Player Experience
The philosophical starting point of
Huizinga's study is the observation that, where there is play, there is also
"meaning". Playing makes sense to the player. Most games presuppose a
player consciously aware of the game's objectives, equipment, and rules. Even
the most primitive forms of play imply some form of intuitive understanding.
Two dogs pretending to fight obviously understand that their actions are only
make-believe, and this reciprocal awareness is an essential aspect of their
pleasure. To describe play is to describe its "meaningfulness" for
the players. Playing is thus closely akin to aesthetics, in that experience is
irreducible: it constitutes an essential aspect of the phenomenon.
Huizinga
sometimes writes that play is "free", by which he means that the
fundamental motive of play is the experience that it affords. We do not
characteristically play to fulfil a practical task; we play for the sake of the
lived quality that attaches itself to the act of playing. To speak of
experience implies a vocabulary of qualitative description. Words like
"tension", "release", "challenge",
"effort", "uncertainty", "risk",
"balance", "oscillation", "contrast",
"variation" and "rhythm" typically describe the activity of
playing as a temporal modulation of rising, falling and evolving intensities.
According to Huizinga, the cultural study of play consists in a careful
description of the players' experiences. The consciousness of risk, for
instance, presupposes that the player cannot confidently anticipate the result
of an action; this unpredictability largely determines the intensity of many
games, particularly those involving chance and competition. To experience this
sort of tension is to become invested in an outcome that has not yet been
settled. It is always possible to ask: How will the game come out? The
intensity of our investment in many games essentially depends on our
consciousness that their outcome is not fixed in advance.
A
superficial reading of Homo
Ludens might
suggest that Huizinga views play as a purely "subjective" phenomenon.
There is some truth to this interpretation, insofar as the book insistently
foregrounds the player's experience. But the word "experience" does
not refer to the inner states of an isolated ego. The player's experience
essentially unfolds within a structured situation. A child regularly opening
and closing a door is already engaged in the performance of a structured
action, although its rules are relatively simple, loose and supple. The lived
quality of play depends in part on the organization of the player's actions
around a cluster of rules and equipment.
Every ludic experience is characterized
and individuated with reference to the various rules and resources available to
the person. Different types of play can be distinguished from one another via
the structures that underpin them. For instance, playing games differs from
playing with toys because the former typically specifies winning conditions;
game rules normally determine what counts as victory or defeat. The winner may,
for instance, score more points than her opponents, arrive first at a certain
location, or achieve checkmate. Thus the quality of the player's experience
depends, at least to some extent, on the structure of norms and resources that
guide or organize her actions.
Experience
is inseparable from structured action, which is seldom carried out by an
isolated ego. In most situations, the player confronts either another player or
some impersonal obstacle. There is always a dynamic interplay of move and
counter-move. A squash player must wait to see how the ball bounces back from
the wall. This "waiting to see" indicates an essential feature about
the activity of playing: that there is always something other, and so play is seldom radically
subjective. The experience of the player is partly constituted by this moment
of otherness. The player must respond to some event, in the context of a
structured situation. Playing consists in a trans-individual process of action
and reaction, which often takes on a to-and-fro quality reminiscent of dance.
It is the pattern of this movement, rather than the psychological make-up of the
individual participant,which fundamentally characterizes the experience of play. Instead of
saying that "someone is playing", it might better to say that
"there is playing going on". The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, who
strongly opposes any subjective interpretation of Huizinga's conclusions, has
persuasively argued that "the purpose of the game is not really the
solution of the task, but the ordering and shaping of the movement of the game
itself" (Gadamer, 1989, p. 97). In Gadamer's view, the fascination of play
lies in the way this structured movement "draws" players into its
arena and "fills" them with its distinctive spirit. The encounter
with otherness is thus an essential aspect of the play experience.
Conclusions
Huizina's
starting point asserts that play differs from blind physiological processes
like respiration and digestion, because it presupposes a conscious player who
understands the aims, rules, strategies, conventions and resources involved.
Wherever there is play there is also meaning. Play also differs from logic in a
fundamental way. The core aim of logic is to provide canons of thinking that
guarantee the correctness of inferences. The aim of play is the modulation of
human experience. The experience of the player is essential to the very nature
of play. The study of play as play is
directed towards the experience of the player, rather than the social,
psychological or biological functions that playing performs. The methods of
ludological research do not primarily depend on functional explanations.
