Imagine you’re doing an activity that’s full of restrictions and limitations. Is it fun? Are you enjoying this activity? Did you imagine you were … playing a game? Probably not.
Surprisingly, games — things synonymous with play, freedom and joy — depend on what I’ve described: a series of rules and limitations. So why do we enjoy them, when restriction is often seen as the opposite of release?
To understand what a game feels like when boiled down to its simplest form, try playing Ian Bogost’s “Cow Clicker” or Seth Scott’s “Press/Release.” Both satirical games are, at their core, about the act of literally pressing and releasing a button. They show that games are more than the sum of their rules. It’s the space between those rules where joy lives.
In his book “Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games,” Bogost argues that “limitations make games fun” and describes play as “the operation of structures constrained by limitations.” Constructively operating within boundaries, he says, creates a sense of achievement and enjoyment.
This mixture of limitations and achievement creates what we on The New York Times Games team call the “aha” moment. When prototyping a game, it’s this moment we strive for — finding the right series of limitations to generate a satisfying friction between difficulty and delight, so players get that “aha” moment too.
Never has this been more clear to me than when The New York Times game designer Sam Von Ehren and I were playtesting our newest game, Vertex. When we observed the delta of emotion a player went through, from pure frustration at the beginning to absolute joy once they’d hit a flow state of solving, we knew we’d gotten it right.