The End of the Game

A Technorati link led me to the Only a Game blog, where there’s interesting discussion surrounding Clive Thompson’s article. I hadn’t come across this blog before, but it looks like the authors are very into doing cluster analysis of players, and determining play patterns based on that, and then tailoring games to target those identified markets. They certainly like Myers-Briggs types. 🙂 Looks like they have a book out called 21st Century Game Design as well.

Right off the bat I want to quibble with them on the book title, of course. I’ll have to read it, naturally, before passing any judgements, but to say that design should be aware of market segments and possible audiences is hardly a radical revelation. On the other hand, it’s good to see more awareness of the myriad possibilities inherent in approaching gamers more scientifically. Danc over at Lost Garden offers up a pretty positive review, but it’s pointed out in the comments that the clusters identified by the book bear substantial similarities to theoretical models not arrived at with that degree of empiricism, such as Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist theory from pen-and-paper RPGs, or Bartle’s types from muds.

In fact, when Danc says that serious attention to audience models is needed, it could be argued my MMO aficionados (and has been at length, actually) that there has been too much attention paid thus far, and design distortions resulting from bending over backwards to accomodate a given type.

The real bone I have to pick with the post, however, is similar to the comments I would have regarding Dave Rickey’s take on AToF, where he described my definition of fun as being solely neophilia.

This looks to me to be a ludic fallacy – which is to say, an assertion made by someone with a strong affinity for ludic (structured) play, without taking into account other approaches to play. There is a tendency for people who enjoy agonistic ludic play to forget or overlook players who prefer other styles of play.

FWIW, I’m not an agonistic player by their definition, so I don’t think that I’m simply falling into the trap of generalizing my own experiences onto everyone. As you walk down the list of player types they identify, the defining characteristics end up being:

• The end of the game may be when everything is known or can be anticipated.
• the game is probably up when there is nothing new to experience.
• When the game has no tasks to complete, or the player has become unable to carry out their assigned tasks, the game will no longer sustain.
• the game is up for someone fitting this archetype when they no longer have the capacity to personally affect the game world.

I’d argue (and one other commenter does as well) that all of these are fundamentally very similar. “Everything known” and “nothing new to experience” certainly seem to have tremendous overlap both with each other, and with the neophiliac take on the Theory of Fun. But the other two are also signs of having sufficient knowledge of a possibility space, of having grasped the permutations. They do reflect different learning styles as regards that possibility space, however.

I certainly agree that “there [do] appear to be issues of personality to take into account when considering how and why people stop playing games.” But I suggest that those personality differences lie principally in approaches to the issue of mastering a possibility space, and in one’s affinity for given learning styles, and whether a given game accomodates that learning style. In other words, I’ll quit some sorts of games early because they don’t mesh well with my learning style, and I’ll quit others because I have exhausted them–and with different games, I may well exhaust them in different ways.

(I also disagree with the equation of continued interest and Cziksentmihalyi’s concept of “flow,” but I cover that enough in the book).

I’ll definitely be picking up the book, though; for one, Lost Garden always has very insightful things to say, so if Danc liked it, it’s probably very good. And for another, there’s a lot of very thought-provoking posts throughout the Only A Game blog; it looks like a subject and people worth engaging with. if you get it and read it, let me know what you think.