Instruction

Everyone has played, but few people can say precisely what a game is. Designers need that precision, because you cannot improve something you cannot name. This lesson gives you three tools: a definition of play, a list of the formal elements every game has, and a sense of where today’s games came from.

Play comes first. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga argued in Homo Ludens (1938) that play is older than culture: animals play, children play before they can speak, and play is voluntary, set apart from ordinary life and governed by its own rules. The French sociologist Roger Caillois later sorted play into four kinds: agon (competition, as in chess or a race), alea (chance, as in dice), mimicry (pretending, as in make-believe or role-play) and ilinx (vertigo, the dizzy thrill of a swing or a spinning ride). Most video games mix several. A racing game is agon and ilinx; a card battler adds alea. Play also teaches: children learn turn-taking, fairness and strategy through games long before school names those skills.

A game is play with structure. Game designers commonly break any game into formal elements: players (how many, and in what relationship), objectives (what counts as winning or succeeding), procedures (the actions you take), rules (what is allowed and what follows), resources (what is scarce: lives, time, cards, coins), conflict (what stands in your way), boundaries (where the game stops and ordinary life starts) and outcome (how it ends). Try it on tic-tac-toe: two players; objective, three in a row; procedure, place one mark per turn; rule, you cannot mark a filled square; resource, empty squares; conflict, your opponent blocks you; boundary, the grid; outcome, win, lose or draw. If you can fill in all eight for a game, you understand its skeleton.

Games are ancient and global. The Royal Game of Ur was played in Mesopotamia more than four thousand years ago, and Senet in ancient Egypt. Mancala games, in which seeds move around rows of pits, have been played across Africa for centuries. Go comes from ancient China; chess descends from the Indian game chaturanga; the Aztec game patolli was a race game played with beans as dice. Many Native nations, including several in Southern California, play hand games, in which teams hide marked pieces and guess while singing. These are not a prelude to “real” games: they are designs so good they have lasted for millennia.

Then came computers. In 1958 physicist William Higinbotham built Tennis for Two on an oscilloscope for visitors to Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1962 students at MIT created Spacewar! on a PDP-1 computer. In 1972 the Magnavox Odyssey, designed by Ralph Baer, brought games to home televisions, and Atari released Pong. In 1976 the Fairchild Channel F, developed by a team led by engineer Jerry Lawson, pioneered interchangeable programmable game cartridges. Game technology has since spread into other fields: flight and driving simulators, surgical training and serious games for education all use the same techniques.

Why it matters. The Supreme Court case in today’s reading began in California. The Court held that video games communicate ideas through familiar devices and through the player’s own interaction. That last phrase is the designer’s territory: in a game, meaning comes from what the player does, not only from what the player sees.

Formative check

Work through these before moving on. They are not graded — they tell you, and your teacher, whether the standard below has landed yet.