A few weeks ago I read Raph Koster's book A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Let me say first off, despite my few criticisms, that this book is worth reading. You should go buy it and read it.

Here's the amazon link.

Raph was the lead designer of both Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and is now something like Chief Creative Officer of Sony Online. There are people who love him, people who think he's arrogant, people who don't like his games, and people who point to UO as a risky step into new waters that most designers couldn't have taken so well. I have met Raph a couple times at conventions and I'm pretty sure he didn't think much of me. But none of that has any relevance at all to his book, so you can just forget all that.

Raph has a background in writing, and it shows. Contrary to popular opinion, being a good writer does not mean using a bunch of fancy words. It means delivering a message in clear way. It means speaking to the audience in terms *they* can understand. Except for a few pages in the middle where I thought this simplicity went horribly wrong (lol) the majority of the book is very well written. It's clear, informative, and utterly readible. That is no small compliment, so congratulations, Raph.

There is one point where Raph and I really disagree. He talks about the difference between learning a game and exercising mastery in it. He calls the learning part "fun" and defines fun in such a way as to not include the exercising of mastery. For example, when two basketball teams compete, the losers will say "well it was just for fun." The winners might have won so easily that they didn't learn anything; they were just exercising mastery.

I speak for all competitive gamers everywhere when I say that exercising mastery *is* fun. It really is. That is, for me, where the majority of fun lies in all games. Once I know everything about a competitive game, and so does my opponent, we are finally ready to begin playing. The idea that the best Virtua Fighter player in the world should stop playing VF because he's learned all the game's lessons, and no longer has a chance at fun is totally absurd notion. To me, it makes me wonder how deeply Raph understands competitive games, but I have to cut him several breaks on this one. First, he freely admits he's not a competitive player or a pvp player. Second, virtually no one who writes about games understands competition anyway. Third, and by far most importantly, this point is just a tanget to Raph's main point, and his main point is a very valuable one.

The thing he's really driving at is that "fun" comes from the process of learning in an environment where without severe consequences. Take the same exact elements of a game, and put them in a situation of life and death (such as putting out a real fire while rescuing children, or deciding a nuclear arms strategy) and we don't usually call it a "game" or "fun." But decisions we get to make in a setting where it's ok to experiment and ok to lose allow learning under low pressure, and that is fun. Games allow us to explore many possible outcomes of actions, otherwise known as "playing."

If games are about learning, then what lessons do games have to teach. Raph points out that we have a whole lot of games that teach things that cater to our evolutionary background. We have lots of games about jumping over things, and about aiming/shooting/throwing things. You'd expect us to have games about food, sex, and power, but for whatever reason, they're all pretty much about power. Lots of games (both single player and competitive) are about how to become the "top monkey" either through force or economic pressure.

Raph argues that games are a very important medium because of their power to teach. Maybe they aren't as good at telling stories as a novel, but they are better ways to teach than just about anything else. Far better than a lecture or a textbook. So if games are such powerful teachers, and if this concept is what truely redeems and legitimizes games as a medium, then we really have to look at what we're teaching. Game designers have the power to educate, and yet most of our games currently teach a very narrow range of lessons. He envisions a future when games teach much more valuable lessons than they do today.

A long time ago, I once heard a game designer (I forget who...Earest Adams?) say that the ultimate test of our industry is the problem of making a court room drama game. We have lots of technology for big explosions and gunshots in games, but not that much for creating believeable characters who can debate ideas. The social dynamics that would be needed for a convincing courtroom game just aren't anywhere near a reality yet. This type of game would would develop analytical skills, skills with language, and hopefully reward trickiness, cunning, ability to think on your feet, and ability to recognize and affect the feelings of other people/characters. That's a whole set of lessons that you can't learn in Quake, and I'm sure it would be fun to a lot of people, many of whom do not play games at all now.

Anyway, go read Raph's book. You don't have that much longer to wait for my book, either. ;)

--Sirlin

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 17th, 2005 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.