New paper: The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece

My keynote presentation from the 2008 Philosophy of Computer Games conference can now be downloaded here: The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece.

This is my attempt at giving some nuance to recent discussions about the magic circle of games. Abstract:

In a common description, to play a game is to step inside a concrete or metaphorical magic circle where special rules apply. In video game studies, this description has received an inordinate amount of criticism which the paper argues has two primary sources: 1. a misreading of the basic concept of the magic circle and 2. a somewhat rushed application of traditional theoretical concerns onto games. The paper argues that games studies must move beyond conventional criticisms of binary distinctions and rather look at the details of how games are played. Finally, the paper proposes an alternative metaphor for game-playing, the puzzle piece.

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Postscript

With The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece I had been hoping to create a paper as balanced as my old Games Telling Stories? paper, wherein I would elaborate the merits of pro and con arguments concerning the magic circle.

What I found was that in hindsight, the games vs. stories discussion was the easy one: The participants agree that there exists something called games, and that we can discuss whether or not these can be considered stories.

The discussion of the magic circle is much harder because the participants fundamentally disagree about the terms of the discussion: Proponents of the magic circle metaphor consider it interesting to examine to what extent a game session is or isn’t separate from something outside that game session. Critics of the magic circle, on the other hand, have objections to the question itself because they assume that the metaphor is fundamentally problematic for various historical and theoretical reasons that I mention in the paper.

In other words, the magic circle discussion has not happened so far. In the paper, I hope to have opened a tiny hole in the wall through which future conversations can take place.

The PS3: Difficult on Purpose?

A few people are up in arms over a comment made by Sony’s Kaz Hirai to the effect that Sony deliberately made the PlayStation 3 a difficult console to develop for:

We don’t provide the ‘easy to program for’ console that (developers) want, because ‘easy to program for’ means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is, what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?

I think it does make sense from a certain angle: If game quality improves throughout the lifetime of a console, owners are more likely to keep buying more games rather than getting the latest new console from competitor X.

The counter-argument would be that developers are usually able to improve quality over time even with easy-to-use development tools.

Certainly, it is a strategy that works best if you start from a position of absolute strength – which Sony to their own surprise didn’t this time around.

Fashion in World of Warcraft

My old colleagues Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca have published a study on the role of fashion in World of Warcraft, “‘Because it just looks cool!’ Fashion as character performance: The Case of WoW“.

Findings: WoW players care about the way they look, even when the look has no effect on stats – and that goes for men as well as women.

Abstract:

“This paper explores the neglected area of clothing and fashion in computer games, particularly MMORPGs, which we claim is an important aspect of game aesthetics and player performance. Combining knowledge from the cultural studies of fashion with a study of the function and importance of clothing in the gameworld World of Warcraft (WoW), and drawing on qualitative methods, we argue that fashion in an online gameworld like WoW is a vehicle for personal storytelling and individualization.”

This also gives me the opportunity to mention the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, another interesting academic journal on games.

Obama on the Check Mii Out Channel

Behold one of the top characters on the Check Mii Out Channel (that’s the Mii Contest Channel for some of you).

I haven’t been following the channel that closely, but I think Obama is the first politician to be voted a top Mii.

Obama Mii

This post is therefore not your everyday “look how far video games have come”-post, but “look how far politics has come –  it is now so popular that we have politicians made into cute game characters”.