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Balancing Act
Information, signals, noise, redundancy: the relationships between games and information theory offer subtle but powerful ways of thinking about design. Successful signal processing requires balancing noise and redundancy. It requires tuning a communication system so that there is enough uncertainty to ensure a sufficient amount of information passing through the channel, but not too much information, so that the signal gets lost in vast oceans of uncertainty. This is the balance found in the interconnected informational grids of crossword puzzles. Information theory studies is closely linked to systems theory and it should be no surprise that our observations in this schema bear some resemblance to Games as Emergent Systems. A complex, emergent system can only exist somewhere between the rigidity of fixed, periodic systems and the hyperflexibility of chaotic systems. Too much structure and a game is overdetermined: there is not enough uncertainty or freedom for the players. Too little structure and the game turns chaotic: there is too much uncertainty, too much freedom, and no sense of how the player's decisions should proceed from one moment to the next. All of which leads us back to meaningful play. It is significant that Weaver links uncertainty and information to what he calls "freedom," the ability of a person to make choices in a system. In a system with too much rigidity, a player doesn't have enough freedom: there are choices, but not enough of them, and not enough uncertainty in the system to ever give a player doubt about the outcome. By contrast, in a system where chaos reigns, there can be no meaningful relationship between action and outcome. The system's outcome is perpetually uncertain, and nothing the player does will affect it. In both of these cases, meaningful play is impossible. Meaningful play requires that players choose actions from among a palette rich enough to support a large space of possibility but limited enough to properly structure their decisions. Finding the sweet spot between too much and too little freedom, designing constraints that provide enough (but not too much) challenge for players, is an elemental problem of game design. Information theory is one useful way to make sense of these eternal design dilemmas.
