game aesthetics Games, Striving, and the Toplogies of Choice C.

Thi Nguyen

This is my claim: games are a form of landscape. Theyre a constructed space, designed to support and enhance human choice. This isnt the gospel truth, or even complete story, but I offer it in the spirit of a productive metaphor. And I offer it because I think that the prevailing metaphor - that games are a form of text - is missing something. Texts are meant to be read - they are made up of representations. And once we assimilate games as a sub-form of texts - when we treat them as, fictions or communications or pictures - we import in our ideas about what texts are for. We are lead to ask textual questions: what does a game communicate? What emotions does it express? How do we interpret it? Does it excite the imagination? Now Im not denying that games can do these things. You can read games as a text, because, frankly, you can read anything as a text. What Im claiming is that the textual view of games is incomplete, and that it suppresses attention to a lot of the really unique features of game-design and game-life. So Im going to offer an alternate account of the activity of games. There are two major parts. First: Im going to claim that part of game life is what Ill call striving - trying to overcome obstacles and challenges. Im going to claim that textualism makes it easy to overlook and or misunderstand striving. Second Im going to suggest that we should to landscape design theory to see how we design games for interesting striving. I mean architecture, urban planning. Landscape designers have been thinking about their work, not always in terms of representation, but in terms of how they can make constraints that shape the circulation and motion of free beings. In many games, and in many landscapes, the design goal is not to impart a single fixed narrative to a reader, but to create a setting where create their own narratives - a setting which subtly enables and supports freedom and choice. 1

game aesthetics (Theres only one real idea here, and let me offer it to you know, in blunt and oversimplified form:) Game designers build rules, and landscape designers build walls, but both are often engaged in the same perversity: both work in the medium of obstacles, but they often use these obstacles to enhance freedom by enriching the range of possible choices.

Examples of the text metaphor Let me run through a few representative examples of the textual treatment of games. First, James Paul Gee argues that abstract video games like Tetris arent art. Games become art when the parts start to represent, and form a story. Humans find story elements profoundly meaningful and are at a loss when they cannot see the world in terms of such elements, says Gee.1 Grant Tavinor, in his book The Art of Videogames, argues that videogames are art precisely because they are a form of fiction. He says that they are representational artifacts that rely on our abilities of imagination. They have the same goals: stimulating the imagination, having emotional impact. And Lars Konzack, in Philosophical Game Design, claims that as long as games focus on immersion, flow state, and obstacles, they will remain merely entertainment. Video games will only grow and prosper if they express and present philosophical ideas in a game system. All of these thinkers are trying to give an account of the function and the value of games, and theyre doing it by taking the textual route. They ask about how games represent, communicate, express, how they create imaginary worlds. Now, Im not denying that some games, and some parts of some games, can do these things. But the account seems to me to be

game aesthetics incomplete. I think the textual accounts fragments the domain of games. They single out particular types of games - representational, narrative, communicative games - for special attention and study. Textualism emphasizes the continuity of modern video games with cinema, novels, painting, and breaks the continuity with other games - like poker, chess, and basketball. I think its really interesting that in a lot of recent game studies, were always talking about fiction, or painting, but theres almost never any connections drawn between video games and sports presumably because sports arent fictions, or communications. But it seems plain to me there must be some interesting similarities in the construction, and the pleasures, of, say, multiplayer team shooters like Team Fortress, and basketball. Textualists are leaving out something big, I think.

