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Introduction to Gamification Part 3: Games, Play and Toys

January 18, 2019 by Andrzej Marczewski

In the last part of my introduction to gamification, I explained a little about my thoughts on Games Based Solutions, but I didn’t really explain what a game actually is. The reason for that is, it is a little complicated from an academic perspective. Now, that doesn’t really affect you in a business setting or as you undertake your job as a gamification designer, but it is always useful to have a deeper understanding of things you are speaking about.

Play

Let’s start with play as this is the foundation of games. There are many thoughts on play, I have a whole ebook and sections of Even Ninja Monkeys Like to Play dedicated to it. However, in this introduction series, I want to try and keep things simple!

I define play in the following way;

Play is a free-form activity that is undertaken because it brings fun or joy.

When I go deeper into the subject, I start to speak about things like system rules, meta-rules and all sorts. For our purposes now all you need to understand are two key points.

Play has to have a perceived safe space to occur. This spaces is called the Magic Circle^1,2 and is an imaginary barrier between the real world and all its consequences and the play world.
There are no system imposed rules. That is there are no set goals, defined obstacles etc.

This is not to say that play has no rules, but they are referred to as implicit rather than explicit rules – ie they are not defined by some external designer.

Let me give a simple example, which will lead us neatly into how games can be defined. Two children are playing with dolls. They create an elaborate imaginary world where Mrs Jenkins is having a tea party. They role play with the dolls and create imaginary scenarios. There are no goals, or rules, just imagination and fun.

The same two children are now outside and are just kicking a ball around. This is still play as there is no reason to kick the ball other than because they are enjoying it. Whilst there are no system defined or imposed explicit rules, there are implicit rules associated with the ball. Gravity, friction, momentum etc. There are also meta-rules, unwritten and constantly fluid rules that the children communicate through body language, mood, quick comments and the like.

Then one child says to the other, “Let’s make a goal and see who can score the most goals against the other”. Suddenly there is a system rule, a rule explicitly created and imposed on the play. It is no longer free form and lawless, there is a rule and we now have a game!

Games

This leads us neatly into games. There are many, many definitions of games. Some talk about the nature of games themselves at a philosophical level “[…] a word like “game” points to a somewhat diffuse “system” of prototype frames, among which some frame-shifts are easy, but others involve more strain” ³ from Marvin Minsky, others are a bit more practical, such as Sid Meier’s “A series of meaningful choices” ⁴

For us, we can say that a game is an activity with set goals, challenges and rules defined about how goals are achieved, and challenges are completed. Now, this may seem like a definition of work! One of the things that set games apart from work is how you approach them. Games are approached with something called a “Lusory Attitude”. We enter a game with the mindset of “This is a game, I am going to play it and in some way enjoy my time”.

To go slightly deeper, we can look at a definition that Bernard Suits offers⁵;

“To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude].”

Take a game of golf. The aim of golf is to get a little ball in a hole. This is the Prelusory Goal. The most efficient way to do this would be to just carry the ball to the hole and drop it in. However, there are rules that prevent this method, Constitutive Rules. You must use a club and start a set distance, the Lusory Means. You accept these rules because that is what makes the game of golf fun for you, you step on the golf course with a Lusory Attitude. Again, there needs to also be a safe place for the player, one that is set apart from the real world – the magic circle.

In games, these system-imposed rules are usually created by the game designer. However, they can also be created by the player as they start to experiment with the game. This is called emergent gameplay, where the player begins to create new ways of playing that the designer had not considered or explicitly built. For instance, speed runs in games such as Super Mario. The original designer had not explicitly stated that there should be a version of gameplay where you had to get from the start to the finish of each level in the fastest possible time, players decided to do that themselves and set specific rules about how this could be done, the hardware used, the methods for recording the attempts etc.

I will explore emergent gameplay when I delve deeper into how to make use of play in the next blog.

Toys

I include toys just for the sake of completeness. A toy is an object that is used in play or games that has no explicit rules of its own.

If we go back to our children playing with a ball. The ball has no explicit or system-imposed rules attached to it. It does not tell you that you must kick it at a goal. All the ball is interested in are its implicit rules, such as how gravity may affect it when it is kicked in the air!

Any object used in play and games can be considered a toy, from a stick to an action figure. But toys can also be far more complex. When you consider a video game like Minecraft, you could say that the environment is a toy! There are no system rules stating how you play with the environment. There are implicit rules such as how high you can stack blocks or how blocks might react to each other when combined, but there is no one telling you how to use them. When an entire environment is a toy, it is often referred to as a playground or a sandbox.

