Implicit Game Aesthetics

Abstract

Whatever games might be, people have strong opinions about what does or doesn’t qualify as one. By dissecting the implicit value judgments motivating different definitions of “game,” the underlying aesthetic positions can be excavated, revealing a conceptual landscape of the aesthetics of play. Analysis of various definitions for game provided by both professional game designers and academics allows the identification of distinct aesthetic camps. These include (but are not restricted to) victory, problem, reward, imaginative, social, and uncertainty aesthetics. Additionally, a variety of refinements to these positions can be identified. Collectively, these aesthetic positions outline an answer to the question raised by Mary Midgley’s observation that games and art can be unified because they deal with human needs that necessarily have a structure. This article provides a rough sketch of the shape of human play needs and asserts that the unity that can thus be attained must necessarily be diverse.

Keywords

game aesthetics aesthetics of play games play value judgments

Introduction

Game, as Wittgenstein recognized (1958), is a fuzzy concept that resists simple definition. Nonetheless, the debate over the boundary conditions of the term game continues to rage in game studies as if some definitive conclusion was somehow just out of reach. As Simons (2006) has observed:

If one plays by the rules of academia, the carving out of a special niche for games studies requires the identification of a set of features that is at the same time common to all and exclusive for all things “gameness.”…The number of objects considered as candidates for membership in the category “games” will always exceed the boundaries drawn by theoretical and always soon to be revisited definitions of “gameness.”

These arguments over the answer to the question “what is a game?” are deeply parallel to a far older debate concerning “what is art?” that has proved equally interminable. In his address to the American Society for Aesthetics, Walton (2007, pp. 148, 160) remarked that this latter question is “troubled and seriously contested” and noted: “It’s that darn concept of art that has made it so hard to understand art.” It is my claim, here and elsewhere (e.g., Bateman, 2014a, in press-a, in press-b) that the same situation is mirrored in game studies: The concept of game has made it exceptionally difficult to understand games and play. In the case of “art,” it’s clear that what’s at task necessarily concerns aesthetics. It is my purpose here to argue that this is also true in the case of game.

This purported parallelism between discussions over art and game may appear strange if one assumes that art is deployed primarily as a valorization and game is not, but a core assumption upon which my argument proceeds is that both art and game as defined terms involve valorizations and denigrations in a significant proportion of cases where they are invoked for the purpose of argumentation. The deployment of both art and game, in such examples, is serving to identify a class of artifacts that merit praise (e.g., Danto, 2013, in the case of art––game is dealt with in this article). However, even in cases where the purpose of the definition is not overtly to valorize, aesthetic (and also ethical) values can be excavated from the usage of the term since every definition marks out some subset of phenomena as being of specific interest to its topic and thus involves some kind of value judgment. Claims of this form are commonly encountered in other academic domains, for example, feminist critique of the definition of “woman” (Fulfer, 2008); this article and its companions (Bateman, in press-a, in press-b) seek to extend such value investigations to the study of games.

The broadest form of the general claim at work here is not new: It originates in a nascent form in the arguments of Nietzsche (1901), a perspective that has been clarified by Deleuze (1962). However, the Nietzsche–Deleuze argument is usually taken as meaning that ontology entails ethics (e.g., Zepke, 2005), whereas I am taking the weaker stance that ontology entails value theory (i.e., aesthetics, ethics, or both). My position is that value-neutral ontology is neither possible nor desirable (see Bateman, 2014c). As the philosopher of mathematics, Yablo (1998) observes, following a very different line of argumentation (one that also draws against the work of Walton), ontology rests upon a mistake: There is not a single, literal ontology that can be expected to reliably divide experience on purely objective terms into “real” and otherwise, as Quine (1948) and others have believed. This does not, as Nietzsche is sometimes claimed to have asserted, mean that “nothing is true”––it means that truth is always situated in a specific context.

It is thus not my intent to offer a definitive ontological basis for defining game (I claim there can be no such basis, as the contents of this article attest), nor––in this article, at least––to offer a theory of game aesthetics, much less a grand theory of aesthetics. The method of this article is rather a conceptual analysis in the manner of Wittgenstein, and the purpose of my investigation is to uncover the substrate of discussions concerning “games” and therefore to offer a very rough map of their conceptual territory. However, in the process, it is necessary to become agnostic as to what the term game refers to. The map I am sketching, therefore, will be of the domain of play, which is clearly wider than that of games: If it is drawn correctly, however crudely, every concept of game will fit somewhere within this landscape.

Embedded Aesthetic Judgments

The term “game aesthetic” used in this article refers to a specific value judgment (or set of value judgments) that valorizes some forms of play and that may or may not denigrate other forms of play. Any individual can be assumed to possess multiple game aesthetics in this sense, which they apply to different games and game-like activities in a heterogeneous fashion. This could be compared to the use of different criteria deployed to interpret nongame artworks, for example, the impressionist aesthetic or the mimetic aesthetic of Aristotle and the ancient Greeks, for instance. As examples of these specific game aesthetics (i.e., aesthetic value judgments concerning play activities), I draw heavily from game designers since they offer the most strident definitions and thus some of the clearest examples of my sense of “game aesthetics.” However, I have attempted to balance this with definitions from various academic sources since (as will become clear) to examine solely game designers would be to risk misunderstanding the scope of the landscape of play that this conceptual analysis seeks to reveal.

