NOTES - A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2013)

A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2013)

Appendix C. NOTES

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Prologue

Tic-tac-toe (xviii): Also known as noughts and crosses. Tic-tac-toe, and its cousins go-moku (a game where the board is variously 13x13 or 15x15 and you have to get five in a row) and Qubic (a 4x4x4 cube) are all amenable to mathematical analysis. Tic-tac-toe in particular is fairly trivial, since there are only 125,168 possible games, and the vast majority of the possibility space collapses the moment you regard the board as having rotational symmetry. If both players employ the optimal strategy, the game will always end in a draw.

Chapter 1

Cognates (2): Words that derive from a common root and are similar in meaning, even though they are in a different language. Languages frequently borrow words from one another, and thus similar words in different languages can be found. Often the meaning, pronunciation, or spelling can diverge to the point of being unrecognizable.

Deaf children in Nicaragua (2): Many articles have been written on Nicaraguan Sign Language, also called NSL or ISN (after the initials of the phrase in Spanish). Deaf children in Nicaragua did not have access to each other, nor to training in sign language, until 1979, when schools for the deaf began to be opened. Over a few generations, the children developed a fully functional sign language that enabled them to communicate. This is believed to be the first time in history that scientists have been able to observe a language spontaneously created (as opposed to created intentionally, like Esperanto). A good overview of the story can be found at www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19991024mag-sign-language.html.

NP-hard and NP-complete (4): These are terms from complexity theory, the field of mathematics that studies how hard it is to solve a given problem (as opposed to whether it can be solved at all, which is called “computability theory”). Other types of complexity include P, NP, PSPACE-complete, and EXPTIME-complete. Many abstract board games are classifiable as terms of their mathematical complexity in this way; for example, checkers is EXPTIME-complete, and Othello is PSPACE-complete. Rendering games obsolete is a favorite pastime of mathematicians. They have proven that for optimal players, the first player to move will always win games such as Connect Four and Pentominoes.

Sisyphean task (6): Sisyphus was condemned to roll a heavy stone uphill in Tartarus, deep below Hades. Every time he got it to the top, it would roll back down again and he’d have to do it over. To be facetious, in modern video games, this is called “restoring a save.”

More seriously, since the upper echelons of Internet play attract the most skilled players, it can often be impossible for a typical player to compete. Further, the frequent rule changes in online service games often mean that the task is literally Sisyphean; the strategies and tactics needed to be at the top of the leaderboards change with each significant update, requiring players to relearn large portions of the game.

Mu ha ha ha (8): A common gloat heard in Internet gaming.

Mentally challenging games and Alzheimer’s (8): A study in the New England Journal of Medicine in June 2003 indicated that mental challenges such as games retarded the development of Alzheimer’s. Games weren’t the only mental challenge studied; playing musical instruments, learning new languages, and dancing also had similar effects. Another study performed in 2013, called the Iowa Healthy and Active Minds Study, showed that certain videogames could have positive effects on overall cognitive function, while crossword puzzles did not (results were published in PLOS ONE, http://bit.y/plos-one-random).

Games as vertices (10): Many games that require you to place one piece adjacent to another can be expressed as problems in graph theory, a field of mathematics that studies points and links between them. Each node is called a vertex, and each link is called an edge. Analyzing games in this highly abstract way can reveal many fundamental characteristics about how to play them well.

Make more money than the movie industry (10): In 2011, the L.A. Times reported that global box-office receipts were $31.8 billion, and the research firm Gartner stated that the videogame industry (where the bulk of game revenues reside) reached $74 billion. However, box-office receipts are not the only income streams for movies: they have physical copies on disc, streaming, airplane showings, TV showings, and even videogame licensing fees in their downstream revenues. On the flip side, the games industry figures include the sales of hardware—and game consoles can be purchased for use as media devices. And so the debate continues.

Chapter 2

Game theory (12): A field of mathematics that studies decision making in formal models. Most games can be interpreted as formal models, but game theory (like economics) tends to run afoul of real-world data when the mathematical hypotheses are tested, largely because game theory is based on optimal strategies. Most people aren’t optimal all the time. Game theory doesn’t always help you design a better game, but it can help explain why people make certain choices in a game.

Roger Caillois (12): An anthropologist who wrote a book called Man, Play and Games in 1958. In it, he also categorized games into four types, based on chance, competition, make-believe or pretense, and vertigo. He saw games primarily as tools of acculturation.

Johan Huizinga (12): Author of Homo Ludens (1938), a book primarily focusing on the importance of play in human culture. Huizinga defines the concept of the “magic circle” within which play takes place as a protected and even sacred space that must not be violated.

Jesper Juul (12): An academic who is a leader of the relatively recent “ludology” movement. His website is www.jesperjuul.dk/. I recommend his book Half-Real (MIT Press, 2011) for an introduction to ludology.

Chris Crawford (14): One of the grand old men of computer game design, his seminal works include Eastern Front 1941 and Balance of Power. Crawford has long advocated games as art, and has also been a major proponent of interactive storytelling. His book, The Art of Computer Game Design, is considered a classic.

Sid Meier (14): One of the most highly regarded computer game designers working today, Meier has been responsible for Civilization (the computer version, not the board game version, although there is now a board game version of the computer game), Pirates!, and Gettysburg.

Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design (14): This book was published by New Riders in 2003. It is a solid “how-to” book covering a variety of game genres as well as general game design principles. Disclaimer: I helped write the chapter on online games, so I am biased.

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman and Rules of Play (14): Rules of Play is one of the most important books on what games are and how they work. It was published by the MIT Press in 2003. The authors are academics and also game designers in their own right.

Recognizing faces (16): The part of the brain that recognizes faces is called the fusiform face area, and it’s actually used for recognizing individuals of a given class (as opposed to the parts of the brain that recognize classes of things). When people get brain damage in this part of the brain, they become unable to recognize the photographs of famous people, even though they can still classify them as women, men, blondes, brunettes, young, or old. The fusiform face area has to be trained; most people are experts in other people, so they recognize individuals and read their emotions easily. Autistics show reduced functioning of the fusiform face area when examined via MRI. Birdwatchers and car experts show activation of the fusiform face area when they are identifying particular birds or cars.

Filling in blanks and not seeing your nose (16): Some fun experiments to demonstrate blind spots and the brain filling in known data can be found at http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/chvision.html. Many popular optical illusions are based on the fact that the brain makes assumptions about what we are seeing.

The brain... (18): Steven Johnson’s book Mind Wide Open (Scribner, 2004) is a wonderful excursion into the mysteries of the human mind.

The large gorilla (18): The original Harvard study on this is whimsically titled “Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness,” and was done by Simons and Chabris. It was published in Perception in 1999.

Cognitive theory (18): The field of cognition breaks down into several different areas. Cognitive psychology, the mainstream tradition of the field, is mostly abstract, and doesn’t reference biology very much, whereas the relatively new field of cognitive neuroscience attempts to relate information flow to how the brain works. This latter field is relatively new, and it is what most of the commentary in this book references.

Chunking (18): According to G. A. Miller’s influential 1958 paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” our short-term memory (which you can think of as our “scratch pad” for doing mental work) can only handle around seven units of information. If you overload your short-term memory, you’ll forget some of the items. Each unit of information can be fairly complex, as long as we are capable of reducing it down to a “chunk,” or a collected unit of information with a single easy-to-remember label. This has important implications for a number of fields, including linguistics, interface design, and of course, games—it helps explain why adding more numbers to keep track of in a game will very quickly make the game too hard. Only short-term memory has this limitation; the brain itself is capable of far more. The classic example is to ask you to memorize a sequence of seemingly jumbled numbers and letters. When these turn out to have associations to previously mastered patterns, it becomes far easier. Try it yourself at http://www.youramazingbrain.org.uk/yourmemory/chunk01.htm.

Automatic chunked patterns (22): Cognitive science uses numerous terms for many of these related concepts, including chunks, routines, categories, and mental models. In this book I used “chunk” because it’s already used in different ways by different disciplines, plus it makes sense on a layman’s level. Technically, most of the big “chunked patterns” to which I refer are called schemata.

Chunks not behaving as we expect them to (22): When people learn information, the brain always tags it as “correct” and rarely considers the source’s credibility. It takes conscious work to determine otherwise. People also tend to automatically group similar things together in the absence of complete data—thus, a person who didn’t know much about either might consider a pumpkin and a basketball to be the same type of object. This can lead to unpleasant surprises when you try to make a pie. There is a field called “source monitoring” within the study of memory that works on examining these issues.

The golden section (24): Also called the golden mean, golden ratio, and divine proportion. This is too large a topic to discuss in an endnote; whole books have been written about it (such as Mario Livio’s The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World’s Most Astonishing Number). The golden ratio is the irrational number, approximately 1.618, called phi or φ. Ever since the ancient Greeks, art composed using this ratio in the composition has been deemed more beautiful. Some degree of this perception seems to be hardwired into our brain, perhaps because the ratio manifests in a wide range of natural phenomena, including the spiral pattern of seeds and petals around a flower stem, the shape of curling sea-shells, and certain proportions of the human body.

