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

If a player relies on a Large Language Model (LLM) AI agent to guide them through a videogame, how will the robot perform…? Can it give the player decent advice? And will it do as well (or better) than an old school FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)?

It’s no secret that I am a sceptic about AI, an inevitable consequence of having studied the subject for my Masters Degree. As impressive as the LLMs are at creating blocks of text that portray the illusion of intelligence, the mirage relies upon absorbing probabilistic relationships from actual human discussions. The impression of reasoning is supplied by the inference engine that effectively performs symbolic manipulations of logical propositions. Some of the things that LLM-based AI can do are certainly impressive - it can effortlessly produce text in specific written styles, for instance, which is much tougher for a human to do on demand. But when push comes to shove, can it actually provide a meaningful service like guiding a player through a game?

To investigate this, I decided to put it up in a battle against the venerable FAQ. The long-form FAQ replaced videogame magazines as a player guide around 1995 (when GameFAQs was set up), and were in turn was largely supplanted by the ‘Let’s Play’ video in the 2010s. Now the AI agent is emerging as a potential challenger to both approaches, and I wanted to discover how good a game guide a robot could be. I’m focussing here on AI versus FAQ, and setting the video format to one side, but I’ll make a few remarks about gameplay videos as player guides later on.

The Case Study - Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance

I’ve long wanted to play a Fire Emblem, so when the Switch 2 GameCube emulator offered Path of Radiance, I was keen to dive in. This seemed like a perfect scenario to test the efficacy and accuracy of an LLM-based AI at guiding players - a role I expect they will increasingly be called upon to perform in the years ahead. The game was released in 2005, and so there was plenty of written material online for the LLM to have sucked up during its training, and there were unlikely to be many ambiguities about how to play it well at this point.

I focussed the experiment on the housekeeping aspects of the game more than the battles, that is, on how to train my mercenaries and how to comprise the team in terms of which characters to recruit and level up. Fire Emblem games give a lot of characters to choose from - there are 46 in Path of Radiance! - and there are important choices to make in the game regarding which weapons to equip (each character can have four at a time, each offering a different tactical option), as well as where to spend permanent attribute increasing items like Speedwings and Dracoshields (in this respect, Fire Emblem is very much like Pokémon, which is unsurprising as they all descend from Dragon Quest).

The ‘control’ in this experiment was a FAQ written by ‘Ask B 007’ and published on GameFAQs, the content of which was last updated in March 2007. The author had clearly revised the guide with input from the Fire Emblem community, and this particular guide was tagged ‘Most Recommended’. I used this resource to assess the answers the robot provided, sometimes after following its advice and sometimes before following it. I also sometimes checked Rick52’s Skills FAQ, not because the Skills weren’t covered by Ask B 007, but because it was an easier resource to search.

I played through the game twice, the first time in around forty hours and the second time in about twenty hours. I used Copilot as the LLM agent simply because it has seemingly better web search integration than other AI agents I’ve used. During the first run, I asked many more questions than the second outing, which I used to refine and test what looked like the strengths of the robot in terms of its power to answer questions.

How did it do? Let’s look at four cases.

Right Answer, Wrong Reason

Sometimes the robot would give me an answer that was accurate in terms of what it was claiming, but was justified completely incorrectly. For instance, it recommended giving the Adept scroll (which gives a hero a percentage chance to trigger a special attack) to Zihark and Marcia, and claimed that this Skill was activated on the characters SPD (Speed) attribute. In fact, there are no Skills in Path of Radiance that are activated on SPD, they are all activated on SKL (Skill), a relationship a human would be hard-pressed to get mixed up about. To human eyes, it’s pretty obvious that with a game mechanic called ‘Skills’, the SKL attribute does the work.

What happened in this instance was that players had discussed the advantages of giving the Adept scroll to faster characters because in these games you get two attacks (’double’ an opponent) if your SPD is 4 points higher than the enemy. As a result, faster characters double more often, and trigger more attacks, and players seemingly assumed this meant more activations of Adept. However, this turns out not to be so! Skill activation is based on the attack (or counter) activations, not the number of actual attacks. It would be true that there would be more relevant cases if we were talking about Criticals, since every attack (including doubles) qualifies for a potential Critical. But it wasn’t true of the Adept skill.

Nonetheless, Zihark and Marcia are potentially good recipients of Adept, because of their high SPD. It means they have potentially three attacks instead of one (because their high SPD triggers doubles fairly often), which can lead to outright kills rather than just wounding the enemy, which is always a tactical advantage. This is an example where the advice the robot gave was sound, but its reasons for giving it was entirely incorrect. It looks as if it had picked up the community advice around the game, but could not construct logical propositions to adequately explain its reasoning because fundamentally it had no understanding of how the game worked.

Wrong Answer, Right Reason

Sometimes the robot’s reasoning would be sound but the answer given would be completely unusable. This happened frequently in a series of cases whereby it insisted that certain characters wielded weapon types that they were flatly incapable of using. For instance, Brom can only use Lances prior to promotion, while after promotion he can use Swords as well. The robot insisted Brom was an Axe wielder not a Lance Knight - up to and including claiming to have examined the source code(!).

It simply would not bend on this issue despite being completely wrong. There is something highly surreal about telling a robot that you have the game open and are looking at it and can see that something is a certain way, and having it come back and tell you that you are mistaken, and that you must be playing a hacked version of the game, or an obscure Japanese variant. Anything but admit that it was wrong! Premature certainty is one of LLM-based AI’s greatest weaknesses.

On this occasion, the cause of the robot’s confusion was that Brom (and many of the other characters in Path of Radiance) appear in other Fire Emblem games, including the sequel, Radiant Dawn, in which he can indeed use Axes. Because LLMs process the likelihood of words appearing next to one another, it had absorbed all the discussions about Brom and Axes relating to the sequel and could not distinguish between that and the first game. It was just a high probability of ‘Brom’ and ‘Axes’ appearing near each other.

In these cases, the propositional reasoning was often sound. It recommended Axes because, frankly, they are overpowered in Path of Radiance, partly because there is a surplus of Lance enemies (and in the game’s ‘weapon triangle’, Axes are strong against Lances but weak against Swords), and partly because the Hand Axe gives Axe wielders a strong counter that works against ranged attacked as well as melee attacks. It knew that Axes were a good bet, and therefore recommended them. The trouble was, it was not useful advice because it was completely impossible to follow its suggestion.

Wrong Answer, Wrong Reason

Then there were cases where the answers given were just complete nonsense. It thought that Arms Scrolls raised all of a hero’s weapon ranks, rather than just the rank of the currently equipped weapon, and so advised giving them to those heroes with a lot of different weapon combinations (chiefly the Mages). I suppose you might say that its logic was sound here, but it was premised on false assumptions, and as such ought to be considered incorrect reasoning, as well as an unhelpful answer.

Likewise, it consistently proposed Skill combinations that were flatly impossible to achieve. Most characters have either 25 or 20 points available for assigning Skills, and if you use an Occult scroll to acquire a Mastery Skill, it uses up 20 of that capacity. It was forever recommending combining 10 capacity Skills with a Mastery Skill that takes 20, a combination that no character could ever possibly have in practice. Again, you could say that its logic was sound in that the combinations it proposed would be very powerful if they were possible. But the fact that they could never be achieved makes the reasoning incorrect, and the answers themselves were also utterly wrong.

When pressed, it would sometimes make bizarre suggestions, like this one:

Right — since Zihark already has Vantage + Adept, Wrath is officially off the table for him in Path of Radiance. You can’t stack three skills unless you remove one with an Occult scroll, and Vantage+Adept is already one of the strongest combos in the game

While its correct about Vantage with Adept, the idea that you ‘remove one with an Occult scroll’ is completely erroneous, since an Occult scroll is used to add a Mastery Skill, and you don’t need anything to forget a Skill. Also, you can stack three Skills because there are 5 point Skills and two of them are available as scrolls.

Furthermore, it endlessly got the details wrong. It thought that the Boots were a hidden item in the fourth stage of Chapter 17, but they actually appeared in Chapter 15. It correctly stated that it was a hidden item, but had the wrong level and the wrong location. Worse in this case, because I failed to double-check the FAQ on this occasion, I entirely missed my chance to get the Boots (which grant 2 extra movement, and are exceptionally useful because of it) because by the time I knew the robot had made a mistake, I couldn’t easily go back and correct it.

Similarly, when asked to perform a task requiring gathering data across the length of the game, it performed very poorly. Tasked with locating the four Occult scrolls (which should have been easy, since every FAQ has this answer) it got the first one entirely correct, got the second and third one in the wrong chapter of the game and with the wrong method, and for the last one got the correct chapter but the wrong method. In general, these kinds of ‘list all the instances’ questions were almost always either full of errors, or missing content.

Right Answer, Right Reason

Still, there were times that it got the right answer with the correct reasoning. It was reasonably good, for instance, at working out what was missing when I proposed different possible team compositions for the second run. It could spot that we were missing a ‘tank’ to hold chokepoints, or that we didn’t have ranged support, and other such role combinations rather well. However, it seldom if ever volunteered the relevant analysis. More often, I would ask what it would mean to add such-and-such a character to the team, and it would correctly analyse the gap in our line-up that would be filled by that mercenary’s abilities.

In some cases, it gave answers that were correct, and correctly reasoned, but did not apply to the part of the game I was in. For instance, it thought that Spirit Dust (which raises MAG by 2 points) would be good on the Healer, Rhys. This was good advice in some respects, in that after promotion, Rhys gains Light magic, and an extra two points of Magic power would give him stronger killing power with those spells. However, prior to promotion, he can only use healing staffs, and he has plenty of MAG such that even the weakest such staff is enough to heal any team member fully.

Using the Spirit Dust on Rhys would have been an investment in the late game, but it wasn’t good advice for where I was in the game (which it was well aware of, since many answers of its answers took into account the chapter I had mentioned I was currently on). You could argue that its reasoning was wrong in these cases, in that I might have benefited immediately more from giving it to a different character, but fundamentally, investing in endgame power was not bad advice, it was just something I didn’t fully comprehend until much later in the campaign.