To facilitate the conceptual analysis, it will be helpful to set aside certain troublesome concepts while the more straightforward issues are identified. To begin with, therefore, I shall take as unproblematic only two presumptions: that games entail rules and that games entail fiction. Both these apparently foundational assertions are sufficiently general that when taken singularly, they exclude very few things people would consider as games, and indeed, include many things that a great many people wouldn’t consider a game. Later, it will be possible to kick these blocks away later in order to be left with a more complete conceptual model of the aesthetics of play, as it manifests through definitions of game.

It may seem premature to treat “games entail fiction” as unproblematic, given the wealth of arguments within game studies that have attempted to discard fiction as an irrelevance for the study of games (e.g., Aarseth, 2004; Kirkpatrick, 2011)––especially given Juul’s (2001) commonly accepted point that games are “themable,” that is, chess is the same game but can be dressed up in different fictional clothing. However, such arguments do not suggest that fiction is not entailed in games––they rest on the presumption that it is both present and mutable––they only dispute the importance of fiction to the study of games.

Furthermore, scholars who mount such arguments are frequently dependent upon the recognition of the importance of fiction in their own work: Juul (2005) makes a crucial distinction between rules and fiction core to his major thesis upon video games, and Aarseth (2007) depends upon the description of his play of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda, 2006) in terms of the fictional world of the game in order to explicate his concept of transgressive play. The fiction denial, as I have termed it, that these and other scholars have expressed is part of an attempt to maintain an exceptionalism that asserts the importance of the video game qua game as an object of study (Bateman, in press-b): It does not and cannot remove fiction from the elements entailed in games as a broad category, for reasons, Juul (2005) explicates.

One final observation is worth making before commencing the conceptual analysis proper. It is the nature of this article to approach definitions of games on the assumption that they embed value judgments, but it is not necessarily the case that a proponent of a particular definition endorses the corresponding aesthetic judgment. Regardless, each definition is archetypal of a wider viewpoint that has been reflected in player studies over many thousands of players. The individual proponents of definitions, therefore, are akin to spokespeople for a particular aesthetic archetype that reflects particular play styles of the kind discussed previously by myself and others (Bartle, 1996; Bateman, 2009b, 2011; Bateman & Boon, 2005; Bateman, Lowenhaupt, & Nacke, 2011; Lazzaro, 2003, 2009).

Crawford’s Taxonomy of Creative Expression

There is no better example of my claim that definitions of ‘game’ conceal aesthetic value judgments than the famous taxonomy of creative expression given by Crawford (2003). By using the term “creative expression,” Crawford seeks to include art, games, and other forms of entertainment media under one heading––but in so doing, he also drives a wedge between art and games, implying that these are two radically distinct domains that cannot be bridged.

Crawford’s taxonomy is constructed as a series of questions, each of which divides activities into two classes, with game being an accolade attained only by passing through each of the defined “gates.” Crawford first considers the motive of the creator: If it is beauty, he terms it “art”; if it is money, “entertainment.” Since Crawford places games under entertainment, games seem to be immediately excluded from art, despite Crawford elsewhere (1984) yearning for games as an art form. However, he also allows that this first step could be omitted. The process continues according to the following basic outline:

Within entertainment: “is it interactive?”––if no, it is in the same (unnamed) class as movies, books, and films, else it qualifies as a “plaything.”

Within playthings: “is there a defined goal?”––if no, a “toy”; if yes, a “challenge.”

Within challenges: “is there an agent to compete against (or the illusion of one)?”––if no, a “puzzle”; if yes, a “conflict.”

Within conflicts: “can you impede your opponents?”––if no, a “competition”; if yes, a “game.”

Thus, only those things that are interactive, have goals, include opponents, and allow attacks against those opponents qualify as a game in Crawford’s terms. By placing ‘game’ at the apex of this sequence, there is an unavoidable sense of priority to this order, such that Crawford appears not only to assert a number of aesthetic value judgments concerning games but also a hierarchy of aesthetics of play.

Crawford’s steps correspond broadly to an agency aesthetic (interactivity), a victory aesthetic (goals and challenges), and a conflict aesthetic (opponents and direct attacks)—all three of which can be found expressed by other game designers, although rarely in so rigid a sequence. Furthermore, other game designers do not tend to give so much weight to conflict: Crawford devotes two entire steps of his process to distinctions within conflicts, making direct competition a requirement of games rather than a class of games. This oddly groups games such as Snakes and Ladders, golf, and all golf simulations, Ubongo (2005), Race for the Galaxy (2007), and Fill in the Spaces (FITS, 2009), as being competitions rather than games, despite most people’s strong intuitions that at least some of these are indeed games.

It is worth noting that Crawford’s games, prior to his withdrawal from the games industry in the early 1990s, epitomize the values he places at the top of his hierarchy, being primarily comprised of directly competitive strategy games such as Eastern Front (1941, 1981), Excalibur (1983), and Balance of Power (1985). Nonetheless, he represents a quixotic figure precisely because having been lauded for the creation of such games, he spent his later career eschewing such commercial projects and instead pursuing ways that video games could be art (Crawford, 1993).

Costikyan’s Taxonomy of Critical Language

Costikyan (1994) offered a rebuttal to Crawford’s earlier presentation of his terminology in The Art of Computer Game Design (1984), suggesting:

A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal.

It is noticed immediately that Costikyan wants to assert games as art, contra Crawford’s distinction––this is an aesthetic value judgment, but about art rather than games, per se. He adds:

What’s key here? Goals. Opposition. Resource management. Information.

