This post is part one in a series of two.
So a couple of months back, when I went to hear Anna Anthropy talk at the NYU Game Center, I got into a brief conversation with her about the notion of challenge and whether or not it was necessary to games.
Games can be challenging. Like climbing mountains. But with less risk of frostbite.
She had noticed a trend among the minority of folks hating on her game dys4ia, namely that people, particularly dudes, seemed uncomfortable with the fact that there was no way to lose the game and there was no element of challenge against which they could bash their manly egos.
I don’t want to go into too much detail about that conversation because I’d likely just misattribute something to her by accident, but it got me thinking about whether challenge is an essential component of games.
To kick off this conversation, I thought it would be useful to provide a few definitions of games by various thinkers in the field:
“Games are unnecessary obstacles that we volunteer to tackle.” – Jane McGonigal
She phrases it better and in more detail in her book Reality is Broken but this definition works for now because I was able to Google it and if memory serves it’s not far off base.
“Telling us something, anything. Making me feel a connection.” – Anna Anthropy
She said this in my Games for Change interview with her on what makes games worthwhile. In her book, she delineates games as an experience moderated by rules, a definition proudly and admittedly wide enough to drive a truck through.
“Playing a game is the act of solving statistically varied challenge situations presented by an opponent who may or may not be algorithmic within a framework that is a defined systemic model.” – Raph Koster
For more details, read his post on why some digital interactive art should not be called a game.
A game is a “competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement or for that of spectators.” – Dictionary.com
Okay so it’s not a thinker in the field but it’s an interesting definition to rip into a bit.
McGonigal’s definition makes perfect sense for her approach to games as vehicles for change. It highlights the unnecessary nature of the challenge in games, and yet, rather than thinking of that characteristic as a badge of their frivolity, she sees as their pathway towards a greater purpose.
Koster’s definition is a tight, nugget of text that seems limiting and hard to penetrate at first, but he makes the case that it’s actually pretty inclusive. He notes that it allows for people who turn “interpersonal relationships, or the stock market, or anything else into ‘a game,’” and the more you try to apply it to various scenarios the broader you discover it is.
With apologies to Rene Magritte: Ceci n'est pas une "game"
Dictionary.com’s defintion is laughable in some ways, the most glaring of which is the fact that it excludes one-player games from its definition. But this description of what constitutes a game is interesting precisely because it comes from a source distinctly outside the industry.
Do all games have to be for amusement? Clearly not. You could even wedge bullying into this definition of a game. With regards to challenge, this definition sets up skill, chance, and endurance as the sources of this challenge, but I’ll touch on that more in the second part of this post.
Interestingly, but not so surprisingly, Anthropy’s definition is the outlier in terms of omitting challenge as a central element of a game. I get the sense that this connects to her upset over the insularity of the gaming industry. The distinction that’s often made between casual gamers and hardcore gamers is not the amount of time they commit (if you add up the hours so called “casual” gamers log on Bejeweled or Spell Tower it could probably give some WoWers a run for their money) but their fluency in the in-speak, memes, codes, and rituals of the video game industry.
In that way, challenge can be, and is, used as a barrier to entry that keeps certain games from being accessible to certain people. And yet there are many different types of challenge, which I will go into further in the second part of this post.