Aesthetics of Play - Redefining Genres in Gaming - Extra Credits

Joining us once more this week is Shannon Meisner, lead artist at Low and Behold Games, who you'll probably be hearing us mention a lot in the coming year. So, long ago when talking about Western and JRPGs, I mentioned this idea that we're fundamentally looking at our game genres wrong. This topic is a bit heavy on the game design theory, but it's an important discussion for designers and possibly useful for players as well. So, here it goes. Back in the early 2000s, there was a paper on design theory published by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek called Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics. It's one of the earliest attempts to formalize the field of game design theory, and it's fundamental to how we look at game genres. Today, we're going to give a highly interpreted and expanded view on the ideas contained within the first section of that paper, the portion on the aesthetics of play. James usually has an hour to give this talk, but we'll see how this goes. To start, we have to talk about the way games are categorized. This idea of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics is a useful framework for dissecting games.

So, what are these three? Mechanics are the rules and systems that create the play we experience. So, the math for how shooting works in an FPS. Dynamics are the actual experiential play those mechanics come together to create that we engage in, i.e., the running and gunning gameplay in that FPS. And the aesthetics are the underlying emotive reasons we go to that game for, the challenge or the fantasy of being a marine, etc. So, the mechanics come together to create the game's dynamics, which all come together to form the overall aesthetics of play. A key insight in the Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics paper is that game designers and players fundamentally approach games from the opposite ends of the spectrum. Players are going to most viscerally and directly experience the core aesthetics, the broad emotive play experience that the game offers. But designers, due to the nature of production, have to start with the mechanics and build their way up. Unfortunately, this leaves many designers so focused on the mechanics that they're not actually thinking about the aesthetics of play they're trying to deliver. Or perhaps worse, they mistakenly think that specific mechanics always deliver specific aesthetics, which is not the case. Take the mechanic of leveling. Leveling in Mass Effect serves a completely different aesthetic

than leveling in Call of Duty multiplayer. Many a terrible clone and knockoff have been made by designers failing to realize this fact. But okay, what does all this have to do with genres? Well, in every other medium out there, genres are defined by the underlying emotive reason that we go to that genre for. Comedy, drama, action. But in games, we've haphazardly defined our genres over the years, so that we now lump everything that's superficially similar into the same genre. Take the first-person shooter. We have defined an entire genre by the fact that it has a first-person camera and involves shooting. And that's ridiculous. Now, what if we defined film genres that way? Wide-angle punching. Close-up kissing. Steady-cam running. And here's the thing, we already know this first-person shooter definition's faulty because we're breaking it all the time. We may not be able to explain exactly why, but we all know that Portal and Fallout 3 don't really fit in the first-person shooter category. I mean, they're both in the first person, they both involve shooting, they fit the rigid criteria, and yet we can all tell that they're fundamentally different. Why? Because they fulfill different fundamental needs. They may share mechanics with

other first-person shooting games, but they have completely different aesthetics. So, what are these aesthetics specifically? Well, surprisingly, there are a very finite set of underlying reasons that we enjoy games. In the Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics paper, they define eight core aesthetics that draw us to play. In James's entire time designing, he's only added a few of his own to this list, most of which we'll save for another time. And he's found that the appeal of almost every single game can be defined by two, three, maybe four of these aesthetics. Now, there are a handful of exceptions out there that may deliver on even more. Games that are so expansive that they're practically multiple games all bundled into one single executable. For example, Minecraft delivers quite well on more than four aesthetics, which is one of the reasons it's been such a huge success. But there's a lot of different games wrapped up in that package. The people playing on giant cooperative monument building servers are practically playing a completely different game from the folks playing in survival mode. Oh, and one more thing before we start defining the aesthetics themselves. When we talk about the aesthetics of play, we're talking about the core aesthetics of a game, the fundamental reasons you play it. Because you'll find that most games contain elements of all of these aesthetics, but

that doesn't really tell us much. The useful information comes from talking about the core aesthetics which the game tries to deliver. Because sure, even Mario games have a narrative, but most of us aren't playing those for the deep interpersonal drama between Mario, Peach, and Bowser. So, that's not a core aesthetic. All right, so here's the list. The first is sense pleasure. Sense pleasure is perhaps the simplest aesthetic to define. It's any game that you go to for how it stimulates your senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. So, if it's a game that you play for the visuals, or one that you go back to time and time again just for the music, that's a game with sense pleasure as a core aesthetic. Games like Rez, Child of Eden, DDR, or even tag at recess, or boxing, all deliver on sense pleasure as a core aesthetic. The second is fantasy. Fantasy is the ability to step into a role that you're not able to participate in in real life. They boil that experience down to its essence and deliver it to you in a steady drip. Games like Call of Duty, NFL Blitz, Cabela's Hunting Games, Eve Online, Rock Band, these all use fantasy as a core aesthetic. The third is narrative. Narrative is game as drama. It's about

