I'm Morgan McGuire (@CasualEffects). I've been working on computer graphics and games for 20 years at great places including NVIDIA, University of Waterloo, Williams College, Brown University, Roblox, Unity, and Activision.

See my home page for a full index of my blog posts, books, research, and projects.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Game Design as a Science for Public Policy

Screen shot of the action role-playing game Titan Quest
by Iron Lore Entertainment © (THQ Inc., 2006)
This is the first in a series of posts defining and motivating a game design research agenda.

What do a presidential election, a sporting event, government spending bills, and a video game have in common? They are all subject to analysis as games: scenarios where intelligent agents (players) seek to maximize their payoff (win) under a set of rules. Although some seem like fun and others like work, an understanding of each instance informs the others, and insights for any improve how we both work and play.

Games are about decisions, and decisions matter. Computer science, mathematics, psychology, economics, and political science have explored decisions in formal games for several decades. Their classic problem is to find the best strategy under a set of rules. A new, more important problem reverses this: design a rule system that drives players to desirable behaviors. In the real world, we want the rules in our tax code and laws to be fair and encourage strategies that benefit society as well as the individuals. In virtual worlds, choices must also entertain the agents. Sometimes the line between these is blurry: Ebay's auction rules intentionally trade market efficiency with the thrill of last-minute deals ("sniping"). The short-lived "entertainment shopping" introduced by the Swoopo company took this one step further, in a form that we're likely to see more in the future.