Keith Burgun's 4 Interactive Forms
April 21, 2021 7:44 AM Subscribe
"Within 'interactive entertainment', there actually exist a number of forms – patterns of design that work in a certain way. Only by understanding these forms can we proceed with guidelines for better interactive system design." MeFi's own Keith Burgun, a game designer and game design instructor, discusses mapping, solving, evaluation, and understanding in four categories of interactive entertainment.
I've listened to Keith on various podcasts and don't think he intends any harm, but he needs to come up with better terminology. There's enough exclusion in gaming culture without putting up walls around what gets to be called a game.
Come up with a new word for strategy games because calling someone else's favorite game a "toy" starts every discussion off on the wrong foot.
posted by Gary at 10:12 AM on April 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
Come up with a new word for strategy games because calling someone else's favorite game a "toy" starts every discussion off on the wrong foot.
posted by Gary at 10:12 AM on April 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
Sweet! Glad to see this posted on MF! :D
> he needs to come up with better terminology. There's enough exclusion in gaming culture without putting up walls around what gets to be called a game.
@Gary - I agree - with my first book in 2012, I used the term "game" for my prescriptive form "strategy game", which over the following years I was convinced was a bad call. By 2015 when I wrote my second book I had abandoned that terminology. My view is that everything people colloquially call "games" are "games", I don't have a prescriptive term for "game" anymore.
Also yeah calling an existing thing "a toy" is not really the right use of the system. It's not a taxonomical system; you're not supposed to use it to classify existing games. Its intention was for designers to be able to identify certain patterns of play so that we can build theory off of these foundations.
posted by keithburgun at 10:18 AM on April 21, 2021 [9 favorites]
> he needs to come up with better terminology. There's enough exclusion in gaming culture without putting up walls around what gets to be called a game.
@Gary - I agree - with my first book in 2012, I used the term "game" for my prescriptive form "strategy game", which over the following years I was convinced was a bad call. By 2015 when I wrote my second book I had abandoned that terminology. My view is that everything people colloquially call "games" are "games", I don't have a prescriptive term for "game" anymore.
Also yeah calling an existing thing "a toy" is not really the right use of the system. It's not a taxonomical system; you're not supposed to use it to classify existing games. Its intention was for designers to be able to identify certain patterns of play so that we can build theory off of these foundations.
posted by keithburgun at 10:18 AM on April 21, 2021 [9 favorites]
"Toy" makes me think of Will Wright's "software toy" which Wright was using for The Sims and Sim City, things he himself designed, so he was presumably not trying to disparage them.
I wonder if we need another category or another axis for games as hangout? For multiplayer games only. One of Bartle's categories was "socializers" and you also have stuff like Fortnite's "Party Royale." I think a lot of game designers are less interested in that because then it makes your game feel like a glorified chat room, but it does reflect how a lot of people use games.
posted by RobotHero at 10:32 AM on April 21, 2021 [4 favorites]
I wonder if we need another category or another axis for games as hangout? For multiplayer games only. One of Bartle's categories was "socializers" and you also have stuff like Fortnite's "Party Royale." I think a lot of game designers are less interested in that because then it makes your game feel like a glorified chat room, but it does reflect how a lot of people use games.
posted by RobotHero at 10:32 AM on April 21, 2021 [4 favorites]
The asshole knee-jerk responder in me wants to argue that anything that isn't measurable probably isn't a good enough simulation of the physical world, or alternative possible worlds, to be worth the effort. It may well be that's okay and lots of fun. I can't imagine an ethical objection.
But, now I know the thing I can't stand in video games (and board games, ARGs, novels, jokes, comedy, radio) is sometimes called a "puzzle." Thanks! This is really interesting.
posted by eotvos at 10:44 AM on April 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
But, now I know the thing I can't stand in video games (and board games, ARGs, novels, jokes, comedy, radio) is sometimes called a "puzzle." Thanks! This is really interesting.
posted by eotvos at 10:44 AM on April 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
I also want to vote against the idea that "toy" is a disparagement. Some of my best times in PC Gaming are with lovely toys.
posted by Meatbomb at 11:32 AM on April 21, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by Meatbomb at 11:32 AM on April 21, 2021 [4 favorites]
I wonder if we need another category or another axis for games as hangout? For multiplayer games only. One of Bartle's categories was "socializers" and you also have stuff like Fortnite's "Party Royale."
I actually think there's a similar thing in some single-player games. Like if you just want to get in a car and drive around the city in GTA 5 listening to some tunes. You're not exploring or discovering anything new or tinkering with the simulation to see what will happen, you're just hanging out in a virtual place.
posted by straight at 11:48 AM on April 21, 2021 [3 favorites]
I actually think there's a similar thing in some single-player games. Like if you just want to get in a car and drive around the city in GTA 5 listening to some tunes. You're not exploring or discovering anything new or tinkering with the simulation to see what will happen, you're just hanging out in a virtual place.
posted by straight at 11:48 AM on April 21, 2021 [3 favorites]
Any taxonomy has overlaps and edge cases and such, of course; this one's pretty decent as a framework of thinking about games. One of the good future-taxonomy-argument hooks it presents is treating them as a progression where each form includes the elements of the one 'before' it, so it does good work on springboarding rebuttals and rectifications and support.
