No Such Thing as Single Player
An inquiry into game personification and solo social roles
A Masters Thesis
Presented by
Isaac Lenhart
Master of Technology and Games
I.T. University of Copenhagen
June 2012
No Such Thing as Single Player
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No Such Thing as Single Player
“Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.”
― Alan Turing (1912 - 1954)
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No Such Thing as Single Player
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No Such Thing as Single Player
Table of Contents
Abstract ................................................................................................................................ 8
PART 1: ..............................................................................................................................10
Expecting Others.................................................................................................................10
1: Boundary Games: You Know, For Kids ..........................................................................11
The Argument ..................................................................................................................13
2: Games as Social Situations ............................................................................................16
Marking out a Space ........................................................................................................16
Never Solo .......................................................................................................................19
3: The Social Roles in a Game ............................................................................................23
4: Personification.................................................................................................................27
Getting past the “Just Computer Code (just an Object)” ...................................................27
The Technical Divide .......................................................................................................28
Latour and Objects ..........................................................................................................30
PART 2: ..............................................................................................................................32
Finding Others.....................................................................................................................32
1: Objects ............................................................................................................................33
2: Intentionality ....................................................................................................................34
3: Personifying Technology .................................................................................................39
Behavioral Bandwidth...................................................................................................42
4: The Expression of Intent in a Game ................................................................................44
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Agency and Agents..........................................................................................................44
Representation ................................................................................................................46
Player Experience............................................................................................................48
Avenues of Intent .............................................................................................................50
Recap ..............................................................................................................................52
PART 3: ..............................................................................................................................54
Playing with Others .............................................................................................................54
1: The Variations of the Roles .............................................................................................55
Player Role ......................................................................................................................55
Parity in Games............................................................................................................55
Deviations from the Norm .............................................................................................57
Deviant Players ...............................................................................................................58
Game-master Role ..........................................................................................................61
Deviant Game-masters ................................................................................................62
Referee Role ...................................................................................................................64
Deviant Referees .........................................................................................................64
Spectator Role .................................................................................................................65
Deviant Spectators .......................................................................................................66
No Role and Brink Games ...............................................................................................67
2: Personification and Deviance ..........................................................................................69
3: Conclusion ......................................................................................................................72
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No Such Thing as Single Player
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................74
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Abstract
Games are an inherent social experience. Culturally and historically, we are primed to enter a
game context with certain expectations and we are primed to expect other participants who
share our same sense of play attitude.
In traditional games with multiple players, the implicit default is that we are playing against
others who have approximately the same amount of skills and knowledge, i.e. they are human
players just like ourselves, but what does this mean for a solo game?
As we interact with our own technology and cultural artifacts, we naturally and automatically
personify them with goals, attitudes and intentions by observing their behavior, resulting in a
personification model in our head of that artifact as a social actor.
Specifically when we play solo games, our social leanings create in the mind of the human
player other social roles who have a set of imagined goals and attitudes. These social roles
exist in a solo game as stand-ins for the roles offered by traditional multi-player games. From
this perspective, the ways in which these roles are primed in the solo player can affect the ways
in which the game is experienced and played, just as they would be in a multi-player game.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
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No Such Thing as Single Player
PART 1:
Expecting Others
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No Such Thing as Single Player
1: Boundary Games: You Know, For Kids
In 2010, I was walking through the board game aisle in a toy store in the United States,
looking at the various games on offer. The expected board games were present: Monopoly,
Chutes and Ladders, Life, Checkers, Chess and so on, many of them aimed at children but the
majority aimed at all ages. Amongst the games on the shelves was Hasbro’s “Ouija”, a game
which purports to offer players answers to their questions, provided by an undefined entity. It
caught my eye due to the varieties of the board as produced by Hasbro: one for boys with a
deep blue color and glow-in-the-dark letters, as well as a bright candy-pink version for girls.
The Ouija board has a rich history, going back hundreds of years and predated by
numerous kinds of divination and ritualistic methodologies. The use and treatment of the Ouija
board exists in American pop-culture extremely ambiguously, existing somewhere between a
goofy party game and an extremely dangerous tool to contact supernatural spirits. In numerous
films, such as the Exorcist, Paranormal Activity and Witchboard, the Ouija board is depicted as
not a game at all, but more of a kind of telephone to malevolent demons. Yet, there in the
brightly lit aisle of Toys R Us, a brightly colored pink box for the Ouija board was displayed as
being a game for girls: “Ask the questions that girls want to know!” I hadn’t seen this frilly pink
version of the Ouija before, so the dissonance was jarring.
The Hasbro game is indirect about what it is and the box text and instructions for the Ouija
are intentionally mysterious and coy. When it was produced by Parker Brothers in the 1970’s,
the box was labeled as “A Parker Game”, as well as a “Talking Board Set”. On the modern
Hasbro box, it announces itself as “The Mysterious Mystifying Game”, yet in the instruction
booklet for the game, it reads “The Ouija Board is just a game…or is it?” Hasbro clearly wishes
to walk the line by billing itself as mysterious and unexplainable, marketing itself as a game
(“talking board set”) while leaving open the possibility that it might not be a game, that there is
something more mysterious going on. Hasbro’s product description says about the game: “How
it works has been a mystery for over 30 years”. It’s a rare product which the makers disavow
any knowledge about how it really works.
Even in the possible case of the Ouija board being simply a game system, a harmless inert
board, Hasbro’s description still admits a kind of personality to the board, as the instructions
note: “Ask it a question and it will respond by spelling out your answer in the window of the
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Message Indicator”. This description is ambiguous, and might lend itself to a technical reading,
as though the board is a semi-intelligent systemic entity, a kind of low-grade artificial intelligence
encoded into the board. Or it might not.
What is interesting about this phenomenon is that -strictly speaking- the rules and play
behavior of the Ouija board are the same either way. The difference being highlighted by
Hasbro is that the experience of the game changes depending on whether the players see it as
a technical game system artifact (“talking board set”) versus the broader cultural understanding
of the Ouija board as a mysterious communication tool to an unexplained other.
Further, even if one believes that the Ouija board does communicate with an “other”, the
instructions and game artifacts leave it intentionally ambiguous as to what the intentions of that
other might be. The Ouija board is interesting because it relies on the potential human user to
set their own expectations about who they might be playing with or even if the experience will be
play at all.
There are numerous toys and games that play on this “is-a-game-or-not” ambiguity and
others which in the past used to carry this ambiguity but have since lost it. Everyday dice used
to be viewed as a communication tool with the fates. A roll of the dice would expose a real truth
about the world or express a message from another realm. Modern playing cards have their
origins in divination systems, most clearly seen in their close cousin the tarot card set. The
Magic 8 Ball is a toy that is a close relative of the Ouija board, a toy which can be seen as
“serious” or not, depending on one owns view. Enochian chess is a game which can be played
for fun similar to chess, but at the same time is a kind of spiritual training tool to align oneself
with supernatural forces.
This discussion is not aimed at an in-depth examination of the relationship between ancient
divination and ritual systems and games, as a huge amount of valuable literature exists
examining the history and relationship between those kinds of systems and games (Pennick,
1989). Those resources are well worth looking into as context for this discussion and some of it
will be touched upon tangentially here, but largely the focus is different. The main phenomenon
here is the experience of the human player feeling whether the activity in question has another
participant: is this serious? Is this for “real”? Is this “just a game”? “Who am I playing
against?”
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The Argument
A major part of this interpretation lies not within the rules, the play or the aesthetics of the
game, but the psychological outlook of the human player towards the game. Specifically that
the human player personifies the actions of the game system, takes the interactions with the
game and puts a social role to it. Games that exist on the boundary, such as Ouija or Enochian
chess, exploit that human tendency to personify the perceived game behaviors in different
ways. Exploiting this tendency may create a potentially more enjoyable and mysterious game
experience, but it also greatly runs the risk of the game redefining itself out of the class of
games and into something more “serious”.
As a human player interacts with a game system, they perceive the actions and happenings
within the game. Many, if not most, of these are reactive to the actions of the player. But, it
may be the case that the game offers no explainable motivation for those happenings. Things
such as the narrative or game art (if any) may provide no background information, and thus the
human player may naturally start to personify the actions of the game as having specific roles
and intentions according to their own views.
In other cases, the game will provide an explanation for the actions of the perceived other,
for example by proposing a fiction that the player is playing with or against a certain kind of
personality. In computer chess, the game may provide an image or backstory for the “opponent”
or more explicitly in a game like Street Fighter (Capcom, 1987), the representations of the
opposing fighters directly allow for a personification of their personalities.
Regardless of whether a game purposefully represents other possible participants, games
require a ludic attitude on the part of the human player and a kind of shared understanding of
what Goffman calls a “social occasion” (Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, 1963), with certain
expectations and assumptions. Human players enter a game experience with certain
expectations around fairness, skills required and an assumed attitude of the nature of play.
Human players who play what is ostensibly a single-player game expect a certain kind of “play
experience” and assume a kind of knowledge about the social structure of the experience.
Goffman also refers to game situations as “focused gatherings”, where he seems to
emphasize the shared experience of a game (Goffman, 1961, p. 18). A game is a kind of social
contract, a co-emphasis between the participants that a specific kind of activity and attitude is
underway. A game is a self-sustaining social encounter between participants.
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Put another way, the way in which we enter games is predicated on this kind of social
expectation that we get reassurances from other participants that they will be adhering to the
rules and spirit of the game. If we fail to get these assurances, we may not consider the activity
to be a game, or we may consider the other participants to be something else: griefers, cheaters
or other non-playing roles.
In the context of a single-player game, where there is no other human involved, it is up to
the game system to present itself in a valid way. In many computerized computer games, we
assume that the game encounter contract will be upheld. For example, if we play a turn-based
strategy game against a computer game system (i.e. we are playing solo), we expect and
assume that the computer has taken on a social role compliant with play, that it will be playing
fairly and that it will be using roughly the same skills and knowledge as ourselves.
In essence, we expect and assume that the game system will take on the role of a co-player
or another valid game participant role.
This discussion is not asserting that there is always another literal, ontological and actual
other sentient player that always exists in every solo game. It is counter-productive to claim
such a definitive status for a game system, but the possibility is at least feasible in the mind of a
human player, which is why the example of the Ouija board is interesting. Hasbro intentionally
refuses to say (or at least purposefully confuses) what the social role of the board will be.
It is not imperative to define whether there actually is, in practice and reality, another player
of a certain kind, but rather how the human player understands and psychologically frames the
concept of another potential participant. There does not have to be another sentient participant
in order for the human player to believe and act as though there is one.
This discussion does assert that regardless of the presence or absence of a literal and
ontological other player, it is the case that human players will conceptualize and personify the
game in different ways, creating a kind of personified participant. It does not matter whether the
Ouija board actually talks to ghosts or not and whether those ghosts are actually “playing” in a
definitional sense, but more importantly whether the human player frames the game encounter
as a typical social situation and further whether they believe the game participant is fulfilling a
game social role.
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In order to explore this topic, I will look at various concepts relevant to the way a human
player relates to a possible personified participant and how that will affect the concept of the
game.
To that end, I will look at the concepts of a game as a social encounter. I will also explore
the assumptions that human players have by default, namely that unless otherwise stated, a
game opponent will have knowledge, skills and psychological expectations roughly equivalent to
their own. Human players expect parity to have a well-played game and if the human player
suspects otherwise, they may feel there is cheating or other phenomenon. In such cases where
there is a great perceived mismatch, a game contest may not even be possible.
Further, I will look at the ways in which people frame technology, either as well-understood
technical systems or as more “enchanted” systems which have hidden and mysterious
information. I will also draw on the works of Sherry Turkle (Turkle, Alone Together: Why We
Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, 2011) (Turkle, Evocative Objects :
Things we Think With, 2011) (Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, 2005),
Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass (Nass & Yen, The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What
Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships, 2010) (Nass & Reeves, The Media Equation:
How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places, 2003)
regarding the tendency of people to automatically personify technical artifacts and systems with
personality and motivations.
And finally, I will discuss the ways in which a game might start to break through those
boundaries and create an inconclusive social experience in a solo game. There may be
situations in which a game will purposefully choose to present itself as fulfilling a specific role to
enhance the pleasure of the human player, but this may also cause difficulties in the way the
human player approaches the game.
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2: Games as Social Situations
Marking out a Space
We can talk about the boundaries of a game without nailing down exactly what a game
might be. The treatment of a game here follows the Wittgenstein term Familienähnkichkeit, or
“family likeness” (Wittgenstein, 1968). It’s usually true that we can point to a game and say,
“that is a game”, but the sheer variety of game artifacts, rules, platforms, environments, players
and attitudes makes it difficult to put them all under one umbrella, despite our craving for what
Wittgenstein called “our craving for generality”, something he attributes to our love of science
(and perhaps, by extension, technology with its love of standardization) (Wittgenstein, The Blue
and Brown Books, 1958) (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1968).
