{"id":1182,"date":"2008-11-17T13:48:59","date_gmt":"2008-11-17T11:48:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/?p=1182"},"modified":"2015-07-02T13:45:49","modified_gmt":"2015-07-02T11:45:49","slug":"a-playful-stance-my-game-design-london-2008-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2008\/11\/17\/a-playful-stance-my-game-design-london-2008-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"A Playful Stance — my Game Design London 2008 talk"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A while ago I was interviewed by Sam Warnaars<\/a>. He\u2019s researching people\u2019s conference experiences; he asked me what my most favourite and least favourite conference of the past year was. I wish he\u2019d asked me after<\/em> my trip to Playful ’08<\/a>, because it has been by far the best conference experience to date. Why? Because it was like Toby, Richard and the rest of the event\u2019s producers had taken a peek inside my brain and came up with a program encompassing (almost) all my fascinations — games, interaction design, play, sociality, the web, products, physical interfaces, etc. Almost every speaker brought something interesting to the table. The audience was composed of people from many different backgrounds, and all seemed to, well, like<\/em> each other. The venue was lovely and atmospheric (albeit a bit chilly). They had good tea. Drinks afterwards were tasty and fun, the tapas later on even more so. And the whiskey after that<\/em>, well let’s just say I was glad to have a late flight the next day. Many thanks to my friends at Pixel-Lab<\/a> for inviting me, and to Mr. Davies<\/a> for the referral. <\/p>\n

Below is a transcript plus slides of my contribution to the day. The slides are also on SlideShare<\/a>. I have been told all talks have been recorded and will be published to the event\u2019s Vimeo group<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Perhaps 1874 words is a bit too much for you? In that case, let me give you an executive summary of sorts: <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The role of design in rich forms of play, such as skateboarding, is facilitatory. Designers provide tools for people to play with.<\/li>\n
  2. It is hard to predict what people will do exactly with your tools. This is OK. In fact it is best to leave room for unexpected uses. <\/li>\n
  3. Underspecified, playful tools can be used for learning. People can use them to explore complex concepts on their own terms.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    As always, I am interested in receiving constructive criticism, as well as good examples of the things I’ve discussed. <\/p>\n\n\"\"\n

    Hello everyone. My name is Kars Alfrink. I am from the Netherlands, from the lovely town of Utrecht<\/a>, to be exact. Utrecht is so keen on becoming the nation\u2019s capital for game design, that they let Microsoft light up the Dom tower green for the Xbox 360<\/em> launch\u2026 Anyway, I work freelance, as an interaction designer. I guess the reason I was invited to come here is because I occupy myself mainly with designing for playful experiences. What that means exactly, I am still trying to figure out myself!<\/p>\n

    Interaction design is a discipline that occupies itself with shaping the dialogue between people and the stuff they use. Sometimes that stuff is a way to communicate with other people. Sometimes not.<\/p>\n

    When I was studying interaction design, I could not stay away from games. This irritated most of my teachers greatly. I\u2019d always enjoyed playing them of course. But then I also got fascinated by their design, in particular of their interactivity. I found their interactions so much richer than most other things.<\/p>\n

    However, I was not that interested in games as entertainment, or at least, I wasn\u2019t interested in designing them for this end. And I\u2019m still not very interested in that area. Which is why I say I design for playful experiences. I want to design things that use play to facilitate things such as learning, collaboration and creativity.<\/p>\n\"\"\n

    So in my work I straddle the line between interaction design and game design. You could draw both fields like this, both being equals. <\/p>\n\"\"\n

    Although often I draw the picture like this: game design being a specialized sub discipline of interaction design. And I would be on game design\u2019s edge, approaching it from an interaction design perspective.<\/p>\n

    What I like about play is how it forces me, as a designer, to take a certain stance<\/strong>. In many ways I think designing playful things is very humbling. Designers tend to be control freaks, and interaction designers, myself included, are no exception. This urge to control the experience of use has often annoyed me. I guess this is why I\u2019ve drifted towards the design for play. <\/p>\n\"\"\n

    Designing for play is like a holding a bird: squeeze too hard, and it dies. Of course, if you hold it too loosely, it will fly away\u2026 <\/p>\n

    So it\u2019s this stance that I\u2019d like to talk about today. Using a few examples, I hope I can paint at least a partial picture of what I think it is about.<\/p>\n\"\"\n

    Let\u2019s start with skateboarding. Who has seen the documentary film Dogtown and Z-Boys<\/em><\/a>? <\/p>\n

