What’s the Game?

What is a game to you? Is it something you used to play on the fields at school? Is it a disc that you put into a computer or console? Is it played on a board? Is it something involving a ball of any kind? The real answer is that all of those are games, although some of them would differ completely. However, since the Johan Huizinga book ‘Homo Ludens‘ (or Playing Man) from 1938, gaming theory has expanded and developed.

Johan Huizinga - Author of Homo Ludens

How can a book published over 70 years ago reveal anything about the fast-paced gaming world of today? In his book, Huizinga mainly talked about the concept of gaming, which when studied, makes it easy to categories even modern games into the different types of gaming categories that he outlined. He also mentioned a theory that during a game the players get a sense of being in a ‘special time and place’.

“All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.”

– Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, pg. 10

One of the most well-known theories from Huizinga’s book is the theory of the ‘magic circle‘. What on earth is a magic circle, and what does it have to do with a game?! Basically, the magic circle can be applied to many things, not just games. It’s the thing that makes a space that it used to fit a particular activity (i.e an opera house, is usually built to look like it is exactly that), however, if you stripped all the interior away and left just an empty room, with no evidence of its previous use, then the room would be totally inconspicuous. In the gaming world, the easiest thing to think of as a magic circle would be a football pitch, without the lines creating the boundaries and without the goal posts, the football pitch would ultimately become just another field.

 

The Football Pitch - The Magic Circle for Many

But what about the magic circles in digital games? Digital games, as far as I know, are always played in front of a screen (unless there’s some kind of projection device available, but I’ll leave that out to avoid almost certain confusion). There are many objects and environments that could contribute to the digital gamers magic circle. It could be within the screen, the room/area where the game is being played, in a MMOG it’s perfectly viable to say that the magic circle could exist between the players in the game.

A French intellectual called Roger Caillois outlined his classifications of gaming in his book ‘Man, Play and Games‘ (1961).  In this book, Caillois theorised 2 main types of play, Paidea (‘wild, free-form improvisational play’ pg. 36) and Ludus (‘complementary to and a refinement of Paidea’ pg. 29). He also defines 4 different types of basic play within the categories :

1. Agon – Competitive gaming, for example, a race, where someone or a team must ‘win’.
2. Alea – Games that revolve around chance much more than skill
3. Mimicry – Free-form play, play that is make-believe, for example, wearing a mask or a disguise to alter the players identity. The player is pretending to be something else, but should still abide by the rules.
4. Ilinx – This type of play can be compared to the experience of being on a ‘rollercoaster’, for example, if someone was spinning around for a sufficient amount of time, when they stopped the way that they see the world would change significantly for a short amount of time.

However, do any of these apply to modern-day digital gaming? Obviously, in some ways they all can, it depends on how strictly you apply them. When playing a racing computer game, there is either competition between you and online competitors or you and the computer, which covers the Agon aspect. Although slightly harder to apply to the most popular computer games, factors of Alea can still be found, for example, in a game of computer Solitaire there is always an element of chance in what deck you end up with. Not to mention the popular game of ‘Pacman‘, which contains chance due to the direction of which the, erm, ghosty things, decide to go. The Mimicry aspect can roughly be applied to role-playing games, where they gamer/player takes on a different identity for the game, which can be compared to wearing a disguise in real life. And finally, Ilinx is possibly the most difficult one to apply to digital games, but in a way when people get ‘immersed’ (refer back to previous blog, on immersion!) in games it can sometime change their state of mind, offering a similar ‘rollercoaster’ experience.

Pacman - a game resting on chance?

Although I’ve already spoken a lot about digital video games in this blog already, what are they?! According to Jesper Juul, game should not include such things/elements such as hypertext fiction, storytelling, traffic, noble war etc. but they do include fixed rules, variable outcomes, player effort, player attachment  to outcome, negotiable consequences etc. However, is what Jesper Juul outlined always definite? Sometimes it won’t be, as when someone plays a video game the experience, like most other things on Earth, is very individual. For example, is it true that any games that have a storytelling element aren’t games at all?

 

Jesper Juul’s gaming chart

Why are games so popular nowadays? A guy called Geoff Howland detailed certain ‘hooks‘ within games that urge people on to buy them, these hooks are:

1. Gameplay hooks – ‘any activity performed by the player for the purpose of furthering their playing’
2. Action hooks – ‘action hooks require the player to move their controls, characters or pieces around, or to interact with the game explicitly’
3. Resource hooks – ‘resource hooks are elements that the player does not directly control… Ammunition or health are basic examples of resource hooks’
4. Tactical and Strategic hooks –  ‘not present in every game… tactical hooks change the way the game works’ i.e. weapons available, skill levels etc.
5. Marketing hooks: ‘designed to attract the player to by the game, or from the style or gimmick hooks that may entice initial play’ ground-breaking graphics in the game, etc.
6. Supporting hooks: ‘differentiate games within the same genre’ i.e. providing something new and appealing to the player to choose that particular game rather than a game which is seen as similar.

What is the main element that makes games fun to play? There are many elements to a game that appeal to every different person, people like to play games for the interactivity, some like to play them to escape the ‘real world’ and be someone/something else. Ultimately, games are getting more popular year by year, with new advancements in the way that they are played, and with new consoles offering new things, they’re only going to keep getting more popular.