The concepts of play and games belong to a class of human cultural behaviors and
emotions that are hard to pin down and label on a shelf. Like love, art, pornography, etc., “play”
and “game” belong to the category can perhaps be best described as “I know it when I see it”.
Despite this, we can usually point to where a game ends and begins.
Huizinga’s emphasis on play being located in a specific time and space sets the familiar
“magic circle” (Huizinga, 1950) as a proper starting place for the boundaries of games.
Huizinga’s descriptions of arenas and magic circles stress the formality associated with play
(such as beginning and ending the play act) while simultaneously emphasizing the cultural
importance of play: the “play-element” rather than play itself. Play is not defined necessarily by
the context in which it occurs- it is not completely defined by the physical actions and
boundaries- but rather by the primacy it holds within human culture and life. In particular, an
important signal of the start of play and/or games involves the behaviors and attitudes that are
taken on by the participants, whether they are players, referees or spectators. Certain rituals
and acts are typically performed which underscore the shared understanding of a game
underway.
Huizinga very much draws parallels between rituals and play, comparing the way in which
the boundary is present in each. Without looking at the specific attitudes within each, the
boundary condition is very similar. There is usually a specific time and a specific place and the
event is self-contained. Everything within the experience is aimed at making it “come off”, as
Huizinga says (Huizinga, 1950, p. 47).
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No Such Thing as Single Player
This focus on play as culture shows that the play experience is inherently social and that
individual play is less culturally significant. In a game context, we depend on other participants
to keep the game going, to persist the illusion of the game. Indeed, Huizinga says as much
when he notes that “solitary play is productive of culture in only a limited degree”, which seems
to make the meaning of play almost entirely valid only within a multi-player environment
(Huizinga, 1950, p. 47). Huizinga discusses this aspect more closely when talking about
“winning” when he says that “solitary play knows no winning” and that winning is linked closely
to the idea of raising the player’s esteem within the group (Huizinga, 1950, p. 50).
If this is true, then it begs the question of why anyone would ever play a solitary card game
like Solitaire. If it is true that play is culturally social and that winning is linked to a group, how
do we conceive of “winning” a game of Solitaire by ourselves?
There is a further clue to this within Huizinga in his description of play as being “tense”, that
we wish to succeed in something difficult, that even solitary games such as Solitaire, puzzles
and jigsaws allow success in the sense that we can beat them. It’s a fairly common term in
modern day solo video games to say that one has beat a game, as in “I beat Bioshock”. When I
as a player make such a statement, where I beat a solo game, is there an element of social
structure inherent in such a claim?
It may be the case that play and games prime a social viewpoint, regardless of the actual
sociality of the situation, that in solo games we still treat the play experience as as-if it were a
social situation so that we can enjoy the experience of winning. To do this, we would need to
extrapolate the missing social roles that would be otherwise present and assign them
somewhere. If I have “beat” the game, then I may be treating the game itself as my competitor,
even as I recognize it as a technical, physical or programmed artifact. If I have rolled dice and
gotten bad results, I may act as-if there is a hidden arbitrator or game-master that is overseeing
my game and playing “with” me (though not necessarily against me).
Erving Goffman offers a useful framework to look at these kinds of situations as he defines a
more concrete system of the ways in which players approach a game. Goffman defines a social
occasion as: “a wider social affair, undertaking, or event, bounded in regard to place and time
and typically facilitated by fixed equipment; a social occasion provides the structuring social
context in which many situations and their gatherings are likely to form, dissolve, and re-form,
while a pattern of conduct tends to be recognized as the appropriate and (often) official or
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No Such Thing as Single Player
intended one—a “standing behavior pattern,””. (Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, 1963, p.
loc 267).
For Goffman, a game is only a specific kind of a social situation, a specific case, and we
should note the similarities between the ways in which Huizinga marks off a ritual and/or game
and the way in which Goffman defines a social situation. Both stress a boundary condition and a
shared spirit of behavior between the participants. Goffman’s “standing behavior pattern” is, in
games, the ways in which the participants have agreed to behave.
In Goffman’s essay “Fun in Games”, he uses a slightly different terminology, of a
“focused gathering” (Goffman, Fun in Games, 1961), but which shares the same structure.
When we enter a Goffman gathering, we commune together and arrive at a shared agreement
about the purpose and spirit of the event. This might be a funeral, a wedding, a party, a
business meeting or any number of shared experiences which have focused beginnings and
ends, guidelines on who is allowed to attend and what kinds of activities are tolerated.
As Goffman says about this: “Each class of such occasions possesses a distinctive ethos, a
spirit, an emotional structure, that must be properly created, sustained, and laid to rest, the
participant finding that he is obliged to become caught up in the occasion, whatever his personal
feelings” (Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, 1963, p. loc 276). This description is immediately
relevant to the way that we understand the game situation.
As social creatures, we participate in these kinds of encounters every single day. Some
are explicitly defined -such as a funeral- while others are more implicit, such as how one should
behave in a grocery store. We don’t always make an explicit pact with all participants, but there
are clear markers and social cues in place that notify us about what is allowed.
In essence, we are used to acting in social ways in a huge number of contexts and we
historically and culturally treat games as a social phenomenon. Thus, when playing an
ostensibly solo game, we may still act as though the game encounter is social, despite our
knowledge of the game artifacts and our own status as “being alone”.
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Never Solo
In his paper Never Playing Alone: The Social Contextures of Digital Games, the game
sociologist Bart Simon discusses the ways in which sociality is expressed within game contexts
and how “games are already always social phenomenon”. Simon covers four different social
contexts of digital gaming, three of which deal with a human player engaging with other human
players via the game system. The two last contextures he presents are the most interesting:
“playing with others online” and “playing alone” (Simon, 2011).
Simon notes that for the casual observer, it is rather difficult to tell the difference
between watching someone play a multiplayer game with others online, versus playing a single
player game. For example, take the game Battlefield III (Electronic Arts Sega, 2011), a first
person shooter set in modern day war arenas. As a casual observer of someone else playing it
on their computer alone, we may be familiar with some of the ways in which a first person
shooter works, but without some specific knowledge about the game, we may not be able to tell
whether the player is actually, in fact, playing with others.
Whether playing alone or with others online, in neither case is there a co-located bodily
experience: in a multi-player game, the other player is somewhere else in the world and aside
from extra-game communication (text chat or voice) and familiarity with the conventions of the
game, that other player could be an artificial intelligence. To the extent you are “playing with
others” in a multi-player game, information about the other players is revealed and
communicated via the game system alone.
Per Simon, in a multi-player game the social experience is virtual. The social needs,
attitudes and actions of the other players are all mediated by the game itself, and the human
player is highly involved in the social requirements of the game despite a lack of physical copresence with the other players. .
Simon defines a solo game as a form of gaming that occurs in the absence of other
human players and goes on to state that many solo digital games are, in fact, simulations of
multi-player situations. As he says, “in many games, solo play is meant to simulate or
approximate the idea of playing with others, such that one test of a good solo game is its ability
to make players ‘believe’ as if they are really playing with others” (Simon, 2011).
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Simon argues here that, in a real sociological sense, a solo game is an intentional
stand-in for the social interactions normally supplied by a human opponent, that a solo game
tries to mimic the social illusions one would normally experience in a true human to human
multiplayer game.
This seems rather straightforward in games such as a first person shooter, where there
is an obvious stand-in for other players: their avatars and representations on the screen. But,
what might this mean for games that have no explicit representation, games like Tetris,
Bejeweled, Shadow of the Colossus, Katamari Damacy, The Sims and a host of others?
It is true that in these games, there is no obvious avatar or representation of another
player on the screen, that there is no player two or opponent explicitly represented, but that
does not mean that the play of the game does not allow for the kinds of actions that a secondary
player might add to the encounter. For example, in Tetris (Pajitnov, 1984), the main conflict
comes from the variance of the shapes that fall from the top of the screen and the increasing
speed at which they fall. In Katamari Damacy (Namco, 2004), the challenge arrives from the
placement of the various game objects in the environment, against the amount of time that is
needed to collect them.
Certainly, we do not experience another player in these as a moment-to-moment player,
one that we encounter through constant interaction as in an online first person shooter such as
Battlefield III (Electronic Arts Sega, 2011), but we can alternately experience this as a kind of
mastermind intelligence who is acting against (or with) us. It is fairly easy to conceive of a
multi-player Tetris where the second player is choosing the shapes which fall, while the first
player is the one who is stacking them. In a solo game like Tetris, I may feel that I have “won”
against the game because I can formulate the in-game actions as fulfilling a social role of a coparticipant, one who is interacting with me to challenge me.
Indeed, The Sims (Electronic Arts, 2000), which might be thought of as a solo game, is
perhaps the best example of a simulated social encounter. The challenges within The Sims
come from the interaction between the characters the player encounters and the whimsical
situations that arise in game (things catching on fire, burglaries, etc.) These happenings, rather
than attributing them to an algorithmic source, are perhaps more rewarding when thought of as
being produced “as-if” the game was a participant in the encounter.
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So, if we say that a good solo game simulates a social encounter, what varieties of
social simulation might be happening? As Simon notes, the possibilities include Sherry Turkle’s
view that a solo game is psychically social, as a solo player is effectively playing against other
aspects of their own unexplored personality mediated through their interactions in the games,
i.e. they are playing against their own personality (Turkle, 2005).
Or we might say that the solo player is playing against the designer of the game,
encoded and distilled into the game system as one might relate to the author of a book by
reading it (as perhaps referred to in Rules of Play (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003)). The most
intriguing aspect, as Simon puts forth, is that perhaps the human player can be viewed as
playing against the game itself, that perhaps “solo play constitutes an interaction between a
player and a genuine if flawed artificial intelligence (i.e. the game or the characters in the game
are actors in their own right).” (Simon, 2006) (Emphasis mine). It’s an interesting question.
What if the game is viewed as-if it is an actor in its own right?
In other words, in the context of a solo game, the sociological and psychological needs
of the human player might be fulfilled by viewing the game system itself as a kind of competitive
intentional actor (even if it is not very “intelligent”).
Looked at through this perspective, a solo
player relates to the behaviors supplied by the game as a secondary participant, thus changing
the ostensible solo play into a simulated multi-player game experience.
We can look at this from the other side as well. Would it make sense to have a game
system without a kind of personified participant? In Staffan Björk and Jesper Juul’s paper Zero
Player Games: What we talk about when we talk about players, they raise the question of the
importance of looking at zero-player games, or games where there is no human player at all.
(Björk & Juul, 2012)
In their paper, they offer examples of zero-player games, such as Conway’s Game of
Life, Robotwar, Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, or Hex. These are games where all of the
“players” are non-human, where the game proceeds with humans as spectators watching the
outcomes. For example, if we could set up a computer chess game with an AI as player one, as
well as an AI as player two, then we could sit back and watch the game commence.
In the use of player here, we are not assigning an internal state of enjoyment or
“playfulness” in the internal psychology of these computer participants. The truth is we cannot
really know the internal state of these participants (even if they were humans). The claim here
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No Such Thing as Single Player
is that in such a situation, a participant would recognize the situation as a game encounter and
would try to understand the interactions of the participants as-if they were players, even if the
spectator is well aware of the technological underpinnings of the participants. Player here
means a social role of a player.
If someone were to set up the above computer chess game between two AI’s and we
came upon it, we might find it enjoyable and interesting. As we watched the moves performed
by the AI’s, we would see strategies unfold and we might ascribe intent and direction to each
“player”. And following Simon’s observation, if we came upon such a game already underway,
we might have some difficulty knowing whether the “players” were AI players or if they were
human players playing remotely, yet we would recognize them as fulfilling the player social role.
A side note that Juul and Björk make is that the term “zero-player game” is itself a
misnomer and that what is actually meant are zero-people games (Björk & Juul, 2012, p. 6).
According to them, in zero-player games, the game takes on the role that a human player would
have performed, without the human player interfering during the actual gameplay. In essence,
the game system acts “as-if” it were a human player: it attempts to perform the role of a player,
and this interpretation of the computerized game participant(s) as being a player or not rests on
the personification being made by the human observer. Juul and Björk put forward that such a
game is interesting to observers because the non-human player expresses actions we would
normally see from a human player: intentionality and interactivity. In such cases, a human
could observe the zero-player game and find it highly interesting if the behaviors adhere to
social roles that exhibit these qualities.
In essence, as social creatures, humans are primed to understand game situations as
inherently social and we expect that participants take on social roles in relation to the situation.
We may expect players, cheaters, referees, game-masters, spectators and others, and it is the
shared agreement of those participants that helps us understand the game encounter.
