Game-playing requires two components: a game and a player. The game designer works to produce a game, and so his immediate preoccupation is with the game itself. Yet, his final goal is to educate, entertain, or edify the game-player; hence, the human player is he proper primary concern of the game designer.
Why do people play games? What motivates them? What makes games fun? The answers to these questions are crucial to good game design.
One way to address the question of the purpose of games is to inquire into their history. Games now are too varied, too intricate, too involved, to indicate a single clear function. Perhaps their fundamental nature would be more evident in their earliest incarnations.
Fortunately, direct recourse to paleontology is unnecessary. A trip to the zoo will suffice. There we find two lion cubs wrestling near their mother. They growl and claw at each other. They bite and kick. One cub wanders off and notices a butterfly. It crouches in the grass, creeps ever so slowly toward its insect prey, then raises its haunches, wiggles them, and pounces. We laugh at the comedy;
we say that the cubs are playing a game, that they are having fun, and that they are such fun-loving, carefree creatures.
We are right on the first count: these cubs do indeed appear to be playing a kind of game.
We may be right on the second count; who knows if lions can have fun? But we are dead wrong on the last count. These cubs are not carefree. They do not indulge in games to while away the years of their cub hood.
These games are deadly serious business. They are studying the skills of hunting, the skills of survival. They are learning how to approach their prey without being seen, how to pounce, and how to grapple with and dispatch prey without being injured.
They are learning by doing, but in a safe way. Better to make mistakes with butterfly and sibling than with the horns of the wildebeest.
Games are thus the most ancient and time-honored vehicle for education. They are the original educational technology, the natural one, having received the seal of approval of natural selection.
We don’t see mother lions lecturing cubs at the chalkboard; we don’t see senior lions writing their memoirs for posterity.
In light of this, the question, "Can games have educational value?" becomes absurd. It is not games but schools that are the newfangled notion, the untested fad, the violator of tradition. Game-playing is a vital educational function for any creature capable of learning.
We commonly associate the playing of games with children. Indeed, "play" as an activity is considered to be the almost exclusive preserve of children, and the term is applied to adults either disparagingly or jocularly.
Children are expected to play games because we recognize (perhaps unconsciously) the fundamental utility of games as an educational tool. As children grow up, cultural pressures change and they are encouraged to devote less time to the playing of games so that they can devote themselves to more serious activities.
Hence we can say that fundamental motivation for all game-play is to learn. The educational motivation may not be conscious.
There are many other motivations to play games that have little to do with learning, and in some cases these secondary motivations may assume greater local importance than the ancestral motivation to learn.
These other motivations include:
1. Fantasy / Exploration,
2. Nose-thumbing,
3. Proving oneself,
4. Exercise,
5. Need for acknowledgment.
Why do people play games? What motivates them? What makes games fun? The answers to these questions are crucial to good game design.
One way to address the question of the purpose of games is to inquire into their history. Games now are too varied, too intricate, too involved, to indicate a single clear function. Perhaps their fundamental nature would be more evident in their earliest incarnations.
Fortunately, direct recourse to paleontology is unnecessary. A trip to the zoo will suffice. There we find two lion cubs wrestling near their mother. They growl and claw at each other. They bite and kick. One cub wanders off and notices a butterfly. It crouches in the grass, creeps ever so slowly toward its insect prey, then raises its haunches, wiggles them, and pounces. We laugh at the comedy;
we say that the cubs are playing a game, that they are having fun, and that they are such fun-loving, carefree creatures.
We are right on the first count: these cubs do indeed appear to be playing a kind of game.
We may be right on the second count; who knows if lions can have fun? But we are dead wrong on the last count. These cubs are not carefree. They do not indulge in games to while away the years of their cub hood.
These games are deadly serious business. They are studying the skills of hunting, the skills of survival. They are learning how to approach their prey without being seen, how to pounce, and how to grapple with and dispatch prey without being injured.
They are learning by doing, but in a safe way. Better to make mistakes with butterfly and sibling than with the horns of the wildebeest.
Games are thus the most ancient and time-honored vehicle for education. They are the original educational technology, the natural one, having received the seal of approval of natural selection.
We don’t see mother lions lecturing cubs at the chalkboard; we don’t see senior lions writing their memoirs for posterity.
In light of this, the question, "Can games have educational value?" becomes absurd. It is not games but schools that are the newfangled notion, the untested fad, the violator of tradition. Game-playing is a vital educational function for any creature capable of learning.
We commonly associate the playing of games with children. Indeed, "play" as an activity is considered to be the almost exclusive preserve of children, and the term is applied to adults either disparagingly or jocularly.
Children are expected to play games because we recognize (perhaps unconsciously) the fundamental utility of games as an educational tool. As children grow up, cultural pressures change and they are encouraged to devote less time to the playing of games so that they can devote themselves to more serious activities.
Hence we can say that fundamental motivation for all game-play is to learn. The educational motivation may not be conscious.
There are many other motivations to play games that have little to do with learning, and in some cases these secondary motivations may assume greater local importance than the ancestral motivation to learn.
These other motivations include:
1. Fantasy / Exploration,
2. Nose-thumbing,
3. Proving oneself,
4. Exercise,
5. Need for acknowledgment.