working definition of “Interaction“.
Instead of trying to come up with the Ultimate Definition, they disambiguate Interaction into four modes:
- Mode 1: Cognitive Interactivity (the way you interact with television or a book)
- Mode 2: Functional Interactivity (how you interact with an interface, clicking or scrolling etc)
- Mode 3: Explicit Interactivity (making decisions, overt participation - in other words, the kind of interactivity associated with most games)
- Mode 4: Beyond-the-Object Interactivity (interacting with something outwith or after the event - i.e. fan fiction / TV forums etc).
They promote the idea of Designed Interaction - if the designer has a goal when designing, the experience will be much more meaningful for the interactee (player).
Within their chapter in Interactivity, they also offer five stages of interaction that construct a choice in a game:
- What happened before player given the choice?
- How is the possibility of choice given to the player?
- How did the player make the choice?
- What is the result of the choice. How will it affect future choices?
- How is the result of the choice conveyed to the player?
These questions could certainly be used to ‘problem solve’ unsatisfying gameplay.
And that’s where I am so far.
Fascinating, thorough and useful book so far - and I haven’t even got to the main content yet.
