My Understanding about Meaningful Play

Imagine in the faraway future, where new advanced technologies allow humans to experience anything by connecting to AR device or playing an immersive video game. Even nerves can be stimulated electronically, providing a truly immersive experience. It reminds me of a scene in the animated film WALL-E, that owing to the technological advances, humankind became so comfortable, lazy, so averse to physical activities and obese,that they never bothered to experience nature in its natural phsical form. If this happened, how do you feel as a game designer?

Games are not meant to supplant real life experiences; they are meant to enrich our human experiences. This is what I thought after watching that scene. You might wonder: am I only talking about educational games. No, not really. Possibly as a result of the high strung force-fed education that I had (in China), I think there are many aspects can be improved in educational games. When I first heard the term “educational games”, it was field under the genre of “serious games”, and hence never caught my eye. As the genre sggests, most “educational games” are either too utilitarian or too boring.

However the more games I've played, the more I feel that games is a good tool to have a meaningful impact on human life. It is not only about games that are tagged as "educational", but also about any games that cast influence on players. So what is the problem? How can we solve it? The key lies in the difference between being “educational” and “influential”.

I remember that we used to have Ideological and Politics class in school. I always find these classes are nothing but time consuming, mind numbing and brainwashing. What they taught made sense but the way of its being taught is far from pleasant; which is exactly the contrary of what I mean by “meaningful” interactions. For instance, in China, “patriotism education” is the first lesson we learned in kindergarten. It probably sounds ridiculous and hard to imagine for who've grown up in the free world. Regardless, at that age, it’s impossible for children to understand what “love” means, what “nation” is, and what “party” stands for, let alone to put them together. The teaching is excessively utilitarian in its sole purpose to get everyone brainwashed rather than educating effectively. That’s certainly not a good means of education. But, there was a teacher who impressed me. She taught honestly (as honest as she could), not afraid of comparing the education in China with the ones in other countries, especially the early education. In some other countries, children are guided to feel the love for themselves, their parents, their friends, the people, public facilities, the country, etc. The main differences here are, “rote learning” vs. “inspiring by feeling”. The effect of the two methods should be apparent.

However, I feel there’s no excuse not to develop entertaining meaningful games. The reason why I emphasize the word “entertaining” is that the more enjoyable a game is, the more convincing and powerful it will be. Gaming is a process b which the emotions of the player play an integral part. So I treat “entertaining” to be just as important as being “educational / meaningful / influential”. Maybe because I’m also an artist, I can’t regard educational games as real games. It’s kind of like the sophistry paradoxes of “A white horse is not a horse”. It doesn't make a game for not being fun enough; at most it is just sequence of interactions.

There are well-crafted educational games that can achieve their goals. There are engaging indie games with deep intrinsic values, and it often makes people consider their real life. Like what I said earlier about games being meant to enrich our human experiences, a good game tries to form a certain behavior pattern by guiding players to solve the game; a good character tends to be a positive example by inspiring players to comprehend and learn from their behavior. It might sound difficult and impossible. But it’s not. So my attitude is to achieve and never asking the outcomes. Because if you focus on how much you can influence your audience, it tends to lose fun. In other words, it depends on the audience. That’s why I feel “meaningful play” more accurately describes what I’m thinking than “meaningful games”. Without the interactions of players, we can never judge a game. Meaningful games are where meaningful play happens.

Let’s go back to the scene I described at the beginning. There seem to be a conflict between completely taking over people's lives and bring positive value to our players. By taking these considerations into heart, we can be more direct and clear when designing a game. Like, what do I want to convey through designing this entertaining game that might change the way that players do something? Is there any positive ways my characters can do something which will hopefully be emulated by players do or think about something? Or is it more effective for an educational game to better engage our guests?

What Makes Games Addictive

I remember when we talked about what we want to learn in Game Design class, someone said ‘how to make games addictive’ while another asked ‘how to make games not addictive’. Being addictive to video games is a common phenomenon and mostly it was discussed as a negative part of games. But as game designers, in order to make our games more engaging or popular, sometimes we do need to make our design kind of addictive. So today I’ll talk about what makes games addictive.

