Greg Costikyan - Uncertainty in Games

Uncertainty in Games

Playful Thinking

Jesper Juul, Geoffrey Long, and William Uricchio, editors

The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, Jesper Juul, 2013

Uncertainty in Games, Greg Costikyan, 2013

Uncertainty in Games

Greg Costikyan

The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England

2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Costikyan, Greg.

Uncertainty in games / Greg Costikyan.

p. cm.(Playful thinking series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-01896-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-262-31359-9 (retail e-book)

1. GamesDesign and construction. 2. Game theory. 3. Video gamesDesign and construction. 4 Computer gamesDesign and construction. I. Title.

GV1230.C67 2013

794.81536dc23

2012030557

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Series Foreword

Many people (we series editors included) find videogames exhilarating, but it can be just as interesting to ponder why that is so. What do videogames do? What can they be used for? How do they work? How do they relate to the rest of the world? Why is play both so important and so powerful?

Playful Thinking is a series of short, readable, and argumentative books that share some playfulness and excitement with the games that they are about. Each book in the series is small enough to fit in a backpack or coat pocket, and combines depth with readability for any reader interested in playing more thoughtfully or thinking more playfully. This includes, but is by no means limited to, academics, game makers, and curious players.

So, we are casting our net wide. Each book in our series provides a blend of new insights and interesting arguments with overviews of knowledge from game studies and other areas. You will see this reflected not just in the range of titles in our series, but in the range of authors creating them. Our basic assumption is simple: videogames are such a flourishing medium that any new perspective on them is likely to show us something unseen or forgotten, including those from such unconventional voices as artists, philosophers, or specialists in other industries or fields of study. These books will be bridge-builders, cross-pollinating both areas with new knowledge and new ways of thinking.

At its heart, this is what Playful Thinking is all about: new ways of thinking about games, and new ways of using games to think about the rest of the world.

1 Introduction

Uncertainty is not, in most circumstances, a good thing. We do not wish to be uncertain about whether we can pay our bills, uncertain of the affections of the people who matter to us, uncertain about our health, or uncertain about our job prospects. Businesses are always concerned about the management of risk; they seek ways to reduce uncertainty. At least in the developed world, people pay taxes mainly as a means of reducing uncertaintythe risk of invasion and conquest, the uncertainty of terrorism, the risks created by possible unemployment, by loss of income in old age, and by health crises. They top this off by devoting a portion of their income to insurance, pension plans, and savings, all attempts to reduce uncertainty in their lives.

Yet if the goal is a reduction in uncertainty, the reality is that we live in an uncertain and conditional universe. Even in apparently civilized countries, madmen may come to power and slaughter millions of their own citizens. Apparently sane leaders maintain arsenals capable of destroying whole cities at a blow. Despite the miracles of modern medicine, terrifying diseases can spring out of nowhere and devastate whole populations. Seemingly harmless practicessmoking, applying pesticides, drilling for undersea oilcan turn out to have devastating and unexpected consequences. We may wind up cooking ourselves in our own industrial waste, or turning the oceans into sewers. For that matter, terrorists could get hold of a nuke, an asteroid impact could erase tetrapodal life from the planet, a nearby star could go supernova and subject us all to killing radiation, nanotechnology could turn us all into gray goo, and Jesus could return, smiting all sinnersand I can assure you that, by the standards of the people who think this last remotely possible, I certainly qualify as a sinner.

The world is in fact filled with terrifying uncertainty, and it is a tribute to the dauntless and objectively insane optimism of the human species that we, most of the time, are fairly cheerful about it.

But the reality is that we are faced with uncertainty throughout our livesand that much of our effort is devoted to managing and ameliorating that uncertainty. Is it any wonder, then, that we have taken this aspect of our lives, and transformed it culturally, made a series of elaborate constructs that subject us to uncertaintybut in a fictive and nonthreatening way?

Im talking about games, of course.

In the course of this book, I shall endeavor to persuade you that games require uncertainty to hold our interest, and that the struggle to master uncertainty is central to the appeal of games. I will explore the many sources of uncertainty in games of diverse sorts and come to some conclusions about how to categorize these different sources of uncertainty. Finally, I will suggest ways in which game designers who wish to design with intentionality, that is, to purposefully craft novel game experiences rather than implement a new skin for a well-understood game genre, can use an understanding of game uncertainty in its many forms to improve their designs.

2 Games and Culture

What humans do is create culture. Culture is what differentiates humans from other animals.

The most primitive life-formsamoebas, for exampleadapt to their environment almost exclusively through evolution. Only over generations of slow change can new behaviors be added to their repertoire of the possible. In other words, they store information only in the genes.

Somewhat more advanced specieslike, say, reptilesare capable of learning new behaviors; they can store information also in the memory, but have no means of transmitting that information to others.

Most mammals, and some birds, can indeed impart things theyve learned to others; birdsong varies by region within a species, kittens need to learn the kill stroke from their mother (or as adults, they wont know what to do with a mouse). Memories can be shared, at least to a degree.

When animals that live in social groups have the ability to learn, you get the beginnings of culture, that is, the transmission of knowledge within a group. Von Schaik describes how one group of orangutans knew to use a stick to get into the flesh of a spiny fruit, while another group living nearby did not have this knowledge. In general, the great apes and elephants are known to have cultural practices that vary by group, and to transmit information within the group. In an anthropological sense, they have culturenot, obviously, in as elaborate a form as among humans, but culture nonetheless. They have the ability to store information not merely in the genes, or in the memories of individuals, but in the collective knowledge of the society.

While some great apes have been taught rudimentary sign language, humans are largely unique in their ability to speak and, more generally, to use symbols and manipulate abstract concepts (both abilities that are implied by language). Thus, while apes and elephants have culture, humans have culture on steroids, because language allows us to transmit knowledge far more effectively. The invention of writing allows knowledge to be fixed in tangible form and transmitted through generations; the printing press made writing far more available throughout society; and the Internet makes all knowledge quickly and readily available to everyone (with a net connection, at least).