What makes a good game? | Eric Zimmerman

Elise Hu (0:03)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume.

When someone hands me a set of rules, guidelines, constraints, or fine print, my instinct is that they're going to get in the way of doing something creative. Eric Zimmerman would tell me I have it backwards. He's a game designer, and he has spent his career in the strange, generative space where rigid rules meet total spontaneity.

Eric Zimmerman (0:33)

If rules are logical and rigid and fixed and unchanging, play is spontaneous and creative and unexpected, and it's so much the opposite of rules.

Elise Hu (0:43)

Eric designs video games, tabletop games, museum installations, and teaches game design at NYU. And in his talk, he makes the case that the constraints we present are the very thing that makes creativity possible.

Once you learn to play with a system, rather than just follow it, you can unlock something joyful and surprising.

Eric Zimmerman (1:04)

It's like a very collaborative parasite. It's like it grabs on to something, but instead of sucking the life out of it, it does the opposite. It just adds joy.

Elise Hu (1:13)

And for Eric, it's about more than just fun and games. He shows how this same playful mindset can reshape a dinner party, a building, even the way a democracy works. That's coming up right after a short break.

And now, our TED Talk of the Day.

Eric Zimmerman (1:41)

Hello, everybody. I'm Eric, and I'm a game designer, and that means that I make video games, I make tabletop games, I work with architect Natalie Potze to do large-scale museum installations, and I also write books about game design, and I teach at the NYU Game Center at Tisch School of the Arts, where we think about games as an art form and also play as a deep form of literacy. Today, I want to talk to you from my point of view as a game designer about how to really make something that engages and grabs and hooks an audience, right? And how you can apply these ideas to whatever it is that you do. And how do we do that? We play with rules, right? I want to talk about that. I want to structure that in terms of a series of levels. I'm sorry about the level thing, but I am a game designer, so here we are. So let's start at the beginning, right? Rules. OK, what are rules? What do I mean by rules? Well, think about when you buy a board game. What are you actually buying? Well, you have maybe a pretty box. There are some cards and dice and little pieces. Well, what you're really buying is rules, right? Rules, from one point of view, is the essence of what a game is. Rules tell you what to do each turn and how to win. If you're playing the game and it's like, oh, we landed on a red space, what does that mean? I don't know. We have to clarify this ambiguity by referring to the rules, right?

Let me give you another example. Let's say you're playing baseball, right? And you say, OK, this tree here is second base. OK, so I'm playing. I'm here on second base.

And then, while the next batter is up, I'm like, oh, maybe I can, like, hold on to this little twig, like, way over here and get as close as I can to third base, right? And then I'm tagged out. And I'm like, wait, wait a second. I'm on second base. You're not on second base. Second base is the tree. It's not the tree. It's the trunk of the tree, right? OK, there's an argument here. And in order to actually play the game of baseball, we'd have to resolve this ambiguity, right, in order to move the game forward. So from this point of view, like, games don't sound like that much fun, right? Rules are, like, rigid and fixed and logical, right? But the amazing thing about games is that if you decide to enter into those rules, right, if you decide to play, then what happens is play, and play is the opposite of rules, right? So if rules are logical and rigid and fixed and unchanging, play is spontaneous and creative and unexpected, and it's so much the opposite of rules, right? But we need those rules in order to help facilitate that play, which brings us to our next level, play, right? Okay.

Play is not something that just happens on its own. With play, we always play with something, right? Let me explain what I mean.

We can play with any system. Even this is a system just like walking, right? So getting from point A to point B. So that's like the logical sort of efficient transportation idea of walking. But if you imagine in your head a child walking playfully, something else is happening, right? What is happening? What are you imagining? Somebody shout it out.