On interactive entertainment
This essay spun off of the intensely involving “Fun In Games” debate on MUD-Dev in early 2002.
The difficulty comes about because of the word “interactive” that is prepended in front of the word entertainment. It’s not analogous to “screen-based” or “prose-based.” Those are media, not verbs. So perhaps a better term is “computer-based entertainment.”
As soon as we say that, we realize that there’s a hell of a lot of forms of computer-based entertainment that are not games. And they’re not all “fun” in the sense generally meant either. Perhaps a good example might be this mailing list, which could not exist in recognizable form without the mediation of the computer.
So the problem lies in “interactive.” Let’s presume that we interact either with or through the medium of the computer. Both seem to qualify as interactive entertainment; they basically boil down to single participant or multi-participant activities.
In the case of “interact with,” we can presume that the experience cannot be primarily passive, as it is with stage-based, prose-based, etc. After all, interacting with stage-based media is generally termed “acting” and interacting with prose-based media is usually termed “writing.”
There’s been a lot of discussion in professional videogame design circles lately about “the surrender of authorship” inherent in both greater flexibility in the games and in the burgeoning “mod” community. I think the key insight here is that it’s all just “interacting with the medium.” In other words, modding is just playing the game in another way, sort of like a budding writer might rework plots of characters from other writers into derivative journeyman fiction or into fan fiction. The fact that some forms of it are constructive (modding a game), experiential (playing a game), or destructive (hacking a game) are immaterial–the same activities are possible with a given play or book or song. Arguably, the act of literary analysis is much the same as the act of hacking a game–the act of disassembling the components of a given piece of work in a medium in order to see how it works, or even to get it to do things, carry messages, or otherwise represent itself as something other than what the author of the piece intended.
We can sit here and debate whether performing music, writing a story, or drawing a picture are “fun.” As someone with some training in all three, I can tell you that they are all hard work, which isn’t something we necessarily consider “fun.” But I derive great fulfillment from it. This is perhaps analogous to watching Hamlet on stage, reading Lord Jim, or viewing “Guernica”–not exactly fun, but fulfilling in a different way.
This suggests that given that writing isn’t necessarily fun but might be something valuable for the writer to do; and that practicing piano for hours on end might not be fun but something that gives fulfillment; that engaging in interactive computer-based entertainment need not be fun either but might indeed be fulfilling, thought-provoking, challenging, and also difficult, painful, and even compulsive.
Prose medium breakdown:
| Collaborative | Competitive | Individual | |
| Constructive | Co-authorship | Writing for publication | Writing for oneself |
| Experiential | Reading aloud | Competitive interpretive speech | Reading |
| Destructive | Teaching literature | Academic paper-writing | Deconstructionism |
Musical medium breakdown:
| Collaborative | Competitive | Individual | |
| Constructive | Co-composers | Busking | Practice |
| Experiential | Public performance | Fiddle competition | Listening |
| Destructive | Ear training | Music criticism | Analysis |
That said, it doesn’t mean that the form the interactive computer-based entertainment takes is necessarily “a game” or even a “software toy.” The definition of game implies certain things, as does the word “toy” or “sport” and maybe even “hobby.” These words do imply fun, even if often in deadly seriousness.
For those of us on this list, of course, the interesting factor is cases where the interactive entertainment is going through the computer, as opposed to merely being acting on it. As soon as you have multiple participants in the environment, the endeavors (which are likely to be the same–constructive, experiential, or destructive) will shift to being either individual (read: disengaged from other participants), collaborative or competitive. In fact, your participants may not all be engaging in the same endeavors at the same time. (Even to the extent that we can probably consider participants engaging in individual interaction with the medium to be people effectively participanting in a single-participant activity, since they are interacting with the computer, not with the other participants).
We do happen to have words for competitive activities engaged in with other people; “game” and “sport” are among them. We also have words for collaborative activities engaged in with other people, but since they comprise such a wide range of activities, we tend to lump many of them under the terms “community.”
A surprising number of these activities come out as what we label “games,” in fact. Consider the breakdown for what we might term “map and counters mediated activities,” wherein several of the boxes can profitably be filled with the word “game” or “toy,” albeit of different types (roleplaying, wargame, Legos, etc).
Computer-based breakdown:
| Collaborative | Competitive | Individual | |
| Constructive | Open source development | Commercial development | Modding or skinning |
| Experiential | Mudding | Deathmatching | Single-player gaming |
| Destructive | A CS degree | Hacking | Thinking up this post |
It’s fairly easy to see how just the realm of muds can be fractally expanded to cover much the same territory. This leads to the suggestion that Bartle’s mapping of four types, which recently in some circles has come under pressure to add a fifth type, voyeur, or a sixth type, “roleplayer,” is merely a subset of this larger categorization. It’s pretty easy to find more mud-based activities that fall into the nine types, and I imagine that just as this is a fractal take on the above graph, this graph can profitably be expanded to find nine types of activities within any given box.
| Collaborative | Competitive | Individual | |
| Constructive | Running muds; Socializer | Commercial mud operation | Mud design |
| Experiential | Roleplaying | Playerkilling; Killer | Voyeurism |
| Destructive | Powergaming; Achiever | Griefing | Explorer |
Where does this leave me vis-a-vis whether games are supposed to be fun? Games as classically defined are some boxes within the framework, but not all of them. Arguably, all of the above are fun to someone. And lastly, online worlds aren’t just games. 🙂
| Collaborative | Competitive | Individual | |
| Constructive | Community | Job | Hobby |
| Experiential | Performance | Sport | Consumer |
| Destructive | Teaching | Criticism | Analysis |
Then identify, like Will Wright did at GDC, keywords that go with each of these broad categories, and do searches on the Net to see how often keywords pop up for different interactive entertainment products. Then graph the results. I suspect that we would see interesting patterns in what interactive entertainment products break out to wider markets, and which muds are more popular and which fail, etc.