Even static has patterns (24): A concept from algorithmic information theory. An algorithm is an elegant way to describe complex information. The fraction “22 divided by 7” is a lot shorter than writing out 3.1428571. When we look at 3.1428571, it looks like chaos (it might look like π, but it’s only an approximation). And yet the 22/7 expresses this very big, dense piece of information in a concise manner when we use the algorithm of long division on it. What looks like highly disordered information may actually be highly ordered information—we just might not know what the algorithm to describe it is. Three people described algorithmic information theory nearly simultaneously: Andrei Kolmogorov, Raymond Solomonoff, and Gregory Chaitin, all of whom arrived at it independently.

Three chords and the truth (26): One of the most basic chord progressions in all of music is the progression from tonic to subdominant to dominant and back again, often written as I-IV-V. In most folk music, blues, and classic rock, this pattern repeats over and over again, albeit in different keys. Music theory states that certain chords lead naturally into others because of leading tones within the chord—the V chord “wants to” go to the I chord because the V chord includes a note that is one half-step below the tonic note. Stopping on the V makes the music sound unresolved. This is also an expression of information theory, in that skilled musicians can intuitively guess what sorts of harmonic structures will follow on a given chord based on their experience.

Flat fifth (26): A major or minor chord will make use of a perfect fifth, which is two notes that are exactly seven half-steps apart on the scale (seven black or white keys on the piano). The flat fifth, or tritone, is six half-steps and is extremely dissonant, unlike the perfect fifth and perfect fourth. In much classical music, the tritone is not permitted and is called “the devil’s interval.” It is, however, extremely common in jazz.

Alternating bass (26): A rhythm whereby the bass alternates steadily between the tonic note of a chord and the perfect fifth above it.

Grok and Robert Heinlein (28): The definition offered in the book is “Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because we are from Earth) as color means to a blind man.” In Martian, however, the word means “to drink.”

Brain functioning on three levels (28): A good book describing this theory is Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind by cognitive scientist Guy Claxton, published by Ecco in 2000. He describes how many problems are best solved by the unconscious mind rather than the conscious, or “D-mode,” brain.

Approximations of reality (28): We deal with approximations all the time, and perhaps they are our only reality. Is color a hue, or electromagnetic radiation? The best example of this that I can come up with is “weight.” Physics tells us that mass is the correct concept. But in everyday life weight is “good enough.” Another example: hot water is composed of highly excited molecules. But even hot water has molecules that are barely moving (and are therefore “cold”). When we speak of the temperature of water, we don’t consider the trillions of water molecules with varying levels of excitation—we instead consider the average of all of them and call it “temperature,” a convenience that makes sense for us because we’re so big and molecules are so small. Ludwig Boltzmann explained the difference between “temperature” and “individual molecule excitation” as the difference between a macrostate and a microstate. The schemata the brain works with are macrostates—they are algorithmic representations of reality. All of these are models for a reality where temperature and excited molecules are both “real,” but some levels of abstraction are a lot easier to cope with than others.

Sticking your finger in fire (30): The typical elapsed time for a reflex reaction such as this is around 250 milliseconds. Doing it consciously requires around 500 milliseconds.

The football player and instinctive reactions (30): In the book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, Gary Klein describes how most complex decisions are made based on the first impulse that came to mind and not conscious thought. Eerily, the first impulse is usually right. When it is wrong, however, it can be disastrous. The joke about the football player is funny because it rings true—we recognize something about how the brain works in it.

Deepening my knowledge (32): This is also an expression of information theory. In 1948, Claude Shannon developed the basics of information theory, proposing the notion that you could regard an information stream as a chain of probability events. Assume a limited set of symbols (like, say, the alphabet). When you get one given symbol in a sequence (like, say, the letter Q), you can reduce the possible symbols that might come next (like, say, to just the letter U) because you know enough about the symbolic system within which Q and U exist. You’re not likely to pick K, but you might think of E for Q.E.D. or A for Qatar. Music happens to be a highly ordered and fairly limited formal system, and so as you develop a “musical vocabulary,” you are also developing a sense of the shape of the entire problem domain, even though a few new letters in the alphabet (such as tremolo on the mandolin) might be new to you.

Practice (32): Alan Turing, better known as the father of modern computing, is also the creator of something called “Turing’s Halting Problem.” We know that you can get a computer to tackle incredibly difficult problems. However, we do not know how long it will take for the answers to be returned; no predictive method works. This is because of the Church-Turing thesis, which simply states that you can compute anything that has already been computed, but problems we haven’t computed yet are unknown territory. Only experience tells us the scope of a problem. In short, we only really learn things by experiencing them.

Mental practice (32): This is called “mental imagery,” and it is widely used in sports training. One study by Anne Isaac in 1992 showed that mental imagery helps an athlete improve in a skill. Other studies have found that autonomic nervous system responses are triggered by detailed mental imagery. It’s important to note that actual practice is still better than just imagining yourself doing something—the mental images have to be highly detailed and specific to provide a benefit. One of the most famous examples of mental imagery in the last 100 years is shown in the film The Pianist, where Wladyslaw Szpilman, played by Adrien Brody, “plays” piano while hovering his fingers above the keys, so as to avoid detection by the Nazis.

Chapter 3

Our perception of reality is basically abstraction (34): An important paper called “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain,” by Lettvin, Maturana, McCulloch, and Pitts, described the fact that what the brain “sees” as output from the eyes is not even vaguely close to the literal visual image. A significant amount of processing turns the literal input of light and shadow into something that the brain copes with. In a very real sense, we do not see the world—we see what our brain tells us we see. Solipsism is five blocks down and to the left.

The map is not the territory (36): This is a condensation of a statement by the father of general semantics, Alfred Korzybski: “A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”

Run permutations on a book (36): This statement is a bit too forceful. There exist works of literature that are intended in this manner. Examples include the entire genre of hypertext fiction (Victory Garden by Stuart Moulthrop is a good starting point). There are also books such as Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (translated as Hopscotch) that are intended to be read in multiple different orders. And of course, the genre of games known as “interactive fiction,” or text adventures, can be seen as a computer-assisted form of this type of book.

Deeply nested clauses (38): This is typically seen as an expression of G. A. Miller’s number cited in the endnote on “chunking” in Chapter Two: 7±2. In assessing a deeply nested sentence, it’s important to realize that each word is itself already being “chunked” from a collection of letters. The example sentence comes from Jane Robinson’s 1974 paper “Performance Grammars” (http://www.sri.com/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/pdf/1384.pdf).

Richly interpretable situations (38): This is not only my interpretation of the sorts of game patterns that humans find compelling, but also the phrase used by Biederman & Vessel in their research on endorphins and pleasurable feedback from the brain. For a discussion of the applicability of this to games, see Craig Perko’s blog at http://blog.ihobo.com/2012/05/implicit-game-aesthetics-4-cooks-chemistry.html.

The limitations of rules (38): This is a game-specific way of explaining Gödel’s Theorem. Kurt Gödel, in his 1931 paper “On Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica and Related Systems,” proved that there are always propositions that lie outside the boundaries of a given formal system. No formal system can describe itself fully. The “magic circle” is basically an attempt to protect the integrity of a model, in the same way that Hilbert’s view of mathematics attempted to fully define a system. The truly long-lived rigidly defined games have tended to be those presenting truly difficult mathematical problems to their players – games that fall into the NP-hard complexity category. For more on this, I refer you to my conference presentation “Games Are Math,” given at GDCO in 2009: http://www.raphkoster.com/2009/09/22/gdca-games-are-math-slides-posted/.

Endorphins (40): “Endorphin” is abbreviated from “endogenous morphine.” I’m not kidding when I say we’re on drugs when we’re having fun! Endorphins are an opiate. The “chill down the spine” effect is often explained as the release of endorphins into the spinal fluid. Pleasure is not the only thing that gives us this effect, of course—adrenaline rushes caused by fear provide a similar sensation.

Break out in a smile (40): There’s good evidence that the smile can cause us to be happy and not just the other way around. For more reading on emotions, I recommend the work of Paul Ekman.

Learning is the drug (40): “Fun is the emotional response to learning.” – Chris Crawford, March 2004. Also, Biederman and Vessel’s research shows that curiosity itself is inherently pleasurable.

Sensory overload (42): The input capacity of the conscious mind is only around 16 bits a second. Sensory overload can be thought of as the difference between the amount of information and the amount of meaning. You can have a large stack of information—such as a book typed by monkeys—that is very low in meaning. When the amount of information is too high and we fail to extract meaning from it, we say we’re in overload.

Scylla and Charybdis (42): In Greek myth, these two monsters sat on opposite sides of a narrow strait. Sailors wishing to pass inevitably ran too close to one or the other.

RBI (44): “Runs batted in” in baseball. This statistic is tracked per player and is incremented by one each time a run is scored as a result of the player’s turn at bat, no matter who actually scores the run, provided it wasn’t the result of an opponent error or the cause of a forced double play.

