Category: games

Without a Goal: On Open and Expressive Games

I have posted a new article for your perusal: Without a Goal: On Open and Expressive Games.

The article discusses the recent popularity of games without goals or with optional goals, such as Sims, the Grand Theft Auto series, and World of Warcraft.
It is slated to appear in the forthcoming Videogame/Player/Text anthology edited by Tanya Krzywinska and Barry Atkins.

Without a Goal can be considered the academic version of my Game Developer’s Conference 2006 talk on A New Kind of Game. I.e. more references, fewer practical suggestions, and broader theoretical strokes.

Game Studies Volume 6, Issue 1 is Here

In time for the holidays, the new Game Studies issue has just been published.

The biggest issue yet. For the future, we are considering switching to a fixed release schedule of twice a year. (We do these things so you don’t have to.)

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Nick Montfort: Combat in Context

Mia Consalvo, Nathan Dutton: Game analysis: Developing a methodological toolkit for the qualitative study of games

Rob Cover: Gaming (Ad)diction: Discourse, Identity, Time and Play in the Production of the Gamer Addiction Myth

Hans Christian Arnseth: Learning to Play or Playing to Learn – A Critical Account of the Models of Communication Informing Educational Research on Computer Gameplay

Joris Dormans: On the Role of the Die: A brief ludologic study of pen-and-paper roleplaying games and their rules

Thaddeus Griebel: Self-Portrayal in a Simulated Life: Projecting Personality and Values in The Sims 2

Charles Paulk: Signifying Play: The Sims and the Sociology of Interior Design

Benjamin Wai-ming Ng: Street Fighter and The King of Fighters in Hong Kong: A Study of Cultural Consumption and Localization of Japanese Games in an Asian Context

Jonas Heide Smith: The Games Economists Play – Implications of Economic Game Theory for the Study of Computer Games

Hector Rodriguez: The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens

Jussi Parikka, Jaakko Suominen: Victorian Snakes? Towards A Cultural History of Mobile Games and the Experience of Movement

Games have Rules

I am at the State of Play symposium in New York, and by the end of the first panel, we witnessed a discussion about rules.

I have heard this discussion many times by now, but it tends to follow the exact structure that it did here. According to my notes:

Richard Bartle: In games, everyone must play by the rules, and people play by the rules because this gives fun that you wouldn’t have without those constraints. At the same time, there will also be people who cheat.

Conference participant 1: No no, there are many studies that players don’t play by the same rules, and don’t agree what the rules are.

Conference participant 2: Sure soccer has rules, but there is also a large aspect of cheating, so why not make the rules to accommodate this cheating?

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I think I understand it now. Let’s say there are two positions here: 1) Pro-rules, and 2) anti-rules. Pro-rules people generally make pragmatic descriptions of the gameplaying activity, and anti-rules people commonly apply a general poststructuralist skepticism towards descriptions of structure. Here’s how the discussion plays out:

  1. The discussion typically begins with a pro-rules pragmatic statement along the lines of “games have rules”.
  2. The anti-rules person interprets this as saying “games have perfect rules created by an authority, the rules are always perfect, are never ambiguous in any way, players never cheat, and players are always in absolutely perfect agreement about all aspects of the rules, including written rules, house rules, and unwritten rules” and objects on all these counts.
  3. Pro-rules response: Eh yes, players cheat, and people may be in disagreement about what the rules are, but that doesn’t change the point that players engage in games well-aware that they have rules; players negotiate rules and tend to have a clear distinction between what is playing by the rules and what is cheating.
  4. Other anti-rules response concerns the idea that game designers should make the game more open, let players create rules themselves.

Here’s what I think: I think the pro-rules people (such as myself) make general pragmatic descriptions of games and gameplaying. And I think that these descriptions just push a very well-defined button for the anti-rules people that then hear something very different from what I believe is being said.

The anti-rules position additionally tends to claim to be uniquely taking the player’s side, and to uniquely be interested in how players actually use games. Eric Zimmerman once pointed out that talking about rules tends to get you pigeonholed as “anti-player”. This is obviously wrong.

I think a much better starting position for rule research would be to say you want to look at how rules are negotiated, constructed, upheld, and broken. But not to begin by a priori privileging (oh yes) rules being upheld, or rules broken as the preferred conclusion you hope to arrive at.

MIT November 28: Half-Real, A Video Game in the Hands of a Player

I will be speaking at CMS / MIT in Boston on November 28, 2006 at 5:00 PM.
Location: 1-136

Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player

What happens when a player picks up video game, learns to play it, masters it, and leaves it? Using concepts from my book on video games, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, I will argue that video game players are neither rational solvers of abstract problems, nor daydreamers in fictional worlds, but both of these things with shifting emphasis. The unique quality of video games is to be located in their intricate interplay of rules and fictions, which I will examine across genres, from casual games to massively multiplayer games.