How to Do Things with Videogames

18. Habituation

18 Habituation Here’s a game design aphorism you may have heard before: a game, so it goes, ought to be “easy to learn and hard to master.” This axiom is so frequently repeated because it purports to hold the key toapowerful outcome: an addicting game, onepeople wanttoplayoverand overagainoncethey’vestarted, and inwhich starting is smooth and easy. It’s an adage most frequently applied to casual games, but it’s also used to describe complex games of deep structure and emergent complexity. In the modern era, this familiar design guideline comes from coin-op. The aphorism is often attributed, in a slightly different form, to Atari’s founder, Nolan Bushnell. In his honor, the concept has earned the title “Bushnell’s Law” or “Nolan’s Law”: All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master. They should reward the first quarter and the hundredth. Bushnell learned this lesson firsthand when his first arcade cabinet Computer Space, a coin-op adaptation of the early PDP-1 videogame Space War!, failed to meet commercial expectations. Computer Space was complex, with two buttons for ship rotation , one for thrust, and another one for fire. While the same layout would eventually enjoy incredible success in the coin-op Asteroids, four identical buttons with different functions was too much for the arcade player of 1971. Pong was supposedly inspired by this failure, a game so simple it could be taught in a single sentence: Avoid missing ball for high score. It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? Games that are easy to start hABItuAtIon up the first time butalsooffer long-termappeal have thepotential to become classics. Except for one problem: the “easy to learn, hard to master” aphorism doesn’t mean what you think it does. Bushnell’s eponymous law notwithstanding, the design values of quickpickupand long-termplaysurelydidn’toriginatewithhim. Poker is another game that commonly enjoys the description. The same is true for classic board games like Go, chess, and Othello. Indeed, the famous board game inventorGeorge Parkerapparently adopted adifferentversionof Bushnell’s Law in the late nineteenth century. From Philip Orbanes’s history of Parker Brothers: Each game must have an exciting, relevant theme and be easy enough for most people to understand. Finally, each game should be so sturdy that it could be played time and again, without wearing out.1 Note the subtle differences between Bushnell’s take and Parker’s. Parker isn’t especially concerned with the learnability of a game, just that it deal with a familiar topic in a comprehensible way. A century hence, time is more precious (or less revered), and simplifying the act of learning a game became Bushnell’s focus. Still, something more complex than familiar controls or simple instructions is at work here. It makes sense: Pong isn’teasy to learn, atall, forsomeonewho has never played or seen racquet sports. Without knowledge of such sports, the game would seem just as alien as a space battle around a black hole. As it happens, table tennis became popular in Victorian England around the same time Parker began creating games seriously . It offered an indoor version of tennis, a popular lawn sport among the upper class, played with ad hoc accoutrements in libraries or conservatories. Both ordinary tennis and its indoor table variety had enjoyed over a century of continuous practice by the time Bushnell and the Atari engineer Al Alcorn popularized their videogame hABItuAtIon adaptation of the sport (itself a revision of two earlier efforts, Willy Higginbotham’s Tennis for Two and Ralph Baer’s “Brown Box,” which later became the Magnavox Odyssey). Pong offers quick pickup not because it’s easier to learn than Computer Space (although that was also true) but because it draws on familiar conventions from thatsport. Or better, Pong is “easy to learn” precisely because itassumes the basic rulesand functionof a familiar cultural practice. Familiarity is thus the primary property of the game, not learnability; it’s familiarity that makes something easy to learn. It’s what makes “Avoid missing ball” make any sense in the first place. Wii Sports offers a similar lesson. The broad success of the Wii console comes in no small part from the effectiveness of this launch title. Wii Sports is really just Pong warmed over, offering simple abstractions of well-known sports that are themselves quite complex to learn, but which large populations have managed to understand over time. We become...