Salen & Zimmerman · via Lüneburg / GAPPP (2018)
The strongest supporting theory I have, and the only one I have actually tested against my own work.
What it says
Play becomes meaningful when the relation between what you did and what happened is:
- discernible — you can perceive the result of your action, and
- integrated — that result matters to the larger system, not just to the moment.
Fail the first and the player cannot read the game. Fail the second and the action was decoration.
What happened when I used it
I ran it over a single pass through Phosphor and it broke something open. Of my three mapping principles, only architecture to reverb is discernible on its own. Vegetation to tempo and gaze to harmony are not perceivable as rules by anyone who does not already know the mapping — which is nobody but me and Dennis.
That is the same failure Lüneburg reports from GAPPP’s open-world experiments, arrived at independently in my own work. Useful confirmation, uncomfortable finding.
The larger thing it exposed
Agency in Phosphor belongs to the performer. But meaningful play has to hold for an audience holding nothing. Discernibility for the person with the controller is not the same problem as discernibility for the twenty people watching — and I had been treating them as one problem.
That crack is what v4 grew out of.
Related
Local and global agency is the finer-grained version of discernible, and explains why open worlds fail it.