When I attended the Practice: Game Design in Detail conference at NYU, there was one discussion titled “Game Design vs.  & Programming” (the ‘versus’ was crossed out, as shown).  It was run by Chris Hecker, Nick Fortugno, and Manveer Heir, and the talk was essentially asking the question, “how related are programming and game design?  Do programming skill help game designers?”  Not a terrible idea for a talk, but unfortunately, it didn’t go so well.  What happened was, Hecker would essentially argue “yes – programming is great for game designers, because it teaches you system design!”.  Unfortunately, his opponents didn’t use this obvious:  system design is useful, not necessarily “programming”.  It was never clear if they were talking about computer programming specifically, even.  So if you write down your rules, is that programming?

Essentially, the whole chat was sort of ruined because one term was ill-defined.  This happens a lot in my discussions about digital games online. Today I’d like to take some time to talk about a few definitions, so that we might improve the way we discuss these things.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution screenshot

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I was reading through some comments I got for my recent article titled, “On Score”, and there’s definitely a pattern.  Probably 90% of the comments that seemed to disagree with what I was saying went something like this:  “games aren’t about score, games are about fun.  Why would I care about some arbitrary numbers?  And if it’s objective based then that means it’s work.  I want to have fun when I play games.”

In response, I would usually rattle off a quick comment to most of these people telling them that “fun” has no explanatory power and that goals are a fundamental part of a game.  But I think there may be a deeper level to this, actually.

It occurred to me – and maybe this is one of those things that doesn’t seem obvious to me, but perhaps is actually obvious to everyone else – that most people are not thinking about games the way I am.  For most people, normal people who play games, games are nothing but a vehicle for fun.

A game to most people, perhaps, is like a party.  And who wants some “party expert” coming into their party and saying “no, parties shouldn’t be like this!  Parties need X!  And Parties should NEVER have Y, are you people insane?”  Most people want a party to be free and fluid, and I understand that.

But the thing is:  Games are more than a party.  They are more than just fun.  In fact, technically, games actually don’t have to be fun at all.  Some examples of games that are not normally considered fun might be a mock war scenario for people who are actually in the military, or the system of “grading” in schools.  Or better yet, a hypothetical scenario wherein prisoners are forced to fight to the death in some kind of arena.

Don’t get me wrong:  I play games to have fun, just like a lot of my detractors.  But it seems like a lot of people don’t understand that there is something in between PLAYER and THE FUN.  This thing is called THE GAME.

The Disconnect

The disconnect is the “game” part.  I will be talking about a game – which is the rules, mechanisms, actions players can take, goals, etc – and then players come in and say “no, that is not what games are about!  Games are about fun!”.

This is like telling a car mechanic who is trying to fix your car’s engine, “dude, the problem isn’t the engine, the problem is that the car won’t DRIVE!”  “Driving” is the outcome we want to get out of the car, and “fun” is the outcome we want to get out of a game.  I am trying to help fix the engine.  Fun is not a component of games, just the same way that driving isn’t a component of a car.

To my detractors:  why is it, exactly, you think that I am trying to establish these guidelines for game design?  It’s to make games that are more fun!  Did you think that this was just some useless intellectual soliloquy?  You know that automobile manufacturers have guidelines for how to design a good engine.  You know that in music we have guidelines for harmony and melody and rhythm which show us how music can work.  I am trying to help us come up with the same thing for games.

We all want “fun”.  The question is, how do we make games that are more fun?  I will continue to propose solutions, but I don’t want to hear “but what about FUN?” in the middle of an explanation of a game design guideline.

We all know that things are changing pretty dramatically these days in the gaming world.  From how games are designed, to how they are produced, marketed, sold and played – it is all dramatically different than it was even ten years ago.  And the evidence indicates that we are not near the end of this period of change.  It’s likely that ten years from now, the world of games will have changed ever more dramatically, into a shape none of us would in 2012 would recognize.

So things are going to change.  The question is – how are they going to change?  Well, how do you want them to change?  We, the people who play, design, and write about games, are going to have a significant impact on how this change occurs.

Personally, I do not like the direction that things are headed in.  No one is steering.  I feel a responsibility to help angle us into what I see as being the correct direction.  This is nothing new;  this is the basic nature of any dialogue on any topic.  I want to participate, because I have something to say and because I care about the future of games.

We’re talking about games a lot – but what very few of us are doing is coming out and saying “hey – this is what games ought to be”.

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