7    Architects

Sometimes the beauty of play resides in the tension between control and chaos. Sometimes playing is voluntarily surrendering to form; sometimes it is being seduced into form, being appropriated by a plaything. Some other times, the pleasure comes from the appropriation of those forms, breaking and deforming them to play with them.

By “the form of play” I am referring to games more than to toys, which tend to be freer and less formal.¹ To these artifacts we surrender ourselves to being seduced. Form implies that it can be communicated, transmitted, fixed and polished, and adapted and modified.² The form of football is kept under vigilance by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and UEFA,³ the form of basketball by the National Basketball Association and the International Basketball Association. Despite the myriad house rules and interpretations of Scrabble, when professional games take place, there is a shared set of rules that account for what competitive Scrabble should be.⁴ Form is the common language that allows us to share a game—and to design it.

Form also allows us to be seduced, with the seduction starting the process of play. Form gives us a starting point. Play has to begin somewhere, and it does so by occupying a context with its form, typically the rules of a game. When a referee in any sport signals the beginning of the game, the world changes, and in that space, players and spectators experience a new reality. Similarly, when a computer game begins, a new loop in the program starts, virtually taking over the machine and its resources. Through form, appropriation begins; it is the starting point from which play plays itself.⁵

Because play happens through form and is a way of being in the world, the cultural capital of the act of creating the form of play has dramatically increased.⁶ From interaction design to performance art and game design, the activity of creating play, or invoking playfulness, is slowly becoming intellectual work. The form of play obsesses our culture. Of course, this is the wrong obsession, since what is important about play is not its form, which will, after all, mutate as part of play itself, but the activity or the attitude, that is, the process of engaging with the world and oneself through play.

Games are, to a certain extent, a privileged form of play. Games are the culture-dominant material manifestation of the autotelic nature of play.⁷ Performances and rituals have religious or aesthetic purposes, while games are just games, serving a purpose of their own. To understand play, we often focus on games. In this ecological approach to play, which levels the activity and the related attitude across technologies and contexts, I see no preference in the understanding of play. Games are just another manifestation of play.

However, games have also gained enormous cultural capital since the beginning of this century.⁸ The success of computer games overshadows many other developments,⁹ but the presence in our culture of many types of games, from sports to board games and even reality TV contests, is a testimony to the importance of play in our culture. This surge in the interest in games and the dominance of digital games in our leisure economy have contributed to the rise in cultural capital of games as a form of play.

Many academics and game designers have argued that games will be the dominant aesthetic form of this century, taking over the central cultural position of movies, television, and literature. This is an interesting argument for those of us interested in play, since games are just a formal manifestation of play. But one of the consequences of this argument is deeply interesting: the rise in importance of game design as a practice, and therefore the role of the creator of games in our culture of leisure.

Play is a powerful manifestation of knowledge and being in the world, a way of becoming, learning, and expressing ourselves that is deeply and inherently human, though never isolated from a world of cultures and materials with which we play, they themselves playing too. And since games are the privileged way of channeling play through form, making games must be an important social activity. Besides the academic and commercial interest in game design, there is also a cultural interest in vindicating the role of the creator of games as an important member of the culture industries.

There are many reasons behind this vindication, but the one I consider most important has to do with our rationalist, post-Enlightenment, postromantic societies and the privilege we give to those able of creating and understanding both mechanical creation and human expression.¹⁰ The game designer is a figure who understands how humans enjoy playing, mastering the necessary materials that lead to successful play. This designer is a romantic author, a creator who knows about what we access only through intuition and can materially create those experiences. The art of game design is the art of creating play. This enlightened attribute of the designer—the capacity to harness, control, steer and produce play for intended purposes—is what makes them culturally respectable.

However, this idea of game design does not always match with play being a creative force, a sometimes dangerous, sometimes excessive form of being and expression that belongs to the person who chooses to play. Play is appropriation, and therefore its relations with form are complicated. Form encapsulates, shapes, and steers play to a certain extent, but it is also seduced by play and appropriated by it. Within this idea of play, what is game design? How can these privileged forms of play be created?

Before I answer this question, I quickly summarize the modern understanding of game design as a practice and how it relates to play. In this context of increasing cultural capital conceded to games and play, game design has become one of the fastest-growing areas of the discipline of design in terms of recognition.¹¹

A central discourse in game design writing focuses on the relation between games and system design. This way of thinking focuses on crafting systems that involve players and express ideas.¹² Games are seen as expressive objects thanks to their formal design, since they convey meaning through systems. Game designers write about and focus on the form of games as being systems that encapsulate, coordinate, frame, and to a certain extent determine play.

Meaning is then embedded in systems, and players are given the role of relatively creative beings who interact with the system in order to find meaning in the form. Through the system, and not through appropriation, formal play through games becomes a way of knowledge.

I disagree with this view of game design. I don’t disagree with the notion that games are, for the most part, systems, and that is why computers have contributed to their cultural importance. However, system-centric design thinking—the idea that because games are systems, they are important—is contrary to the way these systems are experienced. Game systems can only partially contain meaning, because meaning is created through an activity that is contextual, appropriative, creative, disruptive, and deeply personal. Games are props for that activity; they are important because they focus on it, not because they contain or trigger its meaning. Games are important because they are the privileged form of play, but they are only a form of play.

In order to understand how we can rethink how games are created and how that process can be adapted to the nature of play, we need to look back at design theory and research to understand what the nature of design is and how it matches the nature of play.

