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Typologies of Pleasure

It is difficult to generally speak about pleasure. It is especially hard to find the words that describe the pleasures we experience in games.

Games evoke emotions of struggle, of competition. The kinds of things you feel aren't often given common names in our usual everyday parlance but they are important emotions that we feel and go through and enjoy and find in some mysterious ways enlarge our spirit. How about the anxiety that you feel when your chest suddenly swells as you realize you are going to be a master? How about the sense of self that develops as you concentrate all your being and the various parts of your body upon the task of overcoming obstacles? How about the dejection you feel, the despair when you fail utterly? And how about the exultation and the sense of triumph you feel when you actually succeed? And sometimes a little bit of awe as you maybe find that path out there. And there's another name for these emotions and game developers call them fun.

Game designer Hal Barwood organizes all the varied emotions a game can produce under the heading of "fun." This term does make some sense. Good games are fun. Fun games are what players want. A fun game makes for a pleasurable experience, which is why people play. But not everyone sees the value of this word. Game designer Marc LeBlanc simply hates the term "fun." In several of his talks at the Game Developers Conference, he has called for a moratorium on the word."Fun," according to LeBlanc, is merely a stand-in term for a more complex phenomenon that no one really understands.[7]

Perhaps LeBlanc is right. Perhaps we are falling into a similar trap by our use of the word "pleasure." Is it possible to unpack the more general notion of fun and create a structure for categorizing pleasure? LeBlanc has done some thinking along these lines and has created his own typology, proposed as an antidote to the singular concept of "fun." In his typology LeBlanc lists eight categories that describe the kinds of experiential pleasure players derive from playing games.

Most of these categories are self-explanatory. Note, however, that "masochism" doesn't refer to sexual pleasure, but instead to the more general pleasure of submission to a system. Part of the hypnotic pleasure of Bejeweled or Solitaire, for example, comes from the ritualized act of behaving in a rule-based, stylized manner. That is what LeBlanc means by his category of Submission.

LeBlanc's model is intended not only to assist game designers in understanding the range of forms that "fun" can take, but also to provide a common language for marketing digital games. He has proposed, for example, that by rating each of these categories on a zero-to-ten scale and putting that information on the back of a product package, a consumer could quickly get a sense of the kinds of pleasures the game provides. A first-per-son shooter, for example, might have a high rating in Sensation, Fantasy, and Challenge, but a low rating in Expression, Narrative, and Fellowship. The challenge, of course, is that many of the categories seem to overlap. There is a very fuzzy line, for example, between Fantasy and Narrative. Other ambiguities persist as well. Categories such as Discovery and Expression might easily be applied to other categories: can't a social framework be uncharted territory? Doesn't self-discovery occur in a challenge? Moreover, even if these theoretical problems could be resolved, "officially" rating a game's pleasure in this way would be a highly subjective endeavor. Despite all of these criticisms, however, LeBlanc's eight categories do identify many of the components of game-induced pleasure and are useful as a way of understanding the range of pleasures games provide.

A different approach comes from psychologist Michael J. Apter, in his essay "A Structural-Phenomenology of Play." In focusing on the cognitive arousal play provides, Apter compiles the following list, amended with our brief paraphrasing in italics:

Apter admits in his essay that these categories offer only a partial list of cognitive arousals, and that there is considerable overlap between categories. Despite these delimitations, Apter's model gives us another framework within which to consider pleasure in games, one that emphasizes cognition. Some of his categories, such as Challenge and Exploration, appear similar to LeBlanc's. Others, such as Negativism and Facing Danger, clearly identify alternate approaches.

A third typology of pleasure comes from the classification of games by anthropologist Roger Caillois. In Defining Play, we introduced his four "fundamental categories," which purport to describe the phenomena of play:

In some ways, Caillois' compact categories offer a succinct distillation of the models LeBlanc and Apter propose. In agôn, alea, mimicry, and ilinx, there is a fusion of experiential and cognitive components that creates a useful critical framework.

There are many other typologies we could consider as well. Last chapter, we looked at Brian Sutton-Smith's five categories describing the psychological processes of video game players: concentration, visual scanning, auditory discriminations, motor responses, and perceptual patterns of learning.These too might be considered a list of the means by which games generate and support pleasure. There is no need to choose a single typology to represent pleasure in games. You should feel free to mix and match different models of experience and pleasure, depending on the needs of your design.These typologies are less useful for theorizing about pleasure or for classifying games, but they can be very handy as a way of organizing observations about the kinds of pleasures that a particular game provides. One model is not necessarily better than the others; each offers a different way of thinking about pleasure and its many motivations.

For example, let us employ one of these typologies-Caillois' four categories-in looking at an Unreal deathmatch. Do they apply to the pleasures of playing Unreal? Certainly the game contains a great deal of competitive, agônistic struggle. Mimicry plays a strong role as well, in the fact that each player is represented to the others through a customizable avatar in a fictional, virtual space. Unreal and games of its ilk are well known for representing physical movement through three-dimensional space in real-time, often creating vertigo in the form of motion sickness. There are arguably even elements of chance in Unreal as well, such as the particular players that happen to join an online deathmatch, or the layout and distribution of items on a level.

We can similarly apply the categories of LeBlanc and Apter. A game of Unreal provides all of the pleasures they list too, from the Fellowship that emerges out of hard-fought competition, to the creative Negativism of cheats, hacks, and mods. Pleasure is always already exceedingly complex: where we find one form of pleasure in a game, we will almost always find others. In general, most games provide many or all of the pleasures listed in any typology of game play experience. But at the same time, there is always a balance of factors, a particular ratio of ingredients that adds up to the unique flavor of an individual game experience. What meaningful pleasures is your game providing, or failing to provide? This is the utility of a typology of "fun:" offering a vocabulary for charting out the complex play of pleasure.

[7]Hal Barwood, "Computer and Video Games Come of Age. A National Conference to Explore the Current State of an Entertainment Medium." February 10-11, 2000. Comparative Media Studies Department, MIT. Transcripts. Henry Jenkins.

[8]Marc LeBlanc, Game Developers Conference, 2000.

[9]Michael J. Apter, "

A Structural-Phenomenology of Play. " In

Adult Play: A Reversal Theory Approach , edited by J. H. Kerr and Michael J. Apter (Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1991), p. 18-20.