First up, Raph Koster’s “A Theory of Fun for Game Design”:
Games are at their core mathematical problems. The stories that they are shrouded in are merely the icing on the cake. The 1976 game Deathrace involved running people over in a car to win points, but the point of the game is simply to pick up objects on a 2-dimensional playing field, not to kill people. These stories are merely metaphors for whatever math the game is teaching. ”Deathrace does not teach you to run over pedestrians any more than Pac-Man teaches you to eat dots and be scared of ghosts.”
Here’s the problem: most people pay way too much attention to the stories and not the math, thereby accusing games of promoting violence.
Games are not stories, but let’s compare the two for a second:
- Games teach experientially. Stories teach vicariously.
- Games encourage objectification. Stories encourage empathy.
- Games tend to quantify, reduce, and classify. Stories tend to blur, deepen, and make subtle distinctions.
- Games are external – they are about people’s actions. Stories (good ones, anyway) are internal – they are about people’s emotions and thoughts.
Play and storytelling are the two most important ways of learning, with lecture coming in at a distant third (hmm, i wonder what that says about our education…). Play predates storytelling, which requires semiotics (Koster says language here, but i’m changing it to semiotics because there’s also pictographic storytelling), but Koster claims that stories have achieved much more in terms of aesthetics than games have. Why do we value stories over games, he wonders.