First of all, social features make games addictive. When I say social features, I mean interactions between various players and anything that helps building relationships with others. Not only in MMO games, but also in many small games on network tools such as Facebook or mobiles, social features play an important role. In my last blog, I shared the reasons why I love playing computer games. The most motioned reason in replies is about social connections. Games do help shorten the distances between different people. Do you have a bunch of request from your friends sent through social games when you log in Facebook? If you ever played an MMORPG, do you enjoy leveling up or going through instances (PVE) grouped with other players? Even when you are playing MOBA, do you like teaming up with your friends and fighting against another real people who are on the same level as you are? I always think that MMORPG was the most massively engaging genre of video games. Now with the sensation of League of Legends, it kind of becomes the most popular games. And the things they have in common are having real people players as teammates and having real people players as opponents (PVP in MMORPG). Needless to say, how teaming up plays its role in drawing people together again and again. PVP mode is interesting, because real person players are definitely more fun and challenging to beat comparing with AI. Also, I think when playing with other players, it simply makes you feel safe because you think you are doing something the same with other people, so it should be a good or right thing. To sum up, I think social features are the most important thing that makes a game addictive.

Second, operations of a game can make it addictive. People like gatherable things. A typical example of this is simulation games. Are you attracted by the fancy particle effects and vivid small animations of the ripe crops or collectable coins after a task is completed? Can you simply leave them there and try to never tap to gather when you see them? I can’t. Because the animations and glow are so distracting if I try to neglect them so I can’t help gathering them. This happens in other games too, let’s say MMORPG. My boyfriend is a programmer. Once he complained to me, that the game designer was asking him to change the mail system again by insisting on adding the function of letting player go to the mail guy, have a conversation with him and collect the attachments in every mail by hand. Yeah, that’s true. People just like collecting things with their own hands because this adds to the sense of receiving. When I started playing a SIM game, CastleVille last night, I found that I can keep on tapping here and there without any stop for the first 30 minutes (the true time might be longer, because another thing why this kind of games are addictive is that you don’t even notice it’s so time consuming.) and it was when I reached level 7, I first feel I need to stop and wait for something and come check it again. When I play games, I would like to follow the flow and feel the way I was lead or influenced by the game. Not everyone who plays SIM games does like me, but it still reflect some problems. So the interactive of some games are exactly designed to make it addicting. And to some degree, they are good design.

Adorable animations make games more addictive. Similarly to the gatherable things, they simply control you to check the game all the time. If you ever played Sims Free Play or Hay Day, do you feel guilty when you log in the game your characters are starving to die owing to your poor upbringing? Some people do feel that way and can’t help making up for that and start doing a sequence of operations.

Fast paced gameplay makes a game addictive. Remember in the Lightning Round in BVW (Building Virtual Worlds, a course for the ETC students in first semester), we are asked to make a game that focuses on a simple mechanic and creates a fast and addictive experience. Then we have a game based on Tetris, a game called Sum-O-Drums which allows four players controlling two characters doing sumo wrestling against each other, etc. Those games are really exciting and addictive. Once you start playing, you don’t know when you can drop them. Another example is Flappy Bird. As you may know, this game just quickly became an overnight sensation as it climbed to the top free app in App Store and Google Play last week. Players do report that they want to smash their phones or tablets after playing a few minutes. But at the same time, they can’t stop playing it. Because this game is super hard and you always think you can do better after a few more trials.

Last but not the least, the fluent flow or stories of a game make it more addictive. This happens very often in story based games, such as RPG or AVG (adventure games). When I start play an RPG, I don’t quite identify the avatar as myself at the very beginning. And I don’t feel the immersion of the game, and don’t really care what happens to this game world. But as the story goes, the sense of identification grows stronger and stronger, I turn out can’t wait to accept each challenge, beat the boss, go through the dungeon, touch the truth and finish the game in one breath. This is because the story is closely organized by the writer and you think you need to do it now! I used to read a book about game design. In that book, it said ‘The story of a game is actually fixed, but a good game can successfully make you feel that you are the only hero who can save the world, just with the sword in your hand, and if you DON’T do that NOW, some tremendous tragedies will definitely happen.’ Remember you already build the connection between yourself and the character in the game? Then it’s natural to be addicted to the game and can’t stop playing. If it’s a long game, even there’s ‘Chapter 1’ or ‘Act 2’, still you can hardly get out of the game sometime. Because there are dialogues, quests, check points, dungeons, cut-scenes coming after one another. Everything just comes so fluently without leaving you any chance to quit and take a breath.

Above are the top five things that I think make games addictive. Other elements that contribute to addiction of video games can be the level-up system, the unyielding spirits of players and so on. However being addictive to games is not a good thing. What we can do is to use our tastes to choose what we love and use our eyes to judge what we see. Hope this helps you design or understand games. Thanks for reading.