The Gameplay is the Reward

We need to be able to talk more concretely and specifically about the pleasures of gameplay.

I don’t really like “fun” as a concept. That’s not meant to be a commentary on how much of a bummer I am, but it’s more that “fun” is only a vague way of describing a whole, diverse range of responsive phenomena, many of which are explicitly opposed to one another. It makes sense to describe Guitar Hero as fun or a ride at Disneyland, but I’m not sure I’d call the experience of playing SOMA fun. Yet, there is some kind of delight we get from jump scares and existential dread, a kind of mental and even physical arousal from having our senses excited and disturbed.

There is pleasure in fear and terror, just as there is in sexual arousal. In fact, despite being physiologically very different—arousal draws you toward something where fear pushes you away—these two sensations have a perverse symmetry with one another. They both crowd out reason, causing you to act like something other than yourself, or so it seems. The reality is how you respond to sex and fear is also who you are, possibly something darker or maybe even bolder. It’s through fear that we experience bravery, and letting go of your sexual hang-ups can let live a part of yourself that society told you was dirty and that you should repress. Pleasure, then, serves as an acute reminder of what it means to live and not just exist.

So, pleasure—or, rather, I should say pleasures serve as a more precise means of showing what the nature of a player’s aesthetic response can be. “Fun,” in its abstract singularity, functions as, more or less, a substitute for “good.” “Hey, that ride was fun!” could just as easily be “that ride was good!” without any real degradation in meaning. However, “that ride gave me a hard on!” says something very different and perhaps a little odd. But the oddity of it is actually more interesting. The description of someone’s pleasure in a thing tells you far more about who they are as a human being—maybe a little too much in this instance—than the all inclusive sign of “fun” ever could.

Her Master’s Voice

In her 2002 book Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, poet and critic Susan Stewart says that the aesthetic, sensual characteristics of poetry, the way they shape language and the world, serve as a resistance against oblivion. What’s more, she sees in sense experience a kind of fundamental interactivity.

Through work, play, sex, grooming, and other activities, we use our bodies to address the natural world with an ongoing mutuality. The senses cluster and work at the openings of the body; through them, we engage in an epistemology of process that is specific to parts of the body and yet evidently endlessly synthetic and generalizable, leading to knowledge of exterior forms. (18)

“Epistemology of process” here is just an overwrought way of saying, “knowing through doing.” The senses and sensory experience, then, serve as a means of knowing the world, of, in a sense, playing with it. So, even though Stewart is making an argument specific to poetry, it generalizes quite easily. The senses could be said to bypass reason or are maybe even prior to it. An infant feels, even in the womb, but does little in the way of logical ordering of the world.

This is going to be something of a mild polemic, because there are times when I feel like game design is subject to far too much reason and far too little sensation. As someone academically trained, I’m as guilty of over-systematizing as anyone, but that doesn’t mean we can’t let go of reason and just feel something from time to time. And if, as Jesse Schell claims, games are fundamentally about crafting experiences, then maybe we need to take sensation a little more seriously and not just write it off as a second order effect.

Lauryn and I spoke in our most recent episode about the pleasures of interacting with companions in Baldur’s Gate 3 and the Dragon Age series, but I didn’t get a chance to talk about probably the most interesting companion in BG3, namely Amelia Tyler’s narrator. Now, her persistent voice in your head works differently from the other companions—you can’t romance her, for instance—but you do interact with her in much the same way you do other NPCs, through the dialogue system. Most important, though, is how her voice serves as your, the player’s, primary access to you, the player character, in the game. The narrator is, at once, in you but also other to you, and through this doubled presence, she shapes much of how you respond to what happens.

I want to be clear, though, that I’m not talking about the dialogue, i.e. what she says, but rather how she says it, the way the tenor of her voice conveys trepidation or anxiety or a queasy delight in slaughter. These emotional resonances serve as an exteriorizing of the player character’s own sensations, a necessary one given the fact that player and avatar are mapped onto one another in a game but are not synonymous. The voice mediates this connection, gives it a material reality in sound, and lends it a kind of life that you wouldn’t get if you just fed the script into even the most sophisticated text to speech algorithm. A real human voice, the way it can convey an understanding of the emotional register of what’s happening, is fundamental to making the entirety of the gameplay experience a pleasurable one.

The sound of the voice, then, is a key component of the narrative, the how of the game’s story. It reveals far more than just the meaning of what’s being said. For example, when you first meet Minthara in BG3, she comes off as a stereotypical drow, bold and imperious. She seems to exude confidence and a sense of purpose, one that carries over in the player’s potential sexual encounter with her after betraying the druids in the grove. But once sexy time is over, you get your first opportunity to see the cracks in the veneer, and speaking with her in camp, you learn that growing up in the brutality of drow society instilled in her a sense of personal freedom and ambition but it also broke her a bit.

Listening to Emma Gregory’s vocal performance, you get the full weight of Minthara’s ambivalence in how her confidence falters when describing the fact that the manner of her life has meant she never had anyone she could grow close to. Gregory reveals Minthara’s vulnerability and her desire to share her ambitions with another person. This revelatory quality of the actor’s voice, then, the way it seeps into your ears, mirrors the revelation that Minthara is not entirely what she seems. The pleasure of interacting with her lies less in the culmination of sexual arousal, oddly, and more in the intimacy of knowing her and feeling what she feels. It’s not all about the climax.

