today's reading: ecology of games

Katie Salen: "Born into a world where concepts like copyright, mastery, civic engagement, and participation are seamlessly negotiated and redefined across highly personalized networks ... today's kids are crafting learning identities for themselves-- hybrid identities --that seemingly reject previously distinct modes of being. Writer, designer, reader, producer, teacher, student, gamer--all modes hold equal weight. Where we used to call them player-producers, prosumers, or even multitaskers, we now just call them kids."

I'm currently reading The Ecology of Games, an anthology edited by Katie Salen (the co-author of Rules of Play, which I wrote about here.) It's ostensibly an anthology of critical articles about games, but it's published as part of a six-volume series on "Digital Media and Learning" (part of the MacArthur Foundation's larger focus on the topic). Consequently, as the above quote may attest, it is ending up being about a whole cloud of issues surrounding the axis of gaming: education, adolescence, identity, literacy, skill acquisition, collaboration, and knowledge, among others.

Even though I've only read the introduction so far, this book is shaping up to be a pretty fascinating read, and as part of my "I read books so you don't have to" initiative, I'm posting my notes and scavengings here. Enjoy~

Labels: adolescence, game_commentary, knowledge

Monday, October 06, 2008
12:08 PM
0 comments

where i've been and what i've been up to

A busy week here around Raccoon HQ.

The biggest news, I suppose, is that I'm thinking about returning to grad school, and taking some steps in that direction. Those of you who know me well know that I've been struggling, for years now, with the feeling of being in a "rut" with my academic career: although I enjoy teaching Composition, my interests really lie elsewhere.

If I were going to try to pinpoint exactly where that "elsewhere" is, I'd say it's somewhere around the point where technology and narrative intersect, a point I've explored with some enthusiasm ever since at least 2001 (when I started writing Imaginary Year). There are two programs I've found that seem to focus on that precise intersection: Georgia Tech's Digital Media Ph.D., and MIT's Comparative Media Studies Master's program. I'll be applying to both.

They're pretty competitive programs, and there's of course no guarantee that I'll get into either one. And even if I got in there is no guarantee that I would choose to go: there are a lot of variables to take into account. But it feels good to be taking steps to open some doors.

Deadlines are January 15th, so I've been spending a lot of time this week getting my applications ready. This process has not been without some frustration: yesterday I learned I need to re-take the GREs, which wasn't exactly news that made me clap my hands with delight. But preparing my writing sample was actually kind of fun. I took some material I wrote for this blog a while back—my post(s) on frustration in games—and rethought the phenomenon a little more carefully, and wrote it up a little more formally. End result?: a 20-page research paper on the topic of what happens when games aren't fun, called "Frustration, Anxiety, Boredom: Towards A Typology of Ludic Failure."

It's nice, every once in a while, to remember that I actually like being an academic.

Labels: game_commentary, personal, projects

Wednesday, January 09, 2008
2:33 PM
0 comments

unit operations II

Just finished reading the second chapter of Ian Bogost's Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, and found it shockingly similar to the first. The pile-up of important names continues: this chapter tackles Plato and Aristotle, linguist Ferdinand Saussure, deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, computer scientist John von Neumann, digital media theorists Lev Manovich and N. Katherine Hayles. And, like the previous chapter, this one ends up with a kind of strange left turn, this time analyzing the Department of Homeland Security's Homeland Security Advisory System, which "underscores the tension between unit operations and system operations."

I'm still really enjoying this book, although I'm still struggling to make sense of its thesis in even the most general sense.

Labels: book_commentary, game_commentary

Sunday, March 25, 2007
11:33 PM
0 comments

unit operations

I just finished reading the first chapter of Ian Bogost's Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, and I'm really enjoying it.

Bogost's approach hinges on the concept of the "unit operation," a "mode of meaning-making that [privileges] discrete, disconnected actions over deterministic, progressive systems," and the first twenty pages of the book pretty much constitute an attempt to clarify this distinction.