The Big Picture

By way of a summary, I will leave you with this image that starts to bring all of these concepts together with a little.

You play.
You play a game.
You play with a toy.
You play a game with a toy.

In the next blog, I will talk about how we can start to make use of play in the real working world until then, look around you with a lusory attitude and see what you could make more play or game like!

Key Learning Points

Play is freeform and has no system-imposed rules
Games have system-imposed rules, like those created by a game designer in a video game
For games or play to happen they must be approached with a lusory attitude and occur in a perceived safe environment, or magic circle.

References

Huizinga J. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play - Element in Culture.; 1950. doi:10.1177/0907568202009004005.
Salen K, Zimmerman E. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press; 2004. doi:10.1093/intimm/dxs150.
Minsky M. Jokes and the Cognitive Unconscious. In: Vaina L, Hintikka J, eds. Cognitive Constraints on Communication – Representations. Reidel, Boston; 1984:175-200. http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789027719492. Accessed March 17, 2016.
Rollings A, Morris D. Game Architecture and Design.; 1999. http://www.lavoisier.fr/notice/frWWOR2RRAR3W26R.html.
Suits B. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. 18th ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Pres; 2005.

Playing with Thought Experiments and Meta-Rules

November 22, 2016 by Andrzej Marczewski

No great insights into gamification in this post, more me revisiting play, toys and games – again. When I need to clear my mind of clutter, I tend to consider the nature of play. That is probably why I write about it so much! I doodle about it on the plane, at night, when I have time to kill. I always come back to play. Dutch, a friend of mine in the gamification world likened it to Einstein’s “thought experiments”. Of course, I am not comparing myself to Einstein. The only things we have / had in common is dyslexia and a love (at one time) of physics.

My most recent experiment is trying to figure out how rules affect play. When talking about play, the lack of rules is often emphasised as a big difference between games and play. Not everyone is quite as black and white on that, myself included. What play lacks, in my mind, is what I refer to as system rules. It is still beholden to other types of rules, what I am now calling inherent rules and meta-rules.

Types of Rules

Inherent Rules

Inherent rules are those rules that affect play or toys in ways that are not controlled by outside forces such as a player or a game designer. For instance, a ball has several inherent rules. It is affected by gravity, it has mass, volume, wind resistance etc. All of these things are inherent to the ball. In a game like Minecraft the inherent rules of the game are things like how high you can build, how deep you can dig, what you have to combine to make certain objects. The player plays within these inherent rules.

System Rules

System rules are rules that are added by the player or the designer that are there to create the game. If you are bouncing a ball aimlessly, this could be considered play. The inherent rules control the activity more than anything. How high the ball bounces for example. If you then decided that you have to bounce the ball as high as you can and catch it, you are adding system rules, you are creating a simple game. You are deliberately adding an obstruction to just bouncing the ball!

Meta-Rules

Meta-rules are the new one for me in this thought process. These rules are beyond what you would consider written or system imposed rules. These are fluid rules that can change moment by moment. These are the rules that define how play unfolds. These are the unspoken rules that children manage to communicate to each other when they are playing, where the situation is constantly changing, but they always seem to be able to adapt to the changes without fuss. Mrs Dawkin’s tea party takes a turn for sinister as Action Man invades and takes Teddy Ruckspin hostage. These are rules about rules, rules beyond rules, unspoken rules, unwritten rules and quite frankly – unfathomable rules to those not involved directly in the play!

Toys, Games and Play

As is usual for me, I don’t consider just games and play on their own, I always include toys. Toys can be an essential part of games and play. Toys are just objects. They have inherent rules, as I said earlier, but really they have to have other rules associated with them to be included in play and games. A ball does not play with itself and is certainly not a game without some kind of system rules. So on their own, they just have inherent rules.

Play, as discussed has inherent rules and these meta-rules. Games have system rules as well as inherent rules. A toy can exist without play or games, play can exist without toys or games. Games however, have to have play to exist.

In diagrammatic form (as is my way) this looks a bit like the following

Inherent rules affect games, play and toys. Meta-rules affect play, and in turn games (can’t have a game without play!). Finally, system rules that only affect games.

I hope this has at least been interesting for people. As I say, this is sort of my hobby – my muse if you will. Considering the nature of play helps me organise my thoughts. There is a tip for you, find something that stimulates your mind, but is not work related directly!

