A Game minus all the gaminess equals an Ungame

In an attempt to flesh out the scope of what I mean by playful technologies or playful media, I’ve recently been trying out the term “ungame.” (I get that it’s not a good idea long-term to define a new thing in the negative of another thing, but all this is an evoluation of thought. So cut me some slack, jack.)

Playful media encompasses both structured play like games as well as unstructured play like playing with blocks. So I’ve been speaking of “ungames” to help give context to the latter as distinct from the former. And, of course, ultimately, I’m interested in kicking things way up by marrying technology to unstructured play in wholly new ways.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the arc of video game history to give context to where I think these ideas are headed. Games (i.e. structured play) have been around since the dawn of man. Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution and suddenly there’s opportunity to create products that embody games (e.g. board games, sports equipment, card sets, etc.). Fast forward further still to the digital age, and video games explode onto the scene. Still, each of these iterations embody the same basic structured play mechanics of rules, points, competition, etc. What of the same evolutionary arc for unstructured play? Sure we have toys and various amusements, but they’ve not been developed in any purposeful way beyond elaborate blinking lights and digitized facsimiles of classic play interactions.

Russell Davies starts to get at certain aspects of the distinction I’m trying to make by talking about barely games. Though he focuses on what he terms a little less than games, he calls out essential elements to my notion of an ungame: pretend and interactions outside of only screens.

First, his thoughts on pretending:

Partly because they’re just interesting, partly because these things, and especially pretending, don’t seem to find their way much into the discussion about games. I listen to a lot of chat about games and hear lots about story and play, but very rarely hear about pretending, when, of course, pretending is central to the whole business.

As with lots of luxury goods. What we’re really buying is an object that lets us pretend.

We don’t have the sort of life that requires a Pelican case full of weapons, but we can get some barbecue tools in a case that feels a bit similar. Designers will talk about ‘cues’, brand people will talk about ‘associations’ but it’s all pretending.

Indeed, when we dress up, when we’re on display and at our most public, these are the times when our costumes get the most pretendy — we get married dressed as princesses and officers — then go back to our everyday lives dressed as squaddies, rockstars or resting athletes.

Another thing — I’ve always wondered why software/OS makers don’t do more with the power of pretending. Look, for instance, at the average desktop. It’s using a pretending metaphor — but it’s not much of an imaginative leap is it? It’s a desktop on your desk. I can see how this would have been useful in the early days, getting people used to interfaces and everything, but surely there’s more opportunity to have some fun now — to make software more compelling by adding some pretending value to it.

There have been some notable attempts at this; Tactile 3D make movie-like interfaces where you can fly around your files like an authentic 80s cyberpunk. And the genius of 3D Mailbox must be experienced to be believed…

Second, Davies discusses another topic near and dear to my heart — playful interfaces that do not absorb our visual attention and allow / encourage us to interact directly with one another:

And there’s one mandatory requirement: “No Touch The Screen” — I’d love to build a mobile application that doesn’t demand you stare at and stroke it the whole time. To me the attention-hogging aspects of most games has found perfect embodiment in the AR craze. They want to impose another screen between us and the world. There must be a way to harnass the power of pretending to create something that you can play with while walking around, that doesn’t want you to look at the screen all the time.

(The best example I’ve found to date is RJDJ — again, not really a game, but it fulfills a lot of my criteria, it feels like a game without actually being one. And it is, of course, lovely.)

So we made a Barely Game prototype — The Situated Audio Platform, a browser for geotagged audio files. The idea is that it only has one button, the whole screen, which you use to switch it on, and then you never have to look at it. You can leave it in your pocket, monitoring the world for tagged files, quitely pinging, while you listen to your music. Then if it detects something, you hold it at your side and sweep the area until you home in on whatever it’s found…

But if you wanted to do some pretending, and some stupidness, it could turn into a social fighting game. Where the files you explore are mines and traps laid by other people and you sweep and destroy them to stay alive. All while never looking at your device… So you can be commuting in a crowd and fighting enemies in your head.

Voilá. Technology that fosters pretend and social interaction outside of screens and does so without strict rules. Now we’re getting somewhere.