In preparation for last week’s class, i emailed a blogger friend of mine, an avid gamer with an interest in game design, for his opinions on Raph Kostner’s essay. He couldn’t get back to me in time for that day, but his response is still worth sharing. Read further for why he thinks the essay is “complete bullshit.”
A response to Raph Kostner’s “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” by Christopher J. Lesiw
First of all, this article is not about math. It’s about pattern recognition. Yes, math has patterns to it, but the fact that the author of the article continuously refers to it as “math” is completely, completely wrong. It’s mostly psychology – specifically, it’s conditioning: teach the player that “if A, then B”.
I agree with the author’s point that the whole “video games make people violent” idea is utter shit, because as they point out, players are more interested in learning the game rules than applying them to society. A game is an enclosed space, not something that continues out into the real world. Okay, we’re good there.
The author of the article obviously does not have experience with games in which story and gameplay are combined, as best as possible, into one element. To say that games have a high school level of writing is REALLY going out on a limb – a limb I’ll hack off by pointing out one of my favorite games, Jak II. In it, the protagonist is transported five hundred years into the future, and learns to cope with the city that has sprung up where he used to live. The characters are solid, the dialogue is fantastic, the plot is full of twists and turns and the entire game sounds like a really good book ought to read. So I’ll debunk that theory right here and now: There are plenty of good writers that work on games, and the author of the article is insulting the Hell out of people who write for games.
Now, they go on to state that often the most emotional parts of a game are outside of the gameplay experience. This is true in some games – I’ll admit, some games are really shitty. I’ll pull out a classic counterexample for this one, however, and that’s Portal. The turning point of the game is not story-driven, but gameplay-driven; the AI that has been instructing the player for the past three hours decides to kill her, and there is nothing in the gameplay that says you can’t just, well, die in a fire. The player has to act; the player has to save herself; the player escapes the fire pit, and the rush you get doing that is very real.
Of course, Portal is not most games, but often well-executed games with a turning point allow the player to experience the climax himself or herself. For example, at the end of Ratchet & Clank, after the final battle and nearly the final cutscene of a game, the player is allowed to press the button which destroys the antagonist’s planet. There’s really no reason why this couldn’t be done in a cutscene, but the game itself allows the player to live out the full satisfaction of the moment, through gameplay. Once again, the author of this article is just looking in the wrong places.
“Games are external – they are about people’s actions. Stories (good ones, anyway) are internal – they are about people’s emotions and thoughts.” No, no, and NO. A GOOD game will make the player think and feel the same way as the character they are playing. A not so well executed game, of course, will fail at this, but so will a badly written book. Just because the art hasn’t been perfected yet doesn’t mean it’s not possible, and you can’t just separate games and stories like that. Hell, that separation is part of the reason games haven’t yet reached the same elegance as stories, because people keep treating them as two different things.
Let me make a clarification here that the author neglects: A game is a specific expression of a story. Stories can be expressed in different ways – books, plays, movies, etc. A game and a story are not on the same level. To try to clarify how ridiculous the author sounds, imagine if they were separating books and stories.
After that, the entire second half of the article appears to just go on about what fun might be, and I can’t say I outright agree or disagree with any of it. It’s pretty vague stuff that there’s no clear answer to.
Final thoughts: This article isn’t about math (despite the fact that it labels it as such), it’s about learning. If you really want to know more about the subject, don’t look into math, look into the psychology of how people learn and get feedback, it’s much more appropriate.
So what do you think? If you have anything to tell Chris in response, leave a comment here and i’ll forward it to him.
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