The inadequacy of the text-metaphor Take, Gee, for example. If Gee is right, then a games elements must represent story-elements for a game to be really involving. If thats true, then a novelty chess set - like the ones where all the pieces are figures from Lord of the Rings - should be capable of providing a deeper and more involving experience than a regular, abstract chess set. But this seems utterly wrong. There is a narrative energy in chess there are traps, reversals, clever attacks - but referentiality only seems to distract from absorption in that energy. OK, Ill admit, this is cheap shot. A smart textualist would probably say that there is a certain minimal, iconic representation - the king represents something important, the pawn represents something weak, and that abstractness of the referentiality is important. But I think this also misses the point. The excellence of chess comes from a particular configuration of rules, and the way they interlace to create play. It is
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game aesthetics easy to imagine variation of the rules that dont change the representational content, but weaken or destroy the involvingness of the game. Imagine, for instance, allowing knights to move three up and two over, or allowing the pawns to capture straight ahead, instead of on a diagonal. We can vary the involvingness of chess without varying the representational content. (This, by the way, is a claim about chess in particular, not all games.) The same seems to be true of games like Scrabble and its digital relatives, Words With Friends. Gameplay consists of placing letters to form words in a connected network. Game play here isnt referential; in fact, high-end players say its easier to play if you stop thinking of the meanings of the words at all. There is no created world, and no characters. Tavinor and Gee have to exclude games like this from their theories, and so exclude them from a claim of aesthetic worth. What Im driving for is the claim that textualism misses out on a certain common thread, certainly in Scrabble and chess and Tetris, but even in story games like Grand Theft Auto. What is missing? At first pass, Im tempted to say that the textual account leaves out the essential freedom of game-play. In games we get to choose what happens next. But this first pass is far too simplistic. First, as Aarseth points out in Cybertext, there are plenty of texts where we are free to choose the order that we experience the text, from modernist experiments to Wikipedia. Second, as Walton points out e, in the representative arts, we have a freedom of the imagination with respect to texts. This is more complicated, and worth going into here. Ken Waltons Mimesis and Make Believe is likely the most influential contemporary philosophical work on the representational arts. Walton claims art objects are what he calls props - stimulants to the imagination. A doll and the Odyssey are both props, because they both are take-off points for our own imagination. I take Waltons make-believe theory of the arts to be a serious break from a straightforward communicative theory of text, because the success or failure of a prop for the imagination doesnt 4

game aesthetics depend on the successful, stable transmission of an idea from the toy creator to the toy user. An action figure doesnt need to communicate one idea - it is successful if it promotes many different stories, ideas, etc. Similarly, representational works of art serve to stimulate all sorts of imaginations - we imagine the visual world of The Lord of the Rings, or we read Dostoevsky and imagine the inner experience of the characters for ourselves. And the fact that so many people have so many distinct imaginative responses is a sign of the works success as a prop. His claim is that the representative arts arent continuous with communicative acts, but instead are continuous with childrens play with make believe, and that freedom of the imagination is not a flaw, as it might be in a philosophy essay, but the desideratum. This emphasis on the imaginative play has made Walton very popular for game studies. But the freedom in games is distinct from either of those freedoms. In games we have the ability to causally modify the course of events. We have an active relationship to the course of events - we know that the events depend on and evolve from our choices. What Im groping for here is some account of the different relationship between game designers and text creators with respect to narrative. Classically, texts provide a single narrative or set of narratives, but games can provide the opportunity for players to create their own narratives. Even in videogames with fixed stories and cut-scenes, the most memorable moments are often the ones the player created. What I remember most from playing Half-Life is when I backed up and dropped a grenade, when I baited the guards into my trap. And whats missing from the textualist theory is an account of the fact that many of the best games are so good for the very fact that they help players create their own, wildly varying, narratives, and make exciting narratives more likely, while still making them emerge from the players own choices.

