Let’s study games.

In a giant pile place all the games anyone has ever come up with--from Senet and Poker to Pong and Everquest, from Badminton and Bingo to Chess and Grand Theft Auto III. Now ask yourself, “What do all the things in this pile have in common?” Or, to borrow Jesper Juul’s finely worded inquiry: What is the heart of gameness?

Gameness is one of those tricky qualities. It doesn’t seem to be particularly hard to seperate games from not-games—some things fit, other things don’t. But when you really try to describe why football and Solitare go together, it gets difficult. Jesper’s keynote on gameness both proves the complexity of answering the question and underlines the general lack of consensus on a best and final definition of games. You can easily point toward gameness, but it’s hard to put your finger right on it.

Still, without descending into that lexical quagmire, we can surface a couple of common features. While some might argue these features are not sufficient to describe games, they are certainly necessary pieces. So, we can say that games needs rules and something that makes the game entertaining. And even if you think that a game needs all kinds of other things to be fully realized, these two features, or characteristics are essential. They are the only things that reliably link puttering around in The Sims to undoing your competitors in Monopoly or returning a Tennis serve.

The trouble is, and the point I want to focus on here, is that video games have one extraordinarily distinct component that other games don’t have. There is something about video games that makes them very different from all other sorts of games. And this difference that makes a world of difference, (to paraphrase Gregory Bateson) is the difference that separates video game studies from the rest of game studies as much as motion separates film study from the study of still photography.

The essential difference between traditional games and video games is that video games are hermetic--the rules sealed tightly in an occult chamber. That is, the rules of the game are never fully articulated and must be discovered through practice.

Or put it this way—when you play Poker, you may not know what the other player will do. But you know what he can do. When you start playing a traditional game, you must know what to do and what is possible. In order to play Monopoly, you have to know all the rules. And even if you don’t, someone does. Two people and a set of Checkers don’t make a game. Someone has to know how to play. Someone has to have internalized the rules.

Further, imperfect knowledge of the rules leads to bickering and hollow victories. This is why sports employ referees, umpires and judges—people who are paid to take the ambiguity of exceedingly complex rules.

But video games are different. They are different because our experience of these rules is different.

Think about how you encounter a new video game. Common practice and protocol demands that you start up a new video game before even looking at the few pages of rules inserted with the disc. The video game player expects that the game will provide important rules in context of the play or that they will figure out what is important from the play itself. The printed “rules” included with a video game have the standing of a strategy guide for traditional games. You rely on the printed rules as a sort of performance edge, a coach to hone game play—rarely as an actual source of game rules.

(It is worth noting too that gaming strategy guides, in a perfect ironic symmetry, are actually detailed rule guides that attempt to outline every operating rule in the game system.)

Sidestepping the staggering gnostic aspects of video games, the point I want to make is pretty simple—in traditional games the rules must be absolutely visible. In video games the transparency of the rules is entirely optional and in most cases necessarily obscured.

Take a game such as Tetris. Nominally all the rules are known—shapes fall, you twirl them and make solid lines of blocks. But how is the number and type of falling blocks determined? If you imagined a card game based on Tetris, the answer to this question would be obvious: “Well, this stack of cards here has the shapes and you draw the top one to determine the falling shape. When the draw pile is empty, you shuffle the discard pile and turn it face down on the draw pile.”

But there is no parallel in a computer version of Tetris. We don’t know if the mind behind the piece selection is benevolent or malevolent. We don’t know if the choice of piece is an intelligence test or purely random. Would a smart player see the pattern in the selection of pieces? Are we missing something? Or is it simply that the selection is random and we are subject to fate? Perhaps no one knows that answer other than the person who wrote the algorithm that produces the sequence of falling pieces.

Tetris, in all its apparent simplicity, is actually hermeneutically complex. Tetris is occult, hidden.

Certainly, it is possible to make too much of this hidden nature of video games. But in the common case, too little is made of it. We homologize Chess with Warcraft never realizing that they are as different in nature as live and recorded music,

This is not to say that video games are somehow superior. Rather, the difference between traditional games and video games may actually point to something non-obvious about rules—their possible low-importance in a game experience.

Games with fairly simple rules, such as Chess or Go but which allow for a lot of strategic complexity, are often very popular. These sorts of games minimize the cognitive load of memorizing rules and the consequences of imperfect rule knowledge. You might loose a game of Chess because you didn’t think through that the knight would hop into that particular place, but you don’t loose because you didn’t know that the knight could make that sort of move.

Another way of starting this is that with traditional games, the challenge is not in the rules, it is in the variability or uncertainty in your opponent. This is the genius of Poker. The rules are simple so the game is played out in a complex reading of your opponent’s personality and motives, dreams and desires, passion and self-image.

Video games work in a different way. They isolate uncertainty and provide a promise of regularity and pattern. I may not know what is stored in the algorithms of my computer opponent. But I believe that it is knowable, rationally sortable and recognizable. And this is why Chess with a human opponent is so much more complex than a video game, because your opponent is ultimately unknowable.

In the world of video games, the realm of the video game occult, knowledge is attainable, the world is knowable.

And this is why I think that video games resonate so much with the philosophical pursuits—the dream that the world makes sense with the right models and enough effort. This is also the promise of the occult arts, to know the unknowable and is a key aspect of some theology.

Of course, the world of traditional games and video games abut. And at this borderline there reside interesting philosophical and aesthetic questions that have been explored in the past.

Alan Turing questioned the line between human and computer and proposed his famous Turing Test to ascertain machine intelligence. I have argued elsewhere that all video games are a form of his test. Likewise then, it is possible to see all games, video games and traditional games, as a form of the Turing Test. Or put this way, “What is the difference between playing chess with a human or a computer via email?”

There is also precedent for exploring algorithm as a generator of unique art. The Oulipo provides some perfect examples. Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems combines traditional literature with algorithmic techniques. So, a poem, cut up such that the stanzas in it can be interchanged by flipping pages offers an interesting experience. The rules are known. You can observe how the poem is sliced up and how the substitution of stanzas occurs. Regardless, the variety of outcomes is so great (thus the hundred thousands billion poems) that the experience is unfathomable. You can encounter Hundred Thousand Billion Poems but you cannot fully know the work. This is an interesting example because it shows the invisible dividing line between hiding potential experiences inside a computer-stored algorithm and ones published in the open in traditional media. In relationship to the current discussion, this puts Queneau’s work at the artistic intersection of video games than to traditional games.

So while there are reasons to look at games as a global category, and even reasons to see video games and traditional games as two geographical areas on a continuous surface, the central point remains: Video game and traditional games are different. They share genetic similarities in the same way the all mammals are cut from the same biological cloth. But no one tries hard to see the world of people through the eyes of a dolphin. Likewise, we should recognize the sui generis of video games, and not try to unnaturally mate them continually with traditional video game theory.

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Note: This article relates closely to my work with critical elements, specifically the notion of algorithm. For more information on the critical elements, see the downloads section.