I have a new “hardcore” column up at the DiGRA website today. Called Goals and Life Itself, it tries to point at some of the problems and fault lines I see in video game studies today, and does so by discussing goals, vitalism, and genre theory (in a marginally provocative way, was my intention):
A short theory of goals: You are playing a card game with some friends. A few rounds into the game the group begins arguing. One player claims that the goal of the game is to gain as many tricks as possible; another claims that the goal is to avoid getting any tricks.
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One of the recurrent events the past few years has been the researcher who questions “formalist” theories of games in favor of “in-context” or “situated” methods. This is a special position, where the speaker argues that other researchers are forcing rigid theories upon a complex world, while the speaker asserts that he or she is studying actual game playing.
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This type of assertion is constantly repeated in video game studies: Most obviously in an occasional skepticism towards general theories of games in favor of localized studies, but it is also present when the game developer claims to have a perfect understanding of actual games, as opposed to the researchers locked in their ivory towers, away from the real world. The outlines of the stance can be seen when researchers reject theories from other fields in favor of their own brand new theories of games, or when yet other researchers claim to emphasize the warmth of the story compared to the coldness of the rules. The problem is that this never ends – anybody can reject other theories as cold, stale, and rigid, while declaring their own to be the real thing, a true reflection of what games are really like, of actual game playing.
Nice one.
On the whole I agree with your account – in particular your claim that “a theory of goals can give the tools to examine a wide range of games and game playing practices, including potential tensions between designer goals and player goals.”
Talk about systematically ignored methodological truths.
But as to your general skepticism towards the situationist critique I think you’re being unfair. Because:
1) Examples of formalist analyses that make claims beyond their methodological reach are pretty easy to find
2) The situation in game studies does look much like that of media studies before various situationist approaches presented highly important and (back then) very counter-intuitive results regarding the consumption/reading of media texts. Empirical gaming studies surely have been extremely rare and are likely to yield truly interesting and unexpected results.
But – and here’s where I think you may not be tough enough on the situationists – such a development will NOT occur by complaining about some alleged formalist supremacy. And it will not occur by going local to attempt to make observations about the complexity of social life among gamers.
In media studies, the development pretty much began with David Morley’s study on TV audiences. Morley set out to examine
“the degree of complementarity between the codes of the programme and the interpretive codes of various sociocultural groups… [and] the extent to which decodings take place within the limits of the preferred (or dominant) manner in which the message has been initially encoded”.
The point is that this is a structured study of a relationship; something completely different from a “thick description” of some practice. Variables, hypotheses, models and the like are the tools most likely to provide noteworthy results of a general nature.
I’ll paraphrase your sentence quoted above: If you deny the existence of goals, you’re blinding yourself to the interesting ways in which players use these goals.
It wasn’t meant as a criticism of situationism as much as a criticism of the general rhetorical figure where somebody claims that “I understand actual life in all its complexity and warmth, but everybody else is just promoting lifeless theories.
The situationist critique as you call it has just been the best example of recent, and hence the easiest target.
Here I am mocking myself doing the same: “The outlines of the stance can be seen when researchers reject theories from other fields in favor of their own brand new theories of games”.
I should say that I am always promoting practices such as playtesting in game design & development, so the idea of studying actual users is not particular alien to me.
But as to your general skepticism towards the situationist critique I think you?re being unfair.
I am not at all sceptical towards studying user in context, promise!
Your article has been printed on a fake newsprint pattern and is now used as wrapping paper for Japanese sweets and stuff… cool Internet.