This is my ninth monthly Patch Wednesday post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or not posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas and invite comments. 

The series is called Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies.

I have come to think that there are four main theories of “fun”, or at least experience in video games. They are: Rules, Fiction, Social and Feel. When I teach game studies classes, I usually invite students to mention their favorite game and then discuss which of the categories it falls under. The categories are not exclusive, but they have their own favorite game examples.

Here they are:

1) Rules

This is still the primordial theory of games. According to this theory, (video) games are by definition (or essentially) rule-based structures, and the player’s experience hinges on rules that create interesting mental challenges for the player. This theory tends to claim that it has identified something unique about games.

It can of course then be extended from the description to the prescriptive, and claim that because games are defined by the presence of rules, all games  should be centered on rules, with all other possible design elements (say, Fiction) being negative agents that dilute the purity of a game.

This theory has typically been promoted by game designers and people wishing to identify games as a unique art form. It is also very hard to imagine teaching video game design without it.

Favorite example: Go, StarCraft, Tetris.

2) Fiction

Another classic, this theory has some backing from especially the humanities, and argues that video games first and foremost are about experiencing, and possibly feeling immersed in, stories and fictions. This theory is particularly useful when we think about games in a cross-media perspective.

This theory has typically been promoted by literary and film scholars.

Favorite game examples: Final Fantasy, Uncharted, BioShock.

3) Social

This is a slightly different theory in that it doesn’t invoke the game’s content, but the social sphere around it. The paradigmatic game genre for this theory is currently MMOs. And this is sensible as an explanation of why many players keep returning to this type of game.

The social theory also has a stronger version in which the social sphere isn’t simply something around the game, but it defines or is the game, both for multi- and single player games. (Mikael Jakobsson and Anne Mette Thorhauge are probably the main proponents of this strong version.)

Favorite game examples: World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons, Wii Sports.

4) Feel

Feel is the newer theory, and it is only really articulated Steve Swink’s book on Game Feel. Here, video games are seen as centered on the immediate sub-second experience on controlling something and receiving audio and visual feedback. This is the theory for discussing game controls, graphics and sound. (Yes, you could argue for graphics as a separate theory, but let’s just put it here).

It is also a good theory for teaching how game design often starts with narrowing down a central core mechanic which feels good as in the picture, and how designers must then add context around the core mechanic for it to remain interesting.

I suspect feel hasn’t been popular in media or literature departments because it talks about an experience which is very hard to verbalize, and hard to connect to existing theories. (Though Donald Norman’s Emotional Design has some family semblance).

Favorite game examples: Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros.

The meaning of “is”

The question of course is what we mean when we say that a video game is anything in particular. As always, there is a fine line between:

1. Proposing a particular description (“feel is one way to look at it”).
2. Insisting on a particular description (“to ignore the social is to ignore the lived experience of players”).
3. Insisting in having identified an essential component of video games (“without rules, there is no game”). (Though the rigid designator comes up here: it just is easier to claim a central position for rules than for, say, 3d graphics).
4. Insisting that all video games should be made with a particular theory in mind.

There are other theories, of course, but I think these are the four dominant ones at the moment, November 2014.

PS. This 4-part list does not replace the (cough) ludology-narratology debate or the rules/fiction distinction in Half-Real. The rules/fiction distinction is about how the players conceptualize the game that they encounter. Feel and Social are theories about other aspects of game-playing.

This is my eighth monthly Patch Wednesday post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or not posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas and invite comments. 

The series is called Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies.

It is easy, and probably common, to think of video game history as a series of innovations that propel video games “forward”, allowing for new experiences and expressions. (Not that anyone has written such a history in any significant detail.)

But what about in between? There are periods of time where, as I like to say, we know what video games are.

Four voices
When I took music classes in high school, I learned to do 4-voice arrangements of church hymns according a set of rules for harmony and voicing. Though it has later come in handy in weird ways, I can’t say that I appreciated learning those rules at the time, as it was rules about music that I did not care much for in the first place. In music theory, what I learned relates to the common practice period, ca 1600-1900, which is considered a stable period with certain rules about harmony, well-known chords and so on. One of the famous rules of the period is that two voices/instruments cannot follow each other in octave or fifth intervals. This was strange to me as I listened to much music, say Led Zeppelin, which often has the bass and the guitar playing riffs in unison.

