Contextual Studies: Costikyan

In my last contextual studies lecture, we were given a presentation on the various different ways people defined games by our course leader, Marie-Claire Isaaman. After which, we were asked to read through an article by Greg Costikyan called I Have No Words I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games. We were also asked to pick ten points we found interesting from the article, and discuss them. The points and the discussion behind them are as follows:

1.  The distinction between puzzles and games. As I read the article, I had the good fortune to be casually fondling a Rubik's Cube (Erno Rubik). Costikyan's discussion of Chris Crawfords definition, from The Art of Computer Game Design, of what seperates a game from a puzzle forced me to look at the cube and consider which the cube is. Crawford states that a puzzle is static and does not interact with the player. A game, however, does interact with the player, opening up new options to the player as new choices are made. It is because of this I see the Rubik's cube as being a game. Even according to some of the later sections in the article, the Rubik's Cube qualifies. The Rubik's Cube, like a lot of digital games today, offer the player many different ways to reach the same conclusion; or to quote Costikyan "the game state changes in response to your decisions". Each time the player interacts with the cube, new problems are create, each having several different solutions. This means, from my point of view, the Rubik's Cube is a Puzzle Game, as opposed to just "a puzzle".
2. Costikyan's discussion of players defining their own goals. Cosikyan states that games must have goals. If they have no goals, they are toys. He also demonstrates his point with Will Wright's SimEarth. According to Costikyan, SimEarth has no real goals with which to aim towards. As a result, SimEarth is just a complex toy and very rarely talked about in modern times. In contrast, he used SimCity, also by Will Wright, to demonstrate that game doesn't nessacarily have to have programmed victory conditions to have goals. SimCity allowed the player to create their own goals because of the many different ways the player can interact with the game. I like this idea because of its heavy use in modern games. A popular example could be Rockstar's incredibly popular Grand Theft Auto series which allows the player to freely run around an entire city with a lot of interactive elements. This is the perfect example of the environment needed for players to create their own goals. In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, players are often found racing motorbikes down train tunnels, attempting to race the trains. This is a player defined goal I don;t think even Rockstar predicted.
3. Smaller, alternate goals that help to complete bigger goals. Costikyan uses the example of Pen & Paper RPGs and MMORPGs to show that, as well as a bigger goal, smaller and alternative goals can keep the player's interest. The games he describes have the ultimate goal of character development. The players character must improve their character by gaining experience from the world in which he or she is placed. This is done through smaller, story driven goals which keeps the players interest. He also talks about alternative goals, which I have experience with from my time as a DM (Dungeon Master) for the Wizards of the Coast Dungeons & Dragons Role-Playing Game. My job would be to create adventures for the players. I would then play as the monsters they fought, the traps they sprung and the characters they met. During this time, I found that the players seemed much more engaged in the game when they had alternate goals. For instance, if they were fighting four or five goblins, which can take some time for players just starting out in the D&D world, it makes the game more fun if I also have traps or some other event going on in the roon, such as floor panels which activate arrows from the walls. Not only does this require much more cautious strategy from the players, but it also provides them with an interesting alternative to killing goblins, i.e., getting the goblins to kill themselves.This prevents players from getting bored from focusing on one thing to long a period.
4. Costikyan's views on Cooperative games. Costikyan states that "the politically correct" dislike and oppose many digital games because of the competition they encourage. He then goes on to talk about how it doesn't seem to be the competition they're against, but the struggle. Games require struggle. If a game is going to challenge the player and make them feel like they have achieved something when they overcome the challenge. He then uses Pen & Paper Role-Playing Games again to demonstrate how cooperative games still require struggle to be fun. I like his example, especially since this idea has flourished in recent years. A good example of this is Valve's Portal 2, which puts two people up against a variety of puzzles. The game's Cooperative mode has been praised many times over because of how well the design forces players to commucate between themselves and work together in order to overcome the struggle. This could easily be used as a counter-argument to the "politically correct" as to how struggle in games can be used to teach people to work together and cooperate.
5. Struggle in games. As said before, games require struggle. Costikyan uses the example of Grim Fandango, a LucasArts game, which is a point and click adventure game. He said that a player could, if they wanted to, look up a walkthrough and simply run through the game in order to enjoy the story. However, this prevents it from being a game tp the player and more a form of point and click picture book. Although I would put the same point differently, I agree with him. My personal view is that, the reason struggle makes a game more involving, is because of the emotional investment put into it. You will care about a character because you have been through what he or she has been through, as opposed to passivly watching from the sidelines. In fact. in many Role-Playing games, you are encouraged to identify with the protagonist. A good example is Bioware's Dark Fantasy game, Dragon Age: Origins, which asks the player to create their own character and, depending on the character's race and profession, you are given a different experience in-game. On top of this, the whole way through the game, the character is forced to make choices that effect, both, later gameplay experiences and future plot developments. This game takes every measure possible to make the gameplay experience as unique to the player as possible; almost forcing them to identify with the character they have built from the ground up.