If we take away the human sociality and we play a game within a solo context, we may
be primed to still understand the solo game by assigning it a social role or creating new ones
that are not in conflict with the game.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
3: The Social Roles in a Game
.
In the context of a game encounter, we might understand the situation better by attempting
to divide participants into categories: bystanders, spectators, referees, players and gamemasters. These terms are culled from various sources, but describe different roles which are
general separate but may overlap in some cases. We can examine each in turn, loosely from
more game-involved to less.
Montola and Waern provide a good framework for understanding the general differences
between these roles in their paper Participant Roles in Socially Expanded Games (2006). In
this paper, they make a determination that people become aware of a game through several
stages of awareness (Montola & Waern, 2006). First is the unaware state, where the game
experiences are unnoticed or are treated as being “everyday” phenomenon. Second is the
ambiguous state, where the experiences of the game are obvious, but there is still no frame of
reference that would reveal that it is, indeed, a game. Lastly is the conscious state, where the
game context is accessible and understandable to the person.
A useful way of defining the game roles can be understood through the various invitations
that can be made to non-players, as described by Montola and Waern (2006). Someone who is
not involved in the game can be introduced into the game through various means and through
their acceptance or rejection, they take on various roles. For example, a person can be offered
an invitation to play (making them a player), an invitation to participate (making them a
participant), an invitation to spectate (making them a spectator) and an invitation to refuse
(making them a bystander who is ignoring the game) (Montola & Waern, 2006).
A bystander role would thus be a person who has refused to participate in the game at all, or
who is not aware of the game in the first place. For the purposes of being in-game, this has a
limited social utility, except for the physicality of certain games. An augmented reality game
may take place within a library, where the play of the game encroaches on people who simply
want to study and want to pay no attention to the game. Bystanders have either an unaware
state or an ambiguous state, but the play of the game necessarily must adjust to be respectful of
those individuals. Bystanders are socially outside the game.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
A spectator role can be achieved by offering the ability to watch without playing. In this case,
a person is aware of the game context but is not actively participating. Just as with the
bystanders, the play of the game may involve the various players’ treatment of the spectators,
but the spectator role is one in which the players are freer to “bother” and involve the spectators
with the goings-on of the game
An invitation to participate may also be offered, which is different from spectating or playing
and this closely maps to the usage of referee above. Montola and Waern describe a situation
where non-players may be invited to referee the player’s activity, or to vote on the way the play
is proceeding. Strictly, these participants are acting in a meta-context, where they are fully
aware of the game but are simply enforcing the rules or guiding the way the game outcome
proceeds. Generally, it is expected that these non-player participants are following a different
set of behaviors than the actual players, much like a referee at a football game differs from the
players.
The role of player should be familiar already and should be understood as one who has
been offered an invitation to play and is entering the game with parity and a shared
understanding of what is expected. Without belaboring the point, the player role is a main actor
in the game and is the one playing.
A game-master is a specific role which is not covered by Montola and Waern, but deserves
special treatment. In The Meilahti Model by Stenros and Hakkarainen, a game-master is defined
as “a role adopted by a participant when defining the diegetic framework of the game” (Stenros
& Hakkarainen, 2003). By diegetic frame, Stenros and Hakkarainen describe the game-master
has having total control over the history of the past of the game, the present and the
expectations that the characters should have. This is particularly relevant for role-playing and
larps, which is the context which the authors come from, but this creational role of world building
can also be expanded to mean a game designer, or the author of the game. In this sense, the
game-master is a social role which oversees and controls the goings on of the game and who
can potentially be appealed to. A person acting in the game-master role may also choose to
enter the game and interact with the world as a player, but in this case, that person would shift
to being the player role.
A game-master is essentially a kind of “god” of the game, who is responsible for the diegetic
history and future, as well as being responsible for the structure of the play and the rules that
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No Such Thing as Single Player
are being followed. The game-master, like the referee role, is not acting according to the same
rules as the players, and unlike the referee (who is simply enforcing the rules), the game-master
has the possibility of changing the rules or the game world itself.
The roles mentioned above are also discussed by Huizinga in various contexts, with a focus
on the roles of spectators, but he does not go as far as to differentiate non-player participants
(referees or voters) and spectators. In some cases, such as in the Eskimo drumming contest,
he equates spectatorship with a non-player participant. (Huizinga, 1950, p. 85). Regardless,
these social roles are ones we are familiar with and may expect, depending on the type of
game.
The game-master role also holds a specific connotation as being “why the game is what it
is”. As a game designer or the creator of a game context, certain decisions are made as to
what is allowed and what the rules are. If we create a game of Scavenger Hunt and hand out
the list of objects to various players, we are a game-master but we are not playing. It may be
the case that some of the objects are very easily found or very difficult to find. In these cases,
we might be appealed to by the players in order to change the list, or we may be blamed for
having made the choices that we made. Regardless, the game-master role is the originator of
the conditions and rules of the game and as such, those choices may be perceived as being
one of intentional by the players.
The game-master may also have either a neutral, adversarial or cooperative role in regards
to the players. While the game-master may not be specifically playing, players may feel that
when they win, it is because they have “beat” the game-master’s original intentions. The gamemaster may not even be involved or may not be present during the play of the game, but
“winning” may be a case of competing against the game-master as an absentee force, as a way
of showing off prowess to the other players.
It is important to note that these are social roles, not specific persons. There can be a great
fluidity between the enactments of these roles, in that a particular person may shift easily from
one to the other as long as they have made the proper agreements with the other participants.
A bystander may be called upon to suddenly referee a game. A spectator may be called in to
become a player. A game-master, seeing that the game is underway and needs no more
guidance, may give up the game-master role and simply become a player.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
In a solo game, we are almost certainly enacting the player role, but if we are conditioned to
treat games as social experiences, we may look for these other roles within the solo game
context. We may look for evidences of social intentions within the actions of the game, to
identify a process or force that is acting as a spectator, player, referee, game-master or even a
bystander.
Naturally, in a solo game, there is no other human person, so these social roles have to be
fulfilled by non-human stand-ins. This claim would suggest that game objects, both virtual and
not, can perform internationalities and fulfill social roles, so in the next section, we look at the
ways in which the actions and state of a game present evidences of personality and intention.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
4: Personification
Before we can look closely at the ways in which games display personality, intention and
allow for personification, we should start even more basically with cultural objects in general.
Whether we are talking about simple objects like a vase, or complex encoded technologies like
games, there are various facets to the way in which these take on personalities.
Getting past the “Just Computer Code (just an Object)”
When we talk about assigning social roles to games, particularly digital games, there is a
possible immediate objection that the actions and behaviors exhibited by non-human processes
and entities cannot fulfill these roles. Essentially, this argument states that in a solo game
context, there is no possibility of game processes and objects taking on a social role because
they are “just a program” or “just an object”. In the previous example of two AI programs playing
chess against each other, the argument is that these are not truly players, but simply pieces of
computer code that are programmatically executing, that “the lights are on, but nobody is
home”.
Are these programs really playing? Strictly speaking, it doesn’t matter. The problem is, we
cannot know other minds (animal or people), just as we cannot know really whether a computer
mediated interaction is necessarily coming from a human actor or an AI. Stevan Harnad talks
about this difficulty in his excellent paper Other Bodies, Other Minds:
“There is in fact no evidence for me that anyone else but me has a mind. In the case of any
other kind of objective, scientific evidence (such as laboratory observations and
measurements), I can in principle check it out directly for myself. But I can never check
whether anyone else but me has a mind. I either accept the dictates of my intuition (which is
the equivalent of: "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...it's a duck")
or I admit that there's no way I can know.” (Harnad, 1991)
Harnad explains that we cannot really know other minds, so in our various interactions with
“mind-having” entities, if the entity acts exactly as if it did have a mind, we treat it as-if it did.
We create a model of “having a mind” and then compare the behavior of the entity to our model.
If it convinces us, then we accept it.
Note that there is no easy way to tell if a human has a mind versus a computer having a
mind, and this is conceptually very similar to Bart Simon’s assertion that it is difficult to tell
whether someone is playing a solo game versus an online game.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
Therefore, there is little utility in differentiating between understanding a game object or
process as taking on a social role of a “player” and that game object/process actually being a
player. This discussion is making no claim for the internal state of “playfulness” in any game
object or process, but simply that for all intents and purposes in a solo game we have the
possibility of treating those objects and processes as-if they were players.
Is an AI really alive
and really playing with us? Is there really a sentient game-master behind Tetris who is making
deliberate choices to thwart us? When a set of dice keeps coming up with bad rolls, is there
really a vengeful dice god named Nuffle who is purposefully causing it (Games Workshop,
1986)? It doesn’t matter and is perhaps impossible to prove, but we act as-if there is.
The Technical Divide
In the modern age, there is a focus on the science and technology, perhaps part of the
same “craving for generality” that Wittgenstein described earlier (Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, 1968). If we focus deeply on the fact that game objects and processes are “just
programs” or “just objects”, we may miss the fact that these processes and objects can fulfill
valuable social roles.
Further, a focus on the technology and scientific aspects may keep us from holding
imaginative and alternate ways of conceiving the same activity. A focus on the technology
alone may blind us from the social roles being performed. For example, we can look at dice. In
pre-modern days, a roll of the dice was thought to be much more than it seemed. The outcome
of a roll of the dice was fated or controlled by powers outside human comprehension. Fortune
telling and different forms of prognostication used game-like objects to ascertain the will of
forces outside our control (and in fact, present day gambling still contains some overtones of
this outlook).
In Nigel Pennick’s Secret Games of the Gods, he talks about the original uses of dice:
“The original use of dice in divination is embedded in the word die and its plural dice,
which come from the Low Latin dadus, meaning ‘given’, that is ‘given by the gods’. In
the time before the idea of randomness was discovered, it was considered that
everything that happened was part of the will of supernatural beings, whether the gods
or the demonic empire.” (Pennick, 1989)
Dice were not seen as physical and scientific objects of randomness, they were tools of
unknown actors, perhaps of an unseen kind of game-master or referee. In the modern age, we
tend to no longer look at dice in this way by default. As a culture, we have learned much about
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No Such Thing as Single Player
physics and mathematics, how the forces of the dice hitting a surface might work and what the
probabilities of a particular roll are. In the modern day, we have switched from looking at dice
as mystical objects, into looking at them as technical and culturally created objects.
But this may not be totally true. In his book Techgnosis, Erik Davis describes the ways
in which sociality informs our view of technology and describes how there is still modern overlap
in the ways we think about cultural objects:
“Though we may think of technology as a tool defined by pragmatic and utilitarian
concerns alone, human motivations in the matter of technology are rarely so
straightforward. Like the rationality we carry within our minds, whose logical convictions
must make their way through the brawling, boozing cabaret of the psyche, technologies
are shaped and constrained by the warp and woof of culture, with its own peculiar
myths, dreams, cruelties and hungers” (Davis, 2004)
Davis invokes Bruno Latour to further discuss the relationship between culture and
technology:
“[…] Pre-modern and indigenous people wove everything – animals, tools,
medicine, sex, kin, plants, songs, weather- into an immense collective webwork of mind
and matter. Nothing in this webwork, which Latour calls the anthropological matrix, can
be neatly divided between nature and culture. Instead, this matrix is composed of
“hybrids” – “speaking things” that are both natural and cultural, real and imagined,
subject and object.” (Davis, 2004)
“Speaking things” is particularly in harmony with Sherry Turkle’s use of “evocative
objects” (Turkle, 2011), suggesting that if we slightly de-emphasize the technical slant, we can
treat game objects as something richer, in a less scientific and slightly more imaginative
approach.
We do not today typically think of dice as being “of nature”, we think of them as being “of
culture” (i.e. human technology), and we understand them on a technical level. Thinking of
game objects as being “of nature” is alien to the modern outlook. Davis ties this to Latour’s
notion of the “Great Divide”:
“We don’t generally think this way today because we are basically moderns, and
modernity is partly defined by the enormous conceptual barrier erected between nature
and culture. In his book We Have Never Been Modern, Latour dubs this wall the “Great
Divide” […]
On one side of the Great Divide lies nature, a voiceless and objective world “out there”,
whose hidden mechanisms are unlocked by detached scientific gentlemen using
technical instruments to amplify their perceptions. Human culture lies on the other side
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No Such Thing as Single Player
of the fence, “in here”, a self-reflexive world of stories, subjects, and power struggles that
develop free of nature’s mythic limitations. The Great Divide thus disenchants the world,
enthroning man as the sole active agent of the cosmos.” (Davis, 2004)
In other words, a side effect of the modern age is that we tend to favor our outlooks
towards the technical, but we cannot completely block it out. There is a cognitive tendency to
explain or understand technical systems as purely scientific, even while we still attribute
personalities and motivations in a limited way to our cultural artifacts. As Erik Davis suggests,
no matter how technical we get, our understanding of technology can never get away from the
mysterious filter of our cultural outlook. We want to imagine things about our technology.
