Chapter 6. Interactivity

Every language has its own special words, words that express an idea better than any other word in any other language. There really isn't any other word in the world that quite expresses the idea of the English word "fun." There are plenty of words for "humorous" or "enjoyable" or "playful," but nothing that quite catches the combination of informality, enjoyment, and near-vulgarity that our word "fun" connotes. We have shamelessly stolen such words from other languages. "Taboo," for example, is stolen from a Polynesian word; can you think of any other word that really captures the idea of that word? There are gobs of words we have stolen from European languages: entrepreneur, manana, schadenfreude, presto. But there's one word, a German word, that we haven't yet stolen that should be high on our list of targets: schwerpunkt. It means "focal point" or "concentration of effort point" or "central point of attack." It's a beautiful word because it expresses an idea that we just don't have in English: the notion that, in any effort, you have many necessary tasks, but there is one central task that must take first place in your considerations.

Consider, for example, what an army does. An army fights, right? And who does the fighting? Soldiers, right? But wait a minute: The soldier can't fight unless there's a cook who keeps him fed. No cook, no fighting. Ergo, cooks are just as necessary as soldiers. We therefore deduce that the cook is just as important as the soldier, because he's just as necessary. Same thing goes for truck drivers who bring the ammunition to the front, and the clerks who keep track of the food and ammunition, and the guys who dig the latrines, and so on. All of these people are necessary, and so they are just as important as the soldier. But if you are the soldier, the guy who has to charge through fire and death to face the enemy, would you agree that these other people are every bit as worthy as you are? They may be necessary, and they may be important, but they're not central to the task. The soldier is the whole point and purpose of the effort. He's the schwerpunkt. And the soldier's fundamental task is to fight. So the schwerpunkt object in an army is the soldier and the schwerpunkt action is fighting.

Or consider a computer system. What goes into a working computer system? Well, there's a power supply you can't have a working computer without a power supply. There's also a plastic box, a motherboard, lots of solder, plenty of wires and cables all these things are absolutely necessary to a working computer, and I suppose you could argue that they are therefore important. But they're really not the heart of the computer. If you want to get down to the absolute core, it's got to be the CPU. That's the real essence of any computer. When you describe your new computer to someone, do you say, "It's a beige tower system with a 200-watt power supply and an 8 inch by 10 inch motherboard?" No, the very first thing you specify is the CPU and its clock speed: It's a 900MHz G4. That's the real schwerpunkt of the computer: its CPU. And what does a CPU do? It processes; after all, it is the Central Processing Unit. Thus, the schwerpunkt object in a computer is the CPU and the schwerpunkt action in a computer is processing.

So let us now determine the schwerpunkt of games. What is it that is absolutely central to games, the one element that is more than important, more than necessary, but indeed the entire point and purpose of games? The answer we immediately pounce upon is "play"; after all, what else do you do with a game than play it? Unfortunately, although that answer is certainly correct, it's not very useful; like the infamous term fun factor, we can never really pin down what elements of game design are useful to support good play. Can we snuffle about and develop a more useful answer?