reflection

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amusement. We don’t like to be played with. And when we say, “This isn’t a

game!,” what we mean is that someone is behaving recklessly or not taking a

situation seriously. This admonishment implies that games encourage and

train people to act in ways that aren’t appropriate for real life.

When you start to pay attention, you realize how collectively suspicious we

are of games. Just by looking at the language we use, you can see we’re wary

of how games encourage us to act and who we are liable to become if we

play them.

But these metaphors don’t accurately reflect what it really means to play a

well-designed game. They’re just a reflection of our worst fears about games.

And it turns out that what we’re really afraid of isn’t games; we’re afraid of los­

ing track of where the game ends and where reality begins.

If we’re going to fix reality with games, we have to overcome this fear. We

need to focus on how real games actually work, and how we act and interact

when we’re playing the same game together.

Let’s start with a really good definition of game.

The Four Defining Traits of a Game

Games today come in more forms, platforms, and genres than at any other

time in human history.

We have single-player, multiplayer, and massively multiplayer games. We

have games you can play on your personal computer, your console, your hand­

held device, and your mobile phone—not to mention the games we still play

on fields or on courts, with cards or on boards.

We can choose from among five-second minigames, ten-minute casual

games, eight-hour action games, and role-playing games that go on endlessly

twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year. We can play story­

based games, and games with no story. We can play games with and without

scores. We can play games that challenge mostly our brains or mostly our

bodies—and infinitely various combinations of the two.

And yet somehow, even with all these varieties, when we’re playing a game,

What Exactly Is a Game? | 21

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 complex­

ities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and

voluntary participation.

The goal is the specific outcome that players will work to achieve. It fo­

cuses their attention and continually orients their participation throughout the

game. The goal provides players with a sense of purpose.

The rules place limitations on how players can achieve the goal. By remov­

ing or limiting the obvious ways of getting to the goal, the rules push players

to explore previously uncharted possibility spaces. They unleash creativity and

foster strategic thinking.

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.

Finally, voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the

game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback.

Knowingness establishes common ground for multiple people to play together.

And the freedom to enter or leave a game at will ensures that intentionally

stressful and challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable activity.

This definition may surprise you for what it lacks: interactivity, graphics, nar­

rative, rewards, competition, virtual environments, or the idea of “winning”—

all traits we often think of when it comes to games today. True, these are

common features of many games, but they are not defining features. What

defines a game are the goal, the rules, the feedback system, and voluntary

participation. Everything else is an effort to reinforce and enhance these four

core elements. A compelling story makes the goal more enticing. Complex

scoring metrics make the feedback systems more motivating. Achievements

and levels multiply the opportunities for experiencing success. Multiplayer

and massively multiplayer experiences can make the prolonged play more

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unpredictable or more pleasurable. Immersive graphics, sounds, and 3D en­

vironments increase our ability to pay sustained attention to the work we’re

doing in the game. And algorithms that increase the game’s difficulty as you

play are just ways of redefining the goal and introducing more challeng­

ing rules.

Bernard Suits, the late, great philosopher, sums it all up in what I consider

the single most convincing and useful definition of a game ever devised:

Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary

obstacles.1

That definition, in a nutshell, explains everything that is motivating and

rewarding and fun about playing games. And it brings us to our first fix for

reality:

A F I X # 1 : U N N E C E S S A R Y O B S TA C L E S

Compared with games, reality is too easy. Games challenge us

with voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths

to better use.

To see how these four traits are essential to every game, let’s put them to a

quick test. Can these four criteria effectively describe what’s so compelling

about games as diverse as, say, golf, Scrabble, and Tetris?

Let’s take golf to start. As a golfer, you have a clear goal: to get a ball in a

series of very small holes, with fewer tries than anyone else. If you weren’t

playing a game, you’d achieve this goal the most efficient way possible: you’d

walk right up to each hole and drop the ball in with your hand. What makes

golf a game is that you willingly agree to stand really far away from each

hole and swing at the ball with a club. Golf is engaging exactly because you,