Edited for Blogger
Before we start this, I want to both apologise in advance (in case I get any information wrong) and credit Raph Koster. The discussion of patterns was based on his research presented in the book A Theory of Fun.
Before we can discuss what a game is, we must learn about some basic human psychology.
What do you see here?
The likely answer is either a face or an electrical socket, depending on where you live (we'll hopefully discuss schemas and links in a moment). I find it quite intriguing that mind can convert 3 tiny lines on a computer monitor, and make it look as though they represent something else.
The simplest explanation of this is a single word. "Patterns".
Human life LOVES patterns. One could say our entire existence is based around patterns. Our ancient ancestors developed our pattern-seeking brains as a defence mechanism for a number of reasons; one such reason might be survivability through adaptation. Let's imagine there was a trap lying about that killed many of the other people around us, but somehow we learnt how to detect this trap by learning what components made up the trap and storing them in our memory. Suddenly, we could avoid said trap in the future so long as we look for those components we already know about. That's quite ingenious.
Alas, trap-evasion isn't the only reason why we developed pattern-recognition.
Humans are lazy. And I don't mean the whole "not getting out of bed in the morning" lazy. Our brain hates doing work. We call this the pleasure principle, one of the driving theories of Freudian psychology. Basically speaking, the pleasure principle states that:
Human life continues to seek pleasure while avoiding pain in order to satisfy the biological and psychological needs of the Id. Maturity occurs once the brain is willing to endure pain when reality requires it (known as the "reality principle", controlled by the Superego).
And essentially, doing work is a type of pain. See, pain isn't all physical. Physical pain is just nerves responding to stimuli and reacting as a kind of "alert" to the brain that something is probably going wrong. Mental pain doesn't have the same response system. Instead, we have something called "boredom".
You ever been bored during a maths class or while doing some chore? How about hearing someone saying they're ready for a "sea-change"? Boredom is another defence mechanism. See, the brain hates it whenever you're doing unnecessary activity, as I said above (I added the "unnecessary" keyword for reasons we'll see soon). Boredom occurs whenever our brain feels we're performing some action and one of the following conditions is true:
- The brain feels it has completely learned everything it needs to about the above activity, and that the activity can offer no possible benefit, so therefore you're just wasting time (A pattern is too easy to grasp)
- The brain feels it has no possible chance of ever grasping the current activity, so it just quits out of sheer frustration (A pattern is too hard to grasp)
Patterns are how we avoid excess work. For the brain, a pattern is essentially just a string of knowledge associated with something. Facial recognition, passwords, locations, playing video games...these are all comprised of patterns. The brain wants to try and conquer these patterns...so that it doesn't ever have to learn them again.
I'm quite serious. I do recognise the irony. The brain is doing extra work to avoid work.
The brain will try to devour just about any pattern you try throw at it. Provided the brain hasn't already learned a pattern before and grokked it (we're getting there) or it decided the pattern is too hard to learn, the brain will get to work. If it involves physical labour, it refines and enhances your body's movements to better perform the actions. It learns the connotations and links associated with patterns. This is where your history and personal understanding of the world becomes important. The brain is constantly storing information for these patterns, and it's constantly linking information together. How you interpret an object is entirely based off everything you've learnt before. This is both good, because it saves you time relearning information, it can be disastrous if you've learnt something "wrong", since every judgement that relies on that information suddenly becomes wrong as well.
The brain keeps learning. It keeps storing. It gets better and better at this information. You study for your maths tests. You keep retrying every time you die in a video game. You keep missing the bus over and over again until you memorise the timetable. You keep pushing yourself to play the correct notes on the guitar. You get the idea. The brain becomes obsessed with a pattern as it strives to learn everything about it. Once it has, then it enters a process called "grokking". This is when it finally has learnt just about everything with a pattern, and stores it in a permanent memory bank. You are now a professional. At this point, you'll continue to use a pattern until the brain feels you're gaining no benefit from using the pattern, at which point you will enter boredom.
There's a slight situation here, however. How exactly is the brain going to get us to learn what it thinks is useful and stay away from what it thinks is "boring"? Well, the brain has a little reward/punishment scheme it has set up. Whenever you finally start to understand a pattern, the brain decides to reward you for the hard work it takes. It gives us a little boost of endorphins, which cause the feeling of "happiness". Happiness really is the optimal state of pleasure, and so we continually seek it out. The punishment for boring activities? It's nothing significantly disastrous, but the brain will begin to wonder and find other things to do. It will start to worry about other problems, such as things you need to deal with in the future. Did you forget to check your Facebook notifications?
This is why meditation is so successful and so important. It increases the range of patterns we can learn through building our focus. People like me who are very jumpy and distracted are "highly optimised"; finding most patterns useless since we've found an "optimal pleasure state" that's easy to achieve, and as such our brain finds problems for us to solve that may cause pain to us down the road.
The last thing to make note of is that the brain only has a limited space for which to store information, as unfortunate as it is. Therefore, it can't keep all patterns or information without removing something else that's less relevant. That's why we feel as though we have to relearn things after spending a lot time not doing them. Our brain removes "obsolete" patterns in order to make room for more relevant ones.
