The Ludologist

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.

Book Details

 

Happy to announce Jaroslav Švelch’s new book in the Playful Thinking series, second book this week!

Player vs. Monster: The Making and Breaking of Video Game Monstrosity

A study of the gruesome game characters we love to beat—and what they tell us about ourselves.

Since the early days of video games, monsters have played pivotal roles as dangers to be avoided, level bosses to be defeated, or targets to be destroyed for extra points. But why is the figure of the monster so important in gaming, and how have video games come to shape our culture’s conceptions of monstrosity? To answer these questions, Player vs. Monster explores the past half-century of monsters in games, from the dragons of early tabletop role-playing games and the pixelated aliens of Space Invaders to the malformed mutants of The Last of Us and the bizarre beasts of Bloodborne, and reveals the common threads among them.

Covering examples from aliens to zombies, Jaroslav Švelch explores the art of monster design and traces its influences from mythology, visual arts, popular culture, and tabletop role-playing games. At the same time, he shows that video games follow the Cold War–era notion of clearly defined, calculable enemies, portraying monsters as figures that are irredeemably evil yet invariably vulnerable to defeat. He explains the appeal of such simplistic video game monsters, but also explores how the medium could evolve to present more nuanced depictions of monstrosity.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047753/player-vs-monster/ 

Happy to announce Aaron Trammell’s new book in the Playful Thinking series I co-edit with Mia Consalvo and Geoffrey Long:

Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology

A provocative study that reconsiders our notion of play—and how its deceptively wholesome image has harmed and erased people of color.

Contemporary theorists present play as something wholly constructive and positive. But this broken definition is drawn from a White European philosophical tradition that ignores the fact that play can, and often does, hurt. In fact, this narrow understanding of play has been complicit in the systemic erasure of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) from the domain of leisure. In this book, Aaron Trammell proposes a corrective: a radical reconsideration of play that expands its definition to include BIPOC suffering, subjugation, and taboo topics such as torture. As he challenges and decolonizes White European thought, Trammell maps possible ways to reconcile existing theories with the fact that play is often hurtful and toxic.

Trammell upends current notions by exploring play’s function as a tool in the subjugation of BIPOC. As he shows, the phenomenology of play is a power relationship. Even in innocent play, human beings subtly discipline each other to remain within unspoken rules. Going further, Trammell departs from mainstream theory to insist that torture can be play. Approaching it as such reveals play’s role in subjugating people in general and renders visible the long-ignored experiences of BIPOC. Such an inclusive definition of play becomes a form of intellectual reparation, correcting the notion that play must give pleasure while also recasting play in a form that focuses on the deep, painful, and sometimes traumatic depths of living.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545273/repairing-play/

PS. Notice the cover’s great take on Roger Caillois’ Man, Play, and Games.