tag, football, chess, solitaire
- do these have gameplay?
this is an open discussion topic! im interested in others thoughts.

prompted by a good question from an anonymous source

hi droqen
i have a kill gameplay question im curious about, since i think i grasp at least parts of what u mean.
whats your opinion on irl games? kids games like tag, sports ranging from football to chess, games you play alone like solitaire. do those have gameplay in the same way? do they differ in some major way? feel free to just link me if youve answered it before. also sorry if dming is not cool i just didnt know where to ask.

my own answer to the question is that it's sort of complicated; as i see it, it all depends on the systems of enforcement. in the case of a videogame usually the system of enforcement is the computer: the rules of the videogame are enforced by the rules encoded into the code which the machine enforces. in the case of physical games, the enforcement is rules encoded which either the players enforce, or sometimes a referee enforces.

when players enforce rules, we can get a little psychological: i like to think about how it's some combination of the self and the superego* which enforces the rules. the players individually decide to enforce the rules; part of that is that they think enforcing the rules is going to lead to a good/desirable outcome, i.e. they want to play the game and believe that enforcing the rules is necessary for doing that, and part of that is that they think they don't have a choice but to enforce the rules, i.e. they "should" or "must" enforce the rules.

*im not a psych major and i havent significantly read literature on superego so this is based on a loose understanding of it. i think of the superego as the voice that says "people should x" which comes from societal understanding and unison, it's the voice of culture that we have internalized.

when "a referee" enforces, it's something external to the players. this is a pretty flexible entity: a videogame has a referee (the computer), but in the case of a physical game such as, for example, a magic the gathering tournament or a televised football game, there may a human whose role is to enforce the rules (the judge, the referee). this is the same role either way.

~

as to the question of whether irl games have gameplay in the same way, i think about this divide. are the players, essentially, empowered to change the rules to suit their play? i think there are two major axes of "kill gameplay" here and both of them are leveled at the idea of giving players control over their experience:

1. "kill" the referee (i.e. dismantle external authority, reject its necessity)

on the game developer side of things, i think that we create systems of enforcement -- this isn't something the player necessarily has control over. there is kind of this unquestioned notion that it is the only way to author play, and that it is necessary for the creation of games, but i wonder how true that is. i question the truth of that assumption. is it the only way? what happens if we reject the idea that we need a referee at all, in any context? can't players look out for each other? can't we look out for ourselves?

2. "kill" the superego (i.e. recognize, reject internalized authority)

on the player side of things, but to some degree the cultural/societal side, there is this idea that people should collectively kind of arrive at truths and this leads to people self-enforcing other people's rules. or in some cases self-enforcing rules that don't belong to anyone else in particular, we make up rules that we think we should follow. it's complicated and weird and i wonder what can be done about this: to communicate to players, to people in general, that we should follow rules because we understand what's good about them, and not out of some vague internal expectation/hope/faith that they must or should be followed.

~

at heart i think im kind of idealistically anarchist, and i believe in the goodness of people. this is clearly naive. this is not really a genuinely political position, i dont actually want to, for example, dismantle the entire legal system and remove all systems of protection. but i also believe in and dream of the idealistic version of that world: can we live in a benevolent paradise of only people who have everyone's best interest in mind?

relevant reading:
- The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le Guin

my response to a further inquiry re: the definition of gameplay clarifies something about the whole thing for me:

Would you . . . partly define gameplay by the existence of a third-party rule-enforcer in general?

i guess the gameplay in kill gameplay might be definable this way, although if true this means that my usage of the term is very incomplete (as i always knew it had to be, but still). in the context of this discussion right now, i agree that the third-party rule-enforcer is critical to that which i take offense at.

. . . in order for a game to function it does need some authority. . . but [under "kill gameplay"] the authority should be the participating players, guided not by a referee of an idea of what the rules *should* be, but the rules they find to be valuable.

i need to write a little more about the connection between this & Christopher Alexander at some point, but the very short version is that he expresses a difference between the forces that motivate most architects now, vs the way that 'architecture' in general should be: motivated by, answerable to, the people and forces and patterns that already exist and live in the real place itself. the architect's responsibility is to them, and the architect should seek to involve them as much as possible.

in the case of games, at some level i've lost sight of that because it's a lot of responsibility and building systems that truly respond to their players seems like a lot of work that i don't actually want to do.

a different solution, which perhaps goes by the name "kill gameplay", is to place the focus outside of the system itself, such that what is really important about a work is no longer what is being refereed by the system, but lies outside of the system, instead in the realm of experience and interpretation.

once that's what is important, the player regains total control over the important thing... but maybe by violently redefining something. hmm.

just a thought, i guess.

