A while back, I published a pair of blog posts about using Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and a small number of other texts to read non-game situations. This may seem somewhat flippant – using the qualities that make up games to explain why, say, conservatives are hostile towards transgender people and refugees (they are violating the “magic circle” of accepted behaviors and, thus, are not simply cheaters or opponents, but are “spoilsports” who must be removed from the game; given that the field of play is “all of social life” this often takes on rather unpleasant dimensions).

However, I wanted to explore a further dimension of political life outside of just the conservative fringe through this lens. To this end, I wanted to look at a set of concepts introduced in “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research” by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek – all game designers with academic backgrounds.

“MDA” is an acronym for “Mechanics – Dynamics – Aesthetics”, which explores the different ways that designers and players of games approach a game. Designers work up from Mechanics to Aesthetics, while players enter from the aesthetic end of things and ultimately end up grasping the mechanics. It’s one of those points that’s fairly basic but still needs to be articulated (a variation of this point is one I often make in the composition classroom; writers and readers approach the text from different ends, and writers often need to think about this as they compose the text.) Many beginning game designers commit a grievous error by approaching their project from the aesthetic end, thinking that they can figure out the mechanics later, only to discover that the end product is hampered by their inattention to the basics.

However, I am not interested in looking at the whole of MDA at the moment, but simply a subsection that is contained within it that has broken containment and been discussed elsewhere in the design space. This section is colloquially referred to as the “eight kinds of Fun.”

Listed off, these types of fun provide a fairly complete taxonomy of the reasons that people might willingly engage in games on their own terms. People could be seeking “Sensation . . . Fantasy. . . Narrative . . . Challenge . . . Fellowship . . . Discovery . . . Expression . . . [or] Submission.” Different games allow for different proportions of different varieties of fun. Chess allows for challenge – competing against an opponent – and perhaps even fellowship – respect between well-matched opponents – but in no sense allows for a narrative or discovery. There are no characters, and there is no blank space upon the map. Meanwhile, so-called “walking simulator” games like Gone Home, or The Stanley Parable, or Dear Esther generally lack the “challenge” component in any traditional sense. They cater to the drives towards Narrative, Discovery, and Submission, but there is no bureaucratic drive to a higher point total.

Of course, there is a 9th option on this scale that the writers of “MDA” ignore, which is the “Null” option. The “game” that is not fun at all, which is partially what this series of posts I’m doing right here is predicated upon, as driven by David Graeber’s observation in The Utopia of Rules that “Bureaucracies create games—they’re just games that are in no sense fun” (p. 190). What I want to argue here is that the “Null” or “unfun” option isn’t necessarily simply the negative result, but a positive option on this scale. There is a ninth type of fun and it is “not fun at all.”

I want to consider it this way because it seems to me that the “Null” or 0 option on the scale can coexist with the other kinds of fun, and that this is the result of an exercise of sovereignty. One party has the ability to force the other party into a game that is fun for Party A but not Party B; oftentimes, this is a failure of the “submission” type of fun.

Let’s take this in a direction you’re probably not going to expect me to. Consider: how many times has a child badgered you into playing a game that is unfun or poorly thought out? I remember babysitting for a family member, and the child continuously altering the rules so that he was less and less likely to lose. I considered it part of my duty as an adult given temporary custodianship of the child to explain that games needed symmetry. There needs to be a chance for each party to win for it to count as a proper game.

This partly connects back to Huizinga’s ideas about play, which I will reiterate here:

Play is free, and could be thought to constitute freedom.
Play is not “ordinary” or “real” life.
Play is distinct in time and space.
Play creates order.
Play is separate from material interest.

Now, I would call some of these into question – the idea that I am talking about today flies directly in the face of 1, and my second post called into question 2. However, these are largely thought exercises that are meant to allow us to understand other things in terms of play, because play – given some of these ideas – can be thought of as the way in which we create an imaginal and symbolic world of civilization, bounded off from the monstrous, overwhelming “real” world beyond it. In short, civilization is a game. Perhaps one of the oldest games.

But back to the issue of fun.

If we accept that it’s possible for a game to be not fun, the next obvious question is simple: if it is not fun, is there perhaps some other reason for playing it?

It seems obvious to me that the answer is that participation can be coerced: you might play the game to get the child to cooperate at dinner or to go to bed on time. You might play a round of a game to shore up social bonds. You might participate in a religious ritual for social capital or the college class for material gain down the line (and here #5 has gone out the window.)

However, a game can also be broken, and we can still be coerced into playing it, either for extrinsic means like I have described above or for intrinsic means like a matter of honor or a sense of duty. What makes people choose to play games that are simply not fun?

There are a total of four possibilities – motivation can be intrinsic or extrinsic, and it can come from reward or punishment. Intrinsic reward is the feeling of satisfaction that comes from doing the right thing. Extrinsic reward is the feeling of being recognized (and potentially given material reward) for doing the right thing (or it may be, simply, that the toddler cooperates when it’s time to brush his teeth). Intrinsic punishment comes from feelings of guilt or shame. Extrinsic punishment is social or legal censure for doing something wrong. This is all most likely a spectrum (social censure is likely intended to evoke a feeling of guilt, for example), but I’m sketching, right now, and it’s going to be a sketchy model. It always seems to me that the intrinsic motivations are going to be stronger than the extrinsic ones – if there is no mechanism for enforcing a rule, it may as well not exist, but I can always feel a greater degree of guilt or shame, and I can’t escape that.

