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It's not that you have to "care" in order to get good, but rather that you have to be kept caring. You've got to be kept in the right state so you'll get to some places a little bit better all the time, so that a goal remains alive by always moving just ahead out of reach and you keep wanting to attain it without having to spend a fortune.- David Sudnow, Pilgrim in the Microworld
Introducing the Play of Pleasure
Video game arcades are sites of lucratively programmed caring, worlds of fun nourished by a seemingly endless stream of quarters, tokens, and plastic swipe cards. Players enter, they play, and if the game designers have done their job well, they stay to play some more. The carefully crafted arc of rewards and punishments that draws players into games and keep them playing connects pleasure to profitability. Such intricate games of pleasure and play are not unique to the arcade. Pleasure is, perhaps, the experience most intrinsic to games. From the visceral excitement of an online death-match to the satisfying clink of a Go stone on wood, games provide an abundant variety of pleasures. We often take it for granted that games are fun to play, that they provide pleasure, that they embody enjoyable experience. Players derive many kinds of satisfaction from play, from the imaginative adventures of a narrative role-playing game to the social camaraderie of a team sports match. But what is the pleasure that underlies the appeal of games, the pleasure at the core of game play, the pleasure that provides the enticement to begin play and to continue playing? What connects pleasure to the design of meaningful play? The word "pleasure" evokes associations with activities of leisure or self-indulgence. Sex, drugs, and rich foods come to mind, as do stolen naps, deep friendships, or dancing to a favorite song. Pleasure is commonly understood as a fundamental feeling that is hard to define but that people desire to experi-ence. [1]Words such as delight, amusement, gratification, satisfaction, or happiness describe the kinds of feelings pleasure evokes. When we speak of pleasure in games, we are referring to the fundamental feelings derived from the intense concentration of a game of Memory, the exhilaration of a winning touchdown, the charged socio-sexual maneuvers of Twister, the hypnotically satisfying patterns of Tetris. Pleasure can include any physical, emotional, psychological, or ideological sensation. Of course, pleasure's opposites (pain, frustration, despair) are equally important in understanding the play of pleasure in a game. Within Games as the Play of Pleasure, a game's space of possibility is defined as more than a mathematical entity. It is a space in which a player's emotions and sense of desire undergoes manipulation and coercion, teasing and seduction, frustration and reward. As the sculptor of the space of possible pleasure, the game designer faces a truly challenging set of problems. Managing the pleasure of a game's players means translating the formal intricacies of the rules into an engaging experience of play. Although the emergent math of formal rulesets may be complex, the tangled puzzles of pleasure and desire are surely enigmatic dilemmas of an even higher order. [1]Wordnet, Princeton University.
