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Yorke on Games #20 – A Taxonomy of Bad Games

There are bad games, bad games, and bad games. And typically, we don’t bother unpacking the meaning of these very different uses of the word ‘bad’, which correspond roughly to ‘immoral in nature’, ‘poorly designed’, and ‘poorly played’. Today, I’m going to take on the task of creating a taxonomy of games with a very specific purpose: to disambiguate the kinds of factors which lead to bad gaming experiences, which will hopefully lead to a ‘Now You Know’ moment for readers by the time they reach the conclusion about why they’re not having fun in various gaming situations. Recognizing what makes bad games bad is the first step in discovering what makes good games good, and helping us have positive lusory experiences (which is the point of playing in the first place).

Pie Chart Demonstrating Value of Knowledge
Pie Chart Demonstrating Value of Knowledge

But First

In our last installment, ‘Games as Contracts’, I made the following extended analogy and argued for the utility of its application to our everyday gaming practices:

Games are like contracts in that both are entered into voluntarily, with full consent given to follow the rules (the formal equivalent of the terms of a contract). The consideration, or payoff, of the game for both parties (players) is a positive lusory experience—the joy of a game well played. For the payoff to be possible, both players have a (largely implicit) mutual obligation to take the intra-lusory goal of the game seriously and pursue it to the best of their abilities (demonstrate capacity), and to not ruin the experience for the other players (demonstrate competency).

This is why I claimed that offers should only be made to play games which are known or expected to produce positive lusory experiences, and to players who are not known or expected to be cheaters, triflers, or spoilsports (or, I here add, lackwits). It wouldn’t make rational sense to offer (or accept) a contract to game with someone otherwise. “That’s Sneaky Lou. He wants to play Snakes and Ladders with you”, hardly sounds like an enticing lusory experience that we ought to race to sign up for (we’d be in for a bad game, against an even worse opponent, so contracting to game would be irrational).

But I’ve already tipped my hand here to the careful reader, for despite my catchy article titling, games themselves are not in fact contracts (although they do share many features with them). More to the point, contracts are a prerequisite for games. There must be some sort of understanding that exists between players before they can play together: a serious, mutual commitment to the goal of having fun. Bernard Suits calls this the ‘lusory attitude’; we can recast it in Nietzschean terms as the ‘will to game’: accepting a ruleset because it enables a certain type of (desirable) gaming experience to occur.

The offer and acceptance of the ruleset precede the gaming experience, and also give it shape for its duration. The distinction here is subtle, but important: it is the distinction between signing a contract and fulfilling it. So, to clarify: games are the act of fulfilling certain kinds of (typically non-legal) contracts. That statement doesn’t make for a good article title, but it does have the virtue of greater conceptual precision.

“So… We can play Commander now?”
“So… We can play Commander now?”

And Now

It’s evident from the previous discussion that choosing to play a game with a morally bad, perverse, dull, frivolous, or otherwise defective opponent will yield a ‘bad’ lusory experience in the sense of it being ‘poorly played’, and thus dampen your will to game (at least with that person). However, there still remain (at least) two other senses of the word ‘bad’ as it refers to games, that are far more general in effect: ‘immoral in nature’ and ‘poorly designed’ games. Rather than making you want to avoid a particular player, these kinds of bad make you want to avoid playing the games themselves. But these two axes of evaluation are importantly different, in a manner which becomes most striking when presented in table form with examples of each category:

YorkeTable

The Taxonomy, Explained

When I use ‘good acts’ and ‘evil acts’ as terms to describe the things moral and immoral games encourage their players to do, I make no distinction as whether the good or evil occurs in-game or outside (after) the game. Also, I am not grounding this account of morality in any particular philosophical or religious framework, but keeping it at the populist level: ‘good’ and ‘evil’ actions are just those that the majority of humans would find (respectively) praiseworthy or reprehensible. Diplomacy and Werewolf, when played well, require that you to lie to other people in order to win; while Russian Roulette and boxing require you to partake in an activity wherein physical damage to yourself or others is an inevitable consequence of your actions. Lying and hurting others are generally regarded as undesirable, regardless of where your particular moral foundations are rooted, and so I have no reservations about describing these games as immoral.

image007

It is seemingly a more subjective task to classify games according to the quality of their design, although games with absolutely no latitude for the exercise of skill (once the underlying structure of the game is made evident) are easy to categorize as ‘poorly-designed’. Calling a game ‘well-designed’ requires me to regard it as enabling activities that are completely absorbing and flow-generating. Indeed, one of the reasons that the deceptions that inevitably occur in Diplomacy cause so much negative emotional feedback is that the game is so engrossing in its play that you put your whole self into it: the betrayals thus transcend the fiction of the game and become personal. The various stakeholder roleplay games that are now routine fare for corporate retreats and graduate school seminars, on the other hand, often require players to educate themselves on real-world topics in-game, and then use that knowledge to arrive at a greater understanding of other people’s interests and goals in relation to their own, in order to cooperate toward a group victory. While equally engrossing as Diplomacy, these games are of immediate and long-term intellectual and emotional benefit to their players, and are thus morally commendable.

