The Concept of Game - Game Design Theory - page 13

also being free enough to shed them when you see a unique opportunity
crop up. Games that have been solved do not allow for this, and by my
definition no longer qualify as games for this reason (perhaps you could
call them “dead games,� since they were originally intended to be games).
Playing them is no longer an art because there is no longer any creativity
involved. The element of creativity is what makes games so interesting,
and also what makes them so difficult to create. They must restore the
feeling of creative play (which exists in basic interactive systems, but is
lost in contests and puzzles) within a highly structured type of system.
Game designers are doing more than just creating art: they're creating
arts.
The Value of Games
The unique combination of problem solving, competition, and the afore-
mentioned ambiguous decisions in games make them unique types of
machines that have great value to a human intelligence. If you were to
ask what the value of games are, most people would say that games are
fun. However, this answer is not precise enough for a game designer—
and further, it's not even always true. The primary and direct value that
games have for us is that they teach us how to learn. They provide an
environment for us to focus on increasing a specific skill or set of skills.
They teach us to formulate tactics, to second-guess our thinking, and to
commit to a strategy. Quite simply, they allow us to train ourselves as
thinkers .
It's true that the byproduct of this training can usually be called fun .
What's actually going on, though, is that humans (being highly cerebral
and curious creatures) have a natural biological hunger for further un-
derstanding the world around us. When we experience a feeling of self-
improvement, or a feeling of having learned something new, our brains
reward us by releasing endorphins. The pursuit of mastery is exciting for
us; this is one of the things that makes human beings very special. And
it's also one of the things that makes games in particular so important
and valuable to us. Our studies of humans and other primates make it
very clear that our curiosity—our need to understand —is a biologically
important element that's on par with our need for companionship.
Games have great philosophical and social implications for us; in
a way, they help us to understand who we are on a very basic level. In
Frank Lantz's 2011 Game Developers Conference talk, “Life and Death
and Middle Pair: Go, Poker, and the Sublime,� he talked about the game
Go—an utterly abstract game—and all of the meaning he sees in it. He
described a Go match in progress as a way of seeing two minds entangled