    I think it\u2019s brilliant. It tells the story of the 1970s Zephyr skateboarding team, who were a big influence on the ultimate shape the \u201csport\u201d would get. One of my favourite sections of the film is \u2018The Birth of Vertical\u2019 \u2014 where we see how a chain of seemingly coincidental events lead to a dramatic change in the dominant style of skateboarding. In short, a draught causes lots of private pools to be empty. The Z-Boys decide to try and skate in those pools. Because of the particular shape of the pools \u2014 bowl shaped and irregular \u2014 they try reaching the edges, and eventually they start jumping out of the pools and back in. \u201cVertical\u201d is born.<\/p>\n

    This all sounds very logical to us now, since when we think of skateboarding, we immediately think of verts and half pipes, and aerial acrobatics. But back then, to these kids\u2019 knowledge, what they were doing had never been attempted before. <\/p>\n

    So I think this is a prime example of what we in game design call the exploration of a possibility space. The Z-Boys were trying to figure out what the limits were of the combination of their equipment, their bodies, and their environment. Why were they doing this? For the sheer enjoyment of it. They weren\u2019t doing it because it had some outside purpose. In fact, in my opinion, they were doing it exactly for the sake of its uselessness. Play is an end in itself.<\/strong> Later on in the film you see how, for some of the Z-Boys, skateboarding looses its charm when competition and money get involved.<\/p>\n\"\"\n

    (For those of you who are familiar with Roger Caillois<\/a>\u2019 classification of games \u2014 I think skateboarding started out firmly in ilinx<\/em> territory, which is all about physical thrills, and only later moved towards ag\u00f4n<\/em>, which is about competition.)1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

    Another aspect of this story that I find so fascinating is how the vertical style of skateboarding apparently emerged<\/em>, without any top-down orchestration. Skateboarding was not \u201cdesigned\u201d, in the usual sense of the term.<\/p>\n

    But certain parts of the ecosystem in which \u201cvertical\u201d was \u201cborn\u201d were<\/em> designed, or at least man-made. At that time, skateboards were already commercial products sold in stores \u2014 toys, you could say \u2014 although they weren\u2019t meant to be used as the Z-Boys did. The pools were designed as well, obviously, although again, not for vertical-style skateboarding. But some of the choices made by the pool makers were, I feel, of much influence on the emergence of vertical skateboarding: round edges, irregular shapes.<\/p>\n

    What would we call these things? Are they media? I do not think so. The best term I can come up with is \u201ctools\u201d. They were tools used by the Z-Boys to play.<\/p>\n

    So design was not completely absent in the emergence of vertical skateboarding, but it wasn\u2019t as instrumental as we would like to think it is. However, no-one can deny that skateboarding has become a noteworthy form of play \u2014 an industry in its own right. I have not been part of skateboarding as a designer in any way, but it is clear to me that, if I had been, an over-controlling stance would have been inappropriate. Counter-productive even.<\/p>\n

    I think it is interesting to try and design tools, that can be used for known and unknown forms of play.<\/p>\n\"\"\n

    Earlier this year, in January\u2019s Edge<\/a> I read an interview with Yoshinori Ono<\/a>, who is the producer of Street Fighter IV<\/em><\/a>. Somewhere in it, he describes his game as a \u201ctool for having fun\u201d. I thought that was brilliant.<\/p>\n\"\"\n

    Ianus Keller<\/a>, a friend of mine, has designed a tool for designers called Cabinet<\/em><\/a>, which allows you to collect inspirational material and organize it. It acknowledges the serendipitous nature of design. Much of design is actually very playful (if done properly). But I digress.<\/p>\n

    Ianus says about tools: <\/p>\n

    \u201cGood tools extend your capabilities. Great tools go beyond that and allow you to create things that neither you nor anyone else has ever thought of.\u201d<\/blockquote>\n

    I\u2019d say that\u2019s a pretty accurate description of what the skateboards and pools were to the Z-Boys.<\/p>\n

    So that\u2019s part of my preferred designer\u2019s stance: don\u2019t see yourself as a maker of media, but as a creator of tools. The use of which you can never fully predict. There\u2019s two ways to handle this uncertainty: one \u2014 try to eliminate any chance of people messing with it, or two \u2014 embrace this uncertainty, and leave open opportunities for new play forms.<\/p>\n

    Let\u2019s examine this issue using playgrounds as an example. <\/p>\n

    I would love to design a playground, a proper real-life one, some time. Unfortunately I have no architectural training whatsoever. I do enjoy reading about architecture though, one of my favourite books being A Pattern Language<\/em><\/a>. (Strangely enough, it seems architects aren\u2019t too fond of its author, Christopher Alexander.) The book aims to help regular people design a house, or improve their neighbourhood. The book is structured in so-called patterns \u2014 building blocks, you could call them.<\/p>\n