The Examples, Defended

It was much easier to first find uncontroversial examples of poorly-designed and immoral games than it was their opposites. This mirrors the main theme of Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, and helps explain the interesting phenomenon that while depictions of Hell are plentiful and graphic, descriptions of Heaven are few and vague. As a species, it seems we’re much more closely attuned to things that go wrong and need improvement: we can find consensus on what is painful much more easily than on what is pleasurable. Nevertheless, I gave it a shot.

The original Game of Life [contained 95% more moral fiber]
The original Game of Life [contained 95% more moral fiber]

I didn’t want to get into a debate about whether chess is a well-designed game or merely passable, so I excluded it from the column of non-moral games (leaving aside the unlikely historical question of whether its dominant theme of regicide has ever been used as the inspiration for revolution, which might have led to its inclusion in the immoral column). Also left out is bingo, as its main use is gambling, which typically straddles a moral dividing line I don’t want to focus on today (plus, the fact that money is involved boosts the drama of an otherwise emotionally sterile play experience—recognizing sounds as numbers and then marking them down—which for some helps mask the fact that it is, structurally speaking, a poorly-designed game). The examples I did use are, I hope, generally unobjectionable and get the point across.

The infamous ‘Wheel of Torture’ used by Filipino police to make abusing suspects more entertaining for them
The infamous ‘Wheel of Torture’ used by Filipino police to make abusing suspects more entertaining for them

Some games, like the Wheel of Torture, need no explanation because they’re just what you expect them to be from their name. Others are childhood staples or mass market games that I will assume the readers have familiarity with. A few outliers, however, are rather obscure and need introduction.

Chore Wars is a role-playing game designed by Jane McGonigal (described in her book Reality is Broken) to make housework fun. You get experience points by doing dishes, vacuuming, and so forth, and compete with other household residents to get the buffest avatar. In a similar vein, Health Month is an online game that award points and tracks your self-reported progress toward specified health goals. While not the most stimulating genre of game out there, these games do have positive real-world payouts, represent the better side of gamification, and are clearly less tedious than completely deterministic games like Snakes and Ladders.

Free Rice is a quiz game that donates 10 grains of rice to needy people around the world for every question you correctly answer. The addictiveness of the game comes from the combined facts that the quiz questions are themselves well-constructed and get harder with every correct answer, and that every correct answer gives you visual feedback on the amount of rice you’ve earned for donation. You feel like you’re getting smarter and more charitable at the same time, which is a truly unique gaming experience.

While the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Spin the Bottle are both probably well-known to readers, some might wonder why I have deemed them to be poorly-designed. Research in game theory has established that in iterated versions of the Prisoner’s Dilemma you always get the best result by cooperating in the first game and then adopting a tit-for-tat strategy forever thereafter (I had this version in mind when I classified it as moral). In non-iterated versions, defection is always the rationally preferable strategy. Once this is known, this thought-experimental game becomes less intriguing.

Spin the Bottle, on the other hand, is poorly-designed because there is no possible inherent interest in the principal mechanic of the game: spinning the bottle itself. If sufficient care is taken to remove or greatly reducing individuals’ spinning skills from the equation (e.g. requiring two full turns of the bottle before its result is taken as valid), then the game consists exclusively of a indeterminately-long series of random people being pointed at and kissed. The only goal of the game is its own continuation, so long as at least two active players want an excuse to kiss each other. While socially expedient as an ice-breaker, this game is only interesting because of the relative entertainment value of the physical rewards (and punishments) it randomly distributes, and not because of any merits inherent to its structural design.

Finally, anybody who thinks that Punch Buggy isn’t an immoral game hasn’t gone on a long road trip with a sociopathic pre-pubescent male relative who used it as a pretext for giving you at least a dozen bruises.

Conclusion

To the vast majority of game-agnostic civilians out there, “a game’s a game”. Playing Pass the Pigs is as good a way to pass the evening to some as playing Civilization is to others. But just because the man on the street can’t taste the difference between a White Zinfandel and a Cabernet Sauvignon Oakville Au Paradis doesn’t mean there isn’t an important one.

Now, I haven’t developed this taxonomy of games in order to lay claim to being a connoisseur, or to enable the snobbery of others. People usually know who they are, and what they like, and I don’t harbor any judgement on that basis. It is a shame, however, that we often lack the lexical terms required to justify those likes and dislikes to others in an intelligible fashion.
It is my hope that by categorizing games in terms of the moral intent behind them, and the structural quality of their design, we can arrive at a more judicious method of critiquing games and profitably interrogating their role in our lives. If what we do shapes who we are (and if it doesn’t, what else does?), then it stands to reason that the games we play directly contribute to shaping our character and tastes (or at least help us discover what we’re not willing to do, and dislike). Along this line, games could be used as tools for moral introspection (e.g.: “I think I’m a good guy; so why does successfully deceiving others in Werewolf feel so good to me?”) or aspiration (e.g.: “I’d like to combine my love of games with my desire to do good in the world; maybe I should log in and play Free Rice for an hour.”). On a more mundane level, this taxonomy (and others like it) could help us select the games we play to better match the characters we are, and/or the goals we possess, which means more fun for everyone.

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