AI vs FAQ

Ultimately, the FAQ was orders of magnitude more reliable than the AI, making essentially zero mistakes (even aesthetic choices were qualified accordingly in the text), provided all the helpful advice required to get through the game, and doing it in a form that was helpfully arranged and easy to look up. I learned an enormous amount from the FAQ, which was entirely reliable on everything I checked against it. I note that if I’d used a ‘Let’s Play’ video, it would have been basically useless unless I watched the whole thing, since I wasn’t looking at how to get past a particular point in the game (which videos work well for), but rather asking questions requiring knowledge. The FAQ had it. The robot did not.

But the robot was not a complete dud. For a start, it could provide answers far faster than checking the FAQ (since searching for the information in the long-form text requires finding the specific areas relevant to the answer), and additionally it could provide answers in cases that were far beyond the FAQs ability to address, such as reasoning about team compositions. Of course, that speed and reach came at the cost of accuracy - I would say it got at least a quarter of its answers factually or logically incorrect, and another quarter of its answers were missing important information. That’s a serious failure rate, one that in a few cases where I didn’t cross-refer with the FAQ cost me things I valued for my playthrough, like the Boots.

Additionally, it was an enormous help in overcoming analysis paralysis. I perpetually struggle with permanent stat-increasing items in games, since you cannot undo them if you get them wrong. I often finish Pokémon games with left over HP Ups and Vitamins because I can never convince myself that there isn’t a future scenario in which those would be more valuable later. In my Fire Emblem games, the AI could easily comprise a list of all the attribute raising items and the first and second choices to give them to. I didn’t always follow its advice (I didn’t give the Spirit Dust to Rhys, for instance). But I never got stuck quavering in indecision, because it always gave an authoritative answer - even though many times it was completely wrong, and at one point it tried to gaslight me by saying it had checked the source code and that I couldn’t be seeing what I was witnessing with my own eyes.

AI vs Let’s Play

If we consider the difference between the AI agent and a video walkthrough, there’s another serious difference to bear in mind. None of the questions I asked the AI agent could be adequately answered by watching a playthrough video without watching the entire thing, which would be a 30-40 hour investment, much like playing the game itself. This is obviously a bad return.

A video works if you’re stuck at a particular point, as you can find the relevant part of the playthrough and watch the solution being played out. But it’s useless in almost every other situation. As such, the AI agent could easily win out for video users who don’t have the literacy or patience to work with a more detailed guide format like a FAQ.

Worryingly, the AI agent could end up driving the FAQ extinct (videos having already made them endangered) by being such an easy-to-use aid to lazy players. This is part of a larger cultural shift away from reading and writing and towards video and audio, one that AI tools look set to accelerate. It would be tragic for the games industry to lose the long-form guide, but given the speed at which a LLM can return definitive answers (albeit, frequently wrong answers), there’s a genuine risk that they might finish off FAQs for good We’ll have to see how this plays out over the next few decades.

A Philosophical Conclusion

My short-form philosophy book Wikipedia Knows Nothing is getting a second edition this year, and its key concept of knowledge as a practice is highly relevant to why the FAQ outperformed the robot. The human that made the FAQ had played the game and built up practices for doing so. Those practices, those skills, gave it actual knowledge, from which the author could derive individual facts and observations. The facts were the side effect of having the knowledge, understood as practical skills not as statements. The FAQ was a series of facts, but it was produced as the residue of acquiring genuine knowledge.

The LLM-based AI, on the other hand, has no knowledge whatsoever - like the Wikipedia, it ‘knows nothing’. All it could execute was factmongering. It was able to take the propositional statements that other people had made about the game and deploy its inference engine to manipulate these using symbolic logic. This allowed it to derive further logical claims, but it could achieve nothing more than this. Sometimes these claims were based on faulty premises, but it couldn’t ever tell this was the case, because all it could do was factmonger and not apply its knowledge. It simply had no knowledge whatsoever to apply.

Have you used a LLM-based AI to help you play a game? If you have, let me know about it in the comments! I’d be interested in your experiences.

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The excellent Konstantinos Dimopoulos has suckered me into running a Game Design Masterclass for his D6 Learning group. There’s a Course Presentation event this Tuesday, which is worth coming to if you’re interested in the Masterclass. We’ll be talking a little about my career and also about the way I’m planning to approach the training course.

You can register for the event (it’s free) on Eventbrite. It will be at 4:30 pm UK time, which is 5:30 pm Central European time, and 10:30 am Central US time. If you’re not in those time zones, click the link and Eventbrite will convert it to your local time.

Hope to see you there!

Chris.

PS: I’ll have a brand new essay for you next week! Rerunning the classic pieces has inspired me to write some fresh content.

In 2000, Wizards of the Coast released the third edition of AD&D, now called simply Dungeons & Dragons, thus marking the end of the two-pronged market strategy (and the commercial termination of Basic D&D). From now on, there would be only one product line for D&D at any given time. The third edition was marked by a daring decision to license the core rules, known as the d20 System, under the Open Game License (OGL), although both Dungeons & Dragons and d20 System remained trademarks of Wizards. The motivation for this came from D&D‘s brand manager, Ryan Dancey, and was commercial in nature. It was a fact of the marketplace for tabletop RPGs that rulebooks sold far better than supporting materials such as adventure modules; the OGL spread the cost of producing support materials to other companies (latter day Judges Guilds, in effect), while theoretically driving sales of the core rulebooks. A later 3.5 edition was also released under the OGL, and for seven years D&D was the flagship product in the open gaming movement.

However, reading between the lines, it seems as if Hasbro corporate were less than pleased with what was entailed by open gaming, and when Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition was released in 2008 it came with a new, highly restrictive license known as the Game System License (GSL). This license has since been updated, but it still falls wildly short of the freedoms offered under OGL. The genius of the original OGL was that it allowed Wizards to own the premier product in a theoretically expanded marketplace (on the principle that a smaller share of a bigger market would be worth more). However, judging from the revisions in the GSL, Hasbro’s legal department had taken issue with both the freedoms being granted to potential competitors and with their lack of control over the content that might be offered. To their credit, the GSL still allowed relatively easy licensing of 4th edition books, certainly compared to the situation in other media – but it shut down almost all other kinds of support, including software, magazines and websites, and provided no affordances for content rooted in 3rd edition.

One of the interesting things about the revised GSL was its effective admission of how little of the content in the D&D settings actually belongs to Wizards/Hasbro, on account of the game even from the outset being cobbled together from dozens of different source materials and mythologies. Just thirteen monsters are listed in the revised GSL as being effectively D&D intellectual property, and of these only the Beholder and the Mind Flayer are particularly notable*. The creatures most associated with D&D such as Orcs, Elves, Dwarves etc. had already been excluded from legal protection in a landmark case between TSR and the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien, which established that no-one can legally own a race. Tolkien’s estate did claim “Hobbit” as a trademark, however, and references to Hobbits and Ents were removed from D&D in 1977 as a result of the legal case.

The net result of this new GSL was a split in the market between third party companies supporting 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons and companies unwilling to commit to the GSL (the scariest clause of which is the one which allows the terms of the agreement to be changed at any time without notice). Those who rejected the GSL either continued to support the 3.5 edition of D&D under the original OGL, or produced spin-offs such as Paizo Publishing’s Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, the appearance of which may have been a factor in souring Hasbro on the OGL. Since the whole point of the OGL as (presumably) sold to Hasbro was to drive sales of the core D&D rulebooks, the appearance of rival rulebooks may have been a deal breaker (which might also explain why the GSL expressly locked down any ability to reference the mechanics of the D&D core rulebooks).

Beyond the legal issues, 4th edition raised eyebrows because for the first time in its life the new D&D ruleset clearly showed the influence of MMOs – a change probably intended to help attract MMORPG players to the tabletop game. The core of D&D‘s cash flow lies with teenagers and university students, and the revised rules seemed to assume that making the game more like an MMO would help appeal to an audience already familiar with online adventuring. This was most strikingly apparent in the spelling out in the 4th edition rulebooks of specific ‘roles’ for combat, each of which overtly corresponded to the combat roles popularised in the World of Warcraft community (given here in brackets): defender (‘tank’), striker (‘DPS’), controller (‘crowd control’) and leader (‘healer’). Such roles make zero sense in the context of participatory storytelling or the history of fantasy novels; they emerged from game balancing issues unique to the post-MUD online dungeon-bash games.

Thus one of the most original and innovative games ever to be published became second fiddle to its electronic progeny. Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition seemed to recognise that the success of World of Warcraft lay not in its ability to support role-play, since only a minority of players participate in the game world this way, but in its slick, streamlined reward structures – inspired by the original D&D game, but tweaked to addictive excellence by the designers of computer role-playing games over the intervening decades (especially in Japan, where the genre remains the most popular form of videogame). Nothing can take away the tremendous contribution of this game to the history of play, but it is still slightly saddening to see that with its fourth edition, D&D as a commercial product became less about supporting the incredible niche hobby of participatory storytelling that it founded, and much more about wringing the spare change out of teenagers.

Are you, or were you, a Dungeons & Dragons player? I’m interested in hearing from all players of the game who have opinions about the different rulesets, particularly players who still use 1st or 2nd edition AD&D rules or B/X D&D boxed set/Cyclopedia rules, players who refused to leave 3.5 for 4e, players who jumped ship for Pathfinder, and anyone who played 4e and enjoyed it. Thanks in advance for sharing your views!

*The full list of restricted monsters was Balhannoth, Beholder, Carrion Crawler, Displacer Beast, Gauth, Githyanki, Githzerai, Kuo-Toa, Mind Flayer, Illithid, Slaad, Umber Hulk, and Yuan-Ti.