Despite the goal to push against Crawford’s approach, Costikyan’s key constitutive elements of games embody two of the same value judgments as Crawford: the victory (goals) and conflict aesthetic (opposition). Added are “resource management and information,” which are presented in the context of the player’s need to make decisions. This corresponds to Sid Meier’s aesthetic assertion that “a good game is a series of interesting choices” and can be understood as a decision aesthetic. There is some potential overlap with the previously mentioned agency aesthetic, although agency arguably tends to concern the fiction of the game, whereas decisions tend to concern rules.

However, decision making is a subset of problem-solving tasks relating to games, and thus the decision aesthetic is part of a wider aesthetic of play. As Costikyan remarks in countering Crawford’s suggestion that Zork (1979) is a puzzle and not a game:

Almost every game has some degree of puzzle-solving; even a pure military strategy game requires players to, e.g. solve the puzzle of making an optimum attack at this point with these units. In fact, if a game involves any kind of decision making, or trade-offs between different kinds of resources, people will treat these as “puzzle elements,” trying to devise optimal solutions. Even in deathmatch play of a first-person shooter, players will seek to use cover and terrain for advantage––“solving the puzzle” posed by the current positions of opponents and the nature of the surrounding environment, if you will. You can’t extract puzzle from game entirely.

Thus, even though Costikyan favors putting emphasis on decisions over the wider activity of puzzle solving, there is a recognizable (and more general) problem aesthetic that views all play as puzzle resolution. The overlap with agency is somewhat obscured in this switch, for example, choosing a particular color of car is not strictly a soluble problem. These aesthetics may be in natural tension––a rules focus (problem/decision) contrasted to a fiction focus (agency).

Costikyan’s approach becomes far wider when considering what can “strengthen games,” namely, diplomacy, color (i.e., fictional gloss layered over the game rules), simulation, variety of encounter, position identification, role playing, socialization, and narrative tension. These broadly divide into general aesthetic positions. Those that concern the way that players interact beyond conflict (diplomacy and socialization) could be termed a social aesthetic. Color, position identification, and role playing rely on fiction or the player’s imaginative faculties and represent an imaginative aesthetic. Costikyan’s simulation probably also belongs to this category––he notes that “simulation is a way of providing color” and also that “it improves character identification,” which seems consistent with this approach. Finally, a variety of encounter and narrative tension relate to an uncertainty aesthetic that we’ll examine later. It is notable that all these aesthetic approaches to play are present in the tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) Costikyan is most famous for having designed, that is, Toon (1984) and Paranoia (1984).

Koster’s Fun as Learning

Koster (2012) offers a definition of game centered on the player’s activity:

Playing a game is the act of solving statistically varied challenge situations presented by an opponent who may or may not be algorithmic within a framework that is a defined systemic model.

Putting the player first seems to prioritize the play over the game, but this sentence conceals an opposite (but complementary) stance by concluding that the player’s actions take place “within a framework that is a defined systemic model.” The entire definition could therefore be run backward as “a game is a defined systemic model within the framework of which players face a (possibly algorithmic) opponent who presents statistically varied challenge situations the player solves.” Once again, the victory (challenge situations) and conflict (presented by an opponent) aesthetics appear central, and the phrase “statistically varied” may point toward the uncertainty aesthetic, discussed subsequently.

Koster places explicit focus upon a systems aesthetic that was arguably foreshadowed in Costikyan’s allusions to resource management. What the systems aesthetic excludes are kinds of play that lack any kind of formal definition, for example, children’s games of make-believe, but this is still broad compared to the victory and conflict aesthetics. Of course, Koster also includes these such that the systemic model requirement almost ceases to contribute anything additional. A spontaneous race between two joggers might qualify as challenge with an opponent but not qualify as occurring under a defined systemic model––this would depend upon whether Koster intends to include activities that can be modeled systemically but aren’t thought as such by their players. Since any activity can be systemically modeled, a definition in advance is a reasonable implication of Koster’s wording.

What a game designer usually does is precisely the creation of these kinds of systemic definitions, so favoring the systems aesthetic is arguably to valorize the contribution that game designers make to games. It is also notable that Koster’s own game projects, such as Ultima Online (Origin Systems, 1997) and Star Wars Galaxies (SOE, 2003) are complex designed systems, including (for instance) economic simulation at a level of detail beyond competing titles. It can thus be argued that the aesthetic values he expresses via his definition are mirrored by a commitment to systemic complexity in his commercial game designs.

However, in both video games and board games, the kinds of systems encountered become engrained in the playing culture for example, the fundamental systemic elements of first-person shooters changed only marginally between Quake (id Software, 1996) and Halo: Combat Evolved (Bungie, 2001) and similarly between Halo and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward, 2007). There was no redesign of systemic elements involved, only modifications to interface efficiency (e.g., Bungie’s abandoning of clunky weapon inventories for a two-gun system) and enhancements to multiplayer (e.g., Infinity Ward’s importing of experience point mechanics from RPGs). The bottom-up design of complete game systems is rare outside of very decision-centric games (e.g., strategy games and computer RPGs), and it is possibly the case that the systems aesthetic expresses a preference for these kinds of games. Crawford (2003) echoes this sentiment when he calls Costikyan’s allusion to resource management “a strategy gamer’s approach to the problem.” It may be no coincidence that the vast majority of game designers fit personality inventory archetypes associated with strategic thinking (Bateman, 2009b, p. 9).