A good future twist on it will be to turn it into more of a loop instead of a ladder, where "strategy game" feeds back into "toy" by some deft semantic play. Which also opens up thinking about the ways each form blurs into others. Puzzles oscillate into contest, for example--lots of puzzle videogames now have "leaderboards" for rated solutions--solving a level in a lesser amount of pieces used, moves used, that sort of thing. But arguably that kind of contest blurs right "backwards" into puzzle forms too, by the joy of seeing how others saw into a solution in novel ways. Not even necessarily 'better" ways--there's a puzzle game I'm fond of called Opus Magnum, which involves mechanical actions (push, rotate, slide, connect, separate) of abstract atoms to perform alchemy with a specified output from given inputs, and people enjoy sharing hilariously overcomplicated solutions to puzzles in it.
Which could be seen as itself a form of contest...or even a strategy game of really exploring the solution space in ways that go past suboptimal-to-maximum-optimal to aesthetic...which wraps right into the joy of toy again.
In short, games are neat, and game design is nifty, and ways of thinking and arranging them are too.
posted by Drastic at 12:22 PM on April 21, 2021
A good future twist on it will be to turn it into more of a loop instead of a ladder, where "strategy game" feeds back into "toy" by some deft semantic play. Which also opens up thinking about the ways each form blurs into others. Puzzles oscillate into contest, for example--lots of puzzle videogames now have "leaderboards" for rated solutions--solving a level in a lesser amount of pieces used, moves used, that sort of thing. But arguably that kind of contest blurs right "backwards" into puzzle forms too, by the joy of seeing how others saw into a solution in novel ways. Not even necessarily 'better" ways--there's a puzzle game I'm fond of called Opus Magnum, which involves mechanical actions (push, rotate, slide, connect, separate) of abstract atoms to perform alchemy with a specified output from given inputs, and people enjoy sharing hilariously overcomplicated solutions to puzzles in it.
Which could be seen as itself a form of contest...or even a strategy game of really exploring the solution space in ways that go past suboptimal-to-maximum-optimal to aesthetic...which wraps right into the joy of toy again.
In short, games are neat, and game design is nifty, and ways of thinking and arranging them are too.
posted by Drastic at 12:22 PM on April 21, 2021
I'm not sure the distinction between "Toy" and "[Strategy] Game" is really well justified. This page, for example, says of "Toys" that:
posted by Pyry at 12:52 PM on April 21, 2021
HOW CAN WE USE THIS? A good toy will have a vast amount of rules to discover. Think Legos, or Minecraft, or a ball.and of "Games" that:
HOW CAN WE USE THIS? A game should have a very vast and deep set of rule relationships that we can explore for as long as possible.I don't think these are saying different things. One reading is that toys go for breadth of rules, whereas games go for depth of rules, but I don't think this stands up to scrutiny: compare how many rules Minecraft has to how many Crusader Kings 2 has. Or, to take the most reductive example, how many rules does Conway's 'Game' of Life have and where does it fit into this taxonomy?
posted by Pyry at 12:52 PM on April 21, 2021
My view is that everything people colloquially call "games" are "games", I don't have a prescriptive term for "game" anymore.
I'm glad to hear it. I like a lot of the ideas behind the categorization. I also can't think of a better name for "strategy game" that would fit better. Any term I can think of that is close (4X, roguelike) come with a lot of other baggage that would mess up the system in other ways. Naming things is hard!
posted by Gary at 1:28 PM on April 21, 2021
I'm glad to hear it. I like a lot of the ideas behind the categorization. I also can't think of a better name for "strategy game" that would fit better. Any term I can think of that is close (4X, roguelike) come with a lot of other baggage that would mess up the system in other ways. Naming things is hard!
posted by Gary at 1:28 PM on April 21, 2021
The ladder/hierarchy strikes me as pretty strange...
For example, the descriptions on the right in black are /additive/, suggesting that each level subsumes the previous things. (strategy game = mapping + solution + measurment + understanding), but at the 'contest' level, the text sez that a contest is designed to be unsolvable.
Contrariwise, it seems that lots of toys are measurable in one way or another. (think population in sim city.) There's also a lot of 'toys' where the idea is to invent goals of your own and see them through; the game designers often provide some set of goals to help the player along, as well. (Think of 'open' games like Kerbal Space Program; contracts get things started, but eventually I'm trying to figure out how to use slingshot maneuvers to get to Jool, at no one's suggestion but my own.)
