Discord and Rhyme: Playing By the Rules

Rules are the bedrock of civilization. Quite frankly, the threat and promise of punishment is the only thing that keeps me out of prison every time I get behind the wheel, so I know what of I speak; rules are good. That said, at what point does a game cease to function as a mechanism for play and adopt the role of whip-cracking, rule-administering taskmaster? For me, it’s the moment when individual expression is subjugated to the whim of the designer; in other words, the moment I realize that I’m not playing a game as much as it’s playing me.

My personal nominee for an example of bad game design is the original Simon, Milton Bradley’s electronic Skinner simulation from the late-70s which had you pressing large, brightly lit buttons to “match wits” against the machine by duplicating its patterns. Simon issued a gentle razzing sound whenever you made a mistake, but you know that the sadistic bastard would have gleefully sent forty thousand volts coursing through your synapses if given the opportunity.

There are thousands of games on the shelves, both board- and video-type, for which the apparent creative motivation can be outlined by one simple principle: the developers valued the experience of making the game more than they valued the experience of playing it. There’s nothing wrong with game design as a vehicle for expression, as long as the particular designer seeking expression isn’t a compulsive, controlling wank, but whenever the focus in any field shifts towards process as an end unto itself, the final result – whether game, film, novel, or pot of chili – often winds up smelling like a seat cushion in a cross-country Greyhound bus. Without air conditioning. In August.

Obediently leaping through hoops in order to please other people has never held much appeal for me, which is why most of the games I enjoy utilize mechanics that allow the player to control, if not entirely craft, his own experience. Even during childhood, a simple competitive game like Connect Four offered little in the way of self-expression other than dropping chips into slots, and on particularly boring days, using the game’s plastic yellow frame to slice Velveeta. Yet Monopoly, in all its glorious, capitalistic avarice, permitted me to become the J. P. Morgan of the dining room table, trading and buying and selling and cutting deals with the poor slobs who couldn’t pay their rent; it was, and still is, all about expression. Do you have mercy and allow Grandma to stay in that tiny oceanfront bungalow, or do you evict the old bag and force her to mortgage her hovel on Baltic Avenue just to stay in the game? Expression, man.

Thanks to the lasting imprint of a tiny metal race car on an area of my body which shall remain unspecified, I eventually learned not to express myself so aggressively, but the broader lesson remains; to paraphrase Steve Martin, a great game may not be the truth, but it is what we wish were true. Games, and play in general, are at their best when they allow us to express ourselves not merely as we are, but as we would be.

This type of play, which French sociologist Roger Caillois referred to as mimesis, or mimicry, comprises a large portion of most videogames. Whether slicing and dicing hobbes in Fable or stealthily snapping necks in Splinter Cell, successful mimicry demands a hearty suspension of disbelief. This is easy enough when you’re a kid stomping around the house in dad’s shoes, roaring and knocking things over while giving your most earnest impression of a tyrannosaurus mess, but it gets progressively more difficult when we must rely on other people to fashion this suspension for us. The problem is that no magnitude of childlike imagination can compensate for technical failings like bad control or a chuggy framerate, or dialogue that falls on the ear as though it staggered out of an episode of Teletubbies with Tinky Winky’s shiv embedded in its kidney. Put bluntly, sometimes other people’s suspension sucks. Hard.

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One of the feats that games like Half-Life and BioShock accomplish so gracefully is to present their entire experience inside the context of the gameplay without ever removing us from the action and thus disrupting the imaginative play. The childhood equivalent of good mimicry spoiled was playing with that one kid who just didn’t get it; you’re all set for a round of Steve Austin vs. Maskatron, and he insists on being the Fonz. Or you’re smokin’ along with your three-story Death Star Wedge o’ Destruction playset complete with detachable trash compactor, foam garbage, and green plastic dianoga, and this kid thinks he can credibly squeeze all five members of G-Force into the party. As if that weren’t enough, his favorite was Tiny. Not Mark, or Keyop, or even that arrogant smartass Jason, for cryin’ out loud. Tiny. Clearly, some people are beyond help.

In an interactive medium like gaming, development is a two-way process in which the finest creators are facilitators of individual expression, rather than enforcers of arbitrary rules that give little consideration to the personality and preferences of the end-user. Rules should empower the player by providing structure and feedback, which is why even relatively simple fare like Geometry Wars Galaxies and Space Invaders Extreme offer such compelling experiences; their rules – shoot a bunch of stuff, don’t die – consistently uphold the player’s choice and skill as the games’ raisons d’etre, providing multiple paths to success and only one – annihilation – to failure.

Other than puzzles, far too many games invert that equation by offering hundreds of ways to fail and only one to succeed; they often require absurd solutions to mundane real-world problems that otherwise might have been resolved by more creative means had these games not been designed to play the player instead of the other way around. As a result, these titles languish on my shelves in a non-negotiable state of disuse, gathering dust and irrelevance in equal measure, since the most engaging games across all media employ rules which enable creative participation rather than distance the player from his own imaginative involvement.

Whether engaged in a marathon session of face-editing at the outset of Oblivion, or decorating our Sim’s house, or even cooking a pleasant meal, some of life’s most gratifying experiences are those that we fashion ourselves. By extension, the best game designers aren’t those who grab you by the throat and run you through their predetermined frenzied paces, or set you to a gratuitously arduous task in a world rife with inconsistent, illogical dynamics. Instead, the best designers are those who take you by the hand and consistently amaze, not simply by showing what they can do, but by showing what you can do, and by skillfully forging the illusion the player is the most indispensable element in their game.

Matt Turano is full of sound and fury, signifying corn chips.