Author: Jesper

Imagina 2004 impressions

Imagina 2004.
Mostly an industry event which traditionally has focused on graphics but is beginning to have more game stuff. You could tell that a lot of resources had gone into flying in top speakers.

I thought the top event of the conference was the panel on "Video games: Where do we go next", one of those panels with a dangerously big scope but where the 90 minutes of conversation between Doug Church, Jez San (who wrote Starglider for the Amiga!), Peter Molyneux, Ken Perlin, Noah Falstein and Charles Cecil covered a lot of interesting ground. The meta-issue became the question of how to have more interesting emotional content in video games – which isn’t easy, of course. The discussion circling around AI questions and some of Perlin’s charming animation experiments. Charles Cecil was perhaps overselling the comparison between games and the movie industry, but so it goes.

Also of interest was Jordan Mechner’s keynote on Prince of Persia, and panels on MMOGs and AI.

As an academic, I was perhaps slightly marginal but had an enjoyable time talking mostly to game developers. Here’s a pic with Patrice Désilets of Prince of Persia fame, me, Jurie Horneman (Rockstar Vienna), Martin de Ronde (Guerilla Games), Robin Hunicke, off the right edge of the picture is Jordan Mechner (who I got to tell how much I loved Last Express) and to the left is the right arm of organizer Sophie Revillard:

View from outside my hotel along Avenue Princesse Grace towards the Grimaldi Forum which is hidden behind a Japanese garden thrown in for good measure:

It was only the last day I actually saw a supermarket. Until then I’d only seen jewelry stores and Lamborghini sports car dealers. With a technical term, Monaco is "obscene". It’s expensive apartments, bellboys, room service, women in fur coats. I did go to the casino and the heavy late-fifties American man next to me at the roulette placed for €500 chips, 22 came out and he confided to me:"That 22 has cost me a lot of money tonight." Apartment buildings in suitable colors and properly clean facades with spotlights on in the evening, private rooms for playing. The city is set against a background of small mountains with lots of paragliders coming down. It’s all very James Bond, really, and it’s great fun. But this makes sense on another level because there is a feeling that to stay here, you would have to become a spy or an assassin or you’d go crazy from boredom within months.

It turned out that my young researcher award was to be handed over at a ceremony in a big theatre. Lots of music and lights and I got to get called on stage after the opening of an envelope. I had planned a small speech but the slightly, ahem, in-character announcer apparently thought we weren’t quite on par with the other recipients. Here’s the speech:
It is a great honor to receive the Imagina young researcher’s award. And it’s a great honor to be here as a video game theorist at an industry event. Initially, the industry has often regarded video game theorists as conceited backseat drivers … which we are, of course. But there is a lot of synergy to be had between academia and the industry. So let’s have some more of that. Thanks.

And here’s my glass teapot award, shot from the hotel balcony:

Great fun, and it’s not every day your 8-page academic paper earns you the right to parade along other prize winners who had worked on such small matters as Prince of Persia and Lord of The Rings. Prince Albert of Monaco then congratulated each of us. Yep, ludology just is that glamorous.

On the road again

Doing a bit of quick travelling the next few weeks:
First a general talk at the State of Play conference in Newcastle on January 28th.

Then a 20-minute presentation called “Working with the Player’s Repertoire” at the Imagina trade show /conference in Monaco on February 4th. In addition to presentations by Jordan Mechner and other industry luminaries as well as discussions about the future of video game theory, the movie Blueberry will premiere “in the presence of the actors (Vincent Cassel – Michael Madsen – Juliette Lewis) “. How weird is that?

The Monaco trip is because I submitted a paper and won one of the two “young researchers’ awards”. Incidentally, this includes a prize of 750 euros, and since the event takes place in Monte Carlo, I am awfully tempted to spend it on gambling – does anyone have a foolproof system for winning at the roulette?

Pictures from the defense

OK, here are some pics from the defense:
Final points
Last slide – the main points of the dissertation.

The committee
The committee: Brian Sutton-Smith, Peter Bøgh Andersen, and Marie-Laure Ryan.

Concentration
Hard questions.

Showing off
But actually all the answers are in this book.

At the blackboard
At the blackboard with Marie-Laure Ryan: When do rules cue fiction and when does fiction cue rules?

With the committee
A brand new Ph.D. – I do look sort of happy.

Dr. Juul

Yesterday, I “successfully defended my dissertation”, so I am now a Ph.D..

