reflection

20 | REALITY IS BROKEN amusement. We don’t like to be played with. And when we say, “This isn’t a game!,” what we mean is that someone is behaving recklessly or not taking a situation seriously. This admonishment implies that games encourage and train people to act in ways that aren’t appropriate for real life. When you start to pay attention, you realize how collectively suspicious we are of games. Just by looking at the language we use, you can see we’re wary of how games encourage us to act and who we are liable to become if we play them. But these metaphors don’t accurately reflect what it really means to play a well-designed game. They’re just a reflection of our worst fears about games.

And it turns out that what we’re really afraid of isn’t games; we’re afraid of los­ ing track of where the game ends and where reality begins. If we’re going to fix reality with games, we have to overcome this fear. We need to focus on how real games actually work, and how we act and interact when we’re playing the same game together. Let’s start with a really good definition of game. The Four Defining Traits of a Game Games today come in more forms, platforms, and genres than at any other time in human history. We have single-player, multiplayer, and massively multiplayer games. We have games you can play on your personal computer, your console, your hand­ held device, and your mobile phone—not to mention the games we still play on fields or on courts, with cards or on boards. We can choose from among five-second minigames, ten-minute casual games, eight-hour action games, and role-playing games that go on endlessly twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year. We can play story­ based games, and games with no story. We can play games with and without scores. We can play games that challenge mostly our brains or mostly our bodies—and infinitely various combinations of the two. And yet somehow, even with all these varieties, when we’re playing a game, What Exactly Is a Game? | 21 we just know it. There’s something essentially unique about the way games structure experience. When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complex­ ities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. The goal is the specific outcome that players will work to achieve. It fo­ cuses their attention and continually orients their participation throughout the game. The goal provides players with a sense of purpose. The rules place limitations on how players can achieve the goal. By remov­ ing or limiting the obvious ways of getting to the goal, the rules push players to explore previously uncharted possibility spaces. They unleash creativity and foster strategic thinking. The feedback system tells players how close they are to achieving the goal. It can take the form of points, levels, a score, or a progress bar. Or, in its most basic form, the feedback system can be as simple as the players’ knowledge of an objective outcome: “The game is over when . . .” Real-time feedback serves as a promise to the players that the goal is definitely achievable, and it provides motivation to keep playing. Finally, voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback.

Knowingness establishes common ground for multiple people to play together. And the freedom to enter or leave a game at will ensures that intentionally stressful and challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable activity. This definition may surprise you for what it lacks: interactivity, graphics, nar­ rative, rewards, competition, virtual environments, or the idea of “winning”— all traits we often think of when it comes to games today. True, these are common features of many games, but they are not defining features. What defines a game are the goal, the rules, the feedback system, and voluntary participation. Everything else is an effort to reinforce and enhance these four core elements. A compelling story makes the goal more enticing. Complex scoring metrics make the feedback systems more motivating. Achievements and levels multiply the opportunities for experiencing success. Multiplayer and massively multiplayer experiences can make the prolonged play more 22 | REALITY IS BROKEN unpredictable or more pleasurable. Immersive graphics, sounds, and 3D en­ vironments increase our ability to pay sustained attention to the work we’re doing in the game. And algorithms that increase the game’s difficulty as you play are just ways of redefining the goal and introducing more challeng­ ing rules. Bernard Suits, the late, great philosopher, sums it all up in what I con@ sider the single most convincing and useful definition of a game ever devised:

Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. 1 That definition, in a nutshell, explains everything that is motivating and rewarding and fun about playing games. And it brings us to our first fix for reality: A FIX #1: UNNECESSARY OBSTA CLES Compared with games, reality is too easy. Games challenge us with voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use. To see how these four traits are essential to every game, let’s put them to a quick test. Can these four criteria effectively describe what’s so compelling about games as diverse as, say, golf, Scrabble, and Tetris? Let’s take golf to start. As a golfer, you have a clear goal: to get a ball in a series of very small holes, with fewer tries than anyone else. If you we@ ren’t playing a game, you’d achieve this goal the most efficient way possible: you’d walk right up to each hole and drop the ball in with your hand. What mak@ es golf a game is that you willingly agree to stand really far away from each hole and swing at the ball with a club. Golf is engaging exactly because@ you,