The Aesthetic of Play

A game designer considers the experience of play, why games have rules, and the relationship of play and narrative.

The impulse toward play is very ancient, not only pre-cultural but pre-human; zoologists have identified play behaviors in turtles and in chimpanzees. Games have existed since antiquity; 5,000-year-old board games have been recovered from Egyptian tombs. And yet we still lack a critical language for thinking about play. Game designers are better at answering small questions ("Why is this battle boring?") than big ones ("What does this game mean?"). In this book, the game designer Brian Upton analyzes the experience of play--how playful activities unfold from moment to moment and how the rules we adopt constrain that unfolding. Drawing on games that range from Monopoly to Dungeons & Dragons to Guitar Hero, Upton develops a framework for understanding play, introducing a set of critical tools that can help us analyze games and game designs and identify ways in which they succeed or fail.

Brian Upton cofounded Red Storm Entertainment, where he was lead designer of the popular games Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon. He is now a "script doctor for games" at Sony's Santa Monica Studio.

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
I Games
1 Defining Play 9
2 Interactivity 23
3 Play Spaces 39
4 Heuristics 51
5 Anticipation 73
6 Mastery 93
II Minds
7 Understanding 117
8 Epistemology 127
9 Neurons 145
10 Signs 161
III Stories
11 Playing without Winning 183
12 Performance 199
13 Narrative Play 215
14 Narrative Structure 237
15 Play and Meaning 259
16 Critical Play 283
Bibliography 307
Index 319