TL;DR Edition: "A game is an engaging experience of the human condition in an abstract state that involves and develops any interacting parties."
Let's break this bad boy down.
A Game is...
As I've said in another topic, the objective and subjective properties of any game are as follows:
Objective:
- Goal/Objectives
- Challenges to overcome
- Rules
- Boundaries
- Engagement
- Visual
- Audio
- Player Input
- World Output
...an engaging experience...
You might be wondering why I bothered with that massive patterns lesson up above. There's a reason.
We discussed boredom. Boredom is when you are actively disinterested in a subject. It's also possible to be passively disinterested in a subject. You might be watching a movie, but not paying attention to the plot or the characters, just instead kind of listening to the sounds and seeing colours on the screen. You're sort of there, but at the same time sort of not.
Engagement is when you're physically, emotionally and mentally connected to an activity. You've devoted almost your entire focus to this activity and nothing else is taking up your attention. Engagement is a state in which you are learning and perfecting digestible patterns. So long as you are constantly engaged, you are engaging in cognitive flow. Flow is the state of uninterrupted engagement. You're playing a game which is giving you patterns that you enjoy solving and discovering. Engagement means you're having fun.
This fun only happens because you are playing with patterns. If those patterns didn't exist, you would become bored, and disengage with the game, and therefore the game would have no point existing because nobody would want to play it.
One thing to remember is that there needs to be some form of motivation. This is discussed in my game lesson topic elsewhere on the site, but essentially, we need to give a reason for our brain to care, which causes it to be engaged. Goals are one form of motivation, but there can be many others.
...of the human condition in an abstract state...
Games can't be representative of something completely foreign to us. I can't even provide example because I simply don't know what I've never known before. That's kind of the point, though. We won't learn a pattern if we don't have some connection to it. There needs to be some ground level for us to start at that we can build from there. That's why we don't teach 2 year olds rocket physics.
Games always deal with some kind of element of human nature, and that's important. We need to have a personal connection with our character (or however we interact with the game) in order for us to be both motivated enough to try play the game in the first place (refer to Experience Loops in my game lesson topic) and to assist with pattern learning. Seeing human nature in games like CoD and Mass Effect are easy, because you're dealing with human characters who are trying to survive (survival is a very big part of the human condition, although less now than it was hundreds of years ago). In games like Tetris and Pong, we're still dealing with human properties; stacking is an important activity we learn while we're young and use regularly, and Pong is all about speed and accuracy.
You might be wondering about the "abstract state" bit, however. Here's the thing about games; the consequences in games don't have any significant impact in our lives, outside of the lessons we learn and the health impacts if you sit and play for too long, ignoring your human self. If we present gamers with a hyper-realistic environment we are presented with a number of problems, such as gamers losing sensitivity with real world problems, but we also begin to sacrifice attempting to make fun patterns for gamers to grasp over realism.
We need to make our games fun and engaging before they can apply to real principles, which is why some of the best games in the world (Minecraft, Bioshock, Bastion, Halo, Dark Souls) all look and feel very different. The best way is to make the visual, audio and story styles unique, with just enough connection to the real world so that players will be tempted to delve deeper and discover these patterns.
... that involves and develops any interacting parties.
Here's the key thing that games need to do, which we've already discussed over and over again.
Games need to teach. They teach through patterns. As we learn and practice these patterns, we get better and better, and we are able to overcome the challenges that the game presents.
Here's something I want you to consider, however; challenges aren't always "physical". It's not always some enemy you need to click, some blocks you need to remove or a door you need to open. A challenge can be anything. Interpreting the visual world around you. Understanding the story and discovering the motivations of a character. Learning when to click the "Skip" button in buggy game with cutscenes in order to make some weird glitch happen. Completing a campaign level faster than any player on earth. Challenges can be player motivated, implied and/or instructed.
A good game provides players with appropriate challenge that allows for personal interpretation. If you give your player a single answer to a puzzle, you're not giving them the room for them to test out their patterns and try solve it in a way they see fit. This could lead to them becoming bored, as they can't find solutions which match the patterns stored in their head. Moreover, it's disrespectful to assume that the game is property solely of the designer, and that the end player should not be allowed to have fun within something they purchase for the purpose of having fun. The best way to teach players is to provide them with methods for which they can find their own answers, not the other way around.
Another consideration to be made is the idea of "develop". Development within a game can be massive or minute. It can be as small as being able to make more accurate movements of thumb when aiming a sniper rifle, or it could be as big as suddenly understanding Objectivism and all its inherit flaws. The important thing about games is that they teach.
The reason? How do you think kids learn? They explore their world through play. Kids learn how to walk, talk, and interact with objects. They continually attempt to push boundaries to see how objects function, but also what they can and can't get away with. This is the exact same mindset that players bring when the try out a game. Door won't open? Bash it open with a wrench. Play and Games go hand-in-hand, and since play is all about teaching children about the world, games should be the exact same for more mature audiences.
