Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
erable experience that few would define as fun and still be a game.
It could still be a
good
game, as seen through my lens. To use an
example horrible enough to illustrate my point: a knife fight to
the death would probably not be any fun at all, but it is still abso-
lutely a game (and there are people who love, and study, the art
of knife fighting) A real life example might be fights in the Colos-
seum—which I'm sure were not much fun for participants, but
which were still deep, rich, and interesting games. But we need
not even look to those kinds of examples to find games that are
not fun. What about games that are simply bad? We've all played
at least a few games that we personally did not find fun (many of
us might even say that most
games are not fun), but that doesn't
mean they aren't games. Personally, I design my games with fun
as a desired outcome, but it's not a fundamental part of games.
One does not “add fun� to a game.
Games Can Occur Naturally
There is nothing about games that says that they must have been de-
signed intentionally by a human being to be games. Think of it—many
people's workplaces function as games: there are goals (solutions), there
is competition, and they often require that the “players� make meaning-
ful, ambiguous decisions. Of course, if your job is on an assembly line it
may be simply a contest. Fistfights also qualify as games, since there is a
system of rules in place, in the sense that it's taking place in the physical
universe. There are also goals (solutions), and there are most certainly
very interesting decisions to make.
However, it is often the case that naturally occurring games usually
don't make great games in a pure sense. The problem with naturally oc-
curring games is that they are messy—there are many “meta� elements
that can get in the way of the game mechanisms. In the case of a street
fight, for instance, some third party may attack you suddenly, or the oth-
er “player� may pull out a gun, or you may stop the fight early for fear of
being arrested or injured. This is the reason that designed games tend to
be isolated, somewhat abstracted, self-contained systems: so that players
can focus fully and completely on the mechanisms themselves, which al-
lows them to reach their full potential in the game. Very few people have
been able to really explore the “game� of real-life street fighting because
of the legal and physical risks involved in such a game.
As I mentioned earlier, when we create a game we are trying to mim-
ic a nature that never existed. We must tap into the same concepts of
asymmetrical balance (but not necessarily asymmetrical forces, which
