Instrumental play
Form of play seeking to maximize performance
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In game studies, instrumental play (also known as rationalized play, power gaming or min-maxing[1]) is a form of play that has external, non-intrinsic goals. Often, these goals are to maximize performance within the rules of a structured, organized game.
Theory and history
The study of play being used to achieve external goals extends back to Classical Greece[2] – Plato and Aristotle saw play as being necessary for the educational development of children. Aristotle and medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas noted play's use as activity separate from work.[3]
Instrumental play can be characterized as a form of instrumental rationality, which is in turn a form of social action that exclusively aims to achieve a goal through any means.[4] Sociologist Max Weber, the creator of these concepts, also wrote extensively about the rationalization – the "increasing importance of a style of reasoning" – of society.[5] This movement can cause the original purpose of societal structures to become distorted, as "meaningfulness devolves into practical advance".[6]
Gaming theorist Roger Caillois classified play into several categories including "paidia" – play without rules or organization – and "ludus": play with rules or organization, or a "taste for gratuitous difficulty".[7]
Literary theorist Wolfgang Iser conceptualized instrumental play in his 1993 book The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Iser examined philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer's notion of play as oscillation[8] – back-and-forth movement that "renews itself in constant repetition".[9] From this framework, he introduced instrumental play as play with a goal, that ends when said goal is reached. As opposed to instrumental play, free play is play that stays in motion, without a predefined end.[10][11] No play can be purely free or instrumental; purely instrumental play is no longer play and simply becomes a task, and purely free play inevitably moves towards instrumental play.[8] Games make use of both, flowing from one to the other.[12]
Concepts
Optimization and theorycrafting
Instrumental play aims to find and implement the best way possible of playing a game.[13] It puts significant effort into understanding the technical details of a game and developing strategies around it (a practice called theorycrafting). Theorycrafting is highly quantitative, reducing a game into the simple numbers and logical rules that make it up. Through this it determines the "right" way to play the game.[1]
A player heavily engaged in instrumental play (a "power gamer") is willing to put in significantly more effort than a casual player to achieve their goals,[14] and push the technical boundaries of the game by using tools such as macros or engaging in actions like running multiple instances of a video game.[15]
Social rationality
Sociologist George Herbert Mead first described play as a system of social rationality. Play is used to communicate and judge one's status within a group, through the use of "publicly shared symbols". In the context of a game, social rationality describes how players assume roles, and form expectations of how others will act in their own roles.[16]
Critical theorists M. Grimes and Andrew Feenberg describe the process of a game becoming a system of social rationality, which they call ludification.[17]