In 1979, a story broke that a university student in Michigan had disappeared in the school’s steam tunnels while playing a live-action version of D&D. A 1982 TV-movie, Mazes and Monsters, starring a young Tom Hanks, was based loosely on the events, and wildly misrepresented the role-playing hobby in a manner reminiscent of the classic Reefer Madness. It was the beginning of a spate of negative publicity, which lead to a backlash against the game from conservative Christian groups who alleged the game promoted demon worship and suicide. This opinion had originating in Patricia Pulling, whose D&D-playing son killed himself in 1982, although there is no evidence the game was a factor in his death. Three years later, Pulling appeared on 60 Minutes opposite Gary Gygax, after which Gygax received death threats and had to hire a bodyguard. He left the company shortly afterwards owing to a dispute with the controlling shareholders, not long after creating the briefly successful Dungeons & Dragons cartoon for CBS, which lead its time slot for two years.

Between the negative publicity and the cartoon show, the media attention on D&D served to raise awareness of the game to new levels, and TSR’s annual D&D sales shot up to $16 million in 1982, and $29 million by 1985. The New York Times speculated in January 1983 that Dungeons & Dragons could be “the great game of the 1980s”. During this time, Basic D&D diverged even further from AD&D under the guidance of new editor Tom Moldvay, who produced the 1981 edition, and the two rulesets were definitively considered to be entirely distinct games. AD&D was supplemented during this decade by many new hardback rulebooks, each of which sold a few hundred thousand units. Basic D&D was supplemented by a sequence of new boxed sets, each dealing with progressively higher level characters – Expert (levels 4-14), Companion (levels 15-25), Master (levels 26-36) and Immortals (level 36+), but the bulk of sales appear to have been for the Basic and Expert boxes. In 1989, the Basic boxed set apparently sold over a million units, annual sales that no other tabletop RPG has ever reached.

The very existence of D&D had been formative for the computer role-playing game genre, and was a clear inspiration for both Ultima and Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, both launched in 1981. Both titles were key influences in the development of computer role-playing games, and Wizardry affected designers in both Japan and the US to an enormous degree. Despite this chain of lineage to D&D, TSR were slow to benefit from videogame revenue. Some largely unsuccessful Mattel and Intellivision titles in 1981 and 1982 were eventually followed in 1988 with the first of the popular “Gold Box” titles by SSI, beginning in 1988 with Pool of Radiance, and followed by half a dozen other titles in this line over the next four years, along with a slew of other licensed videogames over the next decade, several of which enjoyed modest success.

The 1990s were not so lucrative for TSR. David “Zeb” Cook’s 1989 revision of AD&D into 2nd Edition removed a great deal of what had offended conservative Christians in the original game, including references to demons and devils, playable evil classes and races, and sexually suggestive art. This version drew less influence from the sword and sorcery fiction of Howard, Leiber and Moorcock, and represented itself as a blend of medieval history and mythology (although the Moorcock-inspired alignment system remained). Unfortunately, the entire tabletop role-playing game market was to suffer a near-fatal blow at the hands of a new contender in the hobby game space with the arrival in 1992 of Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering, a unique and addictive trading card game designed by Richard Garfield. M:TG (and to a lesser extent other collectible card games) sucked almost all the air out of the balloon for tabletop RPGs, and drove many companies bankrupt.

The final insult for TSR came in 1997, when the ailing company was purchased by Wizards of the Coast, the very company that had effectively driven it out of business. Ironically, two years later, Wizards of the Coast was itself purchased by toy giant Hasbro, who had little or no interest in tabletop role-playing, but were very interested in the massive revenues generated by both M:TG and the Pokémon Trading Card Game, which WotC had shrewdly licensed. Ironically, the Hasbro acquisition united Dungeons & Dragons with the company that had paved its way, Avalon Hill, the rights for which had been acquired by Hasbro after the collapse of the ailing wargaming company in 1998.

Under the guidance of Wizards of the Coast, Dungeons & Dragons was finally to enjoy more substantial success in the videogame marketplace, beginning with BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate series (1998-2001), the engine for which also drove the 1999 PlaneScape: Torment, a highly regarded but commercially unsuccessful title by Black Isle Studios, who had also acted as publisher for Baldur’s Gate. However, just as D&D had been slow to take advantage of its influence in the cRPG space, it was too slow to move into the new massively multiplayer online RPG space. Early MUDs, the direct predecessors to MMORPGs, had been vastly influenced by D&D (especially the numerous LP and diku MUDs), and there is no reason the Dungeons & Dragons brand couldn’t have moved to dominate the MMO space. Instead, another direct descendent of the ideas that originated in D&D was coming to claim the crown…

Next Week: Hasbro vs Blizzard

One of the most influential games of the last century was Dungeons & Dragons. This is not to suggest it has enjoyed enormous commercial success – it hasn't. Except, perhaps, in contrast to other role-playing game systems, which (other than White Wolf's horror-fetish World of Darkness and perhaps Steve Jackson Games' GURPS and Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu) have suffered either instant or lingering commercial failure. Estimates state some 20 million people have played D&D since its inception – impressive figures, especially for tabletop role-playing games, although for comparison bear in mind that Trivial Pursuit sold 20 million units in 1984 alone.

The influence of Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D, can be divided into two specific aspects: firstly, there is the mechanical influence, which has been felt most strongly in the videogames industry. The progress structures that were developed with this game are compelling and addictive, and become even more so when the rate of progress is increased, as it is when similar structures appear in videogames. In tabletop D&D, a player would be lucky to gain a level each week that they played. In a computer RPG, a player would be surprised not to gain levels in the space of a few hours, or even minutes near the beginning of the game. Not only computer RPGs but videogames in general owe a huge mechanical debt to D&D – even Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas contains reward structures descending from D&D amongst its mechanics.

The second influence – which is less commercially relevant but is just as culturally significant – is the confluence of narrative and play in what has been called participatory storytelling. Prior to D&D there were no mechanics for this kind of play – only children created ad hoc stories together; adults might write fiction, but they did not perform fiction with one another outside of improvisational theatre. The genius of Gary Gygax and Dave Areneson was to recognise that the central mechanics in wargames had a potential beyond that of representing conflict – the fundamental elements of these games were applicable to a more narrative form. Chainmail (by Gygax and Jeff Peren), the direct predecessor to D&D, was a 1971 wargame with rules for fantasy monsters and one-on-one “swashbuckling” action, inspired by the works of J.R.R Tolkien (Lord of the Rings) and Robert E. Howard (Conan) among others. It rapidly became apparent that this direction could lead to a new kind of a game – one in which the focus was individual heroes and their stories, not whole armies.

Thus was born the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set, published by Tactical Studies Rules in 1974, back when the height of videogame sophistication was Pong. The original white box edition was essentially incomprehensible to anyone who was not already familiar with wargaming, but still proved hugely popular in comparison with the wargames available at the time. In this regard, it is important not to underestimate the role of Avalon Hill in the success of D&D: without the venerable wargame company paving the way for hobby gaming in general, it would have been essentially impossible for D&D to gain its initial foothold. Only because a niche market for esoteric and often complex boardgames had been established was it possible for role-playing games to spread so rapidly among university students, high schoolers, and other stalwarts of hobby gaming.

In 1977, TSR Hobbies (the next in the long chain of companies in the TSR lineage) began a two-pronged market strategy in respect of the then hugely popular (in hobby games terms!) D&D franchise. On the one hand, Basic Dungeons & Dragons retained the boxed set format (ideal for sale in toy stores) and was designed to be an introduction to the game for new players. On the other, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was offered as a series of premium hardback rulebooks, intended for players of the basic game to “graduate” to, as they mastered the rules. The core of the advanced game came in three books published initially over three years: Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide and Monster Manual, a schema which still exists to some extent today. TSR's product line for D&D was also supplemented by some third party companies such as Judges Guild, which published licensed AD&D content up until 1982.

The basis of the two-pronged strategy was sound: having a cheaper introductory version coupled with a more expensive advanced version made it easier for players to get into the game, and gave experienced players additional options. Unfortunately, the integration between the two versions was scant, and each was actuated by a wildly different design philosophy. Gary Gygax, in charge of AD&D, wanted rules for every conceivable situation (far more, in fact, than any player ever used). Eric Holmes, in charge of Basic D&D, preferred a more stripped down approach, with more room for improvisation. In this regard, it was almost as if the split echoed the two influences cited above: AD&D followed the mechanical line, while D&D followed the role-playing line, loosely speaking. There is a certain irony to Gygax leading the more complicated rule set: he had once quipped that TSR would be in trouble if the players ever realised that they didn't actually need any rules...

Next week: Rise of the Wizards of the Coast

Chris Bateman: You were a regular reader of the seminal ZX Spectrum magazine Crash, and in 1986 the readers voted you Programmer of the Year on the back of a string of incredible titles in '85 and '86. That must have felt wonderful at the time! But did it come to seem as if your career had peaked too early?

Steve Crow: No – I don't think so. Many people involved in video games back then were very young; most like me were teenagers or early 20's. So anyone who was successful was more than likely to be very young. I was more concerned about making games that I and others enjoyed playing and were fun. The good reviews and awards were just in some ways confirmation I was on the right track.

CB: So there was nothing negative about your early successes?

SC: The only bad aspect of being so young was handling the pressure of creating and completing the next game. I think in some ways I starting working on graphics to get a break from this pressure and found that I really enjoyed it. There was still a lot of pressure of course but I was working in partnership with a programmer so the creative process and stress was shared.

CB: Do you miss the way the videogames were back in its 'infancy'?

SC: Looking back I consider myself so fortunate to be in the industry at a time when one individual could be the author of an entire game. By the late 80's games started to be created by small teams of people as the programming, music and graphics became more complex and people began specializing in particular aspects of game creation. Since the mid 80's I have been involved in many very successful games so I don't consider the mid 80's as a 'golden' era of my career but it was a very exciting time to be involved in video games!