6. The idea of invisible structures in video games. Costikyan points out how important structure is in a game. With a board game (or analog games) the rules need to be memorised by the players. This means that an analog game can only have as complicated a structure as the player's attention span, and memory, allows. A small part of the brilliance of digital games is that the computer can deal with the vast majority of the structure, leaving the player to become even more immersed in the game, perhaps even forgetting that they are playing a game at all. For instance, someone playing the analoug version of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, developed and published by Games Workshop, would have a very different experience than someone playing the digital incarnation of the same game, Black Hole Entertainment's Warhammer: Mark of Chaos. They are both based around the same mythology, have similar structures and share a visual style; but the player does not have to memorise an entire tome of rules just to play. As a result, the player is freed from constantly having think about the rules of the game and can just think about the rules of war, becoming immersed in the experience of playing. 
7. The requirement of endogenous meaning. Costikyan describes games as always having some form of edogenous meaning which seperates them from the real world. The same is true for almost every form of entertainment media. Although games do not always need to be completly fantasy, they do need to be seperate from the real world. An example he used was the stock market. The stock market does not have endogenous meaning in that it effects real world businesses and uses money as real world incentives. I am sure that Costikyan means this in a similar way to Caillois who stated in Man, Play and Games, "In every case, the game's domain is a restricted, closed, protected universe". However, it could be argued that the economy in general is based entirely around endogenous meaning and that it is in every way a game.
8.  Games as a form of education. Although Costikyan uses this point to serve as an example of endogenous meaning, it is an interesting point in itself. He uses the example of Imperium Romanum II, by Albert A. Nofi, an analog tabletop Roman Wargame set at a specific point in Roman history. Costikyan says that he believes it to be a much better teaching tool than any literary resource, because of it's ability to allow the player to explore the systems and experience it first hand. I entirely believe in this point. Whilst studying a BTEC in Games Development in Canterbury College, our class was addressed by the college's dyslexia department. They wanted someone from our class to help them to make a game suitable for teaching dyslexics. They had found that, although dyslexics often struggle with more academic media, they could engage perfectly well with game. However, what they wanted was a non-competitive game with simple graphics and basic, easy gameplay. Although I was too unexperienced to get involved with the program, I can look back and say that despite it being a very good idea, they are going about it, what I see, as the wrong way. They seemed to want the sort of game that we were forced to use in secondary school. Cheap looking flash games that are more like mock tests trying to be "down with the kids" than actual games. A game that aims to teach, should teach second, entertain first. I have learnt about history from Creative Assembly's Total War series; and about astro-physics from Giant Army's Universe Sandbox than any of the games designed to be educational. 
9. Interactive entertainment is games. Costikyan points out that there are no forms of interactive entertainment that are not games. By definition, the word "interactive" means an exchange of actions. Collin's English Dictionary (10th Edition, 2009) defines "interactive" as, "acting upon or in close relation with each other; interacting". This means that something like youtube.com is not interactive entertainment. Although the website itself is interactive, the videos, which are the entertainment, are not. Youtube has recently added the ability to place links that pop up at certain points in the video. This means that it allows the video producers to create multi-stranded narratives or quizzes. However, this makes the entertainment into a game, thus proving his point further. Although I wanted to (not entirely sure why), I could not argue with this point. Even when I tried to use things like painting, cooking and debate, I found that they were either not interactive, or did not have endogenous meaning.
10. Game design seperate from other forms of entertainment media. Costikyan brings up this point when discussing one of Marc LeBlanc's Taxonomy of Game Pleasures, Sensation. He states that many people from other media, such as film, television and books have tried to create games, but cannot because of the husge difference between their media and games. I think that this is especially true in modern times because of the exponential increase in the quality of, both, graphical hardware/rendering software and the popularity of the games medium. This, very commonly, fails. Costikyan states that it is because of the focus, in other mediums, on story and visual stimualtion. Games do not require a lot of either of these things to be fun, they simply help. How much depends upon the game itself and the approach it takes. Mojang's Minecraft is a good and, perhaps, overused example of this. I do not think a film producer or writer could predict just how far it would take off and how many people would fall in love with it. Minecraft has done so well because it's creator, who has become known as "Notch", understood games design and what people enjoy in a game. Compared to a linear, cinematic game, it is obvious which one is most thought out and well researched and which one is concieved by, as the games journalist Kieron Gillen would put it, "the money-man".