I get that it's not meant to be taxonomic, but one should still be able to associate the forms of play as they arise in concrete examples. If I want to get really mathy, a good representation is a decomposition of a space into principal components. Different things will contain more or less of the various components; the really 'pure' examples will be lots of one component and very little of the others. So it's helpful to look at KSP as 'mostly' a toy (exploration), with a bit of measureable stuff and no competition.
posted by kaibutsu at 3:55 PM on April 21, 2021
For example, the descriptions on the right in black are /additive/, suggesting that each level subsumes the previous things. (strategy game = mapping + solution + measurment + understanding), but at the 'contest' level, the text sez that a contest is designed to be unsolvable.
Contrariwise, it seems that lots of toys are measurable in one way or another. (think population in sim city.) There's also a lot of 'toys' where the idea is to invent goals of your own and see them through; the game designers often provide some set of goals to help the player along, as well. (Think of 'open' games like Kerbal Space Program; contracts get things started, but eventually I'm trying to figure out how to use slingshot maneuvers to get to Jool, at no one's suggestion but my own.)
I get that it's not meant to be taxonomic, but one should still be able to associate the forms of play as they arise in concrete examples. If I want to get really mathy, a good representation is a decomposition of a space into principal components. Different things will contain more or less of the various components; the really 'pure' examples will be lots of one component and very little of the others. So it's helpful to look at KSP as 'mostly' a toy (exploration), with a bit of measureable stuff and no competition.
posted by kaibutsu at 3:55 PM on April 21, 2021
The notion of a "toy" mechanic in Forge-era pen-and-paper RPGs was a positive one. It was the notion that a rule could be fun just on its own stripped bare of the context of the game. You could have fun pushing pips around a table and rolling dice just to see if you could get good at making it do what you wanted.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:47 PM on April 22, 2021
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:47 PM on April 22, 2021
Oof.
Ok, I'm gonna be that dick:
A long, long time ago I came across a taxonomy of gameplayers: I believe it was six or maybe eight ways of classifying interaction. Explorer, completionist, crafter, fighter, socializers ... this was pre-Bartle even, IIRC, we're talking about a Gamasutra article a decade if not decades ago.
Point being that your classification is arse-backwards. Games/toys are systems and the way users interact with them are what define them. What would be a toy for one is a game for another is merely a chat/forum/social system for another.
How the user interacts with the system defines what it is for them. This hierarchy is ... irrelevant. The way/approach the user interacts with the system is defining for what it is to the user; thus a 'strategy game' in this classification can be used as a toy or a socialising system by another.
Thus as posted one CANNOT subsume another.
posted by MacD at 3:21 PM on April 23, 2021
Ok, I'm gonna be that dick:
A long, long time ago I came across a taxonomy of gameplayers: I believe it was six or maybe eight ways of classifying interaction. Explorer, completionist, crafter, fighter, socializers ... this was pre-Bartle even, IIRC, we're talking about a Gamasutra article a decade if not decades ago.
Point being that your classification is arse-backwards. Games/toys are systems and the way users interact with them are what define them. What would be a toy for one is a game for another is merely a chat/forum/social system for another.
How the user interacts with the system defines what it is for them. This hierarchy is ... irrelevant. The way/approach the user interacts with the system is defining for what it is to the user; thus a 'strategy game' in this classification can be used as a toy or a socialising system by another.
Thus as posted one CANNOT subsume another.
posted by MacD at 3:21 PM on April 23, 2021
your classification is arse-backwards. Games/toys are systems and the way users interact with them are what define them.
I think this is just an extra layer of complexity rather than a contradiction. Game developers definitely intend and design games for particular types of play.
I really only play Assassin's Creed games to explore the world. I set combat to easy, set the language to Italian or whatever, and grit my teeth or eat a sandwich through the cut scenes. If I had a trainer to turn off the combat and skip the cutscenes, I'd use it.
Well, Ubisoft noticed I exist and that there's a lot of me. They made "Discovery Tour" editions of their games set in ancient Egypt and Greece, where all the story and combat has been replaced by historical notes and you can just run around, climb things, explore, and read/hear more about anything that interests you. I love it.
So yeah, a player can use a game however they want, but we can definitely talk about which kinds of play a game is designed for and which kinds of play it succeeds or fails to be good for.
posted by straight at 10:16 AM on April 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
I think this is just an extra layer of complexity rather than a contradiction. Game developers definitely intend and design games for particular types of play.
I really only play Assassin's Creed games to explore the world. I set combat to easy, set the language to Italian or whatever, and grit my teeth or eat a sandwich through the cut scenes. If I had a trainer to turn off the combat and skip the cutscenes, I'd use it.
Well, Ubisoft noticed I exist and that there's a lot of me. They made "Discovery Tour" editions of their games set in ancient Egypt and Greece, where all the story and combat has been replaced by historical notes and you can just run around, climb things, explore, and read/hear more about anything that interests you. I love it.
So yeah, a player can use a game however they want, but we can definitely talk about which kinds of play a game is designed for and which kinds of play it succeeds or fails to be good for.
posted by straight at 10:16 AM on April 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
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he's carrying on a fine tradition. very nice.
posted by j_curiouser at 10:08 AM on April 21, 2021