Fun Inc. by Tom Chatfield Read Free Book Online

writers, directors, programmers, producers, actors, artists, animators, engineers and design philosophers all have their place in a successful games company, even if the hours are notoriously long and the risks substantial.
    As the world plunges headfirst into the digital revolution, video games are emerging as one of its most significant nexuses: a many-headed, compulsively innovative pool of talent and possibility. Like any other medium, parts of the industry will have to adapt to the changing order of things, or face disaster. But most gaming companies’ relationships with their consumers are growing ever closer: it is not only the world’s fastest growing medium, but also the fastest growing area of global expertise in how to entertain, retain and connect twenty-first-century consumers. If the future is looking more and more like a game, it’s partly because the science of satisfaction has never before been so precise, so powerful, or so profitable. Where play goes, the world will follow.

C HAPTER 4
    A beautiful science
    A video game’s relationship with the world appears to be simple enough, no matter how complex the game: it offers delight and diversion, and does so by simplifying and reconstructing reality in pleasing ways. Behind this, however – and behind the idea of fun with which this book began – lies a particular complexity that holds the key both to games’ extraordinary appeal and their extraordinary potential for challenging the ways in which we understand our own relationship with the world.
    Take the act of jumping. As many commentators, including Raph Koster, have noted, a great number of games involve jumping as a key aspect of their control system – from Nintendo’s Mario games (Mario was in fact called ‘Jump Man’ in the very first game he appeared in, jumping being his defining attribute) to the free-running titles currently taking the console world by storm. It’s a mechanism that clearly holds a deep appeal for players. What’s remarkable, however, is that the amount of time characters spend in the air while jumping is extremely similar across a huge range of titles.
    Why is this remarkable? Because the time taken to jump could, theoretically, be anything that a game designer wants. And yet there is an incredible consistency to the jump time in a whole host of games – and not in any sense that directly echoes reality. The jump time from Mario onwards tends, in fact, to be considerably longer than is physically possible: around double the duration of the time that an ordinary human can lift themselves off the ground for. The unspoken gaming consensus is something almost Platonic – an idealised version of the ‘right’ kind of leap. As this suggests, what we are often seeking in games is not so much an escape from reality as a more perfect, and an infinitely reproducible, version of certain aspects of it.
    This perfection is perhaps most clearly visible when it takes on a distinctly unreal form, and one of the most distinctively Platonic forms any game has ever achieved can be found in what would be many people’s nomination for the greatest single-player game of all time, Tetris . Devised in 1984 by the Russian computer scientist Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris features just seven pieces, each composed of four blocks (collectively known as ‘tetriminoes’). The player has to fit them together into a perfectly solid structure as they fall one by one down the screen in a random, unending sequence. The only method of control is rotation and horizontal motion. Make a line, and it vanishes; it gets faster over time. That’s it. And yet this simple creation has outsold the biggest movie blockbusters, made more money than the most expensive artworks, and accounted for more human hours than even the most compelling soap operas, thanks to 70 million global sales of the original and several times as many sales again of its clones, sequels and variations.
    In a sense, Pajitnov didn’t so much