The Ludologist

In The [board] Games Journal, Greg Aleknevicus writes that German Games are Fraudulent.
His basic complaint is that in German board games, the game mechanic and the theme are often completely disconnected:

The point to be made is simple?the wholesale grafting of a theme onto a set of mechanics is dishonest if those mechanics have no real world connection to that theme. Can a game really be about exploring the Amazon if it can easily be re-themed to the terror of the French Revolution? Is it realistic to simply add floors to an existing skyscraper? Did ancient explorers really decide the orientation of the islands they discovered?

This, I think, is the most important aesthetic question in video games. It’s not interactivity vs. narrativity (the open vs. the predetermined). The most important question is the rules (mechanics) vs. the fiction (theme). It’s really what my Ph.D. was about, but it’s a question that pops up all the time: It’s always straightforward to assume that the fiction of a game is arbitrary and unimportant compared to the rules. However, fiction matters, but in strange ways and with different degrees to different people.
For example, the hardcore RTS players who first picked up Age of Empires would recognize the game as an RTS, and think of it in that frame (rules). But someone new to games might think of it in terms of medieval wars (fiction).

Oh, and Frank Lantz also discusses the issue in Rules of Play.

Competing for his third Olympic crown, Arrichion had found himself being choked in a stranglehold from behind. Unable to free himself from the ferocious grip, Arrichion managed to grip his opponent’s ankle and twist it until it broke.

In agony his opponent submitted, but by then the damage was done – Arrichion’s throat had been crushed and even as he was proclaimed the winner, he breathed his last.

It’s BBC News on death in ancient Greek games.

Is this a game?

It is arguably the most difficult philosophical question concerning the concept of “game”: Games are supposed to be played for fun, but sometimes players do get seriously hurt or even die. Is it still a game then?
Roger Caillois argues that professional athletes do not play, but work. It’s also part of my game definition, where games have “negotiable consequences” – and a “game” where all “players” endanger their lives is hence not a game.

It’s certainly a fuzzy aspect of what makes something a game: The difference between the process of political elections and various Idol and Popstars TV shows is not quite clear, but I think this is just the fuzzy heart of games: A game activity has to be “mostly harmless”, and then any number of consequences can be assigned to its outcome.

From joystiq: Play Lemmings online.
(The crazy part about this version of Lemmings is that it was done in DHTML – people are strange.)

I completed the whole thing when it came out in 1990 – there was a summer I remember partly as a series of Lemmings sessions, coming home drunk at 4AM. The really fortunate have tried playing two-player Lemmings on the Amiga (you simply connected two mice).

And I still think this type of game with lots autonomous agents walking around has something going for it – Chu Chu Rocket is a more recent favorite. It’s not about trying to identify with some weird character, it’s all about toying with systems and things that influence each other – the whole emergence thing.

Actually, the recent wave of casual games also follow the formula of not having a main protagonist but rather number of small elements that you can click on or interact with.

PS. In case nobody noticed, I am trying to keep this blog more updated with recent game and academic news.

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.