[subjective value structure]

a loose definition of 'gameplay' (wtf? this was not the point of this project) to help discuss the topic, which i'd like to shape up:

if we define 'gameplay' as some combination of
- interactive systems (which can have different states and/or produce outputs) and
- value structures or measurements (of systems' shapes and outputs),

then 'kill gameplay' can be understood as a call for all of games' value structures and measurements to be non-authoritative.
this can be accomplished in a few different ways, which i think can be organized into two categories: (1) subjective, and (2) moddable.

1. a subjective value structure never affects the interactive system. thus the player may be invited to value what the referee values, but there is no material consequence for choosing different values. note this does not necessarily overcome the 'superego' aspect indicated above, 2 posts ago.

2. a moddable value structure can be altered freely by the player. thus the player may be forced to value what the referee values, but the referee's values may be changed to any value that the player has. multiplayer complicates this, but that's a very large separate topic.

in physical games, the interactive systems are generally all real systems first (e.g. a football, real-world physics, our bodies).

[oh no]

oh no i'm still ruminating on this.

i'm looking back on how this argument got constructed in the first place and i can see the pieces falling into place all over again:

what really is the difference between a system and 'value structures'? a system contains values (for instance, the x-position of the player is a value), and when the player intervenes in the system, they introduce their own values - and the player may value anything within the system, meaning that in practice the first category (interactive system) does not exist in the pure. all elements of the system may be taken to, at some point, be itself a value structure or value measurement if we allow that the player and the player's values are part of the game (which is rarely brought into question).

therefore, all aspects of the system must be either subjective or moddable... and since i've defined 'subjective' to mean 'does not affect the interactive system' i really ought to rename subjective to something else... oh no... someone, come help me out of the hole i've fallen into.

well i'll sum up by saying that following this line of thinking, all parts of the gameplay-system must either:

1. not affect any other part of the gameplay-system, or

2. be moddable by the player.

~

i'm open to all attempts to rescue me from this philosophical trap, thank you!!! goodbye and good night, love, droqen

your use of the terms "value" and "value structures" is really confusing, I can see several different meanings that you seem to be using interchangeably and I'm not sure what you mean in the end. This was a point that also came up in that last twitter conversation we had ages ago, which couldn't be concluded because twitter was devoured by hell musk. At first I thought what you meant by  "value structure" was something like the constraints put into a structure that must be followed to experience it, using the word "value" to mean that, because only some things can be done within that system, those are the things that are "valuable" within that system? but you also seem to use it as meaning the things that are implied to be valuable because of how the system frames some aspects of a system, like if a score goes up when picking a thing, doing that is implied to be valuable, or how getting to the end of a level is implied to be valuable and the goal of the game. Those two meanings come from using the word "value" as meaning "worth" right, like what's valuable, what's important. But then in that last post when you talk of the position being a value, you use the meaning of "value" to just mean like... a number? and you used the word "state" just a post earlier, which seems a far more appropriate word for that, objects of a system have states, so using "value" to also mean that... just confuses me completely about what you mean in the end by  "value structure". I think it would be good to be a lot more clear with keywords to get to a more well formed meaning of "kill gameplay". Here are some meanings I can think of for "value structures" derived from value meaning "worthy" or "valuable", including the two I mentioned before:

1 - The set of things that it's possible to do within a system, and the constraints put on them, which are "valuable" when looking at the system because they are the things that are forced to be considered in order to work within the system; this is a very broad way of using the phrase "value structure" and I'm not sure how useful it is; this is things like how the movement of a game works, the options given to a player, the way the collisions work, even things like the placement of walls and walkable surfaces, which determine where the player can move; in chess it'd be the way each piece moves, how the board divisions are used, and so on; in football, the size of the field, placement of goals, physical law...

2 - The things that are abstractly implied to be valuable because of how they're named within a system, and how the system is built around them; things like a  "score" going up with some actions, there being a explicit goal, the player being moved away from a goal when some action isn't completed accordingly (death and respawn), gating parts of the game depending on reaching goals; a bit more broadly the placement of walls and surfaces and how they interact with the movement system can also be understood to fall under this definition, only in a more specific way, because just by there being a wall somewhere, and movement only allowing to reach past through a specific set of actions, means that any level structure implicitly gates positions around it relative to how it interacts with the rest of the system.

