Verbal Spewage

My writings often take me far longer to compose than you might expect.  I have a tendency to agonize over not only the subject at hand, but whether I am capable of writing in such a way that I do not lose the audience or my way in reaching a conclusion.  More often, I rarely find myself doing more than edits beyond spelling, grammar, flow, and staying on topic.  This is one of the rare instances where I had to completely rewrite the piece because I felt inadequate in being both concise and on topic.  In the case of this entry, it is not only warranted, but also necessary as the subject itself is vaster than I originally imagined.  This, then, is my third rewrite and the indulgence for this introduction will soon be clear.

Some point in 2012 Monte Cook posted somewhere (sadly I cannot recall if it was his blog, Google+, etc.) on the issue of math and language in games.  There was an unanswered question on the arguments in gaming that occur with these two components.  I answered with a phrase attempting to explain the phenomenon.  In effect, the point was that language and math do not communicate with each other.  The previous handwritten draft of this piece ran eight pages with no end in sight.  The phenomenon I tried to explain in brevity to Monte’s original posting and expand upon here I have termed as catachrestic dichotomy only to find at least another instance of it along the way.

Throughout this Anatomy of Game Design series, I have tried to approach games as an academic examining various aspects of games to hone in on the need for a disciplined and cerebral application of knowledge in favor over an intuitive method for game design.  Both are needed, but the former allows for a greater understanding and appreciation of design as science and art.  My reason for doing so is that games are both artifacts of science and art.  I hope this introduction helps with the perspective needed to describe why arguments over rules occur in games.  We are dealing not just with a complex topic, but one that transcends boundaries of academic study and our own ability to describe what we see and experience.  This examination will begin by attempting to untangle the issues that contribute to the confusion before getting at the heart of the breakdown between various methods of communication.

Of Liminal States and Amalgams

As discussed for the nature of games previously in this series, games tend to blur the lines between states.  They also follow the rules of logic and are thus digital constructs.  The logic in games is not fuzzy even if the player’s is.  In fact, only the randomness in the tumbling of the dice or the shuffling of cards creates a fuzzy state in the game.  Everything else remains orderly.  From the perspective of the player, all of this is blended together in an illusion of dynamism.  Games create a strange amalgam of multiple states regardless of the components used to design the play space.  The liminal threshold that the magic circle represents is just the most noticeable feature that marks the slippage between boundaries and definitions.

To refresh those who have read the previous installments in this series, the threshold of the magic circle is meant to divide the play space from the rest of reality.  The game therefore is at once a part of and apart from the world at large.  This confusion of space (as in to “con-fuse,” meaning “to join together,” and to make unclear) creates a duality with no clear boundaries within the play space other than the rules of the game used to overlay reality.  The pieces in a board game are like other aspects of models and simulations.  They are representations of something else.  For example, the cannon in a Risk game is used to simulate ten armies and no players mistake it for an actual cannon used on the battlefield.  Symbolic figures may not be the actual objects, but that does not stop people from making the connection and thus seeing the pieces for what they are in play and are not in reality.

Games also relax cultural norms while also relaxing the restrictions for categories of information.  We are free to transgress in myriad ways so long as we do not violate the rules of the game and thus destroy the play space.  In fact, some games purposefully encourage the distortion of information.  Charades and Pictionary are two such games where the lower the signal-to-noise ratio is the more fun the game becomes.  This is another way in which games confuse the components and information that make up the game. By doing so, we are hard-pressed to dig out and isolate the elements without having understood the principles behind game design.  This does not mean the average person cannot find the individual threads, only it is more difficult to recognize and name what one sees.  Game designers and theorists have yet to agree on a single vocabulary to describe what we do, though one is beginning to emerge.  As I am no better equipped than anyone else in this endeavor, I will leave the description of confusion at that and pick the one thread I wish to follow and untangle in this structured chaos we call games.

The issue here is one that may be very familiar to most people: the tension between math and language; or, why many people find one easier than the other.  The issue is an important one for gamers as the structure of all games are governed by math in some capacity or another.  Though not all games use probability, there are formulae underpinning the structure of the game, even a game like tag.  On the surface tag is purely physical.  The result is a complex system of trigonometry and physics in action as well as the digital state of “it”/”not it” and in/out of bounds.  Though on some level we are able to process and keep these complex relationships and formulae in mind, we are not fully conscious of how these states inform us about the game in mathematical terms.  In fact, we may not think of them as math problems or binary states.

Here lays the dilemma: if games are performative pieces (see “Kitchen Table Theater”), then why is the medium of the play space governed by so much math (and, by default, logic)?  Games are artistic endeavors from their architecture to execution.  As designers we have to inform players in the rules what their boundaries are while informing the game what it does with all of the mathematical input the players give it.  Thus, we have to communicate using two different methods to inform our intended respective audiences.  Now, this might not seem like a huge issue, but it is a lot more of one than a causal observation suggests.  Some of the problems stem from the different ways we communicate through language and math.  This necessitates a formal look at how and why math and language are so different and the dilemma left in the wake of these differences.  Something is occurring in the liminal realms created by play spaces that grants us an ability to create alchemical reactions between seemingly unrelated fields of knowledge.  While I cannot define it with any certainty, I believe shedding light on the phenomena of catachrestic dichotomy will give us a glimpse of what it may be.

