Game Studies Volume 12, Issue 2

And just in time for the new year, Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research has just published its latest issue (Volume 12, Issue 2, December 2012). All articles are available at http://gamestudies.org/1202/

Contents

The Algorithmic Experience: Portal as Art
by Michael Burden, Sean Gouglas
http://gamestudies.org/1202/articles/the_algorithmic_experience

Art requires criticism. Portal transcends videogame tropes: it explores the human struggle against algorithmic processes through complex parallels between the player, Chell, the companion cube, and GLaDOS. Increasingly complex frustrations are experienced directly through the game’s aesthetic of play – a freedom bounded by algorithmic control.

In the Double Grip of the Game: Challenge and Fallout 3
by Sara Mosberg Iversen
http://gamestudies.org/1202/articles/in_the_double_grip_of_the_game

A broad notion of challenge, conceptualized as both demanding and stimulating situations, is here proposed as a basis for holistic analysis of digital games which takes both the games’ mechanic and semiotic dimensions into equal account. The offered framework is demonstrated through application in an analysis of Fallout 3.

Death Loop as a Feature
by Olli Tapio Leino
http://gamestudies.org/1202/articles/death_loop_as_a_feature

This essay is a critical examination of the paradigmatic approach of interpreting computer games as games accessible for analysis and critique through ‘research-play’. The essay justifies a differentiation between game design research and game studies, and explores the avenues of analysis and critique of single-player computer games for the latter.

A Study of User Interface Modifications in World of Warcraft
by Sean Targett, Victoria Verlysdonk, Howard J. Hamilton, Daryl Hepting
http://gamestudies.org/1202/articles/ui_mod_in_wow

This paper studies the effect that user created interfaces have had on WoW and its community of users through an online survey issued to WoW players. The survey results illustrate the varied nature of this community and provide information that may aid in the creation of communities dedicated to modifying the interfaces of other software packages.

Best Before: The Red Queen Dilemma of Preserving Video Games?
by Staffan Björk
http://gamestudies.org/1202/articles/bjork_book_review

Review of Best Before: videogames, supersession and obsolescence. James Newman, 2012. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, New York.

Circles tend to return
by David Myers
http://gamestudies.org/1202/articles/myers_book_review

Review of The magic circle: Principles of gaming & simulation. Jan H. G. Klabbers, 2009. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

Forever a moral subject
by Torill Mortensen
http://gamestudies.org/1202/articles/mortensen_book_review

Review of The Ethics of Computer Games. Miguel Sicart, 2009. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Well Played 2.1

By the way, Well Played 2.1 is out:

Well Played: a journal on video games, value and meaning
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/content/volume-2-number-1

Stories from the Seats of Power: Chopper versus Chopper as dueling Travelogues
Matthew Thomas Payne, Michael Fleisch

Unbroken Immersion: The Skyrim Experience
David Simkins, Seann Dikkers, Elizabeth Owen

Super Meat Boy Special Bonus Pack
Caro Williams

Well Suffered
Moses Wolfenstein

Super Meat Boy: A Love Letter
Matthew Thomas Payne, Stephen Campbell

Response to Matthew Thomas Payne and Stephen Campbell’s “Super Meat Boy”
Moses Wolfenstein

Response to Moses Wolfenstein’s “Well Suffered”
Matthew Thomas Payne, Stephen Campbell

A Visual History of Genres and Platforms

Only the other day we were discussing the possibility of creating a history of game genres by parsing data.

And here, NcikVGG has posted such a history on Reddit. This is scraped from Videogamegeek. The top part concerns genres, and the bottom part concerns platforms.

Looking at it, the truth is that the platform part is more useful since the data it concerns is less prone to changing interpretations: a SNES is still a SNES after all these years. But the genre chart really shows how genre labels change over time: “arcade” is no longer a useful category, “action” and “scrolling” even less so.

 

As a supplementary chart, NcikVGG has posted a platform release history with an absolute vertical axis (counting # of releases). This one shows just how many games are being released these days compared to earlier days. It also shows us how important mobile platforms have become (though Android seems to be missing).

 

NYU Video Game Theory Seminar XVI: The History of Video Games begins in Europe in the 1980’s

You are hereby invited to the sixteenth installment of the NYU Game Center’s video game theory seminar series.

“The History of Video Games begins in Europe in the 1980’s”. Friday November 16 at 4-6pm.

Location: NYU, 721 Broadway, New York NY 10003, 9th floor conference room.
Please RSVP, see below!