Fun is another word for learning (46): The theoretician of play Brian Sutton-Smith called this just one of the “rhetorics of play.” He identified several more in his book The Ambiguity of Play, including using games of chance to determine your fate, or using games to determine the fate of nations. I tend to regard almost all of the rhetorics he identifies as differing sources of learning and practice, and the balance (such as the two I just mentioned) as more like alternative uses of games. More recently, designer Craig Perko has written a series of articles identifying what he calls “aesthetics of play,” once again identifying learning and mastery as just two possible things to value within a game structure. “Play” can be taken in a Derridean sense to mean “movement” or “freedom,” as several games academics have pointed out (Salen, Zimmerman, and Bogost). In my definition of fun, the sort of learning we are doing is essentially mapping the space of that movement.

Chapter 4

University programs for game designers (48): To investigate this more, I urge you to look at the website for the International Game Developers Association and its academic outreach page: www.igda.org/academia/.

Pinochle (48): A game of cards. You play with a slightly different deck than the standard 52-card deck used for poker or bridge. Points are scored based on the number of particular combinations of cards (called “melds”) that you hold in your hand, which is similar to poker, but you also bid for “trumps” (naming a suit higher ranking than all other suits), similar to bridge.

1 Corinthians (48): The citation is 1 Corinthians 13:11. The following is from the King James version of the Bible:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

Gamification (50): Two solid critiques of this practice can be found in Margaret Robertson’s blog post on “pointsification” (http://bit.ly/cant-play-wont-play) and Ian Bogost’s critique “Gamification is Bullshit,” published in The Atlantic (http://bit.ly/gamification-bogost-atlantic).

Games with informal rule sets (52): Many theorists have established a spectrum from “game” to “play.” Bruno Bettelheim, the child psychologist, defined forms of play as make-believe (solo or cooperative), joint storytelling, community building, and play with toys. He saw games as team-based, or individual competitions against other people or against self-imposed marker thresholds. Of course, joint storytelling or social tie-building proceed by concrete if unspoken rules. I’d argue that what we tend to think of as “play” or “informal” games may have more rules than the classic definition of game.

Hierarchical and strongly tribal primates (52): For marvelous insight into the tribal and animalistic nature of human societies, I highly recommend the work of Jared Diamond, particularly The Third Chimpanzee (Harper, 2006) and Guns, Germs, and Steel (W.W. Norton and Company, 1999).

Examining the space around us (54): A lot of games can be treated as problems in graph theory—and this is where those guys saying that the game was all vertices were right. These were people who had essentially “leveled up” in how they viewed space; they were practiced enough in territory problems that they were able to abstract any given territory game into a graph and discern patterns that I, stuck in my perception of it, was unable to see.

Cartesian coordinate space (54): This is the classic method, developed by René Descartes, of locating a point in 2-D space on a grid defined by two orthogonal axes. It serves as the basis of much of algebra (as well as most of computer graphics). This tends to be our default assumption for how space is “shaped,” but within graph theory many other types of spaces are possible.

Directed graph (54): A directed graph is one where you have points or nodes connected by lines (vertices and edges, in mathematics lingo) but the lines have direction. Think of the classic children’s board game Chutes and Ladders; the chutes and ladders on the board are directed links between points on the board. You can only move one way on a chute. It is a game that does not use Cartesian space; the shortest distances between points have nothing to do with the physical distances on the board, but rather with the number of moves it takes to get to a given spot. All of the “track” games such as Monopoly are in effect directed graphs.

A tennis court could be both (54): Tennis has two separate spaces divided by a net, and can therefore be looked at either way. Were we to graph it using nodes, we might say that there are four nodes: two halves of the court, and the out of bounds area at each extreme. The game is about getting the ball from your node to the out of bounds area on the opposite side. But of course, it is also a game played in a traditional coordinate space. Player position within a node is actually where most of the strategy lies.

Games where things fit together physically (54): My favorites include Tetris, Blokus, and Rumis.

Games where things fit together conceptually (54): Poker is probably the most obvious example, but many card games work this way, as do many tile-laying games such as Carcassonne.

Games of classification or taxonomy (54): Card games such as Uno and Go Fish!, and even memory games, rely on classifying things into sets.

Games that take one turn (56): We might think of ro-sham-bo when used as a decision-making tool (“Let’s do rock-paper-scissors to see who pays the bill.”), or the mathematical game of Nomic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic), or the parodic “non-game” of Mornington Crescent(http://bit.ly/wiki-mornington) from the UK.

You didn’t learn the lesson (games of chance) (56): Some wags have called gambling “a tax on the math-impaired.” Probability is one of those areas where the human mind just seems to have trouble. The classic example is the repeated coin toss—there are only two possibilities, heads or tails. If you throw a coin and it lands on heads seven times in a row, what are the odds that it will land on tails next? The answer is still 50 percent because of how the question is phrased. If you ask, “What are the odds that eight consecutive throws will land on heads?” the answer is very different (1 in 28). Playing on this weakness has been a classic tool of marketers and con men. Unfortunately, this inherent inability to properly assess probability leads our brain to treat it as a “richly interpretable” situation, resulting in positive feedback for gambling even though the house always wins in the long run.

Blackjack card counting (56): Card counting is based on rough statistical analysis to determine what the odds are of receiving a card of the right value next. This is possible because the game is played with a finite deck of known configuration. A detailed explanation of card counting methods can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting.

Dominoes (56): Because a line of dominoes can only fork when a “double” is played (a domino with the same value on both squares), you can count how many times a given value has been played, and how many are likely to be in players’ hands, in order to determine whether it will be possible to play a given number in the future. Assuming the other players are playing optimally to remove the highest-value dominoes from their hand, you can determine which particular dominoes they are likely to have in their hands based on what play choices they make.

Young girls as status driven (58): An excellent glimpse into this world can be found in Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence by Rosalind Wiseman.

Shooters (58): A class of video games where you fire projectiles at targets in order to score points. Usually divided into first-person shooters and 2-D shooters.

Fighting games (58): A specific genre of video game wherein players take control of a martial artist. Typically, these games involve pressing particular button combinations in order to execute a particular kick or blow, or to dodge or deflect attacks. These games usually mimic one-on-one battles.

CounterStrike (58): A team-based first-person shooter where players play one of two teams: terrorists or counterinsurgents. Each team has a slightly different goal, and the game is fought within a time limit. A very high degree of team coordination is required in order to be successful.CounterStrike was the most popular online action game in the world for many years.

Training provided by shooting a virtual gun (58): In professions where training is a matter of life and death, training is designed to match the real circumstances as closely as possible. A mouse or a tap on a screen does not convey the realities of recoil, mass, size, or how humans react to being hit in various locations. The same is true for operating vehicles, such as tanks or airliners. Interfaces matter tremendously.

Games about rationing (60): The specific game was called simply Ration Board Game and was made by the Jay-line Mfg. Co. Inc., in 1943. The wonderful BoardGameGeek website has an entry on it: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/27313/ration-board.

Chess and queens (62): Chess most likely originated in India 1400 years ago. The most mobile piece is the queen, which is allowed to move any distance it likes across the board, be it horizontally, diagonally, or vertically. This mobility only arrived in the game in the fifteenth century, and some argue that it arose as a result of the increasing presence of queens as heads of state in European politics.

Mancala (62): This family of games goes under many names including mancala, oware, wari, and many more. They all involve moving seeds or pebbles through wells on a board. The variant where you are not supposed to leave the opponent with no seeds is called oware, and is widely played in Africa. The name literally means “he/she marries.”

Modern games about farming (62): There are a number of these, including Euro games like Agricola, social games like Farmville, and card games like Bohnanza. However, none of them encode the same set of social practices as mancala does.

Diplomacy (64): A classic board game of interpersonal strategy, Diplomacy requires that players make deals with one another and then proceed to double-cross each other, all in the context of a board representing a map of the world.

Role-playing (64): Generally speaking, role-playing games are ones where the player takes on an alternate identity. Traditional pen-and-paper role-playing is like a special form of collaborative acting, but the computerized versions tend to put a much heavier emphasis on increasing the statistical definition of your character. A game with role-playing elements is typically one where the character you play can become more powerful over time.

Disgust (66): A quick online quiz where you can test your own disgust levels with various substances is available at www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/disgust/. This quiz is part of a study developed by Dr. Val Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Groups run by outsize personalities (68): For more on the many vulnerabilities of the human mind to persuasion, I recommend the wonderful book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini.

Inbred dislike of groups not our own (68): There are many studies in the history of sociology and psychology that demonstrate this, but perhaps the most chilling is the Stanford Prison Experiment.

“Sowing salt” (68): There isn’t any historical evidence that this ever happened at Carthage. While it probably did happen in a ritual manner among the Hittites and Assyrians, historically populations were much less mobile than today, and ruining cropland would be a foolhardy move. Shifting alliances meant that today’s enemy would be tomorrow’s ally.

