Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
for the duration of a soccer game, the players (and spectators) pretend that kicking
the ball into the net is a good thing to do and that it benefits the team that success-
fully achieves it. Accepting and abiding by the rules is part of the pretending we do
when we play a game.
The distinction between the real world and the pretended reality is not always
clear. If the events in the game are also meaningful in the real world, the magic
circle becomes blurred. For example, various Mesoamerican Indian peoples used to
participate in the ball-court game, a public activity that was superficially similar to
basketball. From carvings that depict the game, it appears that the losers may have
been ritually sacrificed to the gods. If so, the game was literally a matter of life and
death—a matter of great importance in the real world. In spite of this, the ball-court
game was not just a raw struggle for survival; it was played according to rules.
Gambling, too, blurs the magic circle because when you gamble, you bet real
money on the outcome of a game. The process of gambling may or may not be an
intrinsic part of the game itself. On the one hand, you can choose to play domi-
noes for money, but you can also play for matchsticks, or nothing at all. On the
other hand, betting money in craps
is
an intrinsic part of the game; if you don't
place a bet, you're not participating.
FIGURE 1.2
We pretend that real-
world events have
special meanings
inside the magic circle.
SCORING A GOAL
KICKING A
BALL INTO
THE NET
THE MAGIC CIRCLE
THE REAL WORLD
A GOAL
A game must have a goal (or
object
; these terms are used interchangeably through-
out the topic), and it can have more than one. As observed previously, goalless play
is not the same as game play. Even creative, noncompetitive play still has a goal:
creation. Others take this requirement for a goal even further. For example, in
Rules
of Play
, Salen and Zimmerman (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003, p. 80) require that a
game have a “quantifiable outcome.” This definition is too restrictive. Consider an
activity in which the participants collaborate to make a drawing of a scene in a lim-
ited time, with each one holding a crayon of a different color. This activity is clearly
a game—it includes rules, a goal, play, and pretending, and the results vary depend-
ing on the decisions of the players—but its outcome is not quantifiable. Similarly,
the object of
SimCity
is to build and manage a city without going bankrupt, and as
long as the player does not go bankrupt, the game continues indefinitely without
any outcome. In fact, the object of a game need not even be achievable, so long as
