Chapter 23: Games as the Play of Experience

I rise with the first shot, no problem, pushing my head up toward the peak of its ascent, and the ball hits the brick. No it doesn't. I wish it struck the barricade, wish it surged forward and surged back, so as I surge along pushing and recoiling there wouldn't be those blank spaces while I wait for the ball to catch up or fall behind. It has a rhythm filled with empty time, while mine is compacted, full and dense….

I'm rising with the shot then, the volume turned up high now, filling the room with bleeps, and I'm putting the shoulders and head into the action, singing a song with this ten-second sequence…. Hum the sixteen-note melody created by the bleeps when the ball hits paddle, bricks, and side wall. Bleep, the serve…bloop, the return…blapbleep…a quick brick bounce off the side wall down to…bloop, the next return after the beat, and then up, down, off the side down up. Throw yourself into the unfolding melody, carry the hand smoothly from one point to the next, ride with the ball through the whole five places.—David Sudnow, Pilgrim in the Microworld

Introducing Experience

previous chapter, we defined play not just in games, but in the broadest sense of the word. As we move forward, we will limit the scope of our investigation to the play occurring in games.

What does it mean to experience game play? The passage that opens this chapter is from Pilgrim in the Microworld, a book that describes, in loving detail, a player's waxing and waning addiction to the video game Breakout. Breakout was one of the earliest video games, first released as an arcade game in 1976 by Atari, and then published for the Atari 2600 home video game system a few years later. In this Pong-like game, a player moves a paddle back and forth across the bottom of the screen, bouncing a ball into rows of bricks positioned along the top of the screen. Each time the ball hits a brick it disappears; the goal of the game is to move through as many screens as possible, clearing every brick on the screen.

Throughout his extraordinary book, author David Sudnow vividly evokes the experience of playing Breakout. His highly personal account describes the complex experience of play with a nuance and insight rarely found in writing about games. In his observations, Sudnow uncovers a flurry of experiential elements: the kinesthetic movement of his body as he plays; his multi-layered emotions of hope and anxiety, his altered sense of time; the visual and audio rhythms of the game; the minute controlling motions of his hand on the paddle; and even a kind of perceptual identification with the ball itself.

In the sensory blur of game play, the formal system of the game only reveals itself through its experiential effects. The programmed code, paddle controller, console hardware, television screen, and audio speakers become elements of a larger system that includes the player himself. The space of possibility for Sudnow is a visceral space of experiential potential, a space he explores through play, his state of being in some way extended though the input, output, and logic of the game.

The experience of play is just that: an experience. The word "experience" commonly refers to:

In other words, experience is participation. Every game creates its own kind of experience, from the theatrical interventions of live-action role playing, to the international spectacle of the Olympics, to the vast virtual communities of Phantasy Star Online. There is no single, proper kind of experience that all games should try and provide. Yet there are principles of meaningful play that we can apply to games in a variety of design contexts. In this chapter, and in the PLAY schema that follow, we investigate the design of experience as a fundamental principle of game design.

[1]

American Heritage Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).