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'I think that systems have a tendency to get away from us', says Kopas. 'We intend to
portray or produce one thing, but the systems we're creating seem to resist or reshape our
intents.' Even Rohrer, with years of programming experience (this game is his seventeenth),
has to take responsibility when things go wrong. 'As a designer, I'm trying to build the
tightest system that I can build. I don't want there to be those system leaks which allow
bizarre readings and involve the procedural rhetoric effectively falling off the rails and
going who knows where.' (The complete interview is available online at
http://www.news-
Problematizing the possibility for designing 'play' (i.e. our possibility of deter-
ministically predicting its cognitive effects and controlling the ways in which it will
engage the players and change their in-game behaviour) also raises questions con-
cerning the effective persuasive and communicative potential of interactive media.
If the possibilities for autonomous agency and self-fashioning in virtual worlds
threaten to distort and trivialize the affordances and messages originally set up by
the game designers, how could such worlds ever be treated as media of communica-
tion? How could a defi ned meaning ever emerge from contents that are not only
infi nitely interpretable (as was already the case for text and other traditional media
forms) but also infi nitely manipulable?
It is my belief that neither the recognition of limitations in the possibility to con-
trol messages and experiences in videogame worlds nor the discontents with 'pro-
ceduralist' approaches to 'play' should encourage game scholars and game
developers to bluntly discard their insights and methods of deterministic approaches.
The uncompromising rejection of scientistic ways of understanding 'play' (under-
stood both as an activity and as its experiential outcome) is in fact no less impover-
ishing than the excision of its 'ritual' ones operated by 'procedurality'. What I
propose here is, instead, to embrace deterministic approaches for framing 'play' as
instruments that are useful and revealing in specifi c contexts. Perspectives like
ludology, 'procedurality' and game user research (GUR) can be usefully employed
to uncover some aspects of the functional behaviours of simulation and can be rec-
ognized as capable of helping designers and researchers alike to anticipate and con-
trol some of the effects that design choices will have on the players. As already
observed by Sicart, the deterministic framework offered by the 'proceduralist'
approach can be fruitfully applied to analyse single-player videogames that offer
limited operative options to their players. Those games are, in fact, already structur-
ally effi cient in constraining players' behaviour, allowing them to execute a few
specifi c actions in the restraining ways envisaged by the developers (Sicart
2011
).
Among the videogame genres that more starkly funnel players' behaviour, we can
plausibly enumerate the ones defi ned by a few player-related mechanics such as
puzzle games, simple resource management games, point-and-click adventures,
2-D platform games, hidden object games, etc.
What I am advocating in this section of my essay is that the proverbial baby can be
saved from being thrown away together with the dirty bath water by means of a cau-
tious and instrumental use of quantitative methods of approaching 'play' both as game
designers and as game researchers. In other words, formal and objective approaches
to the analysis of 'play' can be fruitful methods to describe player experience when