Koster’s (2005) game definition is only part of his aesthetic judgment concerning play, since he also provides a definition of “fun” that expressly excludes all manner of experiences. For instance, roller coasters provide only “visceral fun” and are thus “not fun” according to Koster. This is one of the strangest value judgments in the entire discourse of game studies, since to a great many people such experiences are the essence of fun! Instead, Koster positions learning as central to fun, stating:

Games are puzzles to solve, just like everything else we encounter in life [and] serve as very fundamental and powerful learning tools.

This may seem to correspond to the problem aesthetic, but Koster has a distinctly new contribution: It is not the puzzle, problem, or decision that’s important, it’s the learning. He is willing to combine goal-oriented games and “playing make-believe” under a category he defines as “iconified representations of human experience that we can practice with and learn patterns from” (p. 36)—that is, he’s happy to unify all play under the auspices of learning––although he can only achieve this by dismissing, a priori, anything that doesn’t fit this description as “visceral.” Koster thus advances a learning aesthetic that is intimately related to the problem aesthetic, which he occasionally promotes directly, for example:

All art and all entertainment are posing problems to the audience.

Elsewhere, he stresses the learning aesthetic directly:

The definition of a good game is therefore “one that teaches everything it has to offer before the player stops playing.” That’s what games are, in the end. Teachers. Fun is just another word for learning.

However, it is problematic to claim that learning is fundamental to games while also recognizing (as Koster does) that learning is central to general cognition. That our neural architecture learns from all experiences isn’t a statement about play or games but merely an observation about neurobiology. Not all fun is about learning, as Koster admits by segregating visceral fun, and if fun is redefined as solely about learning, this becomes a vacant tautology.

That Koster’s position involves an aesthetic choice can be seen clearly in his condemnation of players who are enjoying playing but aren’t learning:

Going back through defeated challenges in order to pass time isn’t a productive exercise of your brain’s abilities. Nonetheless, lots of people do it…But once you get past the point of doing something perfectly, do yourself a favor and quit the game.

Why should players stop what they’re enjoying just because they aren’t learning? There are many players for whom the exercise of mastery is more fun than learning. This mastery aesthetic is distinct from both the victory aesthetic, which takes pleasure only in beating the challenges, and the learning aesthetic, since it valorizes not the process of gaining perfection but the perfection itself. That this approach to play exists is not disputed by Koster––“lots of people do it”––it is simply his value judgment that this kind of play is inferior because it doesn’t entail learning.

Cook’s Player Model

Another game designer, Cook (2007), offers this claim:

Games are not mathematical systems. They are systems that always have a human being, full of desires, excitement and immense cleverness, sitting smack dab in the center. To accurately describe games, we need a working psychological model of the player.

Although this may seem to be arguing against the systems aesthetic, there is no denial here that games are systems. What Cook denies is that games can be understood solely as mathematical systems, instead advocating an examination of the psychology of players since the system means nothing without the player. He continues:

Our player model is simple: The player is entity that is driven, consciously or subconsciously, to learn new skills high in perceived value. They gain pleasure from successfully acquiring skills.

With a shared interest in both systems and learning, Koster and Cook are aesthetically close––Cook praises Koster directly and makes Koster-esque assertions such as:

The sensation that gamers term “fun” is derived from the act of mastering knowledge, skills. and tools. When you learn something new, when you understand it so fully you can use that knowledge to manipulate your environment for the better, you experience joy.

Note that Cook doesn’t claim players enjoy exercising mastery but the act of mastering. Again, the learning aesthetic is placed ahead of the mastery aesthetic––players “gain pleasure from successfully acquiring skills,” not from successfully exercising those skills. Cook draws against neuroscience to support his claims but goes slightly awry in doing so. He cites neuroscientist Edward Vessel’s remarks, and comments:

Upon the click of comprehension, a natural opiate called endomorphin, a messaging chemical in the brain similar in structure to morphine, is released. As humans, we are wired to crave new information constantly. In some sense, what you and I term curiosity can be interpreted as our brain looking for its next fix of deliciously fascinating information.

This is a correct interpretation of Vessel’s work, but it misses out a great deal of what is interesting about it. Vessel, along with Irving Biederman and Xiaomin Yue, has conducted considerable research into the function of endomorphin and said many things that support Koster’s and Cook’s position. For instance, Biederman and Vessel (2006) allege:

We should add that the time course of cognitive pleasure may be somewhat protracted for children. A child may wish to hear the same story read to her over and over again (much to the chagrin of an adult reader), even to the point where sections of the story are memorized verbatim. However, when the youngster is questioned about the story—for example, why a particular character acted in a certain way—the child often reveals a lack of comprehension. It’s only after a child fully understands the point of the story that she tires of hearing it again. This may be analogous to an adult’s experience of mastering challenging subject matter. The payoff is in the click of comprehension, however difficult the path to that point.

However, while their work demonstrates learning outcomes associated with “novel” and “richly interpretable” experiences, learning is tangential to the core of their work that concerns the neurobiology of perceptual pleasure. These kinds of experiences are rewarding because they are richly interpretable, not because learning occurs––although, as they demonstrate (Yue, Vessel, & Biederman, 2007), the endomorphin system triggers the dopamine system, which as Koster correctly observed is involved in learning.

Curiosity isn’t a motivation toward learning, as Cook implies, but an inherently enjoyable experience. Learning is always going on in the background, but it’s incorrect to position learning as the sole purpose of this neural activity. Biederman and Vessel have demonstrated, for instance, that people “enjoy searching for target images…as long as they can maintain a reasonably high level of accuracy” (p. 36)––this is an activity involving endomorphin, but the reward comes from recognizing the target image, not from any consequent learning. (In so much as enjoyment here is related to actual performance, this could be an example of the aforementioned mastery aesthetic.)

