As with my last post, this one will concern itself with issues, thoughts, and parallels raised by Roger Caillois’s Man, Play, Games. Early into the book Caillois outlines his classification of games. He places all games into four main categories: Agon (competition), Alea (chance), Mimicry (simulation), and Ilinx (vertigo).The only objection I had to any of his assertions was with his description of alea, or games of chance. He posits that children are not interested in games of chance because of the way a child “approximates an animal” and does not yet have a fully developed perception of the abstract and inanimate powers of destiny and subsequently, the attraction of ceding one's fate to it. I would have to disagree with this notion. Although he doesn’t completely reject the possibility of a child’s participation with games of chance, he certainly downgrades it almost to the point of non-existence. I can remember in my childhood playing numerous games of chance.
My second grade class was given a stern lecture by our principal about the dangers and poisonous effects of gambling after a week of playing a loose, if not completely incorrect version of poker with candy cigarettes serving as betting chips. I guess Caillois would argue that such behavior would fall under the umbrella of mimicry, namely mimicking adults, but I think that is entirely debatable. I can also recall many a fond afternoon of playing Pooh sticks with a neighborhood guide who wore a belt of throwing knives and who seemed far too old and smoked far too many cigarettes to be an expert on such a juvenile game. Sitting atop a rusted jungle gym that rested above a forest stream, we proceeded to select sticks and drop them into different parts of the stream and see whose stick reached a predetermined finish line first. Agon does enter into Pooh sticks (which parts of the stream have the strongest current, the quality and streamlined composition of the stick, etc.), but it has a very minimal presence and not to someone who has never played or to the more carefree of kids. It was a pure fascination with chance, cause and effect, trial and error, and a general curiosity with seeing the behavior of natural forces that we were interested in. Aside from this aspect of the child and their limited relation to and involvement with alea, I think Caillois’s examination of core play styles is sound.
Despite this one particular inaccuracy, Caillois does a thorough and admirable job of detailing most dominant styles of play and the rules, either implicit or explicit, that come with them. However, in every game described, the player knows the rules before engaging with that game. Be it the correct procedure for stepping onto a merry-go-round and mounting a plastic horse or playing football, the tenets of the activity are known to the participant prior to playing.
One thing I don’t think Caillois mentioned was the phenomenon of a participant playing a game when they weren’t entirely sure of the rules. This isn’t it’s own division of game style since the rules are independent of this, but this blind approach to confronting a game is something I find interesting. In the case of Warioware, I felt that this method of supplying the player with limited information, or no information at all, with regard to the game’s rules was a detriment to the game. The difficulty of the game is making sense of the nonsensical, interpreting foreign, single-serving mechanics that you are being bombarded with. After some exposure to these games (or fool’s errands) as they repeat, you learn what is required of you to succeed. For a majority of Warioware’s games, it is simply the process of discovering just what in the hell you’re supposed to do and not the actions themselves that are challenging and fleetingly fun. Once this discovery is over, the game becomes stagnant.
On the other hand, a game like flOw practices this similar idea of limited user information, but does it in a way that adds another component to the game and adds a fruitful afterlife to the gameplay rather than a premature death. The act of discovering relationships between your single-cell self and other creatures, other organic life (of the nutritional, caloric variety), and other players in the cooperative mode (or in some cases, uncooperative) adds an element of investigation, careful observation, and player interpretation to the game. Sharing thoughts about the attributes and effects of certain digestible matter with other players is also very fascinating insofar as you see how others interpreted the mechanics. This dialogue exposes little aspects of how someone interprets an unknown quantity and adds their own meaning to it through speculation. Different people can perceive the same in-game item as an aid or a hindrance, both not entirely sure of what it does. Some people think a certain action, attack, or state had more of an influence over the space and AI than others. These differences offer little insights into how people think.
But over time, these assumptions begin to break down and the dynamics between the player, the other species, and the resources in the game become apparent. Unlike Warioware, the enjoyment of the game does not cease after this period of discovery because it does not chiefly consist of repeating tasks that only have one proper solution. This is where non-linearity enters in. Once the rules are known to the player, the game goes on to be a remarkable meditative journey, a microscopic fugue that explores relationships between pacifism and antagonism, the will-to-power and all forms of life, consumption and depletion of resources, nourishment and gluttony, primal instinct and rational thought, outward appearances and intimidation, allies and enemies, and so on. Not to mention that it's also the only game that I couldn't comfortably eat snack foods while playing. I became self-aware, stared contemplatively at the finger paintings of potato chip grease that covered my controller and thought about consumption while comparing my eating habits to those of my single-cell self. I think that is quite an accomplishment. To get back to the point, cooperation and competition are both equally supported in single and multiplayer.
This unconventional hybrid of play styles is not something Callois really touches on, but doesn’t rule out either. He does stress that agon games are largely competitive exhibitions to display one’s superiority over obstacles and others. This can be the attitude one would choose to adopt when playing flOw, but it is certainly not the only one. flOw is a rare species. In an industry permeated by classical, agon-centered games, flOw illustrates that we can marry together mechanics from unlikely genres in intelligent and invigorating ways.
I believe that once games start resembling our reality more and more, we’re going to see a dramatic rise in this approach to organic, implied game rules detailed above. Eventually designers won’t need to bother wasting their time and the player’s time on implementing tutorials and gameplay mandates, not to mention the inseparable disruption of player immersion and dramatic investment that follows these in-game irritations, because the rules of the game will already be intimately known to the player through life experience. Obviously this won’t apply to every game, but graphical fidelity, dynamic gameplay-monitoring systems, and improved AI will be instrumental in subtly conveying gameplay opportunities to players in even the more unrealistic of games. At least I hope this is the trend we will see. I suppose that if this paradigm shift is to occur, we first need courage on the part of more designers, publishers, and players to encourage this biotic exchange of experimental game design, to administer this much-needed transfusion of new blood into the pallid skin of mainstream games. Though courage is a rare commodity in the industry these days, games like flOw foster hope for this fascinating possibility.
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