Play Is The Thing
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Identifying playful activities, picking the fun ones out and building games around them. Play is an act in which we we learn, understand and interact with other people or things in the world. Play is argued as an elemental form of interaction and a contributor to culture. Play used as experimentation and socialization. There are no explicit rules to play, but most people develop a good sense for when the lines are crossed.
The more formalized that etiquette and those guidelines become, the closer play inches toward structured games. Understanding how to tap into that primal urge to play gives game designers powerful tools with which to engage players
The Liminal Moment
There is a liminal moment in play when a playful activity transforms into a game. The play provides the spark of fun. The game provides the framework for long-term interaction. It’s the game designer’s job to usher the player through these liminal moments, to transform moments of free play into structured game.
For game designers looking to build casual game experiences, the closer they can keep their game to that liminal moment, the better.
The Rush To Complexity
The adding of new or existing mechanics into a already existing genre to create a new and interesting experience to the user but still holds the fundamental core mechanics from its predecessors. The starting point for the mechanic or how the game reacts to the user would similar to something you may of learnt or seen as a child (FPS - Water gun fights)
The Push Toward Simplicity
Older games can become casual compared to the new ones that add more complexity to keep the players interested.
Casual games are stripped down to the core mechanic and the fun aspect of it instead of piling on added complexity. Eventually it may demand to evolve in complexity to match grown skill and understand of the game.
Patterns Of Play
Attunement play: This very simple interaction produces measurable brain activity and powerful emotional connections. A mother makes eye contact with her child, and the child smiles. The mother smiles back, reinforcing the baby’s smile and bringing the two into attunement.
Body play and movement: We understand much of the world through our own bodies. From babies flailing their arms as they learn motor control, to kids tossing snowballs at each other, to adults learning the foxtrot, we explore our world and simultaneously entertain ourselves and explore our limits through movement.
Object play: Much of our play is inspired by objects. We pick them up, shake them, turn them over, spin them, throw them. Through these interactions, we explore the limits of the object. How much stress can it take before it breaks? How far will it fly with a good heave? Babies do it. Grown-ups do it. Object play can also lead to problem solving as you learn to take apart an object and put it back together.
Social play: Social play runs the gamut from rough-housing to more complex rituals like the Dozens, in which participants trade ribald insults. Animals also engage in social play. This play serves important socialization and cultural functions.
Imaginative and pretend play: Playing house and other games of pretend may seem like child’s play, but it does wonders for our creativity, at a young age and even later in life. It also helps kids build their own mental models of the world.
Storytelling-narrative play: Stories are one of the atomic units through which we organize our understanding of the world around us. We group our lives and our days into stories about the characters and events of our lives. Shaping them into stories helps give them meaning and lets us make sense of the random events of life. We largely learn to create those stories through play. We take on roles, we make up tall tales and we share them with each other.
Transformative-integrative and creative play: We use our fantasy play to spark creativity and imagine new possibilities for our play. We imagine all of the different things we might do with a ball and test them out. Sometimes we use these ideas in our lives outside of play as well. Group brainstorming often takes on elements of creative play.
Tapping Play for Games
Useful ways to think about game design:
- Physical play - Jumping, kicking, hitting, touching etc, can be restructures in new ways to get the player a new context to master.
- Playing with others - Lying, accusing, betting, bluffing, bidding, joking, gossiping, comparing, copying, repeating, guessing, swarming.
- Playing with things - finding fun in the simplest thing helps reveal in our discoveries about how it behaves.
- Playacting - playing as someone else, provides immersion into the game and promotes exploration into the story or theme. Extends outside of game, into such things as acting.
- Daredevilry or pushing your luck - Pushing the limits, testing your abilities and appetite for risk. Joy of preforming a simple action - these activity's offer the trill of seeing just what you can get away with.
Defining Games
Caillois's definition of play:-
Free: in which playing is not obligatory; if it were, it would at once lose its attractive and joyous quality as diversion;
Separate: circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and fixed in advance;
Uncertain: the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained beforehand, and some latitude for innovations being left to the player’s initiative;
Unproductive: creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind and, except for the exchange of property among the players, ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game;
Governed by rules: under conventions that suspend ordinary laws, and for the moment establish new legislation, which alone counts; Make-believe: accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality or of a free unreality, as against real-life
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