3 - The way elements of a system can be understood to be "valuable" because of how they relate to other elements of the system, which creates different hierarchies and emphases within the system; this is even more specific, and is closer to "aesthetic value". Examples would be things like if there's a part of a level with very simple geometry that's very simple to move around, and then there's another part of the level with complex geometry that requires specific techniques, this creates a contrast in how the audience relates to these parts, it can drive attention to one part; how there can be different actions the player can use to achieve a thing in different ways, and they can be contextually relevant, or more efficient, and this creates contrast in how they relate to them and how they chose to use them; in general just how differences in the system create uneven perception and so create different kinds of impressions by virtue of their contrast.

4 - The things that are thought to be "attractive" in the system, by "someone". I take this one from your mention that "the player may value anything within the system". These are just the value judgements that are made by people, both artist and audience, when exposed to the system, and are just things like "I like this red square", or "I like the feel of the jump", or "I like beating hard bosses".

yeah in general it's probably a good idea to have clear terms, so that your thinking doesn't also get confused by unclear terms. I notice that you say "a loose definition of 'gameplay' (wtf? this was not the point of this project)" which I understand as you not being very interested in defining gameplay precisely? maybe also not interested in defining "game"? which I'm assuming maybe comes from how historically a bunch of people have tried to define game to exclude some expressions, and maybe used it as a value judgement? but regardless of that, I think in general having clear definitions is useful to help develop thought and their consequences clearly and precisely, even if the definition is not useful in general, like practically, it's useful to at least clarify what's being talked about. (although it's of course completely fair if, part of the project of kill gameplay is itself figuring out exactly what you mean by kill gameplay, given an uncertain starting discomfort with gameplay!)

I've been reading through the various things you've posted about kill gameplay in the social sites, and the kinopios, and been meaning to post about it, but for this specific question, modulo clarifications about "value structure", regarding the idea of the systems of enforcement, I don't think the idea of "giving players control over their experience", in this specific sense of having only them guide the experience and the rules they subject themselves to, is doable... like, fundamentally, at all. When anyone decides to experience a work of art, they're essentially opting into a "contract", where they accept the conditions under which the piece is to be experienced. "Contract" may sound too committal, but it's just the fact that the audience willingly subjects themselves to the conditions put forward by the artist, like you don't actually see a painting if you go to the museum and instead of standing looking at it, you stand with your back to it, or you don't actually listen a concert if you go and plug your ears and start yelling in the middle of it.

So essentially players already controlled their experience, just agreeing to the enforcement of the rules in the form that the enforcement takes in that game; this contains the assumption that this was, already, their own choice. I understand your idea that, within a work, more degrees of freedom can be given to a player to guide their experience, but that would be, by definition, also a part of the initial constraints of the work that were accepted by the players; it's not that it's assumed that the systems of enforcement are the only way to author play, it's that creating play necessitates systems of enforcement, for that play to be "something", rather than "nothing" (lol), and external systems of enforcement allow possibilities that wouldn't be achievable without them (because they can keep track of more things, and give a final say on how rules are interpreted), and those systems of enforcement may include giving more leeway to players, which is an interesting idea and probably underexplored, but not fundamentally different from giving less leeway for players, since the amount of leeway itself defines the kind of experience that will be had, and is agreed upon in advance. So I guess my main contention with kill gameplay is that the claims are too broad and not justified by reality? I get them as a preference to guide a style of design, but as claims about reality they don't seem to hold up.

I can understand the notion that the rules that are being enforced and the system of enforcement is assumed to lead to "good", and that it may not really be the case (and it's a completely fair criticism that sometimes even the results of the "superego" rules are not good in actuality, and are just assumed as such out of cultural inertia or something!), but that's a very specific claim, strictly about the goodness of the result, or process, that comes out of some rules and their enforcement, which can be treated separately from the fact of the rules and enforcement themselves, which don't have an intrinsic goodness, and if the participants of play opted into it, it seems best to assume their consent implies an expected goodness out of the process and its enforcement, rather than distrust them to engage in the "wrong things" (seems like a bit of a nanny state mentality?)

