Every now and then, when the moon is gibbous and the wind is blowing from Tanelorn, we put aside our consultancy work and make a microdev game of our own.

This year, it’s The Dust of Battle, a lightning-fast turn-based tactical game built around decisive Strike vs Counter battles on unique 7-zone battlefields. While other strategy games with levelling characters take forty hours to complete, ours takes forty minutes!

I’ve done it three times before. First, there was Play with Fire, where I got to work with Paranoia RPG creator Greg Costikyan.

Then there was Silk, my quirky tribute to the late Mike Singleton.

Lastly, Scramble All Fighters!, which was a chance to make a small game out of an old AI system my friend Neil Lothbruk and I designed in the early days of ihobo.

This time, I’m not just trying to make a microdev game, I’m trying to make a successful indie game – but I need your help to do it!

Our campaigns are short, intense, and deeply replayable, with a roguelite structure to provide long-term progress. Warriors level up automatically after every battle, but you also choose one to receive a Trophy, and those warriors become the backbone of the warband for the rest of the campaign. It’s one of many high-impact decisions that makes every campaign a unique experience.

It’s all the tactics experience without the drag.

The Dust of Battle now has its own section within the ihobo games newsletter. If you want to follow the game’s development, you’ll receive updates automatically, and you can manage section subscriptions at any time.

How fast is our new game? See for yourself!

I’m really proud of my design work on the class-engine and combat system on this, and my dev partner Matt Mower – an old friend of mine in more ways than one! – has been an amazing engineer and robot-whisperer. We both believe in the potential of this game, but we’re entirely dependent upon word of mouth and community support to get the game noticed, so we have to ask for your help.

It would really help The Dust of Battle if you Wishlisted it on Steam right now! It takes thirty seconds if you already have a Steam account.

Even if you don’t play turn-based games, your wishlist now helps generate what’s called ‘wishlist velocity’, which increases the chance that Valve will show it to the people who will love this game.

Wishlist now, please!

With unlimited love,

Chris.

Considering the franchise is named after her, Princess Zelda took a while to take an active role in the series. Shigeru Miyamoto has explained that she is named after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, simply because he liked the sound of the name. In the 1986 original, which was called The Hyrule Fantasy: Legend of Zelda in Japan, Zelda serves as a framing device in the grand pattern of the ‘rescue the princess’ trope. This is not wholly surprising, since the game’s working title was ‘Adventure Mario’, and the Mario series has almost universally been framed as a ‘rescue the princess’ story. These stories have a long history, with some of the oldest examples being Andromeda being rescued from the dragon by Perseus in Greek mythology, and the rescue of Sita from the demon king Ravana by Lord Rama in the Hindu epic the Ramayana. Even if we have recently become suspicious of the implications of ‘rescue the princess’ stories, the Zelda franchise’s thirty year run helps reveal a gradual change of attitude towards ‘helpless’ Princesses.

In the first game, Zelda provides the backstory by having broken up the Triforce of Wisdom into eight parts before being imprisoned behind a wall of flame under Death Mountain. After defeating Ganon in this game, Link frees Zelda – whose 8-bit appearance (pictured left) is a triumph of lo-res sprite design. The sequel, The Adventure of Link, has another ‘rescue the princess’ framing story, this time a different Zelda from an earlier time who has been asleep and is awakened by Link at the end of the story. Apparently, Princess Zelda was so unimportant a character at this time that she could be entirely substituted by a replacement Zelda without any impact upon the games at all. Even A Link to the Past only barely improves Zelda’s status as an extra in her own legend since at this point she actually has some speaking lines, admittedly to exhort Link to save her from being sacrificed by the dark wizard Agahnim, who succeeds in so doing, although she is still rescued by Link at the end of the story.

It is Ocarina of Time which finally improves Zelda’s status as a character. Although it seems from the outset that the game will work as a ‘rescue the princess’ story, what we actually see in Link’s dream during the opening sequence (and again in person when these events actually occur later in the story) is young Zelda being spirited away on horseback by her bodyguard, Impa, who had appeared in the backstory of the earlier games as her ‘handmaiden’. When Link has his Tom Hanks moment and fast forwards to being an adult after drawing the Master Sword out of a stone hexagon within the Temple of Time, he is assisted by the mysterious Sheik (pronounced ‘sheek’), whose identity is kept concealed. It is eventually revealed that Sheik is Princess Zelda in disguise – subverting the expectations of a ‘rescue the princess’ story, by letting Zelda assist Link in overthrowing Ganondorf.

Although she does not appear in Majora’s Mask at all, the games that followed continued to give Princess Zelda more of an active role in the story. In Wind Waker, the pirate Tetra turns out to be Zelda in disguise, in something of a revisit to the Ocarina of Time plot. In Twilight Princess, the climax has Zelda wielding the Bow of Light from the back of Epona (whom Link is riding) – allowing Zelda to step up to the role of hero (well, co-hero) in this story for the first time. Skyward Sword, which serves as the prequel to the entire Zelda timeline, has Link pursuing Zelda after a tornado whisks her away from Skyloft, but we do see her being trained by Impa and establish that she is the reborn spirit of the goddess Hylia before she ends up sealed in a crystal and reduced to plot device for the rest of the story.

It is only when we get to Breath of the Wild that the series truly lives up to the promise of being ‘The Legend of Zelda’, since for the first time in the series the majority of the explicit narrative materials are Zelda’s story, albeit in direct relation to Link. It also should not be mistaken for a ‘rescue the princess’ story – despite the occasional character that pleads for Link to ‘save Zelda’. The story has Zelda holding the evil of the Calamity Ganon in check through her own power, and having done so for a century. This is not a case of a powerless princess being used as a pawn by stronger powers. Zelda is the one who has prevented Hyrule from falling to the dark force that threatens it, and Link’s requirement to ‘save’ her seems to reflect more the general lack of faith in Zelda sustaining her power that these various characters have, since as the only one capable of holding Calamity Ganon at bay – and, ultimately, defeating it, after Link manages to undermine its power – this is the story of Zelda saving Hyrule with Link’s help, and not the other way around.

The set up for the new story is the polar opposite to Skyward Sword, which was the earliest episode in the overarching story of The Legend of Zelda. Conversely, Breath of the Wild [and its sequel] are set at the far end of what is known as the Downfall timeline. Ever since the publication of Hyrule Historia in 2011, fans of the franchise have had access to the general contents of the narrative ‘Bible’ for the series, which has three branching timelines subsequent to the events of Ocarina of Time. The Downfall timeline concerns what happens after Link fails to defeat Ganondorf in that game, and the new Zelda takes place at the furthest point along this timeline. Although it has never been made explicit, the set up for Breath of the Wild entailing endless recurrence of the great calamity known as Ganon implies the Downfall timeline, as do the parallels with the original Legend of Zelda, which also belongs in this timeline. In a Game Rant interview, the Zelda franchise ‘apprentice’, Hidemaro Fujibayashi, confirms that the new game is set in the ‘far future’ of its fictional world:

It takes place in an age long, long after any of the titles released to date. It is the most recent age. And because of this we believe players will be able to easily immerse themselves in the game. Of course, regardless of the time period, the story does unfold in Hyrule so for those who’ve played other titles in the series there will be a lot of recognizable places to enjoy.

As mentioned previously, the narrative design of the 2017 Zelda is radically far from the conventional GTAIII-style open world formula used throughout contemporary AAA open world franchises. That standard formula uses a conventional linear narrative, often with an Act or Chapter structure, and requires the player to crank the plot by visiting the next location where a story event occurs. This works well… and has thus been worked well into the ground. Breath of the Wild [and its sequel] instead disconnect the linearity from its explicit storytelling entirely and make every cut scene part of backstory exposition rather than an advancing present tense plotline. This is framed for Breath of the Wild in terms of Link having suffered from amnesia as a result of his long century of recuperation (which ends when the game begins), although the basic narrative structure here could be deployed in any game with substantial backstory, and does not require the loss of memory to make it work. [Tears of the Kingdom has an even more McGuffin-esque excuse for recovering Zelda’s memories, alas, but it just about works all the same.]

For Breath of the Wild, there are eighteen locations throughout Hyrule that have a connection to the backstory between Princess Zelda and Link. The narrative structure entails a first Act upon the Great Plateau, completing the extended tutorial and acquiring the four Runes that almost all game puzzles depend upon. A second (entirely optional) Act concerns Impa – now old and infirm, having waited a century for Link’s return – and the Sheikah Slate that is the in-game representation of the player’s Wii U ‘tea tray’ or Switch in handheld mode. This second Act culminates in the player being shown twelve photographs of locations in Hyrule, and after this there are no further Acts save for the Final Act concerning the showdown with Calamity Ganon. The player has to use their growing knowledge of the landscape (with a touch of blind luck) to locate these twelve locations, each of which reveals a flashback to Link and Zelda’s backstory. These can play in any order – leaving the player to piece the narrative together. This has been done in videogame narrative before via journal entries and the like, but never in an expensive to develop feature like a fully animated cut scene.

In addition to the twelve Captured Memories pictures, which are the main body of the game’s explicit narrative, there are six additional memories. Four of these correspond to the Champions who in the backstory (a century before the game’s events) were to take the Divine Beasts into battle against Calamity Ganon, and are the main additional characters to appear in the memory cut scenes. A further memory concerns the Master Sword, and Princess Zelda placing it into a ceremonial stone triangle to wait for Link’s return (this is the last event in the chronology of the backstory, although the player could uncover this cut scene at any point in the flow of the game). When all of the twelve Captured Memories pictures have been located, Impa also provides a final memory – and this cut scene is thus very likely (but not certain) to be the last piece of the backstory that the player unlocks, allowing it to take upon a special significance.

Zelda’s story for Breath of the Wild is as follows: 10,000 years before the events of the game, the ancient hero – let’s call him Backstory Link – defeats the Calamity Ganon with an army of marvellously technological Guardians and Divine Beasts, and the fiend is sealed away by the power of the ancient Princess (Backstory Zelda). Our Princess Zelda is the latest in the royal line of descendants to Backstory Zelda, while our Link is either a descendent of Backstory Link or his soul reborn in a Royal Guard of Hyrule Castle. At the time of the first Captured Memory, Link has already proved himself possessed with the courage and purity of heart required to possess the Master Sword, which he carries with him in every memory-related cut scene. Zelda is supposed to possess the power to seal the Calamity Ganon into captivity but the death of her mother when she was six years old has given her doubts… she feels unprepared and, worse, she has found herself to be something of a nerd and her father the king consistently undermines her confidence by telling her she must abandon “playing at being a scholar” and focus on her training.

Zelda, however, as the Champion Urbosa confirms, has knocked herself out trying to fulfil her duties and has come to despair about ever manifesting her supposed powers. When her father, the king, assigns Link to guard Princess Zelda as she visits the the Springs of Power, Courage, and finally Wisdom, Zelda reacts badly. Although she protests to Link that she doesn’t need his protection (which is clearly not the case), Zelda finds herself frustrated by Link because he successfully – and perhaps even effortlessly – fulfilled his destiny in being able to wield the Master Sword. As the Champions of Hyrule whisper amongst themselves in what is chronologically the first memory, seeing Link is a constant and painful reminder that Zelda is not able to awaken the power to seal the darkness within herself, despite the extreme efforts she has expended trying to do so.

The situation begins to shift after Link saves Zelda from an attack by the Yiga Clan, a cult that serves Calamity Ganon and forms one of the major sub-plots of Breath of the Wild. From this point onwards, Zelda and Link become close friends. She talks freely to him about all the nerdy things that interest her, he shares advice about horses with her (he doesn’t seem to know much about anything except weapons and horses), and she opens up about her anxieties, even revealing that she would like to run away from her duties (even though she cannot actually consider this doing this in practice). At Hyrule Castle, she is watching with great interest the awakening of the Guardians, the machines that ten thousand years earlier defeated Calamity Ganon, when her father appears and openly scolds her, accusing her of playing a “childish game” and suggesting that the people mock her because she is “heir to a throne of nothing… nothing but failure.”

Undaunted by her father’s disappointment, Zelda proceeds to visit the final Spring, the Spring of Wisdom on Mount Lanayru, on her seventeenth birthday, but she is still unable to awaken her power. Mipha, the Zora Champion, tries to tell her that her own powers were inspired by her love (whether for Link or her brother Sidon, it is never clear) – but Calamity Ganon awakens, ending the conversation. While Urbosa wishes to hide Zelda away, she insists that there must be something she can do to help on the battlefield. However, the great battle is ultimately lost – Calamity Ganon possesses both the Guardians and the Divine Beasts, slays all the Champions and everyone in the Castle – and a devastated Zelda is only saved by Link rushing her away at the last second.

At the climax of the story, Guardians have relentlessly pursued Zelda and Link to Fort Hateno, coming in numbers far beyond anything the player faces during the game. A wounded Link tires and stumbles as a Guardian is about to unleash its beam attack. Zelda places herself between it and Link and finally, her power unlocks. For the first time, she is not trying to awaken her power because it is her duty, but in order to save someone she loves. There is a mighty blast of energy, and the Guardians fall silent. This has especial resonance for most players, because the battleground outside Fort Hateno is something they have seen many times by this point, and now it becomes clear that it is Zelda’s power that is responsible for it.

Link collapses, dying, but Zelda finally comes into her own birthright, both as wielder of the power to seal Calamity Ganon away, and as crown Princess of Hyrule. She is about to fall back into despair when the Master Sword talks to her, mind to mind, and reassures her that all is not lost. Zelda then instructs two Sheikah (Purah and Robbie, both of which the player has met by the time they view this memory) to take Link to the Shrine of Resurrection, where his wounds will heal over the next century – setting up the opening to the game. She then delivers the Master Sword to the Great Deku Tree to wait for Link’s return, and proceeds to seal both Calamity Ganon and herself away for the next century, using the power that she has now successfully claimed.

Even if this is not the most sophisticated piece of storytelling, it is still substantially more nuanced than any plot previously offered by a Zelda game, and really does focus on Princess Zelda – her failures, and ultimately her successes, as she ceases to feel trapped by her duty and instead accepts her fate and goes on to successfully seal away Calamity Ganon forever. In a post credits scene that the player sees only if they have collected all the memories, we see the Princess – now Queen of Hyrule – thinking through what needs to be done to rebuild the kingdom, very much focused upon the aftermath of the fall of the Champions that provides the four Divine Beast side plots (and dungeons) within the game. It is a relatively slight coda, but it works. [The necessity of removing Zelda from the chessboard in Tears of the Kingdom feels like a step backwords, but it broadly works in its own terms.]

I was not, I confess, enormously enamoured with Patricia Summersett as Princess Zelda in the English language version [neither in Breath of the Wild nor Tears of the Kingdom]: her performance is fine, but her voice feels wrong for the character, too mousy and whingey. The role needs to convey both resolve and commitment, as well as self-doubt and vulnerability, and the tenor of the performance reverses this emphasis. I can see why this casting decision might have been made, however, especially since it aligns well with the Japanese language performance – but should the English language voice performance match the Japanese? The cultural expectations of those two audiences are radically different.

Throughout the franchise, Princess Zelda has transformed from a ‘rescue the princess’ plot device (the first three games) to someone with an active role in the story but only in secret (Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker), a woman with the power to fight Ganondorf alongside Link (Twilight Princess), and now finally a woman who can save Link’s life, hold evil at bay for a century, and swoop in FTW (‘for the win’) as Queen of Hyrule, admittedly with a bucket load of teenage angst along the way. The Legend of Zelda franchise remains one of the most remarkable achievements in videogame history, both for its relentlessly innovative design and its creative narrative design, which in Breath of the Wild offers an entirely new vision for how open world story telling can be constructed.

Enjoyed this serial…? Please leave a comment!

Near the very beginning of my time as a blogger, I laid my cards upon the table concerning my love of videogame horses. It all began with Ocarina of Time, one of my least favourite Zelda games that was nonetheless entirely redeemed by the presence of the first great videogame horse – Epona. There had been horses in 2D games before this, Mike Fahey mentions the Atari 2600 game Stampede as his first, but polygonal 3D animations give a sense of presence to equine models that hugely transcends anything that sprite animations can achieve, and riding Epona through Hyrule in 1998 was an unforgettable experience.

It is apparent from the moment the N64 game begins that the horse is the star of the show, with the attract sequence focusing on Epona riding across Hyrule to the gentle strains of music by Koji Kondo, who wrote the iconic score for Ocarina of Time and a great many other Nintendo classics. According to an interview with Eiji Aonuma for Nintendo Power celebrating the ten year anniversary of the game, Epona became part of the project largely because Shigeru Miyamoto likes horses. Pegasus Shoes had been considered for travel prior to that point, but Miyamoto-san was keen on having something to interact with. According to a 2011 Iwata Asks, while the motivation came from the original Zelda master himself, it was up to Yoshiaki Koizumi, now Deputy General Manager of EAD, but then 3D System Director, to make the idea work. Apparently, it had first been explored as an idea for Super Mario 64 and had not proved practical at the time, but Koizumi-san persisted in producing a technical demo that cleared the way for the horse to star in Ocarina of Time.

It was Koizuma-san who came up with the name Epona, after the goddess of horses and fertility in Celtic mythology, having apparently been briefly called ‘Ao’, a Japanese word for a blue-green colour with no equivalent word in English, associated with horses because of the exceptionally rare blue roan coloration. An inherent design tension is apparent in the implementation of Epona: on the one hand, Miyamoto-san had dictated that “a Legend of Zelda game doesn’t need any difficult actions”, hence the horse jumps automatically. On the other, the Zelda-creator felt that simply riding the horse wouldn’t be fun without some kind of action, so the horse was given a set of carrots that allowed the player to make the horse go faster, but when none were left it was not possible to jump. It is within this tension – actions that are easy to take but require finesse to use well – that all Zelda games pitch their challenges.

Epona was a huge success with players – who had almost certainly never wanted a game with a horse before this moment – and she reappears in Majora’s Mask (the direct sequel), although has something of a lesser role because the temporal structure of that game tends to de-emphasise the physical space of the world. With Wind Waker, however, a new ‘mount’ was tried in the form of a beautifully implemented sailing boat, the King of Red Lions, but despite the aesthetic success of this design it was not to appear in the franchise again. Likewise, Skyward Sword features a flying mount called a Loftwing, that is unique to that game and does not appear elsewhere. These experiments in alternative mounts are interesting in their own right (especially the King of Red Lions), but the franchise keeps returning to horses as the mount of preference.

In Twilight Princess, Epona makes another appearance (although the player has the capacity to rename her in this game), with far more advanced implementation. In Ocarina of Time, it was possible to fire the bow from horseback but not fight. For Twilight Princess, mounted combat is a significant part of the game, and the final battle against Ganondorf occurs on horseback with Princess Zelda sat behind Link upon Epona’s back. As with the earlier game, Link has the capacity to call his trusty steed and icons to make her gallop faster, but these are now styled as spurs rather than carrots, an iconography that recurs with Breath of the Wild.

While it is possible to get Epona in the newest Zelda game [and its sequel] by using a Link Amiibo to unlock her, Breath of the Wild features a far more expansive horse system. Indeed, the implementation of horses in this new game is the most complex and engaging of any videogame ever made, and one of the great triumphs of the development team’s work in this iteration. This is particularly apparent during the time that players are building up their relationship with a new horse, since the mount behaves quite convincingly like a wild horse that has already been broken in (that is, become comfortable with a rider). Rather than the horse simply following the player’s instructions, it resists according to its own fears and concerns, being reluctant to go down certain routes, cross the most precarious bridges, or to ride too fast in some areas. The experience of riding during this rather brief window with a new horse is deeply rewarding in terms of the play aesthetics, creating a real sense of partnership between horse and rider, comparable to authentic horse riding in many respects. Of course, if the player treats game horses as cars on legs, they will be frustrated or disappointed. But for someone such as myself with a lifelong love of videogame horses, Breath of the Wild raised the bar absurdly high.