I think I would have appreciated the lessons much more if I’d understood that the rules were a description of a particular musical style, and that all musical styles have sets of rules for what can and cannot be done.

Common practice periods in video games
And so it seems that video games have similar “common practice periods”, where video games, or at least certain video game genres, follow a set of rules. For example, the shooter genre is still in a common practice period where we expect a new game to contain both a single and multiplayer game, with the single-player game lasting between 10 and 30 hours for story-heavy games, and <10 hours for multiplayer-focused games. In addition, we expect such games to be promoted on ever “better” graphics, allow us to shoot firearms, collect more of them, manage ammunition, and so on.

In a bigger perspective, another common period was from 1980 to 2005 where we knew that video games were sold in boxes, aimed at a particular demographic, and (also) promoted on “better” graphics.

Does it follow that changing distribution models have bigger influence on the stability of game design than technology does?

And we can keep zooming out: When I was writing my game definition I dealt with the issue of change by not claiming that I had defined everything called games for all time, but rather that I was identifying a particular “classic game model” that had been dominant for several thousand years.

Institutions behind common practice
Going back to music, periods of stability may often have some institutionalized codification where rules are followed not only by observation, but may be explicitly taught to practitioners, and sometimes enforced. Video game educations and game design books can then also serve to define and maintain a period of common practice, though I suspect that many contemporary video game educations are more fascinated with breaking the rules than with maintaining them. Though that can become a type of common practice by itself, a “tyranny of pixelated platformers”.

That would be another type of history to write, one where we examine what it was that made certain periods of video game history so stable.

This is my seventh monthly Patch Wednesday post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or not posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas and invite comments. 

The series is called Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies.

Here is a figure from Brian Schrank’s interesting new book Avant-garde Videogames. In the book, Schrank discusses various types of art-world avant-garde, and examines how they correspond to experimental video games.

Schrank structures the discussion around two axes of radical-complicit and political-formal. (I am personally placed in the bottom-right mainstream formal and complicit quadrant, but that’s OK.) He acknowledges the simplicity of this model and has many nuanced points and observations.

But let me just look at the political-formal axis. It represents video games, and art, such that a video game is either political or it is a formal experiment. Art historians can talk about this question at great length, but it is certainly an idea that was also expressed in 1940’ies denunciations of experimental, formalist, art. In that case, a powerful political entity felt threatened by experimental art and therefore decreed that artists should simply stop experimenting and rather only express established ideas in well-known form. And of course, the well-worn argument about art for art’s sake – that art should be judged on its own terms outside politics – sets up a similar opposition between the political and the formal experiment.

But is this really what we see in video games? Consider any of the high-profile political video game such as Howling Dogs, Dys4ia, Unmanned, September 12th, Cart Life. All of these games are highly experimental in form and political. In fact, it is clear that their political messages are expressed through their experimental form. And it seems the formal-political distinction breaks down in most of the obvious examples of political video games.

Fortunately, there is an alternative view which has much more explanatory power. Here is Salman Rushdie reviewing Gabriel Garcia Márquez’ novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Rushdie says that magical realism (where supernatural events naturally happen in seemingly realist settings) is a way of expressing experiences that cannot be expressed through established more forms such as plain naturalism. The formal experiment is necessary in order to express political ideas and overlooked experienced:

El realismo magical, magic realism, at least as practised by Márquez, is a development out of Surrealism that expresses a genuinely ‘Third World’ consciousness. It deals with what Naipaul has called ‘half-made’ societies, in which the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new, in which public corruptions and private anguishes are somehow more garish and extreme than they ever get in the so-called ‘North’, where centuries of wealth and power have formed thick layers over the surface of what’s really going on. In the works of Márquez, as in the world he describes, impossible things happen constantly, and quite plausibly, out in the open under the midday sun. (Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands)

This, I think, is a more convincing way of seeing the issue. New and experimental literary forms are necessary because they are the only way to express complex and hitherto unexpressed experiences. Political video games are also formal experiments in game design because this is the only way to express new and radical ideas. There is no opposition between the political and the formal experiment. Fortunately, for think how drab the world would be otherwise.

PS. And this is not a criticism of Schrank’s very useful book. It’s just a discussion of a particular view on the relation between formal experiment and political expression.

My monthly Patch Wednesday series is on holiday this July.

To think about over the summer: What are the unanswered questions in video game studies? What are the questions that we have not answered as well as we imagine?