The Ludologist

Out now in the Playful Thinking series: Peter D. McDonald: Run and Jump, The Meaning of the 2D Platformers.

We are proud to present Peter D. McDonald’s new book.

“How abstract design decisions in 2D platform games create rich worlds of meaning for players.

Since the 1980s, 2D platform games have captivated their audiences. Whether the player scrambles up the ladders in Donkey Kong or leaps atop an impossibly tall pipe in Super Mario Bros., this deceptively simple visual language has persisted in our cultural imagination of video games. In Run and Jump, Peter McDonald surveys the legacy of 2D platform games and examines how abstract and formal design choices have kept players playing. McDonald argues that there is a rich layer of meaning underneath, say, the quality of an avatar’s movement, the pacing and rhythm of level design, the personalities expressed by different enemies, and the emotion elicited by collecting a coin.

To understand these games, McDonald draws on technical discussions by game designers as well as theoretical work about the nature of signs from structuralist semiotics. Interspersed throughout are design exercises that show how critical interpretation can become a tool for game designers to communicate with their players. With examples drawn from over forty years of game history, and from games made by artists, hobbyists, iconic designers, and industry studios, Run and Jump presents a comprehensive—and engaging—vision of this slice of game history.”

20th Anniversary notes on The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness.

What is a Game?

What is a game? Early in my career, people wanted to know, but should I try to respond? In The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness I tried to give an answer that was attentive to the ways we use the word “game”, open to change, and useful for generating new kinds of games. I presented the paper as a keynote talk at 2003 DiGRA conference in Utrecht, an early career highlight for me.

What is a game? Many people had already tried to answer the question and I had read many previous game definitions. Though I thought the paper was comprehensive, it turned out that I had overlooked writers like Celia Pearce and Clark C. Abt, but I felt that the previous definitions shared difficulties both in dealing with history and with the difference between games and other structured activities, such as going to the university.

What is a game? I wanted to answer this by examining points of contention about what we consider, or don’t consider, a game – that is, I made descriptive definition of how the category of games functions, rather than a static and prescriptive one.

Technically, I think the paper did three things that were different than previous attempts. (It is entirely possible that all makers of game definitions consider themselves unique.)

1. To account for change and to be open to new experiments coming along, the paper describes a classic game model, and shows how video games are moving beyond that model.
2. My definition is a cluster definition where I show how removing different components will give different changes, such that it becomes open to examine borderline cases and change. For example, with the continued growth of persistent games with RPG-like stats that remain over time – think all mobile games – “outcome” now feels less central to games than it did in 2003.
3. Where previous writers had argued about whether games were productive or unproductive, I say that games are really defined by this discussion, by the fact that we can negotiate the consequences of playing.[1]

Changing Meaning in Real-time

Reading the text again, it is striking that three terms have changed meaning during the intervening twenty years:

Telephone: A student asked me why the paper states that telephones aren’t used for playing games, since this seems to be common today. A good question, but at the time of writing, “telephone” meant a landline phone. We did have mobile phones and we played games on them, but not on landline “telephones”.

Hypertext fiction: In 2003, “Hypertext Fiction” referred to experimental literature such as Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl. I discuss in Handmade Pixels how 1990s hypertext fiction writers felt it important that, to be taken seriously, their works were not considered games, and in this paper, I respect that and place them outside the classic game circle. Yet appearing during the 2010s, the genre of Twine games had some surface similarities to Hypertext Fiction, but were either structured as games, or referred to game conventions (sometimes by rejecting them). Though Twine games are sometimes also called “hypertext fiction”, I always argue that Twine games are games.

Game: Much experimental work eschewed the “game” label twenty years ago, perhaps because it sounded unserious, but today we have much more work that tries to make games into something new, and my original paper did fully not anticipate Modern Art-like strategies of working in the game tradition by strongly breaking with that tradition. I think experimental game work can exist in part because some of the stigma of “games” has disappeared, and while – as I note in the paper – games such as SimCity were originally not classed as game by the creator, there is now widespread agreement that a game can be an open-ended simulation that does not need to tell you what is good or bad (“valorization of outcomes”), and that game form can also serve to deliver fixed experience over which you have minimal control and responsibility as a player (“player attached to outcome”), as with the walking simulator genre. Game, or especially video game, can now stand for any audiovisual experience with player input.

