This is my inaugural Patch Wednesday post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or simply not posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas, and invite comments.
The header does sound a bit like Ash Wednesday, so we can reaffirm our faith in the idea of examining video games, but I also call it Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies. It falls mostly on the day after Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday. Time to patch things up and start again.
Question #1: What Determines how a Game is Played
That is, is the player ultimately controlled by the game, or is the game ultimately controlled by the player? I am working on a small piece on this subject.
I believe that there have historically been four central conceptions of the act of playing a game: freedom, submission, subversion and creation.
1) Freedom
The idea that playing a game is a type of freedom, where the game creates a space in which players have a freedom that is enabled by the game design.
- Salen & Zimmerman (Rules of Play) say that, “Play is free movement within a more rigid structure”.
2) Submission
The idea that playing a game is a type submission, where the player is bound by the limits set forth by the game rules.
Gadamer (Truth and Method) argues that, “The real subject of the game … is not the player but the game itself. What holds the player in its spell, draws him into play, is the game itself.” (For Gadamer this is not negative as such.)- Many traditional critical views of video games follow this model but rate it as profoundly negative, describing players as being led or controlled by the game. Loftus & Loftus compared video games to Skinner boxes.
- Newer critical opinions on social games and free-to-play games also tend to assume that there is a particular type of design that reduces players to mindless automatons.
3) Subversion
Playing as subversion, where the player overcomes both the intentions of the designer, and the apparent limitations of the game object.
- Mikael Jakobsson (“Playing with the rules”) examines players of a Smash Brothers variation called Random Smash and argues, “that the very nature of a game can change without changing the core rules”.
- Linda Hughes (“Children’s games and gaming”), studying Foursquare players, argues that, “players can take the same game and collectively make of it strikingly different experiences”.
- Mia Consalvo’s book Cheating also stresses how players may act against designer intentions.
4) Creation
Playing as creation, where the game is ultimately created by the activity of the players. (I discussed this stance in an article on Zero-Player Games.)
- Ermi and Mäyrä (“Fundamental components of the gameplay experience”), say that “Yet, the essence of a game is rooted in its interactive nature, and there is no game without a player.”
- Anne-Mette Thorhauge (“The Rules of the Game”) claims that game rules are in actuality created by players. “The player culture is not just something taking place ‘‘on top’’ of the game, it rather defines the game as a product of the continuous communication and negotiation among players.”
Hybrid and prescriptive ideas
The four positions above are generalizations about how the playing of a game works, but there are also arguments made for the benefits of particular types of design. Calls for emergent gameplay (like those of Harvey Smith) argue for the value of games that leave room for the player.
Conversely, some people who argue for games as expressive devices claim that games should control the player in order to facilitate the designer’s ability to communicate a message. (This discussion would be worth a separate post.)
I have also personally been interested in the examination of how particular game designs can be more or less open, saying that we cannot generalize and decide between the positions outlined above (Emergence and Progression, Without a Goal, Flexible Games). It could sound like this is already present in Roger Caillois’ Paidia-Ludus distinction, but Caillois emphasizes that paidia are unstructured activities, rather than structured activities that give rise to freedom.
Anything else?
Is this a complete list?
I love reading game design sites and replace “player” with “student” and “playing” with “learning”. You get just as much insight in a whole new topic.
It’s missing genre expectations and social conventions, I think.
Players read genre cues and enter into a “genre contract” if you will, and feel betrayed when those expectations are betrayed, and behave in accordance to their understanding of the game’s genre. Likewise, players are trained by social convention to attempt certain strategies (which accounts for why 21st century players of 20th century PC games seldom think to read the manual, and then don’t understand why certain aspects of the game are completely unsolvable). These approaches to games probably fall under your “hybrid” category, as they assume that the game is constructed not only between the player and the designer, but also other games and the cultural climate or zeitgeist in general, seeing the game (or “text”) as a phenomenon.
Maybe : 5) Previous knowledge
In tabletop RPGs, we have a concept called “System 0”. This refers to the game system the game master (or the other players) use when there is no rule he can refers to to solve a specific situation. It doesn’t matter whether these rules are not available because they are not designed, because he doesn’t actively use alreay written rules (for small stakes situations, to go quicker, …) because the game master doesn’t remember them, or because he twist the written rules without even noticing it.
The same thing happens in video games. You don’t only play a specific game, you play partly a specific game and its rules, and partly what you think applies and other rules, mostly that you learned through other games (red items explode, gold is better than silver, …), genre conventions (if this plateform is too high, I can come back here as soon as I get the double jump skill), plateform specific conventions (cross validates, circle cancels…), narrative conventions, your own gaming history, etc.
Some examples might be :
+ when a game location seems about to finish, maybe with a boss encounter, many player just stop going where they supposed to go and start exploring the area again to be sure to get everything that could be collected in the zone.
+ when you play an older game and you try to do whatever was allowed into a more modern one, feeling mostly its limits even though it has made its own genre evolve when it was released (quite common in competitive versus fighting games).
+ …
What about critical reflection?
Where the player plays along with the game, but at the same time is very aware of its artificial nature and cultural context and critically reflects upon her interaction with the game. Although I guess you could could consider it to be a variant of submission. Papers Please would be the examplar game.
@Angela Yes, but I would argue that conventions play a part in each of the four conceptions that I list, both in terms of the design work taking place against conventions, and the player approaching the game with certain expectations. But I agree it is worth spelling out.
@Brand I think those examples would often be used for “subversion” and “creation” arguments.
@ Joris I agree that happens, but I am unaware that anyone has made this central to a theory of what it means to be playing a game?
What about as social activity? The social context in which a game is played can greatly impact what is played and how it is played. The game can even be secondary to the social setting, acting as a mediator or facilitator between players.
@Jason I would put that under the “creation”-header, at least if it is stated strongly.