Mad Skills

Many claim the appeal of games is their ability to provide escape, their ability to transport the player to unusual places where the rules of normal life don't apply. This could be a fantasy world where magic holds aloft spire-cities, or merely the ability to steal a car and not go to prison for it. While I don't think this is false, it also leaves out a very important (I would say more important) reason why games are appealing. The rules of mundane life may disappear in games, but they are replaced by other rules. Mastering these mechanics provides great satisfaction and explains why games are often described as "relaxing" despite them often being quite taxing and stressful.

Jamie Madigan on his excellent Psychology of Games blog wrote about this last week in the context of "recovery experiences." Basically, our mental processes need time to recover, e.g. having a weekend off after a week of work, and return to full function. Three mechanisms achieve this: psychological detachment (not thinking about work), relaxation activities (low-stress enjoyable activities) and mastery experiences (getting better at something). Games are interesting because they can potentially provide any and all of these experiences. The escapist functions cover the first two, but it's the third that's especially interesting.

Consuming other media rarely provides any kind of mastery experience. Maybe there's some feeling of improvement in parsing Shakespeare or a David Lynch film, but even that is a stretch and certainly not the norm. Games are often stressful. Being in the midst of a neck-and-neck Starcraft II match isn't relaxing at all. Nor is Mario bounding from tiny ledge to an even tinier ledge, suspended above a starry void. I imagine the mastery experience in games is similar to learning to play a musical instrument. It requires effort and focus. For a while, you have little to show for it. But it's satisfying because you know you are improving.

Michael Abbott recently began the "Fun Factor Catalog," an effort (inspired by a comment I made, of all things, about Michael's love of baseball sims) to categorize what we enjoy about games. Currently there are 40 entries and of those, my rough categorization would mark 26 of them as mastery experiences. They use descriptors like "feeling clever," "preparation enabling success" and "challenge that tests skill and concentration."

When I think about most of the games I really enjoy, there are certainly some where I engaged with the story and characters (Planescape: Torment, Fallout, any adventure game, etc.). But the majority of my favourites would be games where I had the opportunity to master their systems, to improve skills. I think this also helps explain why so many games can have a terrible story and lackluster writing but still be a very satisfying experience. Obviously these aren't binary experiences either, a game could certain offer both. But only a small handful of studios possess the talent and focus to deliver quality on both those fronts.

So what's the purpose of this observation? We need better ways to talk about what makes games enjoyable. As I said almost exactly on year ago, "fun" is grossly insufficient. Michael's endeavour is laudable, but I'd love to see more of a taxonomy. We talk about characters and narrative a lot, but the skill component seems unfairly neglected in our conversations. Do you find mastery experiences in games satisfying? What kind of games do you find provide the most engagement when it comes to improving skills? I'm definitely curious how others approach this aspect of games specifically.

[Update: Chris Lepine wrote a great piece on his thoughts here.]