If there is one thing that video game historians can agree on, it is the pivotal importance of the 1983 crash of the video game market. Yet, the crash went largely unnoticed in Europe where consoles were few and the industry only nascent. The history of European video games in 1980’s is better described as a period of unbroken growth and unprecedented experimentation in game design. In this session, our two speakers will discuss the history of early European experimental and independent games, and show how they prefigured much of what is happening in the video games today.

The two speakers of the day are Jaroslav Švelch from Charles University (Prague) and Jesper Juul from the NYU Game Center.

 

The Talks

Švelch: The Unintended Avant-garde – Two stories from 1980’s European game development

The talk discusses two separate stories from the history of computer games, united by the fact that the games at the center of these stories broke new grounds without much impact or commercial success. First, we will discuss the British game “Deus Ex Machina”, probably the first commercially released art game, designed  in 1984 by Mel Croucher, whose mission to express abstract human experiences in many ways resembles today’s indie and art games. Secondly, we will talk about the text adventure game “The Adventures of Indiana Jones on Wenceslas Square in Prague on January 16, 1989”, which preceded editorial game design of games like Raid Gaza in being a response to contemporary events – in this case, the violently suppressed anti-regime demonstration in Czechoslovakia.

 

Juul: Indie Games are from Europe

In this talk, I will return to some of the most influential European games of the mid-1980’s and show how they contain both forgotten possibilities that we have yet to bring to fruition, as well as the seeds of many of the current themes in video games, such as the independent developer, games as experiment and personal expression, and the kind of short-turnaround cloning that we find in mobile distribution channels. At the same time, the discussion of video games in the especially the UK gaming press at the time was decidedly un-romantic, avoiding any discussion of games as an art form, vehicle of expression, or indeed as anything more than utility.

 

Speaker bios

Jaroslav Švelch is a Ph.D. candidate, lecturer and researcher at Charles University, and currently also a research intern at Microsoft Research New England. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Master’s degrees in Media Studies, and Linguistics and Phonetics/Translation Studies, all from Charles University in Prague. His research focuses on social uses of entertainment technology, history of computer games, language management online and the concepts of monstrosity and adversity in virtual spaces.

Jesper Juul has been working with the development of video game theory since the late 1990’s. He is a visiting arts professor at the NYU Game Center, and has previously worked at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Lab at MIT, the Danish Design School, and at the IT University of Copenhagen. His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT press in 2005. His book A Casual Revolution examines how puzzle games, music games, and the Nintendo Wii brought video games to a new audience. His upcoming book The Art of Failure will be published in spring 2013. He maintains the blog The Ludologist on “game research and other important things”. Jesper Juul co-edits the Playful Thinking book series for MIT Press.


The theory seminars are aimed at researchers, industry professionals and students. Please RSVP so you can get into the building! jesper.juul (at) nyu.edu

A Visual History of Film Genres

Ever since I wrote the Swap Adjacent article on matching tile games, I have been fascinated with the challenge of writing, and visualizing the history of art forms.

Here is Larry Gomley’s History of Film poster (clearly inspired by Reebee Garofalo’s genealogy of Pop/Rock music), in which we can see the major genres developing over time.

Before we pile on the criticism (US-centric etc..), there are three major reasons for attempting things like this:

  1. It is an interesting way of condensing a large amount of information into a snapshot.
  2. The process of reducing thousands of works into an overview is in itself interesting: how are we thinking about these things, and how would we express them visually?
  3. Some of us ( me for example) were told in no uncertain terms during our university education that you just can’t write histories like this. So let’s do it!

 

Douglas Wilson’s PhD dissertation: Designing for the Pleasures of Disputation

I missed this the first time around, but Douglas Wilson has posted his PhD dissertation, Designing for the Pleasures of Disputation.

Abstract

Designing for the Pleasures of Disputation -or- How to make friends by trying to kick them!

In this dissertation I explore what it might mean to design games that aim to nurture a spirit oftogetherness. My central claim is that games which are intentionally designed to be confrontational, broken, or otherwise “incomplete” can help inspire a decidedly festive, co-dependent, and performative type of play. Appropriating the political theoretical work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that her concepts of “action” and “plurality” provide useful definitions of performance and togetherness as they relate to gameplay. Drawing primarily on theories of embodied interaction, precedents from the contemporary art world, and various folk game movements, I grapple with the messy relationship between designed systems and sociocultural context. I describe how confronting this relationship head-on opens up fruitful design opportunities. Taking seriously Dave Hickey’s concept of “the pleasures of disputation,” I explore how we players and designers might transmute the acrimony of conflict into something joyful.

