The Ludologist

Marilyn Yalom has published a book called “Birth of the Chess Queen” where she traces the appearance of the powerful queen in modern European chess. Article on the book in The Boston Globe.

It sounds like an interesting book, even if it could be over-reliant on the idea that there just must be a connection between ideology, society, and small things like the movement of a piece in a semi-abstract game. But let’s see.

BBC news has a wonderful, if incredibly bitter, piece on the misfortunes of England in the world of sports, the Euro 2004 soccer loss to Portugal being among the recent highlights:

It takes years of practice and dedication which mere amateurs would have no idea about. Anyone can lose anonymously or unmemorably, but raising your game to lose spectacularly takes a sense of drama of which Shakespeare himself would be proud.

Cheer up, mate!

Robin Hunicke recently posted the Mechanics – Dynamics – Aesthetics: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research paper that was used as part of the game tuning workshop at GDC. It’s a co-authored thing by Robin herself, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek.

It’s a very precise description of a few of the most basic issues with games: The relation between the rules of the game [mechanics] and what actually happens [dynamics] (sometimes even referred to as emergence), and the experience of the player [aesthetics].
This is the kind of thing that people (myself included) have often gotten tangled into – are games open or closed? Is a game even interactive? Why talk about the game itself when games are really experiences? … and so on.
The MDA framework is a pretty good way of escaping such problems:

Mechanics describes the particular components of the game, at the level of data representation and algorithms.
Dynamics describes the run-time behavior of the mechanics acting on player inputs and each others’ outputs over time.
Aesthetics describes the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when she interacts with the game system.

Short and sweet.

P.S. Ever the ingrate, I do miss two things in the paper: 1) It’s very system-oriented – it would be nice to see how the mechanics connect to fiction. 2) The paper describes the player and the designer as working from opposite ends – the designer creates mechanics that lead to dynamics that lead to aeshetics, the player works the other way. I think the player experiences the game a bit more like a multi-layered package of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics – the aesthetic experience can even arise from watching the relation between the mechanics and the dynamics.

I’m giving a talk at the IT University this Friday at 16:15 with the above title.

“The past few years has seen the emergence of a number of new games that in many ways change our ideas about what a game is. Recent hits such as Grand Theft Auto 3, Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, EverQuest, and The Sims may seem like very different games, but they all share the fact that the player is free to perform other actions than simply striving towards a game goal.
In the talk, I will examine how the weakening of the game goal works both as a way of opening up a game for different styles of playing and for expanding the audience for video games.”

This is a talk where I draw lines between the entirely general “what is a game”-questions and specific game design issues. (Which is something I want to do.)

Our DiAC department at the IT University doing field work this Thursday:

The game was the cryptically titled “ST? Game”, that Gonzalo and I had designed. Basically a simultaneous turn-based combat game with red and blue teams (distinguished by the color of their office binders) battling to steal student credits from each other by way of paper planes, crumbled paper balls and “daggers” (postit-notes).

The game was a reasonable success even though there were some balancing issues that needed attention:
-It turned out that it was much easier to revive other people than anticipated, and hence the game had a tendency to reach an equilibrium between the two teams.
-The crumbled paper balls were way more useful than other weapons, so their strength should probably be downgraded.
-The amount of student credits in the game was constant, so the more players were dead, the harder it was to kill the remaining players.

Emergent gameplay:
We had given players office binders to keep track of teams and to help them carry all their items. A popular unanticipated tactic was to collect as many paper balls as you could in your binder, and then simply pour them onto other players.

Today is my first day as an assistant professor at the IT University’s Center for Computer Games Research. Lots of new colleagues that I think I’ve seen somewhere before …

The plan is then simply to produce lots of research and teaching in the time to come.

Strangely, this is also the first “real job” I have ever had, I am not sure how that happened.