The Ludologist

I previously mentioned satirical Norwegian online games, but this one is right in the middle of an authentic controversy.

Background story: One of Norway’s famous inhabitants is Mullah Krekar, former leader of the Islamist militant group Ansar al-Islam. Since he has been acquitted for the charges brought against him, it’s unclear what the man has actually done, but he really is an out there totalitarian fundamentalist with some dubious friends. (Which is, of course, not a crime.)

Mullah Krekar has recently published an autobiography, and during a debate, the (female) Norwegian-Pakistani stand-up comedian Shabana Rehman performed a stunt of picking up the big man and proclaiming that if she could pick him up like that, he couldn’t be posing a danger to the country.

Krekar did not find this funny. So he has sued Rehman for “bodily violation” (no, I don’t think he will win the case).

Here’s the lift the mullah-game, Jeg bare Tulla, Krekar. [Krekar, I’m only joking.]

The goal of the game is to lift Krekar by clicking the mouse as fast as possible. (“Klikk som en gal Mullah p? musa!” [Click the mouse like a mad mullah.])

Update: Jill points to another lift the mullah game.
And yet another Krekar game.

I don’t think Krekar finds the games funny either. So this touches on some genuine issues of fundamentalism, terrorism, cultural sensitivities, and freedom of speech.

English language article in Aftenposten.

PS. The game is pretty bad of course, but I wonder why all satirical games tend to end up being jokes about the game format as well? Why is it hard to do a satirical game that is also a plainly good game?

The Philadelphia Inquirer mentions ludology in a news story on video games and learning. People quoted: James Paul Gee, Henry Jenkins, Justin Hall, Greg Lastowka. (I.e. US-centric, but never mind.)

I guess the use of ludology without any references is an indication that the word is now mainstream. Yup.

I will be posting some more detailed few things about Japan, GDC, and games in general in the following days, but as a quick warmup, here’s a picture of a Japanese women’s magazine:

It’s much like the example of the “narrative” clothing section at Nordstrom, and the question is this: What makes it an attractive idea that your life would be like a story? I guess it is a content-oriented view of story – a story consists of meaningful and interesting events. Buying the Nordstrom clothes or the Story magazine means that your life won’t just be “one damn thing after another”, but a series of interesting and important events.

And it’s true that many games (like life sometimes) consist mostly of not-too-meaningful events, too much drudgery and too few things really interesting. Some of the game/story discussion comes from this.

[March 11th update: OK, I was guessing. I have now read Barry Atkins’ paper, and I did misinterpret a few things. So please read the text below as 1) me going at great lengths to prove that I care about fun, 2) some general comments about why some people shy away from talking about rules in games. The comments below do not strictly relate to Atkin’s paper, his paper just made me think about a few things.
Apparently a few people have interpreted the discussion here, here, here as being very hostile or problematic, but this is not my experience at all.
It’s all in the area of the open exchange of ideas, even if some people (myself being a good example) are a bit more jumpy than need be. Just keep it going, everybody!]

*

Nick Montfort has posted his notes from the Form, Culture, and Video Game Criticism conference at Princeton University this Saturday. I can see I should have gone, but instead I’ll just comment a bit on what I guess from Nick’s notes.

Apparently Barry Atkins had some objections to my Utrecht talk about The Game, the Player, the World, because my definition of games (the classic game model) does not include pleasure.
I can see why he is making the point, but I also feel that you can’t talk about everything all the time – fun simply wasn’t the primary focus of the talk. I have written quite a lot on fun/pleasure in games, so it’s very strange to be criticized for ignoring it!
My early 1998 DAC paper work discusses fun.
My 2000 paper on the importance of studying games discusses fun.
I’ve discussed fun in the relation to the experience of time.
At the 2002 Manchester conference I presented a paper on gameplay and fun.
And recently I’ve written a general essay about theorizing fun and the issue of focusing too much on games as being challenges.
Incidentally, the last one criticizes the notion of game quality as hinging on “interesting choices” and challenges. It’s always a weird experience, being criticized for not discussing something that you have discussed, and being criticized for ignoring an argument that you have already proposed in great detail.
But all game definitions have grappled with this problem – it would be really nice to have a point #7 in my model, stating that “games are fun” – but the problem is that not all games are fun; some games are dull; different people enjoy different games or even the same games but for different reasons. You could easily end up with a strange situation where something would flicker between being a game and being a non-game during the course of a game session, etc… The grand point of my game definition obviously is that the negotiable consequences of a game (i.e. the game activity is predominantly harmless) means that it is possible to design a game and play a game for the fun of it.

Atkin’s paper made me think about a general problem I often encounter, an import from literary theory that just turns out not to apply very well to games. Whenever I give talks about games, discuss game definitions or simply mention the fact that games have rules, part of the audience always looks like all the alarms are going off inside their heads. The alarms are going off mostly because much structuralism (say, Propp, Greimas, Levi-Strauss) assumed that all texts really consisted of objective formal structures. The goal of the theorist was then simply to prove that a specific text also had the kind of formal structure that the theory predicted. This of course ignored the small matter of interpretation as well as the pleasures of the reader, and made for some pretty far-fetched readings of literature and film. Very broadly speaking, literary deconstruction and poststructuralism was then a reaction against this, emphasizing the act of reading, the act of interpretation, reader experiences, and the instability of texts.

This is the history that makes a lot of people automatically assume that if anybody talks about rules, structure, or definitions, they must be ignoring the experiences of the user. But the problem is that while this to a large extent is true with literature or film – if you reduce a novel to a semiotic square, almost everything interesting is lost – it is completely wrong when it comes to games.

Games are pleasurable because they are rule-based, because they are well-defined (and definable). It is the formal nature of games that makes them fun. In this case, games are complete reversals of what you may expect if you come from literary theory. If you ignore the rule-based nature of games, their well-definedness, or the kind of formal challenging systems that they are, you will be at loss to understand why games are fun, and you will be completely ignoring the experiences of the player. As I’ve said elsewhere: Games are formal systems that provide informal experiences.

Another assumption in the argument seems to be that work is completely distinct from fun, and that to focus on the challenging aspect of games is to ignore the fun aspect. But again, games are fun because they are challenging, games are fun because they are work.