Immersive Gameplay – Interview with Jussi Holopainen

Evan Torner – Last decade, you and Staffan Björk released a book called Patterns in Game Design. Could you tell us a little more about your purpose with the book and what you saw as its successes and failures?

Jussi Holopainen – I had been collaborating with Staffan since the end of 90s on experimental game design projects, especially based on ubiquitous and wearable computing principles. As we were doing the design work, we consciously tried to explore which game design suited the technologies the best. In other words, we were doing technology analysis from a game design point of view. While doing this work, we were getting frustrated about the lack of proper conceptual frameworks for game design and decided to develop our own. This framework development eventually resulted in the “game design patterns” approach. So we initially wanted to build a tool for ourselves, but then realized that the patterns approach would, if published, benefit both the game development and game studies fields.

The patterns material has mainly been used as a tool for analysis in a number of game research projects, whereas the adoption in the game industry has been limited. I guess that the patterns are more useful in analysis than in the day-to-day design work itself – although, of course, analysis is always a part of game design work process. I have not been that active in game design patterns work for some years now, as my interests have shifted somewhat, but Staffan has continued the work. Staffan is also the main force behind http://gdp2.tii.se/, a wiki-site dedicated to refining and expanding the patterns collection.

To sum it up: the main success is that the patterns approach is useful for analysis of game design, but that using it as an actual tool for game design itself has been a bit problematic.

ET – If you were going to re-write Patterns of Game Design based on the patterns you’ve found up until 2012, what would you add and/or change?

JH – It is not about the new or old patterns as such, but I would like to have a different overall structure to them. At the moment, we have patterns for goal structures, actions etc. but not a real coherent hierarchy or structure. Something like having a hierarchy akin to MDA (Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics) and basing at least some of the aesthetics layer patterns in existing frameworks for human emotion and understanding (e.g., Ortony, Clore, Collins: The Cognitive Structure of Emotions and Lakoff-Johnson’s work on metaphor would be suitable candidates). Actually, that started to sound like a project. I have to talk to Staffan. We will keep you posted on the upcoming revised game design patterns book!

ET – What books should prospective game designers and/or game studies scholars be reading in order to best prepare themselves for the field?

JH – Patterns in Game Design, obviously! Well, there are also some books around which better prepare for the game design or game studies work in a more comprehensive manner. Salen & Zimmerman’s Rules of Play and the follow-up anthology Game Design Reader are both extremely valuable sources of information for both game design and game studies. For more practical game design work, I would recommend Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop and Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design. Ernest Adams and Joris Dorman’s Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design is also a valuable contribution to the field of game design. Perhaps a bit less well-known but very comprehensive and enjoyable book about game design is Aki Järvinen’s doctoral dissertation “Games without Frontiers.” It is availble for download at http://acta.uta.fi/english/teos.php?id=11046 and is in my opinion one of the best pieces of work on game design research ever.

JH – Perhaps the best introduction to these issues is the paper Jaakko Stenros, Annika Waern & Markus Montola (2012): “Studying the Elusive Experience in Pervasive Games.” Even though they are discussing mainly pervasive games, many – if not all – of the issues are relevant to larp research as well. The ephemeral nature of larps is to blame and especially the first-person audience: that each of the players in a larp will have their own distinctive experience which can be drastically different from the other players’ experiences. This makes it really difficult for the researchers to get a comprehensive view about the player experience of any given larp. I am currently interested in using methods such as psychophysiological measurements and eye-tracking in combination with the usual interviews and video analysis for investigating the players’ experiences in larps. They might turn out to be too invasive and burdensome for useful research and also extremely difficult to generalize, but I would like to at least try them out.