After recently being introduced to Hartmut Rosa’s idea of “Resonance” through his book “The Uncontrollability of the World”, I have begun considering how the concept and its related ideas might be relevant in the field of game design. Resonance, by my interpretation, is what we experience when we feel most alive, when the world “speaks” to us in a way that reaches our core, that moves us, that changes who we are, what we think, and what we feel. It makes the subject and object “fuse” so that we become one with our experience, rendering anything existing outside of the here and now temporarily unimportant. It can happen when we have a meaningful conversation, when we see something beautiful, or when we read about a groundbreaking idea. Rosa even links it to the theory of “flow” - one heavily discussed in game design discourse - although he does not equate the two. To say the least, resonance is painted by Rosa as something deeply positive and profound, something we want in our lives, perhaps even THE thing that we want.
But most importantly, in his book and for this text, resonance is, according to Rosa, uncontrollable. Resonant experiences cannot be engineered, manufactured, or commodified. They cannot be hoarded, stored, or acquired. They cannot be guaranteed, or even predicted. Resonant experiences sort of “happen when they happen”, and that can often be in the most unexpected of moments. At the same time, moments that we do expect to be powerful, such as an expensive trip across the world to look at beautiful landscapes, can end up feeling frustrating or disappointing. In fact, it even seems like Rosa is suggesting that attempts to manufacture or engineer resonant experiences often result in the contrary, as it renders them predictable and sterile. In the book, Rosa is critiquing our modern culture for its obsession with control, applied to every aspect of our lives, and its failure to recognize the uncontrollable nature of resonance and the world.
Now, game design is a practice that has the manufacturing of certain experiences as its focal point. It might even be suggested that the main goal of a game designer is to build systems that lead to meaningful experiences for their players. But as has already been pointed out by many others, a game designer cannot actually create an experience, as experiences are subjective and emerge at the moment of play, when a player interacts with the game systems. This paradox lies at the heart of game design, and is one that Rosa sheds further light on with his insights about the uncontrollability of resonant experiences.
Let’s say, for the sake of this text, that players engage with games in the hopes of having resonant experiences, and that it is a designers main goal to support the failitation of such experiences (this assumption is of course often not true, as game creators can be driven by many other types of incentives, such as profit or the expression of their own artistic vision). Following Rosas’ advice, then, would mean to first recognize the fact that we can never guarantee the occurrence of a resonant player experience in the first place, and that a lot of players will end up feeling bored or frustrated with our game, no matter how well we design it. Furthermore, the resonant experiences that do eventually emerge are also uncontrollable in terms of when, why, how, or for whom. The well-crafted game climax might fall flat to a player in the core target group, while their inexperienced friend sitting next to them on the couch might unexpectedly get blown away by some fringe sidequest haphazardly added as content filler. The player’s experience of each gameplay moment is a result not just of the game itself, but also of their thoughts and feelings in the given moment, something far beyond the control of both the designer and the player.
To design a game recognizing the uncontrollability of resonant experiences, thus requires letting go of any attempt at engineering the experience itself. And yet, supporting the chances of such experiences emerging is precisely the goal of the designer’s effort. So what can they do?
A term I like to use for the thing we build as game designers, borrowed from Ian Bogost’s book “Play Anything”, is “playground”. A playground is a space where play happens. Different playgrounds present different structures, properties, and capabilities, allowing for different styles of play. But it is only once a player enters a playground that it can come alive. A player explores, interprets, experiments with, and gives meaning to the structures of the playground, often in unexpected ways, as they bring their own symbolic history and emotional world into it. The playground does not “want” anything from the player. It has no specific expectation on what the player will or will not do. It does not have a goal. It just exists there, by itself, devoid of any meaning or experience, until it is brought to life through play.
Thinking in terms of playgrounds helps us see how a player’s experience is outside of our control as designers. A playground designer can build structures with various properties, presenting a range of possibilities to those who enter it. She can loosely envision a way in which someone might traverse and interact with the playground, but can never fully know until it actually happens. More importantly, though, she cannot predict which point on this traversal, if any, will resonate with the player, or in what way. She can do her best to build systems of interactivity, presenting many different opportunities to players, but she can’t control the subjective experience itself. So perhaps, it would be wise of her to let go of any attempt at such control and think of her creation as a thing in itself. When Bogost presents his idea of playgrounds, he does so to support and explain his promotion of a relation to the world rooted in object-oriented ontology, a relation that emphasizes a focus on the world and its content in itself, rather than on the subject and their experience of it. Bogost wants to employ what he calls “worldfullness” (as opposed to mindfullness), in which a striving to look at the world and take it seriously, for what it is, is suggested as a requirement for having it speak back to us. So also in Rosas’ text, in which he argues that resonance can never occur in an “aggressive” relationship to the world, a relationship in which we try to control and exploit our material reality to feed our subjective experience of it. Instead, Rosa argues, we can only experience resonance when we are not in full control of the world around us, when we decide to view it on its own terms, and when the world speaks back to us, only when it wants.
For a player to have a resonant experience in a game, they cannot be in full control of it. But they also cannot be completely devoid of all their ability to influence it, as that would render their actions meaningless (Rosa uses the term “semicontrollability” to point to the balance that is required for resonance to occur). The player must accept the world for what it is, with its own internal rules and logic, and play by that logic, to have a chance of it speaking back to them.
For this to be possible, a game must first contain its own inner logic and have a sort of “life of its own” that is disconnected from the player and their actions and desires. An interesting world seems to have its own goals, which might, on rare occasions, align with those of the player, but that more often does not. To design such a world requires employing a sort of antithesis to user-centered design, a design that, to a large extent, disregards the goals of the player and operates instead based on its internal logic (Bogost actually spends a portion of his book criticizing user-centered product design for this reason). A world that has a life of its own, but that presents the occasional opportunity of connection only to those willing to accept its logic.
So, players want resonant experiences. They want to feel the world speaking back to them. But no game can guarantee them that, as it can only occur in interaction with something that takes on a life of its own, that has a will separate from themselves. Therefore, a designer must partially let go of trying to bring a certain experience into reality. They must partially disregard the interest of the player, and instead simply invite them into a world that takes on a life of its own, planting opportunities for partial agency, but not for control.
Perhaps, learning to create such worlds can help us understand the uncontrollable nature of resonant experiences not just in games, but in life generally.