Edge.org presents their yearly question to various thinkers and scientists. This time it is:
Me, I changed my mind about fiction in games – I used to discount it, but then realized my error.
[Clarification: This change of mind happened between 1998 and 2003. Half-Real was written after I changed my mind.]
I find it pretty fascinating to change my mind – suddenly you are in a slightly different world from before and everything has to be reevaluated.
On the other hand, I did change my mind about changing my mind as being always-good. It can also be overdone with a certain self-indulgent gesture as in “5 minutes ago I thought X, but now I realize it’s Y, and I am never afraid to admit mistakes – that’s how great I am!”
And you don’t want to go there either. This is one of the things that makes life (and research) so amazingly interesting.
Happy 2008!
Could you expand on this?
(Oh, and happy new year!)
Once in a while you get this impulse from someone else to change your mind about something – or actually to start think about something in the first place. For me it feels like we have all these conventions and common sense in gaming that we did grow up with the last 15 years playing video games – and that now we are able to understand these conventions through game design theory (with books like Rules Of Play or Half-Real).
With this in mind I was really blown away by the last keynotes of Jonathan Blow where he’d questioned all kinds of things that we take for granted or even consider as best practices within the industry.
Lemon,
My first work on video games was based on the viewpoint that “games are not stories, never will be, and nothing beyond the pure rules of a game is relevant“. My first conference paper made this point in 1998.
This type of position later became known as “ludology”.
In 2001, I made a slightly more nuanced version of the argument, but admitting that “stories” could have some relevance on occasion.
My later work, like Half-Real (2005) takes a more balanced approach and considers the relative functions of rules and fiction in games.
In a recent paper (2007), I argue that the idea that fiction does not matter is typically a retrospective view of certain games that you have played a long time. The initial view of a game tends to be more oriented towards fiction than the final view. (With many variations between different game genres.)
That’s what I changed my mind about.
I’ll swap with you Jesper — I never thought I would get so depressed that the first reaction of many of my students to questions of games design is to leap immediately into the telling of story… Consequently I tend to respond by denying any possibility for storytelling in games. Ever.
Not exactly a change of mind, but close.
Happy New Year.
Barry
Barry, I see what you mean. That intuitive “it must be storytelling” reaction was the reason why it felt necessary to do the anti-narrative position in the first place.
To me it depends greatly on the game. In abstract games for example story is irrelevant, but then in an RPG like Bioshock where the game opens with a fantastic monologue by the game’s antagonist, it draws the player in so well that the story even becomes a meta objective for the player.
I dare anybody to make a game with a story and then the same game again without a story and prove that the one without is better.
Jesper, having just read your most recent DiGRA conference paper, ‘A Certain Level of Abstraction’ I also would like to get in on this, (as you say) indulgent self-depreciation and commend you for such a splendid series of arguments. As someone who more or less detested the ludological position on games, (owing more to the unfortunate, territorial tenor of Eskelinen and Frasca) I must also say I have come into the middle and prefer now to think of games from the perspective of “the gap” between the pure process of the codes, algorithms and rules on the one hand, and the varied textures of signifying and aesthetic elements on the other.
I did want to comment on the general thesis of this essay though, particularly the rather novel assertion that ontologically speaking, games are better understood in terms of their duration- their lifespan so to speak- over which the status of the game changes.
The idea that a game has a lifespan is perhaps not so radical to ‘experienced players’ (the ludological tendency to separate out the ‘novices’ and ‘experts’ still leaves a bad taste in my mouth) but in terms of theory I think this assertion is extremely useful to make. You then qualify this thesis by suggesting that the representational (semiotic, aesthetic, diegetic) elements of the game tend to cede importance to the abstract, rule-based relations of objects in the games’ algorithm/simulation.
These two observations made me think of another ‘media’ (if it can be so called) that can be compared in many ways to videogames- dreams. Leave the associations to fantasy and fears and neuroses for later- (though I think they are definitely very relevant also) what really is interested is that the same kind of immersion-reflection cycle is at work in dreams as well. While we are dreaming, we rarely are aware we are dreaming yet we know that we dream and can remember the strange, surreal feeling of it happening to us. But individual dreams have to be recalled in order to be interpreted. We get clinical about this activity that is ‘in media’, very un-clinical.
I suppose that theory ‘in the gap’ could be summed up by this very observation, that videogames are a kind of technological dream- and a dreaming technology. With videogames you can no more take the technology out of the dream than you can take the dream out of the technology.
Here’s shouting out to the new ludologists, theorizing in the gap and taking off in new directions.
(And Guten Tag, Barry. See you in class monday)
Whups, different Barry. (Who’d have thought there could be two?)
Eben, when saying that a player’s perception of game changes over time, I was more or less copying some old discussions in literary theory, but it is pretty obvious that what I call “themability” (the ability to have the same game appear with different graphics or dressings) is a retrospective conclusion, having played the game.
The difference between an in-the-moment and retrospective experience is present across many types of experiences, dreams included. Dreams, food, theory, etc…
Hi Jesper. I’m a high school student doing an analysis of games as literature for English Extension (Lit Studies). I was totally overwhelmed by the amount that there already is in the field – i thought it would be kinda bare!
I was just wondering why some refuse to acknowledge either ludology or narratology as having varying importance in a game? I mean, I read Gonzalo Frasca’s ‘notes from a debate that never happened’ but it still seems like there’s friction between the camps.
Another question: A Lit lecturer I know was saying that all she knew about ludology was that it made use of Lud. Rules eg. Mario will die if you fall in a hole, and Lud. Tools which undermine the rules, eg. Mario is able to use the ‘jump’ tool to get over the holes.
However after much looking I have not found evidence of this… I think she was tricking me… Is there any such layout of Ludological Rules?
I really like your work – trying to find a copy of Half-Real now. Thanks.
Matt, I think that people were exaggerating the conflict quite a bit, so later people like Gonzalo Frasca or Celia Pearce tried to smooth things out, perhaps a bit too much …
I am not familiar with that distinction between ludus rules and ludus tools.
I would usually distinguish between rules and goals (or “valorization of the potential outcomes”).
Gonzalo has a similar distinction between paida rules and ludus rules, so perhaps that was what you lecturer was referring to?
Thanks for the answers Jesper – paida rules and ludus rules are quite interesting. To follow on from your statement about people exaggerating the conflict, is this more of a link to abstract or paida games?
I would laugh if anyone told me computer chess told a story, but if your take Braid (and Jon Blow with all his ego) the final level seems to use the game elements to support the story… I guess what i really mean is, if we can’t view the story in games through narratology, what can we view it through?
I don’t think I’m making sense. Thanks for your patience.