I think it went as well as you can reasonably hope for, though it’s amazing how quickly 4 hours can pass. (Rumor has it that the people in my family who are not into computer games experienced time as passing rather slowly, so it goes.)

And then big party afterwards, slept late.

The people at the game research center gave me an Xbox. I’ve resisted the Xbox for a while, among other things because it’s so damn big, but now I have the big three (+ Dreamcast) all lined up.

Jesper’s law: You know you’re in the right line of work when the gift from your colleagues is a game console.

Thanks to everybody who made this possible, the friends who supported me in different ways, and to all the people who provided interesting discussion and comments during the process. You rule! Game on.

The Ph.D. dissertation abstract

Don’t know why I didn’t post it earlier, but here it is.
The defense is January 16th, 13:00 hours in room 0:19 at the IT University of Copenhagen, Glentevej 67, 2400 Copenhagen NV.

Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds

This dissertation aims to provide the basic components of a theory of video games. By video games I mean games played on personal computers, consoles, and other games played using computer processing and a video display.

The dissertation argues that there is a basic affinity between computers and games: computers and computer processing are commonly used for playing games, and the modern digital computer works as an enabler for games in the way that the printing press or cinema has worked as enablers for storytelling.

The central theme of the dissertation is the examination of video games as a constantly evolving tension between the rules and fictional worlds. The dissertation describes video games as two rather different things at the same time: video games are real in that they consist of real rules that players actually interact with; but fictional in that the worlds they project are just that, fictional. In this perspective, to playing a video game is to be engaged in the interaction with real rules while imagining a fictional world, and to design a video game is to design a set of rules as well as a fictional world.

Chapter 2 on the classic game model examines a number of previous game definitions in order to provide a new definition of games, a definition that describes games as working on three different levels: the level of the game itself, as a set of rules; the level of the player’s relation to the game; and the level of the relationship between the activity of playing the game and the rest of the world. The model is classic in the sense that almost all traditional games fit squarely inside this model, but the later part of the 20th century has seen a number of game forms – including some video games – that have developed beyond the classic model.

Additionally, the model does not tie games to any specific medium, and games are therefore transmedial in the same way that narrativity is transmedial. Video games are therefore best seen as a continuation of a long history of games, but video games have revolutionized games primarily by letting the computer handle the rules, thereby freeing players to focus on strategy and fictional worlds.

Chapter 3 on rules examines games as rule-based systems. I argue that rules in games offer affordances as well as limitations, and that the rule-based nature of games provides an explanation of the affinity between computers and games. This affinity extends to the theoretical realm in that many aspects of the rules of games can be understood through the lens of computer science. Games are basically state machines that proceed according to rules that have an algorithmic character: the rules of a game are designed to be unambiguous, definite and above discussion. I explain that this happens through a process of decontextualization, where each rule also includes a specification about what aspects of the game are relevant to the rule.

The dissertation argues that the rules of games produce an apparent paradox: while the rules of games are algorithmic, the enjoyment of a game depends on these rules presenting challenges that cannot be solved algorithmically. This takes different forms in different games but we can outline two basic ways in which games are structured and provide challenges for players: that of emergence (a number of simple rules combining to form interesting variations) and that of progression (separate challenges presented serially).

This leads to a player-oriented account of what it is to play a game: the player of a game will at any given point have a specific repertoire of strategies and methods for playing the game. Part of the attraction of a good game is that it continually challenges and makes new demands on the player’s repertoire.

Chapter 4 on fiction provides an account of the fictional aspect of games, an account that covers the spectrum from abstract games, to games with incoherent fictional worlds to games with detailed fictional worlds. To be able to discuss this spectrum, the theory of fictional worlds is employed to describe how the fictional world of a game can be optional for the player.

It is argued that the majority of games contain incoherent worlds: worlds that cannot fully be imagined due to incoherencies, but where the player accepts incoherence as a reflection of the rules of the game.

The importance of the game world varies on a scale from the highly replayable multi-player game (the emergence game) where the player gradually ceases to imagine the game world to, at the other extreme, the "complete-once" adventure game (the progression game), where the player only faces each setting once and therefore is more likely to take the fictional world at face value. A video game provides the player with the opportunity to imagine a fictional world. The player’s experience of the game world does not appear to require much consistency – the world of a game is rather something that the player can choose to imagine for a shorter or longer period of time, or not at all.