Blind obedience (68): This tension in games is at the center of the powerful series of games entitled “The Mechanic is the Message,” by Brenda Romero. In particular, the board game Train (see http://romero.com/analog/) is about the complicity of players in performing terrible deeds (or finding ways to subvert the system).

Jumping puzzles (70): A challenge often found in games, jumping puzzles are sequences of jumps that must be performed with precise timing. They are often denigrated as a designer’s failure of imagination.

Tile-based (70): A term for computer graphics that are based on drawing discrete squares, or tiles, each with an image on them. Generally, nothing in the game can straddle the boundary between two tiles.

Topology (70): More specifically, the branch of geometry that is interested in the properties of shapes that do not change when you “squish” a shape. In theory, if you had a cube that you could squish all you wanted, you could shape it into a sphere. However, to change it into a donut, you have to punch a hole in it. The donut, however, can easily become a teapot; the hole becomes the handle. This is called a “continuous deformation,” and we term shapes that can be squished into one another “homeomorphic.” Quite often, we find that different game designs are more or less homeomorphic, too: the variances between them have more in common with the difference between a cube and a sphere than they do between a cube and a donut.

Platform games (70): Any of a broad class of games where you attempt to traverse a landscape collecting objects or touching every space on the map. Platform games originally featured platforms as their setting, hence the name.

Frogger (70): A simple space traversal game where you play as a frog attempting to reach one of five safe spaces on the other side of a busy road and a river. Both the road and the river present the same obstacle, but clever artwork makes them look like different play experiences.

Donkey Kong (70): One of the earliest arcade platformers, this game required you to play as Mario, a plumber who wanted to rescue his girlfriend, who was abducted by a giant ape. You had to walk up slanted platforms and jump over rolling barrels in order to reach the top.

Kangaroo (70): Another early arcade platformer. In this game, you played as a kangaroo mother trying to rescue her baby joey. Monkeys threw apples at you from the side of the screen as you tried to reach the top.

Miner 2049er (70): An early platformer available on 8-bit computer systems, this game was actually very similar topologically to Pac-Man. You played as a miner who had to touch every spot on the map—as you walked over girders, they changed color to indicate that you had been there.

Q*Bert (70): Another map traversal game, this game took place on a triangular grid of diamonds rather than in a traditional Cartesian space. It also featured a few spots where there were elements of a directed graph—you could jump onto a little disk that floated beside the map and be taken to the top of the triangle. Once again, the objective was to visit every node on the graph without colliding with an enemy.

Lode Runner and Apple Panic (70): Complex platformers for 8-bit computers where you were asked to collect all of a number of objects on the screen while not being caught by the enemies. Unlike other platformers, however, these let you actually change the map by dropping a substance that temporarily removed a segment of the floor. Enemies could fall in the floor and be trapped—if the floor was restored before they escaped, they would be removed from play. Often, objects you needed to retrieve would be hidden under deep floors that required you to tunnel down using this ability, thus risking death. The best levels were highly difficult puzzles.

3-D on rails (70): A term used to refer to games that have a 3-D representation but do not permit you to move freely through the environment.

True 3-D (70): A term used to refer to games that use both 3-D rendering and a 3-D space in which the player can move.

Secrets (72): A term for hidden objects scattered throughout a level of a game. Many games offer up the collection of secrets as an additional axis for success in order to reward thorough exploration.

Pick-up (72): A generic term for a game object that grants new abilities to the player when collected. The classic early examples include the large dots in Pac-Man that make the player capable of eating ghosts and the hammer in Donkey Kong, which allows the player to destroy barrels.

Whether or not the price of oil is going to rise (72): This game does exist in various forms, most famously as World Without Oil, a serious game that invites players to collaboratively describe a global oil crisis. See http://worldwithoutoil.org/.

Jumping times (74): An article by Ben Cousins in Develop Magazine (August 2002) examined this. The author found that hit games with well-received gameplay had level lengths clustering around 1 minute and 10 seconds, characters that jump with an elapsed time in the air clustering around 0.7 seconds, and the elapsed time to perform three combat moves in succession clustered around 2 seconds. He suggests that these should be considered constants for good gameplay.

Time attack (74): A common tactic in many games, particularly platform games, is to ask you to do the same tasks you have done before but within tighter and tighter time limits.

Atari 2600 (74): The first blockbuster success in the console industry, the Atari 2600’s heyday was in the late 70s and early 80s.

Laser Blast (74): Designed by David Crane, this simple shooter from Activision features a flying saucer with a gun that can shoot at any one of five downward angles. On the terrain below are three tanks per screen. Shots are almost instantaneous, so this is a game of lining up the correct angle and firing before the tanks do.

Quantized (76): Quantizing is the act of taking continuous values in data and forcing the data to fit to a pattern; for example, turning a picture with infinite shades of gray into an image with 256 levels of gray, or taking music that isn’t quite on the beat and forcing it to fit perfect mathematical rhythm.

Five fighting games (76): I realize this is a controversial statement to make! The five I would identify are:

§ Rock-paper-scissors, where players do not physically move, have three moves, and each attack is a one-hit kill.

§ Early fighting games such as Karate Champ by Epyx. This allowed players to move towards and away from each other.

§ A family split off here, with fighting games where the player fought through a series of opponents while moving sideways through the world—Karateka and other games fall in this category.

§ Even once technology allowed 3D graphics, early 3D fighting games such as Virtua Fighter were still players locked on an axis facing each other. It wasn’t until Battle Arena Toshinden that we saw that axis be broken; it was the first fighting game I can recall where you could end up facing not just away from your opponent, but at an arbitrary angle.

§ True free roaming 3D fighting games arrived with Bushido Blade, and arguably there hasn’t been a mechanically new one since.

Combos (76): Many games reward players for executing a series of moves correctly. Often they give a bonus for doing so, such as extra damage when attacking.

Shmup (78): Slang for “shoot ‘em up.” This term typically refers to a subgenre of shooter games, ones that embrace the limitations of 2-D graphics.

Space Invaders (78): The original shmup, Space Invaders by Taito featured a tank that moved along the bottom edge of the screen, some barriers that protected the tank but eroded as they were fired upon, and an army of aliens marching inexorably down the screen while firing. As you reduced the number of enemies approaching, the speed of their approach grew faster.

Galaxian (78): An elaboration of Space Invaders that featured some of the aliens leaving the formation and dive-bombing the player, rather than the formation moving down the screen.

Gyruss (78): A spin-off from Galaxian that distorted the playfield into a circle. The player moved along the outer rim, and enemies emerged in spirals from the center.

Tempest (78): An arcade game by Atari in which the player moved along the edge of various shapes, all of which effectively distorted the view of the playfield in what was a fairly standard shooter. Some of the playfields were topologically circular, and others were lines.

Galaga (78): This sequel to Galaxian introduced various key concepts such as bonus levels and power-ups (your ship could be captured and then recaptured so that you earned double firepower).

Gorf (78): A whimsical arcade shooter that featured notably different opponents on different levels, including a mothership as a final enemy for stages.

Zaxxon (78): Isometric scrolling shooters are not unheard of, but they are usually merely visual tricks to spice up a shooter that is truly a 2-D experience. Zaxxon, however, permitted movement along the vertical axis and had obstacles and targets at different heights. The perspective made it tricky to align the ship, but the graphics were amazing for its time. Very few other games made use of this style of gameplay, with the notable exception of Blue Max and its sequel, which set the gameplay in World War I and included the ability to bomb targets.

Centipede (78): One of the most charming shoot-’em-ups ever made, Centipede was notable for its extension of several key concepts from earlier games. It permitted full planar movement within a restricted area at the bottom of the screen, allowing enemies to inhabit the space behind the player. It made use of the same sort of barriers that Space Invaders had, only it characterized them as mushrooms and spread them across the entire screen. It had a wide assortment of enemies, some of which marched down the screen and some of which were dive-bombers. Finally, the control mechanism was a trackball, which gave players control over acceleration rather than just linear movement speed, employed by joystick-controlled shooters.

Asteroids (78): A shooter played on a toroidal field. The torus was never displayed to the user as such, of course; the player was presented with a stark black screen with asteroids drifting on it. The top and bottom edges wrapped around, as did the left and right edges. Every time you shot an asteroid, it broke into smaller pieces. Only the smaller pieces could be removed from play. You controlled your ship using a reasonable 2-D simulation of inertial physics. Most people chose not to move very much and instead played the game as a turret, as it was difficult to control your ship.

Robotron (78): One of several classic games developed by Williams during a very fertile period for game innovation there. In Robotron, control requires two joysticks, one for movement and another to fire in any of eight directions. The field is a simple rectangle filled with enemy robots and with humans you must try to save. Should a robot contact a human, the human is killed. Collecting the humans gave extra points, but advancing to the next level was based on slaying all the robots.

Defender (78): Another Williams game featuring rescue, Defender made the importance of protecting your humans even more critical. The gameplay field was a long wrapping ribbon, and players were able to move freely all the way around the surface of the ribbon. At the bottom of the ribbon were humans, and from the top descended a variety of aliens. Some sorts of aliens would attack you directly, but others would locate humans and carry them to the top of the screen. Once captured in this way, the humans became extremely dangerous enemies that hunted you down.Defender was famous for an extremely difficult control interface as well.