An Alternative Reward Structure

“Climax” is an interesting word in English, naming at one moment the culmination of a narrative arc and in another moment the ecstatic release of a sexual encounter. I am not the first person to point this out, but I wanted to bring this connection to the fore because I think it can help explain why an all too common logic of the reward structure of games is not terribly satisfying. In fact, climax as a model of in game reward might actually represent a means of avoiding considering the pleasures of gameplay in their entirety.

So, we have to revisit our old friend and nemesis, the gameplay loop, the one pattern to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. It posits something very easy to understand. You do a thing, and if you do that thing correctly, you receive the means to do the next thing. Rinse and repeat until the game comes to an end. But due to the inherently repetitive nature of this structure, much of game design is about resisting the loop by incorporating variety. Just like Frodo and the One Ring, the game has to carry this structure while avoiding succumbing to its temptations.

Consider for a moment, the aesthetics of a combo. At the level of the controls, your actions are pretty repetitive: mashing the same button over and over again. But the sensory experience of the game, through its sights and sounds and haptic feedback, don’t serve you up the same thing every time you attack. Your avatar strikes or shoots in different ways each time, creating both a more pleasing attack sequence as well as giving it a kind of temporal rhythm.

This is why combat design is as much about feel as the underlying math. You could describe the virtues of a charged attack in terms of damage (big math!) or in terms of how it fires off a massive glowy projectile that, when it hits, causes the enemy to explode into a pile of gore, replete with gross crunching and sloshing sounds (big feel!). This brings us back to Stewart’s “epistemology of process.” There is something we know about a game in the way it feels to us, viscerally, that can’t be explained by complex charts and decision trees.

Where games abrogate the pleasure of process, of the doing itself, it can begin to feel like work, like a grind, where the only reason you’re doing something is for the subsequent reward. While this is all too common in games, I believe it to be a bad tendency. In the pod, I spoke about the transformative effect of delayed gratification, but that delay can’t just be a gap between a craving and its satisfaction. There must be something of the end result in the waiting. Otherwise, it’s like you’re always chasing a fix, and it’s something of a black mark on games how many of them play into such addictive behaviors.

Having “something in the waiting” is a lot like the aroma of food as it cooks. It is at once a premonition of the meal to come while also being a pleasure in itself. When my partner worked in a café way back when, she would come home smelling of coffee and I would often bury my head in her shoulder to take it all in before welcoming her home. Smells, like sounds, can have an immediate effect on your mood and disposition, and the pleasure in having them assault your senses lies in how they both bypass your reason and how the thing itself stimulates rather than acting as an impediment in the way of some subsequent fix.

You can see this in games like Guitar Hero or any other game where the player is asked to embody a particular performance. And I mean embody, for the way the GH controller is designed facilitates a high degree of physical, sensual pleasure that in turn transforms your own subjective state to make you feel like something akin to a rock star… ideally. Because the pleasure of playing GH lies in the performance, in the doing of the game’s most basic mechanics, the focus is drawn away from the climax, from the tyranny of the loop, onto the process. And through the elation—or perhaps the frustration—of that process, we become, if only for the time being, something other to ourselves.

Conclusion

So, then, the process itself, the most basic fundamentals of gameplay, becomes the reward. Which brings us back to the centrality of narrative in design, not just as a stand in for story as a “wrapper” for game content, but as a mode for understanding why the how of a game is something that can be imbued with significance for the player. Rather than seeing it as a means to an end, the means, in a perverse way, is the end or a kind of end in itself. In this, the structure of romantic engagement in BG3 or DA and the structure of performance in GH share a key similarity: they both locate the pleasure of interacting with the game world in what might seem to be the mundane, ordinary parts of gameplay, not some distant fix.

As a result, seemingly trivial things start to take on greater significance. The particle effects of a given ability start to matter much more, because their visual appeal is now part of the pleasure in using that ability. If your avatar is a big axe guy like, say, Axe in Dota 2, there’s something very satisfying in the large, crunchy whack of his ultimate ability, Culling Blade. And if you’re going to be spending hours of your life micromanaging your Sims, the least they can do for you is put on a nice outfit. These details, then, that seem superficial at first are about fleshing out a game with little pleasures, little moments of surprise or delight that make it stand out against their counterparts.

Thinking of these things in terms of narrative can also help us see them as a complex system, a series of little revelations that keep the player engaged throughout the entirety of the gameplay experience rather than in particular, long delayed moments. They tell a kind of story about what you game is and why, frankly, the player should give a crap in the first place. By shunning the vagaries of “fun,” it’s easier to see these pleasures in their specificity, so that we can more effectively design with them in mind.

I suppose that’s all for this go around. Next time, if all goes according to plan, I’ll probably have more to say about the mechanics of “acceptance” as opposed to “struggle,” where the challenge lies in how we confront ourselves rather than a hoard of enemies or some big bad. Or, you know, I’ll talk about something else. Who knows!