A Human Aesthetic for Games
For games to truly be able to transform people in meaningful ways, they need to love and respect the player so that the player can then attain a true understanding of the knowledge presented in that game. Many games exist for the mere entertainment of people, but often entertainment has the power to hurt people more than it can truly help them. To make games that have the power to transform people in a positive way, we need to fundamentally change the way that we think about games and their aesthetic qualities.
To understand my aesthetics for games, it’s important to understand my own spiritual development. I never really had a moment in time where I converted to Buddhism, but rather, it was much more of a gradual process of finding answers to my internal dilemmas. As a student of mathematics, I found knowledge in the abstract, in pure logic. As a human being and as an artist, I found knowledge in the perception and awareness of the world. How does one know which is the correct knowledge?
I grew up in a very spiritual household. My grandparents, devout Hindus, would lecture me about Lord Krishna’s life as I listened very carefully. My parents strayed from the theistic ideals of Hinduism but kept the teachings of advaita vedanta, or non-duality, the teaching that no two things are truly any different in substance but rather our perception of them is illusory. Once I realized that I could choose what to believe in, I labeled myself as an atheist and decided that scientific inquiry was the path towards knowledge.
Through the cycle of questioning my beliefs, I eventually ended up studying East Asian literature, leading to my discovery that constantly examining one’s own beliefs is key to developing self-understanding. Games are an important art form as they are inherently a medium that involves the self and one’s understanding of the world. Games present choices to players, who must then examine their knowledge of the world to make a decision. Within my life, I have observed that the games that have changed me the most share a number of qualities. Commonly, these games do not attempt to force behavior from the player, but rather they respect the player’s ability to make decisions and think critically. I describe this feeling as the same as true love. It is a love for the player which has the power to help the player.
In my experience, to love is to exist without fear. For a game to love, it cannot fear the player. This means not being concerned with making the player addicted to the game, or trying to trick the player into believing that the game is fun. It means being honest with the player, not lying to them about the state of the world. In True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart, Thich Nhat Hanh discusses four requirements to distinguish true love and false love.
The first [element of true love] is maitri, which can be translated as loving kindness or benevolence. Loving-kindness is not only the desire to make someone happy, to bring joy to a beloved person; it is the ability to bring joy and happiness to the person you love, because even if your intention is to love this person, your love might make him or her suffer
Maitri, the desire and ability to bring joy and happiness to the object of love, exists very easily in games, and is the basis for nearly all modern games. There is some question of what joy and happiness entail. While games largely are for entertainment and enjoyment, I wouldn’t classify this as true happiness. Games that aim to let the player escape from reality or provide some fantasy don’t provide the basis for happiness but rather they mask the player’s suffering. While the subject of true happiness is outside the scope of this piece, there are a lot of unanswered questions when considering the potential for games to make people happy and it is a subject that should be considered carefully.
The second element of true love is compassion, karuna. This is not only the desire to ease the pain of another person, but the ability to do so
Nearly all games cannot ease the pain of their players. While many players use games as a means to escape from pain, rarely is the game an actual cure to the pain, but rather they just hide the pain, helping to pretend that the real world doesn’t exist. To pretend that real suffering doesn’t exist isn’t real compassion, and instead of helping, this illusion of easing pain is often more harmful. For a game to love it must acknowledge the player as a real human being playing a real game in the real world.
The third element of true love is joy, mudita. […] If there is no joy in your love, you can be sure that it is not true love
A game feeling joy does not necessarily make sense, however, the creation and communication of the game can be joyful. One may argue that it doesn’t matter if the act of making games is joyful if the same game is produced in the end. I argue that a game that is made with joy, cannot be made without joy. It is the aspect of genuine humanity that is unreproducible in art. With the creation of any game, there is necessarily a why for that specific game. The game and its why are indistinguishable. To make a game that diverges from its why is to have a new why. Thus, the game that is created from human qualities is necessarily human. In his essay, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics, R. W. Hamming describes how the depth of knowledge from simple mathematics is merely a sign of the human need to categorize and name the world.
Thus my first answer to the implied question about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is that we approach the situations with an intellectual apparatus so that we can only find what we do in many cases. […] What we were taught about the basis of science being experiments in the real world is only partially true.”
Hamming explains that the knowledge and beauty of mathematics are a symbol for humanity rather than a symbol of divine or absolute truth. Mathematical structure is an invented construct to peer into the knowledge of the universe. In the same way, games are a way for humans to explore the space of knowledge by categorization and naming. If it is justly human to name the world, then a game, which seeks to explore the space of knowledge created by humans, holds human truth. By genuinely expressing these truths, games can uphold the element of joy in love.
The fourth element is upeksha, equanimity or freedom. In true love, you attain freedom. When you love, you bring freedom to the person you love. If the opposite is true, it is not true love. You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free, not only outside but also inside
The fourth element, I believe, is the most important to games. While games have the power to kill freedom, I ultimately believe that the power for games to liberate is much stronger and is core to the medium itself. Often this freedom is a freedom for the mind, a breaking of conventional thought and liberation from our perceptions of the world. By making choices, players actively use their minds to play, and in doing so, they bring their own perceptions and ideas of reality into the game. In the dialogue between the game and the player, the game can then re-name reality to the player, and thus break their understanding of the world and themself.
Games that love should then follow these guidelines but there is still a question of how to follow these guidelines. While there are many interpretations of what creates a loving game, I will present a set of aesthetic rules that I believe leads towards personal transformation. These aesthetics use the beauty stemming from simplicity to guide players inwards and transform themselves.