Choplifter (78): An 8-bit computer game developed by Broderbund. In Choplifter, you played a helicopter pilot on a long oblong field that scrolled in both directions. An enemy convoy marched from one end of the field to the other. In its path were buildings full of humans you had to fly out to, rescue, and return to your base at the other end. Although you could spend your time shooting the enemy, your score was based on your success at the humanitarian goal rather than the destructive one.

Bosses (78): A generic term for any enemy that is notably larger and more powerful than those that came before, typically placed at the end of a series of thematically linked levels.

Tetris (78): An abstract puzzle game designed by Alexei Pajitnov. Played on a grid that is taller than it is wide, this game features pieces composed of four smaller squares falling from the top of the field. The player is allowed to move the pieces from side to side as they fall and to rotate them in place. Should the pieces pile up to the top of the field, the game is over. When a full horizontal row is created, all the squares on that row are deleted and the pieces above fall down to take their place.

Hexagons (78): The Tetris variant with hexagons was, naturally enough, called Hextris. However, it did not make use of pieces with six hexagons and therefore didn’t have the clever pun in the title of the original Tetris.

3D Tetris (78): Many variants of 3D Tetris were created. The designer of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov, created Welltris, which was really four separate games of Tetris played on a cross-shaped field (the pieces slid down the “sides” of a “well.” There have also been true 3D variants, but they proved to be extraordinarily difficult to play and never garnered much acceptance.

Puzzle games based on time (78): since the original edition of this book, manipulation of time has become a far more common element in game design.

Chapter 5

“King me” (80): The phrase spoken when you move a checkers piece to the last row on the board. There’s an interesting political undertone to checkers, in that it is assumed that common soldiers must only charge forward, whereas kings have more freedom of movement (and may retreat)—and yet, it is also assumed that any soldier may become a king.

Abstract games (80): In the gamer community, religious wars occur over whether or not a game should include fictional dressing or not. There is an entire genre of abstract strategy games that is arguably not enhanced by the inclusion of back story or art treatments.

Deathrace (82): This was also the first instance of a movie being adapted to a game.

Deathrace 2000 (82): Movie released in 1975, starring David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone. It is about cross-country racing in the future; running over pedestrians scores points in the race, and some fans are crazed enough to throw themselves under the wheels of their favorite drivers to help them win.

Effects of media on violence (82): An ongoing debate among academics. Most of the evidence is limited to demonstrating a rise in aggressive behavior for a few minutes—hardly advanced mind control. Others feel that vicarious exploration of violence is natural and even a necessary part of development. For a representative look at this position, try Gerard Jones’s Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, published by Basic Books in 2003. In addition, the American Academy of Family Physicians determined that there was insufficient evidence to make a link between video games and violence, www.aafp.org/afp/20020401/tips/1.html. There have been studies showing that watching violent films may actually reduce real life violent activity; see http://www.international.ucla.edu/cms/files/dahl_dellaviga.pdf.

School shootings (82): Several school shootings have been blamed on the effects of video games. There have also been cases of criminals claiming inspiration from acts of crime in video games. The industry’s position is that games are an art form and worthy of protection under the First Amendment, and that the responsibility for keeping violent media out of the hands of children rests with parents. In addition, several statistics can be cited to buttress the opinion that video games do not have a significant effect on violent crime; for example, the incidence of violent crime has fallen dramatically just as the popularity of video games has risen. Were there a causal link, one would expect the two to rise in tandem.

Murder simulators (82): The most outspoken advocate of the point of view that media and video games cause violent behavior is Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, the author of Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence, published by Crown Books in 1999. The term “murder simulators” is his.

Cumbia (84): A Colombian folk dance style in 4/4 with a distinctive “heartbeat” rhythm. It has become popular worldwide and is one of the commonest Latin music rhythms heard.

Marinera (84): A Peruvian folk dance with a distinctive rat-a-tat beat. It is a highly dramatized courtship dance.

Games that put story first (86): some of the best examples come from the genre of interactive fiction, such as Galatea by Emily Short, or Photopia by Adam Cadre.

Story written by an actual writer (86): Two good books on the subject are Lee Sheldon’s Character Development and Storytelling for Games (Cengage, 2004) and David Freeman’s Creating Emotions in Games (New Riders, 2003). We are also seeing, as of this writing in 2013, a rise in storytelling games where narrative elements are actually treated as tokens within a game system. These games include many of the latest developments in the game genre termed “interactive fiction,” as well as games such as Sleep is Death by Jason Rohrer or Daniel Benmergui’s Storyteller.

Players can create stories (88): to be precise, there are three terms that are often used interchangeably, but which can also mean very distinct things: plot, story, and narrative. A plot is a sequence of causal events created by an author: “and then they broke up because of his indiscretion.” A narrative is a sequence of events from a perspective: “and then this happened.” We can build a narrative out of any experience at all, and it is very common to build narratives out of gameplay, either after the game is over or even while it is still going on. A story is basically the narrative constructed out of interacting with a plot. In game design circles, we often speak of the author’s story and the player’s story, because these can end up diverging widely.

Planetfall (88): Designed by Steve Mereztky, Planetfall was a very funny text adventure game published by Infocom in 1983.

Marc LeBlanc (90): A noted designer, LeBlanc is also the co-developer of the MDA framework, a system for assessing games in terms of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. His game design writings can be found at http://algorithmancy.8kindsoffun.com/.

Paul Ekman (90): A pioneering researcher on facial expressions and emotions. You can read a good introduction to his research in his book Emotions Revealed, published by Times Books in 2003.

Nicole Lazzaro (90): Lazzaro’s studies were done by her company XEODesign and were presented at the 2004 Game Developers Conference as well as several other conferences. You can read an overview of the research at www.xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames/.

Runner’s high and cognitive puzzles (92): I’m doing a disservice here to long-distance running, for the sake of the argument. I ran track briefly as a kid, and in fact there are a lot of tough cognitive puzzles to solve when running, such as managing your breathing, the strategy of when to sprint and when to jog, judging stride length and how you plant your feet, and so on. Cognitive puzzles lurk in all sorts of places. My main point, however, stands: putting one foot after another to exhaustion isn’t fun.

Schadenfreude, fiero, naches, kvell (92): I am indebted to Nicole Lazzaro for introducing me to many of these wonderful words. Naches and kvell come from Yiddish; fiero is an adaptation of an Italian word, and schadenfreude is from German. Lazzaro’s use of these terms in her research on emotions players feel while playing games has led to their being adopted by the game design community.

Maneuvering for social status (92): there is a branch of evolutionary biology called “signaling theory” which argues that many of the choices we make in our lives are unconsciously aimed at presenting our qualifications as mates and tribespeople to others. For example, a green thumb is indicative of diligence and responsible behavior; a large library of bound books, of erudition; a somewhat messy appearance and “outsider” hairstyle, of creativity. A layman’s introduction to this in the context of consumer behavior can be found in Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior (Penguin, 2009), by Dr. Geoffrey Miller.

Sensawunda (94): A term from science fiction criticism. It means, of course, “sense of wonder.”

Anticipating a solution (96): Dopamine, the neurotransmitter most often implicated in the feeling of “fun,” has been shown to release in anticipation of successful outcomes. It also is associated with focus and learning. The work of Irving Biederman and Edward Vessel shows that “richly interpretable” experiences (to use their term) are rewarding in and of themselves, which of course suggests the sort of learning I am talking about in this book. That said, it is dangerous to try to draw too many conclusions from the neuroscience given the current knowledge; much is controversial.

Bernard Suits and lusory attitude (96): The term comes from his book The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (Broadview Press, 1978). In it, he defines a game this way: “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 means in favor of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude].”

Flow (98): A term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe the frame of mind characterized by intense attention and maximum performance on a task. The sensation of flow appears to be linked to increased release of dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter that apparently increases attention ability in the frontal cortex. Evidence seems to be mounting that dopamine is not, in itself, the chemical that provides positive feedback. For an introduction to the concept, try Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, published in 1991 by Perennial.

Zone of proximal development (98): originally described Lev Vygotsky, and since expanded into a wide swath of educational theory. Also important here is the concept of “scaffolding,” the notion that learning builds on learning. The way in which Super Mario taught you the unfolding power of jumping is often cited as the perfect way to teach a game, and it also lines up very well with the ideal of scaffolding.

Deliberate practice (100): This has popularized as the notion that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to get good at something, which is an inaccurate summary of the work of K. Anders Ericsson. What matters more is the quality of those hours. Ericsson describes the necessary characteristics of deliberate practice: it has to be designed to improve performance, repeated a lot, demanding of focus and concentration, hard (as in, off the top end of flow), and oriented around clear goals. Engaging in this sort of practice can let you get away with less practice time, ironically!

Chapter 6

Differences manifest at a very early age (102): In particular, we see this in the developmental schedule of boys versus girls.

