I’ve tried a couple of times to get this post started, but it hasn’t gone well. The idea still isn’t coherent on its own, so maybe I’ll explain some examples. That should help me clarify my ideas.

I’ve started to think of games as taking up an area in space with four corners. Here some guesses at names for the corners:

That’s the basic idea. Let me see if I can convince you (or myself) of it by looking at some examples.

Examples

Since this is a space, and I just name the corners, games hardly ever squeeze right up to the edge—the more modern and mainstream they are, the larger an area they tend to cover.

Here’s another, even shakier set of names for the dimensions. I am not completely happy with the names for the corners of the space, and I’m even less happy about the names for the dimensions. But here they are anyway. Alternate names welcome.

Nouns:

Verbs:

Narrative:

Narrative games are likely to be the mainstream future of games, or at least the future for the next few generations. They’re the closest to other media, especially movies. In fact, if you can imagine a reasonable game-to-movie or movie-to-game translation, then you are probably thinking of a mostly narrative game. Not to say that the translation would be good…for example, Mass Effect would make a pretty bad Star Trek movie. (Not that most Star Trek movies makes really good Star Trek movies.)

Part of that is a narrative game is much better at exploring a world than a narrative movie or book. At least, a game can make exploration a much larger focus than a movie can. But a movie is better at making you understand and care about characters, I think.

Actually, I’m not qualified to talk about movies, so I can’t say more than a sentence or two without saying something completely wrong. I’d better move on.

Social:

Like narrative games, social games also have pre-existing analogues: sports and board games. Social games, for the most part, are similar to football, paintball, checkers and scrabble. This is deadly obvious in Wii Sports, but Halo is basically just geeky* paintball. Like their physical counterparts, social games have simple rules that don’t change. It’s easy to get into a social game, but to win, you have to beat the people you’re playing with.

To quote Mitch Krpata’s A New Taxonomy of Gamers: “The Perfectionist sees success as relative to the performance of others.” Well, perfectionists play social games. (A few notes comparing my idea to Mitch’s taxonomy are below.)

Although social games don’t have to be about beating other players, they usually are. I think World of Warcraft provides a counter-example when players get together for raids—while players talk about beating a boss (Procedure Mastery), most of the effort goes into coordinating 25 players’ strategies. That sounds like Social Mastery to me. But I have to put a disclaimer here; I’ve never played WoW, just heard friends talk about it ad nauseam. (There’s also WoW’s PvP, but that’s clearly a digitisation of football. Or maybe war.)

*I originally said “more fun", but that’s probably because I’m a geek.

Procedure Mastery:

This is something new games contributed to the world: test your skill against a fixed algorithm instead of an intelligent human. Beat the machine! Just a man and his will to survive! Well, not completely new: there were already things like bar puzzles. You know, like that stupid peg triangle from Cracker Barrel. But they were very simple. Still, it’s not surprising that games went mainstream when Pong set up in a bar.

Still, games that focus purely on procedure mastery have limits to their complexity, and it’s hard to really get into them unless you have a weird personality. Normal people play at them for 15 minutes at a time. That’s the most likely reason for the pre/post-crash difference between Atari and Nintendo. Atari ported arcade games to the home. Nintendo moved games out of the extreme quarter-sucking edge of procedure mastery toward new emphases on procedure learning and narrative.

So began the trivialisation of these already-trivial games. If, like me, you grew up after the Atari years, these games went by a number of pejorative names: “Windows games” in my childhood, when all the Real Games, like DOOM and Descent, ran on DOS. Later, “Flash games", when the Real Games ran on Windows. Now they are called “Wii games", when the Real Games run on the 360/PS3.

Well, that’s not quite fair. Although the Wii brought back procedure mastery games, its focus is on social games. Still, the kind of people that skipped procedure mastery games the first time around because (1) they wouldn’t enter an arcade and (2) they wouldn’t buy an Atari…well, now that they have a Wii for their workouts, they usually have at least Tetris or Tower Defence installed. They’re fun for about 15 minutes every couple of weeks.

Procedure Learning:

If narrative and social games are the mainstream future and past of gaming, procedure learning games are the indie future. On the surface, most of these games look similar to procedure mastery games. But the point is to learn rules, not to win using the rules. Games designed all the way to the edge of this corner change the rules as soon as you have learnt them. Or before! flOw is a good example. Try the flash version and come back. (There’s also a PS3 version, but it’s nearly the same.)

To see how procedure learning differs from procedure mastery, imagine if flOw were released in the 1981 arcades instead of the 2006 internets. What would people say? “The game is too complicated. I can’t tell whether I’m winning or losing! But it’s also too easy! I never died once! And there’s no score!” Well, that’s the point: it’s not about whether you beat the computer or get a high score. The point is to play with the rules and figure them out. By that measure, I didn’t really “beat” the first three worlds, because I still understand less than half of the rules for the creatures I played.