Cook questionably asserts that the pleasure from mastering a skill is experienced only once: “After the moment of mastery, a biological feedback system kicks in that dampens the pleasure response to exercising those same pathways again. What was once exciting becomes boring.” His “moment of mastery” is intended to be Vessel’s “click of comprehension,” but this should not be applied to skills, only to knowledge. The “click” concerns successful interpretation of a situation, and has little to do with the more general process of skill acquisition, which can be continuously rewarding. A musician’s pleasure in developing masterful musical skills is felt in their exercise of that skill, and similarly, a game player may never know that they’ve mastered a skill but may still enjoy exercising it.

Like Koster, Cook prioritizes the learning aesthetic over the mastery aesthetic, but his account also comes extremely close to recognizing a curiosity aesthetic. The research on endomorphin isn’t just about the click of comprehension, it’s about why some perceptual experiences are pleasurable: Novel, richly interpretable images can be enjoyed whether or not any learning takes place. Curiosity does play a role when a puzzle is solved––it is part of what motivates the individual to attempt a solution––but players can enjoy curiosity that doesn’t lead to such blunt payoffs and frequently do. Exploring an intriguing terrain is fun for certain players not because being able to navigate a world is a skill with high perceived value but because the landscape itself is richly interpretable. Curiosity itself is fun, even if it never leads to learning.

McGonigal’s Four Traits

McGonigal (2011) suggests:

…when we're playing a game, 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 complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.

Rules are currently excluded from consideration, and the recognition of goals could be seen as the victory aesthetic, but note that for once the conflict aesthetic is entirely absent. This leaves two new considerations, namely, feedback systems and voluntary participation. The latter is considered subsequently and the former is intriguing: What aesthetic is implied by drawing attention to feedback systems? McGonigal states:

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.

This elucidates the player’s relationship with the goal state, suggesting the victory aesthetic and “system” implies the systems aesthetic. However, there must be an additional value judgment since no one else made feedback a boundary condition. Perhaps what McGonigal is gesturing at is a reward aesthetic, separate from (but related to) the victory aesthetic. Consider her description of the feedback system in Tetris (Pajitnov, 1984):

As you successfully lock in Tetris puzzle pieces, you get three kinds of feedback: visual––you can see row after row of pieces disappearing with a satisfying poof; quantitative––a prominently displayed score constantly ticks upwards; and qualitative––you experience a steady increase in how challenging the game feels.

This is a description of the inherent rewards of playing Tetris, interpreted as feedback. For McGonigal, Tetris cannot be won, it can only be lost; her “goal” for this game is “to stack falling puzzle pieces, leaving as few gaps as possible in between them” (p. 23). Her mention of goals as a trait essential to games thus isn’t an endorsement of the victory aesthetic, since these kinds of “wins” or “goals” would be a part of her feedback system. Rather than feedback being ancillary to goals, the goal is secondary to the feedback system, since that provides the rewarding experience. McGonigal’s goal is simply the instructions for play, the answer to the question “what do I do?”

McGonigal’s approach is similar to that offered in my early work with Boon (Bateman and Boon, 2005), where we suggest that a toy is a tool for entertainment, and a game can be understood as “a toy with some degree of performance” (p. 27). “Performance” here is intended to be ambiguous, to include at its furthest extremes the kind of qualitative measures of play inherent in tabletop role playing, where having a “great game” may simply mean the players performed their roles in ways that were satisfying. However, it expressly includes victory conditions, failure states, and metrics for measuring progress, and as such expresses the same reward aesthetic that McGonigal ultimately prefers to the victory aesthetic.

This preference for the reward aesthetic arguably emphasizes play over outcomes––a direct inversion of the outcome-focused victory or conflict aesthetics. McGonigal is unusual in considering conflict––Crawford’s highest value––entirely tangential to games. This is arguably mirrored in McGonigal’s unusual career as a game designer, with her most iconic work being in the field of Alternative Reality Games, for example, I Love Bees (42 Entertainment, 2004) and Last Call Poker (42 Entertainment, 2005), both created to promote more conventional video games––Halo 2 (Bungie, 2004) and Gun (Neversoft, 2005), respectively.

However, the reward aesthetic can be combined with the conflict aesthetic: Salen and Zimmerman (2003, p. 80) define game as “a system in which players engage in artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.” The “quantifiable outcome” relates to McGonigal’s feedback systems and thus expresses the reward aesthetic, while the requirement that “players engage in artificial conflict” expressly presupposes the conflict aesthetic.

Bernard Suits’ Lusory Attitude

McGonigal also cites the work of philosopher Bernard Suits (1978, p. 55), praising his definition that “Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” as “the single most convincing and useful definition of a game ever devised” (McGonigal, 2011, p. 22). This provides a convenient transition from looking at the definitions of game designers, to examining more academic definitions of ‘game’. In his first article on this subject (1966), Suits––in a somewhat muddy trail of conjecture––begins from his concept of “game playing as the selection of inefficient means” (p. 148) and works up to an ultimate definition that:

…to play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by specific rules, where the means permitted by the rules are more limited in scope than they would be in the absence of rules, and where the sole reason for accepting such limitation is to make possible such activity.