CB: You were writing the machine code for some of your Spectrum games on one of those chunky 80's home computers (the British-made Tatung Einstein), and it seems to me you must have had a great grasp of the technical capabilities – and limitations – of the platforms at the time.

SC: Using the Tatung Einstein for development (as opposed to the ZX Spectrum itself) was a great improvement – it had a real keyboard and a real disk drive! The Spectrum's main strength was that it had a fairly powerful (for the time) Z80 processor so even though it lacked features such as hardware sprites it was possible to emulate this lack of hardware with software sprites.

CB: Is there another computer you would have liked to have worked on back then?

SC: I was most envious of the Atari 800 and C64 as these machines had much better hardware such as true multicolour, smooth screen scrolling, a real sound chip, hardware sprites and interrupts etc. which more than made up for the slower 6502 processor contained in these machines.

CB: Have you ever thought about how different your career would have been if you'd had a chance to work on Nintendo's NES, or some other cartridge-based platform? There were a great many things they could do that were impossible for you...

SC: I did work on one NES game with Mark Kelly, on Overlord, and I recall it was not that powerful a machine. The processor was slow and there was very little documentation, so in some ways it was a step down from the C64 and Atari 800. Looking back the strengths and weaknesses of each machine influenced the games created. For instance I don't think Knight Lore would have been created first on the C64 or something like Uridium created first on the ZX Spectrum.

CB: So you're not drawn to any dream of 'what could have been'?

SC: Well it would have been fantastic to have had the capability to create Starquake as a true 4 way scrolling platform game with hardware multicolored sprites – but alas it just was not possible at the time – at least not on the ZX Spectrum.

CB: In 1986, when you won the award, Nintendo were changing the face of game design by incorporating a save mechanic into titles like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. This was unthinkable for most home computer games. But in your 1985 Wizard's Lair – one of my personal favourite games, incidentally – you came up with a mechanic which circumvented these kind of limitations: the elevators. Each floor of the dungeon had a five letter code, like LYONS or CAIVE, and players who made it that far could skip ahead to that floor in a future game by using the code at an elevator in the early levels.

SC: At the time I would have my brother and sister test out my games. I would tune the difficulty according to how tricky they found it to play. I made sure they could easily play through the early stages. Wizard's Lair had such a large map it was necessary to have staging points and the elevators (lifts!) between floors seemed like a natural point to do this.

CB: What was your inspiration for this mechanic, and did you have a specific motive for including it?

SC: I must admit I did not play many contemporary games at the time and assumed other games employed a similar 'save' feature!

CB: That blows my mind – I can't imagine creating a new game mechanic and just taking it on faith that it was something everyone else was doing!

SC: Wizard's Lair was fully completed before I even found a publisher to sell it! At one point I was contemplating giving it away free with Crash magazine as no one seemed interested in picking it up! As a Christmas present for my sister I created a special version of the game with her as the main character, the lifts were renamed 'loos' and all the codes were her favourite sweets.

CB: Speaking of Wizard's Lair, this was a particularly evil game in that the use of expendable keys – and, for that matter, crosses that allowed you to phase through coloured snakes – meant it was perfectly possible to get utterly stuck and lose the game, slowly wasting away into death. It was a devastating experience as a player! But it was also part of the identity of the game. Did you feel bad about inflicting this on players, or did you enjoy some schadenfreude while laughing evilly about it?

SC: I was actually unaware of this issue – maybe I assumed no one would make such a mistake? If it causes a player to lose just one life I think I would have assumed that was OK. However, if it causes a player to lose every life, one after the other, I would have considered that a design flaw and rectified the issue.

CB: I'm pretty sure you could only lose one life, although you could fail in your overall strategy this way because the keys and crosses were a limited resource. I don't think this was in any way harder than what other games were doing at the time, to be honest.

SC: That's good to know.

CB: Starquake is sometimes considered your magnum opus (although I know players who prefer Fire Lord), and one of the most fascinating aspects of its design is that you replaced jumping with a platform resource that allows you to ascend upwards as long as you have them in stock. As with Wizard's Lair, it could lead to players getting horrible trapped, but it also made the game stand out as entirely unique. Where did the idea for this mechanic come from?

SC: With all my games I created a sand box area of a few 'flick' screens where I prototyped ideas. I would program different mechanics and see how they played out and if they were fun or not. I am not sure where the idea for the platform-laying mechanic came from but I really like the way it worked as it allowed a player to climb but was also a limited resource. It was one of those mechanics that just felt 'right'. Maybe the idea came from a picture in a magazine? I'm just not sure.

CB: Both of these games were heavily influenced by the art designs of the Stamper brothers' company, Ultimate Play the Game, who dominated the 8-bit era in Europe. (They later went on to found Rare, of course). I believe you hadn't even played Atic Atac or Underwurlde, you just saw screenshots and used that as inspiration, is that correct?

SC: Yes this is very true! I was influenced by what the Stamper brothers' were doing (although I did not know who they were - I just knew them as 'Ultimate Play the Game'). I remember seeing one of their games for the first time at a computer fair in London, around the time we were marketing my first game, Laser Snaker. I think it was Pssst. I was blown away by the smoothness of the motion and the animation – all on a 16K Spectrum! I think I owned Pssst and Lunar Jetman, but I never played Atic Atac or Underwurlde – I'd just seen pictures in magazines.

CB: Did you ever meet the Stampers? Did they give you a hard time for 'borrowing' their visual aesthetics, or were they flattered?

SC: I never met the Stampers, and they never contacted me or any publisher in regard to the visual similarities between their 2D games and mine. I really think by the time my games were published they were moving on to bigger and better things.

CB: It has to be said, no end of companies took the forced isometric concept of their Knight Lore as an inspiration, but only you seemed to have been quite as switched on by their 2D explorers, like Sabre Wulf. Why do you think that was?

SC: I think I preferred the visual richness of the 2D games, and they allowed for more artistic creativity and large exploratory maps. I am not sure I would have been able to write a 3D game such as Knight Lore – it was way ahead of its time. When I first played it I was absolutely amazed, it was more impressive than Ultimate's first 2D games.

CB: Talking of exploration games, the 80s saw a great many of these (including several of your own games!) with maze-like layouts that encouraged mapping. The Spectrum in particular featured a lot of flick-screen games in both 2D and isometric forms, and maps were a big part of the 'tips' sections in magazines. Those of us playing videogames in the 80s were in love with those 2D explorers, and still remember them fondly, but today the form doesn't seem popular. What do you think was appealing about this style of play?

SC: I think born into everyone of us is an inherent desire to explore the world around us. This, I believe, is what is behind the popularity of such games. As a child my friends and I would travel miles exploring the fields and woods around the village we lived in, sometimes we would be away from home all day. Unfortunately, children today rarely get the opportunity to have such freedom and video games allow them to exercise that exploration.

CB: Is the classic form of exploration-play gone forever, do you think?

SC: Most games have a fairly linear progression so that instead of true exploration it is more a matter of discovering what is next. It's far easier to design a linear single player experience rather than a truly exploratory game. A major component of the game I currently work on, World of Warcraft, involves exploration – of course this is a 3D game. As far as 2D exploration games are concerned it is hard to tell whether they will become popular again. There has definitely been a resurgence of 2D side scrollers – so you never know!

CB: I've been lucky enough to meet and work with a lot of the British 'bedroom coders' and many of them, like Sandy White (who made 3D Ant Attack), had difficulty getting jobs later in their career. Those that had most success, like the Oliver twins, generally formed their own company (Blitz Games, which sadly closed their doors in 2013). You seemed to have found a different path through the games industry, having worked for many different studios and ending up at what is now the world's biggest software publisher, Activision-Blizzard. What's your secret?

SC: Back then everyone was self-taught. I think my secret has been to never stop learning and growing. Concentrating on graphics certainly helped, and also trying to make everything I work on the very best it can be. Perhaps some developers had a hard time transitioning from 2D to 3D games or simply keeping up with the ever increasing complexity of video games? I would imagine that's especially true for programmers.

CB: Do you miss the days where you were an 'auteur' with absolute control over every aspect of a game's development?

SC: I don't think I really miss the days of being the author of an entire game. It would be fun to do a solo side project but modern games require large teams of people working together. I rather like working as part of a team and you still get control on the asset or portion you are responsible for – it is simply one piece in a much larger jigsaw puzzle.

With thanks to Steve for his time.

The persistence of the terms ‘Hardcore’ and ‘Casual’ might be credited to the simplicity of the player model implied: people find it easier to grasp an idea that divides people into two boxes than to wrestle with a more complete audience model.

Besides, many people working in videogames are resistant to audience modelling as a driver for the game design process. Often this is because the game designer in question wants to trust their instincts as to what is fun rather than a model. There’s merit to this approach, but surely one’s instincts can be better refined by learning the available models?

Earlier this year, football game legend Dino Dini contended to me that game design could be driven by intuition rather than theory. I agreed with him – it is certainly possible to design this way, and I often do rely upon my intuition – but I also pointed out that whether you used theory or intuition to guide the design process, you don’t really know what you have until you put it into the hands of players who’ve never seen it before. Whatever assumptions you’re making, the players are the ultimate test.

If transitioning to the widespread use of more detailed audience models (Lazzaro’s Four Fun Keys, Bartle Types, ihobo’s Player Motives etc.) is hindered by the relative complexity of such models, perhaps we might at least improve upon what we mean by the paper-thin model we do have in common use – the Hardcore/Casual split.

Game Literacy

In August last year [i.e. 2007], I submitted a post to the games industry Round Table which attempted to look at Hardcore and Casual from the point of view of how much experience of games the player had – that is, in terms of game literacy. There is a lot of merit in what was proposed here, and the key points still stand. The market for videogames consists of a ‘head’ and a ‘tail’. The ‘head’ consists of game literate players (the gamer hobbyists), who buy a greater number of videogames and rack up a greater number of hours playing. The ‘tail’ comprises of less game literate players – the mass market – who are gradually in the process of replacing the gamer hobbyists as the primary source of cash flow in the games space. Nintendo’s ongoing success with their mass market friendly Wii and DS platforms emphasises this shift in the marketplace.