Latour and Objects
Bruno Latour’s view of artifacts taking on social roles is particularly relevant here, in
particular his paper Where are the Missing Masses?, where he describes the social roles taken
on by seemingly inert physical objects (Latour, 1992). In this paper he describes the functions
of doors in society and the seemingly difficult social problem of making sure that a door is
always closed. As people move in and out of rooms, not everyone closes the door behind
them, yet we prefer that doors be closed in general.
Latour describes that one solution is to hire a person, called a porter, groom or doorman,
who has the sole function of making sure the door is closed all the time. This person performs
the required social role of “door-closing” and means that when the door is not closed, only one
person needs to be disciplined, not everyone who passes through it. But, as he points out, this
is a relatively expensive operation, as the porter must be paid, must be paying attention and
must perform the job properly every time (not slamming the door, closing it completely, etc.).
Instead, he goes on to talk about how in most cases, we have relegated that social role
to a set of technologies. We no longer hire human porters to close doors, we instead have
constructed artificial means, such as hydraulics, which stand in for that social role. The “job” of
the door closer now is to close the door and he describes an amusing incident where a broken
artificial groom had a sign tacked to it saying “The groom is on strike”, effectively assigning
human motivations to a technical object that is performing a social role. As Latour says:
“What is interesting in this note is the humor of attributing a human characteristic to a
failure that is usually considered ‘purely technical’. This humor, however, is more
profound than in the notice they could have posted: ‘The groom is not working’. I
constantly talk with my computer, who answers back. I am sure you swear at your old
car; We are constantly granting mysterious faculties to gremlins inside every conceivable
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No Such Thing as Single Player
home appliance, not to mention cracks in the concrete belt of our nuclear plants.”
(Latour, 1992)
Latour asserts that these kinds of objects are already anthropomorphic (or personified).
These objects are made by humans, they delegate action for a human and that they shape
human action by enforcing certain behaviors. He questions why we would balk at drawing the
line between a simple “projection of human behavior” versus a “real delegation of action”.
If we focus on the artificial groom as a technical artifact only, just as we might focus on
the coding of a game as simply a technical artifact, we ignore the ways in which those game
artifacts and processes might be socially meaningful.
In this way, we can understand the mechanisms and objects of games as enacting
social roles; that we specifically construct systems, interfaces and game objects so that they are
stand-ins for roles that we would otherwise give other humans. This is the sense of Bart
Simon’s assertion that a good game is one that simulates playing with other people. The game
system, the objects, the interaction, the feedback, the sights, the sounds, the processes and
systemic actions can all be viewed as ways to substitute for another participant. Looked at this
way, a solo game is inherently a social process.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
PART 2:
Finding Others
32
No Such Thing as Single Player
We have seen so far that a game is a social experience and that possible participants
come to a game with social expectations. In the case of a truly solo game, there can only be
stand-ins for that social experience, mediated through the game objects and processes. There
really is no other person around, yet we may expect to find others in the game, but how do we
actually come to find those others?
1: Objects
We are surrounded by our technologies and we communicate, interact and see
ourselves in those technologies. We understand objects and the roles in which they play in our
lives, some even going so far as to fall in love and marry inanimate objects like the Eiffel Tower.
(Piotrowska, 2008). Why and how do we feel for the things we have created?
We start by turning to Sherry Turkle to understand this, using her notion of evocative
objects. In her use of “evocative objects”, Turkle is not tied to technology necessarily, but also
simple material objects as having power to engage humans emotionally, something which does
not always come easily:
“We find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic, as necessities or vain
indulgences. We are on less familiar ground when we consider objects as companions
to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought. The notion of evocative objects
brings together these two less familiar ideas, underscoring the inseparability of thought
and feeling in our relationship to things. We think with the objects we love; we love the
objects we think with.” (Turkle, 2011)
This is to say that when we interact with an object in a meaningful way, we indulge
ourselves and entangle ourselves in the experience of those objects. Because of the human
need for play and the deep significance of play in human culture and psychology, game objects
involve us in processes and experiences that are perhaps more humanly fundamental than say,
using a doorbell or a hammer. And Turkle expresses that a major theme around an evocative
object is “the power of boundary objects and the general principle that objects are active life
presences.”
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No Such Thing as Single Player
Game objects are no exception. At a minimum, we involve ourselves in the chessboard,
in the computer, in the football, in dice, in pen and paper. And these objects are not simply
static and cold, they are present in the game actions.
Personification goes one step further than simply being emotionally attached to an object.
Personification is the attribution of human characteristics to things that aren’t human, to make a
“person” out of something that isn’t.
There’s a terminology question here about personification versus anthropomorphism. There
is some debate between how each applies, but for the purposes of this paper: personification is
the attribution of human traits, goals and attitudes towards any non-human entity.
Anthropomorphism is the representation of objects as a human shape, such as representing a
badger wearing a vest and smoking a pipe.
In essence, personifying anything is to ascribe to it human attitudes and goals, even though
we may believe that really it does not have them, it is an acting as-if (a term which has come up
several times so far in this discussion). Personification in this sense is to act as-if the entity is
performing in a human way, that it is societally relevant in its functions.
We are intimately familiar with this idea, as Latour suggests. We might have a car that
sometimes doesn’t start, so we call it unreliable or cranky. We have a window that is hard to
open, so we call it stubborn. As we run towards a subway car, the door closes in our face and
we yell at it for being malicious. We lose our wallet as we are trying to leave the house for work
and we think that maybe it purposefully hid itself away to spite us. We break our favorite pen
and we feel sorry for it and apologize. This kind of personality attribution to objects is what
makes dolls and toys so powerful, and why the singing and dancing teapots and plates in the
Disney Beauty and the Beast movie are not wildly foreign to us.
2: Intentionality
So, how might we arrive at this understanding? Daniel Dennett talks about the
phenomenon of mind and how we perceive it in others through advocating an intentional stance.
Through this, we can examine how we identify personality aspects in other people, as well as
objects and systems.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
In order to predict the behavior of an entity, Dennett begins by outlining three stances:
physical, design and intentional (Dennett, 1997). Briefly, the physical stance is where we
assume that the laws of nature and the physical aspects of the entity are all that apply. Every
physical thing exhibits behaviors that can be explained from this stance: falling due to gravity,
for example. This may not be sufficient to explain all the behaviors of the entity, however and
thus the next level is the design stance. Dennett uses an alarm clock as an example of the
design stance, where the sheer physicality of the clock is not enough to explain how it behaves,
but we can predict it’s behaviors by assuming that it has been designed to act in specific ways.
In more complicated scenarios, it may become necessary to try to predict the behavior of
a sufficiently complicated entity by assuming that it has certain intentions. Dennett describes
the application of the intentional strategy as “treating the object whose behavior you want to
predict as a rational agent with beliefs and desires and other mental stages exhibiting what
Brentano and others call intentionality”. If we suppose that there are objects and entities from
which we cannot determine the purpose of the behavior, we can apply the intentional stance:
“First you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational
agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the
world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same
considerations, and finally you predict that the rational agent will act to further its goals in
the light of its beliefs.” (Dennett, 1997)
This is to say, in order to understand the internal state of another entity, we make
predictions about the entity, as-if it had intentions that map to goals that you would expect it to
have given what it is.
Take an example of a dog. First we assume a dog is a rational being. Given that, we
guess at what the dog would want, what it believes in, what it needs, as well as what we think a
dog would want. Then, we sit back and watch. If the dog acts in a way that fulfills those
desires, we say that the dog intended to perform the actions it did.
If we are engaging with another potential player in a game, we assume a set of play-like
beliefs and goals on their part and then continuously measure that against the behavior of the
potential player. If we believe that their actions as a player match up against our definitions of
the goals and desires we would expect of a player, we believe that they are acting with
intentionality, that they are taking actions that we ourselves would intentionally do if we were
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No Such Thing as Single Player
playing. Note that again, this depends on us imagining, by default, the other player to have
roughly human-like wants and desires.
In fact, Dennett discusses computer chess games specifically when talking about
intentionality and says it is his favorite example:
“For all their differences at the physical level and the design level, [chess-playing]
computers all succumb neatly to the same simple strategy of interpretation: just think of
them as rational agents who want to win, and who know the rules and principles of
chess and the positions of the pieces on the board.[…] At any moment in the chess
game, simply look at the chessboard and draw up a list of all the legal moves available
to the computer when it is its turn to play (there will usually be several dozen
candidates).
Why restrict yourself to legal moves? Because, you reason, [the chess-playing
computer] wants to play winning chess and knows that it must make only legal moves to
win, so, being rational, it restricts itself to these. Now rank the legal moves from best
(wisest, most rational) to worst (stupidest, most self-defeating) and make your prediction:
the computer will make the best move.” (Dennett, 1997)
And he goes on:
“Sometimes, when the computer finds itself in a tough predicament, with only one nonsuicidal move to make (a "forced' move), you can predict its move with supreme
confidence. Nothing about the laws of physics forces this move, and nothing about the
specific design of the computer forces this move. The move is forced by the
overwhelmingly good reasons for making it and not any other move. Any chess player,
constructed of whatever physical materials, would make it. Even a ghost or an angel
would make it!
You come up with your intentional-stance prediction on the basis of your bold
assumption that no matter how the computer program has been designed, it has been
designed well enough to be moved by such a good reason. You predict its behavior as if
it were a rational agent.” (Dennett, 1997)
We again see the mention of human players treating the non-human player as-if it had
human attitudes and motivations, as Harnad did with the other minds problem discussed above
(Harnad, 1991). Dennett says that in the case of a chess-playing computer, or software, we
have three stances of thinking about its behavior: as a physical entity, as a designed entity and
as an intentional entity. In the case of a computer chess game, only the intentional stance will
help us figure out how to predict its behavior and model its attitudes, such that the computer
chess player had “reasons” to play like it did.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
Many, if not most, definitions of games include a kind of agency and intentionality, in
which a player “intends” to perform certain activities, that players must take action in a game,
must make an effort or make some kind of choice. (Abt, 1970) (Avedon & Sutton-Smith, 1970)
(Costikyan, 1994) (Juul, 2005) (Suits, 1978). While not a primary component of a definition of a
game, the fact that this comes up frequently is an indicator of its importance. This kind of
“choice-ful” agency only makes sense in light of us believing that a player intentionally
performed the action and it wasn’t just random and undirected action. A game choice is only a
meaningful choice if we believe the player meant to do it and wasn’t just following a script or
randomly performing actions with no goal in mind.
We could potentially imagine a situation where we are playing online poker against an
unknown other player. As the game progresses, the other player bets poorly and erratically,
and ultimately loses. Post-game, we may come to find that that before the other player
discarded or made a bet, they rolled some dice in order to randomly tell them what they should
be doing. In this case, we can see that the player was taking actions and was making efforts to
continue the game, but we cannot say that they were intentionally performing any particular
action in the game. We might argue that they were not actually “playing” poker in a sense that
we would typically understand. They were simply a conduit passing results from a random
process.
In this way, we can understand a player as being an entity that we believe intentionally
acts to fulfill the play-like beliefs and game-goals we ascribe to it. Simply put, there is a
Goffman social occasion (a game context) and we encounter another participant who seems to
intentionally play.
Recall that Goffman defines a social occasion as: “a wider social affair, undertaking, or
event, bounded in regard to place and time and typically facilitated by fixed equipment; a social
occasion provides the structuring social context in which many situations and their gatherings
are likely to form, dissolve, and re-form, while a pattern of conduct tends to be recognized as
the appropriate and (often) official or intended one—a “standing behavior pattern,””. (Goffman,
Behavior in Public Places, 1963).
If a situation is a game, we expect a certain kind of behavior pattern. We assume a play
attitude on all participating entities. We cannot truly get inside the head of our fellow entities,
but we naturally assume a kind of human play attitude, a “playful profile” that is coherent with
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No Such Thing as Single Player
our own understanding. We then watch the behaviors and actions of the entity and if the action
appears be accomplishing and pursuing the goals and beliefs that we ourselves would hold, we
then believe the actions of the entity to be intentional. If the entity appears to act in a way that
makes us believe it is intentionally playing, we say that the entity is a player, i.e. that it is
performing the social role of player.
Interestingly, in line with Dennett’s intentional stance, this does not require the entity to
actually have those beliefs and goals to be a player. It might or it might not be actually playing
in some internal psychological way. But, we cannot know for sure. It is only sufficient that we,
the human player, are convinced that the entity is acting in a way which supports those beliefs
and goals.