Learning about playfulness from Toca Boca

April 13, 2015March 6, 2015 by Andrzej Marczewski

Continuing my investigations into play, I wanted to talk about a few things my kids have been teaching me about just letting go and giving in to the fantasy and the lack of imaginative boundaries that real play demands. It is not as easy as it would first seem either.

There are lots of views of play out there. I offered some of my thoughts in a recent post, that play is a free form activity that is undertaken almost just because it can be and it brings fun and joy. In this sort of description, play is an activity – it follows a similar line of thought to that proposed by Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens. It was also Huizinga who gave us the concept of the Magic Circle – the boundary between reality and play.

There are many variations on this idea, most famous probably being Frames from Gregory Bateson (later expanded on by Erving Goffman). This expansion described a frame as a set of unspoken, implicit rules that surround the fantasy world – refereed to as metacommunication.

Anyway, back to the kids. One of their favourite games is Toca Town. If you have kids and have an Android or Apple device, look for Toca Boca – their games are amazing!

Toca Town is a sandbox game, a playground. It gives you a small vibrant town, with a shop, an apartment, a park and lots more. Each area has things that the player can mess around with. In the shop you can fill your basket with goods, scan them and leave. You can eat things, get toys from the vending machine and so on.

In the apparent you can watch TV, type on the laptop, use the toilet and anything else you can think of really. There are also lots and lots of secrets to find. You can combine foods to make meals, cook marshmallows on the camp fire and so much more – it makes my head spin.

For most adults, this does not really sound all that fun. When I tried it, I just didn’t see the point. I had no goals or rules to follow. The characters did nothing by themselves and whilst it was fun to find some of the secrets, it just didn’t click. Then my daughters showed me how to play with it!

You see, I was looking for a game and this isn’t a game. It is frame for play, a playground that is filled with toys. Whilst at an intellectual level I understood this, what I was missing was the imagination to create the next key part of playing in this sort of environment. I was not creating my own narrative or story. They went in and set up a scene in the shop. One of the characters was buying lots of stuff to make a meal for their friends. Once they had left the shop, they decided that it would be more fun to have a picnic, so the story changed to a trip to the park and later the beach. The characters in the story were having so much fun, they decided to camp for the night and go swimming by moon light.

This was a revelation to me, which is in itself a little sad. I understood that play was this free form activity that was not restricted by extrinsic rules and goals – but that was more what it wasn’t.

What it was for them in Toca Town was a way to create a story that they could control. An ever changing and dynamic narrative that had just one boundary – their imagination. The strange thing for was that I have issue with the idea of creating dynamic narratives and playing in that space.

One of my favourite activities to do with the kids is play with Rory’s Story Cubes (I can’t recommend these enough!). These are a set of dice that have a series of icons on them. You role the dice and then try to make a story out of the icons. Each icon has different meanings to everyone who plays them and can be used literally or symbolically in the story. The difference here is that I knew I had to make a story – so I had a parameter and a goal. It sits around what I would call gameful play – it is play, but has some level of game to it (ie the defined goal).

Whilst I was writing this, Toca Boca had one more wonderful lesson for me about playfulness. This was playfulness applied to their website, an element added for no other reason than because it can be added and may provide entertainment or joy to people. Lots of websites now have a big up icon at the bottom of the page that takes you back to the top. Not Toca Boca. Get to the bottom of the page and a big yellow balloon appears. Click it and it floats you back to the top before vanishing. Because – fun!

So, the 5 lessons:

Play requires that you let go and give in to the fantasy.
You have to create the reasons and the meaning in your imagination.
Story and narrative can help to add this meaning, but are not always essential!
If you are playing with others communicate the meaning with them in some way (metacommunication).
If you have kids, watch how they play and see how the fantasy evolves and see if they will let you join in – it is a hell of an eye opener.

Oh and because this is me – here is a little diagram to try and explain the relationships of play, games, toys and playgrounds!!

Play, games, toys, playfulness and gamification

March 10, 2015February 26, 2015 by Andrzej Marczewski

Lately I have been thinking about play a lot. This is probably because of watching my children growing up and seeing how play changes into games as they develop. I have written about play before and it does form part of my general Game Thinking framework, but it is lumped with toys and games – rather lazily.

I wanted to give play and my surrounding thoughts on it its own post.

