What Makes a Good Game? | Eric Zimmerman | TED

Hello, everybody. I’m Eric, and I’m a game designer, and that means that I make video games. I make tabletop games. I work with architect Nathalie Pozzi to do large-scale museum installations, and I also write books about game design, and I teach at the NYU Game Center at Tisch School of the Arts, where we think about games as an art form and also play as a deep form of literacy. Today, I want to talk to you, from my point of view as a game designer, about how to really make something that engages and grabs and hooks an audience, right? And how you can apply these ideas to whatever it is that you do. And how do we do that? We play with rules, right? I'm going to talk about that. I want to structure that in terms of a series of levels. I'm sorry about the level thing, but I am a game designer, so here we are. So let's start at the beginning -- rules. OK. What are rules? What do I mean by "rules"? Well think about when you buy a board game.

What are you actually buying? Well, you have, maybe, a pretty box, there's some cards and dice and little pieces, but what you're really buying is rules, right? Rules, from one point of view, is the essence of what a game is. Rules tell you what to do each turn, and how to win. If you're playing the game, and it's like, "Oh, we landed on a red space, what does that mean?" "I don't know, we have to clarify this ambiguity by referring to the rules." Let me give you another example. Let's say you're playing baseball, right? And you say, "OK, this tree here is second base." OK, so I'm playing, I'm here on second base. And while the next batter is up, I'm like, "Maybe I can hold on to this twig, like, way over here and get as close as I can to third base." And then I'm tagged out. And I'm like, "Wait a second. I'm on second base." "You're not, second base is a tree." "No, just the trunk." Right. OK. There's an argument here. And, and in order to actually play the game of baseball, we'd have to resolve this ambiguity, right? In order to move the game forward.

So from this point of view, like, games don't sound that much fun, right? Rules are, like, rigid, and fixed and logical, right? But the amazing thing about games is that if you decide to enter into those rules, right? If you decide to play, then what happens is play, and play is the opposite of rules, right? So if rules are logical and rigid and fixed and unchanging, play is spontaneous, and creative and unexpected, and it's so much the opposite of rules, right? But we need those rules in order to help facilitate that play. Which brings us to our next level, "play." OK. Play is not something that just happens on its own. With play, we always play with something. Right? Let me explain what I mean. We can play with any system. Even this is a system -- just, like, walking, right? So here's walking -- let me demonstrate walking for you. Walking. I'm walking. So that's the logical, efficient transportation idea of walking, just getting from point A to point B.

But if you imagine, in your head, a child walking playfully, something else is happening, right? What are you imagining? Somebody shout it out. Audience: Skipping. Eric Zimmerman: I will demonstrate. OK, skipping. What’s another one? Wait, running? Oh, "wandering." I'm going to fall off stage here. (Laughter) What’s another one? (Audience voices overlapping) EZ: "Hopping"? You are really putting me to work. EZ: One more. Audience: Trolley. (Laughter) EZ: This is becoming, like, masochistic. (Laughter) So what is happening here? What's going on? I'm playing with the rules of walking, right? So however we see a kid avoiding cracks or skipping or hopping, ... they’re certainly playing with space and time, right? This idea of walking as this efficient transportation. They're playing with their bodies, with gravity. They're playing, maybe, with, like, the social etiquette of the sidewalk, because they're getting in people's ways, because they're doing things that are unexpected and inappropriate.

Right? But that's play. And, you know, play is like a very collaborative parasite. It’s like it grabs onto something, but instead of sucking the life out of it, it does the opposite. It just adds joy. And this is why play is creativity. Because if we wanted to invent new forms of walking, this is what we would do. We would look at those structures. What are the rules of walking? What are the leverage points where we can start playing around with those structures? And how can we then start to, sort of, poke and prod in them, to play with those structures and maybe invent something completely new? Alright, back to our levels. We're at our next level design. We looked at what rules are. We looked at how we can play with systems. And now I want to talk about how game designers actually create a game, how we build games out of constraints. And I actually need two volunteers from the audience. So I have a couple of volunteers. OK, one. I saw you too, come on up. OK, so come on up on stage. Let's give a round of applause for our brave volunteers.

Alright, I'll have you two stand over here. Stand right over here. OK. So what are your names? Mila and -- Ida: Ida. EZ: And this game may not work at first, so we'll just take it step by step. OK. I'm going to give you some rules. Mila, we'll start with you. And what I want you two to do is just alternate saying a word, OK? It can be any word. And the only rule is you can't repeat a word that's already been said. Mila: OK. EZ: Go ahead. Mila: Cheese. Ida: Clay. Mila: Yellow. Ida: Freedom. Mila: Red. EZ: OK, that's a start. Maybe not really a fun game yet, but that's OK. That's not your fault. That's on me, I'm the game designer. OK, I'm going to add another rule. We'll keep all of the rules that we had before. You'll alternate saying words, you're not going to repeat a word that's already been said. But I want to add a restriction. I like your "cheese" opening, that was a very interesting opening.

