The Ludologist

My essay Introduction to Game Time from Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan’s First Person is now online.

As the title suggests, the essay is an attempt at describing how time works in games: I propose that we should see game time as a combination of play time (the time taken to play the game) and event time (the time taken in the game world). I then use this simple description for examining the history of computer games and a number of different game types. For example, the standard contemporary single player game looks like this in diagram form:

While writing the essay (in 2001), I realized that in the classic arcade game, the jump between different levels is temporally unexplained: Level 2 is simply replaced by level 3, and it is often unclear what happened – the levels in the arcade game often seem to be disconnected worlds rather than events that occur on a coherent timeline:

… and actually, one of the reasons why Half-life was so great was that it consisted on one coherent world, rather than a string of levels with cheesy titles.

At the end of the day, this essay was a major turning point for me: I refrained from controversy, and simply tried to say something meaningful about games.

PS. For various reasons, I sometimes refer to this essay as Time to Play.

I’ve neglected following up on this, but as part of the EBR discussion on First Person, the whole ludology-narratology thing has reappeared. (We really need to start reminding each other “not to mention the war”.)

There’s an essay by Espen Aarseth, one by Markku Eskelinen, and reply by Stuart Moulthrop, Julian Kücklich.

Andrew Mactavish on it here. Julian Kücklich also has created a small game where ludologists try to put everything into ‘boxes’, and narratologists try to keep space ‘open’.

What surprises me is the apparent perception that ludology is against other disciplines, even possessing a “reluctance to interdisciplinary cooperation”. Of course nobody can claim to speak on behalf of “ludology”, but I don’t think anybody ever spoke against using any methods from other disciplines? The whole thing was always against simply putting games into a preexisting box called “narrative” and ignoring everything that didn’t fit.
In my view, ludology was always against “closing off” avenues for research and always for interdiscplinarity.

The strong anti-narrative thing (as in my M.A. thesis) came from the fact that this was the default humanities response to everything in the late 1990’s. Certainly at game studies conferences, things are not fortunately not like that anymore – hence Seth Gidden’s objection here – I just think that things looked differently in 2001 when the essay was written.

Here’s what I wrote in my small 2000 manifesto about the need for ludology:

But we need a separate theory of games. We need a theory that isn’t just interactive bits and pieces tacked on to narratology or dramaturgy. We lack a theoretical understanding of what games are and can, and how they relate to the narrative media such as the novel or the movie. We lack the tools to evaluate and place a computer game both historically and in relation to other games.

Ever noticed how a 10*10 pixel characters in Lemmings looks great, but that the 20k polygon players in Top Spin look really strange?
It’s called the uncanny valley: We have strong emotional response to things that are not terribly realistic, but when things look almost human, any minor discrepancy (such as weirdly bending fingers or odd-looking faces) is strongly disquieting. In other words, higher-resolution models may not look more real, but less real.

The concept comes from Masahiro Mori. Dave Bryant has a writeup on it here.

(Courtesy of Antifactory / somebody who mentioned it at the Imagina 2004 conference.)

Timothy Burke has posted two pieces on MMOs:
Rubicite Breastplate Priced to Move, Cheap: How Virtual Economies Become Real Simulations was presented at the 2001 Bristol conference (feels like it was 10 years ago). It discusses economy and players in MMOGs and I think it was the first time I saw Bartle’s player typology in action.

The newer piece is The Narrative-Nudge Model for Massively-Multiplayer Games. This one deplores current MMOGs for not being true virtual simulated worlds:

If all we want is games with no world component, no sense of world simulation, then I might suggest that developers would be wise to stick to the design philosophy of City of Heroes: a no-frills, combat-oriented design that is essentially a first-person shooter with persistent statistics. There’s nothing wrong with that: I like City of Heroes quite a lot, and play it regularly. But it’s not and will never be a virtual world. Nor will any MMOG which starts from the design foundations that all MMOGs to date have adopted.

Wired article on the current slate of MMOs being cancelled.

While it’s hard to guess how big the market can become, it’s been pretty clear from the outset that the market was becoming too crowded. The game industry just never seems to recover from the “me too” TLA syndrome. It was FPS, then RTS, and now it’s MMO.

In case you haven’t heard, Public Beta is a project for “creating and publishing better material about videogames and videogame culture”.
For the time being, Iain Simmons and James Newman are working on a book titled “Difficult Questions About Videogames”.

Here are a few questions they’ve been asking people:

Q. What is a videogame?
Q. What is gameplay?
Q. How can you tell if a videogame is rubbish?

For the last one I took the easy “enjoyment is subjective” way out, with a few modifications.

A game is rubbish when … it just is, you know.

From Scott Miller’s Game Matters: The Hollywood Reporter interviews Scott Miller on games and movies.

THR: When you say that of the 5,000-plus TV series and movies produced by Hollywood each year, only two or three have potential in the video game space, do you mean that literally?

Scott Miller: Yes. And often it’s only one — or none. In my opinion, the vast majority of games licensed from movies, TV, novels, and comic books that are aimed at older teens and adults are a waste of time for the games industry to pursue.

Look, movies and TV are storytelling media. And while games can be a storytelling medium, they are really about interactivity and gameplay. What makes a movie or a TV series successful may or may not make for a good interactive experience. For instance, “Gone With the Wind” has a great story, but I can’t think of any sort of gameplay element that would be unique to that story. That’s the hurdle that trips up 95% or more of all mass media licenses; they simply don’t have the hook that makes for unique or compelling gameplay.

THR: Give me an example of a “gameplay hook.”

Miller: Take “Spider-Man,” which makes for a brilliant license almost solely because it’s so perfectly suited for a unique and fun gameplay experience. He’s a character who can do something very unusual — shoot out webs and swing from buildings. And he can climb walls, which puts an entirely new twist on navigating game levels. Other than “Spider-Man,” I can name fewer than a dozen other Hollywood properties that have the genetic material that makes for great games.

It is a games and stories angle – these days I can only reaaally find it interesting if it relates to actual production, lots of good examples, but this interview fits the bill.