Greg Costikyan, “I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games”
“People talk about gameplay, as if it’s some magical, mystical thing that games need to possess” (9)
“‘gameplay’ itself is a nebulous, and therefore pretty useless term. Saying ‘it has good gameplay’ is about as useful as saying ‘that’s a good book’” (9)
“Calling something ‘good’ doesn’t help us understand what’s good about it, what pleasures it provides, and how to go about doing something else good” (9)
“‘The game’ is an amazingly plastic medium” (9)
“Chris Crawford contrasts what he calls ‘games’ with ‘puzzles.’ Puzzles are static; they present the ‘player’ with a logic structure to be solved with the assistance of clues. ‘Games,’ by contrast, are not static, but change with the player’s actions” (10)
“You can’t extract puzzle from game entirely” (10)
“Every game is interactive; ‘interactive game’ is a redundancy” (11)
“What makes a thing into a game is the need to make decisions” (11)
“the game is not intrinsic in the toy; it is a set of player-defined objectives overlaid on the toy. Just so SimCity” (12)
“Games are goal-directed interaction” (14)
“Competition is one way of make a game a struggle” (15)
“Whatever goals you set players in a game, you must make them work to achieve their goals” (16)
“The desire for ‘cooperative games’ is the desire for an end to strife. But there can be none. Life is the struggle for survival and growth. There is no end to strife, not this side of the grave. A game without struggle is a game that’s dead” (17)
Commentator’s Note: Well, Greg. This seems like a problematic, emphatically masculinist proposition!
“My friend Eric Zimmerman likes to say, ‘Games are structures of desire.’ I don’t like the phrase, for two reasons. Firstly, it’s pretty obscure; it needs to be explained before you ‘get’ it. Second, it makes games sound like a whorehouse” (17)
Commentator’s Note: Zimmerman: awesome. Costikyan: ugh.
“Narrative structure is one dimensional, because you can follow only a single path through a story” (20)
“Game structure has to do with the means by which a game shapes player behavior. But a game shapes player behavior; it does not determine it” (20)
“The structure of a game is analogous to the structure of economics” (21)
Commentator’s Note: UGHHHHH.
“It helps, in other words, to think of a game’s structure as akin to an economy, or an ecosystem; a complex, interacting system that does not dictate outcomes but guides behavior through the need to achieve a single goal: energy, in the case of ecosystems; money, in the case of economics; victory, in the case of a game” (21)
“Indeed, if I had my way, a solid grounding in economics would be required of anyone seeking to learn about game design” (21)
Commentator’s Note: UGGGGGHHHHHHHH.
“A game is an interactive structure that requires players to struggle toward goals” (21)
“A game’s structure creates its own meanings” (22)
“The meaning grows out of the structure; it is caused by the structure; it is endogenous to the structure” (22)
A game is an “interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires players to struggle toward a goal” (22)
“Games are fantasy … I mean that they ain’t real” (23)
“Any form of ‘interactive entertainment’ that isn’t a game must be noninteractive; or not entertainment; or pointless” (26)
“Interactive entertainment means games” (26)
“Marc LeBlanc’s taxonomy of game pleasures. He says there are eight” (26)
- Sensation (26)
- Fantasy (27)
- Narrative/drama (27-28)
- Challenge (28)
- Fellowship (28)
- Discovery (29)
- Expression (29)
- Masochism (30)
Commentator’s Note: Masochism can be interpreted in the macho, oppressive way, but also in the queer, pleasurable way. ‘Games have always been queer’…
“if you’re a game designer, you begin by trying to design a game like one you enjoy” (30)
“Game design is, therefore, the creative attempt to imagine, a priori, the kinds of experiences players will have with your game, and through that act of imagination, to create a structure to point them toward the kinds of experiences you’d like them to feel” (32-33)
Game
- A Short Hike