Yet despite this remarkable developmental success, horses are entirely undermined within the game by the fast travel system, which allows players to revisit at will any of the 120 Shrines, 15 towers, or 3 special locations simply by selecting them from the map. Unlike any Zelda before, this capacity to travel instantly to just about anywhere the player has already visited is available from very nearly the beginning of the game (strictly, from the moment the first tower is activated). This makes travelling by horseback of extremely limited use: while there are places (such as Kakariko village) that can be reached more easily for the first time by horse, this is offset by the fact that when travelling a route for the first time there is a great deal to find and the player is unlikely to feel comfortable simply riding through, ignoring everything on the way. Indeed, in the case of Kakariko, if the player ride there for the first time (as I did) you miss out on the encounter with Hestu, the Korok character who provides the essential capacity to expand the player’s inventories, and for which there is absolutely no funnelling to ensure the player will locate him afterwards.

A generous interpretation of this situation is that it honours the player’s agency in giving them the choice of whether to ride or not to ride. But a pragmatic analysis of the way the game functions suggests that there is no real choice here: riding is inferior in terms of travel time when revisiting (since the fast travel is instantaneous) and disadvantageous when first exploring, because either nothing is found or the player must stop constantly and dismount. There are a handful of side quests that require horses to complete, but beyond these all the beauty and charm of the mounted systems are essentially wasted in Breath of the Wild [and its sequel], having been undermined by the sheer immediacy of travelling directly to any of the 138 locations on the map that can offer a lazy immediacy of access.

In my own case, my initial joy at exploring the horse system was short lived, but I was bowled over by the impact of the first encounter with wild horses. The game asks the player to capture untamed horses by sneaking up to them and then surviving a ‘bucking bronco’ challenge where success is directly proportional to Link’s current Stamina (or supply of Stamina-restoring meals…). There follows perhaps half an hour of riding time where the horse possesses tremendous personality and identity. After this, the horse behaves much like a horse in any other contemporary AAA game (e.g. Assassin’s Creed: Origins) with the capacity to follow paths on their own but otherwise little identity. Don’t get me wrong, they are still enormous fun to ride – but all the unique aesthetic moments the horse system provides are under-represented or squeezed out of relevance.

However, after completing the game for the first time, I made a personal commitment to the horses and for the next ten hours or so did not use the fast travel system for anything. I wanted to experience what the Hyrule of Breath of the Wild was truly like as a mounted adventure – and was extremely satisfied by this experience, which took me more or less everywhere that it is possible to ride a horse. I was particularly impressed, for instance, that it is possible to reach the elusive Korok settlement in Great Hyrule Forest with a horse, despite the difficult problems posed by crossing the mysterious and spooky maze that is the Lost Woods. These were some of my most enjoyable hours with the game, in part because I was freed from its compulsive grip (having already competed it) and felt empowered to enjoy the world for what it was.

There is, however, one last aspect of the horses that provides a significant advantage and that might cause some players to find keeping up their equestrian practices worthwhile. Upon horseback, jumping rockets the player into the air to a degree equivalent to using a stuntman’s trampette. Since the game allows the player access to ‘bullet time’ when drawing their bow in the air (but never on the ground), horses provide the most reliable access to these time-slowing capacities, which can be especially useful when fighting the dreaded Guardian Stalker enemies, whose beam weapons are fatal in the early game and remain nasty all the way through. This small silver lining provides a reason – beyond the sheer aesthetic pleasure of riding – to traverse the beautiful lands of Hyrule upon the back of a horse.

One final point is worth mentioning. Horses can die. This provided the most shocking moment of any Zelda game I have ever played, when a routine expedition along a coastal path went horribly wrong as I took a narrow path too rapidly and my mount stumbled, fell down the cliff, and died. Even knowing that the developers had provided an option for resurrection via a convenient Horse Goddess, I was hurt and humbled by realising that I had brought this imaginary horse’s life to an end. This was radically more upsetting than the death of Agro in Shadow of the Colossus, since that event happens in a pre-scripted cut scene (and thus not as a result of player action), and was also not much of a surprise to me as an experienced game writer. Losing a horse in Zelda, though – that was a powerful and distressing moment, one that forever changed the way I rode around Hyrule. I was not, and still am not, willing to let another of my beautiful fictitious horses die as a result of my carelessness and this serves as another reminder of the incredible polish evident in the horse system in Breath of the Wild. What a shame that it is also so cruelly undermined by the overall design.

Next week, the final part: Zelda

One thing and only one thing remains consistent across the various armouries of the Zelda series: Link is armed with a sword, a shield, and a bow. There may be other weapons – a boomerang, for instance, or a slingshot – but the certainty that Link’s standard compliment of weapons is a sword and a bow remains unchanged until Breath of the Wild. Similarly, it is not until the 2017 Zelda that the game features a dynamic inventory capable of holding a variety of items: up until this point, every Zelda game has a static set of items and the only question is whether the player has acquired a specific item or not. This is an element of the Zelda practices that few other games have copied, and the change in the latest game is one of the few cases of Zelda apparently moving towards a more conventional videogame practice and giving up its own unique ways of doing things.

In all the Zelda games prior to Breath of the Wild, there has been a core sequence of blades – typically some kind of starting sword (just called ‘Sword’ in The Legend of Zelda, later Fighter’s Sword, Kokiri Sword, Hero’s Sword, Wooden Sword, or Practice Sword) that later progresses in one or more steps to the Master Sword, which made its first appearance in A Link to the Past. Wind Waker allowed Link the capacity to pick up weapons wielded by enemies for the first time, but it did not permit him to keep them, while Skyward Sword, which is set at the earliest point in the Zelda timeline, is effectively the story of the forging of the Master Sword and thus has a sequence of swords that represent the steps along this path (Goddess Sword, Goddess Longsword, Goddess White Sword, Master Sword, and finally True Master Sword).

In some respects, as already noted, Breath of the Wild moves towards conventional CRPG practices with its grid inventory that holds weapons, shields, and bows for the player to choose between. Yet at the same time, something very unusual happens in the new Zelda in terms of the weapons breaking and disappearing. Weapon durability is hardly a new element in videogames, and even within the franchise it appeared in Ocarina of Time in the form of the Giant’s Knife that breaks after a handful of hits or in Majora’s Mask with the Razor Sword, which returns to the Master Sword after one hundred swings. But the usual way weapon durability is dealt with in videogames involves weapons breaking when durability expires, and then the player taking steps to fix them e.g. weapon repair kits and blacksmiths in The Witcher 3. Controversially, given some players’ highly negative reaction to weapon durability, Breath of the Wild [and Tears of the Kingdom] have weapons that break and are gone for good – subverting conventional player practices to such a degree that it creates a play experience almost no player is prepared for.

How powerfully an individual player is affected by this depends on their prior experiences and expectations, but for many of us who would ordinarily avoid a game that would not let us keep our beloved toys, the impact of the weapon system is akin to the five stages of grief. First, anger: they couldn’t possibly have thought this was a good idea, could they? (They did.) Then, denial: these are just the starting weapons, the later weapons won’t break (they do), and surely the Master sword won’t break? (it does, well, it takes long naps at least [then gives up the ghost completely in Tears of the Kingdom!]. Then, fear: how am I going to keep supplied with weapons, they’re breaking faster than I can find them! (Until you start finding reliable places to get good weapons, which both last a long time and require fewer hits to do the same job.) Then, exhaustion: just how much of my time is going to go into keeping me supplied with weapons? (As much as it takes to get you through thinking of weapons as a fixed resource). Finally, impatience: why aren’t my weapons breaking fast enough to make room for more cool weapons?

Provided you adapt to the player practices the inventory system implies, and don’t fall permanently into one of these disgruntled intermediate states, the result is an experience quite unlike anything else that is out there. Like the best of the previous Zelda combat systems, namely Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, the new battle design is simple but still allows the player tremendous mastery when they get to grips with it – and once you do, the experience of fighting in Breath of the Wild transcends anything else in the space of games that are seeking to offer an accessible combat balance (rather than, say, risk-reward challenges e.g. Dark Souls, Monster Hunter). With the core skills under your belt, the weapons cease to matter because you can kill a Keese with a tree branch, overcome a Lizalfos camp starting with a single bow and one Shock arrow, or take down a Lynel with just a couple of half-decent weapons in your inventory. I am not a player with a particular taste for victory in battle, I’m much more of an explorer than a conqueror – but even I became obsessed with mastering each of the foes, and can happily retake a Major Test of Strength over and over again, just to enjoy my own martial prowess. And I doubt, frankly, that I’m really that good at the combat in the game.

It is important to appreciate what the weapon-grind brings to the game that would be impossible without it. If the weapons were all permanent, the player would rapidly exhaust interest in the vast majority of the available blades since the best weapons acquired are the only ones you need. This is a problem I struggle with again and again in the design of my own CRPGs because you want the player to get new weapons, but new weapons invalidate the old ones, which become just things to sell. Not in Breath of the Wild: there’s a role for almost all weapons, as some monsters fall easily to certain types… even the weakest spear is a perfect choice to defend against Keese, a single hit from an Iron Sledgehammer shatters any Pebblit, and a fire weapon instantly slays an ice enemy. You want to keep a balanced armoury so you have the right tool for the right job, but in a pinch a skilled player can make just about any weapon work long enough to get more weapons. You do not hoard weapons like a collector in this game, the weapons flow through Link and you enjoy their passage the moment you get over your certainty that it would be better if they didn’t break.

Instead, all the weapons are interesting, even the terrible weapons up to a point (my son is forever asking me what I can take out with a tree branch), and unlike any CRPG that could be named, the player can rise – and fall – in power as rapidly as they can locate and pick up a powerful blade and then break it. What’s more, this reinforces the open structure which, as discussed last week, is far more open than the conventional open world formula. Thus, the very real possibility of completing the Great Plateau and then immediately making a bee-line for the Calamity Ganon (yes, it’s a silly name – Zelda has always been chock full of silly boss names). The weapons inside Hyrule Castle, where the final boss can be found, are stronger than anywhere else in the game so if you possess the skills to survive there without Hearts to protect you (or, equally possible, you have quickly acquired meals that supply you with a lot of bonus yellow Hearts), it becomes possible to grow in power near-instantaneously and be ready to win the game in just a few hours. Provided, of course, you already spent many times that much time learning where everything in Hyrule is, and mastering anything Link needs to be able to do.

As mentioned, however, the system can be extremely tiring once you have learned reliable places to get good weapons, but lack the confidence that you will be able to make do with the kit that you have brought with you plus whatever you happen to find along the way. The result – as with the collection of cooking ingredients that initially motivates but later risks rendering parts of the exploration rather passé – is an exhaustion with the process of keeping the weapons stocked up. This is rooted less in the design, however, than in the player’s desire to control the inventory as if the weapons do not break. Once the disposability of the weaponry becomes as natural as jumping in a platform game, there is no way to be exhausted by the inventory management because it doesn’t matter. Half decent weapons are everywhere, excellent weapons are not hard to find, and brilliant weapons are not worth obsessing over because hey, they’re going to break too.

If there is a tangible flaw with this arrangement it could be that new players, especially younger players with less videogame experience to draw against, face almost insurmountable problems learning to fight because all of the early weapons do very little damage and break with absurd ease the moment Link touches them. (I guess Link must be holding them wrong, because they never break in the enemy’s hands!) Against this, the only hope of redemption is owning any of the many Hyrule-themed Amiibo, since the daily chest drops from these supply weapons that, while mediocre to an experienced player, are a godsend to starting players, raising them far above the bar required to get the ball rolling. (I found several Zelda Amiibo in a $5 bargain bin in Knoxville, TN, the month Breath of the Wild released, some of which were selling on eBay for close to a hundred dollars at the time – much to my smug satisfaction.)

As this discussion highlights, this audacious piece of design is not for everyone. Players who cannot make their peace with the idea of weapons breaking will be in a perpetual hell of emotional insecurity punctuated with the endless cursing that happens when yet another of your weapons breaks. But remember, you are not some suburban nerd collecting weapons as if they were trading cards: you are Link. Your tenacity is his courage, and your knowledge of Hyrule is the weapon that can never be taken away from you. If you wish for permanence, claim the Master Sword that is your birth right and make sure you carry something in reserve for when it gets tuckered out and needs a nap. The Link of Breath of the Wild is a master of any and all weapons [and in the sequel can even forge his own variants]. Accept their impermanence, and you shall be too.

Next week: Horses

In John Boorman’s 1981 retelling of the Arthurian mythos, Excalibur, the secret of the grail is that ‘the land and the king are one’. This motto could equally apply to narrative videogames, where the player character and the world is inseparable precisely because the avatar – the player’s capacity to take action in the fictional setting of the game – links the player to the world via a representation of a character (often a visual model, effectively a digital doll). As we saw last week, in the mind of current Zelda franchise master Eiji Aonuma Link’s name is precisely a reference to his role in linking the player to the world of Hyrule.

The elegance of the Zelda franchise’s solution to the problems entailed in facilitating avatars is such that it has many imitators, although it is worth noting that the 1986 Metroid – released by Nintendo in the same year as the original Legend of Zelda – has essentially the same relationship between character and world. It can be described as follows: the character starts with only the capacity to explore and to defend themselves (or, equivalently, to enact violence but without a huge degree of efficacy). Through exploration and survival, the player overcomes challenges that grant them an increase in their power, which can involve making the character tougher, increasing their capacity for violence, or granting them a way to access parts of the world that were previously inaccessible. Once the player has acquired sufficient powers in this way, they have a final showdown that tests their ability to deploy all the powers of their character, after which the game story concludes.

If this reads like a description of any videogame, this is a mirage caused by the extent to which this structure has permeated the player practices of digital entertainment. Note that in a Mario game, there is no gradual acquisition of power, and neither was this the case in arcade games, which were not able to pursue exploration because of the time limitations of the coin-drop economy. Similarly, the classic CRPG structure does not necessitate the relationship between overcoming challenges and gaining power, since experience systems permit players to grind against weaker monsters to increase their power and these games almost never increase the character’s capacity to access new parts of the world that is central to both the Zelda and Metroid structures. It is also worth remembering that while there were earlier save game mechanisms, The Legend of Zelda and Metroid had ratcheted progress that was entirely novel in its day, for all that we take it for granted now. This developed in time into an elegant unified save system, and then in Breath of the Wild to an innovative set of six autosaves that allow the player to restore any time in the last few hours without any requirement for the player to manually manage their save library. [The same system is reused without changes in Tears of the Kingdom.]

In the Hyrule of The Legend of Zelda back in 1986, the increases of power that are central to the formula of the franchise are acquired from within dungeons, which are hidden around the world. Although the player is unaware of it, there is an implied sequence of these dungeons, but this order can be easily subverted – the first few can be done in any order, while the later dungeons require tools acquired in a different dungeon in order to progress. This made progressing in the first Legend of Zelda much more of a puzzle than in either Metroid or any Zelda that followed, and is the reason it is sometimes described (somewhat misleadingly) as an open world. In Aonuma-san’s recent interview with Game Kult, the point was raised that he found the original game too stingy with its clues, while in a Game Informer interview during the promotion of Skyward Sword, he noted that it was the exploration in the third Zelda game, A Link to the Past, that really drew him in – and set his career on its path.

Even under Shigeru Miyamoto’s control, the Zelda franchise was to move away from the obscurity required to complete the original game and into a comfortable formula that addressed this problem. This entailed a fixed sequence of dungeons, each containing a new tool that was required to complete it and that afterwards provided access to new parts of the world, including the next dungeon. Thus bombs that could blow holes in damaged walls, a hookshot that allowed crossing gaps, or a blue tunic that allowed Link to breathe underwater. This concept is already there in the original game, what is new is the strict sequence making it more apparent what is expected of the player, and thus reducing the obscurity of the puzzles – as well as opening up the games to a far wider audience. (I confess, that while I did complete the original The Legend of Zelda this was only in retrospect; my first Zelda game was A Link to the Past and if the puzzles had been more obscure than they were it mighthave ended my interest in the franchise then and there. In Ocarina of Time, the puzzles very nearly ruined my enjoyment of the game entirely.)

With Breath of the Wild, the formula that had sustained the Zelda franchise since the beginning was completely subverted. The tools required to overcome puzzles are not paced out over the length of the game but delivered to the player in the first few hours, within the Great Plateau that serves as the tutorial area for the game. [Tears of the Kingdom clones this structure but replaces the tools with a diffrent set.] Rather than dungeons being in a strict sequence with each one unlocking a new capacity, the four dungeons in the latest game – the Divine Beasts – each provide the player two extremely useful advantages (one that applies to the entire world, and another that weakens the final boss) but completing these challenges is entirely optional. Indeed, nothing prevents the player from completing the Great Plateau and then proceeding to defeat the boss straight away, something that was on paper possible in some earlier videogames (such as the original Fallout) but which has become exceptionally rare, and certainly was never possible in any previous Zelda, including the 1986 original.

Much discussion around Breath of the Wild has focused upon the claim that it has moved closer to the practices of the open world genre, typified by the structure established by Grand Theft Auto III (as discussed in the introduction to this serial). But this is a mistake: almost nothing that the new Zelda does is in the form that is codified and conserved by the mainstream open world genre. This is most apparent in the narrative design, which in the GTAIII formula is a chain of waypoints some of which require challenges to overcome, and which are often arranged in an act structure with separate terrain allocated to each act. Whether Vice City and San Andreas in 2002 and 2004 or Witcher III in 2015, this structure remains fundamentally unchanged. Yet Breath of the Wild does not use this narrative design at all, and instead invents an entirely new structure with two parallel elements, both of which are entirely optional to completing the game. The first of these are the memories, which we will discuss when we get to the question of Zelda herself. The second are the Shrines, which represent a total subversion of the standard Zelda character advancement structure, and a corresponding new vision for Hyrule itself. [Note that, once again, Tears of the Kingdom does not innovate in this regard but simply clones the same design.]

Shrines are equivalent to individual rooms within dungeons in any earlier Zelda game i.e. they present either a puzzle, a combat challenge, or just a straight reward to the player. In the standard Zelda formula, dungeons are intricate puzzle boxes, much admired by fans of such things, such that the elegance of the design often transcends the individual rooms. The Divine Beasts retain this dungeon structure, and are an excellent example of the form, although as already noted – unlike every preceding Zelda – you don’t have to complete any of them. The same is true of the Shrines: the player must complete the four Shrines on the Great Plateau, after which they do not need to complete any Shrines to finish the game. If your interest as a player does not include puzzles, you can just complete the combat shrines (as I did in my second playthrough), and if you don’t like fighting you can just focus on puzzles, but if you simply want to explore the world you can bypass all but the first four Shrines. True, you will face a much tougher challenge in the final fight if you do not complete any Shrines, since the Spirit Orbs you earn from them are tremendously helpful. But all challenges except the first four Shrines and the final boss fight in Breath of the Wild are optional. This is not the standard open world structure at all, but an entirely new and innovative structure, unlike anything we’ve seen before.