But there are flaws to the substitution of Hardcore for gamer hobbyist, and Casual for mass market. As we are coming to the end of our analysis of survey data from 1,040 gamers (both Hardcore and Casual, based on self-assessment), we are able to examine some of the differences between the two (strictly, three) groupings.

Most of the findings in this regard are trivial. Self-assessed Hardcore gamers rated themselves higher for the importance of all the emotions we inquired about (and all these findings were highly statistically significant) – which is to say, Hardcore gamers were more emotionally invested in their play, or at least more likely to rate the importance of any emotional factor in their play higher. Hardcore gamers also rated themselves higher on every aspect of game literacy or player skills in the survey (and these results were even more statistically significant). Finally, Hardcore gamers were more interested in games of challenge, heavily structured play, and games of escapism (acting out in a fictional world) – all of which broadly validated the findings from our earlier survey.

But these results obscure something interesting about the players who self-identified as Casual. Firstly, Casual players still play games very often. 81% of those who self-identified as Hardcore said they played videogames everyday, but 49% of Casual players also said they played everyday. Hardcore players gave themselves high marks in game literacy (more than 95% of Hardcore respondents claiming the top two marks, and about three quarters the very top mark), but Casual players didn’t exactly rate themselves low on this (around 85% of Casual respondents claimed the top two marks, and roughly half the very top mark). So while some of these Casual players might be mass market players, many of them are highly game literate players who play videogames every day. (Those who declined to choose between Hardcore and Casual looked remarkably similar to those who self-identified as Casual).

What other factors might be in play?

Punishing versus Forgiving

In January of this year [i.e. 2007], the host for the games industry Round Table discussions shared thoughts about what characterised Casual games (as opposed to Casual players). They characterised these games as forgiving:

Casual games are typically very forgiving games. They don’t harshly penalize failure, they have gradual increases in difficulty, they don’t demand you spend large blocks of time in one sitting. They don’t have complicated control schemes or complex mechanics. Typically, you don’t even have to read to be able to play (excepting Bookworm and its ilk, obviously).

This formulation of Casual games as forgiving is a major step forward in understanding Casual players! On the basis of case studies at the very least, Casual players are looking for games that are indeed more forgiving – and along the same lines, more welcoming. They don’t necessarily want a big time commitment (but may still spend a lot of time playing a particular game), and they certainly don’t want to be punished for their failures – they want failure to be forgiven.

This was part of the genius behind the design of PopCap’s evergreen favourite Bejewelled. It not only allowed you to excuse yourself from additional stress (by opting out of a timer – a major source of excitement in play, but also a source of unpleasant panic for certain players), but it doesn’t penalise you for making a mistake. Swap two jewels that don’t make a line and you’ll just be warned that you made a mistake – no score penalty, no penalty of any kind. This was a break from a tradition of punishment that runs throughout the history of videogames, and it found an eager audience waiting for it.

Conversely, the gamer hobbyists include a great many players for whom the ‘old school’ sensibilities of the arcade and the early home videogames are more desired – games in which you are up against impossible odds, where you will fail often, and be punished for the slightest misstep. [Even three years before the release of Dark Souls, the play needs this game would meet were already evident.] Why are games in these styles enjoyed? Because punishing failure makes success all the more vital to strive towards and so the threat of punishment adds not only excitement to the play of the game, but it intensifies the reward in triumph (or fiero, the emotion of triumph over adversity) that is the ultimate pay off when success if finally attained.

This, then, is the other side of the Hardcore/Casual split – not the division of the market based upon game literacy, but the division of the players according to whether they are looking for a forgiving game (one that will welcome them, and behave in a civil and friendly manner) or a punishing game (one that will raise the degree of challenge and dare the player to rise to the level of difficulty that it demands, in order to earn the biggest payoff in the experience of triumph when victory is eventually attained).

It may be tempting to associate ‘forgiving’ with female players, but it would be a gross simplification to assume that this is an adequate and complete explanation. There are female players looking for punishing games, and there are plenty of male players who want a forgiving game – Animal Crossing is a quintessentially forgiving game, and its audience shows no gender bias. The DS version has sold more than 9.5 million units, almost twice the audience that a typical punishing first person shooter can even hope to attract [in 2008].

Conclusion

The Hardcore/Casual split doesn’t work any more. It’s an incomplete description because as games have pushed deeper and wider into the demographic landscape the old assumptions have failed. Hardcore might mean game literate, and it might mean seeking punishing games, but there are players who self-identify as Hardcore and yet detest any game that will make them feel angry (an emotion that enhances triumph, and can be associated with punishing games). We have no way of distinguishing between those two state of affairs in our current language.

Similarly, Casual might mean less game literate, but there are a great many players who self-identify as Casual but who are clearly well versed in the language of gameplay. And Casual might mean desiring more forgiving games, but about one in five players who self-identify as Casual still say they looking for (or willing to tolerate) anger in their play – roughly the same proportion as in Hardcore players. Once again, the term describes multiple different kinds of players, between which we cannot distinguish in our current language.

If we want to better understand the marketplace for games, perhaps we should start thinking in terms of two very different splits. The split between game literate gamer hobbyists, and less experienced mass market players on the one hand, and on the other the division between victory-focussed players seeking punishing play (challenge-oriented, triumph-seeking players) and players seeking forgiving play (who do not want games that make them feel angry). Hardcore and Casual is a compromised terminology – it means too many different things, and it no longer reflects the state of the marketplace. The time has come to move forward into a new language for describing the essential splits in the audience for videogames.

Much of what this piece discussed in 2008 still applies today! Interestingly, we anticipated the rise of ‘cosy games’ in the late 2010s. These are the perfect example of what this piece calls ‘forgiving play’, and a major segment of the commercial landscape for videogames today.

What is the distinction between a Hardcore gamer and a Casual gamer? Are these distinctions still useful to us? Is it valuable to define a third state in between? And what, if anything, can we learn from this terminology?

For many years now, and with origins cloaked in mystery, the crudest audience model has persisted as the one most commonly used – namely the split of players into Hardcore gamers and Casual gamers. It is probably the simple nature of this dichotomy that has allowed it to spread, as humans take to ‘us and them’ distinctions rather too easily. Marcus of Verse Studios suggests that the focus on these terms is entirely misleading, and we should just concentrate on making games that are fun. I admire the sentiment – as long as we remember that one person’s fun can be another person’s horror.

When my company began the research into the gaming audience using survey analysis, we were investigating a particular hypothesis: that those people who constituted the majority of so-called Hardcore gamers belonged to a particular psychological mindset, denoted in Myers-Briggs typology by Introverted, Thinking and Judging [i.e. low Extraversion, low Agreeableness, high Conscientiousness in ‘Big Five]. In effect, we expected Hardcore gamers to be people who kept themselves to themselves, favoured pragmatism over affiliation, and who displayed obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

To conduct the research, we had to decide how to determine if someone could be considered a Hardcore gamer, and to do this we used to methods: firstly self-selection. Players were asked to answer if they considered themselves a Hardcore player, a Casual player or didn’t know. Secondly, we enquired after how much time was spent playing games, and how many different games were purchased and played. As it happened, all of these methods proved to be broadly equivalent: there is significant statistical overlap between players who self-identify as Hardcore (sometimes reluctantly!), players who spend a lot of time each week playing games, and players who buy and play a lot of games. We shouldn’t be entirely surprised!

The hypothesis behind our research was largely disproved. Although it was validated that Hardcore players were more Introverted (in Myers-Briggs terms) than non-Hardcore players, the presumed Thinking and Judging preferences turned out to be indicative of a pattern of play independent of Hardcore status. In fact, Intuitive bias i.e. preference for abstract thinking [Openness to Experience in Big Five] turned out to be a better indicator of Hardcore status. This discovery completely changed the way I thought about the gaming audience, and lead to the development of our research into the many different play styles that exist as an entirely separate issue to Hardcore or Casual status. (More on the subject of this research can be found in our book 21^st Century Game Design [now out of print]).

It is important to understand that while this research showed that Hardcore players (both in terms of self-identification, and commitment of time) were predominantly Introverted and Intuitive (in Myers-Briggs terms), neither of these factors are necessarily reliable indicators of a Hardcore player. In particular, there are people who express both traits but have no interest in videogames at all!

So what do we mean when we talk about a ‘Hardcore player?’ Putting aside the subtle and confusing shades that this term has acquired, at heart we mean a player who spends a lot of time playing videogames. I have suggested a better term for such a player is a gamer hobbyist, someone who pursues videogames in the manner of a hobby, rather than as a distraction and diversion. This term is more descriptive than ‘Hardcore’, and comes without the baggage the old term has acquired.

Is a ‘Casual player’ then someone who doesn’t spend much time playing videogames? Well, as it happens there are many players who do not self-identify as ‘Hardcore players’ and who do not buy and play many games but still rack up a lot of hours playing games. They play the same games over and over again (especially games such as Tetris and Solitaire).

If we are to rescue the crude ‘Hardcore versus Casual’ partition and make something more worthwhile of it, we should consider the underlying distinction to be game literacy. By this, I mean the individual’s familiarity with the conventions of videogames, and thus by extension their ability to pick up and play new games with little or no instruction.

It will probably not have escaped notice that videogames evolve along quite channelled lines – that is, genres within videogames show many marked similarities. The potential deviation between one first person shooter and another is vast, yet almost all have a lot in common. The same applies for real time strategy or for almost any well-established genre. This is inevitable: the audience likes to buy games that are similar to the games they have enjoyed in the past (and the games industry, as an employer of gamer hobbyists, likes to make games similar to the games they enjoyed in the past). The inevitable consequence of this dependency is ‘genre conventions’. They may be bent, twisted and and eventually superseded, but each game genre has it’s own habitual tenets, and game literacy represents in part a player’s ability to interpret a new game in the context of their prior experience of these conventions.