We still wrestle (102): A survey of “learning style” studies published in 2009 in APS, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science (http://web.missouri.edu/~segerti/1000/learningstyles.pdf), concluded that there hasn’t been enough rigor in testing learning-style-specific approaches alongside broad-based approaches. In other words, we’d need to run formal experiments with classes of students, one group taught with learning styles in mind, and the other not, to really assess whether it makes sense to essentially present curricula in multiple different ways. After all, teachers are a limited resource, and presenting the classes in one way that covers a reasonably broad base might actually net out as more efficient (though perhaps not maximizing each individual student’s potential). That said, learning styles approaches are pretty widespread in educational theory circles, anyway.

Bell curve distribution of IQ (102): The standard IQ (intelligence quotient) tests are normalized around an average score of 100. The tests need to be renormalized every few years, because we’re all apparently getting smarter; this is called the Flynn Effect. IQ is not accepted by everyone as a valid measure of all sorts of intelligence. There is a concept called “emotional intelligence” as well, which argues that how well we understand and cope with emotions is at least as important, if not more so.

Howard Gardner (102): In his book Frames of Mind, Gardner defined seven types of intelligence, arguing that IQ tests only measured the first two. More recently, he has argued that there are two more types of intelligence: naturalist intelligence and existentialist intelligence.

Gender differences (104): Two books that provide differing surveys of the field are Sex on the Brain: The Biological Differences Between Men and Women by Deborah Blum and Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women by Anne Moir and David Jessel. Differences can be seen across large populations using statistical analysis. One example is the use of textual analysis to identify the gender of an author of a piece of text. Some papers on this subject can be found here:http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/pennebaker/reprints/NewmanSexDif2007.pdf and here: http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-final.pdf. To try this out yourself, visit http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php.

Variations between individuals (104): A survey of available literature by Carrothers and Reis in 2013 (http://bit.ly/survey-carrothers-reis) showed that virtually all psychological differences are “dimensional” rather than “taxonic.” In other words, on average, yes, there are differences. But men and women overlap to an enormous degree on everything from personality types, to how they think of potential mates, measures of empathy, orientation towards care, fear of success, and many more. For any given trait, an individual might lean more towards one side or the other, so you cannot use measurements of any given trait as a predictor of gender. As yet unclear: the degree to which acculturation affects these results; psychological studies are notoriously biased demographically towards educated Westerners in college, because most psych studies use psych students as their subjects. An excellent survey of the differences that have been shown to exist can be found in The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Spatial rotation (104): A study in Norway found that differences in spatial rotation ability across genders manifest even in a society that has worked very hard to have gender equality. You can read the study at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23448540. There are no conclusions yet in the scientific community as to why exactly this is so, though of course various evolutionary reasons have been proposed.

Language proficiency in boys (104): It is worth pointing out again that it is only on average that boys do worse in language proficiency; biological determinism alone does not doom a given individual. In some studies, boys have been shown to have a greater variable range in various skills than girls; for example, both the higher and lower ends of the IQ range tend to be populated with more males than females. There is also evidence, at least in older kids, that coeducational settings cause kids of both genders to shy away from the subjects that are supposed to be better suited to the opposite gender.

Differences disappearing over time (104): In 1998, a survey of standardized test results showed that, with the exception of high-end math, performance among high schoolers was equalizing at a precipitous rate. See Feingold, http://bit.ly/psycnet-Feingold. Similar results were found in 2010 by a group at Duke looking at very high performers: http://bit.ly/2010-duke-differences.

Permanent changes in rotation ability (104): To quote Skip Rizzo of USC, from the transcript of his presentation at the Annenberg Center’s conference “Entertainment in the Interactive Age” in 2001: “On the paper and pencil test [of spatial rotation ability], men did much better than women. But when we replicated the test involving an integrated immersive interactive approach [e.g., with a video game], we found women performed as well as men...the important finding was that we found that when we administered the paper and pencil test afterwards, that men and women’s scores were no longer significantly different.” This is not a shocking result; it has also been seen among deaf kids, who typically suffer from problems in spatial rotation as well. See http://bit.ly/deaf-spatial-rotation.

Simon Baron-Cohen (104): Baron-Cohen’s theory, elucidated in his book The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain, is controversial, although it echoes earlier theories about Thinking and Feeling brains. Baron-Cohen is an autism researcher, so he didn’t come to this conclusion solely from gender research; boys suffer disproportionately from autism and Asperger’s, and his hypothesis is that these are malfunctions of the “extreme systematizing brain.” There are some tests online that you can take to arrive at your “systematizing quotient” and “empathizing quotient.” They can be found at http://bit.ly/essential-difference-guardian.

Asperger’s syndrome (104): Commonly called “high-functioning autism,” this syndrome is characterized by difficulty with social interactions and reading emotions. In DSM V Asperger’s has been removed as a separate diagnosis, and instead will be simply considered to be on the autism spectrum.

Learning styles (106): Sheri Graner Ray’s Gender Inclusive Game Design is an excellent book covering learning styles as they apply specifically to game design.

Men and women seeing differently (106): Two examples of scientific work on this are http://www.bsd-journal.com/content/3/1/21/abstract and the work of Dr. Gabriele Jordan (you can read about it here: http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-humans-with-super-human-vision). In the first, researchers found that women had slightly faster reaction times in finding stationary objects, whereas men were faster at seeing moving ones. In classic evolutionary psych fashion, these were promptly termed “gathering eye” and “hunting eye” in the media. The other study is about color perception. The typical human has three cones and rods for seeing colors. Many men only have two functioning ones, which leads to a far greater prevalence of colorblindness. Recently it has been found that some women have four. Women with four functioning cones and rods are termed “true tetrachromats” and are able to see more colors than other humans.

Kiersey Temperament Sorter (106): A derivation of the Myers-Briggs personality type that uses a slightly different organizing metaphor based on the Hippocratic temperaments.

Myers-Briggs personality type (106): Based on the theories of Carl Jung, this psychometric tool measures a subject’s preference for one side or another of four different dichotomies. The results can be read as classifying an individual into one of 16 personality types, but in psychology they are intended to indicate preference for given approaches to problem-solving.

Enneagrams (106): Another personality classification system, enneagrams have nine different types into which people can fall. Each type has two subsidiary characteristics as well; the enneagram is diagrammed on a circle, so the “wings,” or secondary types, are therefore the neighbors on the circle. Enneagrams are not based on empirical study or psychological theory so much as they are based on the seven deadly sins and numerology.

Five Factor Model (106): Also known as the Big Five, OCEAN, CANOE, and more. Each of these five breaks down further into more subcategories. The five factors were found via cross-cultural metastudies, and though there is still debate about aspects of the model, it is widely used in the psychology community. The FFM does show some gender differences on average, as well as significant variances across cultures. Some cultures may not have one or another of the five factors.

Jason VandenBerghe (106): His work has been presented at a few Game Developer Conference events, and you can see his presentation on his website: http://www.darklorde.com/2012/03/the-5-domains-of-play-slides/

Hormone effects on personality (106): Many hormones have been implicated in personality differences, but there are no clear-cut answers as to why exactly this happens, nor can it be helpfully used as a predictor. That said, as testosterone decreases in males over their lives, they tend towards reduced aggression. Men convicted of violent crimes show higher levels of testosterone than noncriminal men or men convicted of nonviolent crimes.

Book purchases (108): The statistic on the ages of women book purchasers comes from the U.S. Census Bureau. For an impressive statistic regarding book purchases by women, consider that romance novels account for almost half of all paperback sales in America. Ninety-three percent of them sell to women.

Female preferences in games (108): The most popular game genres among women are puzzle and parlor games. This preference is so marked that despite a low penetration of single-player games into the female market, women playing games online make up 51 percent of the online marketplace. The bulk of this large audience is playing puzzle games.

Hardcore players of different genders (108): The population of women in online role-playing games varies from 15 percent to 50 percent, depending on the game. In comparison, the female market for traditional single-player games sold in retail channels is more like 5 percent.

Aging game players (108): Nick Yee was able to graph the differences in male and female behavior across ages after surveying a few thousand players of massively multiplayer online games, aka “MMOs.” Younger males tended towards the more violent activities in the game, and older males tended to more closely match the behavior of females. The percentage of the respondents who were of a given gender showed markedly different distributions across age; there was a huge spike in younger males, whereas the number of females tended to remain relatively even across ages. Yee’s Daedalus Project can be found at www.nickyee.com/daedalus/. We should not equate this to the theory of “dedifferentiation,” which asserted that as we age, our cognitive strengths and weaknesses get “smoothed out.” In 2003, the APA issued a press release about dedifferentiation stating that longitudinal studies had disproven it.

Girls breaking out of traditional gender roles (110): Reuters reported in September 2004 on a study performed at Penn State that showed that the games played by kids at age 10 had a significant correlation with their academic performance years later. Girls who played sports at age 10 became more interested in math at age 12 than girls who didn’t do sports. Girls who spent time on stereotypically “girly” activities such as knitting, reading, dancing, and playing with dolls tended to perform better later in subjects such as English.

