The Ludologist

Congratulations to Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern for releasing their interactive drama, Fa?ade, today.

Official announcement. Download, already!

The video of our shared Eric Zimmerman / Jesper Juul presentation from GLS is available online.

Click here, look for “Playing Culture”. For around 20 minutes of the talk you see an empty room as the game was being played in the hallway outside…

(I still need to work on my microphone technique.)

It was interesting having to switch between talking and having the audience play a game, but I think we managed with a reasonably low glitch and uncertainty rate.

A collection of DiGRA impressions and roundups:

Grand Text Auto with pictures.
Greg Costikyan on L vs. N.
Miscellany.
David Thomas at Denver Post on my talk.
Games without Frontiers.
Gamasutra.
Terra Nova.
Reality Panic.

And more.

I am amazed so see how the blogs have become our public forum for discussion. Somewhere between 2003 and 2005, click.

With no particular claims for completeness, some impressions from the DiGRA 2005 conference (insert caveats here):

T.L. Taylor‘s opened the conference with a very methodologically oriented keynote arguing that video games should be examined in their situated context (I was taking paper notes at the time, so the phrasing may have been different). As a prime example, trains in Everquest (a player being followed by a large number of monsters) is something that is constantly negotiated – what is a train; what a train means, etc… can only be understood as the meaning the player community assigns to a train.

This was the opening shot in what I think was the main issue of the conference – what are we / should we be studying?

Janet Murray‘s Friday keynote (available here) discussed two different things.
First, she proposed The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies, where she described a “formalist” school of “game essentialism”, of which I seem to play some part:

Because the game essentialists want to privilege formalistic approaches above all others, they are willing to dismiss many salient aspects of the game experience, such as the feeling of immersion, the enactment of violent or sexual events, the performative dimension of game play, and even the personal experience of winning and losing.

A few different things here:
1) It is true that there is a certain school of thought that dismisses all representation in games as irrelevant fluff. I have written a short history that idea in my upcoming book, and I also discussed it in my DiGRA paper this year (see below). I was not the target of this criticism, but I am guilty as charged anyway. I have written much on fiction in games since then though.

2) But Murray is wrong to assume that her position is the only one that discusses the experience of playing games. I have certainly written about the experience of winning and losing in my 2003 DiGRA paper.

3) Interestingly enough, some of the earlier criticism against excessive use of narratology (see Thomas Pavel’s book Fictional Worlds) describes narratology as problematic because it focuses on the alleged formal properties of a text at the expense of referentiality, experience etc… Some historic reversals here.

Celia Pearce
Celia Pearce offered peace. I am for peace. More at Greg Costikyan’s blog.
But I also think I share a basic focus with Celia.

Formalism & essentialism
Thoughout the conference, and during the final discussion, it seemed like quite a few researchers saw themselves as working against the dual enemies of formalism and essentialism (bad). The preferred alternative was looking at games as situated (good).

Now, what does this mean?
Let’s say formalism means looking at the base properties of a medium: Saying that “games have rules” is arguably a formalism, but only on the same level as saying that “music consists of sounds”, “novels consists of words”, or “cinema consists of moving images and sounds”. I am not terribly impressed with any theory that prevents us from making such basic observations.

By any count, Janet Murray is a formalist thinker about media – consider her list of the four properties of digital environments as “procedural, participatory, spatial and encyclopedic”. I have no issue with this – these are not the only things we can say about digital environments, but this list does in no way prevent her from making broader and deeper observations.

If the only thing we could say about games was that they have rules, that wouldn’t work either – but hey, nobody actually said this! The issue here is probably whether we accept that the same thing can be described in several complementary ways, or whether we think there should be one and only one way of describing games.

Essentialism is a bit more tricky, since the term is usually associated with shallow (and politically suspect) assumptions of there being some core idea that constitutes, say, femininity, African-Americanness or the character of the Danish people. OK.

But it just doesn’t work too well when discussing aesthetic phenomena – saying that “action movies center on action”, “love stories focus on love”, or “sashimi is raw fish” are technically also essentialist statements – being afraid of saying such things is not going to get us anywhere.

