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This essay spun off of the intensely involving "Fun In Games" debate on MUD-Dev in early 2002.

On Interactive Entertainment

Fun may be the primary core of games. But it's not the primary core of entertainment. Interactive entertainment, however, happens to mostly be games right now. But it doesn't have to be, I suppose.

The difficulty comes about because of the word "interactive" that is prepended in front of the word entertainment. It's not analogous to "screen-based" or "prose-based." Those are media, not verbs. So perhaps a better term is "computer-based entertainment."

As soon as we say that, we realize that there's a hell of a lot of forms of computer-based entertainment that are not games. And they're not all "fun" in the sense generally meant either. Perhaps a good example might be this mailing list, which could not exist in recognizable form without the mediation of the computer.

So the problem lies in "interactive." Let's presume that we interact either with or through the medium of the computer. Both seem to qualify as interactive entertainment; they basically boil down to single participant or multi-participant activities.

In the case of "interact with," we can presume that the experience cannot be primarily passive, as it is with stage-based, prose-based, etc. After all, interacting with stage-based media is generally termed "acting" and interacting with prose-based media is usually termed "writing."

There's been a lot of discussion in professional videogame design circles lately about "the surrender of authorship" inherent in both greater flexibility in the games and in the burgeoning "mod" community. I think the key insight here is that it's all just "interacting with the medium." In other words, modding is just playing the game in another way, sort of like a budding writer might rework plots of characters from other writers into derivative journeyman fiction or into fan fiction. The fact that some forms of it are constructive (modding a game), experiential (playing a game), or destructive (hacking a game) are immaterial--the same activities are possible with a given play or book or song. Arguably, the act of literary analysis is much the same as the act of hacking a game--the act of disassembling the components of a given piece of work in a medium in order to see how it works, or even to get it to do things, carry messages, or otherwise represent itself as something other than what the author of the piece intended.

We can sit here and debate whether performing music, writing a story, or drawing a picture are "fun." As someone with some training in all three, I can tell you that they are all hard work, which isn't something we necessarily consider "fun." But I derive great fulfillment from it. This is perhaps analogous to watching Hamlet on stage, reading Lord Jim, or viewing "Guernica"--not exactly fun, but fulfilling in a different way.

This suggests that given that writing isn't necessarily fun but might be something valuable for the writer to do; and that practicing piano for hours on end might not be fun but something that gives fulfillment; that engaging in interactive computer-based entertainment need not be fun either but might indeed be fulfilling, thought-provoking, challenging, and also difficult, painful, and even compulsive.

Prose medium breakdown:

	Collaborative	Competitive	Individual
Constructive	Co-authorship	Writing for publication	Writing for oneself
Experiential	Reading aloud	Competitive interpretive speech	Reading
Destructive	Teaching literature	Academic paper-writing	Deconstructionism

Musical medium breakdown:

	Collaborative	Competitive	Individual
Constructive	Co-composers	Busking	Practice
Experiential	Public performance	Fiddle competition	Listening
Destructive	Ear training	Music criticism	Analysis

That said, it doesn't mean that the form the interactive computer-based entertainment takes is necessarily "a game" or even a "software toy." The definition of game implies certain things, as does the word "toy" or "sport" and maybe even "hobby." These words do imply fun, even if often in deadly seriousness.

For those of us on this list, of course, the interesting factor is cases where the interactive entertainment is going through the computer, as opposed to merely being acting on it. As soon as you have multiple participants in the environment, the endeavors (which are likely to be the same--constructive, experiential, or destructive) will shift to being either individual (read: disengaged from other participants), collaborative or competitive. In fact, your participants may not all be engaging in the same endeavors at the same time. (Even to the extent that we can probably consider participants engaging in individual interaction with the medium to be people effectively participanting in a single-participant activity, since they are interacting with the computer, not with the other participants).

We do happen to have words for competitive activities engaged in with other people; "game" and "sport" are among them. We also have words for collaborative activities engaged in with other people, but since they comprise such a wide range of activities, we tend to lump many of them under the terms "community."

A surprising number of these activities come out as what we label "games," in fact. Consider the breakdown for what we might term "map and counters mediated activities," wherein several of the boxes can profitably be filled with the word "game" or "toy," albeit of different types (roleplaying, wargame, Legos, etc).

Computer-based breakdown:

	Collaborative	Competitive	Individual
Constructive	Open source development	Commercial development	Modding or skinning
Experiential	Mudding	Deathmatching	Single-player gaming
Destructive	A CS degree	Hacking	Thinking up this post

It's fairly easy to see how just the realm of muds can be fractally expanded to cover much the same territory. This leads to the suggestion that Bartle's mapping of four types, which recently in some circles has come under pressure to add a fifth type, voyeur, or a sixth type, "roleplayer," is merely a subset of this larger categorization. It's pretty easy to find more mud-based activities that fall into the nine types, and I imagine that just as this is a fractal take on the above graph, this graph can profitably be expanded to find nine types of activities within any given box.

	Collaborative	Competitive	Individual
Constructive	Running muds; Socializer	Commercial mud operation	Mud design
Experiential	Roleplaying	Playerkilling; Killer	Voyeurism
Destructive	Powergaming; Achiever	Griefing	Explorer

Where does this leave me vis-a-vis whether games are supposed to be fun? Games as classically defined are some boxes within the framework, but not all of them. Arguably, all of the above are fun to someone. And lastly, online worlds aren't just games. :)

Well, I can certainly see a case for arranging things differently. It's a mental model more than anything else. I can even see the same actions being taken by different people being considered two separate spaces on the model. Do you run a mud in part to do better at it than others? Do you do it in order to hang out with your friends, build relationships? Same activity, different boxes. The same phenomenon happens when people say they prefer a cozier company than a competitive cutthroat atmosphere, yet both workplaces might be doing the exact same thing.

I definitely think that intent of the participant is key here, yes. Any given example of a medium offers the opportunity to do ALL of the things on the chart. And any given person may well do a mix of them. It's all about how the individual approaches the work.

At some point I would like to do a second take on the chart. Something where I fill out spaces sort of like this:

	Collaborative	Competitive	Individual
Constructive	Community	Job	Hobby
Experiential	Performance	Sport	Consumer
Destructive	Teaching	Criticism	Analysis

Then identify, like Will Wright did at GDC, keywords that go with each of these broad categories, and do searches on the Net to see how often keywords pop up for different interactive entertainment products. Then graph the results. I suspect that we would see interesting patterns in what interactive entertainment products break out to wider markets, and which muds are more popular and which fail, etc.

I've been meaning to turn this into a formal essay for ages now, but never get around to it.