Value of Unwinnable Games

By Katarina Ling

SymSys 205: Systems: Theory, Science, and Metaphor

Spring 2005

During class discussion, someone brought up the idea that the effectiveness of video games and simulation come from having a clear objective and the ability to know when the objective is achieved. In other words, a game is good only if it is winnable.

I disagree. I took Improvisation this quarter and played many games. The style of teaching is through games with often arbitrary rules, and a lot of make believe. One can imagine that this class could be taught via Virtual Reality, with each person represented by an avatar. In any case, many of our games had objectives, a goal to achieve before we could exit the scene – but one did not.

This new game was called The Vigil. Led by the instructor one at a time, each of the twenty five students entered a bare unlit room. The rules of the game were, stay in the room, keep moving, and don’t use language (speak, make vocal sounds, or use sign language) for the next hour and a half. You can see that many of us thought this would be an extremely boring game at first. Would we just sit in a corner and fidget for 90 minutes? However, with the requirement of having to move, the game became pretty fun as we chased one another, copied one another in a LifeSavers dance, pretended we were planes, smashed each other’s imaginary sand piles, biked uphill upside down, did handstands and crawled between each others legs. This all occurred without actually speaking or any planning. Yet, it was very helpful in teaching us a number of lessons about communication and space. We operated at more of a three dimensional level, going over and under each other. We realized that most of our communication came from non verbal signals  - from facial expressions and body stance.

One might say that this game worked, despite having really no objective and really no way to win, because the game was real and a video game would not be able to reproduce our gestures and expressions. Yet, with the advances of avatars, this might very well be possible. Anyway, the games were make-believe. There was no sand in the classroom and there were no bikes. We made them up.

So was teaching these observations about communication and space the purpose of the game? No, the game was merely an experiment to see what would happen and lessons arose from it. I only mentioned what I learned but other members in the class learned a much wider variety of lessons, many of which were unique. It’s possible that future MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games) could take on an experimental form. Of course, it helps if the players all know each other and thus trust one another not to do anything obscene or hurtful.

It seems that there was a sort of self-organization that arose. Put a critical mass of people together and something will happen. This kind of playing may take awhile to catch on (excluding the group of pre-schoolers and primary grade children) because Marketing cannot guarantee the curriculum that the customer will obtain. They will learn something, just as children learn from playing, but exactly what may vary each time the game is played. Thus, although games may be more marketable if they can tell you that you will learn to speak Spanish, if you can kill all the zombies by typing accurately and quickly, games without a predefined “win” can also be good.