The ‘Hardcore gamer’ or gamer hobbyist therefore represents a player with high videogame literacy. Such a player can play any and all games they choose – they have the requisite knowledge to do so – although the actual games they enjoy will vary from person to person. They require little or no tutorial for a game that fits into their existing experience comfortably – perhaps just an explanation of how the conventions of the new game differ from their expectations. A typical gamer hobbyist will have acquired between 15 and 50 player months of experience with videogames, and will also have played 20 to 100 different games in that time. (Note that when I say ‘player month’, I mean a month of continuous play time totalled up).

The ‘Casual gamer’ therefore becomes the player with low or limited gamer literacy. This is an explanation for the simplicity of successful Casual games like Zuma, Bejewelled, Bookworm and Solitaire – to succeed in an audience with low gamer literacy, one must make games that do not require this domain-specific knowledge. Thus a successful Casual game draws from experiences familiar to people from outside of videogames – accuracy (for Zuma), logic puzzles (for Bejewelled), word puzzles (for Bookworm) and card games (for Solitaire). Equally, a successful Casual game requires the player to learn only two or three rules. Thus, the barrier to entry is lowered.

I prefer to term the Casual gamers as the mass market, in keeping with the usual terms used in business. After all, that’s what we’re talking about here: the largest group of consumers, those who lie under the long tail of a particular industry – that’s the mass market, and that’s what I believe we are usually talking about when we talk about Casual gamers.

But of course, what we are talking about here is a continuum: from the spike of the gamer hobbyists, the most game literate, to the tail of the mass market, the least game literate. ‘Hardcore’, as previously used, refers to that spike, and ‘Casual’ refers to the tail.

Of course, being a continuum we can break it up in many different ways. We could split it into three, as Jenova Chen and That Game Company did by defining ‘Core’ as a midpoint or intersection between the two extremes, or we could split it into any other number of segments – say, a sevenfold division into (say) hardcore, hobbyist, experienced, core, inexperienced, casual, mass market – but what would be the point in doing so? We know we are dealing with a continuum, the clearest way to denote such a phenomena is to label the poles (hobbyist and mass market, or Hardcore and Casual) and remember that the majority of people fall between the extremes. That said, render whatever models help you make your games – a model is just a model, after all.

As my company gets ready to launch its next round of research into the gaming audience, the issue of Hardcore versus Casual has slipped into obscurity for us. We will be exploring issues of game literacy instead – although we are still including the self-assessment question from our earlier survey investigation so that we can compare game literacy to self-assessment. But even this is a tangential element of the research we are conducting this time. The survey will go live in two weeks time [back in 2007, that is!], just in time for me to promote it at the Austin Game Developer’s Conference.

Thinking about the issue of ‘Hardcore and Casual’ games in terms of gamer literacy adds clarity to the nature of the situation, and allows us to reason about how to proceed. Those games that used to be the centre of the marketplace are increasingly becoming niche markets for gamer hobbyists, while some – sometimes against all odds – have transitioned to the edge of the mass market (World of Warcraft and GTA being only the two most well known examples).

This gives game designers a choice in how they approach their games: they can target the gamer hobbyist side of the audience, in which case the game either needs to be developed on a prudent budget or be lucky enough to be supported by a platform licensor (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) as a possible driver for early adoption or brand loyalty. Or, they can target the ‘long tail’ with simpler games that do not require much if any gamer literacy to play. Or they can work in the space with the greatest potential for both profit and failure – the elusive middle ground between the two extremes. There is success to be found here, but it requires careful consideration of how the games will support players with low game literacy, intelligent structuring, and more than a modicum of luck.

It's probable that the genres beloved by hobbyists can support commercially viable niche markets, and we will see a widening of the gap between such players and the mass market. It is perhaps more likely that the mainstream videogames of the future will need to learn how to balance the needs of the game literate player against the mass market players with little prior gaming experience in order to maintain commercial viability. But the problems to solve in this journey – riddles of difficulty and related issues in game modes to name just two – ensure that the field of game design still has much to learn about how to take videogames forward into the twenty first century.

This is the first of two pieces revisiting ihobo’s thoughts about ‘Hardcore and Casual’ in the late 2000s. The second piece runs in two weeks time.

Wait, eleven? You said there were ten player motives! Actually, although there are ten player motives that are commercially important, there are many other motives to play games - they're just not as important to the industry making and selling play. This 'eleventh motive', which I call 'the aesthetic motive' does not drive sales quite like the others, but it encapsulates everything that makes games such an intriguing, creative medium. As such, even if this isn't your best bet for making money at making games, you really have no excuse not to support those auteurs who are finding ways to satisfy our aesthetic desires for creative originality and unexpected experiences.

2005 was a banner year for the aesthetic motive in games, as it was the year that various voices began to consider what it might mean for videogames to be artworks. It was the year of Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern's stage-play inspired Façade, and it was also the year of Tale of Tales astonishing debut The Endless Forest. Dubbed a 'massively multiplayer screensaver' by the impish genius of its creators, Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, the game would go on to influence the hugely popular Journey by thatgamecompany, with its incredible conceit of encounter, a theme that recurs in Tale of Tales brilliant but under-appreciated Bientôt L’été (Almost Summer).

There followed a glorious explosion of aesthetic exploration of what games could be. Jason Roher's Passage in 2007, Dear Esther's deconstruction of gameplay to the thinnest play imaginable in 2012, and 2013's Proteus by Ed Key and David Kanaga, which I consider the most beautiful videogame ever made. However, another strong contender for this title is Tale of Tales final game, Sunset in 2015, an utterly astonishing game that, while flailing slightly in its narrative, manages to play with light, shade, and colour in a way that transcends almost anything I can think of in any medium.

Yet this way of telling the tale of the aesthetic motive is misleading, as it makes it seem as if it all happened in 2005. But this was really the rediscovery of something that game developers had in some sense always known: that videogames were a creative, artistic medium, capable of being much more than entertainment. Mel Croucher's Deus Ex Machina in 1984 served as a mind-bending refusal to accept the player practices of the arcade, showing for perhaps the first time the tremendous possibilities inherent in a medium that was capable of creating unique artworks but had largely settled with satisfied itself through 'mere' awesome entertainments.

I have mentioned before the utter lack of investment in indie games that blights the games industry. Small scale publishers do not feel they need to put money into making smaller games, as a lively wellspring of 'bedroom coders and artists' are making games in their own time and then selling them to the publishers. But the aesthetic motive is a reminder that however commercially logical this strategy might be, it sells the medium of videogames quite short of what it is capable of achieving. The Endless Forest would never have come about without investment from the Belgian arts council, and nothing that thatgamescompany made between Flow and Journey could have happened without EA first funding Jenova Chen's student project Cloud, and Sony deciding to invest in aesthetically interesting games.

Movie studios understand that as well as making big-budget movies that garner equally gigantic returns on investment, they have a creative obligation to invest in smaller, more creative films - so-called 'art house cinema' - that nourishes both the sources of creativity, and the creative people at work in their industry. Videogames continues to deny this necessity. When your corporation is earning billions of dollars from its games, what possible excuse could there be for refusing to invest a few hundred thousand in creative experiments on the side...? The games industry wants all the glory of being declared an artistic medium without being willing to put its money where its mouthpiece is. Until the industry as a whole invests in artistic games at all scales of development, there is a certain hypocrisy to the cries of our artistry.

Throughout these short reflections on our motivations for playing games, I have focussed on the ten most commercially significant motives players have for engaging with the games they love. Yet while videogames may be a mature industry in terms of revenue, we are still all but destitute when it comes to the aesthetic potential of our medium. There might be no better way we can shed our terrible yet deserved reputation of being little more than monetised violence and compulsion porn than finally resolving that yes, games are artworks, and any culture that praises art must have patrons that invest in bringing it about. Until we do, we will never come close to fulfilling the incredible aesthetic potential of games.

Discussing the narrative motive, we came up against an essential problem of using games as a storytelling medium: the player expects to have influence within the game world. This is the domain of the last of the ten key commercial player motives: agency. But in order to understand how the agency motive works, we have to appreciate that there is an essential tension. Not between stories and games, as the line is typically drawn, but between agency and narrative.

There is perhaps no better way of illustrating the distinction between the narrative and the agency motives than comparing the long and distinguished lineages of Japanese computer RPGs and their 'Western' variants. Although these lines are increasingly blurred today (as AAA cRPGs will tend to draw heavily from both traditions), there is a clear historical period after the Ultima-Wizardry split that dominates more than two decades of cRPG design. In many respects, Final Fantasy VII and Bioshock that were mentioned in the context of the narrative motive highlight this very split: the Japanese took Wizardry and choose a form that prioritised the narrative motive for its storytelling (hence the 'animated movie cut with a game' that followed in the 1990s). Conversely, Ultima placed the agency motive above the narrative motive - the play itself creates stories from the toy box the game provides.

Nowhere is this foregrounding of agency above narrative more evident than in the open world games - whether we're looking at The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto V, these games give the player the illusion that you can 'go anywhere and do anything'. This is the agency motive in a nutshell: our psychological need for autonomy manifests in games as it does in life. But in games, we come across a specific barrier that causes problems, and it is one we met before with the problem-solving motive: confusion.

Agency arguably hit its peak in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrorwind - a game with unparalleled player freedom! There was only one problem: the majority of players had literally no idea what they were supposed to be doing. Players for whom the problem-solving motive was a key part of their play had a blast with this game - enduring confusion being the 'mutant power' of such players. Most players of the game were just hopelessly lost. They needed much more help than it provided. Grand Theft Auto III provided the solution: use a film-like narrative to block out a prescribed route to follow, so that the player alternates between intervals of 'infinite agency' and following-the-path. It is the model that all contemporary open world games follow.

