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Rule-Bound
Picture a child poised excitedly at the starting line of a footrace, ready to run down the track, breathlessly awaiting the starting signal. Rather than giving in to her intense desire to leap from the starting line, she waits for the signal that the race has begun. What's going on here? Why does our player anxiously hold back when she really desires to run? Developmental psychologist L. S. Vygotsky notes that "Play continually creates demands on the child to act against immediate impulse, i.e., to act on the line of greatest resistance."[2] Certainly the child in our example wants to begin running, but the rules of the game order her to wait. At the same time, the runner knows that the rules are artificial, describing systems that are in some way outside ordinary life. So why follow the rules? Vygotsky argues that players accept the rules of the game not in order to restrict pleasure, but instead to maximize it. "To observe the rules of the play structure promises much greater pleasure from the game than the gratification of an immediate impulse."[3] Through mechanisms of restraint and the withholding of immediate impulses, games transform the play-er's experience of constraint into one of abundant pleasure.
In Defining Play, we noted that we would not be investigating the purpose or function of play in this book. Rather, we focus on the way that play creates meaningful experiences for players, when considered from a game design perspective. Likewise, in the study of the play of pleasure, we will not suggest a root cause or mechanism, nor argue a unified theory of pleasure. There is a tremendous amount of existing research on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, cognitive, and cultural qualities of pleasure, some of which we reference in this chapter.
The notion that pleasure is an effect of submitting to the rules of a game, that pleasure delayed and constrained is pleasure enhanced, offers a powerful model for understanding all kinds of pleasure.Think of examples from your own experience: waiting to eat a particularly enticing dessert until completing the main course, or not skipping ahead to the end of a suspenseful murder mystery. The delayed gratification of orgasm is heightened when it is initially resisted, as is the urge of opening a fine wine before it has properly aged. Submission to constraint is certainly not the only way to understand pleasure, but it is an appropriate starting point for a discussion of the play of pleasure in games. Consider, for example, how the notion of constraint intersects with several core game design concepts:
Rules and Play. The idea that players subordinate their behaviors to the restrictions of rules in order to experience play-and its pleasures-is a fundamental aspect of games. The restrictions of rules facilitate play, and in doing so, generate pleasure for players.
Free Play. A player's sense of pleasure is explicitly derived from being a part of the system of a game, from being "at play" within the more rigid structures of a game. In Man, Play, and Games, Caillois makes an explicit link between a player's free action within the limits set by the rules and player gratification: "This latitude of the player, this margin accorded to his action is essential to the game and partly explains the pleasure which it excites."[4] Free play is dependant on, yet also resists, the rigid structures that give rise to it.
The Lusory Attitude. Playing a game means abiding by artificial restrictions, which make game actions seemingly inefficient. Runners not only wait for the starting gun, but, as Bernard Suits points out in Grasshopper, they also run around a circular track, instead of cutting through the middle of the field to reach the finish line first. Games are constituted by these kinds of constraints, which simultaneously restrain and enable pleasure. The willingness of players to step into these artificial systems in order to experience the resulting pleasure is at the heart of the lusory attitude.
Stylized Behavior. Although play is a free and improvisational activity, the rules of a game stylize the actions and behaviors of players in very particular ways. Think about the patterned movement of players engaged in a game of Ping Pong, or the tightly constrained movements of Simon Says. There is something very pleasurable in the way that games stylize play through a ritualistic, collective orchestration of movement and action. Children derive pleasure not just from the dramatic tension at the start of a race, but also from the collective experience of running together in formation, pumping their arms and kicking their heels toward the finish line.
Rules give rise to the dramatic structure of pleasure, the link between constraint and pleasure binding tightly the formal and experiential qualities of a game. But players don't simply stumble into a game. Unlike other forms of ludic activities (such as playing with a toy), a game demands that players know the rules before play begins. What provides the enticement to begin play? What makes players stay in a game once it starts? [2]L. S. Vygotsky, "Play and its Role in the Mental Development of the Child. " In Play-Its role in Development and Evolution, edited by J.S. Bruner, A. Jolly, and K. Sylva (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 548.[3]Ibid. p. 548 [4]Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), p. 8.
