Game Design

What’s a video game? In many cases—for example, in the case of games like SWAT4, Deus Ex, Half Life, or Chibi Robo—a video game is a set of experiences a player participates in from a particular perspective, namely the perspective of the character or characters the player controls. Of course, not all games offer the player an avatar: while this fact is important, I will deal with it later, where we will see that having an avatar is just one way of achieving “micro-control”, one of the defining features of video games. For the moment, I will stick with games played from a first- or third-person perspective.

Video games like those I have just mentioned are designed to set up certain goals for players, but often leave players free to achieve these goals in their own ways. The game may also allow players to construct their own goals, but only within the rule space designed into the game (for example, you can accomplish things in different ways in Thief, but robust hand to hand combat is not one of them). Level design ensures that players both get lots of practice applying what they have earlier experienced in similar situations (within a level) and in somewhat less similar situations (across levels). Feedback is given moment by moment and often summatively at the end of a level or in boss battles. So a number of our learning conditions are met as a matter of the basic design of the game.

Such games also encourage players to interpret their experiences in certain ways and to seek explanations for their errors and expectation failures. Such encouragement  works through in-game features like the increasing degrees of difficulty that a player faces as the levels of a game advance or when facing a boss that requires rethinking what one has already learned. However, it is precisely here that talking about “games” and not “gaming” as a social practice falls short. A good deal of reflection and interpretation stems from the social settings and practices within which games are situated.

Reflection and interpretation are encouraged not just through in-game design features, but also through socially-shared practices like faqs or strategy guides, game reviews, cheats, forums, and other players in and out of multiplayer settings. Gamers often organize themselves into communities of practice that create social identities (“being- doing a gamer” of a certain sort) with distinctive ways of talking, interacting, and interpreting experiences and applying values, knowledge, and skill to achieve goals and solve problems. This is a crucial point for those who wish to make socalled “serious games”: to gain the sorts of desired learning effects will often require as much care about the social system (the learning system) in which they game is placed as the in-game design itself.

But let me talk here directly about game design (in-game design), not Game design (the design of the interactions around the game). Video games offer people experiences in a virtual world (which we will see below is linked tightly to the real world) and they use learning, problem solving, and mastery for engagement and pleasure. It should be noted that humans and other primates find learning and mastery deeply, even biologically, pleasurable under the right conditions, though often not the ones they face in school. Thus, I want to  argue that game design is not accidentally related to learning, but, rather, that learning is integral to it. Game design is applied learning theory and good game designers have discovered important principles of learning without needing to be or become academic learning theorists.