Games that love should be simple. Here, simplicity means contained and clear. If some aspect of the game isn’t fully defined or understood, that is a good sign that it is complex. A game should know what exactly it is, and it should not try to be more than what it is. Often we see complexity in high-selling commercial games that use complexity to appeal to as many people as possible. A loving game respects the player and doesn’t try to force certain behavior out of the player. This isn’t to say that games should be microscopic in scale, but rather that games should take a much more minimalistic and focused approach when deciding what ideas are present. By being simple, the player can clearly understand the value of a game, without the complexity of unnecessary ideas. It is this simplicity that allows beauty to arise in the game.
Games that love should be deep. For any idea presented by the game, the player should be able to discover the deepest knowledge stemming from that simple idea such that there aren’t unanswered questions if the player tries hard enough to discover. In my piece Exploring the Universe Through Rules, I discuss the nature of beauty through the exploration of mathematical rules. On Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems I wrote:
[These theorems] mean that the things that we can have knowledge about are directly dependent on the rules we base them on. It means that nothing can be proven without the construction of arbitrary rules. The things that we take to be true are based on a simple set of beliefs that we have no reason to believe, and if we only were able to change our beliefs, we would find a whole new truth, a new reality.
All games, at some level, are describable by mathematical rules and exhibit each their own reality with a finite amount of knowledge. The finite pool of knowledge should be accessible to the player. This comes at a bit of a dilemma where the game should be both simple and express a great depth of knowledge, which may come at the cost of complexity. It is then the role of the game designer to find how to express the complex in simple rules. In a talk by game designers Jonathon Blow and Marc Ten Bosch, they describe this as “Aim[ing] toward the Richest Space.” Bosch describes how his philosophy is to find the most interesting and most beautiful truth within the system of rules that he can then show the player. I think that it is much more important to find the boundaries of what the game is about, rigidly defining what is and isn’t part of the game. Thus games that love should understand what exactly they are about and they should allow for as deep an exploration as possible.
Games that love present the world in a way that breaks our perception of it and in turn help to transform the self. Depth combined with simplicity creates beauty in the same way that mathematical depth creates beauty. This beauty is very powerful and it contains the ability to transform lives by letting us, for a moment, detach ourselves from reality to be present with the object of beauty itself. Jonathon Blow describes this phenomenon as “surprise,” when he talks about a surprising moment in the game VVVVVV, saying “This is really funny. It’s a funny joke in the game. […] But I think that part of the reason that it is funny is that it is true, especially in the sense of truth that we are talking about today. […] Most players will not have envisioned this scenario in their head, and so when they get to it it’s a surprise and it’s funny and it’s kind of wonderful.” By breaking the conventions of the world, games often showcase something that is beautiful or surprising.
This beauty is specific to the player who perceives the beauty, and as such games should not pretend to hold universal knowledge. Games are made and played by humans who view the world through their individual perceptions. It is easy to convince oneself that games are like mathematics and that they possess some divine knowledge within them. Mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays:
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty […]. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.
There is some idea that the knowledge of mathematics is beyond that of physical phenomena, though I disagree with this notion of knowledge coming from pure logic, as “being more than man.” Rather, mathematics comes from our nature to patternize the world. Hamming wrote:
Indeed, to generalize, almost all of our experiences in this world do not fall under the domain of science or mathematics. Furthermore, we know (at least we think we do) that from Godel’s theorem there are definite limits to what pure logical manipulation of symbols can do, there are limits to the domain of mathematics. […] When you consider how much science has not answered then you see that our successes are not so impressive as they might otherwise appear.
He explains the way that mathematics, by itself, cannot name the universe, but rather it is humans, who put their faith in mathematics and use it, who name the universe. Mathematics is a tool devised by humans to name the universe. The truths within mathematics are not truths about the universe but rather they are about the human perception of the universe. Thus the idea that games present a truth that is divine or universal isn’t true. For a game to believe that it holds the ultimate truths of the universe is just prideful. Hanh writes on pride: “According to the teaching of the Buddha, in true love there is no place for pride. If you are suffering, every time you are suffering you must go to the person in question and ask for his or her help. That is true love.” Games should not act as libraries of knowledge, but rather as a source for dialogue with the player about the world. The game invites the player into this dialogue and must go with whatever the player chooses. In order to not prescribe truth onto the player, instead, games should present a non-dualistic form of the world. A game does not need to decide if winning is good or losing is bad, understanding that these concepts are two parts to a whole experience. Instead, a game should respect the player’s ability to decide these things for themselves. If the game doesn’t label these concepts, then the player will eventually be able to understand this non-duality as well. Hanh writes:
There is no battle between good and evil, positive and negative; there is only the care given by the big brother to the little brother. In Buddhist meditation, we observe, we act in a nondualistic fashion, and thus the waste materials of the conscious mind can always be transformed into flowers of compassion, love, and peace.
When we give the player the space to name the world, then when they discover new knowledge they will be able to break their own preconceptions. Thus a loving game acknowledges its own humanity and does not delude itself into thinking that it holds universal truths.
When the knowledge and beauty of simple yet deep systems of rules is presented to the player in a loving way, games can use that power of love and trust to guide the player towards transformation. By discovering, or rediscovering, the reality that the game is contextualized in, the player’s understanding of the world is broadened and their sense of self is transformed. When we humanize the game, and we humanize the player, we get a much more impactful relationship between the two.
Hạnh Thich Nhât, and Chödzin Sherab. True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart. Shambhala, 2011.
https://medium.com/exploring-the-universe-through-rules/mathematics-1208bfea2c8f
Bertrand Russell. “Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays/Chapter 04.” Wikisource . Wikisource, 8 Jan. 2015. Web. 14 Apr. 2021.
Hamming, R. W. “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics.” The American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 87, no. 2, 1980, pp. 81–90. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2321982. Accessed 14 Apr. 2021.
IndieCade 2011 Conference Jonathan Blow & Marc Ten Boch, Designing the Universe, October 7th, 2011.
