Heller: The word game has many implications if not also meanings. What is your definition of a game?

Zimmerman: I have probably thought too much about this question. My formal definition (something I developed with designer Katie Salen) is:

A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome. The main ideas here are: A game is a system; it involves one or more players; it models or embodies a conflict; but that conflict is artificial (separate in some way from “ordinary life”); it is defined by rules; and there is a knowable outcome (someone or everyone won or lost, or there was a score, time or other numerical output).

This definition is useful in a number of ways. For example, it helps separate games from less formal kinds of play (like narrative play with dolls or playing catch with a Frisbee) that don’t have a definite outcome or endpoint. Definitions are important. Game design is such a new field (even though games themselves are ancient) and it is important to be able to define its domain of study.

Heller: A game is also about play. So what is play? And what would you say is the purpose of a game?

Zimmerman: Yes, games are about play, but many other things are too. I put play into three kinds of categories:

Game Play is the formal play of a game that occurs when players follow rules and take part in the kind of game I defined in your last question.

Ludic Activities are other kinds of activities that we would recognize as play (two dogs chasing each other, two kids rough-housing, someone casually tossing and catching a ball)

Being Playful is also a more general kind of play. By this I mean the kinds of circumstances in which a spirit of play is injected into other activities or perceptions, such as giving a playful lecture, sex play, or even the play of light on a wall. (In this last case the expression implies that there is something playful about the way the light is falling.)

Heller: Okay, so what is common to all of these?

Zimmerman: Common to all of these things is a more abstract notion of play, which I define as: Free movement within a more rigid structure.

This definition applies to all three categories of play phenomena. For example, when we play a game, we enter the rigid structure of rules, but dance in and about them through the process of play. The person tossing the ball is playing with gravity, the material qualities of the ball, and his or her own physical and perceptual skills. And “being playful” means that we are taking some usually more rigid activity (like giving a lecture) and finding the interstitial spaces where playfulness can arise.

Heller: I suppose serious game designers must be cognizant of this complexity, and here I thought designing a game is supposed to be fun.

Zimmerman: Game design IS fun. But it’s really a lot like other forms of design. Game designers create the rigid structures of rules from which play will emerge. Other kinds of designers have a similar process: the designer creates a system (a typographic system, an architectural system) and the viewer/user/audience engenders play through participation, use, and engagement. Games just make this process particularly explicit.

Heller: Before the computer people played all sorts of interpersonal/interactive games -- from Chutes and Ladders to Parcheesi to Monopoly -- mostly as diversions from the rigors of the day. What has changed about games now that they are played in digital environments?

Zimmerman: I would argue that very little has changed. For a game designer, the principles of creating meaningful play still hold. The fundamentals of game design, such as the relationship between rules and play, holds true no matter what the medium.

On the other hand, digital platforms allow for new kinds of experiences. They can network remote locations, manipulate large amounts of information, automate complex processes, and provide very immediate feedback for actions a player takes. As a new form of media and pop culture, computer and video games also participate in global cultural trends in a way that board games do not.

Heller: Buckminster Fuller's World Games were developed to enhance the cooperative spirit among different people in large groups -- clearly a means of socialization that would benefit the planet. What is your goal in creating interactive games? Is it cultural, social, political, or simply entertainment?

Zimmerman: gamelab takes on a variety of work that has a variety of goals. Sometimes, we are asked to help sell a product or brand through a game. For example, when we work with LEGO.com, even though we are able to make very enjoyable games, at some level we have to make a game that satisfies the client and the client’s sense of the LEGO brand. Luckily, that brand embodies very progressive play values of modularity, creativity, engineering, aesthetics, imaginative play, etc, so it is a pleasure to work with them.

We also do original work. In these cases, we try to explore new kinds of visual aesthetics, narrative and cultural content, and – especially – gameplay. Right now we’re in the middle of a collaborative project with a non-profit organization called Global Kids, in which we are working with high school kids to develop a game based on social issues. In that case, we are trying to bring new kinds of political and social content into gaming. I’m very excited to see how that is going to turn out. Overall, gameLab’s mission is to expand the boundaries of this new medium however we can through the creation of experimental and innovative work.

NEW QUESTION

Heller: How do you work with these kids? Is there some kind of direct link? And do these kids engage in the concept alone or the overall design?

We’re finding the design of the collaborative process very challenging. As much as possible, we bring the kids into the design process. At the same time, we can’t expect the kids to be game designers and know how to make design and production decisions.

In essense, we engage the kids in order to determine the content of the game -- the social issue that is deeply relevant to them. They do content research on the issue, visual design research, and also think about how to simulate or represent the issue in game form. Most high school students play computer games, and so they have a lot of experience as players to draw from. At the same time, making games about social content is very much experimental territory, and so we don’t expect the kids to solve those game design problems. That’s where we come in.

As we develop the prototype, the kids give us feedback, which we incorporate into the design. This fits neatly into our development process, which is already highly iterative.

Heller: Is there a particular "language" that you employ in your game design, one that is accessible yet unique to your methods? If so, what does this entail? If not, is there a universal gaming language?

