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What's the allure of games, both creating and playing? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Max Gladstone, Writer of Serials, Games, Novels, on Quora:
At first glance, from a kind of brutal Ebeneezer Scroogelike perspective, games seem like a waste: they use a lot of mental energy to no particular purpose beyond “fun.”
But board games have existed in one form or another all the way back into recorded time. We have excavated backgammon sets from 3,000 BCE; Egyptian tomb carvings show pharaohs playing Senet. Games were played back when the overall human lot was more precarious than most peoples’ today. So, what’s all the fuss (and fun) about?
There are whole fields of scholarship devoted to answering this question from all sorts of different angles, but here are a few of my general thoughts, as a gamer and game designer.
Games are at least in part a cognition hack. Our brains like activity, change, and problem solving. They like the world to shift around them. They don’t like to remain idle. A gamer exists in a kind of tuned reality, designed to provide meaningful simulation, solvable problems, and a range of dramatic possibilities from failure to success. Play alone, and you’re playing against the universe; play against an opponent, and you’re playing with social status at risk—even if you’re playing against family members, even if the game relies on random chance. Games order and offer meaning to the world—but their randomness can also relax us, remind us that reality remains just out of control.
The game designer’s work offers her a chance to play around with basic levels of human consciousness: with cycles of reward and punishment, with the rush of a good roll or the agony of a clever strategy’s near miss. Like music, games are a medium of emotion—but unlike music, where an uneducated listener may miss out on some complex and meaningful sequence of tonal shifts, a player in a game necessarily understands the rules, and as a result the risks and opportunities they face—if she doesn’t, she’s not really playing the game.
So much for games themselves. But what’s the benefit of telling a story with a game?
Well, for one thing, don’t assume that ‘game’ and ‘story’ are so easily separable. Every game tells a story, even Go, even Snakes and Ladders. The story may be abstract, composed of opportunity costs, percentages, and strategy, but it exists.
But that said, there are huge advantages to wedding games with more concrete narrative. And huge risks as well.
Game narratives are, for better and for worse, immersive. The player feels the constraint and drama of the narrative firsthand, as her point of view character is the personal avatar through which she relates to the rules of the game. If the narrative works, the player identifies with the character (or characters) more instinctively than with the protagonist of a typical piece of fiction—which presents huge potentials for moral storytelling, but also raises risks for the designer. A reader may feel that a character making the decision to spare a villain, only to be betrayed by him the next moment, is a piece of grand tragedy; the player will feel that they have been betrayed, and perhaps even “lost” the encounter.
The games storyteller walks a fine line. She tells a story with room for player agency—but she must carefully guide that agency, so every player choice leads to interesting consequences. She draws the player to identify with her character—while forcing some distance between player and character, to reinforce dramatic tension. She controls the player’s reality through rules and information release—but makes the player think herself free. It’s a great challenge.
So: we write, and play, games, because games are “fun”—but they’re fun because they cut to the core of human experience: joy, boredom, frustration, elation, fear, pain, defeat, and victory. We see the world through them—and we also see ourselves.
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