This morning I found the Amazon’s package with Raph’s book into it. I’m quite happy. It’s actually the first book I buy and read in english aside some school-related stuff. But what is important is that it’s a real book, it is solid. All this time I passed discussing and playing online games is simply virtual. It’s a virtual life that right now is near the totality of my life. It’s like a dream, I really wake up in the real world and I can assume nothing I do exists. Instead this book is solid, like a sign that the dream was somewhat real. It’s a proof.

So the book has an “horizontal” shape, 240 or so pages. I like having it in my hands, it’s well organized. On the left page there’s what Raph wrotes, organized in paragraphs and with an easily readable font. On the right there’s what Raph draws, with the role to illustrate a concept.

The concept he used is rather good. It’s not an “hard to understand” book, that requires you an effort of concentration just to grasp the logic sense. Instead it lures you in, it is pleasant so you go after it. Accepting the ride directly as a fun ride. The language is simple and essential and it mirrors directly the approach: reaveal the simplicity as something where the secrets are held.

From the other side it’s still a solid (in the material sense) book, as I said. This time we aren’t on a message board with a shifty attention span and active filtration and selection. A book, even when simple, still requires some dedication, you have to allow it to lead you in, with its own time and rules. So here Raph has a new advantage. Writing book is surely about having a power. This just to explain that I’ll need to give it its time before I’m able to finish it, digest it and perhaps comment. But I’m really happy to have this possibility and I’ll surely have fun. Having the book in my hands made me notice how much I like this sort of studies and activities. Like something I’d really like to do. Fascinating in a personal way. I love it.

For now I just skimmed it, read something here and there, looking at some of the comics. I also started to glance at the first pages, but I did that in front of a window, standing still. I only read books while I’m sitting, so I’ll surely go back and start again from the first word.

Just a few considerations about what I read in a few minutes that could be completely off-track but I still want to archive.

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Back at the end of the last May we were already discussing “fun” in games in a thread at Corpnews. After some posts I wrote my own, simple idea:

Learning is the key of the whole process:

+ We have fun when we are able to learn.
+ We are frustrated when the learning process is hard or forbidden.
+ We are bored when the learning process is missing.

So I identified three different statuses, plus I focused on the learning process as the core of the “fun”.

This isn’t different from Raph’s approach. He also focuses on the learning process and he starts to deal about the language and the cognitive studies. But before starting the real considerations he still feels the need to define what is a “game”. With my superficial attitude on the issue I never felt the need to properly define what a game is. So before reading further I stopped a second and asked myself how I would define it.

For me a game is always a “let’s pretend”. It’s a “what if”, a simulation. Something like a legend, with a tie to the reality about an aspect. Then moving to the essence of that aspect. Like linking a symbol to a meaning. A game has always a system of rules that is set, big or small but always “finite”. Then there’s a goal. Within this environment there’s a path to follow, or to discover that brings you to accomplish the goal.

These are more or less my own considerations about the definition. A simulation within a closed rulesystem with a goal and possible paths to reach it. At this point I continued to read and I was happy to discover that various “high-profile” academic guys more or less underlined the same idea, like:
Sid Meier – “A series of meaningful choices.”
Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings – “One or more casually linked series of challenges in a simulated environment”
Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman – “A system in which players engage in an artificial conflict,defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome”

Not far from my concept. The difference is that I still (once again since I criticized Raph on this many times) link the simulation with the reality as something important. It is a formal system, like Will Wright says, but it’s still linked outside the formal aspect. Raph starts to talk a lot about tic-tac-toe but this is not only a “dumb” game, as he defines it, it is also too abstracts to be enjoyed. As a kid I didn’t like these kind of games too much. Kids in general like a lot more to use the body, do sports, challange each other, roleplay TV movie or comics and all the rest. What I mean is that the “formal” aspect is indeed an aspect, but there’s also the roleplay, the simulation as something tied with a reality that is still meaningful aside a “formal theory of fun”. If you describe the cross and the circle signs in the tic-tac-toe game as knights fighting for a kingdom (just to explain.. not a great example), the kids are way, way more interested, because aside the formal system there’s the culture with its myths having a strong role in the dynamic known as “fun”.

But this was a side thought that popped in my head and following various critiques I wrote in the last months, against Raph, against Big Bartle. Instead Raph continues the ride focusing on “patterns”. This is interesting because it links to the idea of fun I wrote and pasted here above. I’m always superficial but I wasn’t wrong. I link the “fun” with the frustration and boringness. Like three possible statuses depending on the learning process. If you can learn and it’s viable you are having fun, if you cannot learn because it’s too hard you are frustrated and if you’ve learnt already everything you are bored. Raph descibes the same attitude melting my boringness and frustration together. When he plays a game that is too hard he is still bored:
“That’s not just me saying, “I can’t cut it in Internet play! Damn 14-year-old kids.” My reaction isn’t mere frustration; it’s also got a tinge of boredom. I look at the problem and say, “Well, I could take on the Sysyphean task of trying to match these guys. but frankly, repeated failure is a predictable cycle, and rather boring. I have better things to do with my time.”

This is interesting because it leads directly to go a bit deeper in what I only scratched with my own idea. It’s not just an homogeneous, indistinct (and undefined) “leaning process”. As I said I’m lazy and superficial. Raph analyzes better and focuses the attention on the “patterns”. At this point we can go back and consider what a game is. Again I define it like a medal with two sides that (must) melt together. There’s a context (that is too much ignored and trivialized) about the simulation itself, the myths, the culture. And there’s the algorithm. The solution of the puzzle, the “series of meaningful choices”. It’s this that Raph defines as “patterns”. And it’s the relationship of peoples with these patterns that regulates my frustration/boringness/fun distinction more or less accepted by Raph.

And that was all I was able to read and consider in a small span of time. Perhaps I’m already completely off-track but as I said I didn’t even really started to read the book. That’s something that will require a different attitude. And I’m really looking forward to sit down on a comfy armchair, with a pencil, and start reading with lot of time ahead :)