Suits refines this definition in his later work (1978) and suggests that the accepting of limitations in order to participate in a game constitutes a particular state of mind associated with play that he terms the lusory attitude. He also offers a shortened version of his definition:

…playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

The concept of a lusory attitude that makes game playing possible is a valuable contribution, but Suits’ definition strains at its edges. In order to fit games of make-believe into his approach, Suits has to argue that “the important thing in a game of this kind is…that the moves one makes…keep the game going instead of terminating the play” (p. 131). Calling this “the principle of prolongation,” he thus proposes that such open games fit his definition because their unnecessary obstacle to overcome is the end of the game. Yet this doesn’t describe what players of (say) a diceless tabletop RPG actually enjoy when they are engaging with their roles.

Ultimately, Suits gestures between the victory and problem aesthetics without committing to either. Those who see either as fundamental may find Suits’ definition appealing precisely because it cooperates with any outcome-focused approach. McGonigal, however, seems to reject both in favor of her more nuanced rewards aesthetic––although this fits equally well under Suits’ broad umbrella, as will any of the other aesthetics that relate to victory or problems (such as learning, decision, and conflict aesthetics). What Suits excludes is anything outside of goal-oriented play, for example, the agency, imaginative, or social aesthetics.

Roger Caillois’ Patterns of Play

Perhaps the oldest definition provided for what constitutes a game comes from Caillois (1958), who was pursuing an essentially anthropological investigation into cross-cultural play that I have characterized as patterns of play (2009a). Caillois was French and thus used the term “jeu,” meaning both “play” and game, and as a result, his definition is highly inclusive. In brief, he states that everything that constitutes play is free (nonobligatory), separated by limits specified in advance, uncertain, unproductive, governed by rules, and entails make-believe. The last two have been set aside, and the separation condition can be understood as refinement of the rules-fiction dualism proposed by Juul (2005). This leaves three value judgments: Play (and hence games) must occur freely, without obligation; play entails uncertainty; and play must be nonproductive.

It is not clear that the first and third will hold: As Castronova (2005) noted, massively multiplayer games severely blur the lines as to what kinds of play are “productive.” Similarly, it is unclear that a gold farmer who also plays World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004) for fun should qualify as playing at night but not during the day. As Malaby has critiqued (2007), the boundary between work and play assumed by Caillois has become impossible to sustain. Nonetheless, there is a voluntary aesthetic advanced by Caillois, as well as Suits, McGonigal, and additionally Avedon and Sutton-Smith (1971, p. 9) who stated “we can define a game as an exercise of voluntary control systems….” This aesthetic seems to entail that players of a game are, as Caillois suggests, under no obligation to play. Since the same game could be played in both a voluntary and a mandatory context—imagine being forced at gunpoint to play Russian Roulette—it’s difficult to see why this would serve as a workable boundary condition, though. Perhaps the voluntary aesthetic’s claim is that games cease to be fun when they are mandatory.

The remaining element of Caillois definition is the requirement for uncertainty. This might be foundational––are there any clear cases of games that don’t entail uncertainty? Regardless, an uncertainty aesthetic can be tentatively accepted as entailed in Caillois’ view and implied by Costikyan’s (and possibly Koster’s). Caillois isn’t necessarily making a strong case of the aesthetic merits of uncertainty so much as he is reporting his view that those who enjoy play derive some proportion of their enjoyment from the uncertainty of the activity. This sits oddly with some activities Caillois includes: Theater, for instance, is given as a highly formalized kind of playing. Walton’s make-believe theory of representation (1990) supports this, but not unproblematically: If someone enjoys a stage play and returns to watch again, is uncertainty really their interest? It’s not an entirely plausible suggestion that the audience hope for things to go wrong! Similar concerns relate to players who master a particular video game sequence perfectly and return to execute that sequence repeatedly. It’s not a wholly satisfying explanation for this behavior that their motivation involves the possibility they might fail. This suggests that some kind of uncertainty aesthetic in games is applicable.

Thomas Malaby’s Disposition of Play

The uncertainty aesthetic finds its strongest expression with the anthropologist Thomas Malaby (2007), who decries the assumption that games and play should be seen as continuous. Malaby is particularly hostile toward Caillois’ suggestions that games must not be productive and in general aims to conceptually disentangle play from game, and similarly play from “work.” He suggests:

A game is a semibounded and socially legitimate domain of contrived contingency that generates interpretable outcomes.

“Semibounded” concerns the “leaky” Magic Circle (Castronova, 2005), while the social legitimacy requirement offers an anthropological interpretation of games rather than an aesthetic value judgment, as such (although it might be taken to support the social aesthetic hinted at by Costikyan). Both are perspectives on the rules aspect of games, but from a vantage point so distant that it is barely recognizable as such. It is the “contrived contingency” and “interpretable outcomes” that are the core of Malaby’s definition, and these reflect the uncertainty aesthetic intersecting with the fiction aspect of games (“interpretability”). Malaby’s definition is so broad it lets in many things not normally consider games, but this is the nature of any widely construed definition. The trade-off for defining game is always between too inclusive and too exclusive. Exponents of victory and conflict aesthetics tend to vehemently prefer exclusivity, whereas exponents of uncertainty aesthetics like Caillois and Malaby favor inclusivity.