    One of those building blocks is called ‘Adventure Playground’. When I first skimmed through the book it naturally drew my attention. I wondered what Alexander had to say about designing for play. <\/p>\n

    The problem statement of Adventure Playground reads: <\/p>\n

    \u201cA castle, made of carton, rocks and old branches, by a group of children for themselves, is worth a thousand perfectly detailed, exactly finished castles, made for them in a factory.\u201d<\/blockquote>\n

    And the proposed solution: <\/p>\n

    \u201cSet up a playground for the children in each neighborhood. Not a highly finished playground, with asfalt and swings, but a place with raw materials of all kinds\u2014nets, boxes, barrels, trees, ropes, simple tools, frames, grass, and water\u2014where children can create and re-create playgrounds of their own.\u201d<\/blockquote>\n\"\"\n

    A good playground, in other words, does not presume the kinds of play that will happen there. A good playground is a tool that offers enough freedom to children for them to invent new play forms. (This, incidentally, is a very bad<\/strong> playground.)<\/p>\n

    Habbo Hotel<\/em><\/a> is a good playground. At this year\u2019s GDC<\/a> I attended a talk by Sulka Haro<\/a>. In it, he showed many examples of emergent play. Here\u2019s one of them: can you guess what these kids are enacting? <\/p>\n\"\"\n

    It\u2019s a man\u00e8ge! What I find so wonderful about this is that there\u2019s no explicit support for playing a horse, or building a stable, and yet, the players come up with this idea and find a way to play at it. They negotiate the meaning of the bits and pieces available to them: to be a horse, you need to adjust your avatar so that it has a brown skin colour, pig tails, and brown clothes.<\/p>\n

    (This, by the way, is what Paul Dourish<\/a>, an HCI theorist who wrote a book titled Where the Action Is<\/em><\/a>, means when he says that in social computing, meaning is coupled by users, not designers.)<\/p>\n

    Sulake<\/a> consciously chose to keep the number of objects and actions in Habbo Hotel<\/em> limited, or at least generic, so that players were encouraged to create their own forms of play. It\u2019s what in interaction design is known as underspecification.<\/p>\n

    So when designing tools for play, underspecify<\/strong>!<\/p>\n

    We\u2019re running out of time so I\u2019ll wrap up by giving you one example of how playful tools can be applied outside of the realm of entertainment. <\/p>\n\"\"\n

    StarLogo<\/em><\/a> is a computational tool designed by Mitch Resnick<\/a> \u2014 we can also thank him (at least partly) for Lego Mindstorms<\/em>. Resnick wanted to improve people\u2019s understanding of complex adaptive systems. StarLogo<\/em> is a simple programming environment in which you program agents who, through their interactions, give rise to larger scale patterns. The tool was used in education. He describes many examples of children building simulations of aspects of reality, and discovering new things about them.<\/p>\n

    In his book Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams<\/em><\/a>, he writes: <\/p>\n

    \u201cProbably the best way to develop better intuitions about decentralized systems is to construct and \u201cplay with\u201d such systems.\u201d\n<\/blockquote>\n

    He even uses the P word!<\/p>\n

    At the end of the book, Resnick writes:<\/p>\n

    \u201cWhat\u2019s needed are microworld construction kits, so that you can create your own microworlds, focusing on the domain you find most interesting.\u201d\n<\/blockquote>\n

    That was in 1994. I think his challenge is still worthy of acceptance, and I think Resnick\u2019s attitude towards play is a wonderful example of the stance I mentioned in the beginning of this talk: he\u2019s created a tool, one that affords people a large enough degree of freedom, so that they can explore concepts and arrive at new insights, without the designer needing to prescribe them. <\/p>\n

    And all of this through lovely, delicious play.<\/p>

    1. The article can be found in the excellent The Game Design Reader<\/em><\/a> edited by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      A while ago I was interviewed by Sam Warnaars. He\u2019s researching people\u2019s conference experiences; he asked me what my most favourite and least favourite conference of the past year was. I wish he\u2019d asked me after my trip to Playful ’08, because it has been by far the best conference experience to date. Why? Because … Continue reading A Playful Stance — my Game Design London 2008 talk<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[248],"tags":[367,686,685,10,684,1041,351,247,574,19,401,267,11,410,118,168,544,125,596,377,309,683],"class_list":["post-1182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks","tag-gd","tag-gdl","tag-game-design-london","tag-ixd","tag-playful-08","tag-talks","tag-architecture","tag-conferences","tag-control","tag-design","tag-emergence","tag-game-design","tag-interaction-design","tag-learning","tag-media","tag-play","tag-playgrounds","tag-presentations","tag-skateboarding","tag-slides","tag-tools","tag-underspecification"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1182"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2787,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182\/revisions\/2787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}