An example of this is a cheater in a game. A cheater likely has access to skills or
knowledge unavailable to other players and thus some aspect of the game is known by the
cheater in advance. The cheater is not completely subject to the moment to moment changes
in the game state and does not have to respond to them in the same way as other players. A
cheater is not acting truly improvisationally, nor treats the game as though it has an uncertain
context: the cheater attempts to subvert the game to have a specific outcome that they control.
For them, at least, certain aspects of the game are more “certain” than they are for other
players.
We dislike cheating because when we discover it, we have been fooled. The so-called
cheating player acted in ways that we assumed to be compliant with goals and desires that we
ourselves have (namely to play), but as it turns out, they actually held goals and desires that
were contrary to the play attitude. They appeared to be “playing”, going through the motions of
the game but not adhering to the same play attitude. Our typical method of revealing
intentionality has been subverted: a cheater appears to be a player until the moment when we
suddenly uncover their true intent, if we ever do.
This might help us to understand the play behavior and attitudes of other living creatures,
but does it apply to non-living games? In other words, can we examine a game system (digital
or not) and come away with an impression of an attitude, an intentionality?
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No Such Thing as Single Player
3: Personifying Technology
In the Second Self (2005), Turkle talks about the ways in which humans approach
computers and virtual spaces as evocative objects. As she says: “The computer is a
‘metaphysical machine’, a ‘psychological machine’, not just because it might be said to have a
psychology, but because it influences how we think about our own.” (Turkle, 2005)
Turkle is here talking about computers specifically, but as she makes clear this is
because computers are information objects that manipulate language, an information system.
And even more specifically, machinic processes have a seemingly special ability to evoke our
own psychology, as Latour hints at as well.
There is probably no better evidence for this than the extensive experiments carried out
by Clifford Nass et all, and described in his books, The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What
Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships (Nass & Yen, 2010), and The Media Equation:
How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Place (Nass &
Yen, 2010).
It is abundantly clear through the huge number of experiments performed that people
treat computerized technology as having social roles. Furthermore, in experiments where
technology was treated as conveying a personality, personality attributes shown through
strongly and clearly (for example, see personality experiments outlined in The Man Who Lied to
His Laptop (2010).
People have the power and the inclination to assign personalities and
intents to an entity which performs a social role, and can easily interpret personality traits via a
computerized interface.
Technology does not necessarily have to mean a literal computer and software system
here. A complex technical system can be supported through non-digital means, though it
becomes complicated to use. There are non-digital solo games that are very complex, such as
the pen-and-paper Ambush! game (Avalon Hill, 1983), but generally evoking a complex
emotional response will require a complex system in order to provide a wide enough gradient of
information.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
For example, we already have digital and computerized constructs in which we invest
attachment and personalities. In Alone Together, Turkle discusses at length people’s
relationships with robots and other algorithmic systems and how people relate to them (Turkle,
2011). In one example, she relates an experiment performed by Freedom Baird which involves
several artifacts upside down for a length of time: a Barbie toy doll, a Furby robot toy and a live
gerbil. These three examples have varying levels of “aliveness”, of systemic feedback. The
Barbie is a static object and has no behaviors, so to speak. The Furby doll has behaviors within
the range it is designed to display. The gerbil has, of course, all of the normal gerbil behaviors.
Figure 1: Furby
In all cases, people are willing to hold the Barbie upside down for an unlimited time, the
Furby for a shorter time (until it complains, which it is programmed to) and the gerbil not long at
all. Why do people hold the Furby toy robot upside down for less time than a Barbie doll?
Turkle suggests that this is because the robot “performs a psychology” (Turkle, 2011) and that
because of this, people experience this as proof of an inner consciousness. Indeed, as she
reports, people feel uncomfortable “distressing” the Furby robot, as it reacts in a way that
mimics the distress of a creature that is alive. In a sense, it does not matter whether the Furby
robot really is alive, but more importantly, that a human participant believes its performance.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
Agency and
Behavior
information
Human
Human
Personified Idea
of what Furby’s
attitudes are
This again brings us back to intentionality. In each of these objects, we try to predict
how we would act were we such a being. The Barbie fails to react at all to being held upside
down, thus we ascribe no desires or intentions to it, we might apply Dennett’s physical stance
and be satisfied. The Furby reacts in a limited way and we ascribe a limited set of desires to it,
despite perhaps knowing that it is simply programmed to perform that way (mostly Dennett’s
design stance, but perhaps a little of the intentionality stance). And, of course, the gerbil reacts
violently to being held upside down, as we would.
Figure 2: Simon game
We might also consider the color choosing game Simon, which is a round disk of plastic
with four colored panels on the top. The Simon is self-contained, it is the game and it contains
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No Such Thing as Single Player
all the game logic within it. The Simon game presents a series of color sequences over a
number of rounds, each round making the sequence longer and harder, as the human player
must repeat the sequence that Simon had just displayed. During the play, one gets the sense
that Simon is trying to be tricky. Sometimes Simon repeats a color multiple times, or the
sequence goes around the board in a pretty pattern. Ultimately, one gets the sense that Simon
is improvising the color sequence (play attitude) and is really very much intentionally trying to
beat the human player. As we play Simon, we get a limited sense of Simon’s perceived
personality, what Simon wants and how Simon is acting. Even the fact that the device has a
human name “Simon” helps to contribute to giving it a personality. Simon acts almost exactly as
we might, if we were controlling the actions of Simon, and thus we build a playful profile of
Simon as a taking on the social role of an additional player.
Behavioral Bandwidth
The example of the Barbie, Furby and gerbil points to a relationship between the amount we
are willing to personify and the amount of information that an entity can express. Even if we
believe that a Barbie has feelings, the physicality and construction of the Barbie does not
provide any information. Barbie is as inert as a rock, though has a human shape. On the other
end of the spectrum, the gerbil can squeal and squirm, breath heavily and pass out, providing all
kinds of information about the internal attitudes we suppose it to have.
There is a similar transition between analog games and digital games. Board games are
generally magnitudes simpler in terms of the amount of information they can convey. Even if we
were to believe that a chess board is alive in some sense and had feelings, there are very few
ways in which it seems it could convey that. In contrast, a digital game offers up sight, sound
effects, text, music and an apparent representational way to change its own state. A digital
game has far more “channels” of information it can exploit to convey a sense of behavior.
The Simon game seems to sit somewhere in the middle, perhaps slightly less than the
Furby. Thus, loosely we might say:
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No Such Thing as Single Player
This is not to say that a rock, chess board or toaster cannot be personified at all. Rather, it
means that it may be more difficult to personify them easily due to the relatively low innate
“performative” avenues available to them.
Performative channels in this case means any method of communicating information,
including sight, sound, movement, friction, momentum, touch, smell, etc., but this also includes
the various human-rich modes of communication through those methods, such as behavioral
gestures, emotional sounds, evocative written imagery, voice, music and countless others.
This is generally referred to in the Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) field as “affective
computing”, the ability for a computerized system to emote (Picard, 1997), and when we speak
of the amount of affective information that is communicated, it is referred to as the affective
bandwidth.
Picard discusses this at length in regards to emotional computing, but the point is that
various technologies have different amounts of channels available to them to convey emotional
information, and thus we may more or less easily personify and ascribe intent to them
depending on the affective bandwidth. A ballpoint pen is extremely limited in behavior, but we
may still personify it. A fully functional AI controlled robot has an extremely large range of
channels available to it, but this only makes the personification easier.
Technology thus has the power to emote behaviors and cause a modeling of social roles
and intentions in the minds of the human participant and the amount of modeling done depends
on the number and intensity of the performative avenues available to the technology or object.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
4: The Expression of Intent in a Game
Agency and Agents
Before we go too far down this road, we must talk about agency, agents and NPC. When
talking about behavioral and affective channels in a game system, we must talk about the
channels which express behaviors consistent with the play attitude.
When we talk about the game experience, we are also talking about the “againstness” of the
game, the ludic friction, the challenge, the adversity of the rules: if a game is not difficult, then it
is not fun to play, we cannot improvise with any meaning.
When we personify any aspect of a game as having a social role, we are attributing those
other participant’s motivations and behavior through whatever channel they may arrive.
Specifically, this does not mean that personification requires a human-like representation of the
game personification, only that if such a representation appears within the game system it will
make the personification easier.
As an example, we will look at several degrees of chess games. The Chessmaster
(Ubisoft, 1986) computer chess game series has since the beginning presented itself as you
playing against a bearded and hooded old man who presumably is very good at chess (a
“master”, if you will). In the incarnations of the game, there have been images and text from
that old man with different moods and communications, giving the direct impression that you are
playing against him. Over time, the series has gradually added the idea of additional
personalities with their own playing styles and moods. In the mind of the human player, it is
made very easy to attribute intentions and behavior.
The human player naturally expects a social role of a secondary player despite it being an
ostensibly solo game and the representation of the chessmaster creates an easy hook for us to
create that role by providing a varied set of cues in the form of video, pictures and text
feedback.
In simpler computer chess games, there is no representation of the other player; it is usually
just “versus computer”. At a minimum we enter the game context and we expect another
player, but we are given almost no opportunity to get emotional feedback or affective
intentionality. However, as the gameplay progresses, the behavior is expressed almost entirely
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No Such Thing as Single Player
through the movement of the pieces and we start to build a model of who we are playing
against. Perhaps this personified player is a ruthless player, or makes the same mistake over
and over. Perhaps we see that they always try to capture the queen and we sense a kind of
single-mindedness.
In this case, we may not be able to pinpoint the represented location of this other player,
and for the purposes of play, it does not matter. As technically literate individuals, we
understand that it is a confluence of the hardware and software acting in concert to “play against
us” and we understand it in purely intentional and human terms. As long as the system
projects play behavior, we are satisfied because it acts as-if it is a secondary player.
In the late 1700’s, a hoax chess-playing device was created called The Turk. The device
was billed as a mysterious automaton, but also though by some to be operated by a spirit. In
truth, the device housed a hidden chess master inside the machine who would play against the
human player. This was a physical device with no apparent other player except for a wooden
manikin “obviously” operated by visible gears. The workings of the device was only partially
unexplained and hinted at as being magical (Standage, 2003).
The interesting thing about the Turk is that it actually had a representation of a secondary
player in the form of a wooden mannequin dressed in Turkish robes. Though this was clearly
“the hook” onto which people were expected to project the social role of secondary player, it
was also confusing to spectators as it was obviously a machine. Many could not believe that a
machine could exhibit such agency because the representation was too machine-like. Others
accepted that it was a machine, but that the machine was simply a conduit for agency and
intention from another source, either a hidden human or a spirit.
This was a liminal player object, one in which you either believed that you were playing the
machine (machine-as-the player) or you believed that you were playing something else. Some
correctly guessed that there was a human player inside. Some thought it was enchanted and
operated by spirits. In all cases, no matter which conception or frame of thought a human
player or spectator belonged to, they all held the idea of a personified participant, the idea that
there was a player to whom they were playing against.
This again underscores the desire for humans to expect another participant in a solo game.
It is true that a chess game systemically requires that there be another participant, but in the
case of the Turk, this was not sufficient. People did not think of it as “interacting with a chess
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No Such Thing as Single Player
machine”, but rather “playing against the Turk”, and because of the dissonance of the
representation, there was room for people to imagine who or what was the agency performing
the social role of secondary player. Human participants went above and beyond the systemic
interaction to try to create imagined personalities for this other participant (spirits, a machine
intelligence, a hidden human).
Representation
It is not necessary to explicitly present a representation of another participant. A game may
choose to present the other participant explicitly as part of an agent, such as if one plays a firstperson-shooter death match against a bot or AI. If we are playing the first person shooter Halo,
the social role of secondary player is clearly available to us and deliberately demarcated on the
screen. In this case, the representation makes it simple and we naturally personify the
represented agent as performing the social role of player.
Other games may not make it quite so easy. When we play Minecraft (Majong, 2011)by
ourselves and we look for a social role of a co-player, spectator, game-master, etc., where can
we find these roles? Minecraft offers challenges in the ways the entire environment seems to
be against the player. The enemies have seemingly limited intelligence and no long term goals,
and a player is just as likely to die by falling or catching on fire as they are to die from an enemy
attack. So, in Minecraft, if we look for these roles, how might they be represented?
We can borrow from Huizinga here and say that winning a game is a process of conquering
a challenge and proving ones prowess to others. Minecraft is an interesting example because
there has traditionally been no clearly outlined winning condition. Playing Minecraft is an
ongoing process of surviving, exploring and building against the ever present challenges in the
world.