Also with regards to the idea of placing the focus outside of the system itself, such that what is important is in the realm of experience and interpretation... I kind of think that, fundamentally, that is all that can ever be done. Like when an artist puts green next to yellow, because it looks cool, the thing they're communicating isn't "green next to yellow", it's "look how cool and awesome green next to yellow looks". Similarly with some game system, the artist just thought "wow playing with this system is really fun/cool/interesting/weird/etc, I'll make a thing so other people experience it", not the plain facts of the system itself, because ultimately everything we experience we perceive internally as some kind of thing that we feel. There can be different degrees of how many levels (and nested levels) of internal abstraction are being pointed at through the piece, but I don't think there's any possibility other than the internal experience.

With all that in mind, I think the error in the conclusion is that the "value structures" of a system can never be fully "subjective" or "not affect any other part of the system", because by virtue of existing, the system has some amount of intrinsic "value structures", which are always independent of the player's subjectivity (otherwise it'd just be "nothing"), that may give different degrees of moddability allowing players to change it, but the degree of moddability is itself a part of the system, and a fully moddable system is just one that can be turned into any other? which is equivalent to just opting out of playing this particular game?

To add one last thing on the idea of irl games having gameplay that ought to be killed, thinking about the more constrained idea that kill gameplay is about gameplay systems sometimes leading to bad outcomes, which I've seen you reference before, with some obvious examples like games that incentivize gambling or any kind of compulsion, where the author is essentially profiting off compulsion, I don't think in the case of chess or football that's present, because their constraints seem to work exclusively to make the game systems work internally, but maybe examples of irl games where there is gameplay to be killed would be some tv contest type of games, also related to gambling, where players are made to do some thing for some prize and there's lots of lights and fanfare driving all the dopamine and such.

Also it makes me think, following the idea of designing for compulsion, that other non-game art forms could have this kind of gameplay to be killed, in the form of common mechanisms that drive engagement in a superficial manner, like a soap opera having superficial drama, or tropes that are meant to be recognizable and engaging, or even music having a common and recognizable structure with a dramatic arc, or the kinds of typical structures seen in films, where a hero has to find themselves to be able to overcome a challenge or some such... all of these are mechanisms that allow the artists to more easily capture the attention of the audience, and since the mechanism itself can capture the audience's attention, it can be used regardless of the substance of the piece, for evil, though it of course can also be used to reinforce or make more approachable a piece that has deeper substance.

The generalization of this idea though I think emphasizes that kill gameplay cannot be a general drive to kill all gameplay, but rather a specific drive to identify bad uses of it, because these kinds of mechanisms can be identified at lower and lower levels, such that you could say that even something like having simple contrast is a way to engage attention, because it is, but without it you're left with nothing, so it seems to me like art is, fundamentally, made of parts that even at their simplest level draw attention and engagement, just at different scales.

Therefore, everything is gameplay

[clarity]

clarity

    Yes, my ambiguous use of "value" in the last couple posts is super confusing. Maybe even confused myself there. I agree with what you said in the Discord; "state" is better. I would also use "measurement"; a measurement is somewhat value-neutral until we value it. (Tautology of the year, here.) Making something visible, however, is very impactful; when something is visible, we are capable of assigning it value. We are not capable of valuing what we cannot observe. (Giving things names also has a lot of power here.)

value structures

    I wouldn't separate values into these four structures, since they all interoperate very meaningfully. Something is possible, making it visible to me and therefore more possible for me to value. I value it, making it possible to cause me to value a resource or state which allows me to experience it.

    For example... winning the jackpot gives me a material reward and displays pretty colours and lights, I enjoy all of the aspects of winning and want it again, the system provides a way to win again, therefore I perform the action which the system requires I do in order to win. (Put in the money, pull the lever.)

    I don't value paying money or pulling the lever, but the constructed scenario requires that I do those things in order to pursue my goal of acquiring that which I do value, and the lines start to get blurred. Do I value winning the material reward? Do I value the pretty colours and lights?

the contract

    I can't think of another art form so picky about its verb of engagement. Games and games design are deeply interested in play -- in perceiving, predicting, and playing with or manipulating the way that its players interact with it in this specific way. I might just be too far inside games and too far outside everything else. Your suggestion that all art form engagement is the same sort of contract doesn't ring true for me. It's different, but I can't put my finger on it yet.

design

    I've recently come to realize that running parallel to all this is an anti-design sentiment which differentiates products from art. I'm frustrated by the way these two activities have become so intertwined in games, the assumption that every choice must be weighed in terms of the effect that it has on the player.