This freedom comes with a significant cost. Side quests in Zelda have always held the possibility of getting either a Piece of Heart (a quarter of a health container in every Zelda except Twilight Princess, which unwisely inflated this to five) or an Empty Bottle (that is, a significant inventory expansion). In Breath of the Wild, every side quest is entirely irrelevant from the perspective of powering up the player character since Heart containers and Stamina vessels are earned from Spirit Orbs acquired exclusively in Shrines, and inventory expansion is achieved by finding Koroks, solving a relatively simple puzzle or challenge and then trading the seeds they give you for equipment slots by speaking to the musically-minded Korok giant Hestu. There are side quests that earn Shrines, and a side quest that earns a useful item of clothing, but to a surprisingly great degree, completing side quests has been downgraded in Breath of the Wild [and Tears of the Kingdom] to the single least important element of the challenges the player is afforded. For the first time, Link can be played as a total misanthrope... the other people in Hyrule barely matter in terms of the design.

Another aspect of the new structure is the way the game copes with the massive size of Hyrule. In point of fact, Hyrule has always been – from the very beginning – laid out as a patchwork quilt of different encounters. A monster here, a hazard there, a hidden chest here, a Great Fairy Fountain there, someone to talk to here, a town over there, a dungeon over here. The world of Hyrule is a carefully curated distribution of things to find, fight, talk to, or puzzle over. With Breath of the Wild, the sheer enormity of the world makes it far harder to maintain an even distribution of content – even allowing for 120 Shrines to discover and 900 Korok mini-puzzles. [Tears of the Kingdom is even more mind-boggling in this regard, since it features additional areas in the sky and an ‘underworld’ to explore.]

Building on the collection element introduced in Skyward Sword, where the player is rewarded for stockpiling ingredients and monster parts that are acquired from various enemies and locations, the new Zelda [andits sequel] space out monsters, group-fights, secondary bosses, Koroks, and Shrines with areas to forage for cooking ingredients and hunting zones with non-monster animals that provide meat (which is also the most effective way to earn money within the game, excluding a few mini-game exploits). The result is that as long as the player remains interested in the collection, they can set out on any route at all and discover things worth finding.

The downside to this is that as soon as the player ceases to be engaged in the collection, the intrinsic greed that originally kept them searching falls by the wayside and the longer journeys can begin to become tiresome unless the player is able to enjoy the sheer aesthetic beauty of the landscape – and this becomes much tougher when the player is intermittently accosted by enemies. In the early stages of the game, the rewards for searching are substantial since the player’s lack of capabilities makes cooking for meals and elixirs that boost their abilities or restore Hearts or Stamina utterly invaluable. As the player completes Shrines and earns Heart containers – and even more so as they acquire Stamina containers – they gain in power (as the essence of Zelda requires) but consequently lose motivation to engage in gathering. A sense of fatigue therefore sets in at some point during the process of play for almost all players (an experience remarked upon by Jed Pressgrove in his review), one that either encourages them to achieve completion and make a break from the game, or requires them to think differently about their play from then on in.

One last aspect of the new Hyrule is important to discuss: climbing. Aonuna-san, in numerous interviews in connection with Breath of the Wild, stresses the importance of the climbing experience to the game, aligning with the Japanese marketing message of “Climb, live, protect” as the essence of this new title. In the Game Kult interview, he notes:

From the beginning of the adventure, Link is able to climb high enough to allow you, once you reach the summit, to observe the landscape and head for the place that caught your eye using the paraglider. This loop made of climbing, contemplating and gliding is the essence of exploration in this Zelda, and I really wanted to make getting lost in this world a pleasure.

Although climbing has been a part of Zelda since Ocarina of Time, it takes on an entirely new meaning in Breath of the Wild both because this Hyrule has been carefully designed for it (as the above quote attests) and because of the limited Stamina. Thus, in the early stages of the game, climbing functions as a puzzle with players required to identify ledges to rest upon in order to complete difficult ascents (or, alternatively, stockpiling meals or elixirs that restore Stamina, costing the player their time and effort). Great flexibility comes into play here, with each climb offering either an environmental puzzle to solve or a logistical supply issue to address. Then, in keeping with the essence of Link as the character who gains in power as the player persists, acquiring Stamina vessels makes every climb radically more manageable, until the experienced player can effortlessly defeat any mountain in a manner parallel to the way they defeat a strong enemy, through the combination of Link having grown in power, and the player having grown in skill. Some players may object to the restrictions that Stamina applies to climbing in this game – but no-one can justifiably complain that it is not in keeping with the spirit of Zelda as a franchise.

As with Boorman’s King Arthur, Link and Hyrule are one – the capacities the player acquires for Link through their persistent overcoming of challenges and puzzles only make sense in the context of a world that yields to that increase in power. While Breath of the Wild mostly disrupts the standard Zelda model of providing new tools that grant new ways to exert increased agency, the Stamina system provides a unique way of making climbing parallel to combat and exploration, creating a Hyrule that offers more capacity for exploration and mastery than any before. In providing the player choices to apply their skills and the powers they have earned, the new game continues the traditions of the Zelda franchise, while simultaneously carving out an entirely new approach to open worlds.

Next week: Weapons

According to an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto in 2012, the original concept for the 1986 Legend of Zelda had involved the triforce being electronic chips from the future, and the hero of that game was thus a link between the past and the future. However, Eiji Aonuma, who took over the series from Miyamoto-san, provided an alternative explanation in a 2007 interview (quoted by Darrin W. Harr in a discussion of Link’s role and identity) that is more consistent with how the character has developed across the years:

When a player is playing a Zelda game, my desire is for the player to truly become Link — that’s why we named him Link, so the player is linked to the game and to the experience. Of course, the player can always change Link’s name to their own name to further that notion should they want.

On this understanding, the name ‘Link’ has a parallel to the term ‘avatar’ that, with some debt to the Ultima player character with that name, has been used to discuss the connection between players and the fictional world of games. However, the avatar concept is easily misunderstood. As I discuss in Imaginary Games, the term avatar describes the player’s capacity to act within the fictional world, but it is used most often to describe the in-game model of the player character, the doll that is being played with. Since not all videogames that allow the player agency in an imaginary world have visual representations, the avatar cannot necessarily be something visual. The term stands for the link between the player and the game – hence Link – and that can cause problems when the avatar is also a character.

Broadly speaking, there is a spectrum of approaches to the player character within videogames from a clearly defined character (in the narrative sense) that the player is invited to take on as their persona – Ryu in Shenmue is an excellent example – to a mask that the player wears that lets them act out in the world – Gordon Freeman in Half-Life, for instance, who has almost none of the qualities that would be ascribed to a character in the way this term is used in discussions of narrative, and is really only there as a surrogate for the player and not as a character, per se. Typically, this leads to a perverse schizophrenia. C.J. in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, for instance (and any other GTA player character for that matter), is a mask for most of the time the player is in the world of the game but then transforms into a character for the cut scenes. There is almost no fidelity at all between the player’s thuggish antics and CJ’s personality. In other words, a mask is an avatar through which the player acts out, while a player character is an avatar that asks the player to role-play; combining the two by distancing the player from the character (by having all narrative aspects of the character occur solely in cut scenes) is schizophrenic, although also ‘business at usual’ in contemporary videogames.

Link is a particularly interesting case because with the singular exception of Skyward Sword, Link is not developed significantly as a narrative character but functions primarily as a mask for the player to act out with. Yet Link does not fall into the schizophrenia of the GTA franchise and its imitators, nor the player-led genericism of Elder Scrolls that defines a role for the player but lets the character fulfilling that role exist solely in the player head (which, all considered, is a perfectly reasonable solution to this problem). Link is a mask who remains consistent with the character he is intended to be. In other words, Link the character – Link the denizen of Hyrule – is designed to be consistent with Link the mask – Link the avatar of the player. The alignment is never perfect, of course, but the fidelity between avatar and character in the case of Link is better than in the vast majority of games.

Tied up in this is the fact that Link is not an adult. His age in all the Zelda games varies from 9 to 17 years of age. He is never an adult, in part because no adult could be excused from the relentless smashing of pots in search of rupees (or arrows in Breath of the Wild [and Tears of the Kingdom]) that Link doggedly pursues under the player’s guidance. Link behaves badly because the player behaves badly, but everything that the player can do with Link (with any Link in any Zelda game) is consistent with this idea of who Link is, namely a rather unruly teenager. The series even disrupts the player’s expectations in this respect by occasionally having a character challenge Link about their anti-social behaviour. Thus Mila’s father in Wind Waker charges the player rupees for the pots they smash in his house – much to the shock of the player! – and Pumm, the landlord of the Lumpy Pumpkin in Skyward Sword, blows his top when the player breaks his chandelier in order to get a Piece of Heart, and indentures link into a delivery boy in order for him to repay his debt.

Of course, the reason for the close alignment between player and character in the case of Link is that the qualities that are ascribed to Link the character are either the qualities that we can expect the player to show because they are a mask (and thus free to act out) or those that the player must possess to play him effectively. In that latter case, we’re talking about qualities that players are expected to possess if they hope to succeed in most challenge-oriented videogames (which Zelda always is), but which are (uniquely) represented as the character in the case of Link. Most significant here is that Link has, as it is described in Skyward Sword, an “unbreakable spirit” – which is to say, the player must keep going, and Link is undaunted by any challenge that faces him. (Conversely, in my CRPG scripts, I sometimes have the player character comment on the absurdity of the challenges that the world is throwing at them, and mock the player’s willingness to keep participating in the charade.)

In the world of a Zelda game, Link is associated with the Triforce of Courage and the fearlessness it embodies, but as a player, no such virtue could be implied because the player is never in any risk. Rather, Link’s courage and “unbreakable spirit” is embodied in the player’s tenacity in continuing to play the game – and rewarded by Link constantly improving his capabilities as they progress together through the challenges they are facing. This is the essence of a Zelda game, as confirmed by an interview in French for Game Kult (translated by a reader at Nintendo Everything), which raises the point that Miyamoto-san (the old master) and Aonuma-san (the apprentice becoming master) had always debated what the core of The Legend of Zelda might be:

It’s indeed always a source of debate with Mr. Miyamoto, simply because we both think about what defines Zelda and we’re not always on the same page. We eventually agreed this year, when we went to New York for a promotion tour. As we were talking, Mr. Miyamoto found the right words by saying that the essence of The Legend of Zelda is an environment where Link evolves and gains power, which the players will directly feel through the actions they can take as the story goes on.

Thus the acquisition of Heart Containers in all Zelda games is symbolic of the player having overcome challenges to gain in strength, and so too with Pieces of Heart for which commitment to exploration often replaces challenge-completion. The green Magic Meter (although white in Adventure of Link where it first appears) and the green Stamina gauge that replaces it from Skyward Sword, are also typically improved by the player’s continued persistence – in Breath of the Wild, Pieces of Heart being replaced with Spirit Orbs that can be used to acquire either Heart Containers or Stamina vessels [with a parallel design in Tears of the Kingdom]. The Game Kult interview suggests that Stamina might have been adopted from Shadow of the Colossus, and Aonuma-san’s reply to this question is telling:

It’s funny that you’re mentioning this game, because we are friends with Mr. Ueda and he’s always said that he wanted to make a game like Zelda – hence the similarities in Shadow of the Colossus. Mr Ueda was kind enough to send me a copy of The Last Guardian late last year and as I was playing it, I could notice the moments when you climb on Trico’s head to find a path, and jump to reach places that were inaccessible from the height you were at. Without seeing each other or talking about it, I realize we had the same idea. It’s amusing to see we had the same inspirations, the same gameplay velleities at different times.

What can be seen here is the point made last week about the insular quality of the development practices of the Zelda team at Nintendo EAD: Aonuma-san barely plays any other games, and remains utterly embedded in the player practices of this one franchise. Shadow of the Colossus, as he alludes, has parallels to Zelda because Fumita Ueda is also participating in the player practices of Zelda; the idea that influence might have flowed in the opposite direction is effectively beyond belief for Aonuma-san.

The Stamina system is one of the most significant and divisive changes in the Zelda franchise. The conservation of player practices that underpins the design of all games creates particular challenges for an insular development community like that that makes the Zelda games each time the outcome of their process makes it out ‘into the wild’. Precisely because player practices are habits, they are conserved, but at the same time this creates resistances when players encounter constraints that they are unfamiliar with. ‘Why am I hamstrung by limited Stamina when (say) Assassin’s Creed lets me climb freely?’, the logic goes, and this resistance is apparent in Jed Pressgrove’s review of Breath of the Wild, Tim Roger’s complaints about Skyward Sword, Luke Plunkett’s commentary on his son’s responses to playing Breath of the Wild, and numerous forum posts along the same lines.

Such complaints are understandable, but arguably misguided: the Stamina system in Breath of the Wild (far more so than the one in Skyward Sword) are effective extensions of Link’s character – and are even more effective than Heart Containers at representing Link’s identity. This is because Heart Containers are something the player requires only to absorb their mistakes at playing the game, and as the player’s skill increases the usefulness of Heart Containers decreases. Conversely, there is no level of skill at which more Stamina is not more beneficial than less, and indeed experienced players almost universally argue for spending Spirit Orbs on Stamina Vessels not Heart Containers in the newest game. (I concur: in my second play through, I acquired only Stamina Vessels, and my enjoyment and appreciation for the game was greatly enhanced by this approach).

To fully explore this point, however, means to go beyond consideration of Link as a unique concordance of character and mask and to begin to look at the relationship between Link and Hyrule. For every avatar that can be considered, the relationship between world and character is essential because the avatar is what allows the player to take action inside the fictional world and the world is what responds to those actions. Thus while Link and Hyrule are two halves of the same whole, this is not a unique claim about The Legend of Zelda at all but a fundamental truth of the videogame experience: the avatar and the world are one.

Next week: Hyrule

Considering the franchise goes back more than thirty years, The Legend of Zelda is not a huge commercial powerhouse for Nintendo, as the Mario and Pokémon franchises undoubtedly have been. Despite not kicking off until 2007, more than twenty years later, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise has racked up more total sales than Zelda has in its thirty year history, some 93 million to Zelda’s 85 million. The Zelda games, however, have been hugely influential throughout their long and chequered history, inspiring Legacy of Kain, Soul Reaver, Beyond: Good and Evil, Shadow of the Colossus, Okami, Darksiders, Binding of Isaac, Hyper Light Drifter and more besides. But the real influence of these games is not felt by those that borrowed its template wholesale, but in the way professional game designers constantly check the new Zelda releases for how it will shift the landscape of videogames – make no mistake, even now, games in production are having their directions altered as a result of Breath of the Wild’s critical and commercial success. [By comparison, Tears of the Kingdom has had very little influence at all, since it mostly clones the breakthroughs achieved in its predecessor.]

This serial looks at key facets in the Zelda series, how they are used in Breath of the Wild [and Tears of the Kingdom], and the relationship this newest game has to the player practices and fictional worlds of its predecessors. My purpose is to try and reveal both the essential aspects of what makes Zelda what it is – and why that is so influential – and to apply the game design lineages method of historical analysis to Zelda in order to show how the conservation of player practices, the influence of material constraints, and the subversion of expectations through creator vision have all affected the path of this venerable franchise. Before looking at specific elements of the Zelda experience, however, it is necessary to put these games into a production perspective, by examining the circumstances outside the game that shaped the path of the series’ development.

The franchise roots are in two highly successful NES games, The Legend of Zelda in 1986 and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link in 1987. Series creator Shigeru Miyamoto wanted the second title to feel distinct from the first, presumably in part because the technical limitations of the NES meant following the same style at that time would have resulted in a very derivative game. As a result, The Adventure of Link feels like the black sheep of the series and has had little influence on the play of future games in the franchise (it borrowed much from platform games and the newly-popular JRPG lineage, kicked off primarily by Dragon Quest), although it still contributed significantly to the still-developing lore that shapes the narrative space of each Zelda game. Conversely, the original Legend of Zelda not only provides the template for its 16-bit successor, A Link to the Past, released in 1991, but also for Breath of the Wild. Featuring what has come to be known as an open world, The Legend of Zelda was actually a little late to this party, since most of the key early open world games were released in 1984 and 1985. It also seems as if the ‘openness’ of the title might have been partly a consequence of the material constraints of the NES rather than express intention: Miyamoto-sans later Zelda games, A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time, are much more locked down in their structure – a structure that had huge influence in the 3D combat and exploration games that followed.

The Legend of Zelda’s 6.5 million unit sales (which were meteoric for 1986) were not surpassed until 1998’s The Ocarina of Time, which brought the core player practices of A Link to the Past kicking and screaming into polygonal 3D, selling 7.6 million units, and (along with Super Mario 64 and GoldenEye 007) making the Nintendo 64 into a hit console. Ocarina of Time also set world records for high review scores, although personally I do not like the game very much, apart from two elements – the titular ocarina, which was perfectly designed for the controller and taught the player some actual musical skills, and the horse Epona, about which I will have more to say later in this serial. This was the first Zelda game that future franchise mastermind Eiji Aonuma worked upon, and its direct sequel, Majora’s Mask in 2000, was the first time he was handed the reigns. Far too arcane for the mainstream, Majora’s Mask’s labyrinthine temporal structure and impressionistic ending mark it out as a creative masterpiece, and it is not surprising that Miyamoto-san felt comfortable passing the franchise onto Aonuma-san, while remaining a stalking presence in the production of every Zelda game since.

It is 2003’s Wind Waker – Aonuma-san’s first major Zelda title (since Majora’s Mask was a spin-off from Ocarina of Time, reusing the same resources) – that begins to pave the way for Breath of the Wild by ‘failing’ commercially at ‘just’ 4.4 million units sold. This is actually twice what the best selling game I’ve worked on sold, and was still a good sales figure in 2003 – but on the budgets Nintendo affords a Zelda title, this was probably not much better than breaking even. The poor performance of the GameCube console was a factor here (as with the Resident Evil remake) but another problem was the choice of cel-shaded art. As Tom Hoggins touches upon in his Zelda retrospective, the choice flowed naturally out of the interior decisions guiding development but sat badly with many gamers, despite offering beautiful aesthetics throughout:

Many Zelda fans were aghast but those who fell for it fell hard, whisked away on the waves of colour. For Aonuma, the decision to switch wasn’t difficult. “Many developers were looking at ways to incorporate cel-shading into various games at the time, Nintendo too,” he says, simply. “One of the experiments was whether we could include these visuals into the world of The Legend of Zelda. When we finally decided that Wind Waker would feature child Link as the main character, we decided cel-shading was appropriate for the game and the more cheerful child-Link.”

The unique art style of Wind Waker has its own side-lineage in Zelda’s portable incarnations, Phantom Hourglass (2007) and Spirit Tracks (2009), which act as sequels. But the die was cast for the core of the franchise: the audience wanted a more realistic looking Link, and that is what they would get with 2006’s Twilight Princess, originally developed for the GameCube but then painfully reconfigured for the Wii. In the Hoggins retrospective, Aonuma-san only half-jokingly remarks that after the platform change his job was reduced to cheerleader: “From that time on, rather than actually making the game my job was to approach each staff member to convince them we could do it.” Twilight Princess was a success, setting a new high watermark for the franchise’s sales at 8.6 million units (1.6 million of which were on the ailing GameCube). This pattern was repeated two titles later with Breath of the Wild, which also launched on a troubled older platform (the struggling Wii U) as well as launching the new Switch, and by January 2018 the new game had sold an impressive 7.8 million (1.1 million of which had been on the Wii U).

Just as Twilight Princess’ heading had been altered by the sales of Wind Waker being blown off course, the radical vision for Breath of the Wild was a response to the disappointing 3.7 million units that Skyward Sword had sold in 2011. Unlike the GameCube, the Wii had a massive install base to draw against – but the majority of use that the Wii was getting that that time wasn’t with the kind of core gamers that typically buy a Zelda… The focus on newly-improved motion controls probably did not help the 25th anniversary game’s performance, since this had been something players had merely tolerated in Twilight Princess and wasn’t enough to lure them away from the PS3 and Xbox 360s that were enjoying the benefits of well-developed online services by 2011. In a GameInformer interview, Aonuma-san tells a story of how one fan’s reaction to Skyward Sword resonated with him:

There was something that fans said before starting development that changed what I thought. There was a fan that said he really, really loved Zelda. But, while playing Skyward Sword, he missed experiencing this huge world where he could just ride Epona around. During Ocarina Of Time, he really loved doing that. Somewhere within myself, I felt the same way. So for Breath Of The Wild, it’s something that I definitely thought about.