Why does Mario have Three Lives
My own talk was at an angle of my original abstract, and discussed why and when we accept game incoherent game fictions. The basic question was this: Why does Mario have three lives?
Answered like this: When we experience fictional worlds, we fill out the blanks using what Marie-Laure Ryan calls “The principle of minimal departure”. When something unexplained happens in a fiction, we try to come up with the simplest explanation we can. In Donkey Kong, we could technically argue that Mario has three lives because Donkey Kong is a Hinduist game with reincarnation. But in actuality, players (the ones I have asked) explain the three lives with reference to the rules of the game: “Those are the rules”, “otherwise it would be too hard”. This happens in quite a few games: Many things in games are very hard to understand with reference to the game fiction. In these cases, we explain the game events with reference to the game rules.
The big unanswered question is when and how we accept this, and when it feels like a jarring contradiction.
I think this will become a written paper in the near future.

Aesthetic Thought vs. the Study of Players
Ludology vs. Narratology is only skin deep. The actual conflict is between 1) considering games as an aesthetic art forms that we can design and discuss intersubjectively in first-person perspective and 2) considering games via a third-person perspective, observing people playing games.

I see no reason why we can’t do both, and I am sure that everybody will happily agree on this. At the final discussion, people seemed to agree that we should be methodologically inclusive, but are we?

A shot of the latte I brought to Michael Mateas & Andrew Stern’s paper on Facade and interactive storytelling at DiGRA 2005: The fortune cookie wisdom on the cup tells me that I am “Scared of Fictions”, ouch.

Andrew Stern blurry in the background.

Their presentation taught me the concept of “wicked problems”: A wicked problem is a problem which is intertwined with its own solution. That is, problems that you can only understand by looking for the solution, problems where you don’t really know what you are trying to solve before you actually solve them.

At the DIGRA 2005 in Vancouver:

A meme at the conference is the idea that there actually is no discussion called, you know, that N&L thing, and that we were all agreeing all along.

I think that we are all weary of the discussion, we all want to get it over with, and yet everybody wants the last word. And we can’t really let it go, because it is part of what keeps us all together, like a couple always arguing about the same thing yet secretly cherishing the returning disagreement.

According to my scribbled notes, Janet Murray said that the ludologists are really battling the father figure of narratology which constitutes our background. Hmm.

Celia Pearce was also referring to it as a non-discussion, and … I really have to say that I disagree.

Especially a few years ago there was a real need to take on the automatic narrativism that was floating around. I think we have wasted perhaps 25% of our research and made impossible perhaps 50% of the student projects the last 5 years due to an unhealthy obsession with narratives. If we had just talked about “player experiences” rather than trying to square the circle, we would have been much better off.

N&L: I can’t take it anymore, and it may have been a lot of shadow boxing, but there are also really serious issues that we have had to take on, head on.

I’m off to the DIGRA 2005 conference in Vancouver, where I will be giving a paper on Rules and Fiction in video games. The paper presents my core point about games being half-real. There will be examples as well as high concept theories :)

Half-Real: The Interplay between Game Rules and Game Fiction

Video games are two rather different things at the same time: They are real in that they are made of real rules that players actually interact with; that winning or losing a game is a real event. However, when winning a game by slaying a dragon, the dragon is not a real dragon, but a fictional one. To play a video game is therefore to interact with real rules while imagining a fictional world and a video game is a set of rules as well as a fictional world.
In this paper, I will examine how rules and fiction interplay in different game examples, how fiction can cue the player into understanding the rules of the game, and how rules can cue the player into imagining a fictional world. The paper aims to explain the two things that video games are made of: real rules and fictional worlds.

After that it’s the Games, Learning, and Society conference in Madison. At GLS I am doing a joint session with Eric Zimmerman:

In this unusual and provocative session, Jesper Juul and Eric Zimmerman will explore a cluster of issues surrounding social game play, game meaning, and the ways that players learn and use rules. Juul and Zimmerman are both game creators and game theorists, and for this session they bring their design and their scholarly interests to bear. Through an audience exercise, participants will not just play a game, but embody and perform games and game cultures. The game will serve as the touchstone for a presentation and discussion about the difference between game rules and game fiction, social roles that players take on during play, the role of a game’s goal in social learning and play, the relationship between learning game rules and learning the “rules of culture,” and the ability of game design as a critical too reflect upon itself as well as on important questions of games, learning, and culture. Come to this session prepared to play like you mean it.

Hope to see you there!