Yet the agency motive has more to offer. We have lost sight of the possibility of playing with the implicit narrative of The Sims or Ultima. The original inspiration for Grand Theft Auto were a series of British videogames that were the first to offer 'playground worlds'. All of these games were published between 1984 and 1985, and while Elite is the most famous, Paradroid, Mercenary, and The Lords of Midnight all show this same capacity - overcoming the limited technical capabilities of 8-bit hardware by providing a framework with which the player has maximal agency.

For a brief time there, it felt as if we might rediscover the power of the agency motive that these pioneering proto open world games unleashed. With the meteoric rise of Minecraft in the mid-2000s, we once again experienced worlds that overcame technical capabilities to offer unparalleled agency. In this case, the trick was the simple expedient of simplifying the world into cubic blocks. In a brutal yet hilarious irony for me personally, I had done exactly this several years earlier with Play with Fire, a project that eventually flailed and fell into obscurity because of the utter lack of investment in indie game projects (a problem, I might add, has never gone away).

What happened with Minecraft, however, was that it succeeded as much because it was virtual Lego as because it successfully channelled the agency motive. It enjoyed great and deserved success, but the key to its prosperity was its support of diverse regimes for play - enormous risk-reward in Hardcore, exciting exploration in Survival, and boundless imaginativeness in Creative. Yet successors copied only the substructure of Minecraft, and fell back on the familiar tricks and techniques of the game designer's playbook. If we want to truly push the agency motive forward, we need to understand why Minecraft's freedom to choose exactly how you want to play opened a door the games industry has remained reluctant to walk through.

Next week, the final part: Aesthetic

When I talk about our motives for playing games, I am usually able to identify a clear set of emotions that show the psychological underpinnings of why we are drawn to play that way. This becomes impossible when we talk about the narrative motive, because any and all emotions can be evoked by a narrative! But it would be wrong to suggest that there is not still a clear, if you will, 'psychic shape' to our engagement with narrative. So what is it? Why do we love stories so much?

A short and lazy way of answering this question is to state that stories are the basis of the entire human operating system. We live on a daily basis within our stories - the whole idea of a 'you' as opposed to a 'me' is a framework set up by our need to tell tales about everything. We are the most imaginative beings that we know of, and our inner life consists primarily of telling stories about who we are, as individuals, as cultures, and as a species. This same impulse can be found in our relationship with games because, well, there's no escaping it! Even scientific research is absolutely built upon metaphors. (I mentioned above 'human operating system' - a loaded metaphor if ever there was one!)

But precisely because we live in a world of 'stories everywhere', we need to be careful to understand how games engage with narrative. There is a long standing belief among game developers that stories are something other than games, and that something like Final Fantasy VII is basically an animated movie cut with a combat game and an inventory management game. This interpretation is basically spot on, but it applies just as much to a game like Bioshock, which attempts to place the player right in the heart of a story that could not be adequately be told in another medium.

The danger in coming at this problem this way is that it leads to us thinking that narrative and games are different kinds of things. But if we look at games like The Sims or Nintendogs or the hugely successful Animal Crossing series, we can see that the kinds of explicit narratives that we find in games as well as movies and books aren't the only way stories make their way into our games. There is also the implicit narrative that comes from playing with a virtual doll set - and what is The Sims if not precisely this? Sure, the climax of Animal Crossing - let's say, paying off your final mortgage - is not so much a surprise as a distant goal, but we are still engaging with a fictional world with characters and events that build to a satisfying conclusion. And that's narrative. It was never just about conflict, as Hollywood screenwriters are wont to claim - it was always about uncertainty, and 'when' is just as uncertain as 'what'.

What's fascinating about how the narrative motive expresses itself through games is that we can eliminate all of the overtly 'game-like' aspects of the experience and still end up with a narrative that is not at all like a movie or a book. Dear Esther opened a brand new path here, where other games like What Remains of Edith Finch have followed. The genius of The Chinese Room's ground-breaking ghost story was to see that a game world is a canvas upon which stories are painted just as much in a walking simulator as in a so-called open world game.

Yet there is a problem that the narrative motive faces when we play games that we do not face with other narrative media like film and written stories. Games love to fool the player into believing that they have control and influence in the game world (which they do - but only of a much narrower kind that we tend to recognise). This means that, for instance, killing a character for dramatic effect, as in Final Fantasy VII, works only so much as the player is primarily letting the narrative motive draw them forward. If the player is otherwise motivated, this attempt fails because it does not feel like the player's action, it is something forced upon them.

This is the brilliance of the twist in Bioshock: it takes this essential weakness of game stories and inverts it, turns it into a knowing twist without ever breaking the fourth wall. It reminds us that it is not quite true that stories and games are two different things - it is rather that when we engage with games as stories, we have to understand and accept the strengths and limitations of this specific narrative form. And this is something that every story faces in its own way, regardless of which medium it flows through.

Next week: Agency

If you asked me which of the ten player motives was the most underrated, I would without hesitation reply: the curiosity motive. Not only do most game designers not appreciate the tremendous power of this aspect of human experience, but there is very little recognition of the intensity of the emotions that can be brought into play through curiosity. Yes, the emotional experience of triumph is intense and powerful, but it is also so commonplace as to be cheap and forgettable. But players never forget a moment that brings them wonder.

Exploration is the standard way that videogames evoke curiosity, but it is not enough to just throw out a world and drop the player into it. Morrowind did this, and unfortunately a great many players were turned off by the vertiginous freedom of the game. Later Elder Scrolls games cleaved to the now over-familiar formula of the Grand Theft Auto open world, shaping the world through chains of waypoints. This formula works, and is very successful, but it's insufficient to get the best value from the curiosity motive. Nobody's enjoyment of Vice City or San Andreas was primarily centred upon exploration.

Curiosity is an experience that runs on unanswered questions. For the open world game to truly satisfy the curiosity motive, the landscape has to be crafted in order to raise questions. Zelda has the best ever example in the cracked wall: the moment players see a cracked wall, they know there's a way through, and it just becomes a question of what will open it (a bomb, a hammer, a minotaur...). Indeed, if you want to learn how to put together an open world to evoke curiosity, Nintendo's Breath of the Wild is a masterclass. Each corner of the world is designed with tall features clearly visible ahead, and from up on high you can spy many intriguing spaces to fly down to. The player is constantly drawn to explore, and there is always something new to discover.

The Zelda franchise has also done well evoking the secret weapon of the curiosity motive: wonder. This is a full-bodied emotion that leaves a serious mark on those who experience it, and in both its landscapes and its bosses, Zelda has delivered. The boss experience at its best is a blend of fear and wonder - awe. Shadow of the Colossus managed to one-up Zelda in this regard, but it was working from the same playbook, and these days there are a great many games that do a great job getting awe out of bosses.

Yet wonder is not just to be found in the awe of titanic enemies to beat. There is wonder to be found for every new player of Minecraft, who experiences it the first time their mining down breaks out into an underground chamber of great breadth. This joy of encounter quickly fades - but it is telling that even a procedural landscape can produce wonder. There are also ways of designing for the experience of wonder that do not require combat - Endless Ocean gave me a more memorable experience of wonder in the encounter with a wild whale than any videogame boss I can think of.

Curiosity is not just a matter of exploration and encounter, though. Hidden object games like Mystery Case Files or Gardens of Time evoke curiosity despite being set on a single 2D visual field. What's more, this is a genre to have enjoyed enormous success among female players - which in part explains why the gaming media has been so disrespectful of it. Like it or not, there is still a strongly sexist bent among the people who write about games, and even female game journalists often earn their success by toeing the party line.

Finally, there is another way to get at curiosity and wonder - letting people create. This in fact was more crucial to Minecraft's success than anyone wants to admit: creative is the most popular mode in this game, and the fact that it is possible to sell calendars showing off what people managed to build with virtual LEGO ought to be telling. Roblox too thrives on the sense of the weird and the wonderful waiting to be discovered - and Google's grand media colonic, YouTube, is just as dependent upon the curiosity motive.

However, to make the curiosity motive work in games requires tremendous co-operation between departments. If you want to evoke wonder, you will need artists with immense skill and passion for their work, or programmers willing to prototype systems that can be made to behave in unexpected ways. More than any other motive, the curiosity motive is a team effort. There is tremendous enjoyment and pleasure to be had down this path - but the whole development team will have to work together to make the jaws of players drop.

Next week: Narrative

Why is playing with other players fun...? The simple truth of the matter is that no matter how introverted or antisocial you might be, humans are social animals as a matter of biological inheritance. Those with social anxiety or similar issues that make socialising difficult still love spending time with their friends, it is simply that habitual fears make social life troubling for certain people (and many more people than we tend to admit). Indeed, although it is not often discussed, multiplayer games can be a godsend to people with social anxiety because they provide a structured activity that reduces some of the sense of pressure entailed in interacting with other people face-to-face.

When designing videogames for the social motive, it may seem odd to start by examining interpersonal fears - surely players who are into the social motive are extroverts? Well, no. Natural extroverts are far more likely to go out somewhere to socialise with people than to stay at home and play games. Designing for the social motive, therefore, requires an awareness of the different attitudes people have to social interaction. Although there is only one social motive, which draws against the action of the hypothalamus and the neurochemical oxytocin, there are many different ways of satisfying it.

For many of its early years, International Hobo tried to explain to publishers that co-operative play had an important role in videogames, but this largely fell on deaf ears. This problem is the one that I mentioned right at the start - the mistaken belief that the victory motive is all that games are about. In social play, this illusion can become heighted because one way of tapping into the social motive is by giving players real human opponents to beat. The social motive enhances the sense of victory - ask anyone who plays Fortnite or Call of Duty!

Yet if winning in competition was all it was about, Mario Kart would have flopped. After all, this is game in which the players doing the worst are given the best power-ups, and a skilled player can still be taken down by the dreaded Blue Shell. Where's the appeal in that...? It's not in the feeling of triumph that Mario Kart's genius lies but in the emotion of schadenfreude, the pleasure we take in the misfortune of others. There is something immensely satisfying in watching the mighty being brought down, and laughter, not victory, lies at the heart of the greatest joys the social motive has to offer.

