What Makes Games Great?

I love gaming.  It's great.  For so many reasons.  It's engaging.  It's stimulating.  It's social.  Playing a game is a chance to  escape reality and step into another life.  There are puzzles to solve, obstacles to overcome, decisions to make, foes to best and adventure to be had!

As you may have guessed, gaming (specifically tabletop gaming) is one my favorite pastimes.  I've played a lot of games during my [almost] 33 years on this planet and they continue to occupy a substantial amount of my free time.  There are a number of reasons I've developed such a passionate for gaming.  These reasons will be the topic of a future post, because I think they will help provide important context for these posts, but they are beyond the scope of this post.  When you spend a lot of time engaged in an activity, you naturally develop an appreciation for the activity and it's facets.  Eventually, I started to wonder WHY I enjoy games so much.  This wondering led to curiosity, which in turn led to examination.

I don't think there's any media that hasn't been improved by objective examination.  Movies, music, literature, theater; all of these media have dedicated fields of study that led to substantial improvements in our understanding of the media that has subsequently led to an increase in quality of the authored material.  I find it reasonable to view tabletop games as another form of entertainment or educational media, depending on the game's purpose or context.  Following the fusion of these two ideas (tabletop games as media & objective evaluation leads to improved content), I believe that our tabletop games can benefit from similar objective scrutiny.  It's for this reason I want to start putting my thoughts and observations on the matter to text.

I really can't be sure how novel this work is going to be.  While I have found several previous studies and essays on gaming, they have all concerned themselves primarily with the individuals and groups of individuals, instead of the games themselves.  Since this being treated as unknown territory, I expect the tone of the initial posts will be exploratory, and their primary purpose will be descriptive.  Overall, the purpose of these "What makes games great?" (WMGG) posts will be to first discuss the variety of current table top games and establish a functional vocabulary to succinctly describe their characteristics.  After we have an idea of the variety present in the games and we can easily communicate what we are looking at, we can start getting into more advanced ideas and concepts.

Because these posts will start as an exploratory exercise, I expect that some important points will be missed, mistakes will be made, and missteps taken, and for this reason I encourage my readers to provide constructive feedback on the material I post.   I am looking forward to seeing how the community receives these ideas.  Truly, what will be posted here is not intended to be a final product. There's still a lot for me to read, a lot to learn, a lot to find, a lot to integrate.  These concepts will undoubtedly will need to be refined and reworked, improving the quality of the idea with each iteration. 

I would like to be clear that these posts are NOT "What makes great games".  I feel this would be placing the cart before the horse.  The goal of this exercise is to create or define a framework in which we can work to describe and understand games (i.e. "what makes games great").  With this information, we will hopefully have better tools with which to design new games (i.e. "what makes great games").  I believe it is entirely possible to make a good game or a great game [or,  for that matter, a horrible game] with any concept or any rules.  The rules or concepts simply need to appropriately fit the context of the game.  As an analogy, the former exercise is similar to the examination of styles, techniques, materials, tools, et cetera used to create paintings to understand how they influence the final product, whereas the latter is an exercise in application of the styles, techniques, materials, tools, et cetera to create a painting.  Without the former, the latter is much more difficult.

Further, the purpose of these posts is not an absolutely exhaustive exercise in categorization, or a dissection of games into some atomic form.  These goals would be futile, since the useful information would be lost to us in such an exercise; The scale of our examination will be tailored to suit our goals, instead of forced to conform some arbitrary degree of consistency.

As a brief preview, some concepts I expect to address in this series are:

• Cooperation vs competition
• Symmetry
• Stochasticity
• Automation
• Persistence
• Degree of interaction

So, with all that, I'm undertaking this substantial project, but they say the longest journey starts with a single step.  It looks like I've just taken that step, now let's see where it goes.  I appreciate everyone and anyone who comes along for the ride.  I hope this is a productive exercise, and who knows, maybe we'll even make some progress.

/endofline