The point also came up in an interview with Aonuma-san by Mike Diver that discussed the role of fan-feedback in influencing the creative vision of the franchise:

Actually, we did have in mind, from the start of development, that we wanted to create a large, wide, expansive world. And part of the reason for that comes from the feedback we got after Skyward Sword. The way that game world was set up was that you had kind of separate areas, separate strongholds, that you'd sort of land in and explore. But they were all self-contained, and they weren't really connected together.

We listened to a lot of opinions, from people who played Skyward Sword. And a lot of people said to us how they found the game… Not exactly unsatisfying, but they wish they could have explored the areas between the strongholds. So taking that on board, from the very start of Breath of the Wild, we wanted to, and set out to, create a world that wasn't only vast, but where everything was connected. So you really could freely explore the world, without these barriers or gaps imposed.

Skyward Sword was an outstanding example of the polygonal 3D Zelda form that Ocarina of Time had popularised, with improvements over Twilight Princess in almost every significant aspect, and substantial experiments in modifying the formula – including a much more explicitly constructed narrative. Link still did not say anything the player could hear, although for the first time we saw him talking to other characters (i.e. we saw Link’s lips move), and those other characters formed a much more coherent base for storytelling (helped by the single village, Skyloft, that served as hub). Review scores for Skyward Sword were incredibly positive, but the sales did not emerge on the back of it. It is possible that nothing could have lured gamers back to setting up their Wii at this point in time, and certainly not a game that relied upon newly improved motion controls. Speaking personally, however, playing with the butterfly net in Skyward Sword was a far more compelling experience of immersive presence than VR, which relies merely upon visual illusion and is not able to overcome the limitations in controls this entails. But whatever Skyward Sword’s merits, it hadn't been enough. It was time for Zelda to take a giant leap out of its comfort zone.

In one of the few reviews of Breath of the Wild willing to take issue with its problems, Jed Pressgrove calls out a “dubious decision to draw inspiration from prototypical open-world games” seeing this as producing “a conflicted combination of marketing logic and staggering artistry.” This was, all in all, the only interesting review of the new game I’ve seen, since most have merely swooned over its ample pleasures. Jed’s review is the reason I’m writing this serial: there is indeed an aesthetic conflict within Breath of the Wild, as he alludes to, but I contend it is not the result of marketing interference (although don't get me wrong: this is a very tangible force at work in the videogame industry, and one that should never be ruled out prematurely). Jed’s only mistake is to see in Breath of the Wild problems brought about by borrowing from the open world genre lineage as codified by Grand Theft Auto III (having built upon firm foundations established by Elite back in 1984, right before the first Zelda).

However, Breath of the Wild moves into open world territory in near complete ignorance of the GTAIII open world template that fed into Oblivion, Skyrim, and all the Assassin’s Creed games. In respect of these particular games, the only evidence that Aonuma-san had played any of them is for Skyrim (e.g. in an interview for Le Monde, and also for Game Spot), and then only to get a feel for how such worlds work in practice. The other chief source of external influence upon the open world leanings appears to have been technical assistance from Monolith, who had already assisted Nintendo’s EAD developer (which makes the Zelda games) on Skyward Sword. (On a minor, pedantic note, the camera feature in the new Zelda can hardly be borrowed from other open world games – as Jed alludes – since it originates in Wind Waker.)

The bottom line is that unlike other franchises, Zelda is not beholden to marketing influence because it is a flagship franchise that exists in a strange limbo of isolation from the rest of the gaming world. Aonuma-san barely plays other games – and has little interest in making anything other than Zelda games – as this internal Nintendo interview makes clear:

As I get closer to the retirement age, people ask me if I’m ever going to make anything other than a Zelda game. And so sometimes I think maybe I should. But Zelda games really have everything in them that I would want to make in a game. The way the main character grows and develops. The puzzles and the minigames. I don’t think there’s much point in me making something other than Zelda, if I did it would only end up being something just like it. It’s a problem. So I think I’ll just keep making Zelda games!

Putting aside the billions of yen and hundreds of developers involved in making a contemporary Zelda game, at the core of this franchise – unlike any other that we know of – is the relationship of master to apprentice that has passed from Shigeru Miyamoto (age 65), to Eiji Aonuma (age 54), and is currently being passed along to Hidemaro Fujibayashi (age 45), who has worked on Zelda since 2001, firstly for Capcom on The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages for the Game Boy Color before joining Nintendo, co-directing Phantom Hourglass, and then directing both Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild. This is not how major commercial videogames are made, but it is how Zelda is made, and provides the reason that the franchise is primarily governed by the conservation of its own player practices, and the creative vision of a succession of apprentices that subverts these in subtle or radical ways in each iteration.

Over the following weeks I’ll be examining individual facets of Breath of the Wild’s game design and narrative design, situating it in the unique – and insular – game design lineage of the Zelda franchise, and showing how the new game’s content emerges from the effects of a single additional constraint: the desire to transcend Skyward Sword’s functionally-isolated wilderness segments. The resulting serial endeavours to demonstrate how to understand Link as a character (and how Breath of the Wild’s Link is consistent with that character), why Hyrule is integral to this character (in part because of the way videogames necessarily represent player characters), how the horses are simultaneously one of this Zelda games’ greatest achievements and strangest failings, and why Breath of the Wild can lay better claim to the title ‘The Legend of Zelda’ than any game before it.

Next week: Link

It’s not a great secret that I have followed the writing of Michael Moorcock for many years, and that I learned a lot about writing from his advice and techniques. One of his literally hundreds of books is Letters from Hollywood which, logically enough, is a collection of letters Moorcock wrote to his friend J.G. Ballard while he was working in Hollywood. Moorcock's experiences became truly grim and depressing while working for a particularly tyrannical director (unnamed, although a friend has told me who it is most likely to have been) – an incident which makes the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink seem not so far from real life! Moorcock’s problem was that he wanted to tell good stories. But Hollywood's not about telling good stories, it's about telling popular stories, stories that many people will pay to come and see.

Moorcock’s experience soured him to the Hollywood film industry. He says: “I admire all the good films that are made in spite of the system!” Surprisingly, Moorcock has decided to allow a film version of his Elric saga to be made, a fact which suggests to me that he is aware of his own mortality [although this project did not in the end proceed]. Many sci fi and fantasy authors only allow their films to be made when they are in their twilight years and most, like Frank Herbert, do not live to see the theatrical release. (Moorcock, incidentally, already had one of his books turned into a film, although he is not overly fond of the results). Even when you don’t like the Hollywood system, there’s still a certain majesty to the big screen that is hard to resist.

The problem with Hollywood is that it’s very good at what it does, which is make popular movies with the purpose of making money [well, it used to be good at this!]. Thankfully, part of making popular movies is occasionally trying new things, and another part of making profitable movies is capitalising all your niches - which includes avant garde art house weirdness (which does occasionally siphon funding out of the machine) and all sorts of interesting and rewarding films. I won’t cite examples – I’m sure you can find your own.

Greg Costikyan and others have complained that Hollywood tie-in games hurt the games industry. They do. Because most of them aren’t very good games, and high profile rubbish is bad for any industry. But they are an enormous help to the game industry in terms of keeping studios afloat. I reckon that at least half of game developers working today owe a debt of gratitude to Hollywood for providing funding that has seen them through tough times. I know my company would not have survived if we hadn’t had some license adaptations to work on in the rough years.

One can argue that we shouldn’t have to rely on money from Hollywood - sure, if the games industry was capable of running itself as a profitable business. But many developers (and several publishers!) have the business acumen of a block of cheese and at times its a wonder that the industry makes any money at all. In this regard, Hollywood has been very neighbourly, providing capital to keep us afloat at the cost of forcing us to supply some merchandising. It’s really not that bad a deal.

That we are receiving financial support from Hollywood is reasonably good news for many people who work in the games industry. But as the expression goes, give a games company a fish and it will eat for a day, teach a games company to fish and it will eat for a lifetime. The games industry could learn a lot from the way Hollywood has identified the key profitable niches (genres in the case of films) and then invested variably in all these genres on a year to year basis, thus providing the audience with a wealth of choice – and meeting the entertainment needs of millions of cinema goers. Complaints that most of these films are utter tosh are fair but misguided. Worthwhile, interesting and inventive films are still made, and the fact that they are in the minority can hardly be considered a surprise – I challenge anyone to name a media where this is not the case.

What have we copied from Hollywood? Well, mostly their franchise ideas. That Lara Croft was inspired by the Indiana Jones movies is a debatable but inevitable criticism; that Halo owes a vast debt to Aliens seems unavoidable. And in that particular case, the story elements of the game are much cruder than the story elements of its inspiration - and Aliens is hardly the deepest story around. We have a lot of nerve when we bitch at Hollywood when we haven’t got our own house in order when it comes to stories, although the situation is certainly improving and game writing is starting to achieve proper recognition as a craft.

Hollywood is an ally to the games industry – a dangerous ally, but any powerful ally has this element of risk. I do not believe that Hollywood has done anything to make the games industry a worse place, but the games industry has made itself a worse place by trying to copy Hollywood directly instead of understanding what works in the Hollywood model, and then adapting it to games. The narrative structures that work in a film are (in general terms) inappropriate to export to a game, the funding model for films is currently inappropriate for games – but it is the games industry itself which is making the mistakes, the film industry is largely an innocent bystander in our collective incompetence.

How many games are made which are basically agon plus fiero (competition with triumph over adversity)? 95% of our output is doing the same thing – targeting a relatively narrow demographic. That’s not how Hollywood works – they find every viable demographic and exploit them fully. That’s what commercial game development should be doing. (Don’t worry – nothing that happens on the commercial front will take away indie games, as these are made by enthusiasts, just as indie films are made by enthusiasts – and a more stable games industry should mean more money to fund indie development, that’s what happened in Hollywood eventually, although there’s doubtless room for improvement).

Moorcock’s line “I admire all the good films that are made in spite of the system!” applies equally well to games. I admire all the good games that are made in spite of the system! And our system is a mess compared to the Hollywood system. Hollywood is proficient at making popular movies for every corner of the audience with the goal of making money. We are terrible at making popular games for every corner of the audience with the goal of making money. And until we get good at this most basic economic challenge, the industry will be too unstable for us to comfortably support auteurship, expansive invention and advances in dynamic storytelling. Let’s learn from Hollywood in a manner that doesn't equate to copying their ideas and rendering them more blandly. Let’s learn to feed ourselves.

Are game scholars dismissing the importance of fiction in games?

Game studies has thus far been ideologically united by commitment to what can be called fiction denial. Fiction (setting, world, representations etc.) is gauged of lesser importance to rules, or of no importance whatsoever. The premise of this is expressed in multiple equivalent ways: that the setting and representations of a game are interchangeable and that only the mechanics are ‘eternal’ (something akin to what Raph Koster or Dan Cook occasionally suggested); that players initially engage with a game via the fiction but later this becomes unimportant (as Graeme Kirkpatrick and Jesper Juul assert); that the representation has no effect on how the player behaves (as Espen Aarseth claims). Espen gives the paradigmatic example of fiction denial when he says he wouldn’t play Tomb Raider any differently if Lara Croft had a different character model. I believe him. But isn’t this a fact about Espen Aarseth and not a fact about either Tomb Raider or its players…?

The problem goes back to the dawn of game studies – well, the first issue of Game Studies – with Juul's seminal line in the sand between games and stories. Stories, it is claimed by Juul, are already set – they occur in the past, while games happen as you play – they occur in the present. At the time, it was necessary to make this distinction to prevent game studies from being colonized by neighbouring disciplines like narratology that would have silenced the emerging voice of games. But Juul’s argument is not as plausible as it first looks. Any stage play that participates with the audience or environment (passion plays, for instance) are as much in the present as games. Furthermore, both games and stories are constructed, scaffolded, or designed before they are experienced – the player of Halo can no more prevent the ringworld from being destroyed than the reader of Ringworld can prevent the spaceship from crashing. Juul’s concerns about the problems entailed in translating books and films to games are mirrored by the problems translating games of one kind into games of another.

What I’ll call Juul's Trench is an effective defensive measure, but little more – as by Half-Real, Juul himself seems to recognize. However, the later Juul still asserts that rules are real and fiction is not, and this is precisely the ontological claim that undergirds fiction denial. The idea that rules have reality while fiction is lacking in reality inevitably places the rules into a contrast with fiction where it will always come out on top. In Imaginary Games, I tried to unseat this ontology by showing how rules and fiction are different forms of the same thing – different forms of fiction. I effectively support Juul’s division while rejecting his ontology. I don’t want to suggest that either rules or fiction are ‘more real’ than the other. To be honest, I don’t want to get into an argument over what is real at all if we can avoid it!

At heart, fiction denial wants to make the (ontological) claim that it is the game mechanics, the rules, that are the real part of the game. Graeme Kirkpatrick’s observation that players gradually see through the fiction to the rules is meant to support this assertion. While I agree that this does happen, my counter-claim is that this characterizes the experience of a particular kind of player and is not essential to games as such. Furthermore, for players who do engage with the fiction of the game fully, this ‘seeing through’ to the rules is an aesthetic flaw, not a strength, since it breaks with that nebulous experience we term immersion. From this perspective, it is not that the player ‘sees through’ the fiction, but the rules ‘tear through’ the world. Only an ironic ghost train rider wants to see the gears – or perhaps someone who makes ghost trains…

I want to make an additional claim that is more controversial: the causes of fiction denial are ideological commitments to the positivistic sciences. Some phenomena benefit from being studied in a positivist stance – chemistry, for instance. But in game studies Juul’s Trench functions to divide art from science, and to put game studies firmly into the latter camp. What a disaster for the aesthetic appreciation of games: art is excluded by the very people who extol the virtue of games! The strange and wonderful game ontology project [now discontinued] epitomizes this assumption – offering dry, ‘science-like’ terms for game mechanical features, and refusing to allow them representative terms. But it does not even achieve this (thankfully!) – ‘shoot’, ‘teleport’, ‘inventory’, these are not fiction-neutral descriptions of game elements, and hallelujah! We should not want them to be!

What fiction denial hides is the intimate connection between fiction and rules, and particularly the way the content of the fiction implies rules, and thus wedding the wrong kind of rules and fiction together creates an aesthetically displeasing game. If fiction denial were viable beyond the preferences of particular players, an interface designed for a tank could become anything. It cannot – Battlezone controls work for tanks and sci-fi or fantasy variations on the key of tank. Despite the belief that you can reskin a first-person shooter to be anything, you are always constrained to worlds in which wielding and firing a gun or a gun-substitute (a magic wand, fire breath) are central experiences.

One way to break through fiction denial is to temporarily forget the idea that game mechanics are eternal ideas, the ‘laws of physics’ for play. Instead, foreground the world, bring the fiction into focus, identify the props (the fictional objects of the game world; those things with imaginative implications) and then see how the rules support or undermine their usage. As a matter of fact, this kind of thinking was already central to the way games are designed, and has been for over a century. The FPS is the game that emerges from the gun and the first-person camera – and always would be thus. The (fictional) qualities of the gun dictate the rules that can work well with it, and thus with the players’ imagination. It is not the rules that are eternal but the fiction: no matter what rules you make, you cannot change the nature of a gun without it ceasing to be a gun.

I do not want to deny that game studies has been valuable, insightful or scholarly – it has been all this and more – I only want to deny the ideology that would mistake an individual interest in systems for an important truth about games. It is a fact about games that they attract nerds who think about systems. It is not a fact about games that the fiction is tangential to their play. On the contrary, for many players, for many games, fiction is absolutely central to the experience.

Chris Bateman: Proteus, for anyone who hasn't played it, is a game of pure exploration – the tasks in it are thinned down to the point of being very nearly non-existent. Clearly, this is by design – you’ve mentioned before how the character of the play changed when you experimented with goals (what psychologists call ‘overjustification’). I’m curious as to how you came to commit to such a wonderfully thin play experience.

Ed Key: That’s interesting that you bring up ‘overjustification’ – I’d heard about it a while ago but not really thought about it in relation to Proteus. It makes a lot of sense in that context! I can't quite put my finger on why I think this, but I’m not sure it’s the whole story: it seems like there’s a distinct feeling of exploring a world where you have neither clear goals nor any indication of where the limits of the world are. One thing that we’ve avoided is any internal system to tell the player how many animals or events are yet to be discovered.

Chris: That’s become the norm, of course, thanks to Achievements and the like, so you take something of a risk pushing against that trend (albeit an admirable risk!).

Ed: Right, precisely because of achievements! It is a risky move, but it prevents any sort of “checklist” behaviour, even though that would have a certain primal satisfaction for the player. For me this is in tune with how we approach reality outside of games, whether it’s a scientific or creative endeavour.

Chris: So instead of explicit rewards, you have more implicit pleasures from the environment – and especially in the music.

Ed: The idea of a link between surroundings and music arose in the first few emails David and I exchanged. At first I wasn't sure if this was enough to hold people’s interest but it seemed to work well enough! I’m a great believer in not adding things if they don't “stick”, and since things like inventory mechanics and survival stats seemed to reduce the sense of immersion, I always removed what little I added. Instead we aiming for a density and variety of encounters and interactions using only the “move” and “look” verbs.

Chris: That’s one of the things I truly admire about the game, although I can’t imagine it began that way! Your old tumblr website mentions a project entitled Draco as an offshoot of Proteus that “might not go anywhere”. Did you originally plan Draco, and then found that the world you were creating was interesting in its own right? Or did you set off to sculpt Proteus, and considered Draco as a possible way to apply it?

Ed: Draco is one of several small prototypes I've made since starting Proteus that are also about exploring a landscape. These are mostly turn-based and heading towards something more about survival than just experience, playing with things that didn't fit in Proteus. The oil to Proteus's water.

Chris: Can you say anything more?

Ed: Here’s an old picture [reproduced below] of what Draco looked like at one stage, although it went through many forms.

Chris: Wow, I can immediately see a connection between that and the classic Mike Singleton game, The Lords of Midnight! Were you a ZX Spectrum gamer? Was Proteus influenced by early art/games like Deux Ex Machina (1984) or Psychedelia (1984), or early playground worlds like Mercenary (1985)?

Ed: Well, I grew up with a Spectrum but didn’t play any of those at the time. One game that seems like it would fit in that list that I did play was Captain Blood. Fantastically surreal, very French game about exploring a universe and talking to aliens.

Chris: Yes, the magazines loved Captain Blood, but I never managed to find a copy myself, alas. Which other games would you say directly inspired Proteus?

Ed: I don’t think I could point to any direct inspirations in games. I’ve always been drawn to portrayals of nature in games, from Monkey Island, Morrowind, Minecraft, etc, but it’s more of a general osmosis than building on any existing game.

Chris: I think that’s a common experience. The designers who can cite specific influences, like Anna Anthropy, seem to be the exception rather than the rule. What about the abstract art style? Surely that has an 8-bit influence.

Ed: I think growing up with 8-bit games informed that. Since starting on Proteus I learnt a lot about colour theory and abstraction in the fine art world, but I’m still learning.

Chris: You cite as inspiration the work of one of the Taoist philosophers, Master Zhuang, and you’re also friends with one of the British druids. I wondered about how these mythological themes fed into Proteus, and whether you see it as having a mythic dimension. Proteus almost seems to be a love poem to the natural world (including, to some extent, humans) – the sort of thing that can be found in great abundance in Chinese and Japanese poetry. Is there a conscious connection here?

