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Chance and Game Play
There is a curious relationship between chance and game play. One way of framing chance, especially a game of pure chance, is that players completely give up control and have to passively accept the results of the game as they occur. As anthropologist Roger Caillois writes in his book Man, Play, and Games, chance "signifies and reveals the favor of destiny. The player is entirely passive: he does not deploy his resources, skill, muscles, intelligence. All he need do is await, in hope and trembling, the cast of the die." [5]
With all due respect to Caillois, we wholeheartedly disagree. What Caillois describes may in fact be an accurate depiction of the emotions of some players during a game of chance, but there are plenty of chance-based games that do offer player decision and meaningful play. Even in a game of pure chance, a well-designed game continually offers players moments of choice. Meaningful play requires that at some level a player has an active and engaged relationship to the game and is making choices with meaningful outcomes. A player that does nothing but "await, in hope and trembling, the cast of the die" cannot be engaged in meaningful play. Let us look again at a game with which we are all too familiar, Chutes and Ladders. Formally, it is a game of pure chance. On your turn, you roll the die, move your token appropriately, and then pass the die to the next player. Players do not make any strategic decisions in the course of play. However, Chutes and Ladders can be a fun game. Even without considering the social, narrative, and cultural forms of pleasure the game might provide, there are any number of ways that Chutes and Ladders provides pleasure through formal aspects of its game play:
The mechanistic pleasure of inhabiting a game system and helping that system move forward by rolling dice, counting spaces, and moving your token.
The uncertainty of knowing who will win and the struggle to finish first.
The chutes and ladders themselves, which reinforce both of the previous pleasures. On the one hand, with the erratic swoops of movement they produce, the chutes and ladders make the mechanistic system itself richer and more fun to inhabit. They also allow for unexpected reversals of fortune, increasing the dramatic potential of who will finish first.
Although it is true that almost any game will possess the first two qualities, it is always challenging to harness these two pleasures in the service of meaningful play. In Chutes and Ladders, it is the chutes and ladders themselves that serve as the central feature in the formal game structure to provide interest. Imagine the game without the chutes and ladders: rolling a die, moving a token, and getting to the last space first. As a game, it would be a completely flat experience. The chutes and ladders create a structure that results in more meaningful play, even without any real choices to make. How does this happen? Consider the formal flow of the game play. Without the ups and downs of the ladders and the chutes, players' scores would slowly accumulate at a roughly equivalent rate. A player might pull ahead or fall behind, but the pattern of the game would remain fairly flat, with each player moving ahead from one to six spaces each turn. In fact, if a player does move substantially ahead or behind of the rest of the players, he or she is on average more likely to stay there, further reducing dramatic uncertainty. The chutes and ladders provide changes of position greater than the die roll's relatively modest adjustment of 1–6. These leaps disrupt the otherwise flattened chances of winning. A second and very different example of pure chance games are lottery-based games. The basic game play of a lottery game is incredibly simple: pick a number or series of numbers and then wait to see if your number or numbers were picked. Again, at first glance, it is difficult to imagine how such a simple game could be so compelling. Yet even though a lottery is a game of pure chance, there are many moments at which players make choices: selecting the kind of lottery game to play, selecting a number or set of numbers, selecting the number of times to enter a given lottery, and even (for regular players) selecting a pattern of play over time. Many lottery games offer additional choices, such as a selection of "scratch-off" spaces on a lottery card. Each moment of choice is an event with the potential for meaningful play. Lottery players often use elaborate systems to help them select numbers, based on past winning numbers, their birthdays, random hunches, or other numerological speculations. The simple choice of what number to play becomes infused with meaning as players explore the space of possible options. Of course, the chance to win money is undeniably an essential part of the appeal of lottery games. However, it is not the only aspect of the game that makes its play meaningful. The opportunities for players to decide how to navigate the system of chance are the decisions that let players rail against pure fate, keep hope alive for winning, and help give the game its meaning. The lesson learned from successful games of pure chance such as Chutes and Ladders or a lottery game is that meaningful play can occur in systems in which there are no actual strategic decisions to make. In games of pure chance, the players' relation to the game system needs to be carefully designed. At every moment that they come into contact with the system, the possibilities for meaningful play should be teased out and emphasized. [5]Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), p. 17.
