a director who creates the dance .
Games are the same way. We could probably use new terminology for games. Often in large projects, we make the distinction between game system designers, content designers, the lead designer or creative director (a problematic term because it means something else in different disciplines, such as in graphic design), writers, level designers, world builders, and who knows what else. If we consider games to be solely the design of the formal abstract systems, then only the system designer is properly a game designer. If we come up with a new term for the formal core of games, comparable to “choreography,” then we’d give this person a title derived from that term instead.
All of this implies that a mismatch between the core of a game—the ludemes—and the dressing can result in serious problems for the user experience. It also means that the right choice of dressing and fictional theme can strongly reinforce the overall experience and make the learning experience more direct for players.
The bare mechanics of a game may indeed carry semantic freighting, but odds are that it will be fairly abstract. A game about aiming is a game about aiming, and there’s no getting around that. It’s hard to conceive of a game about aiming that isn’t about shooting, but it has been done—there are several games where instead of shooting bullets with a gun, you are instead shooting pictures with a camera.
For games to really develop as a medium, they need to further develop the ludemes, not just the dressing. By and large, however, the industry has spent its time improving the dressing. We have better and better graphics, better back stories, better plots, better sound effects, better music, more fidelity in the environments, more types of content, and more systems within each game. But the systems themselves tend to see fairly little innovation.
It’s not that progress along these other axes isn’t merited—it’s just easy relative to the true challenge, which is developing the formal structure of games themselves. Often these new developments improve the overall experience, but that’s comparable to saying that the development of the 16-track recorder revolutionized songwriting. It didn’t; it revolutionized arranging and production, but the demo versions of songs are still usually one person with a piano or a guitar.
The best test of a game’s fun in the strict sense will therefore be playing the game with no graphics, no music, no sound, no story, no nothing. If that is fun, then everything else will serve to focus, refine, empower, and magnify. But all the dressing in the world can’t change iceberg lettuce into roast turkey.
This means the question of ethical responsibility rears its head. The ethical questions surrounding games as murder simulators, games as misogyny, games as undermining of traditional values, and so on are not aimed at games themselves . They are aimed at the dressing .
To the designer of formal abstract systems, these complaints are always going to seem misguided. A vector of force and a marker of territory have no cultural agenda. At the least, the complaints are misdirected—they ought to go to the equivalent of the director, the person who is making the call on the overall user experience.
Directing these complaints to the director is the standard. It’s the standard to which we hold the writers of fiction, the makers of films, the directors of dances, and the painters of paintings. The cultural debate over the acceptable limits of content is a valid one. We all know that there is a difference in experience caused by presentation. If we consider the art of the dance to be the sum of choreography plus direction plus costuming and so on, then we must consider the art of the game to be the ludemes plus direction plus artwork and so on.
The bare mechanics of the game do not determine its semantic freight. Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s picture
Games are the same way. We could probably use new terminology for games. Often in large projects, we make the distinction between game system designers, content designers, the lead designer or creative director (a problematic term because it means something else in different disciplines, such as in graphic design), writers, level designers, world builders, and who knows what else. If we consider games to be solely the design of the formal abstract systems, then only the system designer is properly a game designer. If we come up with a new term for the formal core of games, comparable to “choreography,” then we’d give this person a title derived from that term instead.
All of this implies that a mismatch between the core of a game—the ludemes—and the dressing can result in serious problems for the user experience. It also means that the right choice of dressing and fictional theme can strongly reinforce the overall experience and make the learning experience more direct for players.
The bare mechanics of a game may indeed carry semantic freighting, but odds are that it will be fairly abstract. A game about aiming is a game about aiming, and there’s no getting around that. It’s hard to conceive of a game about aiming that isn’t about shooting, but it has been done—there are several games where instead of shooting bullets with a gun, you are instead shooting pictures with a camera.
For games to really develop as a medium, they need to further develop the ludemes, not just the dressing. By and large, however, the industry has spent its time improving the dressing. We have better and better graphics, better back stories, better plots, better sound effects, better music, more fidelity in the environments, more types of content, and more systems within each game. But the systems themselves tend to see fairly little innovation.
It’s not that progress along these other axes isn’t merited—it’s just easy relative to the true challenge, which is developing the formal structure of games themselves. Often these new developments improve the overall experience, but that’s comparable to saying that the development of the 16-track recorder revolutionized songwriting. It didn’t; it revolutionized arranging and production, but the demo versions of songs are still usually one person with a piano or a guitar.
The best test of a game’s fun in the strict sense will therefore be playing the game with no graphics, no music, no sound, no story, no nothing. If that is fun, then everything else will serve to focus, refine, empower, and magnify. But all the dressing in the world can’t change iceberg lettuce into roast turkey.
This means the question of ethical responsibility rears its head. The ethical questions surrounding games as murder simulators, games as misogyny, games as undermining of traditional values, and so on are not aimed at games themselves . They are aimed at the dressing .
To the designer of formal abstract systems, these complaints are always going to seem misguided. A vector of force and a marker of territory have no cultural agenda. At the least, the complaints are misdirected—they ought to go to the equivalent of the director, the person who is making the call on the overall user experience.
Directing these complaints to the director is the standard. It’s the standard to which we hold the writers of fiction, the makers of films, the directors of dances, and the painters of paintings. The cultural debate over the acceptable limits of content is a valid one. We all know that there is a difference in experience caused by presentation. If we consider the art of the dance to be the sum of choreography plus direction plus costuming and so on, then we must consider the art of the game to be the ludemes plus direction plus artwork and so on.
The bare mechanics of the game do not determine its semantic freight. Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s picture
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