Two senses of play

game aesthetics I think in order to understand whats really going on with games, we have to consider the possibility that the activity were engaged in with games can be of a substantively different kind than the activity were engaged in when we read a text. A lot of theorists about games reach for Waltons theory of make-believe, because its a theory of play. But I think this underestimates the diversity of ways in which we play. So what Im going to suggest is that there are two distinct forms of activity that we call play, and suggest that textualism can only capture one of them - the make-believe form. The other form of play is best captured in Bernard Suits lovely book, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. Here, Suits offers us a definition of game: games are unnecessarily obstacles undertaken voluntarily for the experience of overcoming them. Suits insight here is that the essential material of a game is a set of constraints - restrictions on how players may act. The point of running a marathon, says Suits, is not simply to cross the finish line first, for there are far easier ways of doing so: cutting across the middle of the city, or taking a taxi. It doesnt even count as crossing the finish line unless you did it within the specified constraints. The point of poker is not simply get other peoples money, because you could more efficiently by stealing their wallets when they go to the bathroom. And simply distracting your opponent during a chess game and seizing the king doesnt count as winning a game of chess. The constraints are essentially constitutive of the winning conditions. Suits has a really interesting insight here. In normal practical life, he says, we choose the means for the sake of the end. But in game life, we choose the end for the sake of the means they force us through. Theres nothing valuable about crossing that finish line in and of itself; its only valuable because of the struggles it forces you through. And when we make games, we keep tweaking the ends to make the means more interesting, satisfying, and pleasurable. Notice that Suits account doesnt involve representations or imagination essentially into what constitutes games or game-play. His 6

game aesthetics account illuminates, I think, the similarity between Grand Theft Auto, basketball, and rock climbing. We dont have to read obstacles, we just have to get over them. Suits thinks his account is an account of all games, and all play; he actually has an argument that make-believe play is a sub-form of his sort of striving play. Make-believe games like Cowboys and Indians are ones where were playing a striving game of keeping the story going for as long as possible. I think that Suits is wrong to claim this is a definition of all games, but I think he is right that this is a significant category of human activity, and a very accurate account of one of the things were doing when we play games. Similarly, Waltonians often try to argue as if makebelieve play is the primary form of play, and striving play is a sub-form they talk about how when we play chess, we imagine ourselves into the roles of warring opponents. I think that both attempts at reduction fail. Id like to argue that these are distinct forms of play, and irreducible to each other, though they can co-habit. Make-believe play is oriented towards the freedom of creative imagination, and striving-play is oriented towards getting over obstacles, challenges, and the experience of trying to overcome them. These two goals can often co-habit, and can support each other in very interesting ways, but they are distinct, and to understand game-life, we need to understand both forms of play. Let me argue for a bit that theyre distinct. First, make-believe play essentially involves imaginative transport. And striving play does not - not essentially. In fact, the experience of absorbed game-play is often characterized by hyper-attentiveness to the present world and its details. In a tennis match, the player is focussed on the position of his body, the angle of the ball. During a difficult poker hand, the player focuses on the actual facial expressions and psychology of their opponents, of the actual probability of new emerging cards. Jesper Juul points to the fact that competition FPS players often dial down the quality of the graphics, and seem to be less engaged with the imaginative activities. 7

game aesthetics Its easiest to see the difference between striving and make believe by seeing the different ways they break. Make-believe play is broken by what Huizenga calls the spoilsport -the person that shatters the illusion of play. Striving play is broken by the cheat - the rule-breaker. And these are distinct figures. When children are playing Cowboys and Indians, the child who constantly interrupts the play to ask for the rules is a spoilsport, but is not a cheat. And its actually hard to imagine how you might cheat at Cowboys and Indians, which I think shows its mostly a make-believe game. On the other hand, when a chess player constantly interrupts the game to ask for rules clarifications, they are not a spoilsport, because there is no illusion of play to shatter. But cheating at chess is easy to imagine. And even when the two forms of play occur together, they are still distinct. Take a tabletop role-playing game, like Dungeons and Dragons. I take it that most players have a dual purpose they are engaged in both make-believe play and striving-play. But the two forms of play are separable. The player who constantly pauses to ask for rule-clarifications is a spoilsport, and not a cheat. (In fact we have a term for such a player - a rules lawyer.) And the player who stealthily changes the amount of gold on their character sheet is a cheat, but not a spoilsport. [To put things another way: Veli-Matti Karhulahti has suggested that

