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