I'll confess that he isn't a hundred percent successful. At the end of my first pass through the chapter, I feel like I might have a tentative grip on what distinguishes a "unit operation"-based analysis from "systems operation"-based analysis, but I strongly doubt that I'd be able to do something like summarize the difference between the two. I can't entirely blame Bogost for this: "units" and "systems" are both high-level abstractions; we're not exactly talking about apples and oranges here.

Determined to make it clear, Bogost starts pulling in conceptual machinery from a variety of different disciplines: half the fun of the book so far is watching the interesting thinkers pile up on top of one another. By page twenty we've moved through quite the array: Heidegger, Spinoza, Leibniz, Alain Badiou, "object-oriented" philosopher Graham Harman, "autopoetic systems theorists" Francisco Valera and Humberto Maturana, sociologist Niklas Luhmann, mathematician Georg Cantor, digital media theorists Janet Murray and Espen Aarseth, and poet T. S. Eliot—all this en route to, of all things, a unit-operations-oriented analysis of Spielberg's film The Terminal (2004), in which Bogost concludes that the film is about "specific modes of uncorroborated waiting."

So, in conclusion, I'm not really sure yet exactly what Bogost is even talking about, and yet I've jammed the first chapter full of about a pound of bronze (in the form of Levenger Page Points). Being disoriented by brilliance is a good thing.

Labels: book_commentary, game_commentary

Friday, March 23, 2007
10:53 AM
0 comments

the aesthetics of frustration III

Back in January, I was browsing the website of the Independent Games Festival, and was looking at their list of award-winners from 2006. That led me to stumble upon a game called Braid, which caught my attention for two reasons—one, because it was developed by an entity identifying itself as "Number None, Inc." (which means that the developer is making the same obscure cultural reference as my band), and two, because it was described as "a platformer/puzzle game about manipulating the flow of time" (which means that the developer shares at least some of my documented fixation with chronology). The fact that it had won the competition for "innovation in game design" and promised to take an "unconventional stance about what is fun to play, and what the player should spend his time doing," were really just icing on the cake.

My curiosity fully engaged, it seemed only natural that info about the game would also be totally cryptic and that the game itself would not actually be available anywhere. It still isn't available, although we're finally getting closer. Specifically, we're at version 0.847, which I know because the folks at Arthouse Games have gotten an exclusive preview of version 0.847.

The text of that post threatens that it contains spoilers, so I haven't read the whole thing, but I was powerfully struck by a particular passage, about the way that Braid throws out the concepts of both "lives" and "save points." After you die, you are presented with the opportunity to press the Shift key:

"If you ... try pressing the Shift key, and you will be greeted with wonderful sights and sounds: the game rewinds time right before your eyes. The background animations, the goombas, and all of your previous actions move backward. Even the music plays in reverse. You un-die, and up you un-fall, out of the spikes and back onto the platform from whence you jumped. If you let go of Shift, you're ready to try that jump again. If you keep holding down Shift, you can rewind back through all of your actions, right back to the point where you entered the level. Everything can be undone.

"You're suddenly free to try, practice, and learn from mistakes without any annoying overhead. It's like practicing basketball shots without ever having to chase after the ball. I found myself becoming an expert at 2D platform jumps in very short order---I could try a single difficult jump 50 times in a minute or so, racking up much more practice during a few days of Braid testing than I did in a whole lifetime of playing other 2D platform games.

"The upshot, of course, is that standard 2D platform challenges, like difficult jumps, are rendered trivial. You can instant-retry your way through anything, and Braid celebrates this fact throughout World 2 by throwing all sorts of nearly-impossible challenges your way---you'll never see this kind of stuff in a standard platform game, because players would never be able to get past it.

There's a commentary lurking here about video games: they waste the players' time by forcing them to trudge through the trivial over and over in order to retry the challenging parts. Traditionally, with each life lost, you go back to the start of the level, even if your point of failure was near the end of the level. Worse yet, if you run out of lives, you go back to the start of the game, even if your point of failure was near the end of the game. Who wants to replay an entire game over and over just to retry the hard part at the end? No one, obviously, so we invented save points---after the game ends, players can resume from wherever they last saved. But even save points become tedious: you still need to navigate the 'Load Game' menus each time you want to try again. Not as bad as replaying the whole game, but more like chasing after the basketball between practice shots. Still, computers can do whatever we program them to do, so why should we force players to chase the ball? Braid strips out every last scrap of tedium and leaves us with nothing but the core challenges."