games always involve evaluation of performance. Again, I think this is wrong; rather, I think striving play always necessarily involves evaluation, and make-believe play does not necessarily involve evaluation. Both forms of play have goals and purposes - but striving play is also essentially evaluatory and make-believe play is not. Withs triving play, ou get a score, or you win. ]
Now, Im not claiming at all that make-believe play is the domain of texts, and striving-play is the domain of games. I think theyre different functions that can occur separately, or stacked together, which can fight against each other or cooperate. I think a few games, like Cowboys and Indians, are almost entirely make-believe, and other games, like chess, 8

game aesthetics are almost entirely striving. Most modern videogames and themed boardgames are capable of being used for both forms of play at once. Grand Theft Auto does both, and, I think, in equal balance; Pac Man does both, but is much more about striving play. So I think that many games are hybrid creatures, built to support two sorts of play. This also doesnt necessarily mean that everybody plays the same way with them. I think, for instance, some people use World of Warcraft for striving play, and some use it for make-believe play, and some use it for both, and sometimes when they cross paths they come to a lot of grief. (The same may apply to texts, actually. I showed this paper to Lije Millgram, and he read it and commented that he thought it explained something about Jane Austen. Most regular readers of Jane Austen are engaged in makebelieve, but many literary theorists are playing a striving-game. He thought that what made something canonizable to academics was more about its amenability to the striving-game than to make believe. Which is maybe a paper in its own right.) Once we see the distinction between make-believe play and striving play, it is easier to say what textualists misses about games. Textualism got the make-believe play down, but they arent theorizing the strivingplay. Textualism presumes representationality, and make believe is a representational form of play. But striving play is not essentially representative. It can be, but nothing in the definition requires it. But striving-play is the really novel feature here, and so the one in most need of explication.

Striving and Landscape So now we have this new idea to play with - striving-play. Games can be more or less conducive to interesting, pleasurable, and beautiful striving. But do we need to start anew, and invent a whole new critical 9

game aesthetics language for it? For some aspects, yes. But I do think there is a longstanding discussion that is surprisingly close - in the field of landscape design. Here, I mean everything from the design of gardens, architecture, road networks, and urban spaces. Im not talking here about landscape studies within critical theory, which tends to start by looking at paintings of landscapes, and treat the landscapes as texts. Im talking about internal dialogue of architects and urban planners the intentional space-creators. Because landscape designers have been thinking, for a very very long time, about how to design spaces for the motion of free and interacting agents. In striving play, a player must be free, and causally active. The solutions to the obstacles, the narrative of tension, struggle, and overcoming, has to come from the agents own decisions, actions, and effort. Landscape design theory is about providing a setting for, and conditioning, the motion of free beings - not by providing a fixed narrative for them to experience, but by setting up a set of constraints and then letting the users loose in them. As I said before, game designers make rules, and landscape designers make walls and fences. Both are building logical spaces - shaping the space of possible choices and motions. [Let me be clear here: the analogy Im drawing is not from the game landscape to a physical landscape. The constraints a landscape architect builds are all physical; the constraints a game designer can be a mixture of physical, and rules - as Alison points out, it includes the architecture inside the game environment, and the rules of how the player can move, and the rules for how the player can and cannot alter this architecture] What do I mean here by logical space? We could speak of game designers and landscape designers as presenting topologies of choice. What I mean by this is that for all these forms of design, the designer shapes the choices that an agent has, and which choices are available to them from a given game-state or physical position. An architect creates spaces, and he presents possible connections between the spaces. The architect doesnt specify the *motion* of agents 10