Thus, we might think of the game-master social role, that the world itself has an ongoing
intentionality to challenge us constantly, to put challenges in our way and create interesting
situations. In this scenario, Minecraft is not acting as-if it were a co-player, but performs a social
role of an unseen challenge master. In this social role conception, winning Minecraft is a
process of continually overcoming the environmental challenges that we encounter and feeling
as though we have beaten Minecraft itself.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
There is a real-world analogue to this view in the form of mountain climbing. In historical
recountings of the climbing of K2 and Mount Everest, it is extremely common to give the
mountain itself a personality: that it acts vengefully, is kind to the climbers or provides
unexpected situations. When climbers reach the top of the mountain, they feel as though they
have beaten the mountain itself, “conquered Everest”. Of course, Mount Everest is not alive,
but climbers personify it as playing a social role. Minecraft differs because it can continually
generate new challenges and new territories, while Mount Everest is physically and ultimately
limited in scope.
Thus, NPC and agents in a game are only a special case and a distinct avenue by which we
may attribute and experience behavior, though it is one that is especially handy to hang a social
role on. Representation of agency is a kind of heuristic shortcut, a way to guide a player into
conceiving of a social role down a certain path, and it can easily drive a player’s personification
different ways.
Recall the previously mentioned Latour groom door opening object. Typically, the
mechanisms to close a door are just a hydraulic bar that pulls the door shut on hinges. This is a
simple mechanism that we interact with on a social level and we can treat it simply using
Dennett’s design scheme and that it behaves in the way it does because it is designed to do so.
However, we can add a layer of representation and interactivity to this object that guides the
way in which we understand the social role that it plays. We might add a voice mechanism to it
that thanks us for passing through the door. By doing this, we increase the odds that persons
interacting with it give it a more enhanced social role. Instead of it just being an abstract object
that closes the door, it suddenly is easier to give it a personality and we may thank it back.
This is not just changing the representation, but is inherently increasing the behavioral
bandwidth. It can convey more information to us about its “attitude” (real or not) and we can
ascertain more information about its intentions (real or not). Either way, the additional
behavioral bandwidth gives us an easier way to not just give it a social role, but to personify that
social role.
If we were to add additional representation to Minecraft, it would greatly shape the way
players personify the game in a social role. For example, suppose a voiceover was added that
constantly mocked the player for their failures or claimed that it was intentionally sending
enemies to blow up the player’s home as a way to test the player’s ability. By adding this
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No Such Thing as Single Player
behavioral bandwidth, this would focus the player’s conception of the social role. Minecraft
might be even more easily conceived as a overseeing game-master, or the focus might shift to it
being seen as a kind of adversarial co-player.
Player Experience
When a player begins a game, a “social occasion”, we expect to encounter ludic friction and
a play challenge, and we tend to personify whatever objects and technology are providing that
challenge by looking at the affective behavior and matching against our play model.
In a solo game, we may know that there is no other human player, but as long as the activity
satisfies our own play needs we are fine with that. Depending on the complexity and affective
bandwidth of the game system, we may have varying levels of personification that we construct.
There is no hard and fast rule here and no claim that this can ever be controlled or predicted
in a specific way. Because a game system is interactive, it must exhibit behaviors and activities
that we must respond to. And how we interpret those play behaviors influences how we will
personify the social role.
As a difficult example, we look at the physical solo card game Solitaire and how a player
might use the behaviors of the game system to personify it. Regardless of how we conceive of
this personified player, we tend to nonetheless create this player in our heads to the degree that
the game system has affective bandwidth to do so. A deck of Solitaire cards has extremely low
bandwidth and it is only through the interaction itself that we can gather any kind of
intentionality, thus the social roles we perceive may be limited in scope.
There is action in a Solitaire game which is not controlled by the human player, however.
Card games have intrinsically some amount of luck involved: which cards come up in which
order, the meaning of cards within a context of the game and the placement of the cards.
Sometimes we get a card that helps us, sometimes we get a card that does not. As we interact
with the game system (the cards in play, the remaining deck, etc.), we may get a sense that we
are being helped or hindered in some way and we may silently cheer or curse the cards.
The personified participant here does not necessarily have to be competitive or even
performing the player social role. The events of the game might be viewed as cooperative, a
participant who is working with us to win by providing us with cards that tend to help us. Or
perhaps the participant is much like a game-master social role, doling out cards in a way which
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No Such Thing as Single Player
allows the game to be interesting. Depending on our own outlooks, we might view this gamemaster role as being fulfilled by Lady Luck. Or we might personify the game system in purely
scientific terms, as though we are interacting with a fair arbitrator like a referee, something akin
to the dealer we encounter at a table in Las Vegas.
This is directly similar to the role of Nuffle in the multi-player game Blood Bowl (Games
Workshop, 1986), a fantasy football league which takes place in the Warhammer universe.
Nuffle (a pun on NFL) is an entity imaged by the players to exist alongside the game and acts
as a dice god, alternately punishing and helping players with various rolls that they make.
Nuffle, as conceived by the players, does not directly “play” but rather stands outside the action
while influencing it. As players play, they attribute the outcomes of the dice rolls to Nuffle, who
can be a vengeful deity.
This outlook again recalls Pennick’s description of dice as being “given by the gods”
(Pennick, 1989). This avenue of personifying a social role for the dice is available to us as
players because the actions of the dice perform actions that are coherent with the role another
player might perform. In Blood Bowl, Nuffle performs the role of either a referee or gamemaster (using the term from Stenros and Hakkarainen), depending on how the player views
Nuffle.
It is not a difficult leap to see how a solo player playing Solitaire could make the same
social construction about the placement and outcome of the cards.
The major difference, of course, is the amount of supporting behavioral and information that
the game provides. Blood Bowl has a rule book and years of accompanying player community
experience. Thus, when a player of Blood Bowl constructs a social role for the outcome of the
dice roles, the way in which they think about this has already been proscribed. They are
essentially told in advance that this is Nuffle at work and thus it is easy to put a face to their
innate desire to personify. They want to personify the actions of the dice and they are provided
an easy way to do so.
A physical card game of Solitaire has no such built-in ability, at least when using a standard
deck. Our ability to personify a social role is limited to our cultural background and any ideas
we have about “unseen forces” like Lady Luck. The behavioral bandwidth is very low and it
cannot convey complex intentionality very well.
As a human player plays, they may get affective information through a number of channels:
some of which is intentional and some of which is purely interpreted. When a bad card appears
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No Such Thing as Single Player
in Solitaire, we may know that it is just a random occurrence, but we may curse it in the same
way we curse at our pen for running dry. That occurrence may not be intentional in terms of
trying to convey a specific emotional idea, but we still interpret it as such.
Avenues of Intent
If games are to have the ability to express intention, agency and a personality, this is directly
proportional to the amount of behavioral bandwidth available, as described earlier with Furby
and the Simon toy. The more channels available, the more fully formed is the solo player’s
conception of the personality and social role of the game.
As a short and non-exhaustive list, affective bandwidth and channels of a game may include
any of the following:
•
Ludic behaviors – Specific to games, but the results of interactions and changes in
the game state. Occurrences that may appear to have intent.
•
Auditory – Music, sound effects, recorded voice, synthesized voice, etc.
•
Visual – Videos, images, box art, printed patterns, symbols, etc.
•
Text – Stories, chats (simulated or otherwise), etc.
•
Physical Design – The physical makeup and texture of the game objects (shininess,
roughness, color, etc.)
Recall that it can be difficult for a casual observer to know whether a human player is
playing against other people remotely or is playing a solo game. Let us say that the human
player is playing against other humans remotely. The human player must interact with those
remote players on a social level, to relate to them as fellow players, and as such, must ascertain
their intentions and personalities as they play. Those intentions are communicated via
behavioral channels, as described above: visual, auditory, etc. We know the intentions and
personalities of our fellow remote players because those intentions and personalities are
communicated in specific ways.
This is true whether we are playing World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004) with a real person, or
if we are playing chess via paper mail (“Postal Correspondance Chess”). We can see that there
are ways in which we can detect, deduce and personify the actions of who we are playing
against.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
In the case of a “solo” game, the simulation of the intentions other players takes place
through those same channels. A “good” solo game, to borrow Bart Simon again, is one which
provides a rich set of social role informational bits that simulate those behaviors through those
channels.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
Recap
Let’s take a moment to recap. Play and games are wrapped up in human culture and are an
inherently social experience, dating back to before we had complex technologies. We have
come to expect that a game context is a social context by default.
Helping this along is our natural tendency to personify our technologies and objects, to give
them personalities and social roles. Just as with non-game artifacts and systems, as we
interact with our game systems, digital or not, we naturally interact with them as social entities,
ascribing personalities and desires that they may not “truly” have.
The interactions and representations of a physical game versus a digital game differ greatly
in the amount of behavioral bandwidth they can express and thus the more complex the
representation the more fully formed our personification of the social role becomes. Simpler
games that have lower levels of behavioral bandwidth, such as Solitaire, still play a social role,
but cannot offer as many “hooks” or guides for us to refine the personality of that social role.
Thus, even in a so-called solo game involving no other human players, we automatically and
naturally create the different forms of personified personalities that fall into social roles, so that
we can understand the behaviors and to enjoy the game experience. Even in a “solo game”,
these social roles arise, making it a non-solo experience.
.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
53
No Such Thing as Single Player
PART 3:
Playing with Others
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No Such Thing as Single Player
1: The Variations of the Roles
If we play a game with another human player, we assume that person has human-like
goals and desires. If we play a game against an AI opponent, we naturally assume that the AI
has human-like goals and desires (or at least that it is trying hard to simulate them) and that it
has a “need to play” in a sense that we understand. If we play with a dog, we assume there is
some overlap in how it wants to play and how we do.
But, what if we begin to think that the other personified entities do not have the same
goals or desires? What if a game offers an avenue for us to imagine a spectator role, yet we
are led to believe that the spectator is somehow interfering with the game? What if we personify
an aspect of the game behavior to fulfill a referee social role, but we start to suspect that the
referee is not being fair? When this kind of mismatch occurs, we may also suspect that perhaps
an agent taking on the player role has access to skills and information that we do not, that they
are perhaps “cheating” or at least, not playing.
As a way of further explaining the personified social roles, we here give some possible
examples by returning to the various roles described earlier: the bystander, the spectator, the
player, the referee and the game-master. If these traditional social roles are perceived by a
human player as being within a game, what happens when the perceived actions and intentions
start to deviate from these roles?
Player Role
Parity in Games
In many types of games, we expect a certain amount of equality and parity in order to have
a “well-played” game. The more equal the skill and knowledge between two opponents, the
more uncertain the outcome and the more freedom we have to improvise our play. When
playing, we expect that our opponent roughly has the same skills, knowledge, goals, desires
and abilities as ourselves. If not, we at least expect that we will be aware of those differences
and that we may handicap or modify the game structure to allow it to be more improvisational
and uncertain, to support our human play-needs.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
Cheating is an example of this. We expect that other racers in our foot-race have roughly
our same abilities, that they have not taken performance enhancing drugs (skills and abilities
within the game). We expect that when we play poker, our fellow players do not have an
accomplice who is telling them what cards we have (information and knowledge about the game
state). When we play billiards with someone, we expect that they do not move around the balls
when we leave the room for a moment (ability to reconfigure the game state without your
knowledge).
We expect parity in normal play and adjust for it when it is not present. Sometimes,
however, there may be cases when we know there is a mismatch and if no adjustment is
possible, the game loses its enjoyableness.
When an adult plays football with little children, the adult will not aggressively bump the
children or run as fast, in order to make sure that the game maintains a kind of parity.
Otherwise, the children, while having the intentions, goals and desires to play, may not have the
skills to keep up. If the adult did not compensate for their speed and size, the children would be
hurt. When we, as novices, play computer chess against an AI opponent that is set to ultradifficult, we do not find it fun. An AI may have far more computing skill and knowledge to
determine the right move, and potentially may have (illicit) access to resources the human
player does not.
If we attempt to play gin rummy with our cat, we find it boring. The cat may
like to play in general, but gin rummy is not something the cat can enjoy in an intelligible sense
and the cat lacks the knowledge and skills to accomplish that in any case.
In other words, in any human game, the default assumption of a human player is that the
opponent player will have, to a large degree, human-like goals, desires, skills, information and
abilities that are basically the same as the human player’s and that the same kind of humanplay intentions are being met. In some cases, it will be obvious this is impossible and we do
not even attempt to play because we assume some important aspect will be different, such as
playing gin rummy with the cat.
Oddly, this implies that there may be situations in which there is no common ground, where
the perceived intensions of the other player are so radically different from our own, that we
cannot determine the goals and desires from the behaviors and actions of the other player. For
example, if we attempt to play fetch with an insect, it is far from clear that the insect has the
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No Such Thing as Single Player
same kinds of play intentions as a human and would ever pursue it intentionally. It would be
difficult, if not impossible, to say whether an insect is “playing” in a way we understand.