This slots neatly into the whole "aesthetics of frustration" thing I was on about during my playing of Shadow of the Colossus last fall: great game, but not always good about making the player not go through the tedious parts again.

It gets more interesting:

"Further, it shows us that the standard challenges really aren't that interesting, or challenging, without the tedious filler that usually surrounds them. [So] the designers forged ahead and asked another important question: if the rewind button renders even the most difficult timing challenges trivial, what kind of new challenges can we come up with? Worlds 3 through 6 answer this question with an assortment of new time behaviors and puzzles based around those behaviors. In World 3, time works the same as it does in World 2, with the addition of 'purple sparkle objects.' These objects ... are immune to the rewind button."

And that was the point at which my mind began to explode thinking of the possibilities, and I decided to quit reading and just wait for the game to be released.

Arthouse Games also has an interview with Jonathan Blow, Braid's creator: turns out he's also an Invisible Cities fan and a Lynch fan. This is a rare opportunity, it seems, to play a videogame designed by someone who has identical cultural tastes to my own.

Labels: game_commentary, time

Friday, March 02, 2007
4:53 PM
0 comments

what video games have to teach us about learning and literacy

Started to write a capsule review on James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, a book I finished in January, and it quickly sprawled into a longer post. In any case, here it is:

Interesting thesis: Gee identifies thirty-six principles of learning, and argues that playing video games helps to stimulate all thirty-six. The argument that follows is well-written and mostly convincing, although in order to complete this argument, Gee needs to expand out from simply playing video games to becoming a member of the "affinity group" of gamers, which dilutes the focus of the argument somewhat.

For instance, the book seems sharper to me when it discusses a skill like nonlinear exploration preceding movement towards a goal --a skill that Gee convincingly argues that video games develop, as well as one that has an obvious relevance in the classroom. To an educator (like myself) who teaches students who were raised on video games, this information is useful, and it gives me ideas on how I might tailor my assignments accordingly.

By contrast, we have something like learning the rules of a "semiotic domain" or "affinity group." Gee is right to say that gamers learn "to see themselves as the kind of person who can learn, use, and value [a] new semiotic domain" (in this case the "semiotic domain" of the gaming subculture). I also think that Gee is correct to say that a science teacher, for instance, is asking students to do similar work with reference to the semiotic domain of "science," and that students who have learned how to integrate themselves into a domain through gaming might be at a light advantage here. But it seems at this point like we're no longer dealing with "what video games have to teach us," and more dealing with a broader concept of subcultural orientation: certainly a student who belongs to the "affinity group" of, say, Honda aficionados would have had an identical experience and an identical advantage.

Other than this minor quibble (and some other quibbles about the way Gee thinks about narrative in video games, which I may say more about later) the book is an engaging read, one that I'd readily recommend to those interested on the topic.

Note: my notecards on this book (and a few on James Paul Gee more generally) are available as a Dabbledb export, here.

Labels: education, game_commentary, teaching

Wednesday, February 28, 2007
11:36 AM
0 comments

this week's thoughts on seriality: part two (video games)

My whole thinking on video games as a serial (as opposed to "series") format derives from two pieces published by Wired journalist Clive Thompson: "Tune In Next Week For Gaming Fun" and a later piece, "The Myth of the 40-Hour Gamer."

"The Myth of the 40-Hour Gamer" sets up the problem: there exists a class of gamers who admire long-form narrative adventure titles and but struggle with finding the chunks of unbroken time necessary to complete them. Thompson discusses this along age lines: the hard-core gamers playing these puzzle games are clustered in the 6-to-17 age bracket (according to US consumer research organization The NPD Group), a group that Thompson describes as having "very few distractions and commitments." By contrast, adults, busy with jobs, family duties, and other obligations, are mostly bound to compress their gameplay into smaller bursts: an hour here, an hour there, maybe longer on an occasional indulgent weekend. Which means that unless you're committing to taking an full year to complete one of these games, you're likely to get only partially through before abandoning it.