Via Doug’s original blog post about the dissertation.

More protection for game design

Following the Tetris lawsuit and the ongoing EA-Zynga lawsuit, Greg Lastowka comments on the ruling in the Triple Town / Yeti Town cloning case.

Here is what Greg says:

So… to the extent that a game idea is embodied in “objective elements of expression” that resemble “plot, theme, dialogue, mood, setting, pace, and character,” those things are not an “idea” and may be within the scope of copyright.  But how do we distinguish between “objective elements of expression” and the “idea” in Triple Town?  The idea part of Triple Town seems to be set forth above, but what are the “objective elements” of Triple Town?  The court doesn’t spell this out in the abstract so much as it demonstrates its understanding by applying it to the facts:

“Spry Fox’s allegations are more than adequate to illustrate plausibly the objectively similar expression embodied in Yeti Town. The object hierarchy is similar. Progressing from grass to bush to tree to hut is similar to progressing from sapling to tree to tent to cabin. Perhaps more importantly, the object hierarchy coupled with the depiction of the field of play comprise a setting and theme that is similar to Triple Town’s. A snowfield is not so different from a meadow, bears and yetis are both wild creatures, and the construction of a “plain” is not plausibly similar to the construction of a “patch,” at least as the two games depict those terms. Whether 6Waves’s choice of language in its dialog boxes is similar enough to Spry Fox’s is a closer question, but it is a least plausibly similar. There are apparent differences between games (for example, yetis are not bears and “bots” are not campfires), but a court must focus on what is similar, not what is different, when comparing two works.”

Did you follow that analysis?  The court has said that “hierarchical matching” is an idea above.  But here the court seems to place the particular “object hierarchy” within the scope of copyright. Bears are not yetis — but Yeti Town resembles Triple Town in that it mirrors a “wild creature” object within the hierarchy.  Snowfields are not meadows, but again, this is just swapping out one object for a similar object that can fit in the same slot in the hierarchy.  And the end result creates a similar “setting and theme.” I think I get what the court is doing here, but Eric says it “isn’t entirely clear” and Marty concurs about the ambiguity.

And no, nothing is settled here, since it is not specified what “similar setting and theme” is. But it does give a little more protection for game designs (and we can continue to discuss whether or not that is a good thing).

Get your Theory Fix: Game Studies 12/01 out

Technology Trees: Freedom and Determinism in Historical Strategy Games

by Tuur Ghys

This article deals with the representation of the history of technology in historical strategy games by the use of evolutionary tree diagrams called technology trees, in relation to the concept of technological determinism. It does so by comparing four important strategy games: Age of Empires, Empire Earth, Rise of Nations and Civilization IV.[more]

*

Tombstones, Uncanny Monuments and Epic Quests: Memorials in World of Warcraft

by Martin Gibbs, Joji Mori, Michael Arnold, Tamara Kohn

In this paper memorials in World of Warcraft are described and analysed. The repertoires of materials used to build these memorials within the game world are discussed. We argue that game designers draw on diverse cultural materials to create memorials that resemble and allude to traditional and contemporary forms of memorialization.[more]

*

Constitutive Tensions of Gaming’s Field: UK gaming magazines and the formation of gaming culture 1981-1995

by Graeme Kirkpatrick

The paper describes a study of UK gaming magazines in the 1980s and 90s. It argues that a structural transformation of gaming discourse can be discerned in these publications, one which has been fateful both for our understanding of what computer games are and for the identity of the modern ‘gamer’.[more]

*

The Agony and the Exidy: A History of Video Game Violence and the Legacy of Death Race

by Carly A. Kocurek

Released in 1976, Exidy’s Death Race precipitated the first moral panic in video gaming. The incident resonates with contemporary debates about video gaming and provides insight into the evolution of violent games as a topic of special concern for moral guardians and the industry.[more]

*

“Interactive Cinema” Is an Oxymoron, but May Not Always Be

by Kevin Veale

This article engages with the critical history of ‘interactive cinema’ as a term in order to explore why it has been so problematic, and uses close analysis of case-studies in the context of their affective experience to argue for a class of game texts that are neither ‘watched’ nor ‘played.’[more]
*

Pretty Hate Machines: A Review of Gameplay Mode

by Ian Bogost

Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture. Patrick Crogan, 2011. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-5334-8[more]