So what is design? This apparently simple question has been asked in design research for decades,¹³ and it is by no means my intention to engage in that conversation. So I will keep it simple: design is the science of the artificial, a discipline focused on creating new technological objects in the world for specific uses. It is concerned with the creation of new things in the world. Design is also a mode of knowledge:¹⁴ if the natural sciences understand the natural world and the humanities and social sciences try to explain people, design is posed to understand the artificial—or, more precisely, the way the materiality of the artificial interfaces with the world. Designers must know about materiality; they must be familiar with how materials can be bent and manipulated to a purpose. But a designer must also know people: how they interact with objects, how they relate to the future state of affairs encapsulated in a designed object, and how they feel.

To design is to know how materials can be translated into objects that will please, enhance, satisfy, and even create needs. To design is to bring about new things in the world. These things that are not just occupying space; they are fulfilling a purpose, and they have meaning on their own. To design is to create meaningful things for meaningful uses, understanding different uses and different materials.¹⁵

Design is a political, aesthetic, and moral activity.¹⁶ Bringing new objects into the world has to be questioned as a political action—an intervention that modifies our presence in the world. Through objects, we engage with the world and with others, and the ways in which objects mediate that engagement make design an activity that can be understood as political or ethical.

Design is also an aesthetic activity, as functions are turned into forms and incarnated in the world as things.¹⁷ Interaction with any object can have a purpose other than mere interaction: it can be beautiful, pleasurable, enriching. Design is not necessarily focused on creating beautiful things, but the importance of form is crucial for understanding the uniqueness of design as a way of engaging with the world.

The world itself must also be present in design. Again, design is as much understanding materiality as understanding the contexts of use in which that materiality is deployed and how they affect meaning and purpose. The relation between a designed thing and its context is a relation of resistance and occupation: the designed thing wants to focus and facilitate an action while eliminating the resistances that prevent that action from taking place.¹⁸

Design involves materiality and people, but also the economics, politics, and aesthetics of creation, production, consumption, and distribution. To design is to understand how to create things for people—things that are consumed, purchased, acquired, transmitted, enjoyed, suffered, and modified.

So from this perspective, what is game design? The design of games has been categorized as a type of emotional design¹⁹ in which the creation of artificial obstacles enhances emotions through play.²⁰ However, I ask a different question: How can we create games that incorporate, allow, and encourage appropriative, creative, and disruptive play?

Let’s go back to the notion of games and meaning. Much game design and game studies research has argued that games produce meaning because of a tight coupling between their rules and the messages they want to convey. Games are engaging, meaningful, activist, and important because their very form exists to prove it. Because games give strict form to play and someone has been in charge of designing that form, games can do things.

We still think about author, medium, communication, and channel. This is a valid interpretive framework if one accepts the idea of play as a protected activity created and guided by the rules of the game, oblivious of contexts, cultures, or player appropriation. This valid idea of play is tightly coupled to the also valid idea of games as formal systems.

However, in my ecology of play, the activity and the object are only loosely coupled. One cannot understand the playing of games without the rules of the game, but both are in constant motion toward and against each other; they are constantly redefined, negotiated, adapted, and denied by the other. The beauty, value, and politics of play reside precisely in the ways in which players solve this loose coupling, that is, the ways in which players engage with the ambiguous spaces between the rules and the actions and give meaning to their experience as it evolves over time. Playing is negotiating a wiggle space between rules, systems, contexts, preferences, appropriation, and submission.

So for this type of play, what kind of design can we apply? Designing for play means creating a setting rather than a system, a stage rather than a world, a model rather than a puzzle. Whatever is created has to be open, flexible, and malleable to allow players to appropriate, express, act and interact, make, and become part of the form itself.

Game design has sometimes been compared to architecture: the setting of a place with cues for behavior yet open for the users to modification. If we want this analogy to hold, if we want games that are architectural in spirit, then the idea of meaning needs to be abandoned in favor of collaborative processes of engagement and interaction among all agents in the network of play. Nobody dictates meaning, order, importance, or action; all agents, designers and players, negotiate play. The designer is just a stage setter, inviting others to play through this form that has been created or found. The designer’s role is to open the gates for play in an object and with a purpose.

The designer of games should not act as a provider of anything other than context. A designer is a facilitator, a catalyst, but by no means does she possess the form she has created, for the form of play belongs only to those who engage with it—those who play. A game designer is not an author. Like a prop master or a stage director, the game designer proposes and deploys an object into the world, letting it speak for itself and be spoken through. These props not only do not resist appropriation; they encourage it and frame it as part of what it is to play.

The very notion of game designers is troublesome to me. It implies authorship, a privileged communication model, an implied authority or reference. At the same time, play is an affair of appropriation, of creation, of fluid margins and negotiations. A designer sets a frame for form to start its process, and then all other elements in the network take over, starting play as an act of creation and expression.

The word designer, then, seems to me inadequate for understanding the craft of creating forms for the activity of play. At the risk of being pedantic, I foolishly propose an alternative. Let us not talk about “game designers.” Let us bury that terminology if what we are doing is not “games.” If we are doing something else, if our purpose and our activity and our focus are to make people play, then let’s become architects of play. Like architects, we create just contexts, and also like architects, we are slave to the ways others appropriate what we carefully create. We give a space for people to explore and express themselves and the right props to do so. We, the architects of play, make people play.

Game design is dead. Long live the architecture of play.