"Tune In Next Week For Gaming Fun" describes a possible solution: serialized, episodic games. Specifically Thompson looks at Valve Software's sequel to Half-Life and Half-Life 2, called (somewhat confusingly) Half-Life 2: Episode One, which is being released as the first part in a one-year "trilogy" and is designed to be played in a short burst, four or five hours instead of the whopping forty.

Three installments in a year is still a good half a world away from the 20-odd installments modeled by television drama, but I think moving in this direction has a lot of potential benefits. As Thompson points out, some of these might be aesthetic:

"Serial narrative ... lets writers create increasingly labyrinthine plots. Audience members can tolerate only so many twists and turns in a single, monolithic movie before they get confused. But in an episodic narrative, a writer can weave oodles of subplots -- because we've got months and years to puzzle them over. The tangled plots of Lost simply wouldn't be possible anywhere other than episodic TV. Now imagine how dense and twisty Half-Life or SiN could become if the game companies stretched them out to five, 10 or 50 episodes."

There are adavantages to serialization from a capitalist point of view, too. In this article over at Gamasutra, Rick Sanchez unpacks some of the industry benefits:

"[A] growing percentage of your potential audience might be more inclined to buy your product if they know the commitment is smaller, and if they like it, there is more where that came from ... The time and money commitment by the game player for a single episode in a series is small, so the hurdle to purchase is much lower than a $60 SKU. Build into your game the release schedule for future episodes or teasers for previously released episodes, and after you sell one episode to a consumer, you have a built in viral marketing tool and a shot at getting them to buy again. Music downloads trained the consumer to focus on tracks instead of albums, and that trend ultimately led the consumer to focus on TV episodes rather than seasons. It isn’t a huge leap to turn that trend around and get people to focus on buying additional episodes in a game series if we provide them the opportunity."

Seems obvious enough, although I'd quibble with the notion that consumers are now focused "on TV episodes rather than seasons"—one of the side effects of the recent advancements in serial television is that "the season" has strengthened its identity as a coherent aesthetic unit. This is a textbook example of "bootstrapping" or "reciprocal feedback": as DVD technology made it more feasible to package and market an entire season of television, television creators began to make shows that rewarded complete-season viewing, which in turn made entire-season DVDs even more readily marketable. This is a phenomenon that is likely to still be in the process of development.

That said, there are pitfalls here. Thompson's promise that video games could be more like Lost sounds less glowing than it once did, now that people are raising the question of how successfully Lost is managing its "oodles of subplots"—and we shouldn't forget that it's easier to count the ignominious deaths of once-promising serialized SF dramas than it is to count the fondly-remembered successes. Plus there seem to be signs of "narrative fatigue" among viewers: the 06-07 TV season is littered with the corpses of serialized shows that didn't make it). Having every show that ever aired at your fingertips is great, and it makes byzantine ongoing plotlines possible in a way that they haven't been in the past (soap operas being the possible exception here), but if you're only watching an hour or two of television a day it's no small thing to commit to watching an entire season of a TV show (or, at least hypothetically, to commit to playing the backlogged set of episodic video-games that constitute a complete arc).

Labels: game_commentary, media commentary, narrative, seriality

Tuesday, January 09, 2007
9:20 AM
0 comments

books for the game industry

Although I'm not a member of the videogame industry, I very much enjoyed looking at Ernest Adams' list of Fifty Books Everyone In the Game Industry Should Read. There are a few that are game-design-oriented in ways that I can't find relevance in, but only a few: Adams keeps much of the list oriented around theoretical and inspirational texts.

The following are books that I own / have read:

• Rules of Play, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
  

• A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster
  

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte
  

• Visual Explanations, by Edward Tufte
  

• Envisioning Information, by Edward Tufte (he has a new one out, too)
  

• Everything Bad Is Good for You, by Steven Johnson
  

• Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
  

• Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga
  

• The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
  

• Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, by various authors (*cough*gygax*cough*)
  

• Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
  

• Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan
  

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
  

• Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, by Janet H. Murray

and the following are the books on Adams' list that I'd like to read, along with intriguing clippings of his descriptions:

• Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames, by Steven Poole
  "Steven Poole is an intelligent and thoughtful writer who understands not only how games work but what they mean, culturally, psychologically, and technically."
  

• Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul
  "[E]xamines the complex relationship between rules, which create gameplay, and fiction, which creates fantasy worlds."
  

• Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, by Ian Bogost
  "[Provides] a method of analysis that marries literary theory to information theory."
  

• Joystick Nation, by J.C. Herz
  "[A] good introduction to the sociology of videogames, placing them in context as a cultural phenomenon."
  

• What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee
  "He presents, and argues for, 36 principles of learning that he believes can be found in the design of good games"
  

• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, by Frederick P. Brooks
  "Some of the most famous software engineering truisms were first identified by this book, such as 'adding programmers to a late software project will make it even later.'"
  

• A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al
  "Christopher Alexander and his team identify dozens of patterns of behavior—not all so dramatic—and show how to enable that behavior through architecture." I've been meaning to read this book for at least five years now.
  

• Man, Play, and Games, by Roger Caillois
  "[I]ntroduces a classification for games based on four key qualities found in many of them: competition, chance, simulation ... and what he calls vertigo"
  

• The Ambiguity of Play, by Brian Sutton-Smith
  "Sutton-Smith updates Huizinga and moves the discussion into the modern world."
  

Labels: book_commentary, game_commentary, lists

Friday, October 13, 2006
12:30 PM
0 comments

benign masochism III: the aesthetics of frustration

Continuing on in the same vein as before, I came upon an interesting set of posts over at Writer Response Theory dealing with the notion of "frustration" in interactive fiction.

If we treat interactive fiction as narrative, which I've been arguing that we shouldn't, then frustration is disruptive: it snaps us out of the narrative, John Gardner gets cranky at us because we've broken the vivid and continuous dream of fiction, etc. But if we treat interactive fiction as a game, then the frustration is a necessary component of the game, and can be developed as an aesthetic. Jeremy Douglass's posts start us off there, asking: "What would it mean for a piece or a medium to be 'better at frustration?'"

Here's the full series: "Frustration in Interactive Media," "Frustration by Experience, Outcome, and Design," "Frustration, Expectation, and Inconsistency," and finally "Frustration, Irony, and Sanity."

There's a lot to digest here, but a quick glance-through brought me to this line, which I think sums things up nicely: "The art is the error message, and the error message is the art."

Labels: game_commentary, narrative

Monday, September 11, 2006
3:07 PM
0 comments

benign masochism vs. "fun that is bad"

More questions stemming out of yesterday's question. Are games that are hard more fun? My initial feeling is that there's maybe a "sweet spot" between a game that is so easy that it quickly becomes boring and one that is so hard that the player decides that progress is either impossible or not worth the time investment (I quit the otherwise adorable Un Jammer Lammy because the learning curve was too fucking steep for me to play the second level one more time).

Raph Koster's lecture / series of doodles Theory of Fun for Game Design (largish PDF) puts this in terms of pattern recognition: playing a game involves puzzling out its rule or behavior patterns, which is fun as long as steady, non-redundant progress is being made on the task.

Tom Coates' Plasticbag weblog has a post on "things that aren't fun, and fun that is bad," in which he asks a whole series of interesting related questions (specifically on World of Warcraft):

"I've started wondering whether a game could still be considered good if you want to play it a lot but at the same time resent the time that it takes from you. What if you find it boring but still somehow can't put it down[?] Can you love and hate a game at the same time and still call it 'fun'? Can a game be a narcotic, or a guilty secret or an addiction? Can it be a fruitless activity without value that still feels good?"

Long, interesting comments thread follows.

Labels: game_commentary, pleasure

Thursday, September 07, 2006
2:48 PM
0 comments

benign masochism

My sole accomplishment over the long weekend was beating the PS2 game Shadow of the Colossus. If you're not familiar with this game, you might want to read this lengthy review, a splendid piece of game journalism from Insert Credit's Tim Rogers. (The discussion at the end of Zonbi tai kyuukyuusha, a game whose title translates to Zombie Vs. Ambulance, is an added plus.)