Malaby (2009) later offers a new definition of “play,” seeing it as “an attitude characterized by a readiness to improvise in the face of an ever-changing world…” (p. 206) or “a dispositional stance toward the indeterminate” (p. 209). This view of play as a disposition, rather than an activity, is a radical departure from the normal academic discourse on games. Although he doesn’t reference Suits, Malaby here aligns play with Suits’ lusory attitude, although since Suits sees games as expressly goal oriented (victory, conflict, or reward aesthetics), his intention is narrower than Malaby’s. Nonetheless, both are gesturing at the special mental state players enter when participating with the uncertainty that lies deeply in the nature of games. As Malaby recognizes, this has roots even older than Caillois, since Huizinga’s book Homo Ludens (1949)––which inspired Caillois––is based on this idea. Malaby writes:

For [Huizinga], the play-element––marked by an interest in uncertainty and the challenge to perform that arises in competition, by the legitimacy of improvisation and innovation that the premise of indeterminate circumstances encourages––is opposed above all to utilitarianism and the drive for efficiency. (Caillois likewise, despite his misleading claim that games are occasions of “pure waste,” recognizes the centrality of contingency in games.) Huizinga felt that the play-element had been on the wane in Western civilization since the eighteenth century, threatened by the drive for efficiency and the routinization of experience it brought.

There is an aesthetic value judgment here––explicit in Huzinga and Malaby, tacit in Suits and McGonigal––that values playful experiences over and above the pursuit of victory. This is definitely present in Suits’, albeit somewhat concealed by his overt focus on goal-oriented play, and it is inescapable in Malaby who has no trace of the victory, conflict, or reward aesthetics at all in his concept of a game. This playful aesthetic is intimately connected with the uncertainty aesthetic––indeed, it is a refinement of it, perhaps in a manner parallel to the intimate connection between the conflict and victory aesthetics. It is Caillois’ paidia, Suits’ lusory attitude, and Malaby’s play as a disposition, and it directly opposes any aesthetic that would seek to make games solely about winning, battle, or puzzles.

The Landscape of Play

As philosopher Mary Midgley (1974) remarked, there is a unity in concepts like art and game since “they all deal with human needs, which certainly do have a structure” (p. 253). The conceptual analysis presented here is part of a set of articles that attempt to answer the obvious question that follows from Midgley’s assertion: What is the structure of the human needs that provide a unity to the concept game?

The focus of this article has been to examine definitions of game in order to analyze, in a manner inspired by Wittgenstein (1958), how these terms are used and then to explore their usage as expressions of aesthetic value judgments (that may or may not be held by the individuals advancing the specific definitions). As mentioned earlier, these implicit game aesthetics connect with preferences for play that can be empirically observed when people play games and which are discussed elsewhere along with putative neurobiological substrates that warrant further investigation (Bateman, 2014b). However, it is not necessary––and, it seems, may be misleading––to look at the underlying biology in order to understand the shape of the human needs in question. The philosophical methods deployed here, and in its sister article A Disavowal of Games (Bateman, in press-a), provide a general answer to Midgley’s question.

One of the core patterns we associate with play involves the pursuit of triumph––Ekman’s fiero (1992)––which is clearly expressed in the victory aesthetic offered by Crawford, Costikyan, Koster, and others. In its refined form as the conflict aesthetic, this fighting becomes embodied as battle––which some (such as Crawford) place as the highest aesthetic condition of games. In both the victory and conflict aesthetics, there’s a necessity for the player to endure frustration in order to reach the most intense reward states (see Lazzaro, 2003, 2009). This kind of play is “hot,” and angry, and epitomized by the term coined to describe players who embody its aesthetic values: Conquerors (Bateman & Boon, 2005).

However, this experience of triumph can also be reached not by enduring frustration but by enduring boredom or confusion––being compelled by curiosity and the promise of eventual reward to find a solution to a challenge by viewing it as a problem. A gainful comparison can also be made to Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) autotelic personality, which is predicated upon a self-contained capacity to set one’s own goals, or to find objectives even when no external motive is offered for attaining them. The problem aesthetic espoused by Costikyan and others is thus a twin to the victory aesthetic––the same experience is prioritized (“triumph over adversity” or fiero), but the route to it is slightly different. The reward aesthetic, found in McGonigal and the early Bateman and Boon, can be seen as a weakened form of the victory or problem aesthetics, where the endurance of frustration, boredom, or confusion isn’t assumed. Just as the conflict aesthetic was seen as a refinement of the victory aesthetic, the decision aesthetic suggests a refinement of the problem aesthetic (one focusing on the decision making), while the learning aesthetic found in Koster and Cook is a refinement of the problem aesthetic that looks over the long term to what accumulates rather than to the individual problems in isolation.

As well as being a nuanced variation of the problem aesthetic, the systems aesthetic corresponds to the desire to view games in terms of rules. Only when games are seen as formal systems is the rule element of games likely to be emphasized, and with this in mind, we can now abandon the foundational status of rules. Yes, rules are always there to be found––but only when games are seen primarily as systems. There’s no explicit rule aesthetic, as such, but the system aesthetic (and the problem aesthetic it refines) is intimately connected with the perspective of games as rule systems. This is the entire perspective collected under the term “ludology,” as captured by Bogost’s (2009) remark that the ludology–narratology debate seemed to be the question: “Is a game a system or rules, or is a game a kind of narrative?” but would have been better expressed by the question: “Is a game a system of rules, like a story is a system of narration?” Both ludology and narratology stressed the system aspect––ludology just made “rules” the central focus.

Just as the foundational status of rules pairs with the systems aesthetic, the narratologist’s fascination with fiction pairs with the imaginative aesthetic foreshadowed by Costikyan and espoused directly by myself (Bateman, 2011), albeit constrained once again by the systems aesthetic. The systems aesthetic thus bridges between fiction and rules and hence between the problem and imaginative aesthetics. Just as the rules can always be found provided a systems perspective is applied, so too can the fiction always be elucidated provided one comes to the situation with a model of fiction (such as Walton’s make-believe theory).

