This Thing We Call Play

“Man is a Tool-using Animal. . . . Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.” – 19^th century essayist Thomas Carlyle

Upon the acquisition of a shiny new skill from a skill atom, players experiment with it. They try it out in different environments and see if it does anything useful. This semi-random exploration is the classic ‘play’ activity that we see children perform. For example, when a new player masters how to jump, you’ll notice they’ll almost immediately start happily hopping about the level. On the surface, it is a silly frivolous activity. In reality, we are observing humanities instinctual process of learning in action.

In the course of experimenting, the player will occasionally stumble across something in the environment that gives them interesting information that might lead to the mastery of a new skill. At this point, you’ll see the behavior of the player become more deliberate. A mental model begins coalescing in their minds. In our jumping example, the player starts bumping against a platform. They may even reach the top of a platform. It is very common that skills acquisition requires multiple passes through the new skill atom before mastery is achieved.

Eventually, the player uses an existing skill to grok another skill. They experience a wash of pleasure and start the process all over again.

Chaining Of Game Mechanics

We can visually represent how players learn by linking our basic skill atoms together to create a directed graph of atoms called a skill chain.

Diagram 7: Two linked atoms

The skill from one atom feeds into the actions of another atom further down the chain. By linking more and more atoms in, you build a network that describes the entire game. Every expected skill, every successful action, every predicted outcome of a simulation, every bit of required feedback can be included in a simple, yet functional fashion.

Diagram 8: Sample skill chain for Tetris
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A skill chain is a general notation that can be used to model pretty much any game imaginable. Your design can be broken down into dozens of simple atoms that link together to form a clear and easily readable map of how the game plays. The skill chain, with its ability to describe the player experience instead the mere mechanics of the game, provides a far richer description of the meaningful moments that occur during gameplay.

How Players Interact WithA Skill Chain

Players will travel from atom to atom like Pac-Man following a trail of dots towards the power pellet. They move from one skill to the next even when they have only a vague concept of the ultimate destination. Chomping up those dots is good.

One of our peculiarly human limitations comes into play at this point. Players are unable to predict the value of a new skill more than a couple atoms down the chain. As long as there a new skill with potential value within our prediction horizon, players will pursue it. There may be no long term payoff other than the pleasure of the experience, but we don’t care. As long as the short term rewards keep coming, we assume that there will be some final benefit from our efforts.

Diagram 9: Players have limited foresight

If you look at this from an evolutionary perspective, our behavior makes quite a bit of sense. Many useful skills take upwards of five to 10 years to master. During those early days of our education, the basic playful activities such as gossiping about which girls have cooties seem rather silly. Later on however, our mastery of politics, science, or in the case of the cooties, mating rituals, yields a hugely positive impact on our well being.

The just-so story here is that playful folks that instinctually engaged in long term learning with no immediate benefit were the ones that mastered agriculture, hunting and language. These folks thrived. Those that did not died off.

However, our brains never evolved to deal with modern games. The existence of a set of skill atoms that are tuned just to entertain us and that never actually lead up to a real world skill is something new to the world. At their most puerile, games are a grand hack. The minute by minute experience fits all our biological heuristics and sounds all the right bells. So we keep on playing. And we wonder why so many games have such horrible endings.