Play

Play is free form and unlike a game does not need to have a point or a goal to it. It exists within a set of rules created by the person or people playing and is born in the imagination. Often it is a way of exploring the boundaries and extremes of something, in search for new and novel experiences. It is undertaken for its own sake often for fun and joy.

When my daughters were very young, they used to engage in pure play. They did things because they were novel, a new experience, and judging by their smiles and their laughter – they enjoyed it. I would go so far as to say they found it fun. Play did not need external objects at first, they could just move their foot and find that hilarious. Many say that play is essential for children as it teaches them about their environment and themselves. I have to agree – they learn essential lessons through play, but I don’t think that is why they actually play – they don’t think to themselves “I’m going to learn how my foot works now”. They play because they can and it entertains them! Like adults, they are seeking novel experiences.

As they developed, their own movements became less interesting (probably because they had discovered the boundaries of what could be done, mastered them if you will), so play needed to have some help. They would pick up things and do things they found entertaining with them. These things became toys.

Toys

Toys are an interesting concept when considering games and play. In this context, toys are objects or representation of objects that have their own intrinsic rules, but don’t come with extrinsic rules as standard! So a ball, a stick, a transformer etc. You can play with them however you want confined only by the toys own rules – effect of gravity, shape, fragility etc. If you throw a ball, depending on the material the ball is made from it might bounce, it might roll, it might stop dead – that sort of thing. These are not rules that the person playing imposes on the ball. If you throw a Transformer in the same way as a ball, it will obey its own rules. It won’t bounce and will probably break when you throw it at a wall!

There is another type of toy worth mentioning – I refer to it as a playground or a toy box. This is an entire environment rather than a single object. Take Gary’s Mod or Minecraft (in creator mode) as examples. You are in a virtual world that has it’s own intrinsic rules for how the world behaves and the constraints that you as the player have within the world (magic circle). With Minecraft this would be things like how far you can dig down, how far you can build up, how certain blocks behave with other blocks and more. However, within those constraints you can do what you want. You can use the world itself as a toy and play with it. That can include turning the world into the setting for a game!

At first my kids would just play with the toys, they would not create any discernible rules around how they interacted with the toys. After a while though that was no longer enough. It was not fun just to throw bricks at the wall, they started to add rules to the play, stacking as high as they could, lining up the colours. The free form play now had structure – it had become a simple game.

Games

Play begins to become a game, when you start to add explicit goals to it and rules that are imposed by the system. If I kick the ball through a goal, I get a point and I win (Zero sum). If we work together to get the ball through a series of obstacles, we win (non zero sum). For some this will boil down to competition (with the system or other players) and cooperation. For others, there is much much more to it!.

With my kids, I began to see them turning pure cooperative play into cooperative games as they both matured, individually and together. They would create scenarios such as being a chef and a waiter. They had to work together to get Mummy and Daddy their orders. Whilst it was still very free form, it was starting to have game like elements, rules and goals.

Now of course they play games with each other that are purely competitive as well as playing cooperatively. Either way, it is a joy to watch and try to understand!

Gameful and Playful

In my mind there is also a variation on the Game vs Play conversation. Gameful vs Playful. This is not fully formed in my mind, but from what I have seen there are games that are playful and play that can be gameful. So for example, Minecraft in Creator mode is pure play – it is therefore Playful Play. However, when you start to add game like rules and goals to it (create pac man, or hunger games or even play in the adventure mode) it becomes a Playful Game.

Call of Duty games offer little to no chance to play, they offer a single experience. There are opportunities to do stuff just for fun, but that is forced rather than designed. So Call of Duty is a pure game, a Gameful Game.

Toca Boca create games for children. Some of them have actual goals, create things and do certain things. However they are designed to encourage pure play as well. So for me they represent Gameful Play.

As I say, these are fairly embryonic thoughts!

So a quick summary

Play is free form and has no extrinsically imposed goals. It is done for fun or joy.
Games add defined goals and rules to play (such as challenges)
Toys are objects that can be used in play or games.

Games and toys are a subset of play.

You play.
You play a game.
You play with a toy.
You play a game with a toy.

Final Thoughts on Playfulness

As a final thought, I wanted to consider playfulness. If play is free form, does not need to adhere to rules and is undertaken just for its own sake, then being playful would require one to submit to those same concepts. To design a system that encourages playfulness you must create an environment that allows people to do things just because they can. You have to create experiences that exist purely for the sake of being novel and enjoyable to the user.

You need to break the rules a little and give the user a chance to do the same.