So, yes, indie games tend toward procedure learning. With good reason: procedure is unique to video games. If you make a Prince of Persia movie*, you can try to convey the sense of exploration, but the concept of rewinding time can only be translated where the game uses it as a narrative device. Where is has to do with gameplay, it’s impossible to translate. What are you going to do–rewind the movie 30 seconds and play that part again?

Come to think of it, even where rewinding WAS central to the story, wouldn’t it have been better for the game to leave the final big rewind up to the player? Instead it’s presented as a cutscene. It should have been more like the ending of Half-Life.

But I digress. Even though it’s the farther thing from an indie game, The Elder Scrolls (TES) games are in this corner because they pack so many different systems in. They encourage you, for example through the guilds, to explore the different systems. As soon as you’ve got good at sneaking around, sniping from the shadows, you’ll get a quest that requires you to magically breathe underwater for half an hour. So you’ll have to learn how to be a wizard next. Realistically, this is the heart of the game—it’s the part that most people will play for about 20 hours before moving on. Of course, if you like completing quests and levelling up (and I do), then you have moved on past the Procedure Learning part of The Elder Scrolls and into the Procedure Mastery part. But it turns out that mastery of TES is very easy. And takes a really long time. (Of course, this means you’re getting good value for your money, always of paramount importance to the PC pirate gamer!)

*Yes they are making a Prince of Persia movie.

On learning

On learning: One of my friends, a game designer, points out that “fun is learning". However, the bottom half of this space is not about learning. It’s about beating somebody else, or maybe seeing what kind of story they can tell. You can be perfectly happy in Final Fantasy or Team Fortress long after you learn how the game works. This is especially clear in Half-Life. You have to learn the rules, and then win a little bit, but they want you to see the story so much that they make it really easy on you. I mean, I beat both games on Normal. Me! And I played the second one with a controller!

Furthermore, the right half of the space is about systems that are “easy to learn, difficult to master"*. The left half has games that feature systems that are “hard to learn, easy to master". In other words, for algorithmic games, learning the system is the game. The game isn’t hard to play, it’s just hard to figure out. The Elder Scrolls games are a good example: you can have a lot of fun playing while you learn how the various systems work. But the game itself is never particularly hard.

*Or in the case of Wii Sports, “easy to learn, impossible to master".

On “A New Taxonomy of Gamers”

I can’t ignore Mitch Krpata’s “A New Taxonomy of Gamers”—it’s a big influence on my “coordinate space". (I thought about calling my idea a taxonomy, but that implies putting things in only and only one box.)

Specifically, his first distinction between Tourist gamer and Skill gamer is exactly the difference between Exploration game and Mastery game. The only difference is whether to attribute the difference to the game or the gamer. I suppose you could argue that, but I don’t know whether it’s worthwhile.

His next distinction is between two types of Skill gamer: Perfectionist and Completionist. When fit into my space, this distinction is a bit epiphenomenal—the terms don’t need to be explicitly specified because they naturally fall out from gamer’s responses to different types of games. A Perfectionist is a gamer who best understands Mastery games. A Completionist is a gamer who understands Mastery games, but happens to play Exploration games. To a Completionist, it makes no sense that a world could be created just to tell a story, or worse just to be. Much less a rule set! Rule sets are for figuring out and winning! To satisfy these kinds of gamers, many Exploration games make a badge for Exploring everything. That way you can ‘master’ the game. That makes the Skill gamer happy, and doesn’t bother the Tourist gamer. (Note: As Mitch says in his Metroid”’ case study, there may be a more coherent way than badges, but at least badges don’t bother anybody except when they make that Plonk noise right in the middle of an important cut scene in Mass Effect…"Congratulations, Shepard. You <PLONK! Saved the Galaxy Achieved> saved the galaxy"…but I digress.)

Then he further divides gamer into Wholesale versus Premium gamers. This distinction doesn’t have anything to do with games—Oblivion and flOw are both Procedure Learning games, but Oblivion is definitely wholesale while flOw is the opposite. Notably, in his case study of the Orange Box, he stops talking about the Tourist/Skill distinction, despite the fact that Half Life 2 is a Narrative game (I don’t imagine that it offers much challenge at all to a competent TF2 player), Portal is edged pretty far into Procedure Learning territory, and Team Fortress 2 is a purely Social game. So: Wholesale/Premium is a useful gamer distinction, but has more to do with the intended audience for the game rather than intrinsic game design.

Next time: A Theory of Everything should provide explanatory power, so I’ll see how well it covers a couple of games.