Play Is Metaphorical

All play in some sense represents something from the non-play universe. We often confuse this metaphorical aspect of play as simulation. Play is not necessarily a simulation of anything in particular, but it does generate mental associations with real-world issues. In many cases, those associations are in fact generated by means of simulation. For example, a flight simulation allows us to play at flying, and it does so by presenting us with a careful simulation of the experience of piloting an aircraft. But simulation is a small part of a larger picture; metaphor is the broader term that more completely expresses this aspect of the nature of play.

A good example of this is provided by the series of combat flight simulators designed by Larry Holland for LucasArts Games in the early 1990s (BattleHawks, Battle of Britain, and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe). These games deliberately magnified combat results to heighten the emotional intensity of the game. You could shoot down half a dozen enemy aircraft in a single mission. These results were, of course, wildly unrealistic; many fighter pilots went through the entire war without shooting down a single aircraft. But an accurate simulation of World War II fighter combat would have been dreadfully boring. You'd take off, fly for several hours to the combat zone, hear all sorts of excitement over the radio, fly around looking for enemy aircraft, and when you found some, there would either be too many (in which case you dared not approach) or too few (in which case they would run as you approached). Very rarely would you chance upon an encounter with even enough odds to entice both sides to accept battle, and even then the chances of actually making a hit, much less a kill, were low. After many hours sweating in the freezing cold, you'd return home empty-handed. That's what a simulation would show. But a game is another matter; it must model the emotional realities of air combat, and from that point of view, all the missed opportunities and eventless hours are non-entities. The only thing that matters is shooting and being shot at; therefore, a good air combat game will twist reality around to emphasize the emotionally significant parts.

Consider, for another example, the old classic game Space Invaders. This game cannot be said to simulate anything from our experience. There have never been arrays of little space monsters marching back and forth across the sky, slowly closing in on us. Nor is such a situation even plausible. Space Invaders simulates nothing. I see in this game not a simulation but an excellent metaphor for the frustrations of the individual in our society. All the social rules and institutions are arrayed against us; they march in lockstep as they threaten to suffocate us. They rain their nasty poop onto our heads; we can only dodge them. But we do have one gun with which to shoot back, and if we dodge quickly, we can defeat them. It's a compelling metaphor for the predicament with which we all struggle; that's why it was such a huge success. Even more interesting is the fact that there were many, many variations and improvements upon the basic design, and none of them caught on like the original. The designers of these imitations tweaked the components of the design, but they lost the power of the metaphor.

A similar case can be made for another old classic: Pac-Man. There had been plenty of maze-chase games before Pac-Man, and many afterward, but none seemed to have the emotional power of that particular combination of design characteristics. It can't be due to any success or failure in simulation Pac-Man doesn't simulate anything! What Pac-Man captures so well is the frantic nature of our working lives. We rush about, collecting some meaningless dots (carrying out our daily tasks), while bad guys chase us, just waiting to trip us up on some minor mistake. It's frantic, it's mechanical, it's relentless it's just like our daily lives. There were plenty of variations on the Pac-Man design, but none of them got the metaphor to hit home so closely.

LESSON 4

Good games do not simulate physical reality; they mirror emotional reality.

Sadly, the current mania for photo-realistic graphic detail has distracted us from the power of metaphor. Games are now designed with acute attention to every graphic detail, and our continuing successes in this direction have only encouraged this misdirected attention. There remains a huge opportunity here for games that operate in a metaphorical sense, rather than the overly explicit works now in vogue. A game should not be a mere stripped-down version of a simulation; it can reach far into the weird world of human emotional associations to find its truth.