Chapter 5 on rules and fiction is the synthesis of the two previous chapters, and discusses the complex relationship between rules and fiction. While rules also construct the fictional world of a game, the fictional world also builds the player’s expectation of the rules of the game.

Rules and fiction rarely match completely: in most cases, the fictional world of the game will be larger and more detailed than what is implemented in the rules, but mismatches between rules and fictions can also generate positive effects, working as a way of playing with the player’s expectations, as a way of creating parody, and finally as a way of foregrounding the game as a real-world activity.

Methodologically, the dissertation is based upon an eclectic combination of theories and methods including literary theory, film theory, computer science, sciences of complexity, economic game theory, game design literature, and some psychology.

Readings: Game Studies #5; War as a game; The Puzzle Instinct

Some readings:

The new Game Studies issue #5 is out, with pieces by Edward Castronova, Gonzalo Frasca, Shuen-shing Lee, Laurie Taylor, and Jan Van Looy. I haven’t been that active in relation to GS lately, having been engaged in other business, but I am working on getting the reviews up and running again.

A somewhat old link, James Der Derian’s article on the description of war as a game in relation to the Iraq war.
My game definition also discusses this very briefly – I think Der Derian overstates the case a bit, but it’s certainly possible to explain why war is often described as a game: Because it shares 5 of the 6 features of my game definition: 1) Rules, 2) Variable and quantifiable Outcome, 3) Value assigned to outcomes, 4) Player Effort, 5) Player attached to Outcome. But NOT 6) Negotiable/optional consequences.

And a somewhat overlooked book, Marcel Danesi’s The Puzzle Instinct discusses the history of puzzles from ancient Egypt to the present day. I would have wished that it mentioned video games, but it’s a valuable book anyway.

255,168 ways of playing Tic Tac Toe

Tic Tac Toe (noughts and crosses) is always such a nice example.

I was thinking about strategies and decided to implement a program that plays Tic Tac Toe according to John von Neumann’s minimax. This is a kind of meta-strategy that can be used for playing any game: Always chose the move that will minimize the maximum damage that your opponent can do to you.

The algorithm works recursively by looking for the move that will let an optimally playing opponent inflict the least damage. The opponent’s strategy is calculated by way of the same algorithm, and so on. This means that on the first move, the computer investigates the entire game tree – it considers every single possible Tic Tac Toe game and then choses randomly among the best (least dangerous) moves.

Have a go at http://www.half-real.net/tictactoe/

    • Here’s a document with every single game of Tic Tac Toe. It gives the following numbers.
    • 255,168 unique games of Tic Tac Toe to be played. Of these, 131,184 are won by the first player, 77,904 are won by the second player, and 46,080 are drawn.
    • This supports the intuition that it is an advantage to begin the game.
    • These numbers do not take similar board positions into account – rotating the board, mirroring it and so on. It does not matter which corner you place the first piece in, but this is not taken into account here.
    • If neither player makes a mistake, the game is drawn (but we knew that already).

 

  • This is an exercise in examining the objective properties of a game. There are two interesting sides to this:
  • 1) The objective properties of Tic Tac Toe really matter for our enjoyment of it: It is a boring game because there are so relatively few combinations.
  • 2) On the other hand, humans clearly play the game in a different way than the computer. The computer’s playing style lets us make some observations about how humans play games.
  • To the computer, the first move is the most complicated (takes around a second on my 2ghz machine). This is unlike human players who seldomly have any problem deciding what to do on the first move.
  • The program assumes that the opponent does not make any mistakes. Humans do make mistakes, of course, so adding some amount of randomness in algorithm would probably make it a better player against human opponents.
  • The number of possible unique games is larger than I would have guessed, but this indicates how we humans are very good at identifying patterns. Faced with the huge number of variations in a game like this, we simply identify some general properties of Tic Tac Toe: Beginning in the middle is a good thing; if your opponent begins in the middle, you must pick the corner; a good way of winning is to threaten two squares simultaneously.
  • We think about games like this in fuzzy and chaotic ways – this gives us a lot of flexibility.
  • It is the same fuzziness that leads us into making stupid mistakes.
  • On some level, it is our fuzzy way of playing games that allows us to have fun. If we simply played with the unimaginative brute force strategy that the computer uses, it would definitely be work rather than play – and nobody would have any fun playing against us, for that matter.