Designs emphasizing social interaction (110): (Also, see note in Chapter 4 on Diplomacy.) Virtually all games involving negotiation or collaborative storytelling or problem solving might fit the bill. Other examples could include Pandemic, any of the many tabletop role-playing games that de-emphasize combat, and socially-demanding online games such as massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs).

Chapter 7

First recorded rules of war (114): These were a suggestion by Sun Tzu. Most often, these have been intended to protect non-combatants, but sometimes they have been conventions of honor, such as not attacking by night or from ambush.

Cheating during a soccer match (116): On the flip side, if the referee fails to see that we are offside, we’ll take it and often say, “Them’s the breaks.” It is still a violation of the rules, but since the ref (who is part of the formal construct) is fallible, we accept the violation.

Most games do not permit innovation and invention (118): There does exist a game, called Nomic, whose rules you rewrite as you play; it’s part of the game. It too has limits; you bump up against the physics of reality if you try to change too much. In Nomic’s case, the changing rules are themselves part of the pattern—but declaring atoms to be the size of Jupiter, or pulling out a gun and shooting another player, are still off-limits even if you make a rule allowing it. Nomic was designed by Peter Suber of the Philosophy Department at Earlham College.

The destiny of games (120): Many games, of course, seem to become more fun as you learn more about them. This has a lot to do with the nature of the challenge presented in those games; they tend to present problems of a certain complexity level that reveals more subtleties the deeper in you go.

Ludemes (120): As used here, a concept developed by Ben Cousins, a video game designer. An article about the concept appeared in the October 2004 issue of Develop Magazine. Ben has renamed the concept “primary elements,” but I like “ludemes” better, even though the word is already in use in a different context (see http://www.davidparlett.co.uk/gamester/ludemes.html for a history of the term by David Parlett). The idea also has a lot in common with the “choice molecules” described by Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen in Rules of Play (MIT Press, 2003).

Games incorporate the following elements (122): This material on basic elements of games is an extremely brief survey of “game grammar,” the idea that ludic structures have specific structural qualities that make them work. For more information on this idea, I recommend the following:

§ “A Grammar of Gameplay,” a presentation I delivered at GDC 2005: http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/atof/grammarofgameplay.pdf

§ Dan Cook’s article “The Chemistry of Game Design,” found at http://www.lostgarden.com/2007/07/chemistry-of-game-design.html

§ Stéphane Bura’s “A Game Grammar,” found at http://users.skynet.be/bura/diagrams/

§ The book Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design (New Riders, 2012) by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans.

The Mastery Problem (124): This can be summarized as “the rich get richer.” It is an expression of iterative zero-sum games—games in which the winner ends up in a better position than the loser. If a high-level player can reinforce his position by repeatedly defeating easy targets, then eventually his position will become unassailable. This is not in itself a problem—it simply leads to victory. The problem arises when a novice coming to the game cannot possibly succeed.

Opportunity cost (124): Since games are always sequences of challenges, the fact that you made a bad choice cannot simply be undone. At the very least, the fact that you could have chosen to do something else allows your opponent to make her own choice. In playing games, we only give “take-backs” to young children, and there exist a plethora of rules dictating when moves become irrevocable in board games (for example, you commit to a move in chess when you let go of the piece).

Red Queen’s Race (128): In Lewis Carroll’s classic book Through the Looking Glass, Alice runs alongside the Red Queen in a landscape that is moving very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that they have to run to stand still. This situation has become known as the Red Queen’s Race.

Chapter 8

Go (130): The Chinese game of go is centuries old, and in many parts of the world holds much the same cultural status as chess does in the West. The game is usually played on a 19x19 grid. Players take turns placing white and black beads on the board, with the objective of surrounding a larger area than the opponent. You may also capture an opponent’s bead by completely surrounding it. Go is a rich game; it has been estimated that there are more possible games of go than there are atoms in the universe.

Emergent behavior (130): The concept of emergence recurs in fields like chaos theory, artificial life, and cellular automata, which are all mathematical systems in which very simple rules lead to behavior that is realistic or unpredictable. Steven Johnson’s book Emergence (Scribner, reprinted 2002) covers this topic fairly thoroughly.

Less able to learn as we age (132): In general, psychological studies have shown that inductive reasoning and information processing (so-called “fluid intelligence”) decrease as we age. However, verbal abilities and other forms of “crystallized intelligence” tend to remain constant.

Choose the same characters to play (134): The tendency of players to repeatedly choose similar characters in online RPGs is verified in my own research, and can also be observed in playstyle choices revealed in the work of Dr. Nick Yee and other researchers of MMORPG social structures.

Cross-gender role-play (134): There have been many papers written about cross-gender role-play. Males tend to do it far more often than females do, and given the choice, males will rarely choose a gender-neutral presentation, whereas females are more willing. Cross-gender role-play in online games is not an indicator of gender dysphoria in real life.

Apollonian and Dionysian (138): Another way to think about the distinction between the two styles is that Apollonian periods are often about the medium as a medium and Dionysian periods are about what could be said with that medium. Modernism, with its focus on formal characteristics of a medium, was an Apollonian movement; the Dionysian rebellion immediately after included populist art forms such as science fiction and other genres of pulp fiction; the rise of swing, blues, and jazz; and the flowering of the comic strip.

Historical trajectory of new game genres (138): Many game genres have exhibited the arc towards greater complexity. Of course, often the genre is reinvented with a populist take on the game style, whereupon the curve is reset. There are many genres of game where the complexity has reached a point where only a very few play the games; among them are war games, simulators, and algorithmic games such as CoreWars, which required a high degree of programming knowledge in the first place. The designer Dan Cook terms the peak title which strikes the balance between accessibility and rococo complexity the “genre king.” Usually sales of subsequent games after that game decline, until the genre fades away from the marketplace. For a series of articles examining this in great detail, see http://www.lostgarden.com/2005/05/game-genre-lifecycle-part-i.html.

The jargon factor (138): An increase in jargon is also a clear sign that a medium has reached the level of maturity where it can be taught formally rather than through apprenticeship, and where the field has enough self-awareness to have examined itself critically. In film, for example, this developed fairly rapidly as film theory was defined. Unfortunately, games are laggards in this respect.

Twonky (138): The original story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore was published under the pseudonym of Lewis Padgett and filmed in 1953. In it, a device from the future arrives in the past. Its owners cannot cope with it (even though one is a professor), so they get zapped. Even more apropos is their story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” in which toys from an alien dimension arrive on Earth. Adults cannot cope with them, but the children can—and eventually, they learn enough to open an interdimensional door and go elsewhere, having transcended humanity. So far, nobody has teleported as a result of playing video games, but we can hope.

The most creative designers (140): Two prominent examples are Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario, who has publicly stated he has drawn inspiration from topics such as gardening; and Will Wright, whose sim games have touched on urban planning, consumerism, ant colonies, and the Gaia hypothesis.

Chapter 9

Ludic artifact (144): It’s an awkward term, but it avoids the challenges inherent in using “game” for very fuzzy concepts. In short:

§ The world is full of systems.

§ If we approach these with Suits’ lusory attitude, we learn how they work through play, as elucidated in this book.

§ Fun is the feedback the brain gives us in the process.

§ We generally term the resultant activity a game.

§ Systems generally need to meet certain qualifications to be a good opportunity for the above. We could call these ludic structures.

§ A consciously designed ludic structure is a ludic artifact.

§ Even ones that are not consciously designed tend to have such as design imposed on them by our act of turning them into a game: we layer on goals, success metrics, etc.

For an essay-length working out of this concept, see http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/04/16/playing-with-game/.

Mod or modding (144): Many video games are constructed in a way that permits players to create variants on the rules, alter the artwork, or even create whole new games using the game’s software. This has led to large “mod communities” of player-contributed games and content. This is similar to “house rules” for board games.

Lord Jim (146): A novel by Joseph Conrad. It is not a cheery book, and the ending is fatalistic at best and grim at worst.

Guernica (146): A painting by Pablo Picasso, done to commemorate and protest the bombing of that city during the Spanish Civil War.

Software toy (146): A common appellation for video games that are not goal-oriented.

Every medium is interactive (148): Whether you prefer Marshall McLuhan’s nomenclature of “hot” and “cold” media or more contemporary conceptions of audience participation in the artistic construct, such as reader-response theory, is kind of academic because it’s a debate about the level of interactivity present in only one box in the chart.

Mondrian (154): Piet Mondrian was a painter who was particularly noted for his compositions that used only colored squares and oblongs.

Leading tones (154): In music theory, this is the idea that certain pitches naturally lead the ear to expect another note. The act of moving to this new pitch is usually called “resolving” the harmony. The commonest place where we see this is leading from the V back to the I (from the dominant to the tonic), where the leading tone is the major third of the V, and one half-step short of the tonic’s root, the note that is the key the song is in.

Exact cover (154): A class of mathematical problems based on allocating resources so that every contingency is covered. Wikipedia has all the math for you at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exact_cover.

