Tic-Tac-Toe 2.0: The World of Computer Games

In this installment of Make a Game of That, we'll look into the interesting considerations computer games introduce to a games designer. Apart from all the cultural issues having the production of a society's interactive entertainment shift from toy-makers to programmers, video games have their own unique rules simply by virtue of their construction. Tally-ho!

It's an important thing when studying games design in a modern setting to realise that games aren't new. In fact, they're really rather old. It's quite valid to suggest of all the 'civilised' behaviours of mankind, playing games is among the oldest. Animals play, but it's tricky to say whether they play games in our modern sense. We define games as deliberately boundaried regions of play. Throw darts at a wall to see what happens and it's play. Throw darts at a wall from a set distance to see if you can hit a certain point and it's a game. It's interesting to note that adult humans are very bad at playing, but very good at making games. We can't remain in a state of open play for long, we have to begin constructing boundaries and removing factors, honing and adapting our play into more focused forms.

This is where the first big point about video games rests. Traditionally, games have been founded on a consensus of sorts. Let's say you play a game of football. You agree that you don't touch the ball with your hands, if you kick it out of bounds, the other team can throw it back in, you have 11 players on your team etcetera. Now, there's nothing stopping you from actually doing this, just that the game dictates you don't. Games work because of our play behaviour- as mentioned above, we intuitively create games and if we need other people to make the game work, we have this instinct to treat completely arbitrary rules as holy. There are cheats, of course, but game cheaters reside alongside traitors and sadists as some of history's most reviled figures. In ancient Greece, cheats at the olympic games were not only fined and likely whipped, but so was their nation-state. Imagine your country having to fork out to blizzard if you got caught DC-ing on Bnet...

But in the code-logic realm of the video game, the space we play in has a different shape. We don't choose to abide by rules, they are placed as laws on the player by the designer and that leads to an interesting shift in perception. When the upholding of the rules of the game is policed only by the player's honesty and the way the opponents and referee are looking, rules are regarded a sacred. But when those rules are, as it were, mandated by heaven (the program designer), our behaviour becomes more creative, exploring the boundaries, the borders of the game's 'world' (Christians will have a field day with that). This leads to many behaviours, from spawn camping to the mapcracking movements in games like battlefield or halo to animation cancelling in fighting games. For something closer to home, it's also partly responsible for the extreme creativity in strategy games like Starcraft, exploring the limits of units and even the code underlying how they move, combining them in unforeseen ways. The video gamer is a prisoner, raging against the cage. Ok, that's a bit extreme, but the effect is visible, tangible and extremely relevant to us as video game designers. It's a bit of a wakeup call. If we're going to tell people how to play, we'd better be F*cking good at it.

As an aside, there are many computer games that sort of reverse-engineer an open world into a closed one, by continually pointing out how big the world is and how much you can do, they revert the player into that more open, self driven play mode. Achievements are by and large an attempt at forcing just this- to re-introduce the idea that a game is what you make it. So many computer gamers have grown up being spoon-fed their play directions that they need to be ladled the idea that, you know, you don't actually have to do what the great designer tells you to or wants you to. That's pretty sad, if you ask me. Not sad in the snarky teenage finger-bopping way. Sad in the take-a-step-back-and-choke-up-for-a-second way. Computer games are powerful things, and powerful things are dangerous things. Still, there are some computer games that inspire traditional, consensual play. They are the best, and you know them already because there's no way in hell you'd forget them.

because planes are for sissies

So that's one thing we have to think about, what else? Well, here's a puzzle for you.

Games these days are designed to be adaptive. If you're doing badly, they get a bit easier. If you're doing well, they make themselves harder. Some do this highly dynamically- like left 4 dead. Others do it in simpler ways- the better you get, the faster you progress and find more difficult content. They shape themselves in subtle ways to be the perfect game for you. Today, we are used to games that are always not to hard, not too soft, but just right. The so-called goldilocks range. For those of you that endured the brutality that was learning the ropes on the SC1 battlenet servers, or learned to play chess against a father or brother years ahead, you'll understand how tricky and seductive this proposition is. Real life is not like that- at least not at first glance, so the problem solving skills we grow in the world of computer games hit a hard wall when it comes to real life because, unlike our predecessors, our games have not mirrored the fact that problems don't usually do their best to break down to easily digestible chunks in front of us.

Nevertheless, while games provide a problem here, they can also provide the answer, for it is through play and games that we learn to break those big problems down into smaller ones in the first place. It is up to the designers of computer games to not just make these smart games that lead you by the hand, but games that teach you how to beat other games that don't. By doing this, we not only allow ourselves the intense mental ecstasy that the smart games induce, but also give ourselves the tools to bridge the gap between saving the virtual world and helping in the real one.

If real life was a platformer...

And so to one last thing that video games have given us recently, as a part of the great connecting power of the internet. Traditionally, when playing games against other people, we were limited by our opponents. As mentioned above, games have historically been cooperative and consensual. As one builds in skill, however, unless those you play with do likewise, you'll quickly find your skills levelling off and eventually declining without drastic action (like handicapping yourself). I like to use the analogy of martial arts. Martial arts requires that you train with a partner. You can replace it with Starcraft, to be honest, both have the caveat that after a certain, very basic point, one cannot train oneself without dynamic feedback that increases in both narrowness of focus and difficulty. Martial artists play with each other, creating games that achieve this dynamic feedback along with the natural improvement of their skills. Hands only sparring, pushup duels, accuracy training. Some students (like me) drop away, others forge ahead. Soon though, they stand alone. To improve, they must travel. Or move to a place where there are greater students still, and on and on and on.

But in modern computer games, log on and you have a community of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of fellow students. Chances are, buddy, there's someone there who can teach you by shoving your head so far up your a... you get the picture. I call this the problem of the infinite opponent.

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Welcome to the internet, where men become monsters

It's another very powerful factor, and like all powerful factors it can be dangerous. Computer games have shown they are capable of hooking people in so deep that they improve themselves in game at the expense of their health, and the games where this occurs are 90% of the time (roughly

) those where the infinite opponent is most prevalent- WoW and other MMOs and Progames like Counterstrike and Starcraft. The infinite opponent is perhaps one of these new things that has a proverbial shitload of potential. When students can cross intellectual swords across the world at the press of a button, imagine the power that will have on the peak skill level worldwide, and how it will level the playing field between those who live in privilege and those who do not. It's a bright light at the end of the tunnel, to be sure, but the job- and duty- of designers is to make sure that tunnel doesn't cave. At the moment, unfortunately, we're pretty much tugging on the struts to see what happens.

It's a heady time to be a games designer, there's a lot of pretty intense shit flying around. Unfortunately there are a commensurate amount of fans for it to hit, and we're really not looking that hard where we're throwing it. But there's plenty of walls too and, to beat the last drop of essence out of this analogy, we can just hope some of it will stick.

Tic-Tac-Toe 2.0: The World of Computer Games

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