Case Study

Below you find two different videos by Volkswagens The Fun Theory. The idea is to use fun to change people's behaviour for the better. In order to nuance what ‘fun’ means, you can analyse the different interactions afforded by the designs in the videos - The Piano Staircase and The Bottle Bank Arcade - with Caillois’ distinction between ludus and paidia in mind.

Bottle Bank Arcade - TheFunTheory.com - Rolighetsteorin.se (YouTube)

The Fun Theory 1 – Piano Staircase Initiative | Volkswagen (YouTube)

Reflect on these questions from the videos:

In the Bottle Bank Arcade - do you see it as a primarily paidic or ludic design?
In the Piano Staircase video - is it the same paidic or ludic design we see here as in the Bottle Bank Arcade video?

It is not difficult to see how The Bottle Bank Arcade is a designed artefact with explicit rules - both as operational rules (put the empty bottle in the slot under the flashing light bulb) and constitutive rules (each correct bottle inserted correct awards a point, wrong slot does not award a point - feedback is given via a points on scoreboard and a obtrusive audio). The rules structure can be described as progressive in Juul’s terms (there is only one correct way of playing the game) and the interaction is heavily skewed towards Caillois’ ludus. The interaction with the Bottle Bank Arcade is thus very gameful and limited and the experience is perhaps quite short-termed, as nothing new will happen once we have played the game a few times. There is virtually no player agency in the design.

Model inspired by: Salen & Zimmerman’s Game Design Schemas as three different perspectives on games

Try to do a similar reading of The Piano Staircase as a design, by looking at the interaction, rules (via Juul, Salen and Zimmerman's three levels), experience (Caillois). Both designs are embedded in a public (non-play) space and can thus be seen as appropriating this space. In what way? How do the two public spaces (a street-level space versus a connecting transit-space between the Tunnelbanen underground and the street-level above?).

These questions are important questions to ask ourselves we if we want to understand and analyse games as artifacts and play as an activity, but also what kind of experiences emerges from our interactions with these artefacts - and which do not. And as a final layer, we need to be aware of how and through which means games as objects and as experiences are embedded in and in dialogue with the context in which they are placed and the world around them. In the following section we will address the question of how the game and the playing of games can be understood as a dialogue with the world around them, as a way of thinking, mounting arguments, questioning or critiquing that world.

As such we move from a constructive and design approach to games (the core concepts of games we have read in the sections above) that allows us to talk about games and elements of games to a more critical approach to games in the following section. As such we view games as instruments of conceptual thinking, as tools or systems that may help us examine or work through social issues, as games carry beliefs within their representation systems and mechanics.

Reference

• Caillois, R. (1958): Man, play, and games. The Free Press, Glencoe, New York.
• Juul, J. (2002): "The Open and the Closed: Game of emergence and games of progression". In: Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings, edited by Frans Mäyrä, 323-329. Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2002.
• Salen, K. & Zimmerman, E. (2003). Rules of Play. Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press, Cambridge.