Games have at least three advantages other virtual worlds don’t. First, many games, and most social games, involve an entrance into what theorists call the magic circle, an environment whose characteristics include simplified and knowable rules. The magic circle saves the game from having to live up to expectations carried over from the real world.
Second, games are intentionally difficult. If all you knew about golf was that you had to get this ball in that hole, your first thought would be to hop in your cart and drive it over there. But no, you have to knock the ball in, with special sticks. This is just about the stupidest possible way to complete the task, and also the only thing that makes golf interesting. Games create an environment conducive to the acceptance of artificial difficulties.
I’m not sure what he means by a magic circle, but as I put in my previous post on Warcraft and Second Life: Warcraft is very controlled but also very entertaining.
Valleywag and the social software cognoscenti on Many 2 Many apparently have it in for Second Life, probably in response to the gushing and false press reports about Second Life’s successes.
I’m not very interested in Second Life, but I do think that Warcraft is escaping a lot of criticism in these posts. Sure Warcraft is popular, and lots of people like it, but is it good? Eric Rice raises this point by pointing at MySpace: it’s a social software success, but there’s a lot to hate about it.
My main criticism of Warcraft is pretty obvious: it’s a big time waste. Ultimately wasting time is not the best experience. It’s entertaining, but it’s basically like TV: you sit there for a while and it’s not so much a hobby as something to keep you occupied.
As I posted earlier,
Warcraft is a controlled experience with carefully planned areas, kind of like a theme park or Disneyland whereas Second Life is an uncontrolled anarchy. But why can’t we have a mix of both?
Take Lego for example, it’s a toy I played with a lot as a kid. With Lego, you get a box full of bricks and it’s a fun experience just to follow the instructions and put them together like they are on the box. But Lego’s genius is that you don’t always do that. A lot of times you just build stuff with Lego, to make your own designs.
We need more game design like that: not to the pointless extreme of Second Life, but a game wherein you can play the game by itself and have fun, or invent diversions from the game to be creative and just build stuff.