Ed: Definitely! Proteus is absolutely a kind of wordless poem about the world and a certain way of looking at things. David and I had lots of long philosophical discussions over Skype about modes of experience, how meaning arises, and that sort of thing. Another big influence, especially on David’s side, is “A Voyage To Arcturus” by David Lindsay.

Chris: I know the book although I’ve never read it – it’s considered to be hugely influential, though, as it was published way back in 1920. Tolkien was supposedly a fan.

Ed: Yes, it’s this totally unique proto-sci-fi philosophical adventure story about a journey to another planet where the hero grows and sheds different sensory organs as he travels through different regions. It also features two new primary colours (jale and ulfire) and a Primer-like timetravel paradox.

Chris: You call it a game/plaything – are you uncomfortable considering it a game/artwork? Did you feel you had to qualify “game” because so many gamers expect goals and challenges when they hear that word?

Ed: These days I’m less shy about calling it a game than I used to be. I’ll definitely qualify it with some extra verbiage if the situation seems to warrant it, as I don’t want people to go into it thinking it’s something that it’s not, but I’m now pretty happy with saying it’s a game, especially as I’ve had so many votes of confidence since then.

Chris: Personally I don’t even see it as that close to the boundaries, to be honest – there is a definite game-like structure in operation, and tangible (yet subtle!) rewards in the soundscape (I always stop to chase a magic frog!). But people can be terribly protective of the term ‘game’ and can get quite angry about violations of their notions of gameness.

Ed: In a way it doesn't matter – for the most part I find the “what is a game” discussions pretty tedious and limiting. Most of the time these articles boil down to the author’s personal preference, and maybe some kind of anxiety about the status of the medium.

Chris: This was precisely the thrust of my Implicit Game Aesthetics serial [later published as a paper], which excavates aesthetic value judgements in people’s definitions of the word ‘game’. The blurring of the boundaries of gameness is not something new, as something like Deus Ex Machina on the Spectrum showed. The magazines refused to give it a review score, and the same happened with Geoff Crammond’s The Sentinel (1986) even though these days no-one would doubt for a moment that it was a game.

Ed: Yes, there have always been “games that aren't really games”, like Cowboys and Indians and Snakes and Ladders. Maybe even the more free-form D&D style “isn't a game”.

Chris: I prefer to go the other way on this and throw the term as wide as possible. If freeform role-playing games aren’t games then I may never have played a game in my life, since that is how I try to play in all game worlds!

Ed: Probably the main reason for calling it a game is that it’s a nice short word that doesn’t sound too overblown, compared with “ambient experience” or whatever.

Chris: Yes, and Proteus is extremely rich in ambient experience. For anyone such as myself who is open to its low-res visual aesthetic, it’s stunningly beautiful. When I played the latest build for the first time, I cried. Now admittedly I’m an old softy and it doesn't take much to make be blubber, but I've never had a videogame reduce me to tears just because it was so beautiful. I wonder – do you really appreciate just how special Proteus is?

Ed: Wow! I guess I’ve realised that a lot of people really like it!

Chris: Doug Wilson over at ITU Copenhagen has also heaped praise on it, and suggested that it's an important title – I heartily agree with him.

Ed: Doug has definitely been tireless about spreading the love for it.

Chris: I refer to Proteus in a forthcoming paper on game aesthetics alongside artistically motivated games such as The Graveyard and Journey – have you ever seen yourself as an artist or a creator of art?

Ed: As someone who’s lived with this thing for over three years as it slowly grew, it’s really hard to have an objective view of it, but I’m proud that we stuck to our principles and created something with very few compromises. In that sense I do have to consider it “art”, even though the word has some baggage attached – going back to the whole “are games art” debate that was so fashionable recently.

Chris: I hope that my philosophy book Imaginary Games is the nail in the coffin of the counter-arguments to games qualifying for artistic status – but perhaps a lively argument never dies! What about your contribution to this, though: are you comfortable having made something that is going to be used to help defend games as an artistic medium?

Ed: I’m definitely happy with Proteus finding a use in that way!

Proteus is available on Steam and other platforms.

Why do publishers seem to thrive while developers fall by the wayside? Perhaps it is because publishers are obsessively focussed upon what is required for their own survival, while developers generally just want to make games.

Although I am not well versed in economics, it seems to me that all business is about purchasing lottery tickets. These tickets vary as to their price (the cost of investment), the chance of winning (the risk) and the payout (the return on investment). In broad strokes, the dominant strategy is therefore to minimise risk and maximise payout. Unfortunately, it transpires that every project has a certain risk attached, and this can never be eliminated, nor accurately predicted. The payout is similarly difficult to ascertain in advance. Once this is realised, the dominant strategy shifts: buy as many (low risk) lottery tickets as you can find.

Indeed, it has been demonstrated that the safest form of gambling is the stock market. Buying a diverse portfolio of shares is akin to buying many mid to low risk lottery tickets.

Publishers flourish (generally) because they work on the basis of portfolios of games (or in other media, of books, films, TV shows etc.) Since the risk and payout of individual projects cannot be known in advance, having a handful of lottery tickets is the safest approach. Several will fail, but if you have balanced your portfolio well enough, sufficient numbers will succeed to allow for an overall profit. The more steps the publisher takes to minimise risk (for example, by purchasing a license - sports, film, celebrity, TV etc.), the better the chance that the portfolio will show significant profit and the publisher will survive.

Developers wither (generally) because they tend to lack the resources to work on multiple game projects. They usually work on single game projects. They believe that this will work, because they know the game they are making is "good", by which it should be understood that they are making a game they want to play. In effect, developers expend great time and effort to manufacture a single lottery ticket - often one with high risk and low payout. Some get lucky. Most fail.

In the indie community, the situation is slightly better in that the cost of building a new lottery ticket is lower. Also, because the price of the tickets is lower, the returns can be much lower and still imply a profit - which is in effect a means of minimising risk. But still, the indie developers that succeed are those which either manage to get a portfolio together – PopCap I salute you! [That’s pre-EA PopCap I was talking about!] – or those that happen upon a “golden ticket”. These latter souls often still fail in the end, because very few individuals are ever fortunate enough to find multiple “golden tickets”.

The number of game designers who have founded multiple successful franchises can be counted on the fingers of one hand – even if you lost a few fingers in a farming accident.

Against this backdrop, I find myself reluctant to make games that cost more than a fairly modest amount to make, and I find myself constantly looking for new business models that might be applied to development to increase the chances of survival. But as development costs rise, the situation for developers becomes gradually worse unless they give up on making their own games and begin manufacturing products tailored for publishers (not an appealing prospect for many people). Intuitively, alliances could mitigate risks, but alliances between developers seem difficult to broker. Developers want to make the games they want to make. All other matters are secondary – even their own survival.

I doubt this situation is going to change any time soon.

Since I brought this up in my talk at XP Game Summit in May, I thought it might be nice to revisit my original post about the escalator!

A game should possess a clarity of purpose. If it is not clear what the player should be doing, the game has an insurmountable problem. Even games in which you are given a completely open hand only work if this freedom is successfully conveyed to the player. Even games in which the core play is devising what to do only work if the player is sufficiently confident that this is what they are supposed to be doing. Does your game have a clarity of purpose?

When I attended the talk by Pac-man's creator back at GDC 2004, I wasn't expecting the session to develop an almost mystical quality in me. Japanese is an unusual language in that it prefers implication to statement – a quality that often makes it rather hard to translate into the languages of more literal cultures. However, it also meant that Iwatani-san’s presentation was not a carefully structured thesis, but a codex of personal experience centred on the design process behind a hugely popular and successful game. It was the most moving experience I’ve had at any GDC, but it took me some time to completely internalise it.

The image of the escalator was perhaps the most cryptic element of the talk. Iwatani-san asked the audience for their thoughts on what made the escalator a "perfect system"; this audience participation further obfuscated his purpose in choosing this icon. Indeed, at least one report (unless my memory fails me – which it does from time to time) erroneously supplies my suggestion (voiced on the day) as to the strength of the escalator: that even when broken it is still functional, as a broken escalator is a staircase. Only some time afterwards did the gentle zen like effect of the talk finally settle into my mind, and I successfully decoded Iwatani-san’s intended message.

The beauty of the design of the escalator is that anyone can immediately see how to use it. No prior experience, no specialist skills, no instructions are necessary. One can tell from looking at it what is expected. This was the same concept that motivated the design of Pac-man: clarity of purpose. Does your game have clarity of purpose?

International Hobo’s Founder and Chief Consultant, Chris Bateman, is presenting next week at XP Game Summit in Toronto on the topic of The Innovation Paradox:

Everyone wants to make games that are easy to learn, yet also inventive and original. These goals are inevitably in tension: the more you innovate, the harder it becomes for players to learn your game. But the reverse is also true – games that teach effortlessly by doing nothing new are quickly forgotten. Balancing these extremes is a crucial skill for game developers.

This tension reframes the long‑standing friction between game designers and marketing teams. Designers push for inventive changes that marketing often struggles to position as selling points. Meanwhile, designers feel constrained by marketing’s preference for aligning with familiar styles, which can feel unoriginal. Both sides genuinely value originality – they just define it differently.

Designers need to learn that marketing’s instincts aren’t wrong, they’re just poorly communicated. Returning to the original meaning of ‘unique selling point’ offers a way to deliver innovation while keeping the learning curve manageable. The trick is to ask a different question: which player practices are we borrowing...?

Chris will be on at 12 noon on Thursday 21st May 2026. If you’re at the summit, do come along and say hello!

What is ludus? What is a game? Are these two questions related? Is ludus synonymous with rules? What is the relationship between rules and games, and must games expressly possess rules? Because of the flexibility of language, these questions might not possess absolute answers. In tackling ludus, we have no choice but to indulge in philosophical discussions, because ludus exists in the abstract realm of ideas, and cannot be measured or otherwise objectively analysed. How then are we to understand ludus?

In 1958, the eclectic French intellectual Roger Caillois identified four patterns of play - Agon (competition), Alea (chance), Mimicry (simulation), and Ilinx (vertigo), about which I have written previously at some length. Caillois' model for play also includes an axis of distinction, between the anarchy of spontaneous play called paidia, and the more formal, rule-focused state he refers to as ludus. He describes ludus as follows:

A primary power of improvisation and joy, which I call paidia, is allied to the taste for gratuitous difficulty that i propose to call ludus, in order to encompass the various games to which, without exaggeration, a civilising quality can be attributed...

In general, the first manifestations of paidia have no name and could not have any, precisely because they are not part of any order, distinctive symbolism, or clearly differentiated life that would permit a vocabulary to consecrate their autonomy with a specific term. But as soon as conventions, techniques, and utensils emerge, the first games as such arise with them: e.g. leapfrog, hide and seek, kite-flying, teetotum, sliding, blindman's buff, and doll-play. At this point, the contradictory roads of agon, alea, mimicry and ilinx begin to bifurcate. At the same time, the pleasure experienced in solving a problem arbitrarily designed for this purpose also intervenes, so that reaching a solution has no other goal than personal satisfaction for its own sake.

This condition, which is ludus proper, is also reflected in different kinds of games, except for those which wholly depend upon the cast of a die. It is complementary to and a refinement of paidia, which it disciplines and enriches. It provides an occasion for training and normally leads to the acquisition of a special skill, a particular mastery of the operation of one or another contraption or the discovery of a satisfactory solution to problems of a more conventional type.

At this point we must pause and clarify that in talking about ludus here we are talking specifically of Caillios’ ludus; the term can and is applied by other people, and therefore (like all words) has diverse meanings and definitions. Here we are talking solely about what Caillois meant when he said ludus (or what we suppose that he meant), and looking at what this means in the context of the modern games industry.

A few key phrases are worth repeating, in order to understand what it was that Callois was speaking of:

• Ludus implies “...a taste for gratuitous difficulty”

• The early stages of ludus allow for “...the pleasure experienced in solving a problem arbitrarily designed... reaching a solution has no other goal than personal satisfaction for its own sake”

• Ludus provides for “...the acquisition of a special skill, a particular mastery...”

Firstly, let us consider the idea that ludus implies intentional difficulty, because this is clearly stated. Why should this be so? A simple example will serve to elucidate. When children kick around a ball, this is paidia to Caillois; it has no explicit rules, and its play is defined by the inherent properties of kicking a ball. This is principally the physics of gravity, friction, and air resistance and so forth, all of which are implicit (properties of the universe) and not explicit (properties assigned by human agency).

However, suppose that they add to their play a single vertical post – perhaps it is a broom handle stuck into the ground – and begin to play in order to see who can hit the broomstick with the ball. Here, the task has been made harder, for it is clearly easier to hit a ball than it is to hit a specific target with a ball. This is what I believe Callois refers to when he talks of ‘gratuitous difficulty’: the addition of rules which by their very existence increase the difficulty of the play.

Of course, increasing difficulty can be fun. Following Csikszentmihalyi’s model of Flow, if the challenge is significantly less than capabilities, boredom results. Therefore, the addition of rules in this way (the application of ludus) can reduce boredom – it provides a sufficiently entertaining challenge. In adding such rules, however, especially in this early transition from paidia to ludus, it is important that the challenge remains attainable. If the goal were to kick the ball such that it would balance atop the broomstick, it would be beyond anyone’s realistic expectation to succeed, and frustration would naturally result.

In this way, then, we can see ludus as the tempering of paidia with restrictions such that a sufficient level of challenge is maintained. ‘Gratuitous difficulty’ should not be interpreted as ‘challenges beyond reasonable chance of success’ but rather the imposition of sufficient difficulty as to render the activity rewarding.

This ties in with Caillois’ comment about “the pleasure experienced in solving a problem arbitrarily designed”. This should not be taken to mean solely an intellectual problem (such as a crossword puzzle, or a chess game), but rather, a challenge of any kind, solved in the manner appropriate. The challenge of hitting the broomstick with a ball is a physical challenge requiring co-ordination of one’s feet, but it is still “a problem arbitrarily designed.”

This then is why ludus leads to “the acquisition of a special skill, a particular mastery” – because any challenge thus constructed requires specific skills to resolve: in the case of the ball and the broomstick, the skills of ball control which are also the skills used in the game of football (soccer to some) and its derivatives. Similarly, the skills acquired in learning to play a game of Chess are the skills of state space searching, which are also used in chequers and in some games of solitaire.

Ludus can thus be seen as being a synonym for the explicit rules of a game, which include the rules by which play proceeds (or rather, the limits of what is allowed), the rules that define the goals of the game (or any scoring mechanism, which is merely a more complicated form of goal structure) and the rules which dictate the allowable properties of the components of play (the size and weight of a ball, or the dimensions of the playing field).

However, in the transition to the realm of videogames we are faced with a certain problem. We have thus far considered the qualities of play in paidia to be the implicit properties of the system involved – the physics of the ball, for instance – and only the human-applied rules which temper this basic behaviour qualify as part of the realm of ludus.

In a videogame, there are strictly no implicit qualities: the entire system is comprised of programming code, and are thus quite literally explicit. Should we therefore consider all aspects of a videogame to be ludus? I do not believe this is consistent with how Caillois employed the term.

Let us consider a specific example in the form of a generic platform game. The game consists of a world in which the player guides their avatar, primarily through the utility of a jump ability, and secondarily through the use of other abilities awarded through play. Their goal is the acquisition of certain tokens by one or more mechanisms. Enemies populate the world, and can interfere with the avatar’s activities.

Which of these elements fit the definition of ludus?

The avatar’s movement in the world, on foot or by jumping, are inherent abilities possessed throughout the game, and seem analogous to the basic abilities one might possess in the real world. In playing a game of jumping, such as hopscotch, we can scarcely consider the jumping to be part of the explicit rules – rather, it is part of the implicit substructure of the universe in which the game is played. I contend that these basic avatar abilities are similarly part of the implicit substructure of the game world. That these abilities were defined by human agency during the development of the game is tangential (in discussing hopscotch, we did not need to turn to discussion of God or natural selection in order to appreciate that jumping was an implicit property of the players).

The secondary abilities gained are similarly considered. When a player interacts with a ball, they have new abilities as a consequence of the properties of the ball, but the addition of the ball would not normally be considered ludus. The only exception to this might be if the ball was acquired as a consequence of an imposed rule – for instance, the player must jump and balance upon a stool in order to earn the right to kick the ball. We are here in a strange middle ground – since we must consider whether the abilities gained are gained by rule or simply emerge as a consequence of the world.

The goal, and the resultant play of collecting tokens, is the only element which we can unambiguously assign to rules, and hence to ludus. Here we see the embodiment of ‘gratuitous difficulty’ for in the positions of the tokens the challenges have been laid out for the player to both find, and to solve.

The enemies are in a similarly ambiguous state as the secondary abilities. Should one consider these as implicit in the world, or explicit problems to overcome? In a real world setting, a game involving (say) catching butterflies would not consider the butterflies themselves to be a product of ludus, and the only ludic elements would therefore be any rules or restrictions applied (such as the rule that the person who collects the most butterflies wins). But on the other hand, if one were to construct a mechanical dog as a component in a game – perhaps one that snaps at passers by, and thus they are out – would we not consider this to be an added difficulty, and therefore a ludic element…?

What is apparent in this consideration of the specifics of a typical platform game is that the boundary between ludus as Caillois defines it and the game world is extremely subjective. We know (or believe we know) how the real world is comprised and behaves – at least to a degree sufficient to play within it. But in a game world, the behaviour is defined by the developers of the software. To consider the abstractions of the game world as ludic elements is almost to suggest that God (or something equivalent) contributed ludic elements to the universe. [Some Hindu theology does actually lean this way!] But these are not the purpose of these elements (such as gravity) but rather these inherent elements are co-opted to play because they exist.

I wish to suggest, therefore, that we can choose to determine a distinction between the substructure of a game world (the physical laws of the world) and the infrastructure of the game rules (the rules of the game or games played within this world). This is a distinction between the nature of the game world, and the nature of the ludus (rules) of the game. Sadly, we can never draw this line precisely because the boundary between the structure of the game world and the rules of the games played within it is inherently ambiguous. But as Wittgenstein has suggested: “Many words in this sense then don’t have a strict meaning. But this is not a defect. To think it is would be like saying that the light of my reading lamp is no real light at all because it has no sharp boundary.”

What does this mean for a highly abstracted game, such as a turn based strategy game? Here, the substructure of the game world is unlike the substructure of the real world. It consists, for instance, of a series of squares (or hexes et al) within which the components of the game are capable of moving about. Furthermore, are we to consider the properties of the individual units to be originating in ludus or in the game world? Since the individual units have natural properties, and these properties do not in themselves appear to comprise ‘problems arbitrarily designed’ we might be tempted to exclude these from ludus. But in point of fact, the units in such a game can be seen as representing ‘problems arbitrarily designed’. After all, in a game of Chess, do the problems inherent in each move not originate in the properties of the pieces?

Games of this style, therefore – such as Chess, turn-based strategy games, non-real time cRPGs, game-like simulations and so forth – should be considered highly ludic games. Their world is defined in a fashion in which it is much harder to separate the game world from the game rules (the ludus) and therefore we can choose to consider these to be wholly ludic in their construction.

What, then, makes the world of the platform game so different? I contend it is that the world resembles the world of our every day experience, and as such, we interpret those elements of the world which most strongly resemble the world of our experience as being part of the substructure of the game world. Why should we make such distinction? Because in paidia, we play freely because we subconsciously accept the properties of everyday life (such as movement, jumping, gravity), and even in a game world we can accept these things subconsciously if they resemble that with which we are most familiar.

