Games

I’ve been playing games my whole life, so I have some thoughts on what makes them good/fun.

Flashlight Theory

Somehow I’ve lucked out and have an 8yo who thinks secretly reading under the covers past her bedtime is an act of rebellion, and it hasn’t yet occurred to her that her flashlights never seem to run out of batteries.

— Robert McNees (@mcnees) August 13, 2020

To me, this is what good game design is. Game design is all about tricking the players into thinking they’ve beat you, the game designer. Players want to feel smart! I believe the vast majority of games are this at their core. They are reading the book at night, and you are the one changing the batteries. To illustrate this, I want to look at examples that are increasingly less obvious, and explain how this concept (I’ll call it flashlight theory) sits at the heart of the game.

Roguelikes

Roguelikes are the pinnacle of flashlight theory. At the very core of a roguelike is often some kind of build system that allows for emergent synergies, which make the game easier. Think Slay the Spire or Binding of Isaac. These games give the player a challenge: finish a run… if you can! To beat the game designer, you have to use the tools they give you to create something “broken” in order to win. The most fun part of these roguelikes is discovering some broken build. It feels like you’re doing something you’re not supposed to, like you’re getting one up on the game designers. Yet, the game designer put all of those items there for you to do exactly that.

Dark souls likes

At the center of these games is their difficulty. These games challenge the player, almost taunt them, and say “this game is too hard, you’re not good enough to beat it”. To try and beat a game whose primary draw is its difficulty is to defy its premise. Yet, it still exists inside of the metagame that the developers created. They put the items and the broken builds in the game so that you feel like you’re getting one up on them, when in reality its exactly as they intended. Sound like anything?

Platformers

Now we need to get a little more abstract to see where flashlight theory applies. Unlike the last two, the classic platformer (Mario, Sonic, Celeste, etc.) doesn’t have these kind of build systems, so how are you “beating the designer” when there’s no broken build to find? To answer this, we need to think about why a person would play a platformer. To me, it seems like its to overcome the challenge of the platforming. This reminds me of the previous category! In beating a platformer level/game, we see a declaration from the player: “I am greater than this challenge that you have put before me, designer!”. So, here too flashlight theory applies. However, based on this, it seems that flashlight theory can be generalized into something more abstract.

Games are fun when the player overcomes adversity.

Here, all I’ve done is take flashlight theory and replaced “the game designer” with “adversity”. With this simple change, we can likely cover lots and lots of games. However, how do we explain sandboxy games like Minecraft or Animal Crossing? Sure, those games have some adversity baked in, but its not a leap in logic to see that people would play Minecraft with no creepers and Animal Crossing with no debt. Thus “Games are fun when the player overcomes adversity” (what I’ll call “generalized flashlight theory”) must not tell us the whole picture.

The Minecraft Problem

Lets imagine someone who only plays minecraft in creative mode. They build awesome builds, which they may or may not show off to other people. There are no enemies, survival mechanics, or anything else that can be considered “difficult” game mechanics. Yet, the player has fun. Why?

Here I believe we see that minecraft has a sort of meta-mechanic that the player is engaging with. The difficult part of this experience is nowhere to be found in a list of the game’s mechanics. The difficult part emerges as a result of them. For that player, the adversity they are overcoming is the difficulty of building good looking things! Nowhere in the mechanics of the game does it say that good looking things are difficult to build, yet this is where the player is deriving their enjoyment from.

So, generalized flashlight theory is saved! Indeed, it is, but I think we can zoom out and see that the enjoyment that generalized flashlight theory describes is actually better described by a slightly different explanation.

Ego Investment

When our creative mode only builder builds something beautiful, when someone beats Elden Ring, when someone wins the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour, when someone beats another in chess, what do they get out of it? Why does it feel good to overcome that adversity?

I believe that all of these have one thing in common: they are all proving to themselves that they are able to overcome those obstacles. They invest their egos into their gameplay; it is all about testing themselves. This is no different than the reason why artists create great works of art or why olympians push their bodies to their limits!

Thus, games are, at their core, about answering a simple question:

Am I Good Enough?

Games For Narrative

Well, hold on. There must be more to the picture, considering the fact that many people play games just to experience stories. Think Telltale, Visual Novels, etc. How do we fit those in? Well, lets look at them critically to try and find out.

Movies versus Games

Imagine there exists a game whose narrative is perfectly captured by a movie or vice versa. What reason would a person have to play the game over the movie? All things being equal, the big difference is that the game allows the player to “experience” the story. The story is exactly the same, but in one medium, the player feels as though they are making an impact.

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If the only difference between the two is that the player feels as though they are part of the story, then it seems we have an answer. Here too we have ego investment! However, this is a different form of ego investment. Where more competitively minded games are about the player proving themselves, these narrative games are about the player actualizing themselves within the narrative. In both scenarios, we see ego investment as the main driver, just in different ways

Actualizing Themselves

The greatest story based video games allow the player to make meaningful choices that affect the outcome of the narrative. For example, take undertale. The game completely changes based on the player’s choices! A genocide run is almost unrecognizable from a good one. This was the same strength that Telltale games had. In these games, the player sees themselves in the game world.

How do we explain the success of a game like The Last of Us? That game is renowned for its story, yet the player can’t actually choose to change the outcome. It always ends the same. However, is any single playthrough exactly the same? No! Otherwise it would be a movie. The game still require input and choices from the player to be finished. They may not be large narrative defining choices like undertale, but they are choices nonetheless.

How does one come to know themselves? I believe it is through seeing their effect in the world; by percieving oneself. To know yourself, you use the things you percieve to construct a self image, or ego. You look in a mirror, you hear your voice, you see how other people react to you. Games allow you to bring this self realization further: they provide a sandbox where you can make all sorts of choices and see how the world reacts. Thus, all games, even competive ones, have the ego at their heart.

Conclusion

Games are a form of self actualization. They are a mirror that players can look into and see different aspects of themselves. For some games it might be that they are answering the question “Am I Good Enough?”, but all games are answering the same question at heart:

Who Am I?