However, there is a huge gulf between the problem aesthetic (with its goal-oriented, outcome-focused attitude) and the imaginative aesthetic (with its process-oriented focus on story and inventiveness). The agency aesthetic offered by Crawford may fit under or near the imaginative aesthetic, as a refinement of it that pulls back toward the problem aesthetic via the emphasis on decisions the player makes. Perhaps the decision and agency aesthetics could be seen as bridges between the problem and the imaginative aesthetic. The curiosity aesthetic may also have this dual identity: It part fuels the desire to solve problems, but it also powers a compelling interest in richly interpretable fictional worlds.

Another of the aesthetics brought in tangentially by Costikyan probably deserves far more attention than it currently receives: the social aesthetic. Because so few game designers or academics have drawn explicit attention to this in their definition of a game, it is difficult to do this value judgment justice. However, examination of a variety of player studies (Bateman, 2014b) suggests that there are a great many for whom the social rewards of play are a significantly greater draw toward games than victory or problems. It is not, however, commonly drawn attention to by game designers, or academics studying play, although Costikyan is a rare exception, and there’s a small hint of it in the social abusive play recognized by Wilson and Sicart (2010), but even this is buried under their wider conception of abusive play, which is primarily an extreme form of the victory aesthetic.

Finally, the uncertainty aesthetic found in Caillios and Malaby comes at games from perhaps as wide a perspective as is possible––so wide, it can be difficult to recognize it as referring to games at all! All the previously described aesthetics could potentially be subsumed under its vast tent, and the playful aesthetic of Huzinga, Suits, and others can be seen as a refinement of it. Perhaps the voluntary aesthetic advocated by Caillois, Suits, and McGonigal could also be seen as a refinement of the uncertainty aesthetic, if it does not transpire to be a refinement of the social aesthetic instead. The putative mastery aesthetic, found in players but not obviously expressed in definitions of games (although Cook comes exceptionally close to doing so!), might also be a refinement of the uncertainty aesthetic or perhaps a bridge between it and the victory aesthetic. The trouble with viewing specific aesthetics as refinements of the uncertainty aesthetic is precisely the scope of uncertainty to subsume anything under its remit.

Conclusion

When I first began this Wittgensteinian investigation into implicit game aesthetics back in 2012, my motivations were partly philosophical and partly practical. As a professional game designer, I had encountered tremendous resistance within the video game industry rooted in what is called here the conflict and victory aesthetics. Even games intended to target a wider audience––including, in some cases, games marketed to prepubescent girls––were being forced to adhere to a rigidly construed aesthetic concept of game rooted in notions of challenge. This dominant regime within the industry that presupposed the centrality of conflict and victory seemed radically at odds to what I was learning from actually watching people play games. Far from being a single master key (such as challenge or problems), what I found when I studied how and why people played games was sheer diversity (Bateman, 2014a).

While I cannot vouch for the completeness of the landscape of play this inquiry reveals, I can confidently report that this metaphorical terrain is not best described as a single mountain. Indeed, regarding “mountain climbing,” as the remake of Resident Evil (Capcom Production Studio 4, 2002) characterizes the pursuit of triumph in its opening sorter question, we may be forced to recognize that this range has twin peaks: one corresponding to the victory aesthetic and its variations and the other to the problem aesthetic and its variants. However, we must also recognize that the aesthetic values that are expressed through play cannot be constrained to challenges and puzzles. Even restraining our focus to games as goal-oriented activities, we must acknowledge the more general aesthetic enjoyment of reward, present in McGonigal and Suits, that need not involve endurance of frustration or confusion.

If a boundary can be placed around play, the most suitable aesthetic value thus far suggested is uncertainty, an idea present in Caillois and substantially developed by Malaby. All play is necessarily uncertain––although of course many things are uncertain that we would not consider play, let alone a game. Nonetheless, making uncertainty the frontier of all implicit game aesthetics is the only way of ensuring that all possible definitions of game will be contained within the superset of aesthetic values for play. Additionally, any recognition of the diversity of the aesthetics of play must acknowledge the importance of the interpersonal to the play of games, as expressed by the social aesthetic that Costikyan draws attention to, and the vital importance of fiction, inherent to the imaginative aesthetic that he also recognized––while still considering it tangential to the concept of game. This reluctance to acknowledge the importance of imagination, and thus fiction, to games and play is something that seems to be shared by a great many game designers, and a great many of those who have had formative influence in game studies.

In Fiction Denial and the Liberation of Games (Bateman, in press-b), I advocate an end to an exceptionalism that dogmatically treats video games as radically distinct from other forms of play, proposing instead recognition of the continuity between these media and others. I am not the first scholar to draw out such intermedia connections (e.g., Higgins, 1966; Krywinska & King, 2002) and this call for a “liberation of games” is more than just an academic rhetorical device: It is a growing ethical necessity. When the kind of implicit game aesthetics this article explores can emerge as reasons to persecute others who hold different values (see Stuart, 2014 and other reports regarding threats to Sarkeesian et al.), the Nietzsche–Deleuze idea that ontology entails ethics has returned to haunt us in the most grimly depressing manner. Against this, our strongest defense is to recognize and advocate an understanding of games as aesthetically diverse practices. There is, as Midgley recognized, an underlying conceptual unity to the concept of game––but that unity is not unitary and can only be adequately expressed through diversity.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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