Pedagogy

I work from the assumption that it is easier to break the rules if you know them, so I expose students to conventions in different genres and ways to break them, so that students can decide how (and if) they want their games to be experimental.

How I use The Game, the Player, the World in teaching: I find the article useful for teaching, both to get students to see themselves as active thinkers about theory and games, and for creating new ideas:

1. I start by asking students to come up with their own game definitions in groups, then present it to other groups who try to identify when a definition is too narrow or too broad. This gives us a shared sense of what is strange or difficult about games.
2. I show recent games which challenge the classic game model and/or the student definitions.
3. I ask the students to create an almost-not-a-game for the next session – anything that they would be unsure whether to call a game.
4. We play these games and discuss what they make us think about the cultural category of games, and how thinking about conventions can be productive for coming up with new ideas.

 

The Game, The Player, the World taught me that it can be productive to examine fundamental questions, but often by providing different kinds of answers than expected.

 

[1] I think this was inspired by Todorov’s account of The Fantastic in literature.

PS. I still don’t think Wittgenstein said anything profound about games (or Spiel). I read him as making a much broader point – that we cannot assume that a given word has a clearly delineated meaning, which is clearly true. Unfortunately, he is usually invoked to avoid examining the complex meanings of a word, especially the word game.

Another busy week in the Playful Thinking series.

Frank Lantz’ The Beauty of Games is out now.

How games create beauty and meaning, and how we can use them to explore the aesthetics of thought.

“Are games art? This question is a dominant mode of thinking about  games and play in the twenty-first century, but it is fundamentally the wrong question. Instead, Frank Lantz proposes in his provocative new book, The Beauty of Games, that we think about games and how they create meaning through the lens of the aesthetic. We should think of games, he writes, the same way we think of literature, theater, or music—as a form that ranges from deep and profound to easy and disposable, and everything in between. Games are the aesthetic form of interactive systems, a set of possibilities connected by rules of cause and effect.

In this book, Lantz analyzes games from chess to poker to tennis to understand how games create beauty and evoke a deeper meaning. He suggests that we think of games not only as hyper-modern objects but also as forms within the ancient context of artistic production, encompassing all of the nebulous and ephemeral qualities of the aesthetic experience.”

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262048538/the-beauty-of-games/

In the Playful Thinking series we are proud to announce David B. Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman’s new book Mainstreaming and Game Journalism.

“Why games are still niche and not mainstream, and how journalism can help them gain cultural credibility.

Mainstreaming and Game Journalism addresses both the history and current practice of game journalism, along with the roles writers and industry play in conveying that the medium is a “mainstream” form of entertainment. Through interviews with reporters, David B. Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman retrace how the game industry and journalists started a subcultural spiral in the 1980s that continues to this day. Digital play became increasingly exclusionary by appealing to niche audiences, relying on hardcore fans and favoring the male gamer stereotype. At the same time, this culture pushed journalists to the margins, leaving them toiling to find freelance gigs and deeply ambivalent about their profession.

Mainstreaming and Game Journalism also examines the bumpy process of what we think of as “mainstreaming.” The authors argue that it encompasses three overlapping factors. First, for games to become mainstream, they need to become more ubiquitous through broader media coverage. Second, an increase in ludic literacy, or how-to play games, determines whether that greater visibility translates into accessibility. Third, the mainstreaming of games must gain cultural legitimacy. The fact that games are more visible does little if only a few people take them seriously or deem them worthy of attention. Ultimately, Mainstreaming and Game Journalism provocatively questions whether games ever will—or even should—gain widespread cultural acceptance.”

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262375511/mainstreaming-and-game-journalism/ 

Out now in our Playful Thinking series, Pippin Barr’s The Stuff Games Are Made Of.

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