Blog - Unenjoyable Play and "The QA Game"

Monday, June 29, 2009

Today marked the start of Ian Schreiber's free online game design course, Game Design Concepts.

In the first 'class' posted to the blog, posted today, there was ironically a mirroring of a conversation thread happening just yesterday in the Writer's SIG mailing list.

Both spoke of trying to define games, and trying to define play.

To clarify a point someone else was trying to make there on that thread in the mailing list for the SIG, I suggested the person was saying play did not have to be enjoyable.

I'm interested in the idea, now that I've stumbled upon it.

It is already taken for granted in some circles (although many violently disagree!) that games don't have to be enjoyable.
(I will refrain from using the word 'fun' because that's a rather ambiguous word. Does fun = enjoyment?)
Many art games and serious games work off this premise, and intentionally use gameplay which is somehow unpleasant to make their point.

But, well, as I just suggested again in the above sentence when I said "gameplay which is somehow unpleasant", I suppose that one can say play itself can be enjoyable or not. This seems a little odd. 'Unenjoyable play' sounds kind of like an oxymoron. It makes sense, though, and it's easy to come up with situations where there can be play that is not enjoyable.

However, the person I was helping to clarify their argument used as one of her examples the situation of when QA testers are playing through a build of a game, hunting for bugs. Even though they've got the game in their hands and they're playing through it... it's hard to say with confidence that the tester is really playing the game.

I couldn't resist linking this to my experience last week... I was given the task of helping find bugs in a build of a game in production.
This was decidedly work, and not at all like 'playing the game' -- not only hunting down bugs but also figuring out how to reproduce them is a seriously tedious business.

But yet, I noticed I did find some enjoyment in it after all.
Not through the game I was supposedly 'playing' to find bugs in...
...but through the act of hunting for bugs itself.
I realized it was a completely different game in it's own right, layered on top of of the game in my hands as a strange sort of metagame or something.
I was on a quest to hunt collectables, and my collectables were all manner of crashes, bugs, and glitches. Not only did I have to find these bugs... I had to grok them, understand them enough to reproduce them so I could provide the most helpful report possible. It was like a disturbing version of Pokémon, where I had to "catch 'em all", only every pokémon was MissingNo, but different... each with their own bizarre means of discovery and capture.
(And if that wasn't the geekiest reference I've made on this blog to date, I don't know what is...)
And when I thought I was hot on the trail of reproducing a major bug there was definitely one of those "a-ha!" moments that Raph Koster would call "fun".
Getting there required slogging through some really long and tedious grinding, however. ;)

Of course, if you read through the link above to the discussion from Ian's class today, you could argue "the QA game" I'm suggesting doesn't count as a game at all.
But I tend to define game fairly broadly... and it certainly was fun to think about.

Labels: , ,

posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 10:21 PM  0 Comments Links to this post