ABSTRACT
Games are merely a means to an end. On their own, games are just artifacts—clumps of cardboard or bags of bits. Games are worthless unless people play them. The game is not the experience. The game enables the experience, but it is not the experience. This is a hard concept for some people to grasp. Early in the twentieth century, a schism in psychology developed. On one side of the battle were the behaviorists who focused only on measurable behavior, taking a “black box” approach to the study of the mind. Their primary tool was objective, controlled experimentation. On the other side were the phenomenologists, who study what game designers care about most—the nature of human experience and “the feeling of what happens.” Anthropology is another major branch of study about human beings and what they think and do. It takes a much more holistic approach than psychology, looking at everything about people including their physical, mental, and cultural aspects.
