MUD co-creator Richard Bartle’s taxonomy of MMO player types is as uncontroversial as plate tectonics: Achievers, optimizing their performance at the MMO’s mechanical goals; Explorers, delving into the nooks and crannies and edge cases of the world’s programming; Socializers, engaging in the play of community both in- and out-of-character; and Killers, disrupting and influencing (occasionally positively) the experiences of other players. The status of MMOs as playgrounds supporting a variety of playstyles—often over disjoint sets of game mechanics and content—is relatively unquestioned. Why is this same sophisticated understanding rarely extended to “normal” digital games?

Over the last couple of years, game designer Frank Lantz (best known recently for Drop7 and less recently for his involvement with the big games movement) has pushed for a more nuanced view of digital games. His widely-read article “Games Are Not Media” expands on an earlier GDC microtalk, and to my mind the most important assumption it shatters is its second: “Games go in computers.” The bits on the disc are not the game—they are its cards and dice, its colored game board, its rulebook. The bytes in RAM and the vertices on the GPU are not the game—they’re a record of its play, but the game itself happens in between the player and the screen.

At Games for Change 2010, Charles J. Pratt gave a talk he transcribed to his blog as “Make More Tennis Balls”. Pratt describes what Shadow Complex was for him: not a Super Metroid clone, but an “Iron Man, 13%, Golden Gun” game. In other words, he imposed arbitrary additional rules on himself and produced a very distinct play experience. Pratt advocates that more digital games support such varied play, that they be more like tennis balls and less like disposable, consumable media—there’s that dirty word “media” again.

But maybe—just maybe—we’re closer to that future than we may suspect. Certainly, Ben Abraham’s “Permanent Death”, the 391-page saga of mercenary Qurbani Singh’s single-life trip through Far Cry 2, shows how different a digital game can become to a player simply by adding or ignoring rules. The Internet is replete with beautiful stories of Dwarf Fortresses by players (alone and in groups) who make the game their own.

We run into trouble when we consider any game as monolithic. Competitive Halo is a substantively different game from the program’s cooperative campaign, which itself is distinct from the dollhouse play of its machinema makers. Even within the same rules—StarCraft‘s multiplayer melée, for instance, or Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo—hobby players are not playing the same game as the pros. Achievers, explorers, socializers, or killers, players always design and play their own games. Our role as designers is to facilitate this natural, inevitable process.