Solving a problem is one of the most satisfying sensations in the world. Often this satisfaction is preceded by hours, days, months, or years of tedium and frustration as we struggle to understand the problem, collect the tools and skills to approach it, and endeavor to enact a solution. That’s just how life is, frustrating and complex – but hopefully someday rewarding. What if we wanted to try to make something a bit nicer, a bit more convenient? What if we wanted to maximize satisfaction, to make the reward a little easier to find, to create the most enjoyable problem possible? How would we go about that?
Three things tend to stand in the way of solving problems: Effort, Capability, and Comprehension. When a problem isn’t solved solely because of lack of effort, it’s simple but boring. A problem like this is usually called an errand or chore: Its parameters are clearly understood, there’s no doubt that we have the capabilities to solve it, but it demands a certain amount of effort. When a problem isn’t solved solely due to lack of capability – whether because of missing skill or missing funds or any other missing resource – it can seem insurmountable, but in fact has simply become a different problem, that of how to acquire the necessary capabilities. The real problems, though, the ones that fuck you up, the ones that infuriate and mislead and waste precious hours, are those for which we lack comprehension. When we don’t know what we don’t know, it can be almost impossible to find a way to even approach solving the problem, of knowing what capabilities and efforts will even be necessary to proceed – or if it’s even possible to find a solution.
The challenge of comprehension can be impossible to tackle for found problems – but we needn’t restrict ourselves to those if our main intention at the moment is to distill the satisfaction of problem-solving. The good news is that we’ve actually gotten pretty good at constructing satisfying problems: Constructing such problems is the essence of what we call “game design”. Games are generally designed in such a way as to maximize the player’s comprehension, to be as open and clear as possible and ensure the player largely or completely understand the challenges before them, while still requiring significant effort and capability to succeed.
Stating that games tend to minimize the player’s need to comprehend their problems may naturally lead to questions: What about puzzle and adventure games, founded on the uncertainty of how to proceed? What about the success of From Software’s oeuvre, which shy away from explaining much about anything? These games may seem incomprehensible to a new player, and are indeed quite mysterious relative to many other popular games, but are still very much designed to be comprehended. For instance, a point-and-click adventure has only the mouse, Dark Souls has only the controller – it is implicitly guaranteed that anything the game might ask you to do can be accomplished using only these simple and straightforward inputs provided. Often they end up quickly being reduced to something even simpler than that: For all the detail put into these games, it can become quickly apparent which details are meaningful and which are not, and a player whose spent some time with these games can quickly learn to dismiss extraneous information in pursuit of their end-goals. Thus, while these games can be challenges of comprehension, the bounds of these challenges are always sharply delineated and constrained. While it might be tricky to figure out where the key to the door is hidden or where the safe place to stand during the artillery strike might be, it is certain that there is a way past the door and a way past the artillery, and that those both exist somewhere within the communicated constructs of the game.
That’s what makes a video game interesting: Sharply constrained boundaries of problem-solving, with measured quantities of requisite skill and effort. But what about real-life? In general I’m not a fan of the trend of “Gamification,” of formulating necessary or beneficial tasks into Skinner boxes with scheduled rewards, but that isn’t to say that the skills of game design have no application to helping us approach large and complex problems. If the skill of game design is that of taking huge abstract problems – “I want the player to go on a quest where they fight a dragon” – and breaking that down into smaller more specific problems – “To fight a dragon they must first find the unmelting shield and the unyielding sword, then lure the dragon into an enclosed space where it can’t take flight” – then this applies to any situation where we need to break a huge abstract problem down into a set of small, discrete, and approachable tasks (with, of course, the vital caveat that while we may have the latitude to decide the dragon might be more interesting if it were a griffon in a game, that’s not a choice we get to make if we happen to be under dragon attack in reality).
I find myself applying this skill frequently now, applying it towards several nested structures of my life. Most obviously, I am literally designing a game, as well as writing various essays critiquing and analyzing game design, so I have to be constantly examining how to maximize clarity and comprehension and break down each discrete demand I’m making of the player or reader. At the same time, in the process of making the game I’m also trying to break down each individual task for myself, to separate the act of comprehending the task’s place in the greater structure from the act of understanding and executing it – and in so doing create a process of game development for myself that is itself playful and satisfying. One tier above, I am trying to understand each discrete task and component of my life itself in isolation, trying to break down where I feel challenged and lost, and eventually build these into strategies for dealing with those problems. In a sense, I am trying to design my life the same way I would design a game. This is a somewhat quixotic ambition, but at least gives me a method for creating order and direction where I was often overwhelmed with aimless confusion.
Something that I’ve noticed in the process of breaking these tasks down into bite-sized pieces is that this is doing approximately what a manager is supposed to do for workers in a more structured job setting: Find what needs to be done and assign it to a worker to tackle over a certain amount of time with an eye on what resources will be necessary to complete the task. Ideally this will take the burden of figuring out all the external concerns, the vast overwhelming unknown space surrounding the task, away from the worker, and give them a clear and unambiguous purpose to work towards – quite often, though, unfortunately, the manager simply shifts the burden of comprehension downstream, telling the worker what they must do without any clear explanation of what the real parameters of the task are.
Well, if we can describe bad management as a failure of task design – which is in many ways quite similar to a failure of game design – what about good management? What about management that completely removes the cognitive burden of understanding what comes before and after a task, where it’s going, what it means in the greater structure? This is certainly a much nicer situation to labor under, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to see a darker side: If we’re assigned straightforward tasks with no broader comprehension, even if it makes those tasks more enjoyable it also obscures the moral dimension of those tasks. Indeed, this is the situation most of us – arguably all of us – find ourselves in today: Simple tasks are handed down to us from above, we perform them, and the world is impacted by our labor and consumption in a way that is invisible to us and which we are asked not to think about.
The unfortunate truth is that any means of creating emotion or meaning, of making something fun or joyful, is an inherently manipulative pursuit. As enamored as we artists are with our little frivolities, they are at times like playing with loaded firearms: If you can make a task “fun”, you can make it invisible and odorless, performed quickly and snappily with a smile. If you can do that with any task, you can get people to paint as many white picket fences as you can find, regardless of what they fence out or fence in. It’s worthwhile sometimes to be suspicious of those who try to make everything fun and easy – even as it keeps getting harder to maintain those defenses when the world outside is so tedious and difficult.