Shadow of the Colossus is only the second game for the PS2 that I've managed to defeat, the first being the hyperchromatic confection Katamari Damacy (also nicely reviewed by Tim Rogers). The differences between the two games will be evident to even the most casual observer, but I should also mention that Shadow is a lot harder, and took me probably four times as long to complete.

This experience, which required an enormous amount of trial and error, wasn't always pleasurable: after the thirtieth time that I fell off that final colossus I think it's safe to describe my mood as "frustrated."

In any case, now that that game is defeated and returned to its spot on the shelf, and now that my clarity of mind is gradually returning, I have time to consider more theoretical questions, like: do games have to be hard? And, if so, why? Those of you interested in delving into such questions might enjoy the fourth Ludus Novus podcast, "Hurt Me Plenty," which discusses exactly this topic.

As for me, I'm going to turn my attention now to beating We Love Katamari (the sequel to Damacy) and then I'm thinking about picking up a horror game, probably Resident Evil or Silent Hill. Too bad I don't have an XBox 360, because Dead Rising ("not developed, approved, or licensed by the owners or creators of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead") looks like it's a hoot...

Labels: game_commentary

Wednesday, September 06, 2006
12:47 PM
0 comments

still more on games and narratives

I know, being awake before noon on a Saturday and mad about narrative is probably about the geekiest thing ever.

But one more thing that unnerves me about the drive to have games tell better stories is the way it overlooks one important fact: playing, or even watching, a game already has an inherent narrative dimension to it. Namely, the sequence of events that constitutes the experience of playing (or of spectating). A game of football, for instance, doesn't require additional plot to be grafted onto it, and it doesn't require the players to adopt characters or avatars or anything like that.

This type of narrative is defined as "experiential" by Celia Pearce in her piece "Story as Play Space," which appears in Game On: The History and Culture of Videogames, and is probably the single most intelligent thing I have ever read on the topic of the relationship between narrative and play. She defines "experiential" narrative as "The emergent narrative that arises out of the game 'conflict' as it is played out, as experienced by the players themselves."

Related are "performative" narrative ("The emergent narrative as seen by spectators watching and/or interpreting the game underway") and "descriptive" narrative ("The retelling of game events to third parties, and the culture that emerges out of that. In terms of sports, an entire section of the newspaper is devoted to this.").

I couldn't agree more strongly that these are important narrative elements of any game, and I feel like any discussion of "how to make games better narratives" should focus on these things first, and only then focus on how to make a game more traditionally "storylike" (in terms of making them more closely resemble fiction).

I think this approach is exemplified by the following comments from ARG designer Jane McGonigal (from her interview in the New Media Writing issue of Iowa Review Web), in which she seems to be discussing her attempts to script something that will yield a blend of "experiential" and "descriptive" narrative:

"The story I help write and tell is the story of the players. My relationship to story and games is in giving players stories to tell about their experiences, creating narratives of their interaction in particular spaces and with each other... Those stories about the ingenious, impassioned action and interactions of the players--that's the narrative."

It's this kind of thinking that makes McGonigal one of the most exciting game designers working today. Interested parties might want to dig around on her site, Avant Game, or check out her blog.

Labels: game_commentary, narrative

Saturday, September 02, 2006
9:33 AM
0 comments

social environments

And then over here at Gamasutra, we have Chris Crawford, who wrote The Art of Computer Game Design back in 1984 but who for the last fourteen years has been out of the videogame biz and working instead on something called "Storytronics," a development platform for "interactive storytelling" (those of you trying to keep score at home may be dismayed to learn that Crawford's "interactive storytelling" is totally different from text-adventure-style "interactive fiction").

Initially, when Crawford describes "interactive storytelling" as "a story you get to participate in as the protagonist" I start to seize up, preparing to go back on the same rant that I've been on twice already (one, two) . But then Crawford makes it a bit more interesting: "It's not at all like a regular story... You don't charge down a plot line towards the end, you meander through a social environment... The primary thing you do [in] interactive storytelling is talk to other people."

