Several months ago, Kotaku editor and game journalism impressario Stephen Totillo asked me to send him my thoughts on what makes a game good or bad. He included what I told him in an essay he wrote about the topic on Kotaku.
My response to his question was that there is no universal definition of what makes a game good or bad – in fact, it is part of a game designer’s work to define success for a particular game. This is complicated by the fact that games (in a classical sense) have no utilitarian function – they have no end outside themselves – as opposed to more functional forms of design like designing a fork or a car. Every game is a sort of system of pleasure, responsible for both stirring up needs and desires in players, and then frustrating and satisfying them in some way.
Stephen has his own answer to the question of what makes a game good or bad: for him it has to do with a game supplying “interesting choices” for participants. This is a great rule of thumb for designing engaging games, and in fact it’s very similar to the idea of “meaningful choice” – one of the central concepts of Rules of Play. Meaningful choice is simply the process by which a player is given choices, these choices have real outcomes, and the game communicates these outcomes to the player.
Actually, the concept of meaningful choice was almost my answer to Stephen’s original question about what makes a game good. But in the end I stopped myself from proposing even that basic idea. The problem with proposing a single model for a proper game is that any rule of “good design” is made to be broken, by some game or another, in some context sooner or later.
So yes, Stephen, “interesting choice” is a great way to understand what makes most games meaningful. And when I am teaching something like Introduction to Game Design, that’s the kind of model I use to help game design students understand the basic idea of engagement through choice and outcome in a game. So in that sense I’d absolutely agree with you.
But what if we took a wider view? Could we create a game that succeeded – despite giving players no meaningful choices at all? There may be some games that already fit this category: gambling games like slots or Roulette, or creation-based games like Exquisite Corpse. Perhaps in the end we’d no longer call it a game, but that is how cultural forms grow and change.
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Follow-up to some of the comments: The example of Guitar Hero is excellent – it does not appear to have choices because largely it is a contest of skill – which, like a footrace, does not appear at first glance to have any choices at all. Contests and games of chance (like Roulette) in their pure form do not have choices, but of course nothing ever exists in pure form. (Try telling Lance Armstrong that there are no strategic choices involved in a bike race!)
being playful 
Another example of a game massively popular without meaningful choice: Guitar Hero! 🙂
O.
I suppose there are a couple… when to activate the bonus score…. mode… whatever that is called, I forget, is about the only in-game meaningful choice. Which song to pick, what difficulty, those are meaningful choices, but they’re more meta-choices.
But I agree, nothing about what makes that game good is about making choices. You could take out the score bonus thing and it’d still be a good game. It’s just a skill-gauntlet and you hit the notes or you don’t – no choice. That seems to be more or less true of a lot of heavily skill-based games. Then as you move towards more strategic games, you get some that are pretty much ALL meaningful choices – Civilisation?
Dear Esther (if you consider it a game) has no meaningful choices, and yet is a wonderful experience.
Yeah Guitar Hero is a great example! Very little in the way of interesting choice – just hit all the buttons in the right order. There are choices, but I’d argue that they aren’t what makes the game great.
I think exceptionally good games always have exceptionally good traits – but what those traits are isn’t common to all games. Interesting choices is a commonly used trait, so is good use of skill, so is atmosphere…
To take one of those traits and use it as a decisive, narrow definition is kind of a mistake I think.
I’d add Rhythm Heaven to the “great game w/out choice” list. Or WarioWare. Anything that requires you to succeed in a very specific, narrowly-defined way… but still is fantastic fun due to presentation, humor, sense of progression, etc.
I think meaningful choice is a pretty dicey criterion upon which to judge a game. Some games are very ludic and are very true to the meaning of the word ‘game’. Like Tetris, or any other puzzle game. Sure there are choices, but those choices boil down to whether you’re pushing button ‘A’ or button ‘B’. If I didn’t make a choice while playing pong, I wouldn’t have a great time, but it’s not those choices that make it a good game.
Look at something like Half Life 2 or To the Moon, both are (in my opinion) great games, and both don’t have a lot of MEANINGFUL choice. They’re simply great games to experience because of the unification of the elements of the game – great music, story, visuals, gameplay.
I think a big problem when we’re discussing games is that we’ve not yet really got to grips with genre yet. There is such an enormous variety of types of game that trying to find anything that unifies them in terms of criticisim is very hard. It’s like comparing a cook book with Anna Karenina – both could be great but the only thing they have in common is their medium – words on a page. I think it’s something that hasn’t been fully approached yet; we need to answer ‘What is a game?’ before we answer ‘What makes a good game?’
Wow, that got pretentious fast.
Woops! I probably should have read the Kotaku article before posting. He disagrees with a lot of what I said above.
That said though, I think Totilo’s still wrong. I think his whole idea about choices is more about what makes something a game, not what makes a game good.
My first thought for a counterexample were children’s games like Candyland, which have no choices at all. You might argue these are all bad games because adults hate them. But you could also say they are great games for their target audience (very young children) because they offer age-appropriate mechanics, a game arc that includes rising tension and satisfying resolution (again, for the target demographic), and let the players practice critical skills like turn-taking, moving a token, and declaring a winner that many other games build on (i.e. they are a decent gateway into better games).
The game experience is a function of both game and player. Change the player and you change what makes a “great” game. Best you could do to answer the question is to say what makes a great game for you, personally… or some other real or imagined person.
Meaningful choices is a great concept, mostly when you are building a game from the ground and get stuck at some point, questioning the players choices is a good way to untie the problems you encounter through the dev. process.
But, this is a concept that is very design focused leaving the main question when approaching a game design, what is waht I want to say with this game?. I think that the fair answer to the question about what makes a good or bad game, is the good use of the language of game design. So, which is the grammar of this language? well, I think we as game designer are still trying to figure it out. We are still swimming in the isms. like visual arte did at the beginning of 20 century.
[…] sind in diesem Zusammenhang auch die weiterführenden Anmerkungen von Eric Zimmerman, einem der von Totilo befragten […]
[…] sind in diesem Zusammenhang auch die weiterführenden Anmerkungen von Eric Zimmerman, einem der von Totilo befragten […]
Meaningful choices is one of those ideas that really stuck at first as an explanation as to what makes a good game. However, the more you think about it, the less it seems true. I think it holds up quite well for board games, perhaps more so than for video games. Though there are also board games that one could argue do not fall into this slot and are just fun.
But how do we define “good”? The problem of defining what is a “good” game is merely a representation of the current paradigm if you will in gaming. It’s the norm of the masses, the lowest common denominator.
I believe that anything in the space of design, be it art, architecture or game design, is a subject of taste.
I think, much like art, we can claim that good games (subjective as it may be) are games that engage the user(s) in a certain way. We all have different tastes, needs, feelings. Art and games that attract us, engage us because they connect on a certain level with our needs.
As I’m writing, I’m trying to delve deeper, but I don’t think it’s possible to define further. Someone seeking to “let go and relax” might enjoy King of Tokyo whilst someone else might not prefer Tumblin Dice because he dislikes player elimination and prefers skill.
I guess there are too many factors involved to actually be able to pin-point one certain characteristic that defines what a good game is. But boy is it fun to think about.