View source for Production 5 - Games and Feedback

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I recently got a hold of Breath of The Wild, the newest game in the Zelda franchise, It’s a wonder to behold. You wake up in a cave, and then are soon after thrust into a wide open world, with literally no limits except what is accessible by the player’s current skill level and equipment.  Your goal is both to survive the many obstacles placed in your way, as you play out the overarching goal, which is to save the land, etc. Although you have an overall quest, you are in no way railroaded towards it. You can literally do anything in the game, as long as the character controls allow it and you as the player can pull it off. The world is completely free to explore, and as you explore it, you get feedback about your choices, which is inherent to the game. As a small example, you have a stamina bar, which is depleted as you exert yourself. As you traverse the lands, you can climb the game’s hundreds of cliffs, and depending on the degree of incline the rate lose your stamina fluctuates. If you run out stamina, you fall down. The game brilliantly incorporates “failure a natural and often fun part of the process, thus encouraging repeated play  and exploration of new solutions” (Marone 4). If you fall, you scan around and try to find another way to scale. But you never have to scale that particular cliff. The game also requires stealth tactics, resource management, and selective engagement of enemies. The strategy of charging headlong into battle with the many encampments of enemies is almost never rewarded. In short, that’s a pretty quick way to keep dying. Regardless of what you do, the game provides you with options to explore, and then interesting parameters around your exploration. It allows you to engage according to your own interest. 


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Through playing this, it evokes a good definition of play. Play is a system of voluntary engagement whereby the player takes flexible action to achieve a desired goal, within ludus limits that define the playspace and define player actions. In play, a player receives feedback about the actions they take by making known to the player the benefit or detriment of those actions in relation to the desired goal. What’s important in play is the feedback is provided by the game itself, or by other players in the game space. 


This feedback system seems to apply well to to the Caillios’s four game-type categories (Caillios 148).  In agôn (competition), the feedback is provided by the relative advantage or disadvantage a players particular move makes in relation to their objective, either in that moment or revealed further in the game. In alea (chance), the system of feedback is inherent in probabilities of certain outcomes, informing players of the efficacy of their moves, and including whether there is a chance of winning or not which would dictate if the player even wants to continue playing the game. In mimicry (simulation), feedback is given through the awareness of how effective or convincing to others or to the player themselves (in solo mimicry play) and this helps inform what the player next does. In ilinix (vertigo), feedback is provided to the player in the form of how their body feels, degree of disorientation, and other felt senses.  This within-the game feedback system is also inherent in puzzles, in fact, a prerequisite - otherwise one could not build a growing awareness for what is even involved in the puzzle on the way to solve it. Feedback from the player’s attempts provides the player with ongoing possibility. 


In much of the education system, feedback necessary for informed decision-making, authentic engagement and sustained interest - built into even the most simple game designs - is replaced by the teacher or worse by and automatic marking system encoded with "right answers". This is problematic for a multitude of reasons. Here are just some:  1) It makes the goal of learning abstract and remote, leading to disinterest if the student does not care about teacher feedback, or if they feel they can never reach the teacher’s idea of “right” - over time leading to disenfranchisement.  2) Engagement is inauthentic, because it is defined by what a student is supposed to do and often rubs up against what they would rather do.  What is involuntary can never be authentic. 3) When systems of feedback are inauthentic, and engagement is only insofar as getting it right in the teacher’s eye, the student is incapacitated from building a self relationship to what they are exploring, and instead must defer that exploration to what the teacher “knows” to be true (which in some cases is patently absurd because the teacher only themselves learned the material the night before in order to present it). 4) It places the scope of what is explorable to what the teacher believes. When a teacher allows varying points of view, there is far less need to justify one’s point of view if it accords with the teacher's or  -more importantly, with the curriculum's. For an example of this, one need not look any further to than how Economics is taught in high school as a rationalization of a free market system. 5) As pointed out many times, because the student does not build a self relationship with what they are learning, they often have little to no idea why they are even learning it, why they need to, and how they are ever going to use what they are learning. Knowledge is just for the test, and soon forgotten. 


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Engaged learning, which is real learning, takes place when learners relate to the “meaning to their actions, or create their own stories that help them frame their actions through a process of meaning-making that can be generative on both a personal and a social level” (Marone 5). The play-as-attempt-and-natural-feedback system is fundamental to engaged learning. A baby understands that they have the wrong shape because it doesn't fit in the hole they are trying.  When chocolate chip cookies come out of the oven burnt, it lets the baker know they've either been in too long or the temperature was too high. A car sliding on ice informs the driver to slow down, or put the car in a different gear, while an arrow shot that misses the target tells the archer to adjust something in their approach or in their release.  Interpersonally, others' reactions to one's mood or one's words are instructive in one’s becoming aware of themselves in the social space. Of course there are a million more examples. 

In this regard, Huizinga is correct in his assertion that “all play is a voluntary activity. Play to order is no longer play: it could at best be but a forcible imitation of it.” but wrong in his assertion that “by this quality of freedom alone, play marks itself off from the course of the natural process” (Huizinga 102). Actually, it is ''through'' this quality of freedom that play, with its authentic and intrinsic  feedback systems, ''is'' the natural process.

'''Works cited'''

Huizinga, J. Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon.In K. Salen and E. Zimmerman (Eds.) The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (pp. 96-120). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Caillois, R. The Definition of Play and the Classification of Games. In K. Salen and E. Zimmerman (Eds.) The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (pp. 122-155). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Marone, V.  (2016). Playful Constructivism: Making Sense of Digital Games for Learning and Creativity Through Play, Design, and Participation. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 9(3).