Games defined by Greg Costikyan

I Have No Words & I Must Design is an article published in 1994 where Greg Costikyan, the author, put together a deep analysis of the core components of a game and gives his personal view of what make a game something that is interesting to play. To me his views are in large part matching with a exhaustive and useful definitio of what games are worth for.

In particular I find interesting his conclusions:

If we are to produce works worthy to be termed “art,” we must start to think about what it takes to do so, to set ourselves goals beyond the merely commercial. For we are embarked on a voyage of revolutionary import: the democrative transformation of the arts. Properly addressed, the voyage will lend granduer to our civilization; improperly, it will create merely another mediocrity of the TV age, another form wholly devoid of intellectual merit.

After a logical sequence of definitions about games, toys, goals and interactivity, Costikyan finally gives a concise definition:

A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal.

It’s interesting to see what is not a game according to the author’s view:

A puzzle is static. A game is interactive.

(A game) is not a toy.
A toy is interactive. But a game has goals.
(A game) is not a story. Stories are inherently linear.
Games are inherently non-linear. They depend on decision making.
Gaming is NOT about telling stories.
Stories are linear. Games are not.

Talking about interactivity, Costikyan goes one step further saying:

All games are interactive: The game state changes with the players’ actions. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be a game: It would be a puzzle.
But interaction has no value in itself. Interaction must have purpose.
The thing that makes a game a game is the need to make decisions.
What decisions do players make in this game?
Traditional artforms play to a passive audience. Games require active participation.

I have always thought that cooperative games are fun or that games where you have goals where you are not competing against an opposite player are somehow “relaxing” but Costikyan does not see a cooperative game falling in its definition:

The desire for “cooperative games” is the desire for an end to strife. But there can be none. Life is the struggle for survival and growth. There is no end to strife, not this side of the grave. A game without struggle is a game that’s dead.

Obviously such a rational view on a games as systems with a complex balance to sustain could have not include a clear view on the interface design:

The interface must provide the player with relevant information. And he must have enough information to be able to make a sensible decision.
More than that, the interface must not provide too much information, especially in a time-dependent game. If weather, supply state, the mood of my commanders, the fatigue of the troops, and what Tokyo Rose said on the radio last night can all affect the outcome of my next decision, and I have to decide some time in the next five seconds, and it would take me five minutes to find all the relevant information by pulling down menus and looking at screens, the information is still irrelevant. I may have access to it, but I can’t reasonably act on it.

Still on the visual aspect of designing games:

Color counts for a lot: as a simulation of World War II, Lawrence Harris’s Axis & Allies is a pathetic effort. Ah, but the color! Millions of little plastic airplanes and battleships and tanks! Thundering dice! The world at war! The game works almost solely because of its color.

What narrative can’t do, simulation can provoke: immersion in the characters:

Simulation has other value, too. For one, it improves character identification. A Waterloo based on Monopoly would do nothing to make players think like Wellington and Napoleon; Kevin Zucker’s Napoleon’s Last Battles does much better, forcing players to think about the strategic problems those men faced.

And it can allow insight into a situation that mere narrative cannot. It allows players to explore different outcomes — in the fashion of a software toy — and thereby come to a gut understanding of the simulation’s subject.
Character identification lends emotional power to a story.

Computer roleplaying games are basically failing because roleplaying involves perfomance in presence of friends. Performing in front of the computer is… cold, to say the least.

Computer games are solitaire; solitaire gamers have, by definition, no audience. Therefore, computer games cannot involve roleplaying.

And finally the incrementalism principle is also present in engaging gameplay, Costikyan explain it well in this last cited paragraph:

Ideally, a game should be tense all the way through, but especially so at the end. The toughest problems, the greatest obstacles, should be saved for last. You can’t always ensure this, especially in directly-competitive games: a chess game between a grandmaster and a rank beginner is not going to involve much tension. But, especially in solitaire computer games, it should be possible to ensure that every stage of the game involves a set of challenges, and that the player’s job is done only at the end.