Games, unlike any other form of human activity, allow us to experience the Greek word techné in all of its variegated meanings. The space within the liminal boundary of games lets us observe the revelation of technique, skill, craft, and art all at once. The catachrestic dichotomy and the interstice it inhabits within the play space is not just the art of play, but a lens that reveals the essence of the art (and technique) of art.

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Anatomy of Game Design: A Digital State

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 2

I’m going to take a risk and make a statement I was taught – and in turn taught others – not to do: avoid the absolute or amorphous, timeless statements. Since the dawn of our intellect as a species, we have lived in a digital state – at least we have tried to. I base this assumption in part on our need to categorize information. Everything is quantified in a state of being a particular thing. Games have a way of capturing this concept perfectly. The visual is what lets the analogy work so well. Basically, games are digital. They are this way because there really is no way for them to represent a trinary state.

Games have yes/no values predominantly. They generally only express maybe during randomizations. Once the dice stop rolling or the cards are shuffled, the “maybe” state disappears. The same holds true of the spaces on a game board: either they are occupied or they are empty. Probably one of the purer examples of this is tic-tac-toe. Spaces are blank or filled. If filled, they contain one of two symbols. This is because of the nature of the game. The possible pieces of data that go into each space do not represent a trinary state as two of the possibilities give ownership to one of the players. None of this should seem surprising as it is something all gamers have experienced in some fashion.

So, where does this phenomenon of a digital state come from? In many ways, it is intrinsic to who we are as a species. There is a binary that operates in our thought processes; you, me; us, them; male, female; inside, outside the group/play space/magic circle. It is one of the organizing principles we learn to develop before culture informs us otherwise. Then again, a lot of what we do during our formative years is rooted in a system of classifications that allow us to make sense of the world. We do not have to go far to see this in action. We are engaging in that activity right now. Or, more precisely, you are as I sent you a coded script in your past that you just received a short time ago and are now decoding. I do not know when you will get this, but I know that you are not standing over my shoulder reading my first draft written in a notebook – in cursive – or while I type the edited rewrite you see before you now. What I know is this: you understand the message enough to get this far into it because of the rules that define each word’s place in language and the structure which determines meaningful context. All you need to make sense of my words is to identify what is acting in each sentence.

The complexity of sentences is designed to allow us to relate ideas more concretely, but we are aware on some level the categories and meanings of the words used and the ideas they are meant to express. In all, our brains are just looking for who or what acted. The remainder of the words help answer how, why, when, and where. This is a rather simplistic rendering of the subtle nuances of language, but it is the main impetus behind communication. A whole host of binaries are layered in the words: is it a synonym, is it spelled correctly, and is it used properly, just to name a few questions. Classification structures our lives and keeps us from harm as we learn what is safe and what is dangerous, just like it does our language.

Games provide us with a symbolic representation of categorization that we do automatically. We just don’t pay attention to the process because we already have internalized it. If you want to see it happen, observe two- and three-year-olds. The constant questioning and testing their parents’ limits are examples of this mechanism in action. This is how the brain learns to interpret the world. Once the gross patterns are learned, we begin to experiment. The child who makes grammatical errors when trying to conjugate verbs or apply superlatives (“I won you,” “I losted it,” and so on) are examples of attempts to use the structural patterns that define how we translate ideas from our thoughts into images others can grasp.

One of the reasons that games require time to learn is because of this need to categorize different states and to understand how the structural patterns work and how they can be used. The fuzzy state in between the rules is not unlike the individual words in a language. Slippage in definitions creates the spectrum in which meanings can exist by grammatical category and the nuances assigned to any single word. We can orientate ourselves by these signifiers in language to not only find our coordinates in a thought but in the way it seems to be heading. The same happens on a game board.

As our thoughts unfold, we know where they cannot go. On the game’s cartography, we learn the same concepts, only in a much more abstract manner. The way the game takes shape informs the players what is possible and what is not. This, too, is a binary. We might not have every piece of information to tell us all of the possible outcomes, but we do not know what cannot happen. In chess, for example, a pawn cannot move backwards, so we know that once it moves up a square, it no longer threatens the same squares it had. Those squares are not safe from that pawn for the rest of the game.

While games may use some of the tools for information theory in the guise of grammatical constructs, it is symbolic. The abstract information bound in the symbols prevents the binary state from being noticeable. We do not look at the empty spaces. Rather we look for the relationship between the pieces and their current point in the game space. The unoccupied locations only matter for purposes of determining strategic judgments and the odds of winning. Otherwise, the data is extraneous.

The binary elements of “is” and “is not” constitutes the digital world. A switch is either on or off. Games make us of a lot of binaries, but the uncertainty of the game relies outside of these binaries because they do not last long enough and their effects are more relevant than when probability is in flux. As our focus is mostly on chance when we play a game, we do not notice how prevalent these dualities really are. The random results and how we can stack chance in our favor is what we are drawn to. Why not, it is infinitely more exciting than the binary states. For games without random chance, we turn to our own skills against our opponents since we can never know what is in our opponent’s heads. Regardless, it is that underlying digital state which makes the nuances possible in the abstracts of symbolic concepts or the slippage in the definitions of words that fill the spaces between the bounds established by the binaries. It is how we define the rules that create the play space to create what is the game and what is not and allowed actions, positions, etc., that shows that games, and how we view information, are inextricably linked as a digital state.

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Anatomy of Game Design: Modifiers, Part 2

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 1