Understanding Play
Text: Matt Southern
Concept art: Cosmos Interactive
I’ve been leading game development teams of all different sizes for 21 years now, and before that I taught on one of the world’s first Masters Degrees in game design and development. My enthusiasm for it remains undimmed, thanks in large part to Cosmos Interactive. I’ve been helping them for a few months now and I find their passion for making games in new ways is infectious.
I love how together we have embraced the idea that interactive experiences still have a mass of untapped potential. I recently shared some thoughts about ‘play’ with Maxim Zhestkov after reading one of his posts here, and he asked me to share them here too.
The first home computer my family owned was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and even at the time the graphics were pretty poor, especially compared to arcade games, or more expensive machines like the Commodore 64. But what players and creators of games for the Spectrum learned was that when it comes to games, the way they look matters, and the way they sound matters, but they’re not what matter most. Gameplay matters most.
Ian Livingston, who co-created Fighting Fantasy, Games Workshop and Eidos, summed it up (I think it was in Edge Magazine):
"When people ask me what are the three most important things in a computer game, I say gameplay, gameplay, gameplay."
But then I realised, it’s quite difficult to define what gameplay is, and it looked like many others found it difficult too. So I really dug into it. I wrote my Masters thesis about it. And I learned that you can't really understand what gameplay is without first understanding what play is.
Play as a Primordial Force
There is of course a school of thought and philosophy related to play. It's called ludology, the study of games and other forms of play. The subject has evolved rapidly over the last couple of decades and even though the games industry is often wary of scholars and academia and ‘theory’ over practice, I’ve genuinely found ludology to be inspirational when it comes to designing games.
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Perhaps the most seminal ludology text is Homo Ludens by Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga. He described play as ‘an absolutely primary category of life’. Like the desire to eat or to reproduce, we have this innate desire to play, it is a core part of what we are, how we survive and evolve. He said ‘play is free’. For me that means you can't force someone to play, as soon as you do, that's work.
He said play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life, it's special, separate from the activities we regard as ordinary, real life. And he said true play cannot be connected with material interests, no profit can be gained from it. It is the pure and joyful act of playing.
I love it! It resonates with my experience of playing computer and video games.
I really like the point he makes is that play existed even before we did — before all of human history, all of philosophy, all of civilization. We know this is true because we see animals playing, and they ‘have not waited for man to teach them’.
Playing is deep inside us, not just pre-existing all of storytelling, all of art, but a precondition to them existing in the first place. “The great archetypal activities of human society are all permeated with play from the start”. Language, myth, rituals, from ancient dancing around fires to the ritual of going to the cinema, all, as he says “..are rooted in the primaeval soil of play”.
Video Games and Play
Of course, whilst Huizinga is right to say many animals play, it’s only humans who play games. We add rules, winners and losers, scoreboards, tournaments. These days, in video games, we also like to add storytelling, cinematics, amazing visuals, stunning audio, and more. The mix is potent, and hasn’t got close to the limits of its potential yet.
I (and many others!) still like to encourage developers and designers to start with the verbs. Don’t worry initially about stories, settings, characters, lore, art style, technology. Those things are indeed important, but start by remembering what video games - all games - fundamentally are, and focus first on what the player is going to do.
As kids and as adults, the way we truly understand and remember, the real way to move us at a deep, fundamental level, is not through reading, seeing, listening or writing, it is through doing. We know from ludology that play can be more powerful than words, sounds or images, because those things don’t exist without it.
A lot of the seminal computer game designers from my early years, like Sid Meier, Peter Molyneux and Will Wright, had engineering backgrounds, and seemed to grasp this focus on ‘the verbs’.
Thinking fundamentally and first about what players will do, over seconds, minutes and hours, before thinking about anything else. The way they developed games seemed in itself playful, not really like work at all, with a high degree of iteration, mistake-making and pleasure.
I love the fact that Will Wright made a scrolling shooter, but realised the tool he’d made for generating cities was more fun than the game itself, so he turned it into ‘Sim City’. Fantastic.
There are plenty more books and ideas in the ludology library that expand on the difference between play and playing games, but not enough space to talk about them here. Maybe that’s for another post in the future.
What to read on the topic next
- Johan Huizinga 'Homo Ludens'
- Roger Caillois 'Man, Play and Games'
- Elliott Morton Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith 'The Study of Games'
