What Games Are: the optimal zone

October 7th, 2013, 20:15 Posted By: wraggster

Former Microsoft chief experience officer J Allard once enthused about playing Halo on your phone. The notion was one of those mega-ecosystem things that Microsoft likes to dream up: play on your Xbox, go out into the world with your Zune and play some more. Maybe level up your Chief on the road so that when you get home, you’ve got new weapon choices. Such ideas are ambitious, but tend to be impractical.Games are often said to consist of loops. For some this means games are recursive (small loops nested to build bigger loops), but I tend to think of loops as ‘mechanics’ and the bigger outcomes as ‘dynamics’. They have a different shape. The outcome of a mechanic tends to be predicable, but the net build-up of many mechanics leads to something much more interesting: dynamic, disordered, slightly mad chaos.As I wrote in this column last year, games are inherently chaotic in the mathematical sense. They’re weird and beautiful, fascinating, un-yet-semi-predictable, and the overall excitement of playing them lives somewhere between order and disorder. That’s what I mean when I define fun as “the joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics”. But what does any of this have to do with J Allard? Allard was talking about mixing several game dynamics together (mobile RPG, firstperson shooter, etc), and that usually leads to big headaches. Breaks emerge. Players either discover easy exploits that remove the challenge of the game, or the game has so many inputs and outputs that it becomes incomprehensible.The same is true of many singleplayer games. While there are numerous enormous videogames out there, the successful ones tend to have one core dynamic to which the entire game defaults. You, as the player, tend to stay in control of a certain kind of doll that performs a certain kind of task, and everything in the game’s universe revolves around that task. That’s how the game manages to convey its enormity in a way that makes sense. There are some games that maintain a couple of dynamics (it’s rarely successfully more than two), but they do so by bridging them.

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