Game Design

Playing For Fun

The success of all games depends on fun. If you feel like some Grand theft Auto-style mayhem using the social engineering system it provides for meaningful activism, you could be like the nudist on the radio station who cries out for people to tear off their unnatural clothes and embrace nature. With the realism turned low enough, this would have immediate success and result in the streets filling with naked throngs. The adoring masses would flock to your station and raise you above them as their naked Fuhrer with the radio host as your disciple.

Emergence

“The map is not the territory.”

—Alfred Korzybski

“The poet Alfred Korzybski has already been enshrined in the prehistory of cyberspace for insisting on the divide between the representation of an experience and the experience itself. Virtual world builders repeat it to each other frequently, reverently, to remind themselves that they cannot confuse the shell of a space with the experience of it. You cannot build a virtual world and call it complete when you ship or upload. It is made complete again and again in each moment online, filled with people.”

—http://www.vrmlsite.com/apr97/a.cgi/spot1.html

Gestalt is a German word meaning shape or form. In English gestalt refers to the concept where an entity’s properties cannot be discovered from the total properties of its parts. The more general English equivalents are synergy, holism, emergence, and variations on the phrase the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology

Creativity Beyond Competition

The journey is the destination. Empowerment is not necessarily a game based on rigid competition. The idea war is like that, but it is more a matter of building something than destroying someone else.

“Brilliant example recounted to me by Dave Marvit: Two of the world’s top Go players met here in SF a while back for a challenge match. A reporter asked one of the players’ assistants what the match would represent. The reporter was not prepared for the response: “Two players come together to make perfect art,” the assistant said. Go is not a zero-sum game. There is not a ‘winner’ and a ‘loser’ in the binary Western sense — the experience of the game itself, with both players contributing to it, is the perfect art and truth itself. The outcome simply means that a particular game is over. Its message has been made manifest, whatever it was. The game is a consensual hallucination that takes place in the physical world.”

—Misty West, http://www.vrmlsite.com/apr97/a.cgi/spot1.html

Massively Multiplayer

“A generation is defining itself through virtual combat, without the casualties or consequences of World War II and the Vietnam War. And who knows? Maybe one day we’ll figure out less destructive ways to have fun in Carmack’s dreamworld. After all, it would be a shame if, having invented cinema, we made only war movies. Carmack might even be the one to broker that virtual peace. He doesn’t spend much time gaming anymore. But he isn’t giving up on the virtual frontier he opened.”

— http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040809-674778-3,00.html

“There’s something fundamentally interesting about the world in a box. If somebody can be an emperor in a virtual world, with only a cheap computer, is that really a fundamentally bad thing?”

—John Carmack, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040809-674778-3,00.html