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Game Play
The third and final category of play is game play. Just as ludic activities constitute a special subset of the larger category of being playful, game play is a special subset of the category of ludic activities. Game play only occurs within games. It is the experience of a game set into motion through the participation of players. The other two categories of play, being playful and ludic activities, contain a vast and diverse array of play forms.Yet even though game play is the smallest category of the three, the play of games takes on a multitude of forms as well: the strategic competitive play of Settlers of Catan; the performative social play of Charades; the physical sporting play of Cricket; the lush narrative play of Final Fantasy X—all are examples of game play.
Although the number of writings on game design is somewhat limited, in the past few decades, there has been a tremendous amount of study on the nature and function of play. Scholarship comes from a wide variety of fields: animal behaviorists studying the adaptive advantages of play, developmental psychologists studying the cognitive and social skills that children learn through play, sociologists studying the way play fits into larger social needs. By and large, these studies of play focus on identifying the function or purpose of play. The implicit assumption is that play serves a larger purpose for the individual psyche, the social unit, the classroom, the species, and so on. In Child's Play, Frank A. Beach indexes some of the functions that are typically associated with play across many fields:
a release of surplus energy
an expression of general exuberance, or joie-de-vivre
expression of sex drive, aggression, or anxiety
youthful "practice" for adult life skills
necessary context for exploration and experimentation
a means of socialization
tool for self-expression and diversion[12]
Studying the function and purpose of play is important and fascinating work, but we will not address it in this book. The schemas we present for understanding play and other aspects of games focus on the challenges of creating meaningful play, rather than on investigating the social or psychological purpose of games. There is a tremendous amount of literature available on the function of play and we have included many of these references in our bibliography, as it should be a part of the way that game designers understand games.
Game play clearly embodies the idea of play as free movement within a more rigid structure. The particular flavor of a game's play is a direct result of the game's rules. The rules of Charades, written out as text on paper, could not be more different from the exuberant, free-wheeling activity of the game itself. Yet these rules provide the rigid structure within which the play resides, the rules that guide and shape the game play experience. As Caillois himself states, within a game a player is "free within the limits set by the rules."[10]
Because play involves human participation, it is an endlessly rich and complex locus for study. Even within a single game, there are innumerable ways to delineate its play. In the following excerpt, taken from The Study of Games, Norman Reider begins an in-depth study of Chess by touching on many of its characteristics: The fascination and the extent of the addiction to the game; the psychological factors involved in its historical development; its social and therapeutic value; its legal involvements; its relation to love and aggression; the problem of genius in chess; the characterological problem of its players and their style of play; and ego functions as manifested in play, especially the distinctions between the psychological meanings of the game, its pieces and rules, and the psychology of the players.[11]
Most or all of the "facets" Reider lists are ways of understanding the operation of play in a game. The psychology of play, the expression of love and aggression, the way that the game facilitates individual styles of play, are part of the play experience of Chess. Understanding the experiential qualities of play, engendered by rules and given life through game play, is the precise focus of the rest of this Primary Schema. Are you ready to play? [12]Frank A. Beach, "Current Concepts of Play in Animals." In Child's Play, edited by R.E. Herron and Brian Sutton-Smith (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971), p. 311.p. 204–208.[10]Ibid.p.8.[11]Norman Reider, "Chess, Oedipus, and the Mater Dolorosa." In The Study of Games, edited by Elliott Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971), p. 440.
