Rules, play and culture: the theory and practice of game design

Games as vectors of digital culture
I'm going to talk to you folks about games and why it's interesting to talk about games in this context and at this conference. Games, in a lot of ways, represent some of the most exciting vectors of digital culture. There are aspects of experience that are being explored in games such as: narrative, interactivity, real-time 3-D graphical representation, large-scale on-line communities, artificial life, artificial intelligence, experimentation with user interfaces on the hardware side, complex systems, and managing them-that are, in my mind, nowhere being as robustly explored as in games. But even as disciplines begin to converge, I look at game design, and as opposed to other design disciplines-architecture, graphic design, what have you-there really is no discipline of game design. There really is no critical discourse that bridges the theory and practice of games.

First of all, in terms of interactivity, in which game design is kind of a subset, games represent some of the most ancient forms of design interactivity that exist from human civilization. We have systems like Go, Mancala from Africa, ancient Viking games-that are incredibly striking achievements of interactive design. Of course, there's a lot of interesting consternation at this conference about interactivity and what interactivity is. And of course one of my contentions is that interactivity has nothing intrinsically to do with digital media. So a lot of what I'm going to be talking about today is not just about digital games, but regular games as well.

Lastly, before I start, I want to credit Frank Lantz, who is another game designer and interactive designer who's working at kosmo.com right now and is someone I've taught with for many years. In many ways I'm indebted to Frank and a lot of the ideas I'm talking about today were developed with him.

Rules
So, let's think about games for a moment as designed and constructed objects. Games have rules. That's one of the interesting, distinguishing characteristics of games that set them apart from other kinds of media. When you buy a board game, you are essentially purchasing a set of rules and materials, and the materials are physical embodiments of the rules. When you play the game, you submit your behavior to the rules. If you think about a game like "Tic-Tac-Toe," for example, it's a simple set of rules that have produced millions and millions of hours of play. You're armed with this simple set of rules-three by three squares on a grid, two players alternate turns making a mark in an empty square, etc. The curious thing about rules in games is that they're not very comfortable a lot of times. Rules are fixed; they're rigid. Everybody knows them in advance, so there's no ambiguity. If you were playing Monopoly and you landed on a square and you didn't know what to do, the game couldn't continue. So rules are rather scientific, totally closed, and unambiguous. They're almost fascistic; you have to submit your behavior to the rules. You have to stylize your behavior to play the game.

Behavior
What a game designer does is actually limit people's behavior; interactive designers do this too. This is my take on it-you guys can disagree. In fact, when I was talking about Manifesto yesterday someone said, "No rules." It's a very interesting comment. I think there's an interesting misconception about what a game is and how games are made. From virtual reality, for example, we have the idea that playing a game is about doing anything and going anywhere and being able to do anything at any time. This is one of the promises of digital media as well. In fact, games are quite the opposite. They're all about stylizing and restricting behavior. By following these rules-by limiting and stylizing behavior-you get play.

Improvisation
Play is the opposite of rules. Rules are fixed, rigid and known in advance; play is improvisational, creative, and open-ended. Play is an activity or movement that takes place both because of existing structures and also despite, or working against those structures. There's an expression in English, "the free play of a steering wheel." It means the extent to which you can move the steering wheel of your car before it engages the wheels for the more utilitarian purpose of driving. That movement exists both because of these utilitarian structures that make the car move forward and turn, but also despite it. It is exactly in that space where those structures do not exist, that interstitial space between those structures.

Games as systems of desire
Just a couple of more ways of thinking about the way you frame this whole system of rules that result in play. One way is thinking about games as systems of desire. What a game designer does is sculpt and mold that desire. There's the ostensible object of desire-the goal of the game-but there are other pleasures as well. There are the pleasures of the actual play itself; these might be parallel to the goal-oriented play, or maybe the cut across it. Another way to frame this whole system is meaning. If you're playing a game like Candyland where you're moving a piece to the end, who says that it's meaningful to get your piece to the end? No one does. The game is an artificial system that creates its own meanings and desires. One of the striking things about games that are classically non-utilitarian is that they create this artificial space within which special meanings occur. As players make choices and navigate through all of the possible play experiences, they are in a sense constructing meaning for themselves.

Play
Brian Sutton-Smith has written this wonderful book called The Ambiguity of Play in which he describes what he calls the rhetorics of play-you can think of them as discourses. First of all, in our culture play is for children, not for adults. He sees the dominant ideology being one of progress. In other words, the purpose of play is to make children into better citizens, repressing their sexual and violent tendencies and helping them develop cognitively, ethically, and socially into adults and citizens. All I want to suggest is that there are other ideologies of play; they are other ways to frame play activity. They can be mischief, subversion, or transgression. For me, these ideas are what will lead us to the more exciting idea of convergence, which is about emergence-a radical interdisciplinarity. It's the chemistry set model as opposed to the coalescence and deadness of the other kind.