    That is not to say that "kill gameplay" is synonymous with "kill game design", but it might be useful to see "kill gameplay" through a lens of being trapped in a design-centric mindset in a design-centric world.

p.s. thank you for your thoughtful engagement, i've got a lot of notes but i'm trying a new thing where i don't... exhaust myself trying to make every single thought visible and sensible. if there's anything i missed that you regard as particularly important please do mention it, i'm happy to give some more attention to anything that you believe is particularly relevant and share my thoughts. i've focused in this case on the high-level responses and conclusions that feel like there's a significant amount of meat left to explore there. things that won't get us running in little circles, going nowhere.

[defining gameplay]

p.p.s. whoops, i left out a whole section.

defining gameplay

   What struck me years ago was the desire to identify something specific about "gamification". To "gamify" in the common parlance meant to add a certain 'something' to a non-game, and I became mildly obsessed with the notion of removing that 'something' from games. I named these things 'playables', and I made some conclusions, and then moved away from that experimental branch. I'd like to come up with a clear definition of what I mean by gameplay and I appreciate the discussion, and the specificity about the value of being clearer with my words. In this case, I bring up the "gamification" example because I think my idea of "gameplay" is, what is the form or subset of play that only exists in games? All play that could exist anywhere, i.e. not bound within the game form, is not gameplay. "kill gameplay" is a generalization of the idea of making 'games without gamification' -- to remove 'gamification' from everything, not just games.

it's completely sensible to limit your response to not exhaust yourself, I definitely exhaust myself writing those big walls... I conceived it as a brief response to the main points, but then the words just keep falling out lol

You're right that games are more picky with rules and contracts than other art forms, though I'd say it's just a degree difference, rather than the contract being an entirely different sort of thing. You can probably conceive of performance art type of things that specify more rules for the audience to interact, and maybe someone'll append the word "interactive" to it, or call it a "something-game", and I'm sure there are examples of that. Regardless of the amount and specificity of rules to follow, they're still rules to follow though... I think this sort of "contract" is probably a lot more common, and implicitly assumed, than it would be naively assumed. I'm thinking that things like casual conversations with other people, still have the "contract" that you'll listen to them and at least acknowledge their input.

Still, I've become even more confused about what you seek after you referred to your point about "design thinking" in the discord, where you said that the effects of playing are irrelevant to the decisionmaking process. Your "We can do whatever we want" post adds to my confusion. Does this mean you've realized you don't care about the end result--be it the game or whatever artefact seems to contain gameplay--and rather it's more about a... creation philosophy? even if the starting point was a discomfort with games "as artefacts" (as results that you play with)?

I think at least the notion around "gamification" is more clearly grounded, and I think I can tenuously see it's relation to "design thinking" maybe as some sort of bias towards pursuing metrics? Gamification is about adding superficial processes that drive behaviour in games, to somewhere they're extraneous, to motivate behaviour there... things like score, explicit goals, and rewards for goal completion, right?

I think maybe the notion of "extrinsic rewards" vs "intrinsic rewards" can help clear up the distasteful parts of gamifying. When you're motivating an activity using external elements that are valued by the player, but the activity itself isn't valued, that seems like a clearer case where evil is happening.

I also note that the reward being extrinsic or intrinsic is separate from the quality of the reward. An extrinsic reward could be low quality, like addiction driven simplistic stimuli like casino lights, or cocaine, or money; or it could be high quality, like someone wanting to keep playing a game because it has a really good/deep story they want to see to the end. Similarly an intrinsically rewarding activity could be only shallowly valuable, like if you really became addicted to a simplistic activity, because intrinsic and extrinsic only refers to how it relates to other parts with which it comes bundled, although to be honest I wonder how that notion would hold up under scrutiny, I have more trouble coming up with specific examples where someone is drawn, perhaps unhealthily, to an activity that is obviously not valuable or shallow, because many obvious examples I can think, also seem to be tied to some extrinsic reward... though I'm sure it's possible to be addicted to something simplistic?

Speaking of value, I agree all the value structures we could identify separately still interoperate very meaningfully, but it's still useful to identify them as somewhat separate, to be able to more precisely speak and identify what are the elements and forces involved. Not sure if those 4 are the best separation of course, it's just one I thought of in the moment. The extrinsic/intrinsic seems like another useful separation, we can identify that the audience values different elements, and we care if they value one only because it's attached to something they value, or if they value it on its own. I think finding what makes an element valuable on its own could be useful to separate this "gamification" component, trying to find what is actually valuable on its own, without adding anything else, and in the case where it actually is valuable on its own, maybe then "gamification" acts as a neutral force.