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Autotelic Play
The magic circle of a game is, by definition, removed in some way from what Huizinga calls "ordinary life." The victories and losses, the triumphs and failures that a player experiences in a game are in a very real sense contained within the magic circle. As DeKoven puts it,a game provides "a common goal, the achievement of which has no bearing on anything that is outside the game."[5] We know, of course, that there are many ways winning or losing games can impact players: affecting their lifestyles, their sense of self, their relationships to friends, even the amount of money they have in their pockets when the game is over. There are certainly extrinsic ways that winning a game matters. At the same time, every game implicitly asserts the premise that the value of the game is intrinsic, that the game is self-contained, that the fiction of the magic circle will be upheld, that winning or losing the game is separate from everyday lived experience. If one considers the self-contained nature of the magic circle, the way that games create their own meanings and provide their own goals, it is clear that games are strongly autotelic. We borrow the term from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who in his book Flow explains that "The term 'autotelic' derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward."[6] When an experience is autotelic, it is participation in the activity alone that counts. Games are, to a greater or lesser extent, pursued for their own sake, for their own intrinsic stimulation. Although there are always some extrinsic reasons for play, there are always intrinsic motivations as well. In playing a game, part of the incentive is simply to play-and often, it is the prime motivator. Because they have such a strong autotelic component, games are largely non-utilitarian. Most forms of design serve an external function, or utility. Architecture houses and shelters our families, government, and industries. Typography enables visual communication. Automotive design supports mobility through the design of cars. Game design, on the other hand, simply enables its own play. Please note, in saying that game design exists in contrast to other forms of design, we are not proposing that games do not serve external functions, or that other forms of design don't also serve non-utilitarian ends. Our point is that games posit their own intrinsic needs or goals, such as abstract winning conditions, which gives them a distinctly artificial and non-utilitarian status. Contrast an online medical database program with an online multiplayer game. A hospital worker looking for a particular patient's record comes to the software experience with a clear extrinsic goal in mind, such as finding out what meds the patient needs to take that day. The database does not contain its own set of goals; it supports the goals of the user. The database program is used as a tool, as a means to an end, rather than as an end in itself. When the worker finds the record he is looking for and extracts the prescription information, the database has successfully fulfilled a goal that was brought to the system from an external context. In an online multiplayer game, on the other hand, there is no clear utilitarian purpose that the game serves. Why is the player exploring the game world, customizing her character, killing monsters, and accumulating treasure? Because she is playing the game. The game is not a tool being used to fill an external, utilitarian need. The player is not playing the game in order to feed her cats, or tune her car's engine. The explicit interaction of the game is not a means to an end, as in the case of the medical database program; rather, the play of the game represents an end in itself. We play, in some measure, for play's own sake.
Consider the way that the experience of play as an end, rather than a means, has affected the development of digital game technology. One of the reasons why games have been so inno-vative-pushing the envelope of computer processing power, creating experimental hardware interfaces, pioneering graphics rendering and spatial audio-is because games must provide their own motivations and pleasures. The medical worker will suffer through an awkward interface and ugly visual design in order to find the record he needs. A game player, on the other hand, is a much more fickle user: why play a game that isn't fun? The computer and video game industry is continually spurred on by an audience hungry for ever-more spectacular games and ever-more meaningful interaction. People play games because they want to; game designers must create experiences that both feed and satisfy this sense of desire. [5]Bernard DeKoven, The Well-Played Game (New York: Doubleday, 1978), [6]Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), p. 67.
