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For hundreds of years, the field of game design has drifted along under the radar of culture, producing
timeless masterpieces and masterful time-wasters without drawing much attention to itself-without, in fact,
behaving like a "field" at all. Suddenly, powered by the big bang of computer technology, game design has
become a very big deal and the source of some provocative questions about the future of art and
entertainment.
In addressing these questions, the book you are holding raises quite a few of its own. On its surface Rules of
Play appears to be calm and reasonable, carefully laying out a broad theoretical framework for understanding
the field of game design. But beneath this calm surface, the book actually stakes out a controversial position in
a dramatic, ongoing discussion about what games are and what they could become.
In fact, from certain angles this book appears to have the burning impatience of a manifesto. What is the
nature of this impatience? To some extent it is the frustration of workers who are asked to build a cathedral
using only a toothbrush and a staplegun. Games are remarkably complex, both in their internal structure and
in the various kinds of player experiences they create. But there exists no integrated set of conceptual tools for
thinking about games. Until recently, if you were a game designer interested in the theoretical underpinnings
of your field, you would be forced to stitch together a set of perspectives from sociology, anthropology,
psychology, and mathematics, each of which brought its blindman's view of the elephant, and none of which
considered games as a creative domain.
More recently, within the field itself there has emerged a Babel of competing methodologies. Most of these
have a practical focus on the nuts-and-bolts questions of the creative process of game design; few of them
have attempted to ground their insights in a general theoretical system. But the impatience that gives this book
its undercurrent of urgency is more than a response to the field's underdeveloped level of discourse. Why,
after all, does game design need a theoretical framework? There is something more than insight, knowledge,
and understanding at stake here.
Remember that the authors of this book are not just academics looking at games from the outside; they are
themselves active practitioners. Like many people working in this field, they are driven by the feeling that
despite the breathtaking pace of recent technical and commercial advancement, games have remained
creatively stunted. On the one hand, there is a sense of boundless potential, the much-dis-cussed possibility
that games could succeed film as the defining form of popular culture for the new century. On the other hand,
there is the reality of the game store-endless racks of adolescent power fantasies, witless cartoon characters,
and literal-minded sports simulations.
To get a feeling for the sense of potential that fuels this impatience, consider the vast kinds of experiences
games can produce-complex networks of desire and pleasure, anxiety and release, wonder and knowledge.
Games can inspire the loftiest form of cerebral cognition and engage the most primal physical response, often
simultaneously. Games can be pure formal abstractions or wield the richest possible representational
techniques. Games are capable of addressing the most profound themes of human existence in a manner
unlike any other form of com-munication-open-ended, procedural, collaborative; they can be infinitely
detailed, richly rendered, and yet always responsive to the choices and actions of the player.
But where are the games that explore these diverse possibilities? Instead of the rich spectrum of pleasures
games are capable of providing, we seem cursed to suffer an embarrassment of variations on the all-too
familiar pleasures of running and jumping, of Hide and Go Seek and Tag, of Easter egg hunts and Cops and
Robbers. And what happened to the explosion of formal experimentation during the early days of computer
games? For a while it seemed that every other title was a fresh attempt to answer the question "What can you
do with a computer?" Compare that with the current crop of computer games, the majority of which seem to
be addressing the question "What can you do while controlling an avatar that is moving through a simulated
three-dimensional space?" |
