Expressive Interaction Design for Music Games: Emergence and Improvisation?

Game Design (and Life) Essences – Risk & Reward

One of the core philosophies of playfulness (and perhaps of life) is the so called ‘risk-reward ratio’. This dynamic isn’t always noticeable or quantifiable, it can operate on a primal psychological level – hence not all games have concretely defined risks (punishments), rewards (scores, prizes) and goals. See for example play-fighting (rough-and-tumble play, romping), which is common among humans and other animals.

Thus, we can boil ‘risk VS reward’ down to the simpler terms ‘enjoyment VS challenge’: having fun while challenging one’s mind and/or body. Then we see that the idea of play applies to a wide range of activities, like Lego-building, jamming, snorkelling, and you name it. Through challenge, play allows for a comfortable confrontation with struggle, chaos and uncertainty – it’s a window to the unknown, and thus a path to exploration, discovery, wonder and inspiration – eventually coming full circle by feeding back into the player’s motivation. Play is all about feedback loops, just like life. But what are the rules (and those loops)?

How Can We Explore the Unexpected?

We are intrinsically curious and social creatures. Improvisation arises through intuition and spontaneity. It’s a subconscious process. Yet, as stated before, improvisation is never devoid of rules. There is an odd duality at work, or once again: a spectrum. A) Rules can be inherently intuitive or they can be culturally learned and trained. B) Rules can be either formulated or unspoken.

Improvisers – like freestyle rappers – learn an idiom (algorithms) by heart. They train these ‘unspoken rules’ methodically. When kids play-wrestle, they instinctively understand and communicate the rules of non-violence and fair power balance. Even within rule-based, competitive sports – like chess and football – players improvise, as they constantly use their (trained) intuition to deal with unexpected situations.

Good games are “random” enough to never be fully predictable, like life. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the (evolutionary) essence of human playfulness can be traced back to how a mother ‘babbles’ with her baby through the simple rules of call-and-response communication. This is how she teaches the baby to communicate and deal with (unexpected) emotions [source: The Origins and Future of Playfulness by Gwen Gordon]. Play is thus a way of making sense of both the randomness and the patterns of life, the expected and the unexpected.

For gameplay to be artistically expressive – musically or otherwise – its experience needs to revolve around control (flow) and exploration (wonder). Just like “easy to play, hard to master”, flow is about ease of control, exploration is about keeping the mind questioning. Control arises from a clear, intuitive understanding of one action’s, no matter whether it yields successful or unsuccessful results. Exploration arises when the game transforms the player’s creation in a somewhat understandable way – or vice versa – when the player’s input/creation affects the game.