We will never entirely eliminate the subjective element in distinguishing between the framework of the game world and the ludus of the game, but in tying the game world to the expectations for which we are biologically pre-programmed to accept, we can at least minimise the need to debate the boundary conditions. The behaviour of a car in a racing game can be considered substructural because it follows our expectation, while the conditions of the race itself are ludic; the behaviour of a unit in a strategy game is ludic because we must always learn explicitly what that behaviour might be, we can never imply it. Note here that the understanding of the behaviour of a car is a cultural artefact, and not a universal, which further underlines the subjectivity at the core of this distinction.

Ludus, therefore, in Caillois’ sense, is a measure of artificial complexity, and therefore of imposed challenge and difficulty. The more ludic a game, the more complex its components (and the more learning is implied), and the more difficult the play of the game. The more ludic a game, the more and different skills that might be learned – and perhaps too, the more intrinsic to the game these skills become.

When one masters a strategy game, one learns nothing of what is required to play a first person shooter, and vice versa, although of course the ludic elements of the continuum of games are so interbred as to provide more crossover than might perhaps be expected. To give a more specific example, learning the power sequences for specific pokémon provides no benefit when you play a different cRPG, despite the fact that there is considerable crossover in the basic mechanics of any given cRPGs. The ludus that defines each pokémon is specific to a Pokémon game.

The least ludic games are therefore those whose substructure is most akin to our conventional reality, and the most are those which are comprised of many layers of rules and strictures. We might therefore consider the platform game to be quite low on the ludic scale, with a first person shooter perhaps being similarly light in its ludic components, while a cRPG is relatively high upon the ludic scale, and a typical strategy game higher still. Real time strategy games lurk in a middle ground, being highly ludic, but less complex than the turn based strategy games which disappear into an esoteric realm of their own construction.

And what of sporting games? These are highly ludic – but the barrier of learning their peculiar rules is usually mitigated by the fact that those that play the videogame versions are in general fully cognisant of these rules. Since we have been unable to eliminate the subjective effects of culture, one must be tempted to place these lower down the ludic scale than cRPGs and strategy games, since the rules of these games are practically a cultural inheritance. In this, as in any discussion of ludus, there is sufficient subjectivity as for debate to be both possible, and simultaneously quite unlikely to be productive.

Returning to Caillois, the following paragraph succinctly encapsulates the role of ludus:

What I call ludus stands for the specific element in play the impact and cultural creativity of which seems most impressive. It does not connote a psychological attitude as precise as that of agon, alea, mimicry or ilinx, but in disciplining the paidia, its general contribution is to give the fundamental categories of play their purity and excellence.

Indeed, this notion of purity is intimately intertwined with ludus, and those games which express ludus most strongly (including state space games such as Chess, and strategy games of all kinds) are in many respects pure games, or pure ludic games (which need not be a tautology). They barely contain the capacity for paidia at all, because they have no game world substructure, and it is here – in the implicit components of a world – that paidia thrives. They are so far up the ludic scale as to be all but incapable of paidia.

Ludus, as described by Caillois, is a measure of the complexity of a game system, and the challenges and difficulties inherent to those systems. Ludus refers to rules, and also to those abstract properties of systems which function as rules in defining the extent and nature of the interactions possible within the game space. Ludus is abstract and intellectual, whereas paidia is informal and visceral. Ludus describes that which we generally consider a game, whereas paidia describes that which we generally consider play.

Videogames can encapsulate both ends of this continuum. The ludic extreme has already been thoroughly explored, and arguably it is time for us to commit more certainly to exploring the other end of the scale, where paidia is dominant. But then again, the realm of ludus is so vast as to be effectively infinite, and perhaps we will never exhaust the possibilities inherent in the limitless realm of play defined by ludus.

If you enjoyed these pieces on Caillois’ Patterns of Play, please take the time to leave a comment! Thank you.

Where do games begin? In the anarchy of paidia, we play without rules and without limits. It is amusing, creative and chaotic, but it is also short lived, as when the natural play of a toy becomes formalised, it becomes a game. Children find paidia in every corner of their lives, while adults may struggle to ever make it back to a place where they will permit themselves the freedom to play. But if we can construct games that harness paidia, we might become able to make games for a wider audience than we ever thought possible.

In 1958, the eclectic intellectual Roger Caillois identified four patterns of play - agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and ilinx (vertigo). Caillois was aware that these patterns did not cover the entire spectrum of play, but was working towards a sociological model, relating these games to the way societies are organised. Caillois' model for play also includes an axis of distinction, between the formal, rule-focused state of ludus and the anarchic state of spontaneous play he refers to as paidia. He describes paidia as follows:

[Games] can also be placed on a continuum between two opposite poles. At one extreme an almost indivisible principle, common to diversion, turbulence, free improvisation, and carefree gaiety is dominant. It manifests a kind of uncontrollable fantasy that can be designated by the term paidia. At the opposite extreme, this frolicsome and impulsive exuberance is almost entirely absorbed or disciplined by a complimentary, and in some respects inverse, tendency to its anarchic and capricious nature... I call this second component ludus.

(I conjugate 'ludus' to the adjective 'ludic', and 'paidia' to the adjective 'paidic'; I believe language is flexible enough to absorb my reckless conjugations.)

I have accused game designers of being remiss in overlooking the value of alea (games of chance) but we are, on the whole, prone to overlook paidia completely. This is not surprising: the game designer's craft is generally about producing the framework of play, which is to say the rules and abstractions that define the game world and its gameplay. In essence, the game designer works in the field of ludus, and this application of ludic elements is a contrary state of affairs to paidia.

One can see paidia most clearly when a group of children enter a garden, or a playground, or any similar place. In fact, for a child who is young enough, we see paidia wherever they are placed – although if parents and friends have not been careful in ‘childproofing’, tears may result. It begins with exploration, the examination of everything that the play space contains. The components of the play space can include physical objects (a ball, a stick, a daisy), physical spaces (an open field, a long path), logical spaces (the lines drawn out for a sporting match, for instance) and other people (typically a child's peer group). Different children will approach these potential toys in different ways.

In some respects, this moment is the purest expression of paidia, since the instant a course of action evolves, ludus begins to express itself. Indeed, play is arguably always on a journey from paidia to ludus, although it would be wrong to think that it cannot also travel back towards paidia – as when a group discard a tedious boardgame rule because it doesn't suit the way they want to play.

What may happen in our hypothetical playground? A child picks up the stick. It has heft and weight. They may begin to hit things with it (a form of ilinx), or they may see it as a sword and begin to act out a little fantasy (a form of mimicry). A daisy may invite a child to pull off its petals, one by one – perhaps chanting “he loves me, he loves me not” or some similar rhyme (a form of alea). A child in an open field may be filled with a spontaneous desire to run (especially downhill! – ilinx again), which might evolve into a form of agon if other children decide to join in with her running, or they may use the space to spin around rapidly (invoking ilinx). Lines on the ground may invite a child to try and walk and balance along them, or suggest simple games.

Some activities will prove more fun than others. Hitting objects with a stick is more fun if everyone around you is laughing about it, for instance. The infinite possibilities of paidia become mediated by the pragmatics of interaction. If the same group regularly return to the same playground, patterns of play will develop... expressions of ludus will gradually mediate the initial anarchy. Indeed, if the children have already learned simple games, they may turn straight to these ludic patterns (depending, of course, on their personality, mood and inclinations).

Pure paidia, then, is short lived – but the impulse for paidia can exert itself at all scales of ludus. Whenever we are given a set of rules for play, it can be fun to explore what happens when those rules are bent, overlooked, or replaced, although the group must be willing. The more that a form of play is repeated, the more likely it is to become more formally expressed – this is the journey from paidia towards ludic play – but paidia can re-exert itself as a temporary escape from the rules at any time.

The journey from paidia to ludus arguably culminates in sports – which are ludic patterns so formalised that there are professionals hired to enforce the rules (referees). Sports are so formal that they contain rituals such as anthem singing, coin tossing, employment drafts and so forth which have insinuated themselves into their ludic and social structure. As rituals that divert tribal conflict impulses into harmless agon, they are of enormous social significance.

Hobbygames can provide more complex ludic structures than sports, but their cultural effects are limited because their appeal is constrained to those with a love of intricacy. Another key distinction here is that hobbygames are designed, whereas sports evolve from organic paidia. This in part explains why sports can have such esoteric rules. I love American football, but it’s rules are the epitome of arcana, and the Offside rule in football (soccer to some) is famously obscure.

Raph Koster expressed his view that paidia activities generally have more rules not less:

Paidia generally “imports” rulesets derived from a vast array of cultural assumptions, whereas ludus games are ones that have been tightly defined down (and which nonetheless have an assortment of rules that are implied but not stated that are part of the cultural practice of game playing). A game of freeform roleplay (a paidia-mimicry game) is, to my mind, an incredibly difficult challenge involving the learning of and successful navigation of an enormous variety of rules that are no less strict for being unspoken. Often, it’s a process of defining the rules in accordance with cultural assumptions as you go... Our lives are constantly circumscribed by rules; paidia games are about learning what they are and modeling them.

I freely accept that for introverted people, the extroverted play of freeform role-play can be a difficult social challenge. It is an example of how real world role-playing games help people develop their social skills (which supports Raph’s view of games as learning mechanisms). However, the social rules Raph refers to still apply in ludic tabletop role-playing games: the freeform game is simply a small step back towards paidia.

The notion of social rules is an important topic in sociological fields such as social constructionism. But on examination these ‘rules’ are not necessarily ludic structures but rather patterns of distinction between what is normal or acceptable behaviour and what is abnormal or unacceptable. Few game rules take this form. Although I concur that we can model society as a game, I do not share Raph’s view that paidia games are principally about learning or modeling social rules.

For instance, one of my favourite paidia games is Sink, immortalised in the pages of the Principia Discordia. This is a natural play activity which is enjoyed by children (and child-like adults) anywhere there is a large body of water: you throw something that floats into the water, then you attempt to sink it by throwing other stuff at it. Highly recommended! Children do not need to be taught the game, and the game has nothing to do with society, rather the play is the implicit consequence of its elements: a body of water, something that floats, and stones. This is the essence of pure paidia to my mind.

Another paidic activity I enjoy (and have mentioned here before) is making dams out of sand; once again, the play emerges naturally as an implicit consequence of the components of play – in this case, a stream and sand or mud. I am considering in the future hosting a game designer’s retreat based on paidic beach activities: dams, sink and watching sandcastles destroyed by the encroaching tide. [I never did this, but it would have been fun!]

Paidia need not be the provision of children – but when do adults permit themselves the freedom to engage in unadulterated play? I conjecture they do so when they feel safe. This is not only in the sense of physical safety (the absence of risk of injury) but also of psychological safety (the absence of risk of frustration or embarrassment, for instance). Some adults rarely if ever permit themselves such luxuries, but most can be coaxed.

I notice that those with a technical bent indulge in paidia when they get a new gadget. Although a small few will read manuals first, many will launch themselves into experimentation: what does this do? I wonder what happens if I do this? Is there a way I can do this? This is a form of paidia, at least until the structure of the device’s interface or controls become apparent – until they learn to play the gadget’s game.

The same thing happens when a player sits down at a videogame for the first time – but again, only if they feel safe to experiment. This safety can come from game literacy (experience with games), or from a friend or relative standing by to provide advice and support, or just from personal self confidence. Any budding game designer should spend the time to see people with very little videogame experience tackle a game for the first time. When a player begins to play, they commence with the paidia that evolves naturally from experimentation.

At GDC 2005, Ramon Romero of Microsoft’s Games User Research showed footage of various random people playing games for the first time. I was particular touched by the middle aged man who drove around in Midtown Madness as if he was playing a driving simulator. “This is a great game,” he said, as he stopped at a red light and waited for it to change. He had not interpreted the game world as a place exclusively for agon, but had instead automatically tended towards mimicry. What a shame that this particular game did not support this mode of play!

In our hypothetical playground, the children develop from pure paidia to some ludic elements in an organic fashion. In a game world, the transition from paidia to ludus is mediated by the game design. The player finds their avatar in an area with certain elements. The player experiments. If they are highly game literate, they may immediately know what to do, because most games are highly derivative of one another, but as a general case this is unusual.

Suppose the player comes across a ball as the first thing they find in the game world. They want to pick it up and throw it. But how do they do this? They experiment. They push buttons at random and see what happens. If the game is effective at supporting paidia, fun things will happen – they may or may not end up throwing the ball, depending upon the design of the game. They might find that one button causes them to roll on the ground, and this might be entertaining in itself. If throwing the ball is an easy action to deduce, they will eventually do it. If not, they may conclude that it cannot be done. Gradually, the player learns the game rules: ludus is enforced upon them. If throwing the ball is essential to progress, the player may have to be taught to throw it. The necessity of learning is a consequence of enforced ludus in this instance; in the real world, working out how to throw the ball would not be a factor – you’d just do it.

It follows, therefore, that to support paidia we need to encourage and allow for the player’s capacity to experiment freely, and assist the player to express the most obvious implied actions for each game element. This is an unusual situation – a videogame requires formal rules or procedures to exist, but if we want the player to play freely, we need to construct these rules in a form that supports self-expression (or the illusion of self-expression, created by anticipating the most likely free choices and implementing them). There are two principle ways I believe this can be achieved: simplicity and exhaustive attention to detail.

If the game is simple enough in its conception that free play is automatically supported, which arguably happens with Katamari Damacy, a form of paidia results. There is nothing especially complex to learn, so the player has the freedom to play (at least until the goal-orientation of the games' structure imposes). Lego Star Wars benefits similarly from its simplicity (it had to be simple if a parent and child were to play together; most parents are rubbish at games!). The player does not actually have the freedom to do whatever they want, but rather the natural tendencies suggested by the game elements encourages the player to act in a manner consistent with the intended play. Both games are considerably more paidic than we have come to expect from the current games industry.

Alternatively, the makers of the game can invest the time and money to add additional play elements wherever they naturally occur. Part of the success of the Grand Theft Auto games is that attention has been paid to supporting the natural paidia of the environment. A taxi suggests the mimicry of being a taxi driver – so this behaviour is added. Bystanders and weapons suggest murderous carnage – and behaviour is added to the game to support this form of paidia (only suitable in a game!). Sadly, a great deal has been added with excessive emphasis on ludic fiero (the emotion of truimph over adversity), so the appeal still has its limits, but nonetheless, the playground world that the team builds with each successive GTA iteration supports more and more paidia – more and more free play. This approach is devastatingly expensive, however.

There is nothing wrong with highly ludic games, and these will always have an audience, but if we truly wish to aspire to the mass market audience that upper market budgets imply we need to spend more design and implementation time focusing on the issues of minimising how much the player must learn and maximising how much the player can simply play. This involves simplifying the interface as much as is humanly possible and (possibly) the addition of intelligently organised context-sensitive elements. It may also involve adding behaviour to the game elements to support any obviously implied play actions – thus transforming the game world into a play world. [Nintendo were the only company to actually pursue this strategy, but it paid off for them in spades with the Wii!]

This latter process is not principally a (strategic) game design problem, but a (tactical) game tweaking problem ideally requiring observation of new players with the game (what we call ‘blind testing’). If you have ever wondered why certain hallowed game developers no longer seem as good as they once were, I suspect it is because they no longer have the money to pay for the expensive back end of the project – that process of tweaking which brings out the play world, and thus expands the appeal of the game beyond those with a taste for the ludic. Rockstar North has the money to do this (but strangely only do it with GTA games). Most companies can’t afford it at all.

This is our dirty little secret that we're slightly reluctant to own up to: to make mass market games is expensive because it takes a lot of time and effort to tweak them sufficiently for Casual players to be able to enjoy the game. The Hardcore tolerate the rough edges, because they have the game literacy to push through it, and the games are more frequently designed to meet their play needs, while Casual players will stop playing when they cannot work out what is expected of them. The most important property a game developer can possess if they want to succeed in the upper market is good workflow. Good workflow means you can make changes faster, which means you can smooth the rough edges and enhance the inherent play of the game. Good game design is an asset to any project, but it is no substitute for good workflow because even the best game designer in the world does not wholly anticipate how all aspects of the game will work in practice.

Paidia, then, is the anarchic nebula from which all play originates. Paidia (for most players) is fun – it’s the very definition of fun! – but it is a short lived kind of fun... it is exuberant amusement, but it eventually gives way to ludus and to other kinds of fun. We need to recognise the sheer number of people who lack any kind of game literacy and for whom picking up a new game is not fun but instead is a baffling ordeal. I do not believe that videogames are only for a certain type of person – I believe we can make videogames for any and all people. But to do so we need to learn new skills... we need to learn how to support spontaneous play, to discover how to construct game worlds as play worlds, and to present the game so that the player's transition into ludus can be a journey from paidia, and not merely the process of patiently learning the ludic elements of the game.

Let us play...

Next week, the final part: The Complexity of Ludus

So central to the contemporary videogames industry is agon (games of competition) that many people consider ‘game’ to be almost synonymous with the notion of competitive play. We play to win, the presumption states, and this indeed describes a great many videogames. I hope that, by having looked at alea, mimicry, and ilinx before agon, I do not need to put forward the counter-argument (that there can be more to games than agon) and can instead focus on exploring the myriad complexities that this category of play entails.

Agon is one of four cross-cultural patterns of play identified by the noted intellectual Roger Caillois in 1958. Caillios was writing at a time before the hobbygames explosion of the 1970’s, before the proliferation of arcade game novelty in the 1980’s and long before the contemporary videogames market. Consequently, his descriptions of agon are focused on the nature of sports and contests of skill. He described agon as follows:

A whole group of games would seem to be competitive, that is to say, like a combat in which equality of chances is artificially created, in order that the adversaries should confront each other under ideal conditions, susceptible of giving precise and incontestable value to the winner’s triumph. It is therefore always a question of rivalry which hinges on a single quality (speed, endurance, strength, memory, skill, ingenuity, etc.), exercised, within defined limits and without outside assistance, in such a way that the winner appears to be better than the loser in a certain category of exploits.

Whereas Caillois’ other categories of play have not required significant revision to bring into clear focus with respect of modern games, agon requires some slight expansion. When Caillois was writing, the only reasonable form of agon was between two people in a specific challenge or sport. (One could include, perhaps, the agon between matador and bull in the bloodsport of bullfighting, but since Caillois was insistent in seeing agon as a fair contest between participants, I believe this would not qualify: the bull’s chance of survival is considerably less than that of the matador).

A videogame allows the player to engage in a game of agon versus a virtual opponent. This seems to evoke the same behaviour as facing a living opponent. Facing the game, the player first sizes up their capacity to compete. For instance, people who cannot throw do not enjoy participating in field events based around throwing. Similarly, people who cannot operate a first person shooter (a style of game with a particularly codified form) do not play FPS games in an agonistic style. But those that have capabilities in a particular type of game frequently then enter the state of wishing to test themselves against a degree of challenge. This could be against other opponents – which is quite obviously a fit to Caillois’ agon – or it could be against pre-set challenges, such as the main gameplay of a single player game.

It is worth noting that contests of agon present themselves in certain distinct forms which are worth identifying briefly, if only to provide a wider foundation. Firstly, there are games of one-versus-one agon, such as a fighting game. Such games are the most intensely agonistic form, and most recognisably fit Caillois’ description of agon. Then, there are one-versus-many games, such as the FPS which (squad variants not withstanding) place a lone player in contest versus many opponents. Still, the underlying assumption is that the challenge has been balanced fairly (although pragmatically, few games are so well tweaked for this to emerge). Finally, many-versus-many games, such as strategy games and battlefield FPS where whole armies fight, which are akin to team-based sports offering agon between equally matched sides. These distinctions, while notable, do not fundamentally alter the nature of agonistic play, although they may alter the appeal. Fighting games, FPS games and strategy games imply different audiences, with an affinity for challenge in the forms of fast reaction control skills, pathfinding and aiming, or thoughtful complexity respectively being key distinctions.