If by “language” you mean design discourse, there is definitely not yet a common language for how game designers talk about what it is that they do. Most of my academic research over the last several years has been thinking about the discourse of game design and what that design language might be like. That is the focus of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, a book I co-authored with Katie Salen that will be published by MIT Press this fall.

If by “language” you mean a universal set of principles, I’m not sure. Katie and I have developed our ideas about what these game design “fundamentals” might be, but my hope is that game design, like other design fields, will have rich debates and disagreements about what games are, how they work, and how best to design them.

Heller: I recently read a book about the creators of “Doom,” the largest selling video game of the 90s. What differentiates your approach from this "individual shooting" experience, which spawned so many other game companies?

Zimmerman: I think you mean “first-person shooter” games. These games, and other established genres, such as adventure games, simulation games, real-time strategy games, driving games, team sports games, etc, represent the existing tropes of the game industry. gameLab games seek a different kind of audience. We don’t design for the so-called “hardcore gamer” but instead for a wider audience, perhaps for people that might not normally play a computer game. Also, it is our explicit intention not to work in established genres but instead invent new gameplay structures, new forms of interactivity, new ways for people to play.

NEW QUESTION

Heller: How do you engage people who don’t ordinarily play games? My son has many video games, but despite his invitations I never found the want or need to play them – even the ones that I found interesting. Isn’t it a cultural thing?

Partially, yes. I grew up playing Pong and Atari in elementary school, arcade games in junior high school, and computer games on the Apple II+ I got for my Barmitzvah. I was perhaps the first generation raised on video games, a generation that expects their entertainment to be participatory. This trend is only increasing. It’s mind-boggling and inspiring to see 3-year-olds operating a Windows environment with a mouse.

At the same time, games have a long way to go in shedding their well-deserved stigma as adolescent male power fantasies. That’s part of the motivation for the work we do at gameLab – to make games a more viable cultural medium.

Heller: Why is violence so attractive and popular in interactive games?

Zimmerman: Games on some level are about conflict. Even Chess can be thought of as a stylized war simulation, in which pieces advance over a grid-based territory and capture each other. All games model or simulate some kind of conflict. Over the millennia, games have tended to focus on military and economic conflict. That’s one reason why games have ended up having an emphasis on violence. A clear lineage can be traced from Go and Chess, through Kriegspiel and early war games, though Dungeons & Dragons and miniatures war gaming, through to first-person shooters, fighting games, and real-time strategy games. There are certainly other kinds of conflict games might model, from psychological and interpersonal conflict to social and cultural conflict. These are deliciously difficult, unsolved game design problems.

At the same time, there is a transgressive element to play, and it makes sense that play which permits taboo behaviors (like violent behaviors) would be popular. Just think about Spin-The-Bottle.

Finding new forms of conflict to model, new kinds of content for games that go beyond the typical genres, is a major challenge for commercial game design. Part of it has to do with games shedding their cultural stigma as geeky boys’ culture to find new audiences, and part of it has to with solving the design challenges that will make new kinds of games possible. The project we’re doing with Global Kids is one way of addressing these design challenges.

NEW QUESTION

Heller: But isn’t it true that geeky boys are key audience? What other audiences are there?

Geeky boys are part of the demographic that spends the most money on games: the “hardcore gamer” is a twentysomething white male buying several games over a year. These consumers drive the industry.

On the other hand, if you look at who is playing computer and video games, and you include so-called “casual games” like solitaire and online Bingo, the audience age goes way up and gender is split about equally. Many of the online gaming sites that gameLab works with, such as Shockwave.com, have a primarily female audience.

The audiences are out there. We just need to design more interesting games for them.

NEW QUESTION

Heller: How would you describe a well designed game? Obviously it entails more than just graphics and typography. What are the key attributes?

First, I’ll tell you what you can’t describe, which is the experience of a well-designed game. The pleasures of game play come in a huge cornocopia of forms, from the intellectual dueling of Chess and Starcraft to the atletic balletics of Tennis and Quake to the social maneuvering of SiSSYFIGHT 2000. Games, like any complex cultural form, provides a dizzying myriad of experiences.

However, there is one design concept underlying successful experience in any game, and Katie Salen and I call it “meaningful play.” Meaningful play is a simple but powerful concept, and it refers to the ability of a player to make clear choices in a game that have understandable and significant outcomes.

It all goes back to that core idea of play I mentioned earlier: free movement within a more rigid structure. Game designers provide players with the abiliy to make choices: stategic choices, social choices, aesthetic choices. The meaning of those choices, the outcomes of those choices, emerge through the process of play.

The trick is that, like any designer, game designers don’t directly design experience. They only design the structures that give rise to experience. I can design a font, but not the sentences you are going to write with it. Game designers design rules, but play is something that happens when players take those rules and run with them.

For me these are incredibly exciting ideas. A game is less a fixed object and more a set of possibilities. The sweetest pleasure a game designer can experience is seeing your game played in ways you never anticipated. Someone else is using the language you designed to say things you never imagined. As designers, we should all be so lucky.