The Ludologist

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!]

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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.

[Update: I clarified a few arguments on 26-2.]

Now that Associated Press has a story out on the academic study of games that mentions ludology and narratology, and Gonzalo Frasca has posted his version of the story so far, let me post mine.

And this story doesn’t begin with a word, it begins with a discussion.

I think that anybody who designs or discusses games and/or wishes for “deeper” or “more meaningful” game content will inevitably run into a discussion of what the relation is between games and stories. This has been going on for quite some time. So after working on a game called Blackout in 1997, I was as frustrated as anyone with the game vs. story thing, so I started doing theory on it.

But there was a problem: For random historical reasons, video games entered the limelight at a time when the concept of narrative was at the height of vogue. If you wanted to seem clever and deep, easy – simply apply the term narrative/story to everything. His pasta tells a story. I once overheard a guy explaining that Frequency (a music/rhythm game) was interesting because it had a different narrative than other games! This atmosphere meant that much early academic theory was marred by blind assumptions that narrative theory would be the key to understanding games.

Somebody had to respond to this, and I hope I have some claim to fame in being one of the first academics to do this in much detail. So in my early work (A clash between game and narrative, 1998-1999) there are two parallel claims being made:

1. Games and stories are very different things. (Story here understood as a fixed sequence of events.) What makes a game a game is exactly what makes it a non-story. It is a mistake to design games that try to be “story-like” and it is a mistake to analyze games as stories.
2. The enjoyment of games hinge on their rules, not on their representational level. The representation / fiction of a game is unimportant. (I believe I was wrong about this one.)

After a few years, this thread starts overlapping with the thread of ludology – to me the idea that games should be studied as a unique field (borrowing from the appropriate other fields). I thought I heard the word from Gonzalo Frasca, but Lars Konzack has pointed out that he mentioned the word to me a bit before I read Gonzalo’s article on it. The oldest reference I have found is a 1982 article by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: “Does Being Human Matter – On Some Interpretive Problems of Comparative Ludology”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 5, nr. 1. 1982. (It’s about whether we can compare human and animal play.)

The proclamations of a ludology then became interpreted as a rejection of narrative – this isn’t technically true, but you can see why someone would make the connection. First he say A, then he says B, so you assume the two things are connected.

Gonzalo Frasca does not make strong anti-narrative statements, but I do, and so does Markku Eskelinen. Eskelinen is also pretty close to claiming #2 above, that the representational level (or specifically what it says on the game box) is irrelevant.

Other actors in the story include Espen Aarseth and Aki Järvinen – I spent a lot of time with Aki at the DAC conference in 2000 wondering why all these people were looking at the anemic field of hypertext fiction when there were just so many more interesting things going on in games. Aki was also an early ludologist for that reason. And Espen has obviously written some pieces against narrativism, and has a famous paragraph on games not being stories in Cybertext. And anyone I missed.

Does the game vs. narrative discussion still matter today? Well, it has become quite tiring, mostly because half the people are using “narrative” to mean a fixed sequence of events, and half of the people are using it to mean” interesting stuff”. (The second version is not very useful, by the way.) A major point of my Ph.D. dissertation is to sidestep this mix-up by talking about fiction instead.

Perhaps the discussion is most important on a design level. I think that over-reliance on the concept of narrative remains a very serious problem in the game design experiments done at universities around the world.

Finally, as it happens with popular terms, there are many competing interpretations of it. Here are the five most popular interpretations of ludology for the time being:

1. The study of games.
2. The study of games as rules, ignoring their fictional content.
3. The study of games with a strong anti-narrative stance (meaning: against blindly using traditional narratology, but including the fictional content of games).
4. A group of people around the Game Studies journal (decidedly wrong – read the articles, please).
5. The people at the Game research center in Copenhagen (also wrong – read what is actually being published).

Regarding 4 and 5, I know my two colleagues Susana Tosca and Lisbeth Klastrup are really fed up with people randomly assuming they are “ludologists”, and then attacking them for saying things that they haven’t said at all.

You are in reality free to pick your personal favorite from 1-3, but I vote for using ludology in meaning #1: The study of games.

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PS. Both Susana Tosca and Marie-Laure Ryan have recently told me that they thought the ludologists are fighting an imaginary narratological straw man – indeed, that the narratologists do not exist at all. And on some level, I see what they mean – it is very seldom these days that you’ll meet someone who will squarely proclaim that games are stories. But 6 years ago, it was so obvious – everybody academic just instinctively talked about games as narratives. I have explained how games are different to stories to hundreds of people, and they were invariably shocked at the complete radicality of the suggestion. I’ve explained it to so many fellow literature students who thought it sounded completely wild. But I can see why it looks weird now – simply because people started thinking better of it.

PPS. Here are some earlier articles on the game/story thing:

Andy Cameron: Dissimulations. 1995.

Mark Barrett: Irreconcilable Differences: Game vs. Story. 1997.

PPPS. I called this the definitive history because I know the discussion will never die.

I know, we’ve all seen these funny machine translations before, it’s just that the AP story on ludology has reached Japan.

According to Babelfish:

The joule person, majoring the video game, probably is the new person who acquires the doctorate. As for the same person thesis for a doctorate “Half-Real: The video game Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (as an actual law and the semi- actuality which is in interim of the overhead world)” with, what video game, the scholar gropes the definition how it should advance research of.

“When there is no value and trivially it is potato, many people to consider, being afterwards, the details that are interesting shallow fleetingly theory was produced very regarding the game finely”, that the joule person. “From the reason that, as for the video game understanding is not advanced simply relatively, you think that it is worthy of to research directly than the novel and the movie,” that the same person added.

I couldn’t have said it better myself, especially the title Half-Real: The video game Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (as an actual law and the semi- actuality which is in interim of the overhead world)” exhibits a flamboyant intellectualism that I could never have come up with.