game aesthetics - rather, she forms the way in which the possible spaces connect, by setting limits on where agents can move. The urban planner typically has a slightly more flexible toolbox. They can put up fences, but they can also enforce directions of motion - one way streets, for example, are a very powerful tool in shaping the way in which people can move from one space to another. The game designer can do these things, but have an even greater degree of control - they can sculpt the powers of the free agent inside that space. Architects and urban planners are limited to planning for human beings and their typical physical addenda. People walk, run, sit, bicycle, drive. But game designers have far more creative control over the kind of powers their players have. And, landscape designers have to take their inhabitants goals as out-of-control givens, where game designers can sculpt the in-game goals of their players. But even so, the similarity is striking. With texts, the basic unit of a text is units of representation. But the basic unit of the landscape and the striving game is the constraint. Their medium is the same, so to speak. Theyre both designing logical spaces - landscapes of choice. And theyre both after the same seeming paradox: using constraints to enhance and enrich the range of choices. After all, as I said earlier in the conference, imagine a person in a field. Now imagine we build him a house. In some way, his motion is constrained - there are obstacles - walls - in his path. But now he has more options. He can be inside, or outside. Similarly, chess is nothing but a set of restrictions on how one may move pieces, but I in a very important sense, I have a richer set of choices when Im playing chess than when Im idly toying with a chess set. So both are working with constraints. And what both fields want from them constraints is often very similar. In landscape design and striving design, we often want those constraints to be invisible - we want the constraint of the walls, the arbitrariness of the rules, to melt away, to leave the user absorbed in their daily life, or their opponents possible moves. Next, textualism tends to focus on single-player experiences, because thats paradigmatic experience of reading. But landscape 11

game aesthetics designers have a lot of machinery for talking about designing spaces for multiple free interacting agents. And, in striving-game design and landscape design, the goal is not to impart a single narrative, or a set of ideas - it is to provide a setting or environment, which enables the users to create their own varied narratives, and this strikes me as a very different way of thinking. A concrete example will help here. A lot of non-academic game criticism often praises games for letting the the player feel free, or criticizes games for making the player feel forced. How does this work? Landscape designers have insight here, because theyve spent an enormous amount of time thinking about traffic flow and circulation, about how to constrain agents subtly and artfully, even invisibly, how to guide agents without intruding on their awareness. Let me give you an example. Christopher Alexander, in his landmark landscape design book A Pattern Language, talks about the topologies of choice spaces. He says, when building a space, like a multiuser space like a home or office, you want both private and public spaces, and you want people to intermingle in the public spaces. Worst option: order it. Force meetings or scheduled family time. Better option: you can encourage intermingling naturally with a simple trick: you take a common space, and put the private spaces on one side, and the utility spaces on the other. So, a home: bedrooms, living rooms, kitchen. Or, an office: cubicles, common room, copy room and bathrooms. People will naturally run into each on the way towards the utility spaces, and the common space acquires a natural sort of life. Thats the first step. But if thats it, then people can feel forced - this is subtle, they still might feel the space constraining them. Therefore, says Alexander, you should have a long back way from the private spaces to the utility spaces that avoids the common space - but you should make it slightly longer, and thus slightly more inconvenient. Thus, the natural circulation of people will bring them into contact, but if they really wish to avoid contact, they have that choice.

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game aesthetics The topology of loops, says Alexander, contains more generous circulation than the topology of lines. If I had more time, Id go through some examples of line and loop choice topologies in video games, and in board games, but I think once you have the idea, you can do it for yourself quite easily. [In Mimesis and Make Believe, Walton cautions against what he calls have theory will travel - applying an old theory to a new phenomenon, just because you happen to have it lying around. He was talking about people applying communicative theories of text to fiction, and arguing that fiction had a distinct function. But I worry about have theory will travelling Waltons theory. ] To wrap up: Im not claiming that games arent sometimes texts. Once we separate the striving aspect of games from the make-believe aspect, and see how central the striving aspect is, we see how much the textual metaphor leaves out. And Ive suggested that a new metaphor - of games as landscape - is an excellent and fertile resource for understanding how interesting striving is designed - for seeing how games do what they do. And I think, if we work at it long enough, we might get an alternative route to value out of all this. We might even get an alternate route to aesthetic value, which doesnt depend on textual functions. I suspect that the elegance of a game design will often turn out to be quite similar to the elegance of a beautifully designed building - not in the story it tells, but in its subtle openness to human choice, and its ability to aid and abet human creation.

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