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Any earnest definition of play has to be haunted by the possibility that playful enjoinders will render it invalid.—Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play
Introducing Play
The design of meaningful play, in whatever form the play might take, demands an understanding of how rules ramify into play. The play of a game only occurs as players experience the rules of the game in motion. Before a game begins, the many formal components of the game-system lie in wait: an empty football stadium; Chess pieces resting in their starting positions; a game program installed on a hard drive. Only when the players enter into the game does the system come fully to life. Athletes and fans spill into the stadium; Chess pieces sally forth one by one from their starting positions; a saved game file is loaded and the game fills the screen. Dormant relationships spring up between game elements as players inhabit, explore, and manipulate the game's space of possible play. From a formal point of view, the rules of a game indeed constitute the inner "essence" of a game. But there is a danger in limiting the consideration of a game solely to its formal system.The complexity of rules has an intrinsic fascination, the hypnotic allure of elegant mathematics and embedded logic. However, it is crucial for game designers to recognize that the creation of rules, even those that are elegant and innovative, is never an end in itself. Rules are merely the means for creating play. If, during the process of game design, you find yourself attempting to perfect an elegant set of rules in a way that fails to impact the experience of the player, your focus has become misdirected. The experience of play represents the heart and soul of the game designer's craft, and is the focus of all of the chapters collected under the Primary Schema of PLAY. Following this introductory chapter are a number of schemas, each one framing games from a different perspective. Within PLAY, we explore games as systems of experience and pleasure; as systems of meaning and narrative play; and as systems of simulation and social play. We are aware of the near-infinite variety of ways to frame games as experience and we make no pretense that our set of PLAY schemas offer a complete list. There are experiential schemas that offer valid ways of under-standing games which we did not include. We don't, for example, look at play as an experience of learning, or at play as a kinesthetic system of movement. The schemas included offer a starting point for an ongoing discussion of game design and play, a discussion that is only just beginning.
