At various points in my career, I've (self-mockingly) used religious language to describe my own process of exploration. I don't take it all that seriously, it's a metaphor, not a description. So working customer service was my "baptism by fire", being a designer at Mythic was my "initiation", the abortive stint as Lead Game Designer at Mutable Realms was my seminary, my blogs and columns have been my pulpit, the period between Mutable and Orbis was "wandering in the wilderness", and so on.
By that metaphor, the last few years have been a hermitage. F13's Yoru alluded to this in the interview we did at AGC last year, when he said I "retreated in your Miyamoto Musashi manner". What I was trying to avoid is a dilemna many game design theorists have fallen into. Either they can continue to be taken seriously, remain "marketable" as game designers, or they can "jump the shark", ala Chris Crawford's infamous "Dragon" speech. There were ideas I wanted to explore that seemed just too wierd, "too hip for the room", and I realized that I couldn't explore them without going down some laughably wrong blind alleys where a public expression of my thinking process would turn me into a self-parody. I joked that I was "Sitting on the mountain, waiting for the master."
In the parable I'm referencing there, a man is seeking enlightenment and hears that on a nearby mountain there's a Master who can give him good advice. He goes to the mountain, but the Master isn't there. He sits down to wait, and while he's waiting more pilgrims come. They ask him questions, he answers them, and they leave. At the end of the parable, he finds out all these people thought *he* was the Master they had come to find. The "Master" he was waiting for arrived when he did.
So, in my highly tortured metaphor, what great revelation do I bring back from the mountain? It's this: Fun is brain reward. Back when Raph Koster came out with his "A Theory of Fun", I pointed out that there were many kinds of fun that did not fit his thesis that "fun" was pattern-matching. Among these were "Performance" (playing a game you have reached a level of mastery in), "Socializing" (playing to interact with others), "Achievement" (playing to rack up loot, score, or other virtual achievements), and "Grief" (possibly just the dark side of social gameplay, interacting with others in ways to cause them distress).
What all of these have in common is that they trigger deep brain pleasure-center activity, at a level below conscious awareness. Gameplay is not in the cards, not on the board, not on the screen or in the code. It's certainly not in the design document. Gameplay is in the mind of the player.
This means it is impossible to have a rigorous craft of game design that is not informed by the best possible information about how the mind works. And you can see how much of the current state of the game design art is defined by our adoption of the tools of psychology, especially Behaviorism and Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs (along with Aesthetics theory and other work on how the environment affects the mind). But it's not enough. We've hit a dead end, and gameplay is becoming commodified, usably equally for celebrity vehicles, advergaming, cross-genre franchises, and other strictly derivative products built out of the commodities of modular gameplay, mixed with marketing and set on "Puree".
So, would that be so bad? Once we've stopped pushing technology, stopped competing on gameplay, we can start working what what we want to actually do in game, what "message" they carry.And there's a good case to be made there, and a lot of truth in it. But I think our understanding of what we're actually doing in gameplay and design is far too primitive for the most part, there's a lot of work left to be done. Ultimately, what we're doing is engaging someone's mentality at a deeper level than even movies. Books tell you a story, movies show you a story, and both have various tricks for "identification" and "suspension of disbelief", ways to make you treat the things told or explained as real experiences, drawing you into the message and taking the viewpoint for your own.
In games, the viewpoint is your own. When the game tears control from you and forces you to watch a cut-scene where your character makes a decision without your input, it jars. A couple of games have used this to good effect: Max Payne ("You're a video game character, Max."), and BioShock. When it tears your viewpoint out of the character and drops it into another, you either lose identification with the character, or you ignore it and treat both characters as "you". You are the one making the choices, what happens on the screen is just feedback. Changing viewpoints and lack of input are annoying, but ultimately they aren't "you".
In the mid-game false climax of BioShock (if you haven't played BioShock yet, I'm not going to spare you the spoilers), you confront Andrew Ryan, which they have built up to as a traditional "boss fight". You break into his office, and...there's nothing there. No enemies lying in wait, no keys to collect, no codes to guess, just a not-particularly difficult geometry maze to navigate. You do so, and find Ryan....
Only to go into a cut-scene. Normally this kind of thing would make me annoyed, but very quickly you realize this is no ordinary cutscene. "Would you kindly put down your weapons." You proceed to find out that you can't resist anything you're told that is preceded with the words "Would you kindly." You're mentally programmed to have no freedom where those commands are concerned. Andrew Ryan (who you have just realized is your father) proceeds to order you to beat him to death with a golf club while he gives a monologue about how "A man chooses!" You, of course, have no choice at all, it's a cut scene.
So Andrew Ryan dies, and you find out that "Atlas", the freedom fighter that has been whispering in your ear, is actually "Fontaine", a crime boss. And he says "Would you kindly pull that lever and turn off the self destruct." You're no longer in a cut scene, but it doesn't matter: There's absolutely nothing else you can do. No matter how long you wait, no matter how thoroughly you explore the area, all you're going to get is occasional taunts from Fontaine. Eventually, you pull the lever, you have no choice.
This throws into high relief a fundamental attribute of game design: Most choices aren't actually choices. Follow the right path, or fall off the cliff. Fight the NPC, or be killed. Pick the right character attributes or skills, or be a gimp. Develop your economy in an RTS, or be "free beer". The only meaningful choices are those that lead to different endings of the game that are equally desirable, and in most single-player games there is only one, or at most two, desirable endings. Everything else is a false choice, a "difference that makes no difference."
Now, you can go to great lengths to disguise this. Mass Effect is probably the best example of this, all through Mass Effect you are presented with the apparent opportunity to make choices. You have alternative conversation choices, side quests, and the often-present meta-choice to follow the rules in pursuing your mission, or to be completely ruthless in pursuit of it.
And ultimately, they're all false choices. Blow through the main storyline skipping all side quests and optional dialog, and you're going to wind up at the same final boss battle, with pretty much the same level of combat capability. And after you win (and after all, you have no choice but to win), you're going to be presented with the only actual choice of the entire game: Which NPC to crown Galactic Overlord. Trigger final cut scene, the end.
If Sid Meier is right when he says "Good games are a series of interesting choices," how do we make the choices interesting when they aren't really choices? Even inside the context of the game itself, they are a "difference that makes no difference," and therefore is no difference at all. Sure, we can fake it, but sooner or later, won't the players see the pattern and get bored with it?
If you wanted to make a game with 10 meaningful choices, you would have to have 1024 different endings, each of them equally desirable. Good luck with that. So, by the postulates we've come to accept (and the Meier quote is pretty widely accepted and elaborated on), there is no such thing as a good game, and short of holodeck-level technology that can simulate a world and realistically human inhabitants, there can't be one. We're all wasting our time.
Of course, maybe a choice doesn't have to be meaningful, to effect the ending, to be interesting? Going back to Mass Effect, you have a lot of choices presented to you about how to develop your character. You start with your Class choice, playing as an Adept will be very different from playing as a Soldier. And what skills you choose to develop will matter, as will what skills you choose for the NPC's (or if you let them autotrain). These are interesting choices, that do not effect the outcome of the game, but the process that the player uses to go through it. It's not the ending of the game that represents the interesting choices, but the experience the player has on the way to that ending. The journey isn't half the fun, it's all of it.
Gameplay is not on the screen, nor in the storyboard, but in the mind of the player. The question of "What is fun?" comes back to inescapably deep questions about how people think.
