The Ludologist

After a 100-0 win in a girl’s basketball match, the [Christian] Covenant High School in Dallas issued a statement apologizing:

“It is shameful and an embarrassment that this happened. This clearly does not reflect a Christlike and honorable approach to competition.“

The team coach issued his own statement:

“In response to the statement posted on The Covenant School Web site, I do not agree with the apology or the notion that the Covenant School girls basketball team should feel embarrassed or ashamed. We played the game as it was meant to be played. My values and my beliefs would not allow me to run up the score on any opponent, and it will not allow me to apologize for a wide-margin victory when my girls played with honor and integrity.“

The coach was fired.

This is an interesting philosophical issue: Given that basketball rules state nothing about avoiding large-margin victories (the team played the game as “it was meant to be played”), is the winning team under obligation to avoid a humiliating victory?

My opinion is that this really depends on who is playing and the expectations for the game:

• If I am playing basketball against a 6-year old child, I have a clear obligation not to win by a large margin (and probably not to win at all). This holiday, I let several young family members beat me at musical chairs, for example.
• If teenagers play a game with the expectation that it is a competitive game, I don’t see an obligation to hold back. At least lacking any shared expectation or convention that large victories should be avoided.

Here is a way of illustrating the conundrum:

In my forthcoming book on casual games (“A Casual Revolution”), I propose that playing a multiplayer game is to balance three different ways of framing a game:

1. Seeing a game as goal orientation means that players should try to win (also by as large a margin as possible).
2. Seeing a game as experience means that players should try to keep the game interesting by creating some uncertainty about the outcome.
3. Seeing a game as a way to manage the social situation will mean that you will have to play somewhat badly in order not to win against a fragile child or your boss if you believe this will have negative repercussion.

The discussion around the 100-0 game is pretty straightforward then: The Covenant team and coach focused on frame 1 – trying to win, but critics claim that they should have focused more on frame 3 – managing the social situation by making sure that the other team did not feel humiliated. (The critics overlooking the fact that if the Covenant team had openly played badly, this would have been deeply condescending and humiliating as well.)

The frustration of the coach (and the team presumably) comes from the fact that two mutually contradictory things are asked from them:

1. They are asked to produce convincing victories, thereby making their school and community proud of them.

3. But critics allege that they should also be careful not to produce too convincing victories.

The whole issue stems from the fact that the Covenant school is unresolved about what it is asking from its sports team. Does the school want them to win (frame 1) or to be nice (frame 3)?

With contradictory expectations and in the absence of any guideline for navigating between the two, this is what happens.

Full story at ESPN. Opinion piece. (Via Philosophy of Sport which also has a discussion).

The International Journal of Roleplaying has launched its inaugural issue. Many interesting articles.

“The International Journal of Role-Playing is a response to a growing need for a place where the varied and wonderful fields of role-playing research and – development, covering academia, the industry and the
arts, can exchange knowledge and research, form networks and communicate.”

Editorial

The International Journal of Role-Playing is a response to a growing need for a place where the varied and wonderful fields of role-playing research and development, covering academia, the industry and the arts, can exchange knowledge and research, form networks and communicate.

Hitchens, Michael and Anders Drachen. The Many Faces of Role-Playing Games

By examining a range of role-playing games some common features of them emerge. This results in a definition that is more successful then previous ones at identifying both what is, and what is not, a role-playing game.

Montola, Markus. The Invisible Rules of Role-Playing. The Social Framework of Role-Playing Process

This paper looks at the process of role-playing that takes place in various games. Role-play is a social activity, where three elements are always present: An imaginary game world, a power structure and personified player characters.

Champion, Erik. Roles and Worlds in the Hybrid RPG Game of Oblivion

Single player games are now powerful enough to convey the impression of shared worlds with social presence and social agency. This paper explores a framework for defining virtual worlds.

Pittman, Jason and Christopher Paul. Seeking Fulfillment: Comparing Role-Play In Table-top Gaming and World of Warcraft

Through ethnographic research and a survey of World of Warcraft (WoW) players, this study assess the relative fulfillment and frequency of online and offline role-playing for WoW players.

Harviainen, J. Tuomas. A Hermeneutical Approach to Role-Playing Analysis

This is an article about viewing role-playing games and role-playing game theory from a hermeneutical standpoint.  In other words, it presents one view on how a role-playing situation can be seen as a set of texts.

Some people get the red ring of death on the Xbox 360.

Me? For ages I have been unable to add new points to my Xbox live account – I invariably get the error Please try again later. Status code: 80169d94.

I keep emailing and calling Microsoft, who invariably tell me to try again later or update my address information, but nothing ever changes.

Googling for it reveals that I am not the only one.

At least WiiWare works, and I can still buy games in physical packages (so retro).

If you know your film history, you probably know that historically, many theorists and practitioners were strongly opposed to the use of sound in film as they felt it would detract from the special qualities of film.

Here is Paul Rotha in 1930:

No power of speech is comparable to the descriptive value of photographs. The attempted combination of speech and pictures is the direct opposition of two separate mediums, which appeal in two utterly different ways …
Immediately a voice begins to speak in a cinema, the sound apparatus takes precedence over the camera, thereby doing violence to natural instincts.

Why am I quoting this? It struck me how much I was replicating this in an early paper on games and narratives:

But computer games are not narratives. Obviously many computer games do include narration or narrative elements in some form. But first of all, the narrative part is not what makes them computer games, rather the narrative tends be isolated from or even work against the computer-game-ness of the game.

Are these arguments similar?

• Yes – both arguments assume a core feature or core interest in a medium.
• No  – you really can have sound and image at the same time, whereas especially early uses of narrative (cut-scenes) worked by taking control away from the player, making the game less of a game.

Please discuss.

Game Studies issues 08/02 is here.

Contents

• Audio and Gameplay: An Analysis of PvP Battlegrounds in World of Warcraft by Kristine Jørgensen
• A Procrustean Probe by Tom Tyler
• Virtual Torture: Videogames and the War on Terror by Mark L. Sample
• Defining Game Mechanics by Miguel Sicart
• Novices, Gamers, and Scholars: Exploring the Challenges of Teaching About Games by José P. Zagal, Amy Bruckman

Happy kids:

My spider sense says that some of these are faked, but which ones?