The Importance of Play

As part of this study I’m going to be looking at two texts, they are “A Theory of Fun” by Raph Koster and an article published in the International Journal of Computer Game Research that I found particularly interesting; “The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga's Homo Ludens” by Hector Rodriguez.

Both texts differ massively from the very basic ‘A Theory of Fun’ to the very long winded study of ‘Huizinga’s Homo Ludens’.

‘A Theory of Fun’ was written by Raph Koster and was based on a presentation that Koster gave at the Austin Game Conference in 2003. Koster is American born (1971-) and is most notably the lead designer of Ultima Online and Author of this book.

Dr. Hector Rodriguez is a New York University graduate with a doctorial degree in the field of cinema studies and is now an associate professor at NYU.

The article that I am studying however is the examination of “Homo Ludens” by a one “Johan Hyuzinga”, a Dutch historian who was one of the founders of modern cultural history (the combined study of anthropology and history to examine popular culture). Homo Ludens is Hyuzinga’s discussion of the influence and importance of ‘play’ on European culture.

There is something in both texts, despite their obvious differences that is agreed upon and is best summed up by Rodriguez as “The player must respond to some event, in the context of a structured situation. Playing consists in a trans-individual process of action and reaction, which often takes on a to-and-fro quality reminiscent of dance.” That is to say that play is a dynamic interaction between player and event that is either counter or imply and follows to a new set of rhythmic events. The main difference is that while Hyuzinga would rather notion towards play being a mundane experience that is simply lived for the very sake of it and Koster implying that play is, although mundane in appearance, actually the mind testing itself through cause and effect so that it may better improve through experience. Koster believes that play is education in such a format that the mind rewards our senses for achieving goals. The structured format of play is simply how our mind best receives the information.

Applying what I’ve learnt from these texts to the production of my game in the case of ‘A Theory of Fun’ was very interesting to do. Koster, although implying very little that we couldn’t deduce ourselves, set about reaffirming and challenging the notion of games beyond that generic and ‘mundane’ word ‘play’. He would like to see games seen as obstacles we pose ourselves for very serious reasons. He outlined good games in his work as puzzles that bare real life relevance. A good example of this is chess. One of our oldest games and still more than popular it was created as entertainment and played by kings no less. It was commonly thought that although the game was primarily just that, a game, it actually taught better command and strategy. It has been proved time and again that people who trend their gaming habits towards more strategy based games, Age of Empires for one, actually improve a lot of real life strategic problems quicker. This of course is open to debate as to whether this is simply that we enjoy things that we already have some proficiency at and thus those of us who do prefer RTS (Real Time Strategy) will in fact already have some inherent command of such skills.