I have heard of some “teaching to the unconscious” in the sense of marketing, advertising, and branding. I have also read that the jury is out in terms of the research on the efficacy / inefficacy of whether such outreaches actually work.

Then recently, after I wheedled a book from a colleague that I’d been wanting to read for a long time, I came across this concept again. The concept here was found in Raph Koster’s much-cited book “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” (2005, Paraglyph Press). Give me a minute to set up this concept.

Bonafides First

So Koster (b. 1971) has worked for many years in the field of game design—as lead designer for Ultima Online, Ultima Online: The Second Age, Star Wars Galaxies, and many other works. He has won many awards for his work. His book is a fast read—which is well illustrated with images—but which also does contain some challenging concepts.

Koster's Conceptualization of Games

So what makes a game? Koster rattles through the various extant definitions from the various contributors who’ve offered their ideas (Callois, Huizinga, and then more recent ones—Crawford, Meier, Adams & Rollings, Salen & Zimmerman), and then he offers his own definition of a game.

A game essentially involves learning (and pattern recognition), optimally at a state that is not too difficult so as to be frustrating to the player but not too easy so as to lead to boredom. Patterns exist widely in the world, and human brains are unique designed to respond to those patterns—whether they be faces (facial recognition) or musical patterns or artistic patterns. Koster quips: “Even static has patterns to it.”

Games are iconic depictions of the world that work on an abstract level often beneath the level of conscious learning. They may tap into rote memorization, muscle memory, and mathematical patterning. “Fun” then involves engaging the brain and making the brain feel good so as to release “endorphins,” which give the body a feeling of pleasure. The brain is built to process data and understand patterns and solve puzzles—for the survival of the fittest.

Major game design challenges are to make a game simple enough to be playable but hard enough to engage learners…such as by having different challenges and learning. The games have to fit learners at the margin of learner ability which involves what they already know but also what they have yet to learn. People want mostly predictable lives albeit with some unpredictability to allay boredom, he suggests. While playing with other live players may add interest, there has to be a match between the players for the shared play to be “fun” because players hate to lose, he observes. He suggests that cross-pollination in design may be one way to begin to offer more variety in game design.

This is also forcing game designers to find new dimensions for gameplay. He suggests that stories and back-stories are almost negligible overlays to the gameplay itself and are not ever really central to the action. Games teach experientially while stories teach vicariously; games objectify while stories excel at empathy; games simplify and classify while stories deepen, and games are external while stories tend to be internal (Koster, 2005, p. 88).

Games may teach a range of types of learning: social skills, spatial reasoning, problem solving, odds-making (through games of chance), power relations, teamwork, social network building, construction, and others. Koster suggests that many games teach to the reptilian and primitive human brain and should maybe not reinforce some of the following types of negative learning: “blind obedience to leaders and cultism, rigid hierarchies, binary thinking, the use of force to resolve problems, (and) like seeking like, and its converse, xenophobia” (Koster, 2005, p. 68).

In response to the gap between male and female gamers, this author suggests that people should experience games that they may not intuitively enjoy so as to broaden their own horizons. There’s a value to discomfort in the learning.

Nothing Lasts Forever or “The Destiny of Games”

No games last forever. As a matter of fact, Koster suggests that the human being—once it masters a pattern, becomes bored. The game then loses its magical hold on the player, and it’s on to the next game. Once a game is played and a skill is acquired, that results in a kind of permanent learning, in Koster’s view, and the game then loses its utility (of sorts).

Teaching to the Unconscious Mind

Games offer highly abstracted models of the world with an underpinning of quantized models. He then writes: “They primarily teach us things that we can absorb into the unconscious as opposed to things designed to be tackled by the conscious, logical mind” (Koster, 2005, p. 76). Earlier in the text, he had observed that the brain observes and notices more than the conscious mind may assume—and gives up further observations often while in hypnotic states.

The types of teaching to the unconscious mind seems to be that of providing experiential engagements with complex systems and waiting for the brain’s “aha!” realization.

After many years teaching to the conscious mind with my designs, I am now wondering if I shouldn’t have also attended to the unconscious mind.

References

Koster, R. (2005). A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Scottsdale: Paraglyph Press, Inc.