Sculpture of Pheme, the Greek Goddess of fame and rumor, from the roof of the Dresden University of Visual Arts, posted to wikimedia commons by User:Brunswyk, and used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

These four types of motivation can explain why people engage in games that are not fun: they are made to feel that they must for one of these four reasons or some variation and combination of them.

In discussion with Edgar, we came upon the question of why the American political system functions as it does, and I happen to think that conceiving of it as a game with very high stakes is the right approach. However, between our two dominant political factions, I think that the different parties are playing different games – the Republicans are fighting to win, while the Democrats are fighting to ensure that, regardless of who occupies the seat of power, the system persists. This puts the two parties at odds in many ways, but makes them confederates with one another in different ways.

In short, both agree that the game should be played, they just disagree about how. First and foremost, this means excluding those who openly have a transformative vision about how to approach the problems of governance. On the right this is met with open hostility; in the center it is slightly more veiled. They make the claim that progressive policies are not possible – it’s impossible to forgive student loan debt because “where would the money come from?”, or it’s impossible to make the system more just because the rules get in the way, and the rules are sacred.

In short, because they diverge from the game as it is played, they are treated as simple noise. If actually understood, they are handled as the babbling of children. Pie-in-the-sky dreams that are best laughed off. Clearly, it is necessary for the adults in the room to take realistic actions to make sure that things continue as they have been. This impulse is installed in us by our socialization and education. We are taught to view such things as infeasible or naive. It is often called “realism” but it has nothing to do with reality, and everything to do with ideology.

I would also argue that the insistence that we continue playing the broken game of “realism” long after it has become clear that this will not yield desirable results is, itself, a childish position. It is the argument of the child who has positioned the rules so that he can win by default. Because it is comfortable to limit our agonistic competition to the lowest level, and frightening to consider an alteration of the rules, we shy away from altering the functioning of the civilizational game.

However, it is important to understand that this fear, this resistance will always be present. Not necessarily in favor of the current set of rules, but in favor of whatever the dominant set of rules is. It is fear of chaos that leads to this small-c conservatism. Only by de-naturalizing, de-realizing the current dominant paradigm, and understanding it as a step in development – something that has historical and epistemological roots – can we allow ourselves to move past it.

It is my hope that understanding these things in the terms of games can make this leap possible. The other option is a tyranny of childish rigidity, locked into a tautological adherence to a particular set of practices that bring pleasure and fun to one group of participants and immiseration to the remainder.

So what? It’s perhaps a satisfying rhetorical move to point out that the accusations of childishness come from a place of emotional immaturity, but what good does it do beyond this?

It’s perhaps useful to reference Douglas Hofstadter’s work of mathematics, art criticism, and philosophy, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Between each chapter he includes a series of philosophical dialogues between Achilles and a Tortoise, where the two have a discussion that illustrates the principle outlined in the chapter.

Hofstadter, in one of these, invokes a pair of operations that he refers to as “pushing” and “popping”. If we view the world as being made up of a series of “levels” – different steams of narrative, different series of occurrence, different conceptual worlds – then movement between them is best described as “pushing” (moving down a level) and “popping” (moving up a level). When we enter a game, we “push” down to the level of the game and step into its magic circle; if we are playing a video game that involves a mini-game (such as the “card games” or “sports games” that were popular in Japanese Roleplaying Games in the 1990s and early aughts) then this involves pushing down another level and stepping into a magic circle that winds tighter and tighter.

Is it so inconceivable that when we turn off the console, we are popping back out into a larger game, rather than returning to some default ground state that can be called the “real world”? Special Relativity suggests that there is no ground state, no privileged frame of reference to which everything else is a degenerate copy. I would suggest that a truly postmodern understanding of the functioning of human affairs would be that there is no real world ground state – there are only larger and larger magic circles.

But what is important for my point here is the existence of pushing and popping. When you go into work, you push into it; when you leave work, you pop out of it into your “real life” (which is, itself, another game). The erosion of the boundary between work and “life” is your work itself attempting to pop out. It is an attempt by the other player in the work game to expand its scope so that it can extract more labor from you.

When we move from dating to the next step of a romantic relationship, that is the participants in the relationship agreeing to cease pushing/popping from the relationship and erase the magic circle, bringing the contents of that circle into their “real life” in a consensual fashion.

I would say that everyone understands this intuitively, but having a vocabulary to describe it helps.

The magic circles of all of these games are brackets contained within larger brackets. The things outside of these brackets are prior to and of greater importance than what is within them (consider: it’s felt to be a horrible thing if a person misses a family obligation to fulfill a normal work obligation, or doesn’t even attempt to get out of it.) We can think of these in terms of relative scale, but there is no absolute scale to the whole business, because we have no objective referent to point to.

Image of a Necker Cube, made by user BenFrantzDale for wikimedia commons and used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Necker Cubes always seem to be to be a symbol of the push/pop operation, because they ambiguously pop out of the page and sink into the supposedly depthless field behind it.

It’s difficult to put these in spacial terms, but the basic idea is that “pushing” is moving “down” to a more subjective level, while “popping” is moving “up” to a more objective level. I cannot, in this piece, tell you how to defeat these arguments with a 100% success rate – I do not believe I can do that – but I can at least suggest to you that by “popping” out of the terms of the argument, and looking at it from off its vertical axis, seeing what lies above, and below, and prior to it, that you can begin to find the gaps in the argument, and can begin to work on them.

Only in rejecting false realism can we begin to apprehend what really is. Though, of course, dangers lie that way, too.

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On Broken Games (Ludo-Analysis, Part 3)