The initial approach of my dissertation project is to look at the dynamic between the media manager/editor and his or her audience as a game comprising manager and reader-spectator in the roles of two “players”. The idea is to dismantle this relationship to its core pieces and try to rebuild it as something with a “play factor”. To this end, I will examine what is the crucial content and what are the physical and conceptual tools that will make this relationship work.
The book The Art of Game Design, written by Jesse Schell and published in August 2008, came to my attention in a review in the website of the magazine Edge. The review is titled The Best Book on Game Design Ever (published on 4 of August, 2008). Edge is not only a video-game magazine, but also discusses the culture around games, the origins of the best creations, and the history of the industry. A favourable review from them is a good indicator of the quality of any book. The second example of positive reference about this book came from Amazon.
Editors of magazines, as well as the managers of the magazines’ brands, have to develop relevant guides, websites and books. They face the mission of putting a “play factor” inside the products to build communities and make the audience talk about (and interact with) their brands. Most of the times, the products sell journalism, but the managers also have to be aware of how marketing and entertainment are involved in a media product. They need tools that respond to the special needs of a new kind of audience.
In the last decade, with the technological development of personal computers and video-game consoles, games evolved considerably as a media form in terms of themes and storytelling possibilities. With the creation of products as The Sims, which is single-player and doesn’t even look like a regular game, and the massive multiplayer games, which consist of collective worlds that exist and evolve even when the player is not there, the experience of gaming has changed and started to influence other media. At the same time, some of the tools, or logical structures, of these games started to appear in the form of user interfaces in other areas of the internet. Internet banking and social network websites look more and more like games, where the player is managing some kind of resource (be it money or just fame).
Game designers – most specifically multiplayer game designers – and social network managers seem to have some of the crucial knowledge to develop the tools that our media products need; the ability to build communities using engaging and interesting ways to gather and maintain audience interest. The success of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, with its communities, social networks and iPhone apps, is a good example of the possibilities of these techniques (David Carr, How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power).
The Art of Game Design is useful because it approaches the concept of game design as something broader than games. It assumes that the reader can incorporate its concepts everywhere. What it does is establish 100 “lenses”, which are principles or questions that a game designer should apply in order to solve design problems when creating a game.
The “lenses” can be as simple as “Fun” (number 3, page 27), which is self-explanatory, or as complex as the “Interpersonal Circumplex” (number 78, page 319), where the relationship between characters in a simulation is discussed.
Every “lens” is explained thoroughly and in this process the author shows useful data about player habits by gender and age, sharing the information that the game industry uses to create its products. The author explains methods and frameworks to make game design work and techniques for prototyping, testing and idea development.
Although the book is very philosophical in its construction, it never loses sight of the fact that game design is a commercial enterprise. Schell uses many examples taken from his experience creating products for Disney’s theme parks.
The book establishes a diverse array of principles, explains useful methodology and data about the market, talks about player behavior, and addresses a very important principle: the cross-pollination between medias. The best writers, musicians, film directors normally take their inspiration from other medias. This approach makes them think outside the box and find new solutions.
It seems easy to apply these principles to websites, since they are digital and can (and should be) dynamic. Perhaps a greater challenge is to think about how to make it work on paper without being simplistic and just creating simple but pointless game devices (when out of their context), like crosswords or spaces for notes in some part of a page. That is when the book, with its original approach of the lenses, is more useful.
It gives the reader a useful framework to look at the problem (how to make magazines, newspapers and their websites interesting and somewhat “playable” in a way that they are able to engage their audience) and look for creative and practical solutions. Using some or even all of the “lenses”, the manager may find completely unexpected solutions for the proposed problem. With this proposed framework, The Art of Game Design makes the idea of incorporating gaming concepts and techniques into traditional media seem an enterprise that deserves further research.
