Masterful Play
In this adaptation of her mini-talk from the 2009 Game Developers Conference, Tracy Fullerton introduces the concept of “masterful play” and illustrates what it means to players, and their audiences.
“Masterful play” is the kind of play that illuminates and sets into relief the design of an entire system—not only for the player who has performed the mastery, but for their competitors; for other players, past and present; and for those involved in the culture of the game at any level.
The power of a moment of masterful play begins in the deep understanding of a game system: The rules, the constraints, and the permutations of actions on states. The deep play required to become a master of a game exhibits a type of systems thinking which looks beyond the surface of the experience to its underlying nature. This means “gaming the game” to such an extent that one breaks the boundaries of play assumed even by its designers.
Like one who masters a spiritual practice, the player who enacts such a transcendent moment of play is, for that instant, so deeply connected to the system itself that the polarity of power manifest by its rules is instantly, temporarily, reversed. And yet the rules don’t break, because the play is both within the system and without it. And for that moment, the player is both part of a system of constraint and free from it; of the world and not.
