The Ludologist

[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.

*

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.

Nick Wadham’s Associated Press article on video games research is making the rounds.
Here’s a list of the places where it was printed.

Of course I wrote pages of brilliant answers to the journalist and only ended up getting a few lines – but that’s just the rules of the game. So yours truly is mentioned as follows:

In Copenhagen, Denmark, the IT University has established the Center of Computer Games Research, which just graduated its first Ph.D., Jesper Juul.

Juul appears to be the first person anywhere to ever get his doctorate exclusively in video game studies. His dissertation “Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds” seeks to define what video games are, and how academics ought to go about studying them.

“There is an interesting naughtiness in taking something that many people consider unimportant and frivolous and then creating very detailed theory about it,” Juul said. But, he added: “I would say that video games merit much more analysis than novels or movies simply because they are less understood.”

Terra Nova has a discussion about what I really am the first Ph.D. in.

As Greg Lastowka notes, this really is a defining moment of mainstream awareness of what we are doing.
And we apparently continue to be a good story – the juxtaposition of “taking play seriously” just always has that catchy headline quality. Which is good.

Imagina 2004.
Mostly an industry event which traditionally has focused on graphics but is beginning to have more game stuff. You could tell that a lot of resources had gone into flying in top speakers.

I thought the top event of the conference was the panel on "Video games: Where do we go next", one of those panels with a dangerously big scope but where the 90 minutes of conversation between Doug Church, Jez San (who wrote Starglider for the Amiga!), Peter Molyneux, Ken Perlin, Noah Falstein and Charles Cecil covered a lot of interesting ground. The meta-issue became the question of how to have more interesting emotional content in video games – which isn’t easy, of course. The discussion circling around AI questions and some of Perlin’s charming animation experiments. Charles Cecil was perhaps overselling the comparison between games and the movie industry, but so it goes.

Also of interest was Jordan Mechner’s keynote on Prince of Persia, and panels on MMOGs and AI.

As an academic, I was perhaps slightly marginal but had an enjoyable time talking mostly to game developers. Here’s a pic with Patrice Désilets of Prince of Persia fame, me, Jurie Horneman (Rockstar Vienna), Martin de Ronde (Guerilla Games), Robin Hunicke, off the right edge of the picture is Jordan Mechner (who I got to tell how much I loved Last Express) and to the left is the right arm of organizer Sophie Revillard:

View from outside my hotel along Avenue Princesse Grace towards the Grimaldi Forum which is hidden behind a Japanese garden thrown in for good measure:

It was only the last day I actually saw a supermarket. Until then I’d only seen jewelry stores and Lamborghini sports car dealers. With a technical term, Monaco is "obscene". It’s expensive apartments, bellboys, room service, women in fur coats. I did go to the casino and the heavy late-fifties American man next to me at the roulette placed for €500 chips, 22 came out and he confided to me:"That 22 has cost me a lot of money tonight." Apartment buildings in suitable colors and properly clean facades with spotlights on in the evening, private rooms for playing. The city is set against a background of small mountains with lots of paragliders coming down. It’s all very James Bond, really, and it’s great fun. But this makes sense on another level because there is a feeling that to stay here, you would have to become a spy or an assassin or you’d go crazy from boredom within months.

It turned out that my young researcher award was to be handed over at a ceremony in a big theatre. Lots of music and lights and I got to get called on stage after the opening of an envelope. I had planned a small speech but the slightly, ahem, in-character announcer apparently thought we weren’t quite on par with the other recipients. Here’s the speech:
It is a great honor to receive the Imagina young researcher’s award. And it’s a great honor to be here as a video game theorist at an industry event. Initially, the industry has often regarded video game theorists as conceited backseat drivers … which we are, of course. But there is a lot of synergy to be had between academia and the industry. So let’s have some more of that. Thanks.

And here’s my glass teapot award, shot from the hotel balcony:

Great fun, and it’s not every day your 8-page academic paper earns you the right to parade along other prize winners who had worked on such small matters as Prince of Persia and Lord of The Rings. Prince Albert of Monaco then congratulated each of us. Yep, ludology just is that glamorous.

Doing a bit of quick travelling the next few weeks:
First a general talk at the State of Play conference in Newcastle on January 28th.

Then a 20-minute presentation called “Working with the Player’s Repertoire” at the Imagina trade show /conference in Monaco on February 4th. In addition to presentations by Jordan Mechner and other industry luminaries as well as discussions about the future of video game theory, the movie Blueberry will premiere “in the presence of the actors (Vincent Cassel – Michael Madsen – Juliette Lewis) “. How weird is that?

The Monaco trip is because I submitted a paper and won one of the two “young researchers’ awards”. Incidentally, this includes a prize of 750 euros, and since the event takes place in Monte Carlo, I am awfully tempted to spend it on gambling – does anyone have a foolproof system for winning at the roulette?

OK, here are some pics from the defense:

Last slide – the main points of the dissertation.

The committee: Brian Sutton-Smith, Peter Bøgh Andersen, and Marie-Laure Ryan.

Hard questions.

But actually all the answers are in this book.

At the blackboard with Marie-Laure Ryan: When do rules cue fiction and when does fiction cue rules?

