Games Are Restrictive

So I was listening to the latest podcast of Ludology, with guest Eric Zimmerman, author of Rules of Play. The episode was about emergent gameplay, and I definitely recommend a listen. One thing they touched on was that games are basically just restrictions. I'd like to delve into that with a bit more depth.

The reason why games make restrictions is because the restrictions create an unusual challenge to overcome. A sack race, for example, is a race (a normal challenge) with an extra restriction (a novel challenge). A lot of the fun of the game is the silliness of the extra restriction, and people's goofy attempts to overcome this new challenge.

Now why are challenges fun? I've read a few things here and there (I'm way too lazy to Google the papers) about how overcoming challenges creates a very strong emotional responses in people. People love overcoming challenges. It's hardwired into our brains. We want to feel accomplished.
 
Let's take another game most people are familiar with: Scrabble. So the basic idea of the game is that players take turns writing words found in an (usually) English dictionary. There's no real challenge in that, as most adults could do that for an hour and still be coming up with words. This game would not be much fun, as it lacks any sense of challenge. Now let's add the rule that each letter has to fit in a 1/2" square, and words can only go top to bottom or left to right. This by itself would be a silly superfluous rule, as it provides no challenge on its own... but if the availability of the 1/2" squares is limited, you now have a bit of a puzzle.

Now add in a bit of freedom that words can share as many letters with other words as needed, and you give players a mechanic to explore. This gives the player more interesting ways to complete this little puzzle of theirs. But now add in the restriction that words have to share at least one letter with another word (first word being exempt, of course). So now we have a simple little creative puzzle. At this point, we actually have a game.

But let's add a few more restrictions. Simple ones. Not only is the availability of space a restriction, but not the availability of letters. Let's restrict the number of letters that players have available to them each turn to seven. The game is still simple, but it offers up a more interesting challenge because of the few rules (restrictions) the game has.

You could even go further into the emergent aspect of the podcast. Bigger and more difficult words are more 'fun'. People will naturally try to challenge themselves to get the more interesting words out on the board. So, why not make a rule that rewards people for doing this? Less common letters award more points than common letters. This rule isn't so much a restriction as it is a reflection of the emergence of gameplay. Anyone who's played enough word games, like Scrabble or Boggle, will be familiar with the concept of 'good words'. Somebody at the table makes a word, and the other players say 'Oooh, that's a good one!'. Boggle doesn't directly award extra points for more difficult letters, but such a rule would make a lot more book keeping to do at once, and more difficult words generally get awarded by less players getting the same word (you score points in Boggle by making words that other players have not).

So basic rules of games are there to create restriction. Extra rules can be added to reward players for doing fun things, or possibly to emphasize the theme of the game. But, at the core of things, games are a challenge to overcome. Later on I'll have to do an article about what I call 'artificial difficulty'....