The asymmetric case of the one-versus-many scenario is something that we are highly familiar with in videogames, but which might have seemed strange to Caillois. Even in the case of one-versus-one and many-versus-many we see asymmetry in games: playing a fighting game, it is not possible for the computer opponents to provide a balanced challenge for all players. Instead, the game presents a variable degree of challenge; the player climbs the curve of difficulty inside the game. Similarly, a strategy game often has scenarios of increasing difficulty. Instead of presenting a perfectly balanced challenge, the game starts easily (in principle, at least – few games balance themselves to be sufficiently easy for all comers), and then increases the degree of challenge until the player encounters the biting point where they know they will have to perform at the best of their ability to achieve victory. This is when Caillois’ agon really takes hold: prior to this point, one might imagine the player’s actions have merely been training. There is a parallel in sport: an Olympic athlete must still rise through many qualifying rounds against opponents of differing capabilities until they find they are competing against competitors of their own calibre.

This rising challenge versus the player is intended, arguably, to ensure that at some point the player will face a challenge worthy of their abilities. I suggest, therefore, that we can consider there to be some relationship between fiero [fee-air-oh] and agon. Fiero, the emotion Paul Ekman identifies with triumph over adversity, is associated with the physical gesture of holding arms aloft in victory; it is something we can readily observe whenever an athlete wins a difficult game, or in sporting fans whenever their team scores. It is, I attest, intimately connected to agon.

Out of respect for Nicole Lazzaro, from whom I first learned of fiero, I am considering games which tap into this fiero-motivated reservoir of challenge to be games of hard agon (after Lazzaro’s Hard Fun emotional key). These games seem most popular with Hardcore gamers, although this is not to suggest that hard agon is not enjoyed by many Casual players (possibly younger males in particular, although this is far from proven). Fiero can be a tremendously rewarding emotion, and therefore can be a tremendously addictive emotion. Why else would certain players pit themselves against challenges of such depth of adversity that they must endure nearly constant frustration as they pursue with dogged determination the repetitious play intrinsic in most games of this kind? When victory is achieved, the fiero ‘pays for’ all the pain experienced on the way. Indeed, the greater the depths of pain endured, the larger the fiero for some players. (For others, and especially for more mature players, the residue of frustration reduces the fiero to less engaging relief).

Games of hard agon dare players to beat them. Some are so punishing in the demands they ask of their players that they practically reach the boundaries of becoming an ordeal. But, provided the fiero payoff is there, ultimately, it becomes worthwhile. It is a drama which we are very familiar with – the Rocky films alone made millions out of their gradual descent into formulaic fiero fantasy.

I argue that many players often do not notice the (debatably) ramshackle design of videogames because when a game is offering hard agon, shoddy game design (bad control mechanisms, poor mechanics etc.) are just friction adding to the frustrations which are endured on the path to victory. This places a much greater burden on games which do not use agon as part of their core play to have superior game design, delivering a smoother play experience to their audience.

At the opposite extreme to the trials of hard agon are those games which offer trivial victory over opponents. Some of these games are diluting the agonistic play with aleatory (random) elements. Consider for one example, a party game like Mario Party or Bishi Bashi [or WarioWare]. These are ostensibly games of agon – but are really a heady mix of agon and alea. It is not the chance to prove superiority versus one’s foes in these games which provides all the fun, but the random chaos of the mini-games. It is also possible to combine agon and mimicry. I presume part of the fun of a game like The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction (putting aside the ilinx inherent in mindless destruction briefly) comes partly from the illusion of power being supplied. The player is invited to enjoy being strong relative to their opponents – practically the opposite of the fiero-related enjoyment delivered by hard agon.

I propose to call these styles of play easy agon (again, in respectful reference to Nicole Lazzaro’s influential Four Keys model). These games are almost invariably drawing upon a mix of play elements, diluting agon with either alea, mimicry or ilinx in varying degrees. Some players may consider there to be little of interest in play when it has been made so unchallenging (perhaps reflecting the importance of fiero to such a person). I personally find nothing problematic in exploring such child-like escapism against virtual opponents. Such play is amusing and entertaining, and far more suitable for stress release than the tension of fiero.

The space that the player ends up within in respect of any given game of agon is determined almost entirely by the strength of the player relative to the strength of the opposition (determined in part by their own abilities, in part by the game parametrics). Games of hard agon are at the very least evenly matched, and more commonly are biased against the player, so that the player must work even harder to win, and thus achieves an even greater payoff in fiero. Conversely, games of easy agon begin when the player’s strength is weighted higher than the opposition – indeed, these games are arguably at their most fun (and by ‘fun’ in this case we mean the fun of amusement, not the fun of fiero) when the player is ludicrously overpowered with respect to their opponents. This was surely what made Rampage fun to play when it first came to the arcades, and I the recent Hulk game shares something of this feel in its early play.

Because it is the relative difficulty which determines which space the player is in (hard agon, through the ‘true agon’ of equally matched opponents, and finally to easy agon), games can deliver both kinds of play by simply having a large enough range of difficulties. The Dynasty Warriors games in particular demonstrate this facet. On their high difficulty settings, these provide hordes of tough troops and even tougher officers which lure the player to overcome the odds stacked against them and earn fiero. On their lowest difficulty settings (and perhaps after some judicious powering up), the player can enjoy the feeling of effortlessly cutting down hundreds of enemy troops, and knocking enemy officers about the battlefield like they were mere stuffed toys. Both can be intoxicatingly entertaining, but in general terms, these two different settings appeal to different players. (My love of these games is perhaps rooted in the balance between the hard agon I used to enjoy as a teenager, and still have a certain nostalgia for, and the easy agon I find more suited to relaxation in my rapidly approaching middle-age).

The implications for game design are that for videogames wishing to court a wide audience, there may be much value in beginning by balancing the game for easy agon. This is the harder task for almost all games; it is very easy to conceive of means to make a game harder, but generally difficult to conceive of means to make a given game easier without subtracting game mechanics (and thus changing the nature of the gameplay). However, I suspect that game designers who work on highly competitive games of hard agon might argue that balancing for hard agon is an equally challenging task, if for no other reason than the Hardcore audience for hard agon is extremely demanding and particular in their tastes.

The nebulous notion of game difficulty seems to be important when considering agon, whereas this was largely unimportant to the other categories of play identified by Caillois. I used to believe that it was possible to build self-calibrating games that could adjust to match the level of difficulty desired by the player. However, it is becoming readily apparent that the level of difficulty desired by the player is not something we can presuppose. Some players want to be met at about their level of challenge (they desire ‘true agon’), some want to be met with very little level of challenge (desiring easy agon) and some secretly yearn to have the game beat them into a bloody pulp that they may later emerge victorious and aglow with fiero (desiring hard agon).

Perhaps it will be necessary for games with dynamic difficulty mechanisms to identify the player’s desire with respect to agonistic play from the onset. Sorter questions may be the easiest option; something like: “Do you want to: (1) Play for amusement (2) Face a reasonable degree of challenge (3) Triumph against overwhelming odds.” Wrangling the language so that this can be presented to players without confusion is a difficult task, but I remain confident that sorter questions are a viable means by which we can establish the nature of play that the player desires. I am hopeful of a more elegant solution, but perhaps not any time soon. [Sorter questions were briefly deployed by Capcom in the 2000s, but the winning solution turned out to be difficulty tuning settings in the options, not direct questioning.]

The fact that different players desire to be in a different place with respect to the degree of challenge connects notably with the psychological model of flow. The flow channel (depicted), where abilities and challenge are equal, is an area, not a line. When ability outstrips challenge, boredom results, when challenge outstrips ability, anxiety results. Hard agon therefore lies near the top of the flow channel – where the player is close to their limits. Easy agon lies near the bottom of the flow channel – where the player faces just sufficient challenge to entertain. ‘True agon’ lies in the centre of the flow channel. Perhaps finding means to chart a player's position in the flow channel will allow for an automated game balancing system in the future. [It didn’t, but it was a nice idea!]

Agon is a noble pursuit; the desire to improve one’s abilities and to face others in competition in order to see who will emerge victorious is a motivating force behind all sports and many games. Videogames have expanded the remit of agon to include a wider array of challenges, beyond the central ground of equally matched opponents, and into asymmetries of ability that manipulate the emotions of their players, either through the addictive challenge of fiero, or the trivial escapism of amusement. As tools for entertainment, this blurring of the honourable challenge of agon is essentially harmless in videogames. Furthermore, it provides new opportunities to think about play – even the well-worn play of competition – and perhaps to explore new ways to bring that play to an even wider audience.

Next week: The Anarchy of Paidia

Almost every videogame has elements of mimicry. When we sit down to play a game, we know that what is happening is not real; we suspend our disbelief in order to allow the game to sweep us away into its situation and world. The game is a tool for imagination – whether we’re imagining that we’re a heroic warrior‑priestess, a gun‑toting action hero, a hard‑driven career woman, or a fluffy animal. We do not usually consider this aspect of the game to be at the centre of the play... But are we being blinded by an excessive focus on challenge? Is mimicry more of a draw than we realise?

Mimicry is one of four cross-cultural patterns of play identified by the eclectic intellectual Roger Caillois in 1958. He described mimicry as follows:

All play presupposes the temporary acceptance, if not of an illusion (indeed this last word means nothing less than beginning a game: in-lusio), then at least of a closed conventional, and, in certain respects, imaginary universe. Play can consist not only of deploying actions or submitting to one’s fate in an imaginary milieu, but of becoming an illusory character oneself, and of so behaving. One is thus confronted with a diverse series of manifestations, the common element of which is that the subject makes believe or makes others believe that he is someone other than himself. He forgets, disguises, or temporarily sheds his personality in order to feign another. I prefer to designate these phenomena by the term mimicry...

The pleasure lies in being or passing for another. But in games the basic intention is not that of deceiving the spectators. The child who is playing train may well refuse to kiss his father while saying to him that one does not embrace locomotives, but he is not trying to persuade his father that he is a real locomotive...

Mimicry is incessant invention. The rule of the game is unique: it consists in the actor’s fascinating the spectator, while avoiding an error that might lead the spectator to break the spell. The spectator must lend himself to the illusion without first challenging the decor, mask, or artifice which for a given time he is asked to believe in as more real than reality itself.

Caillois was writing at a time before videogames, and his focus was therefore on conventional play activities, but mimicry is especially pertinent to digital entertainment. Where Caillois talks of the actor and the spectator, in a videogame these two roles can be the same person: the player is an actor in the sense that they control their avatar, but they are also a spectator, since they are enjoying watching their avatar execute their chosen actions.

The vast majority of contemporary videogames have a huge component of mimicry. Despite being designed and structured in an immensely challenge-oriented way, mimicry added enormously to the appeal of a game like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, it is probably the chief reason that World of Warcraft is now outpacing EverQuest in terms of subscribers, and it is perhaps the principal reason for the astronomical success of the recent Grand Theft Auto games.

The power of mimicry can be most clearly discerned in the those games for which this is the primary aspect of play. SimCity enjoyed impressive success for its day by offering the mimicry of building a working city, although it was limited by its focus: while creating a city was entertaining, it didn’t engage a great many players for an especially long time, in part because of its inherent complexity and emotional distance. Conversely, in creating The Sims (a huge influence on my own project, Ghost Master), Maxis offered a game of mimicry with a much wider appeal – and crucially, a game with the tremendous potential to appeal to women.

It is not that mimicry appeals more to women than men, rather, it is that the types of mimicry that we are culturally indoctrinated into differ significantly by gender. Boys stereotypically to play with toy cars and weapons – and games incorporating mimicry of vehicles and weapons tend to have an agonistic (competitive) bias. Girls stereotypically play with figures (dollplay) and domestic situations (’playing house’). These play activities had never been provided as the focus of play prior to The Sims, largely because no-one had considered women a worthwhile target audience – thanks in part to enormous gender biases in games industry employment [and that never went away...]. Ten million unit sales and many satisfied customers later and (astonishingly) the industry still doesn’t recognise the significance of mimicry for hitting a wide audience!

Nintendo, more than any other platform‑license holder, seems to recognise the value of this kind of play. Whereas Sony and Microsoft remain focused on challenge as the key driver for play, Nintendo have released games such as Animal Crossing, Doshin the Giant, and Nintendogs, all of which root their play primarily in mimicry. Nintendogs in particular is a game of pure mimicry – the joy of the game is pretending to be interacting with a real puppy. Its success is timely, however: earlier sprite‑based pet simulators required more suspension of belief; Nintendogs leverages the improvements of graphics power (specifically: animation quality) to enhance mimicry.

There are many gamer hobbists who claim that graphics are irrelevant to good games. Such players are probably expressing their own bias towards ludic (formal and rule‑driven) play. It is categorically untrue of people as a whole that graphics do not matter. In fact, the converse is indicated: as a mimicry enhancer, graphics are absolutely critical to the success of games in the mass market. However, most games fritter away their graphical advantages by delivering play in a more agonistic (competitive) context – thus appealing to the players for whom the improvements in graphics are at best an added bonus. That said, the step up in graphics between each generation is becoming rather marginal (games on the Xbox 360 look only slightly better than games on the Xbox to the average person): innovative play design is likely to become progressively more important going forward.

Note that in supplying mimicry, photorealism needn’t be a prerequisite (although it seems to be the case that for the US market, photorealism might sometimes be preferred). Since mimicry is an imaginative process, the transformation into an experience of mimicry can originate in all manner of different art styles. Clearly Lego Star Wars is not realistic in its representation, but nonetheless one gets the emotional connection with the Star Wars characters portrayed quite successfully, and it’s also relevant that we know what Lego is and can enjoy that connection to its visual design.

One can see this hinted at in Caillois’ work. He considered theatre to be the ultimate formal expression of mimicry. He was writing in the 50s, so it wasn’t that motion pictures didn’t exist, but he recognised that the masks, disguises and tricks of the theatrical tradition were a more complete expression of the draw of mimicry (which uses imagination to suspend disbelief – what some might call immersion) than films which aim to minimise the suspension of disbelief. It is possible, however, that those who find imagination difficult in adulthood (and this may be the majority of people) might only be capable of enjoying mimicry when the leap of imagination is minimised through appeals to ‘realism’. Box office receipts certainly exceed theatrical receipts, although one cannot ignore the effect of marketing in this.

There are many aspects to the expression of mimicry in games, although in broad strokes they can be considered to belong to a small set of themes: games which facilitate performance, games which provide mimicry as a challenge and games which arguably more closely resemble toys (what International Hobo has called ‘toyplay games’).

Games which facilitate performance tend to be online and multiplayer. After all, one must have an audience in order to perform! Although this is conceivable in a single‑player game (imagine a child performing for a parent, for instance) the commercial advantages seem most significant when the volume of spectators becomes sufficiently large. This is readily apparent in World of Warcraft, which shrewdly included commands such as /dance which allow for anyone to enter into ad hoc performance. However, these elements of mimicry have thus far been largely incidental, and no‑one has leveraged people’s enjoyment of performative mimicry as a primary play element yet. [I think this is still true!]

An example of a game which presents mimicry as a central aspect of its design, consider the Tokyo Bus Guide games. These pose the player with a very specific challenge: become a bus conductor in the city of Tokyo. Although there is a mode in which the player steers the bus, the game comes into its own in the mode in which the player controls only the indicators, doors and announcement system. In the play of this game, the player ‘wins’ by acting as a convincing bus conductor. They must stop the bus close to the passengers at the bus stop, indicate before pulling away – and remember to play an announcement so that the passengers know where the bus is going! Strangely compelling, the game is slightly too rigid for Western tastes, although the basic play could undoubtedly be exported in other ways.

Toyplay games are exemplified by Animal Crossing. The player is invited to mess around with the game elements however they wish. They aren’t placed in a structure which dictates goals and challenges to be overcome; rather, they are placed in an imaginary world and empowered to play. There are small challenges in Animal Crossing, such as the fishing microgame and the (optional) daily hunt for buried treasure, but these are elective components in a game which has, as its central activity the decoration and expansion of the player’s house. There is also a secondary element which is interpersonal – the player lives in a town with animals who become the player’s friends (albeit at a very low level of sophistication). This is a quintessential mimicry experience, much akin to playing with a dollshouse (play also leveraged by The Sims).

In recent years, the most successful commercial games have undoubtedly been the Grand Theft Auto games, notably Vice City (at least 11 million units) and San Andreas (at least 12 million units). Part of the appeal of these games is that the player is presented with a world to explore and play within, with an impressive lack of limitations relative to other games. Steal cars, beat up or run over pedestrians, knock over a liquor store and engage in a high‑speed police chase – these are the public face of the play of this franchise. But if one examines how people actually play these games, you will also find people driving around the cities for fun, getting dressed up and going out on a date, and sitting on the beach, watching the sun set while the radio plays a nostalgic hit. These games deliver mimicry to a degree previously unrealised. However, Rockstar North achieved this only by virtue of game budgets on a scale previously unrealised.

It is an omnipresent fallacy within the games industry that it is necessary to spend ever more money in order to make profitable games. It is true that if you want to see sales figures on the scale of tens of millions you will need a big budget – either for development (GTA) or for marketing (The Sims). But many of the games which are afforded vast budgets have no potential to tap the higher sales figures. Franchises like God of War, Prince of Persia, or Splinter Cell, which have challenge at the centre of their play are going to top out around three to five million units or so. Any mimicry included in these games is stifled by a structure which is anathematic to the play needs of a wider audience: a series of challenges which must be overcome to progress. Of course, five million units is still a good sales figure, but adding more money isn’t going to grow the audiences of these games significantly, and at some point their ever-growing budget is going to result in a loss. [Of these three, only God of War successfully adapted its design in the decades afterwards.]

Structure is the great empowerer of mimicry. The secret of GTA’s success is a structure that allows the player to simply play. The challenges are there, when the player wishes to tackle them, but they are practically secondary to the world the player is invited to have fun within. (I would argue that the GTA games could be even more successful if the unlocking of new toys was separated from the challenges on the game spine, but this is debatable.) International Hobo has termed these settings ‘playground worlds’ to reflect the focus on freedom of play. We will undoubtedly see more and more such worlds emerge – if the games industry is capable of recognising where it is succeeding, which most of the time it rather curiously is not. [On this front, the industry did come through in the decades that followed!]

The detailed graphics and animations that can facilitate mimicry are expensive, but games of mimicry need not be. Animal Crossing is a great example: it uses rather dated graphics to limit its development cost. True, the audience for such a game is less than the audience for (say) GTA – but the economics of games simply require that games make more money than they cost to make. [Actually, here I was wrong: Animal Crossing now sells as many units as a GTA!] Nintendogs is another good example, enjoying popular success despite (I am assuming) relatively modest development costs.

I strongly believe there is a vast untapped market for games which present mimicry as their core play. Firstly, such games can invite the player to play in their own way and at their own pace. They need not place frustrations in the player’s path and force the player to overcome them. This appeals to victory‑motivated players (those who thrive on triumph over adversity) but these do not appear to be in the majority. The worlds of these games do not need to be as large as a GTA world to support play – instead of large but emotionally empty worlds, they can be smaller but more emotionally invested worlds that allow more player customisation, or have non‑player characters with more personality.