A brand new Ph.D. – I do look sort of happy.

Yesterday, I “successfully defended my dissertation”, so I am now a Ph.D..

I think it went as well as you can reasonably hope for, though it’s amazing how quickly 4 hours can pass. (Rumor has it that the people in my family who are not into computer games experienced time as passing rather slowly, so it goes.)

And then big party afterwards, slept late.

The people at the game research center gave me an Xbox. I’ve resisted the Xbox for a while, among other things because it’s so damn big, but now I have the big three (+ Dreamcast) all lined up.

Jesper’s law: You know you’re in the right line of work when the gift from your colleagues is a game console.

Thanks to everybody who made this possible, the friends who supported me in different ways, and to all the people who provided interesting discussion and comments during the process. You rule! Game on.

Don’t know why I didn’t post it earlier, but here it is.
The defense is January 16th, 13:00 hours in room 0:19 at the IT University of Copenhagen, Glentevej 67, 2400 Copenhagen NV.

Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds

This dissertation aims to provide the basic components of a theory of video games. By video games I mean games played on personal computers, consoles, and other games played using computer processing and a video display.

The dissertation argues that there is a basic affinity between computers and games: computers and computer processing are commonly used for playing games, and the modern digital computer works as an enabler for games in the way that the printing press or cinema has worked as enablers for storytelling.

The central theme of the dissertation is the examination of video games as a constantly evolving tension between the rules and fictional worlds. The dissertation describes video games as two rather different things at the same time: video games are real in that they consist of real rules that players actually interact with; but fictional in that the worlds they project are just that, fictional. In this perspective, to playing a video game is to be engaged in the interaction with real rules while imagining a fictional world, and to design a video game is to design a set of rules as well as a fictional world.

Chapter 2 on the classic game model examines a number of previous game definitions in order to provide a new definition of games, a definition that describes games as working on three different levels: the level of the game itself, as a set of rules; the level of the player’s relation to the game; and the level of the relationship between the activity of playing the game and the rest of the world. The model is classic in the sense that almost all traditional games fit squarely inside this model, but the later part of the 20th century has seen a number of game forms – including some video games – that have developed beyond the classic model.

Additionally, the model does not tie games to any specific medium, and games are therefore transmedial in the same way that narrativity is transmedial. Video games are therefore best seen as a continuation of a long history of games, but video games have revolutionized games primarily by letting the computer handle the rules, thereby freeing players to focus on strategy and fictional worlds.

Chapter 3 on rules examines games as rule-based systems. I argue that rules in games offer affordances as well as limitations, and that the rule-based nature of games provides an explanation of the affinity between computers and games. This affinity extends to the theoretical realm in that many aspects of the rules of games can be understood through the lens of computer science. Games are basically state machines that proceed according to rules that have an algorithmic character: the rules of a game are designed to be unambiguous, definite and above discussion. I explain that this happens through a process of decontextualization, where each rule also includes a specification about what aspects of the game are relevant to the rule.

The dissertation argues that the rules of games produce an apparent paradox: while the rules of games are algorithmic, the enjoyment of a game depends on these rules presenting challenges that cannot be solved algorithmically. This takes different forms in different games but we can outline two basic ways in which games are structured and provide challenges for players: that of emergence (a number of simple rules combining to form interesting variations) and that of progression (separate challenges presented serially).

This leads to a player-oriented account of what it is to play a game: the player of a game will at any given point have a specific repertoire of strategies and methods for playing the game. Part of the attraction of a good game is that it continually challenges and makes new demands on the player’s repertoire.

Chapter 4 on fiction provides an account of the fictional aspect of games, an account that covers the spectrum from abstract games, to games with incoherent fictional worlds to games with detailed fictional worlds. To be able to discuss this spectrum, the theory of fictional worlds is employed to describe how the fictional world of a game can be optional for the player.

It is argued that the majority of games contain incoherent worlds: worlds that cannot fully be imagined due to incoherencies, but where the player accepts incoherence as a reflection of the rules of the game.

The importance of the game world varies on a scale from the highly replayable multi-player game (the emergence game) where the player gradually ceases to imagine the game world to, at the other extreme, the "complete-once" adventure game (the progression game), where the player only faces each setting once and therefore is more likely to take the fictional world at face value. A video game provides the player with the opportunity to imagine a fictional world. The player’s experience of the game world does not appear to require much consistency – the world of a game is rather something that the player can choose to imagine for a shorter or longer period of time, or not at all.

Chapter 5 on rules and fiction is the synthesis of the two previous chapters, and discusses the complex relationship between rules and fiction. While rules also construct the fictional world of a game, the fictional world also builds the player’s expectation of the rules of the game.

Rules and fiction rarely match completely: in most cases, the fictional world of the game will be larger and more detailed than what is implemented in the rules, but mismatches between rules and fictions can also generate positive effects, working as a way of playing with the player’s expectations, as a way of creating parody, and finally as a way of foregrounding the game as a real-world activity.

Methodologically, the dissertation is based upon an eclectic combination of theories and methods including literary theory, film theory, computer science, sciences of complexity, economic game theory, game design literature, and some psychology.