If we agree, per Simon, that a good solo game is a game which attempts to mimic a multiplayer experience (Simon, 2006), this suggests that a good solo game is a game which properly
presents a human-like set of goals, desires and intentions. A solo game is “good” to the extent
we can attribute human goals and desires to it as an actor, per Simon.
Deviations from the Norm
This leaves us with a question. What if a game deviated from the usual, if the social
roles it evokes differ from the normal human-like goals and intentions? What if the player social
role presented itself as potentially not having human-like goals and intentions?
This brings us back to the Ouija board and the ambiguity of the presentation. When the
Ouija board is presented as being a “talking board”, it implies that the other participant may
have goals, information and/or abilities that differ from the human player, or even more radically,
that the other participant has not even agreed to the “parity contract” one associates with a
game. In our personification of the board, we may believe that it has not adopted a playful
attitude and that it has a non-play goal.
On the other hand, if we adopt the friendly Hasbro-promoted idea of it being a fun game
for kids, our personified player would seem to have the usual human benign and fun goals we
would normally associate with the game. This is again regardless of whether there is actually
another player, whether it is just a piece of wood or whether there is a spirit. Our approach to
the game radically changes depending on our construction of the personified player.
Why would Hasbro leave this question open? Why would Hasbro ask on their box, “it is
just a game…or is it?” Given the negative associations with the board, it seems as though
Hasbro would try to fully embrace a scientific aspect, probably something along the lines of, “the
board allows you to communicate with your own subconscious through micro-movements of the
hands”. This would be an acceptable and safe way to allow the player to personify the game
opponent, putting it squarely back into human parity. The player would be playing with and
against a conception of their own psyche.
Yet, Hasbro hasn’t done this and probably for the same reasons that casinos do not
emphasize mathematics on their walls. It would be a poor casino that posted the mathematical
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odds of their games for all players to see. Instead, casinos emphasize the almost magical and
thrilling chance of winning, that it could happen to you, and that Lady Luck might smile upon you
for once. Casinos find it valuable to add this mystery to the games and to provide players with
an opportunity that they are playing with forces that are benevolent to the needs of the human
player. In gambling, the personified player is a co-participant who shares the desires and goals
of the human player while perhaps challenging and exciting them.
Hasbro could go too far, however, and they could intentionally present the Ouija board
as just a technical artifact and denying a personified player. If Hasbro were to describe the
Ouija as “a wooden board with letters that allows you to spell out messages to yourself or
friends”, suddenly there is no personified player available from the game itself. It would barely
even be a toy. The board would just be a communication tool and any game one might
construct would not even require the board necessarily. Functionally, the board would be
reduced to the equivalent of just talking to each other. By leaving room for interpretation,
Hasbro intentionally tries to instantiate a particular kind of social role in the mind of the human
player.
The Ouija board, casinos, card games, computer chess, etc.: all of these objects benefit
from balancing the line between complete technicity and complete mystery and they do this at
different levels through their representation.
Note that in the following discussion, deviance does not necessarily have a negative
connotation; it simply means there are situations in which there is a purposeful conflict created
between intentions and roles. Some of these situations may, in fact, be fun and some of these
potentially have been explored to some extent in various games.
Deviant Players
To explore this deviance, we here look at a few examples of situations where the game
offers a social role of co-player to the human solo player, but then communicates conflicting
intentions that throws the personality of that co-player into doubt.
Threatening Player
Let us suggest a solo computer game system which presented a player role as being mentally
disturbed. We are playing Scrabble (Mattel, 1948) against a player initially presented as a
typical player but we slowly start to realize they are not playing to get a high score, but rather to
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spell out words that will frighten and intimidate us. The rules and actions of the game are the
same; the only difference is our understanding of the social role of that player. This other player
is not playing to win in the same way we are and we might think they would consider it a win if
we left the game early or if we became frightened (assuming there was a way for the hardware
to detect that information).
We might believe at first that this player is playing in the same way we are, but over the
course of the game, the behaviors would start to not match up. There would be odd moves that
score few points. The words might be all intimidating or frightening. We would compare our
own intentions with the our expectations of the social role of that rational agent and we would
come to the conclusion that the other player is not playing to win in the same way we are, that
they are not playing, but are actually trying to frighten us.
In this example, there is too much mystery and disconnect between our expectations
and the role of the other player’s behavior. We do not fully understand why the other player is
doing what they do and we suspect that we do not know their goals. In this case, the lack of
knowledge about intentions destroys the game experience for us. We cannot “win” because we
do not share the same winning condition goals as the other player, or at least we do not know to
what extent those goals overlap. The personified player we construct based on the behavior is
too different from our own understanding of human play-needs.
Machine Player
Alternately, we might picture a computer Scrabble game which goes out of its way to
present itself as an extremely complicated, but not sentient, algorithm. During play, the player
performs very machine-like behaviors and presents information that suggests that it is simply
consulting a static list of all possible moves and combinations. In fact, it may go so far as to
present a sentence like, “Calculating all word combinations and placing the most optimal
mathematical word on the board”, as well as presenting to the human player the current
percentage likelihood that the human player will have a lower score in the end.
In this example, this robs the game experience of mystery and drains it of any kind of
personality. The social role here is far less “playful” than usual. The agent occupying the player
social role seems to just be consulting a mathematical system and not making a choice, simply
picking the scientific best option. There is no choice being made, no playful intentionality, just
the automatic use of the best possible outcome. To the extent a player role might be imagined,
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we imagine an opponent player who has far more information and skills than ourselves, the
ability to instantly calculate all the words and find the best score and placement. In this case,
our game against this player would seem to be widely unequal. Unless we were very confident
of our own skills, playing against this “perfect” opponent might not be enjoyable at all.
We like a bit of mystery. We don’t want to know everything about the other player. We
like to imagine that our co-player in the social role is one who has possible flaws or may
surprise us. As Gordon Calleja describes it: “Players tend to be engaged by the fact that they
do not know the full extent of their opponent’s capabilities and plans. At best they can make
educated guesses about the likely course of action an opponent or group of opponents will take,
and then act accordingly. This action is further calibrated according to the player’s perception of
her own ability in handling the challenge set by her opponents.” (Calleja, 2011)
A social role of player who is presented as being machinic presents us with the difficulty
of understanding whether the game is fun. A machinic player could still be fun to play against,
but could be emotional defeating.
Cheating Player
In a real-time strategy game such as Age of Empires (Emsemble Studios, 1997), we are
presented with an idea of a co-player who is ready to meet us on equal terms on the battle field.
In Age of Empires, two civilizations meet on an undiscovered land covered in a fog of war and
there is assumed to be equal access to all resources and that the human and non-human player
have the same difficulties in traversing the terrain.
The game may choose to present the other player social role as a true player, but as we
play the solo game, we come to find that occasionally, the other player seems to have an
unequal access to resources like gold, or who seems to have advance knowledge of areas of
the map without exploring it. The game presents this other player as being a legitimate player
with the same intentions, but over time, we come to attribute a kind of cheating attitude on the
part of that other player.
In the representation, the game still only communicates fair play and may even present
information that would deny any cheating, perhaps displaying disinformation indicating failures
that never happened (“Player 2 ran into a barbarian tribe and suffered huge losses”). In this
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case, we come to suspect that our co-player is cheating in some way, that it has access to
information or resources that we do not, or is not subject to the same rules.
In some respects, this might be fun. But this presentation of the player social role is
actually more akin to a kind of game-master: one who has more control and access than the
human player. Again, the aspects of parity and fair play are subverted.
In these cases, we want to know that the other player has the same definition and
attitude of play that we ourselves do.
When playing a game, we like to imagine that we are playing against a player who has
human goals, makes choices and who might make a mistake every once in a while. We don’t
want to know everything about the other player, but we want to know that they basically have
the same skills and attitude as us.
Game-master Role
A game containing a game-master role is one in which there is a perceived overseeing
presence who created the game world and is overseeing progress within it, with some
occasional interference. We might conceive of this role as being filled by the game designer or
game creator, who brought the game into being and we are playing the game to overcome the
challenges that they created in the first place. Or we might see this explicitly represented within
the game as a social entity with specific intentions.
An example of this might be the solo digital game Tower of Heaven (Newgrounds /
mirosurabu, 2010), in which the player is attempting to ascend a series of levels of a tower to
reach a deity located at the top. At the beginning of each level, the deity makes some
comments to the player about their progress (usually insulting or combative) and the deity
introduces a new rule about the way the player is allowed to proceed. For example, in a new
level, the player is no longer allowed to move backwards, only forwards. It is understood that
the deity is ultimately in charge of the playing field, but is not necessarily “playing against” the
player, only offering additional challenges.
Or we might consider the example of Peggle (Popcap, 2007). Peggle is a game where
the human player “solves” a series of boards consisting of hitting colored balls with other balls.
Literally overseeing their progress is a representation at the top of the screen of a kind of trainer
or mentor, who claims to have put together the board as a challenge and is watching the player
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proceed. Different sets of Peggle levels have different trainers, represented as animals with
different abilities. These trainers are represented as having set up the board with the intention
of helping the player get better, but they do not interfere during the course of the game.
Socially, these characters act as a kind of overseeing game-master of each level and
presumably could interfere if they wanted to.
Deviant Game-masters
As the creator of the game field, the game-master is assumed to have created a situation
which is at least fair or solvable, i.e. not impossible. If we take a real-life tabletop RPG game
like Dungeons and Dragons (Wizards of the Coast, 1974), with human players and a human
game-master, we can see that when the game-master sets up the challenge it is assumed by
the other players that the game-master will be fair and not capricious. It would be a poor
tabletop game where upon the first moves of the various players, the game-master
unceremoniously killed all of their characters for seemingly bizarre or unfair reasons.
There is a kind of trust, in other words. When we purchase a solo game, we assume that
the creators of the game (the game designers) created a game which is going to be playable
and that they are offering the kind of environment where it is possible to play fairly with others.
Further, it is expected that to the extent the game can influence events, the game-master only
oversees events within the game itself and does not take action outside the game.
Illogical Game-master
If the game offers a social role of game-master, it is possible that the game may convey
intentions from the game-master that are not logically fair. If we look at Peggle’s trainer animals
as game-masters, they initially state that in order to win a level, the player must hit all of the
colored pegs with a ball. This is in line with the expectations that a player might have for a
game. It is possible that the game could subvert this role by having the trainer animal randomly
jump into the game and block the actions of the player for no stated reason. Or if the player is
about to win a level, the trainer animal could suddenly declare that it felt like none of the pegs
being hit were hit “in the right way” and could replace them with no further explanation.
In other words, in these cases, the adherence to the game-master social role suddenly
becomes less certain, as the intentions seem to not match up. The game-master has created a
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game scenario which is illogical and unreasonable without further explanation about what the
rules truly are. This would certainly thwart a player into considering whether the game is worth
playing at all.
External Effects Game-master
Especially with the onset of digital games, it is technically possible that a simple
computer game could connect to any number of other resources on the internet and on the
user’s computer. There is, in fact, a game called Lose/Lose which is a top-down arcade
shooter, in which as the player kills enemies, actual files are deleted off the user’s computer.
The game boundary, in other words, extends beyond the limits of the game space and into the
file system outside the game.
In Lose/Lose (Gage, 2009), however, the game designer explicitly warns the user that
this will happen and asks them if they actually want to play. While this is certainly unusual, it is
at least fair, as the game-master social role is being played by the game designer and has
clearly outlined the effects of playing the game.
However, it would be perhaps trivial for a game-master role to do certain things in secret
while never informing the player. In other words, the game-master social role outlines the
conditions of the game: climb this tower, follow these rules, etc. Yet, in the background, there
may be other effects and rules in play that the game-master has not informed the player about.
Sending emails on behalf of the player, deleting files, examining their passwords and
transferring money. These examples are certainly dramatic, but even if they were benign, any
unsaid information about the game effects can cause a sense of mistrust in the player.
We expect that a game-master will have presented to us a fair playing field where we
more or less know all the rules and conditions it takes to play or that we can at least query the
game-master and get a truthful response. If a game distorts this such that we cannot trust the
game-master to inform us of the situation, we may find the game unpalatable or unplayable.
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Referee Role
As mentioned earlier, this is a kind of non-playing participant in the game, often performing a
social role of being a judge or voter on the events in the game. This social role differs from the
game-master in that this role is not expected to be able to change the rules of the game and is
generally not responsible for why the game is what it is. The referee simply provides feedback
which is supposedly neutral, yet affects certain aspects of the game.
An example of this is most easily seen in a representation of a referee within any digital
sports game. Their intentions and actions are usually directly analogous to the behavior we
would expect of a real referee in a real-life game. We expect them to be fair, neutral and
potentially can be appealed to.