However, do not make the mistake of assuming that friendly competition is the only aspect of the social motive. Players of Words with Friends do want to win, but this game (which is really just Scrabble reinvented for online play) is as much about the 'conversation' that comes out of building the board as anything else. This is even more evident in certain co-operative habits that occur around games such as Minecraft, where people are working together to shape a world into a collective image.

More than any other game, however, the power of the social motive was demonstrated during the height of the popularity of Pokémon GO, Niantic's powerhouse mobile game. Suddenly, unexpectedly, introverts of every age, gender, shape, and size were gathering in public places together with a common purpose - to collect pokémon, and to beat raid battles together. The design may have been simple, and it obviously relied heavily on the popularity of the Pokémon RPGs, but Niantic more than perhaps anyone else in the history of games knew the power of videogames to draw people together - even people who otherwise would never choose to be in the same place at the same time. The social motive is more than a means of enhancing victory - it can bring some of the greatest emotional rewards in the whole of gaming.

Next week: Curiosity

Why do we love horror? It's a question that has provoked a great deal of debate, but the two most important things to understand about the horror motive are that it is about indulging in unpleasant feelings, and that precisely because it's about nasty things, it's not for everyone. Indeed, the absolutely vital point about the horror motive is that if you choose to include it, you're excluding some proportion of your possible audience. Super Mario Chainsaw is not a sensible videogame project to pursue.

The key emotions are fear and disgust, and of the two it is fear that is most important. For the thrill-seeking motive, games trick an ancient part of our brains into responding to the illusion of danger and risk. Fear comes from the same neurobiological roots - the only difference is that we feel the thrill of excitement when we think we are in control while we experience fear when we feel out of control. This is why a great deal of the bag of tricks used by the horror genre involve ambiguity, uncertainty, and surprise (which also play into another motive, curiosity, which we'll get to later).

Disgust is an intriguing emotion, because by definition it is unpleasant. However, there is a pleasure to be taken from the ending of this experience, and this makes it cathartic. Perhaps more importantly for videogames, disgust is the ketchup to the horror burger: it enhances fear. The boss - by far the most conspicuous attempt to evoke fear in players - becomes even more fearful when it is married with disgust, something that From Software have made excellent use of in the design of their bosses for titles like Dark Souls and Elden Ring.

The vast majority of the play book for the horror motive is taken from film. Although horror stories are as old as humanity, the classic tale of horror plays on a reveal that combines fear and disgust as a payoff. That doesn't work in videogames, which are longer and more repetitive experiences. Film, on the other hand, already developed a set of tools for reliably evoking fear - most notably in the use of the soundtrack. Plucked strings evoke tension, the soundtrack goes silent before a jump scare - there's a wealth that game developers can learn from the movie play book that will work just as well in games.

At the heart of what makes a Silent Hill or Last of Us game work is the application of tricks from Hollywood horror to the videogame format, and audio is a huge part of it. The radio static that tells you monsters are near, or the sirens when worlds collide in Silent Hill - or the ominous insectoid clatter of the Clickers in The Last of Us - allow sound design to do most of the heavy lifting. What's more, because audio is cheap, games playing on the horror motive are perfectly suited to low budget development, as Outlast and Five Nights at Freddy's demonstrate. Also, since darkness is ideal for evoking fear, games riffing on the horror motive can get by with less graphical detail - Amnesia made excellent use of darkness, and even made it into a gameplay feature.

Despite the dependence upon film techniques, game designers do have one brilliant trick that they can use to enhance horror: limited supply. This is the true secret to the Resident Evil franchise's genius, and why (despite there being many earlier horror games all the way back to the old 8-bit computers) it was able to found the genre name 'survival horror'. The tagline for the first game was 'Enter the Survival Horror', and it stuck. However, if the player feels powerful, they will not experience fear. By restricting access to ammunition and healing items - and even more so, to their saves - Resident Evil created a design pattern that was unique to games, making limited supply into the raw material of players' darkest nightmares.

Next week: Social

When we first started conducting surveys into how and why people play games, we discovered that one aspect of the play experience was almost universally loved by our respondents: excitement. The example of Bejeweled shows that this was somewhat misleading, however: yes, everyone enjoys feeling excited, but one person's rollercoaster is another person's vomit-inducing nightmare. Time-constraints do make games more exciting, but they also exclude certain players who do not want to feel that stressed when they are playing games. For the most part, however, the thrill-seeking motive is something that everyone enjoys, provided the game doesn't take it too far.

The self-adjusting speed of early puzzle games like mega-hit Tetris worked extremely well to ensure wide appeal. A game like Super-Hexagon divides players and turns off a great many who can't get to grips with the level of challenge, but Tetris adapts beautifully to the skills of the player. Lower difficulties give even unskilled players time to work out how to put the tetrominoes together, whereas a skilled player can jump ahead down the speed curve to find the place that's exciting for them. A huge range of brilliant puzzle game designs in the 90s and 2000s delivered thrill-seeking play that was fundamentally not about winning. The player of an endless mode never wins: defeat is inevitable. Yet players still have fun doing it.

There are other ways of tapping into the thrill-seeking motive that aren't just time constraints and gently-ramping pressure. Among the most iconic are the high speed racers that were extremely popular in the late 90s and throughout the 2000s. The Need for Speed franchise is the commercial the poster child, although Criterion's Burnout series is arguably an even better example. These games were so perfect at pushing player's high speed buttons, that EA bought Criterion and gave them the Need for Speed franchise to develop.

In the 2010s, another way of leveraging the thrill-seeking motive was added to the game design lexicon: the battle royale. Pioneered by PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds but then cloned and tweaked by Epic's Fortnite as a supplement (or replacement) for its underwhelming Save the World mode, the battle royale throws a hundred competitors into a simultaneous knock out tournament. These games are fundamentally about the victory motive - everybody likes to win, after all - but the excitement of being fielded against ninety nine other players in a sudden death, winner-takes-all format was palpable. So much so that even if the victory motive is why people say they play, the excitement is the reason that they stay. After all, only one player wins in each round... if victory were all it was about, these games would not have the thriving player communities that they do.

In a marvellous act of circularity, the success of the battle royale format led to game developers adding this to other existing game mechanics, leading to the return of the puzzle game in a surprising new format. Tetris, for so long the epitome of thrill-seeking purity, has come back as Tetris 99, combining the excitement of the original with the seat-of-the-pants glory seeking of the battle royale format. It is a striking reminder that while ideas come and go in videogames, there is always room to combine something old with something new to take players somewhere very familiar in a new and interesting way.

Next: Horror

Everybody likes to win, but not everyone is willing to suffer to get there. Fortunately, there's a way of making games anyone can win - pure, blind luck. The reason that kids love games with a low degree of skill and a high degree of luck (Snakes and Ladders or Candyland for instance) is that anyone can win - they have just as much chance of beating their parents at these games as vice versa, and that makes games of pure chance very appealing to younger players, who are certainly not going to beat Dad at Chess or Splendor - at least until they get a little older!

The same lowering of the level of challenge was key to the success of Popcap, whose game Bejeweled (modelled on the brilliant Panel de Pon), which was the origin of the term 'casual game'. Bejeweled was built on the breakthrough realisation that having a timer in puzzle games was inherently stressful, and not everyone enjoyed this stress. The addition of an untimed mode was key to the success of this pivotal casual game, which in untimed basically became an opportunity to switch things around at random until the player eventually won. (As a postscript, I note that when EA bought Popcap, they immediately destroyed this clever design by making Bejeweled Blitz...) Along with kids boardgames, this demonstrates how the luck motive can substitute for the victory motive. However, most examples in commercial videogames will substitute luck for the acquisition motive - or combine the two.

By far the most commercially successful example is not even a videogame, however: it's Magic: The Gathering, which took the design principles of trading cards and built a howling goldmine with it. The luck motive is put into play in two ways in the design of this game, one of which has millennia of precedence, the other being less than a century old. Firstly, by shuffling a deck of cards as a source of randomness, games of Magic: The Gathering and any of its descendants such as Hearthstone or Marvel Snap, play differently every time. It's something that adds enormous values to boardgames and all videogames that have boardgame-like system. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, there's the incredible power of the booster pack.

In a trading card game like Magic: The Gathering, booster pack contain random cards of varying rarity. In the original release, a pack would contain one rare, three uncommons, and eleven commons. Over the years, Wizards of the Coast (and later Hasbro, who bought them) varied these designs and came up with different configurations but the core concept was the same. Every booster would have one card you definitely wanted, either for your own set or for its trade value - the rare. It would have three cards that would be of high utility in deck building - the uncommons. And it would have a bunch of commons that were exciting when you first opened booster packs, but would just become chaff after a while.

Magic: The Gathering's booster pack design was incredibly powerful. For acquisition motive players such as myself, it means spending a huge amount of money on boosters to collect (and trade for) a complete set. But even for players who weren't interesting in 100% collections, the luck motive made each booster an adventure in itself. This in turn led to videogames inventing loot boxes, which were digital versions of the booster pack, with the same monetisation policy.

Loot boxes divide players. Many consider loot boxes manipulative... and they certainly can be, even when what is contained is purely cosmetic. You only have to look at the Steam marketplace for gun skins on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to see how players can be motivated to look for ultra-rare, ultra-valuable skins like the karambit knife skin. But the possibility for exploitation isn't a certainty. The design and monetisation of Supercell's Clash Royale has many defenders, for instance.

But you don't have to monetise random chance to make the luck motive work for your design. There is a long and honourable history of games using the luck motive without monetising it. Most of these designs descend from TSR's (and later Hasbro, who bought them) venerable Dungeons & Dragons design, which used random tables to determine treasure drops. Nearly every computer role-playing game that followed over the decades made use of random chance drops to add variety of experience - and, when done well, to capture some of that excitement from 'opening the booster pack'.

Next week: Thrill-seeking