the stories and human drama you witness, rather than the fantasy you live through. Games like Final Fantasy, The Sims, Mass Effect, Journey, Planescape Torment, these all deliver on narrative as a core aesthetic. The fourth is challenge. Challenge is one of the hardest for young designers to grasp. It's defined as game as obstacle course. It's about the engagement you find in over- coming arbitrary obstacles. You find this aesthetic at the core of any Mario game, Charades, Call of Duty, Ikaruga. Often, I see young designers mistakenly define this as difficulty. Now, difficulty is a dynamic that might help deliver this, but it is absolutely not the same thing as challenge. For example, Kirby's Epic Yarn uses challenge as a core aesthetic, but you can't actually lose Kirby's Epic Yarn. Nonetheless, the joy in that game is in overcoming arbitrary obstacles. We could do a whole episode on on between difficulty and challenge, but no time. Moving on. The fifth one is fellowship. Fellowship is found in any activity where we work cooperatively as a group to achieve a goal. It's that innate desire we have as social animals to work as a pack. Games that help establish that feeling of camaraderie are games that use fellowship as a core aesthetic.

So, games like World of Warcraft or Team Fortress, Borderlands, Journey, and even I Love Bees are all games that use fellowship as a core aesthetic. The sixth is competition. I'm sort of unofficially adding this one to the list. In the mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics paper, they mention competition but don't formally define it as an aesthetic. I see it as games as expression of dominance. There's something in us, very evolutionary and innate, that wants to express our dominance over other members of our species. Competition games let us demonstrate our superiority over others in some way. Games like Team Fortress, League of Legends, StarCraft, Call of Duty, and Magic the Gathering are all examples of this. Weirdly enough, you'll often find it in social games as well. The ones that push keeping up with the Joneses as a major element. The seventh is discovery. Discovery is the act of uncovering the new. It can be anything from discovering new territory in Skyrim or World of Warcraft to discovering new recipes in Minecraft or new cards in Magic. It can even be learning new things about a system, such as discovering new emergent interactions in Dwarf Fortress. Anytime you go to a game to find out what there is left to find, you're going there for discovery. The

eighth is expression. As human beings, we have an innate need to express ourselves. You can see it in everything from the clothes we wear to the very fact that we choose to create art. Games can be a powerful vehicle for this expression. Anytime you go to a game because it lets you express some aspect of yourself. From World of Warcraft's classes and gear, the Scribblenauts creative solutions, you're fulfilling that need. Minecraft, Deus Ex, The Incredible Machine, City of Heroes, these are all games that use expression as a core aesthetic. And finally, the ninth one, abnegation. Abnegation is game as pastime. In the paper, they title this category submission, but I don't think that properly expresses the underlying desire here. If you've ever gone home after a long day and just turned on a rerun of a comfortable show because you wanted to tune out, because you wanted to do something that lets you disengage. That's abnegation. In games you find it in grinding. You find it in any Skinner box game. You find it anywhere that you can just zone out. Games like Farmville, Lineage, endless mode in Bejeweled. These use abnegation as a core aesthetic. Okay, so now that we've covered all of that, what makes this information beneficial? And what

does it have to do with genres? Well, if you start to really think carefully about game genres and try to dissect them, I think you'll find that there are a few core aesthetics that almost every game within any given currently accepted genre will have in common. That is how we actually know genres. And that's how we instinctively know that certain games don't fit in with the rest. It's what we're feeling when we say that Portal is more of a puzzle game than a shooter, really. It's how we instinctively know to call Mass Effect an RPG despite its third-person shooting. It's the subconscious guide that actually separates how we think about genre in games. So, I say it's time we start talking about them consciously in this manner and looking to the aesthetics to define our genres. Cuz let me tell you, when designers start to think of mechanics as defining a genre, all sorts of bad game design happens. Knowing and delivering on their core aesthetic is what separates great games in a genre from those terrible clones and knock-offs that just fall flat. But even more than that, this will also help us as consumers to voice our opinions more specifically, to more clearly convey what we want from our games, which will allow the industry as a whole to break the cycle of turning out mechanically similar clones. Because once you start thinking of a genre in terms of core aesthetics rather than just the

mechanics underneath, you can find whole new methods of play to deliver on the core aesthetics of any genre. I hope that was interesting. I'll see you next time. Ah! Ah! Ah!