Homo
Ludens does
not, however, express the thesis that playing is in every respect isolated from
serious concerns. The boundary between the playful and the serious is certainly
real and widely applied, but not sharply defined everywhere, and always subject
to revision. In some cases, the borderline cannot be marked at all. Moreover,
ethical questions about civility and fairness are often intimately connected
with the act of playing. Huizinga asserts, for instance, that many forms of
serious culture originated from ludic actions. Playfulness lies at the origin
of art, religion, politics, philosophy, and the law. It is misleading to view
these institutions in purely functional terms, as vehicles for the transmission
of social values or the reproduction of societal cohesion. Social action is
partly motivated by a desire for intense experiences of risk, uncertainty,
surpassing oneself, overcoming a challenge, etc. These regions of social life
cut across the distinction between the playful and the serious.
Serious
game design has the potential to reveal essential features about philosophy,
science and other serious academic subjects. The reason is that those subjects
already exhibit ludic aspects. Playing can help us to recognize the playful
aspects of human culture. For instance, playing a philosophical game can
highlight the elements of competition and exhibitionism at the heart of
philosophy. Playing with the magic circle can bring to light fundamental
features of all social formations, and so highlight fundamental issues about
philosophy and sociology. Game designers can render the boundary between play
and life systematically ambiguous, thus encouraging players to engage in a
collective discussion about the nature of their community. The formation of the
collective would then become a core theme of experimental game design.
Alternatively, the game designers may selectively withhold from the players
information about where the magic circle begins and ends, so that random
everyday events can potentially be part of the game; serious game designers can
exploit this condition to generate paranoia and other experiences that depend
on doubt.
Different
concepts of play are closely interconnected with different philosophical
assumptions about human nature. Many contemporary artists have advanced a
paradigm of experimental action that values improvisation, exploration and
risk. Game designers can benefit from the experiments already conducted by
members of radical art groups, particularly those designed to subvert the
boundaries of the magic circle. They challenge the tyranny of gallery walls and
other institutional settings that isolate art from the everyday. The
performances of Allan Kaprow and other members of the Fluxus group, for
instance, burst open the confines of artistic institutions, and destabilized
any effort to mark out a clean boundary between art and serious life. Radical
artists have discovered an essential feature of children's play: fluid and
porous boundaries. The borderline of the playing field becomes fragile,
contingent and negotiable. As games open themselves up to the experience of
risk, trust, dependency, vulnerability, fatalism, uncertainty, addictiveness
and violence, playing may thus enable novel forms of subjectivity and
interaction to emerge through experimental modifications of everyday life.
Game designers might argue that some of
these techniques undermine the very nature of play. How can a game remain a
game when its boundaries are no longer clearly defined? Once again, I would
recommend a careful study of the development of modern art. Performance artists
like Kaprow rejected the presumption that there is a distinct sphere called
"art" bound by necessary and sufficient conditions; he organized his
performances without any certainty as to whether what he was doing really was
really art or not (Kaprow, 1993). This gesture embraces conceptual uncertainty
as a generative source. Perhaps the next step for experimental designers
working with digital technologies is to suspend their absolute commitment to
some distinct sphere called "play", or to some self-evidently
distinct art form called "game design", and begin designing
frameworks for actions that may or may not be considered playful. This project
demands a struggle against deep-rooted assumptions about what constitutes a
proper game genre and game design method, and to cultivate an attitude of
open-minded receptivity to the ambiguities, contingencies and potential risks
of human play.
Huizinga
himself underscores that the concept of play sometimes cannot be circumscribed
within precise conceptual boundaries. Homo Ludens seldom advances rigid definitions.
Huizinga's attempt to "define" play in terms of the magic circle, for
instance, should not be understood as a set of necessary and sufficient
conditions, but as a tentative approximation to regions of life that resist
exact categorization. Like a good historian, Huizinga does not shirk away from
ambiguity. His entire study can be seen as an effort to speak as precisely as
possible about categories and distinctions that cannot be neatly demarcated.
Definitions are useful, insofar as they suggest common threads running through
heterogeneous manifestations, but they are not meant to function as absolute
categories. Thus play both is and is not serious. The difficulty lies in paying
attention to important conceptual differences while keeping our descriptive
categories sufficiently supple to accommodate ambiguity and vagueness.
Source: Games Studies - the international journal of
computer game research - volume 6 issue, 1 December 2006http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/rodriges
Mauro Basignani
Alejandra Peralta
