A few weeks ago we looked at Costikyan's article and his statement that a game is "...an interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires players to struggle toward a goal". I really liked this article, it broke down the statement into the factors from which it's composed, like interactive, structure, struggle, goals, endogenous meaning and quite clearly explained through his thought processes and references how he came to his conclusion.
We had to boil the article down into brief bullet points so I'll quickly regurgitate the summary of my notes...
Interaction - A player's(') interaction with a game changes the game's 'state', puzzles and games will always be present together.
Goals - Gives an incentive to the struggle, objectives shape player behaviour and choices, needs to be a chance of failure as well as success.
Struggle - Without competition/struggle there's no sense of satisfaction/achievement, difficulty needs to be in keeping with a player's(') ability level.
Structure - Mutual player agreement that a game's rules/goals bear significance creates a structure. A games structure shapes player behaviour, it doesn't determine it therefore players have freedom to choose what they can do with the rules.
Endogenous Meaning - Factors that only have relevance within a game.
I pretty much agreed with all the points that Costikyan was making although whilst reading the section on endogenous meaning I began wondering if online gambling games could still be considered games, despite the fact that they don't conform to the endogenous meaning part of Costikyan's definition of a game, seeing as players benefit in real life from playing. I'm pretty sure that online gambling games wouldn't fall into the puzzle category, although I'm not entirely sure that they are considered games at all as there's no real struggle either. That was my only real query with the article, so if anyone can explain that to me that would be cool. I also found it interesting that the elements of a game that Costikyan was bringing up all seemed to tie together in some way, for example a struggle is required to create a goal of some kind and the struggle is determined by how the player interacts with the game's structure, which I thought was quite a nice thought.
Interesting work, some gambling games, for example fixed odds gambling games such as fruit machines, are not really games at all by the definition above. They offer what researchers have called 'the illusion of control'.
ReplyDeleteOther forms of gambling games, such as poker, are quite clearly games.
Yeh I'd have agree with you there Rob on the more chance orientated games like fruit machines, roulette etc. Are we going to look at the illusion of control at any point?
ReplyDeleteAnd yeh, poker, albeit partially chance, I would again agree is a game. I should have specified I was thinking more about the examples above I think, cheers for clearing that up!