"Meandering": that's sounding promisingly more "game-like" rather than "story-like," and starts making me wonder whether Crawford has in mind something like a massively multiplayer online game, which has both "game" and "talk" elements. But then he draws this distinguishing line: "Most online multiplayer games, functionally they operate as chat rooms with some structure behind them ... [T]here's a game interaction going on outside the chat room, but the two are pretty distant. So if you want to talk about social interaction, well hell, you're talking about a chat room. We don't need a game for that."

Well, OK, except now I'm confused: it's become unclear to me how Crawford distinguishes "interactive storytelling" from a garden-variety chat room, or (more pointedly) from MOOs or MUDs, virtual spaces which enable the exact kind of socially-oriented environment-meandering that Crawford seems to be claiming as the province of interactive storytelling. And then we're once again up against the problem of (it seems to me, shortsightedly) trying to graft a narrative into these sorts of spaces, which are not inherently well-suited for producing narrative... getting a MUD to produce something that feels like "storytelling" hinges upon all the participants behaving more or less consistently in character, something that's extremely difficult for people who haven't been trained as actors, and that the average MUD-user may or may not have any interest in. I'm not the first person to point out that for every person who attempts to play, say, World of Warcaft in character, there are at least a dozen others who don't. (Some online games have gotten around this problem by stripping out the chat function and radically constraining the array of available character behaviors: see, for example, The Endless Forest, in which characters play deer.)

I'm open to the idea that Crawford has something interesting up his sleeve, but for the life of me I can't discern what it might be. Maybe poking around the Storytron website will help...

Labels: game_commentary, narrative

Wednesday, August 30, 2006
1:56 PM
0 comments

narrative vs architecture

Earlier this month, I griped a bit about the impulse to make [video]games better narratives. The gist of my gripe, for those of you just tuning in, more or less revolves around the point that some of the features that make videogames entertaining as play don't generally make for compelling narrative, and attempts to constrain the play-element to enhance the narrative element seem to be understanding the point of playing a game almost exactly backwards.

I can't take credit for inventing this argument: it's basically a recap of some of James Paul Gee's ideas about "probing" in videogames, ideas which I was exposed to through Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad Is Good For You, which I read this summer. So it didn't come as too much of a surprise when Steven Johnson said the following in the "Literacy in the Age of Video Games" roundtable in the September issue of Harper's:

"[O]ne of the problems we have in understanding games is that we see them as being driven by their narratives. In fact, I think the narratives tend to be a vestigial part of games that has been carried over from earlier forms. When people play games, they aren't playing them for the story. They aren't playing them for a narrative arc of any kind. In fact, if you're looking for an analogy, I would say that game design is closer to architecture than it is to novel writing. The designers do create certain resistances to certain types of behavior and encourage other types of behavior within the space, but first and foremost, they're creating a space that can be explored and occupied in multiple ways."

That puts it pretty well, I think...

Labels: game_commentary, narrative

Thursday, August 24, 2006
5:20 PM
0 comments

probing worlds made of words

Sometimes I'm not sure about the merits of the term "electronic literature." I've used it loads of times, including spending some labor in this very blog working on an unfinished taxonomy of "forms of electronic literature." Although even perusing that list will reveal some instances where I refer to certain types of electronic literature as really being more akin to "toys" or "films" then as "literature" per se.

I think about this a lot in relation to the term "interactive fiction" or "interactive narrative," a category which encapsulates what used to be known as the more lowly "text adventure." "Interactive fiction" (IF) seems to have become the commonly-accepted term for these sorts of creative works, and I've stated some of the things I like about the term on record, but I wonder sometimes if it doesn't distort the way people think about the end product. Specifically, I wonder if it's useful to assess IF using the critical tools one would use to assess a piece of literature: I wonder if IF wouldn't be better assessed using the critical tools one would use to assess a video game.

This came up for me recently when I was reading the transcript of "Interactive Narratives Reconsidered," an interesting speech that Ernest W. Adams delivered at last year's Game Developers Conference.