We're going to restrict it just to food. So things you eat or drink, ingredients, dishes -- otherwise, the same rules. Alright, whenever you're ready. Go ahead. Mila: Ketchup. Ida: Mustard. Mila: Pizza. Ida: Hot dogs. EZ: OK. Mila: Um, uh ... EZ: What was that last one? Mila: Water. EZ: Water. I like that. It’s a beverage, of course. That may actually have been less interesting than our first version. That's OK. It's not on you. I'm the game designer. I'm responsible here. So, what we're going to do is we're going to add one more rule. We're going to keep everything we had before. You two are going to alternate saying [words] so you can’t repeat a word. We're going to stick to edibles, beverages, dishes, things that you can eat or drink. But when Mila says a word, the last letter of your word is going to be the first letter of your word, Ida. And vice versa, the last letter of Ida's word is going to be the first letter of Mila's word.

Let's see how this goes. Whenever you're ready, take a step forward. Let’s go. Mila: Cake. EZ: Cake. Ida: Evian is a type of drink. Does that work? EZ: Evian ends with an N. Audience: Nutella. Mila: Nutella. (Laughter) Ida: Nutella. Mila: “A” is easy. Ida: Almonds. Mila: S ... Shirley Temple. EZ: Oh, wow. Let's give it up for our two volunteers. Amazing, I love it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Here's what I want to point out. Something happened that third time around. When we were adding rules, something happened in that final version. It wasn't just that these two suddenly got much more focused, intensely wanting to play the game well, but I also heard everybody starting to lean forward.

I heard whisperings, I heard suggestions coming from the audience, some of which were taken. And we also started to see some amazing play with the rules. We sort of switched over to some brand names. We got some sort of multi, like Shirley Temple was an awesome closing move there. What game designers do is work with these constraints. These constraints focus and guide the play of players. It may seem when you’re playing a video game that it’s the opposite. Like, a video game lets you go anywhere and do anything and be anyone. But actually, from a designer's point of view, we work with constraints. And those constraints guide and focus the creative activity. And, you know, it can be that too many constraints are a problem, right? I could have said, "Let's also now make it only seven-letter words," right? And you probably would have thrown me off stage. So yes, finding that balance, right?

Finding the right amount of constraints to move the game forward into that creative space of play -- that's game design. And when you see players -- just like we did here, and all of you actually joining in -- not just playing in the system, but starting to play with the system, and kind of bending and breaking rules, like audience suggestions, for example. That's when we know we've really got something cooking and percolating and we're in that amazing space of play. We've looked at rules, playing with systems, and how to design with constraints. And the boss level here is thinking about how to apply this to what you do, to your project or organization, because there's a methodology here, right? The methodology is looking at and understanding the system. How does the system work? How is it structured? And then what are those leverage points for play? How can you start poking around and playing with the system, maybe in ways that are unexpected and even inappropriate? And then, as you start building this experience, don't be afraid of constraints, right? Use those constraints to kind of guide and focus the behavior of your audiences.

I want to finish just with a few quick examples. I was at a dinner party recently, like, a big fancy dinner party, room full of interesting people. Kind of like all of you here today, but I was only at a table with a handful of them. And I thought to myself, "How can I actually interact with more people here and not be just with the same people all evening?" Well, after the first course, I stole all the name tags at the table, and I randomly put them around at different tables. Luckily, everyone played along, but that little bit of playful design made a huge difference on everyone's experience. Another example, there's a wonderful performance space not too far from here in Brooklyn, St. Ann’s Warehouse, and there's a wonderful example of playful architectural design there, in the bathrooms. So the bathrooms have these giant signs, like men over here and women over here, and giant taller-than-a-person signs. And so you go in these grand entrances. When you go in, you realize, "Wait a second, they actually both connect to the same space inside, right?"

And so I love that it's so unexpected. It's playing with our expectations, but it's also playing with our notion of a gender binary, right? And that sort of social etiquette of bathrooms, and it’s just so delightful and a wonderful example of designed play. And finally, final example, I've been working with these amazing organizations, Games for Change and Action for Democracy, and we've been thinking about democracy as a design problem. And this summer, we're bringing together game designers and policy experts to think about how can we play with the structures of democracy and maybe poke around in those systems, do something unexpected and inappropriate, and maybe move them playfully into a new and better space? I don't know what's going to happen there, but definitely wish me luck. We'll need it. Whatever you do, keep playing. And thank you very much. (Cheers and applause)