Formalism (156): As used here, formalism means the examination of essential qualities that make up a classified artifact. It is essentially an approach based on precise description, and arriving at terms. There are many other schools of criticism, including those which reject the notion of essential qualities at all.

Disagree with me on this (158): The game designer Dave Kennerly feels that “shoehorning the principle of the movie, book, narrative, or other inapplicable medium onto the game perpetuates bad games.” In his defense, he is speaking primarily of the construction of formal systems themselves.

Belles lettres (158): Literally “beautiful letters.” The term was once widely used as the rubric for all forms of study of writing.

Impressionism (158): An artistic movement primarily centered in the visual arts and music, it takes its name from the painting Impression: A Sunrise. Impressionism in art is more concerned with depicting the play of light on an object than the object itself.

Posterization (158): An alteration of color and increase in contrast between color forms, frequently used as a filter in image processing software.

Debussy (158): Composer (1862–1918) best known for Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun.”

Ravel (158): An important composer in his own right (“Bolero”), but also a talented orchestrator and arranger. The version everyone knows of Pictures at an Exhibition is his orchestration rather than Mussorgsky’s original.

Virginia Woolf and Jacob’s Room (160): This novel is about Jacob, a young man dead in World War I. We never meet Jacob over the course of the novel. He is depicted solely in terms of how his absence affects the other people in his life.

Gertrude Stein and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (160): This subversive autobiography was written by Stein writing as Alice B. Toklas, who was Stein’s longtime companion and lover.

Zeitgeist (160): Driven in part by the rise of photography and also by discoveries in science, the central concerns here became the foundations of Modernism.

Minesweeper (160): Installed by default on almost all Windows computers, this game involves revealing a landscape full of bombs by looking at revealed squares that provide information about the hidden neighbors.

Chapter 10

Consider films (166): Jon Boorstin’s Making Movies Work (Silman-James Press, 1995) is an excellent primer on the basics of film as a medium.

Notation system for dance (168): It wasn’t until the 1500s that the first very primitive system of notating dance was developed, and it wasn’t until 1926 that Laban developed a system that was really what we’d call complete.

Prima ballerina (168): This calls to mind, of course, the poem “Among School Children,” written by William Butler Yeats in 1927:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Term comparable to choreography (168): “Ludography” seems like a good choice, except that it is instead comparable to “bibliography” and means the games you have created. This hasn’t stopped designer James Ernest from calling himself a ludographer. If anyone has any ideas better than the awful “gameplayographer,” let me know! “Ludeme-ographer”? “Ludemographer”? Right now, the closest term is probably the role of “systems designer,” but that all too often covers aspects well outside of ludic artifact specification.

A mismatch between the ludemes and the dressing (170): the theory term for this is “ludonarrative dissonance,” coined by game designer Clint Hocking in 2007 in his blog post here: http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html.

Games about shooting with a camera (172): Among them are Pokemon Snap for the Nintendo 64 and Beyond Good & Evil, available on various platforms.

Yet it is Tetris (172): In the ten years since the first edition of this book was published, at least two examples surfaced of exactly this game, and at least one more was inspired by this chapter.

Hate crime shooters (174): Several of these have been made, espousing various causes ranging from the agenda of the Ku Klux Klan to Palestinian nationhood.

The Comics Code (174): Established in the 1950s following an uproar over the impact that violent comics could have on children. The result was self-censorship imposed by the comics industry; for many years, no comics were published without the Comics Code seal of approval. The artistic gap between the EC Comics of the 50s and Art Spiegelman’s Maus is not that huge—the time gap that resulted from the imposition of the Comics Code arguably set the medium back by 30 years. David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America (Picador, 2009) is an excellent book covering the history of this moral panic.

Ezra Pound (174): A brilliant modernist poet who was also a fascist and not a very nice human being.

Chapter 11

Gnothi seauton (176): This is the motto over the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi.

James Lovelock (176): An environmentalist who proposed the Gaia hypothesis, which is the notion that our biosphere functions as a single complex organism.

Network theory (178): A whole branch of science has sprung up around a subset of graph theory that studies networks. For further reading, I suggest Small Worlds by Duncan Watts (Princeton University Press, 1999) and Linked by Albert-László Barabási (Plume, 2003).

Marketing (178): Yes, even marketing has given us insights into the way humanity works. In particular, marketing has taught us much about mob behavior, information propagation through groups, and the tactics of persuasion.

Architecture affecting people (182): The classic book in the field is A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al (Oxford University Press, 1977). Although architects have been building for emotional purposes since at least the 12th century and probably longer, this is still a brief time compared to how long we have used story and music.

Glimmers of hope (184): The classic example of a game that provides a subtle moral lesson is M.U.L.E., designed by Dani Bunten Berry. In this game of colonization, players compete on a distant world to be the richest member of the colony via participation in multiple industries and selling goods to one another. However, the game also offers an additional victory condition. The overall success of the colony matters. You could win as an individual and still perish with the colony as a whole. The lesson is a remarkably subtle one on the ecologies of economic markets and the importance of both individuals and society.

Chapter 12

Dani Bunten Berry (188): Designer of such classic video games as M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold.

Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (190): Considered one of the first paintings to attempt to show motion abstractly, this painting is an early example of Futurism.

Shakespeare neglected (196): Interest in the works of Shakespeare has fluctuated over the centuries. Although he was regarded as a solid entertainer in the seventeenth century, and his works were collected in the eighteenth, it is not until the nineteenth century that we see him enthroned as the greatest writer who ever lived.

Epilogue

Shootings at Columbine High School (206): In 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, shot and killed several students and teachers. It was later found that both perpetrators were avid players of violent video games, which led to much blame being placed on the games. This is not the only example of video games being blamed for violence. Several lawsuits have been brought against companies in the industry, accusing them of inciting the violence.

Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (210): Krzysztof Penderecki is one of the most widely respected composers of the twentieth century. This piece in particular is highly abstract yet immensely powerful.

Aaron Copland (210): An American composer whose middle period of work is noted for its use of American motifs and folk tales.

Welles’s staging of Macbeth (210): Orson Welles, best known for Citizen Kane, staged a performance of Macbeth in 1936 when he was 20. The cast was all black, the setting was changed from Scotland to the Caribbean, and the witches became voodoo witch doctors.

Grand Theft Auto (210): An extremely popular video game series in the late 1990s and 2000s, in which you play a criminal performing criminal acts. The games are justifiably admired for their expansive designs, freedom of action, and wide array of fun activities and are also highly controversial due to the subject matter. One of the more reprehensible moments occurs when the player can pick up a prostitute on a street corner, have sexual contact with her in exchange for money, and then beat her up and take the money back.

Pascal’s Wager (212): Blaise Pascal’s famous wager comes from his Pensées: “Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is... If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.”

Funny-shaped dice (220): These dice, mostly based on Platonic solids, are used to play Dungeons & Dragons and other pen and paper role-playing games.

Kinetoscopes (222): Invented in 1891 in Edison’s laboratory, this precursor to the film camera actually used 35mm film on reels, but it required viewers to look into a peephole to see.

Afterword

Austin Games Conference (228): Founded in 2003, and later sold to new operators, this conference has also been known as Game Developers Conference Austin, and GDCOnline. The final event was held in 2012.

Play as a primary form of learning (228): A sampling of lovely quotes:

“The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.” – Plato

“Play is the child’s most useful tool for preparing himself for the future and its tasks.” – Bruno Bettelheim

“Play is the highest form of research.” – Albert Einstein

“Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning...” – Mr. Rogers

“The child amidst his baubles is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force...” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A child loves his play, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.” – Dr. Spock

“Almost all creativity involves purposeful play.” – Abraham Maslow

“Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.” – Jean Piaget

Exhibited at the Smithsonian (228): The exhibit “The Art of Video Games” ran from March to September of 2012, and was curated by Chris Melissinos. It then went on tour. You can read about the exhibit here: http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2012/games/.

Could not be considered an art form (228): An example of this can be found in Jessica Mulligan’s essay “Just Give Me a Game, Please” (http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/virtually10dec01.html). I wrote a rebuttal to that at the time (http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/caseforart.shtml). More famously, we had film critic Roger Ebert declaring that “Video Games Can Never Be Art” (http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-never-be-art) and noted designer Brian Moriarty agreeing with him (http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2011/03/opinion_brian_moriartys_apolog.php).

Worthy of First Amendment protection (228): on June 27th, 2011, the Supreme Court of the United States held in Brown vs Entertainment Merchants Association that games qualify as protected free speech. To quote from Justice Scalia’s majority opinion:

“Like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world). That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”

Ten years later retrospective (229): Much of the new material in this presentation has been incorporated into this, the revised tenth anniversary edition. However, there are a few digressions. Should you care to read it, you can find the slides here:http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/gdco12/Koster_Raph_Theory_Fun_10.pdf and actual video of the talk here: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016632/A-Theory-of-Fun-10.

Science of happiness (229): the research of Martin Seligman, Edward Diener, Daniel Kahneman, and others also identifies mindfulness (savoring your experiences), generosity, and working towards increasing the good rather than reducing the bad as key drivers of happiness.