In his book The Blockbuster Toy, Gene Del Vechio (a veteran marketer from major toy companies) provides eight different ways a toy can appeal to a child, all of which are based around his concept that a successful toy transforms the child in a manner which is emotionally on target. One of these is related to challenge and mastery, one is related to collecting (a form of play not covered by Caillois’ model). The remaining six are all forms of mimicry, with themes such as creating (SimCity), nurturing (Nintendogs), emulation (Tokyo Bus Guide), friendship (Animal Crossing), story‑emulation (film licenses such as Lego Star Wars), and experience (World of Warcraft).

Adult play is simply an extension of child play, although some of the themes and content may be expanded, of course. Sexual or intensely violent themes may emerge, and emulation of stories that have already been experienced may expand to full‑blown storyplay (the spontaneous creation of new stories). At its core, however, much of play is about imagination, and games of mimicry are tools for enhancing imagination and reducing the degree of suspension of disbelief required. Adults may no longer be able to create spontaneous play out of little plastic figures, but place them in a vivid digital world and suddenly they all become like little children, eager to indulge an imagination often desperate to escape from the confines of the mundane world!

Mimicry is a powerful tool for play, but it is one that until now games have often harnessed only tangentially. When we recognise just how powerful mimicry can be, when we get past merely shackling players to repetitive play by designing addictive play systems, or narrowly defining the world of games as those which supply the hot rewards of triumph; when we watch how people play, and what they enjoy, perhaps then we will be ready to allow videogames to be all that they can be.

Imagination is unlimited. Games should be too.

Next week: The Joy of Ilinx

Games designers have a tendency to overlook or dismiss alea (chance), although in cultural terms it is a highly significant class of games. The global video games industry has around $28,000 million turnover [in 2005 - by 2025, it has risen to $197,000 million!], whereas the global gambling industry is worth a staggering $1,098,000 million [in 2005], forty times as much. And gambling is merely the most popular type of aleatory games; there are a wide variety of games of alea, and games incorporating aleatory elements.

Alea is one of four cross-cultural patterns of play identified by the noted intellectual Roger Caillois in 1958. He described alea as follows:

Alea is the Latin name for the game of dice. I have borrowed it to designate, in contrast to agon (games of competition), all games that are based on a decision independent of the player, an outcome over which he has no control, and in which winning is the result of fate rather than triumphing over an adversary. More properly, destiny is the sole artisan of victory, and where there is rivalry, what is meant is that the winner has been more favoured by fortune than the loser. Perfect examples of this type are provided by the games of dice, roulette, heads or tails, baccara, lotteries etc. Here, not only does one refrain from trying to eliminate the injustice of chance, but rather it is the very capriciousness of chance that constitutes the unique appeal of the game.

Alea signifies and reveals the favour of destiny. The player is entirely passive; he does not deploy his resources, skill, muscles, or intelligence. All he need do is await, in hope and trembling, the cast of the die.

Anyone who has gambled will recognise this description; those who have never understood why people gamble will similarly struggle to understand alea. Indeed, many narrow minded intellectuals like to berate and belittle players of lotteries by calling such games “a tax on stupidity”. Caillois’ view on lotteries was rather that they provide hope to those whose prospects in any given culture were limited. He observed that there comes a point in a person’s life when they recognise that they cannot change the circumstances of their birth nor the talents they have been given. If their talents do not correspond to a means to make their own fortune in any given culture (and different cultures value different traits in this regard), they may still hold out hope for a life changing miracle. As Caillois wrote: “It is the [social] function of alea to always hold out hope of such a miracle.”

Frustratingly, I do not know where I read about ‘the Little Satori of Sports’ - that moment of consciousness destroying excitement when something might happen – when your team is close to being able to score, for instance. Time stops. Thought stops. When a lottery player is still enjoying the experience of playing (rather than playing purely out of habit), the lottery draw is a similar Little Satori experience. There is a genuine tension and excitement. In my view, the cost of a lottery ticket is quite low provided it is still giving you this Little Satori experience – a ticket to a sporting event can cost you twenty to forty times as much, and generally only affords you two or three such experiences. Seen this way, a lottery ticket is good value.

There are many minor examples of alea in our daily lives that are not strictly based upon what is conventionally considered gambling, however. The excitement of unwrapping a mysterious present, checking the morning mail for something interesting, channel surfing, listening to the radio (hoping to hear a great song), unprotected sex, sticker collections (and their big brother, trading card games), toy capsule dispensers, and chocolate boxes all have a certain aleatory appeal. Indeed, in the UK one particular brand of chocolate known as Revels, which consists of half a dozen different chocolates with little more than luck to determine what you get, has identified that it's appeal lies in alea. A recent advertisement for Revels shows two people playing a game of Russian roulette with a bag of chocolates – who will pull out the dreaded coffee chocolate...?!

During my case study interviews of players for the International Hobo’s player research, I uncovered alea in another context – one I was familiar with, but of which I had been previously quite dismissive: Tabletop role-playing games. For some time I had viewed RPGs as being at their core about role play, that is, about playing characters (about mimicry in terms of Caillois’ patterns). After publishing three conventional (and obscure) tabletop RPG systems, I was keen to develop a system that got to the core of what I valued in role-playing games. Working in concert with a good friend of mine, we eliminated aleatory elements completely and created the Contract system. Although I have a fondness for Contract (which is really just a formal take on freeform role-play), during the case studies I discovered just how important the aleatory elements of RPGs are to many players.

Playing with dice turns out to be a highly satisfying component of the play experience for many players precisely because of its aleatory appeal. In fact, in some cases, the slapdash game design of something like the original Dungeons & Dragons actually adds a certain appeal. At least one person I interviewed lamented the rise of the D20 system because she liked playing with many different types of dice; the polyhedral zoo that accompanied classic D&D [and had a resurgence soon after this essay was written!] held a certain appeal.

The importance of the dice ritual in a tabletop RPG lies in the sense of ownership over the narrative that it affords. When the game requires the player to make a dice roll, the progress of the narrative depends upon the player’s action. They cannot influence it in direct terms, but in aleatory terms, they have control of fate. Computer RPGs do not capture this element at all, and hence have a tendency to devolve into ProgressQuest.

As a game designer, I could not understand why so many tabletop role-playing games were designed to give the player only a 20-30% chance of success in most tasks. Failure seemed like an inevitable consequence of such a design, which I chalked up to bad game design. In my own tabletop RPGs Avatar and Shifter, I instead made the chances of success quite high (80-100%) but provided an alternative aleatory element in the Criticals system, allowing players to succeed to wildly differing degrees. In this way, the alea was not merely ‘will I succeed or fail’, but rather ‘can I succeed to a degree significant enough to impact the flow of the narrative?’.

However, what I was missing is how a low chance of success can in fact drive the narrative in positive ways. In the hands of a good Games Master, a sequence of failed die rolls generates dramatic tension – that only the occasional die roll will result in success doesn’t matter if the Games Master is canny enough to turn the players failures into a heightening sense of drama. I still prefer my approach, but I at least appreciate why you might want to design it the other way.

One aleatory element that computer RPGs do possess lies in the use of random treasure. Here, the players’ stake is their time which is gambled against getting something impressive out of the random treasure. It’s an equipment lottery, if you will. But we have yet to find a way to build the rituals of diceplay into a cRPG – the ownership of the narrative that comes from throwing the dice is entirely absent from any such game I have seen. It may be that we cannot transfer this function to video games, since pressing a button and getting a random number lacks the tactility and aleatory appeal of throwing dice. The player in such a situation feels that the computer is determining fate – they merely get to tell it when it can start.

Indeed, transferring alea to video games is a challenge, because for alea to truly exist in a game the player must abandon the outcome to fate. But game-literate players have become spoiled. They have a tendency to view games as power fantasy wish fulfilment – an agonistic experience in which they will ultimately triumph. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it does cause some players to insist on, for instance, control of the save mechanisms (so they can have complete ownership of their power fantasy) – and save mechanisms are the reason that video games don’t do alea particularly well, because how can one appeal to fate if the outcome of a random event can merely be repeated until success by reloading…?

This is the reason that videogames incorporating alea necessarily override the players access to save mechanisms. Juiced is a car racing game which attempts to build gambling into the heart of the game structure, but it largely fails because players of videogames are conditioned to having their own way, so the player sooner or later becomes compelled to circumvent the autosave mechanism, rendering the aleatory elements irrelevant. One could build alea into such a game, but it would have to be in the form of the potential for acquiring outrageous fortune (as in the cRPG treasure lottery), not in the potential for outrageous loss.

A more successful attempt to incorporate alea into a game can be found in my beloved Animal Crossing. In fact, this game is packed full of alea – checking the (random) items in the shop each day, fishing, looking for insects, seeking buried treasure and the monthly lottery are just a few of the ways the game leverages aleatory elements to create fun play. In all these instances, the player faces not the threat of loss, but the potential for something wonderful to happen by chance. However, in order to make this work, it is necessary for the player to be denied the capacity to reload an earlier save. I believe that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this – without it, there would be no Animal Crossing, and if denying game-literate players their opportunity to be control freaks creates new forms of game then it’s worth it!

Game designer bias against alea can be seen in numerous forms: Sid Meier’s “a game is a series of interesting choices”, which effectively denies games of pure chance status as games; the typical game designer's excessive love of games of pure competition (Chess in particular); Raph Koster’s attempt to shoehorn chance into his Theory of Fun by considering it “learning about probability”(!); or even my own attempt to factor alea out of tabletop RPGs. It seems that games designers in general just don’t want to connect with this extremely popular form of play.

I'm beginning to see evidence that a bias towards rational thinking is a dominant temperament among games designers (my thanks to Noah Falstein for contributing his observations in this regard), and in this context it’s unsurprising that alea would be downplayed. The desire for total knowledge (and focus on learning) associated with this way of thinking is antithetical to the surrender to fate implied by alea.

Personally, I have found alea extremely useful in designing card games and boardgames. Aleatory elements inherently reduce the dominance of competition, and I find that there are many players who are put off by directly competitive play. Games like Texas Hold ‘Em, which strike a balance between Caillois’ agon (competition) and alea (chance) have a wider appeal because failure can be chalked up to bad luck (and not to personal inadequacy) – plus, of course, anyone can win such games! Indeed, the fact that pure alea gives everyone an equal chance of winning is the reason that we frequently encounter alea in games designed for small children, such as the card game Beggar My Neighbour, Snakes/Chutes and Ladders, or the aleatory elements in Kirby Air Ride (which was designed to cover a very wide age range) [and I note that later Mario Karts – quite unlike the original or Mario Kart 64! – also leaned in this direction].

The Rituals of Alea have such universal appeal because they are absolutely fair. In a game of pure agon (like a sport), whomever is more skilled will win every time (all things being equal), but in a game of pure alea anyone can win, regardless of who they are, or what their skills might be. The greater the reward in a game of alea, the greater the appeal – hence the appeal of state, national and international lotteries, despite the fact that the jackpot of even a modest-sized lottery will set a person up for life. The size of the stake the player could lose may intensify the experience, but it is what can be won that entices, whether that reward is money, a unique gift, a nice chocolate or temporary ownership of the flow of the narrative. I believe that harnessing alea might be yet another way to potentially expand the appeal of videogames to a much wider audience.

Next: The Imagination of Mimicry

Very little has been written about the ilinx (vertigo) of videogames, despite the fact it’s an increasingly potent force in popular games. Ilinx is a pattern of play identified by the noted sociologist Roger Caillois associated with the momentary destruction of perception. It can be the vertigo of speed, the reckless abandon of spinning, or it can be the intoxicating allure of petty destruction – of stomping on a sandcastle, for instance. As the graphical realism of videogames has increased, the potential for supplying the play of ilinx has similarly expanded.

Caillois identified four cro

ss-cultural patterns of play in his 1958 book Les Jeux et Les Hommes (Man, Play and Games). He described ilinx as follows:

Ilinx. The last kind of game includes those which are based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness.

The disturbance that provokes vertigo is commonly sought for its own sake.

In early videogames the graphical power was extremely limited, and it is arguably only recently that we have fully begun to explore the powerful effect of ilinx on players. It can be seen most clearly in any games with the illusion of speed, such as high speed racers like Need For Speed or Burnout, and also in snowboarding games such as 1080 and SSX. In these games, the sensation of high speed motion (often enhanced by special effects such as ‘speed haze’) serves to heighten the players enjoyment by artificially inducing a state of vertigo.

Of course, the vertigo we speak of here is not the nausea-inducing kind referred to in medical circles, but rather a vertiginous experience. A rollercoaster produces physical vertigo, but a video of a rollercoaster still produces a certain sensation akin to vertigo provided the viewer suspends their disbelief. Perhaps the clearest indication of this is the power of a car chase when seen on a cinema screen – we become swept away in the rush of the imagery. Physical vertigo is included in Caillois’ category of ilinx, but it can be extended to cover many peripheral situations, and it is these fringe cases that are perhaps most pertinent to videogames.

The videogames industry cannot deliver ilinx independently. Even a ride simulator which invokes vertigo is still drawing upon what Callois called mimicry (imaginative representation) to achieve this affect. Ilinx, therefore, can best be understood in the context of videogames as an experience enhancer. Because mimicry is implicitly required for ilinx to function, it may be prudent to consider which of these two patterns of play is paramount for any given play: in a game such as Gran Turismo which identifies itself as ‘the real driving simulator’, authentic mimicry is given more weight than ilinx, whereas in a game such as Burnout, the ilinx of high speed movement is arguably more important than the simulation implied by mimicry. This can be considered a case of ilinx enhancing mimicry.

Ilinx can also be used to enhance agon (games of competition), although this is somewhat rarer as most games (Space Harrier not withstanding) can only achieve vertigo through mimicry; the game must simulate moving at high speed to induce vertigo states. Games which appear to use ilinx to enhance agon include the F-Zero franchise; the triumph of winning a race in these games is surely enhanced by the breakneck speed dash for the finish line – a few seconds of total consciousness destroying vertigo, followed by victory. It adds a degree of excitement to the experience, which heightens the eventual reward. Similarly, a game like 1080 Avalanche uses its ilinx to enhance the eventual payoff of victory: in the final avalanche levels, where the player is asked to escape from a rapidly looming wall of snow, the sense of vertigo achieved is almost palpable, and makes the eventual victory seem all the more sweet.

However, this is only part of the full scope of ilinx. Returning to Caillois' description of ilinx:

In parallel fashion, there is a vertigo of moral order, a transport that suddenly seizes the individual. This vertigo is readily linked to the desire for disorder and destruction, a drive which is normally repressed... In adults, nothing is more revealing of vertigo than the strange excitement that is felt in cutting down the tall prairie flowers with a switch, or in creating an avalanche of the snow on a rooftop, or, better, the intoxication that is experienced in military barracks - for example, in noisily banging garbage cans.

This aspect, which might be called destructive ilinx, correlates with the reckless abandon that is allowed by a game such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and its many relatives. One of the reasons the recent Grand Theft Auto games are so successful at tapping into this side of ilinx is that they are not wholly realistic... The tone of the games is realistic in a certain sense, and certainly they are drawing upon mimicry, but there is also an unreal quality. This is expressed in part by the shrewd choice of a non-photorealistic art style, and also by the presence of ‘game-like’ elements in the game world, such as ‘power up’ tokens. This is real, but it is also a game. That empowers the player to, for instance, go on a murderous killing rampage, and laugh as they do it! I do not believe there is anything morally wrong with this [although it can be argued otherwise!], and this unreal quality of the game facilitates this freedom to misbehave.

For instance, there is something inherently pleasing about having C.J. (the protagonist in San Andreas) parachute out of an airliner, touch down in front of his family home, mow someone down with a chainsaw, and then opt to stand there and watch the neighbours pass by and make comments about what just happened as if it was the most natural event imaginable. This is not an appeal to realism (a mimicry experience), but a destructive ilinx experience – as is smashing up every piece of architecture in Blast Corps, Mercenaries, Rygar: the Legendary Adventure, or Otogi: Myth of Demons, and perhaps even going on a tree-chopping rampage in Animal Crossing.

Part of the success of the recent Grand Theft Auto games is that they cast their net wide (a product of their not inconsiderable budget, in part, but also the sign of a team who work well together). For instance, these games deliver agon (competition), mimicry (imagination), ilinx (vertigo) and even alea (gambling, discovery et al). The contribution of the ilinx elements of these games should not be underestimated, however: when a game can make a person laugh dynamically (that is, without a narrative set piece) it is tapping into something deeply human. The ‘game realism’ (versus absolute realism) constantly tells the player ‘this is only a game, follow your impulses’... it allows for a guilt free release of destructive ilinx. This can be understood in terms of Johan Huizinga’s concept of a Magic Circle: whatever happens inside the game space is not a part of everyday life, and normal considerations are temporarily suspended. Those who attempt to replicate GTA in more realistic tones should think twice about their approach.

It should also be noted that you don’t need to be violent to appeal to destructive ilinx. The Katamari Damacy games are built upon the ilinx of rolling things up – you are ‘destroying’ the environment, but not in an overtly violent fashion. Some adults scream when you pick them up, but most children laugh – it’s good natured chaos, not bloody carnage, and as the tiny narrative elements underline, no-one gets hurt. And again, it can make you laugh, especially when you pick up (say) your first cat, or you become big enough for people to run away from you.

The presumption that agon (competition) is the central element of value in videogames places limits on what should be a limitless endeavour: the creation of new play. There will always be a place for games that prioritise agonistic concerns, but it is important to understand that there are more ways to engage a player than by competitive urges alone, and one of those ways is to tap into the creative destruction of ilinx.

The joy of ilinx is reckless abandon... it can be the vertigo of speed, or of wanton destruction; it need not be violent, but it is always irrepressible – the temporary abolishment of conscious thought. Videogames are a wonderful place to explore this kind of play, since you can surrender to ilinx in a game, and nobody gets hurt. Well, at the very least, nobody real. I believe we will see more and more ilinx in videogames over the coming years as we continue to explore the limitless domain of play.

Next week: The Rituals of Alea

In his 1958 book Les Jeux et Les Hommes (usually translated as Man, Play and Games), the noted sociologist and intellectual Roger Caillois introduced a terminology for the patterns we can find in games. He used the term ‘game’ in a very wide manner, applying it to all play activities. This is a partial consequence of his native language, French, where the term ‘jeux’ and ‘jouer’ express the concepts of both play and game in English.

Caillois’ interest in games was sociological: the second half of Les Jeux et Les Hommes is an account of how societies relate to the patterns of play he identified, and makes for fascinating reading. However, the principle value of Caillois’ work for modern game design is that his framework for thinking about games provides a unique perspective for examining play.

The term ‘patterns of play’ was never used by Caillois, but I have coined it to provide a means to refer to his system. Caillois was keen to observe that it was not intended as a taxonomy.

The elements of the system are as follows. Firstly, there are four patterns of play:

• Alea, or games of chance, discussed in Part 1 “The Rituals of Alea”.

• Mimicry, or games of simulation, discussed in Part 2 “The Imagination of Mimicry”.

• Ilinx, or games of vertigo, discussed in Part 3 “The Joy of Ilinx”.

• Agon, or games of competition, discussed in Part 4, “The Challenge of Agon”.

Additionally, Caillois proposed that games can be considered to lie at various points on an axis between free creativity and rule-bound complexity:

• Paidia refers to improvisation, discussed in Part 5, “The Anarchy of Paidia”.

• Ludus refers to rules, discussed in Part 6 “The Complexity of Ludus”.

Caillois' built upon prior work by Johan Huizinga, considered one of the founders of modern cultural history. Huizinga’s work raised a challenge for how we live together that has largely been ignored in the decades since, warning that we were gradually eliminating the play element of culture, with serious consequences. That topic will have to wait for another time. For now, these six essays each open a window onto how we engage with videogames that I hope you will find as engaging as I do.

Next week: The Rituals of Alea