Deviant Referees
If a game offers a representation of a referee as a social role, we expect neutrality and
fairness. We also expect that the referee will not interfere in the game either against or for the
player. We also expect the referee to be competent and to understand the rules of the game at
least as well as the players. But there are several ways in which a referee could be
compromised and affect the playability of a game.
Idiot Referee
We might play a solo game in which there is a social role of referee being performed in
some representation. We can imagine a single player quiz game, in which we are expected to
answer trivia questions correctly in the smallest amount of time. Also represented in the solo
game is a panel of judges who hold up a score relating to how they seem to have evaluated
your answer and time.
If the game represents these social roles as referees, it must be careful to ensure they
appear competent to the player. If one or more of these judges seems to not understand the
correct answer and judges the player as not having answered it correctly, this will frustrate the
player.
Alternately, if the digital game is a football match, the referee perhaps should be
represented as having an understanding of the rules and is “paying attention”. The player likely
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does not want a referee who disappears suddenly for long periods or makes apparently bad
calls because they appear to not be competent.
Biased Referee
Players also expect a referee social role to have neutrality. In a solo sports game, we might
suppose that the computer-controlled referee, performing the referee social role, always rules in
favor of the computer-controlled other team. We might even attribute this to a kind of bias, as in:
the computer-controlled referee always favors the computer-controlled other team because they
are both computer-controlled. From this we would get a different set of intentions that conflict
with the typical social role we expect from the referee.
This kind of deviance has been explored, in fact, in the digital football game FIFA 2000
(Sports, 2000). From the main menu, the human solo player can configure the in-game referee
to have a certain amount of bias in either direction. This case plays with the social role of
referee by humanizing the role at the expense of “fairness”, as it has already been shown that
human referees cannot help but be biased in many cases (Sutter & Kocher, 2004). A player
may choose to bias the referee to give more of a challenge, but it would be a curious question to
find out how many players consistently choose to heavily bias the referee against themselves.
After all, after a certain point, the player may have extreme difficulty in winning at all and may
give up.
Spectator Role
This is an interesting role to consider because it seems to lack a kind of agency. In a solo
game, what could be the agency of a spectator social role? Indeed, deviance of this kind of role
seems to revolve around breaking that idea of agency, to suddenly give a spectator role
something other than a passive observer role, without the typical social agreements that usually
occur.
Many games -particularly sports or fighting games- have characters who are represented in
the background as cheering or watching the event. Street Fighter (Capcom, 1987) has several
levels which have interested parties who are in the background watching the fight proceed, but
who are not participating as players. We understand this social role of spectatorship as a kind
of fulfillment, that even if the game is a solo one against a computer player, we are still
performing for these virtual spectators.
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Deviant Spectators
The main duty of a spectator is to simply be there without interacting, but it is possible that a
game could break our expectations by turning spectators into active participants.
Random Fan
In a snowboarding game like SSX Tricky (EA Sports Big, 2001), there are many levels
which take place over vast areas of snowboard track, in which thousands of spectators are
shown lining the track and cheering. This is certainly a social trick, as it allows us in a solo
sense to experience the feeling of showing off to others. However, a game could shift a
spectator into an impedance by perhaps randomly having spectators interfere with the progress
of the game. Perhaps represented as a “super-fan”, the spectator suddenly gained agency and
enters the game, jumping in front of the player or bringing the game to a halt.
This would be almost certainly very irritating to a player, as it breaks the expectations of
what a spectator social role is. That it would be irritating even in a solo game simply
underscores the presence of this spectator role in a solo game.
Sudden Player
Equally irritating, perhaps, would be if a game presented spectators who jumped into the
middle of the game and started playing. If we imagine a car racing game like GTR 2 (Blimey!
Games, 2006), a player races against many computer controlled opponents who are all trying to
reach the finish line. The racing game may contain representations of spectators, such as other
cars that are lining the track belonging to other racers who are simply watching. Let us suppose
that the human solo player is clearly in the lead and is beating all opponents, but at the last
second, another car, who was simply a spectator to begin with, pulls onto the track ahead of
the human solo player and crosses the finish line first, “winning” the race.
This breaks our idea of what a spectator role is supposed to be. The actions and intentions
of that new player are completely at odds with the behaviors of either a player or a spectator,
and we might consider it to be a cheat or that the gameplay is ultimately unfair.
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No Role and Brink Games
The various roles of player, game-master, referee and spectator are only relevant social
roles within a game context. It only makes sense to talk about these roles because there is an
expected game boundary, a Goffman social situation pertaining to games. Many of the deviant
variations explained in the previous sections are due to the fact that the behavior of the
personified participant is not adhering to a specific social role. Perhaps the participant is shifting
from a game-master to a player role during play, or a spectator to a player role.
It is also interesting to think about deviant variations where the social role shifts out of the
game sphere altogether (as indeed, some of the previous ones do slightly). We can picture a
game which is in every way like Scrabble, where we are playing against a computer player, but
as play proceeds, we find that the behavior of the computer player is not conforming to player
social behavior at all. This is similar to the “Threatening Player” from before. But to be even
more specific, let us say that the game never explicitly represents that other participant as a
player to begin with, that we just assumed it. Perhaps the game actually goes so far as to
represent itself as “This is a game, but there are no guarantees about the behavior of any
participant that might show up. They might be playing, they might not”
The game may, in fact, go out of its way to leave the question of a player role undefined or
state that it is up to the human solo player to figure out the intentions of the other participant
who shows up. This is a deviant type of social role representation, as it leaves unclear or
denies that the game will even be playable in the first place, even if the rules and game artifacts
are familiar and usable.
This is highly similar, and perhaps an example of, brink games, or forbidden games, games
that play with the boundaries of what it means to be a game, and it does so by sending
confusing information about the intentions of the agents against the game-contextual social
roles they are assumed to be enacting. Cindy Poremba provides an excellent discussion of
brink games by describing them as “games that embrace the contested space at the boundary
of games and life” and that the term brink “captures the play of instability and anticipation of the
position and its liminality” (Poremba, 2007).
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Poremba is discussing almost exclusively real-life multi-player games involving real people,
as her examples including kissing games, parlor games and games that bring people into
physical contact. Interestingly, she mentions that Scrabble, while not typically a brink game,
can be turned into one if one of the human players started sending offensive or suggestive
words to the other player, which is almost identical to the example of the threatening player
mentioned earlier in the deviant player role section.
Her point is very important to this discussion, that brink games “specifically draw attention to
the border [between what games are and are not] and implicate [that border] in their unfolding”
(Poremba, 2007). This investigation of the border of games helps us stay within the
Wittgenstein “family resemblances” mode of understanding, even as we are able to draw a line
around that nebulous cloud (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1968). Looking at the
social roles in a solo experience helps to further refine what is meant by a game and what is not
(is this not a game, but work? Is this not a game, but a ritual? Is this not a game, but life and
death?).
A claim here is that a brink situation could be enacted in a solo context, where a part of the
game system is personified and enacts a social role that performs the exact kind of liminal and
brink behavior, toying with the idea of what is acceptable in the game, versus not.
And this brink situation is almost exactly what takes place with the Ouija board, a “game”
system which is intentionally ambiguous about the social role of the other participant that might
join the game. To the extent that the Ouija truly is a game, it plays with this deviance to present
itself as an unclear and liminal object. By possibly denying a social role one would expect in a
game, Ouija runs the risk of defining itself out of the game sphere altogether.
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2: Personification and Deviance
It’s likely that most of the deviations in the social roles as described in the previous section
would annoy or frustrate a solo player. But this frustration points to the fact that in solo games,
we act as-if we are playing with others and that a good solo game is one that is simulating these
social roles well. If it fails to approximate these social roles in an expected way, a solo player
will realize this.
However, it may be extremely interesting and useful to explore these deviances, some of
which may only be possible within a solo game. For example, it may be very interesting and
even fun to play a game which has a “threatening player” social role, and this might not be
possible in a game where an actual person is expected to fulfill that role. In an actual multiplayer game, the human player may feel uncomfortable being that threatening.
This is to say, deviances in these social roles in a solo game should be looked at even more
closely to see what works and what doesn’t. What level of behavioral bandwidth is sufficient to
produce deviance? What types of intentionality need to be communicated to produce a deviant
impression in the social roles of the human player?
And as alluded to before, the concreteness of these social roles is directly related to the
amount of behavioral bandwidth that can be communicated. It is much more difficult to force a
particular personification of a social role on game objects and processes that are simpler. A
deck of cards still can perform a social role that the solo player is expecting, but the intentions
and intelligence of that personification are going to be far more nebulous than something like a
full digital simulation of a character fulfilling that social role.
In the simpler cases, such as the Turk, Ouija board, Solitaire, etc., which have somewhat
limited means to project a specific personification, the human solo player is left to “fill in the
blanks” about the intentions behind the social role those artifacts are performing. It would be
interesting to see further avenues of research around how people personify simple game
objects and what minimal level of personification of the social roles occurs in different types of
digital games.
And, in the pursuit of such deviancy in social role and personification, designers should be
aware of the potential of breaking the game altogether, to making a breach in the boundary of
the game context which is not repairable in the mind of the human solo player. This exploration
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should be done, however, as there is a lot of critical potential in pursuing these kinds of
“brinksmanships”, so to speak (Poremba, 2007).
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3: Conclusion
As we move through the world and interact with our own creations, we encounter objects,
artifacts and processes that are both physical and virtual, all of which project some form of
action and behavior. We attempt to make sense of these behaviors by teasing apart the
reasons for why these perform in the way they do.
It is natural for us as humans to relate to
these cultural creations as we do to each other, as communications of a social nature. We
constantly assign values and intentions to things that we know do not have those intentions, but
it helps us to work with them in our daily lives.
The Latour example of the door-closing artifact is one such case. Upon breaking, a note
was hung on it humorously indicating that it was “on strike”. We love our cars, we feel sorry
when we break our favorite pen. More complex objects like toys such as the Furby, have
greater emotive power to engage us socially because we are naturally tuned to react to our
world in these ways.
Games have a deep and cultural influence upon us, consisting of elements of ritual and
ceremony that are hard-wired into us, perhaps one of the most basic social activities that we
experience with each other. When playing games, we come to expect that others take on
specific roles within the game, such as playing, spectating, refereeing or being a game-master,
and we have specific ideas about the ways in which others adhere to those roles. Within the
game frame, adherence to those roles is paramount to maintaining the illusion of the game
sphere.
With solo gaming, we substitute those multi-player interactions with objects and processes,
both physical and virtual. Basic physical objects like dice and balls can constitute games and
can participate in fulfilling those social roles, but having a greater amount of behavioral
bandwidth available to the game object allows for a greater, richer amount of personification that
can be done. The cards and game play of Solitaire offers a social role, but it leaves more gaps
for the human player to fill in the blanks as to the personification behind that role.
With digital games, there is more opportunity to express complex behavior that
approximates the full range of what we would expect from a social role, though the use of sight,
sound and other feedbacks. A fuller range of intentions present themselves, allowing for a more
concrete personification behind the social role.
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This is to say that with any kind of game, physical or digital, there are ways to shape the
way the social role of the game is perceived by the solo game player, but with a physical game,
it may be more difficult (though not impossible).
When a solo game is being created or designed, decisions should be made as to how well
the other participants adhere to the expected social roles in a game context. The safe and
traditional route is to follow those roles explicitly and to present those social roles exactly as we
would see in a multi-player game.
However, in a solo game, there is freedom to perhaps toy with this, to express behaviors
and intentions through personification that rub up against the expected boundaries of those
social roles. Perhaps my computer-controlled co-player is not really playing as I think. Perhaps
the game-master has not made the playing field exactly fair or solvable. These are all
interesting ways to consider the phenomenon of there being no such thing as a single player
experience.
This would also be true for any game which may involve several human players, but where
there is also an additional social role provided by the game itself. And perhaps this is why the
Ouija board is successful, or at least intriguing. Purposefully, it seems, Hasbro has exploited
the boundary condition of what it means to play a game with a personification that isn’t
necessarily adhering to the expected social role.
This route is risky, as the Ouija board has also shown. By pushing perhaps too hard against
the social role, Ouija has, in some societies, pushed itself out of being a game altogether. By
leaving it open to the human player to fill in the blanks, people are free to interpret the social
role as being one belonging to the game context, or not.
When looking at the idea of a single player game, we naturally think of there being a single
human being and a game object/process. This is absolutely true on one level. However, if we
look at the sociality of games and the ways in which we interact with our cultural artifacts, we
can see that in the absence of another player, people naturally create a social role based on the
personifications offered by the game, just as with any other technology. Altogether, this is why
we can say that there is no such thing as a single player game experience.
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No Such Thing as Single Player
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