How Games Talk to Us

I’ve been thinking a bit about the power roles in game design and how games talk to players due both to a conference paper and withdrawal from not having done any serious game writing the past two years. For months I’ve tossed around the idea of a Cartesian representation of what I see as the four key types of communication within games. I’ve based these four types of communication on the risk-reward task dynamic that all games involve in one manner or another. The idea being that the tasks within games serve different purposes depending on the ratio of Challenge to Reward.

The following chart might help show what I mean. The X-axis demonstrates the relative size of reward for completing a task, while the Y-axis shows the relative difficulty in completing a task. This breaks all game tasks into definable categories: Goal, Supplemental, Instructional, and Immersive.

• Goal Tasks offer the key conscious reasons we play a game. They offer a challenging difficulty and they a high reward, thus they tend to draw attention to themselves. Goal tasks might be to defeat the boss at the end of the level in a platform game, to gain a new level for your character in an RPG, to complete an important story arc in a narrative game, or to win in a competitive game. Such tasks are not exclusive to the genres, but represent something a player tends to strive for with awareness and purpose.
• Supplemental tasks tend to exist as design fillers and in well-designed games should be quite rare. These Tasks offer low rewards for reasonably difficult challenges. A common issue in character levelling is the mostly empty level used to space out power progression for a character. This is an excellent example of a supplemental task.
• Instructional Tasks help teach the player about the game. A classic example is Link finding his wooden sword in the opening of the original Legend of Zelda or a parent tossing a slow underhand pitch for a child’s first at bat.
• Immersive Tasks keep the player involved in the game. These tasks make up the core mechanics of almost all games, setting the pace with a steady diet of easy challenges and minor rewards. Hitting a target, initiating dialogue, gaining a yard, and stomping a Kuppa Troopa all represent Immersive tasks.

Now, how well a challenge works or how fun a game is can’t likely be determined too easily from this setup. It doesn’t in and of itself speak to balance, playability, or fun; however, it can trace focus points of games and it can try to uncover what a game is trying to teach you. There’s a good chance that anything falling into the Instructional Task quadrant is considered vital to the mission of the game. There’s an equal likelihood that anything in the supplemental category is either poor design or a countering measure for game balance (plenty of designers might consider these the same thing). My hope is to have some volunteers plot challenges from a few games on the chart to see how well these descriptions hold up to live testing.

 I strongly suspect a player enjoys games with a denser flow between Goal and Immesrive than Instructional and Supplemental flow because of the equity of balance. Yet, I mixing in the other two in dashes does create excitement in the unexpected.

More to come, but I welcome your thoughts and initial critiques.



4 Responses to “How Games Talk to Us”

1. M. Trice Response #1 « Rhetorics and Economics says:

   June 5, 2010 at 12:35 pm

   [...] It also inspired me to finally begin gathering thoughts on my project concerning the rhetorical economics of a particular type of narrative: http://thefulbrightreport.com/?p=425 [...]
2. Bill Collins says:

   June 6, 2010 at 4:22 pm

   First question, why a Cartesian representation if the categories don’t have equal weighting? (Supplemental tasks are/should be rare, for example. Instructional tasks typically originate at the beginning of a game, etc.)

   Second question, are these actual communications or are they structures? These are described frequently as goals – and in my opinion they are.

   Third question – are you speaking exclusively of tabletop RPGS? Recent experience with FB games has lent me some perspective – most of those have a very similar “click, click, click, obtain minor reward, click, click, click, level, click, click, click….” structure.

   Response – I agree that there’s a significant flow between goal task and immersive task. That’s been pretty clear from my experience. I’m not sure about the structure that they fit into. Tabletop games IMO actually fit into a social gathering model with defined roles for all participants and a recurring open-ended or long-term story.

   Consider Toastmasters – participants join to improve their communications skills. In small meetings everyone has a role so that they have defined participation. The higher the participation and the longer, the more the person’s skills increase. That’s the goal of the social interaction. However, you also get to know the people that you spend that time with.

   In tabletop games, everyone by definition gets to participate in the story creation with the rules as a framework. There are whole interactions and social group memories that become the basis for nostalgia, cameraderie and future memory triggers. “Do you remember when…?” The overall story can also be repeated to others as a summary, which reflects group achievement as opposed to individual achievement (such as with Toastmasters).

   I would love to start recording RPG sessions and filming them to measure certain activities to see what common results are from group to group. Anecdotally, I know what you get, but when you actually pursue data, other patterns frequently see revelation.
3. Michael Trice says:

   June 7, 2010 at 4:22 am

   Hey Bill,

   Good questions. I’ll answer a couple of them quickly.

   I went with the Cartesian model more because I had two balanced measurables: diffuclty and reward. Once I had those I looked at how to describe the four quadrants. While it happens that most tasks fall into two fo the four corners, I still find it an illuminative measuring tool for that reason.

   I’m pretty sure most any challenge-based game could be graphed on the chart: tabletop, sports, video games, board games, chess, and so on. The next task is to test what grpahs so up by surveying players on a variety of these games to see what happens.

   I see these as communication and structure. Even if the measurable of difficulty is subjective, from a semiotic stance, I think we can find an agreed common perception with substantial enough polling for any signle challenge-reward combination.

   I think Facebook games are toying around a lot with the nature of teh immersive task, but I’ve only played 3 FB games in 3 years.
4. Bill Collins says:

   June 18, 2010 at 6:54 pm

   Hmmmmmm. So you’re measuring? Anything more?

   I take your original comment about “mixing in the other two in dashes does create excitement in the unexpected” to be rather prescient. I am not sure it’s possible to measure what’s exciting. It *is* possible to capture it and make a record.