Adams' speech mostly attempts to answer the question of "how can we make interactive narratives better as narratives?" In order to establish the need for improvement in this regard, Adams points out a set of "key problems" that make it "difficult to create interactive narratives."

For instance, "The Problem of Amnesia": "What do we do about the fact that story characters understand the world they live in, but the player is amnesiac about that world? Why does the player have to spend time at the beginning of every game exploring what is supposed to be his own natural environment?"

I think it's a valid point that this maybe doesn't make for a very realistic story, and it may not be compelling as literature, but it's never bothered me very much in the text adventures I've played (or, if you prefer, "in the pieces of interactive fiction I've read"). It's never registered as a "problem," exactly. And in trying to think about why that is, it occurred to me that a big part of what's pleasurable about a video game is this process of exploring and testing the environment. In Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad Is Good For You, he refers to this process as "probing," a concept originally theorized by social scientist James Paul Gee.

Gee is a pretty smart guy (Stanford Ph.D.) who has some things to say on the topic of games as narratives (from this interview):

"Stories in video games work very differently than do stories in books or movies, and we really don't understand well how they work, yet, because we keep treating games like movies. In books and movies, the story is 'top-down,' someone else has made it and you discover it in the order and at the pace the designer has determined. In games, stories are 'bottom-up.' The player picks up bits and pieces sometimes in an order and at a pace determined by the player."

Well, exactly. The sort of "mimetic gap" between the way a player explores a game and the way a heroic protagonist would realistically behave in fiction, seems to me to be a key part of what makes a game a game.

Apply Adams' "Problem of Amnesia" to a classic video game like, say, Defender. I've been playing Defender for approximately 26 years now and I'm still terribly bad at it: the fast gameplay and complicated controls make it a game of near-infernal difficulty. But that's the fun of it. Treating this game as narrative would be laughable: you wouldn't ask "why does this character need to spend valuable time trying to figure out the controls of his own ship?" or "why did this planet choose such an inept defender, thereby insuring their immanent doom?" (It's true that the planet in Defender only has ten humans on it, so their talent pool is pretty limited.)

Similar is Adams' "Problem of Internal Consistency": "What if the player is controlling Superman as his avatar, but wants to do something very unlike Superman: killing people at random, for example?"

This wouldn't make for a very canonical Superman story, agreed, but attempting to do something like that seems to me to be a fundamental part of the process of playing a video game. Part of the fun of a game is figuring out what constitutes its internal consistency, which means that sometimes you're going to do things which don't make consistent or realistic sense were we to be watching the thing as a narrative. Play Shadow of the Colossus and it's only a matter of time before you make the protagonist leap to his doom off a staggeringly high cliff. Taken as story, this makes no sense: why would a protagonist so seemingly driven to complete his goal suddenly opt for suicide? Taken as an instance of "probing"—testing the parameters of a game world—it makes perfect sense.

I just don't think a text adventure / piece of interactive fiction should be held to different standards just because it's made of words and not polygons.

Labels: electronic_literature, game_commentary, narrative

Tuesday, August 08, 2006
11:30 AM
0 comments

Game designer Eric Zimmerman's personal site is currently under reconstruction, but it's worth browsing the version stored in the Internet Archive.

I like the games he designed to be played in the space of an art gallery, but I'm particularly intrigued by Suspicion, a game "for 12-24 players designed to be played in an office environment over a week of real time. ... a social game in which players all belong to secret groups. To win the game, you must find the other players in your groups using code words and code gestures. Then you work with your allies to sabotage other groups and 'steal' their Suspicion cards through clever gameplay."

More on Suspicion here:

"Traditionally, games take place in artificial environments. Football players, for example, operate within strictly delimited boundaries of time and space when they play football. Football games take place in a field. The games have a beginning and an end. There is normally no question as to whether or not the players are actually playing the game.

Suspicion, on the other hand, does not create a separate environment for play. It has a parasitic relationship to the already existing physical, psychological, and social work environment. Suspicion operates in this environment in curious ways.

For example, by randomly placing the players in groups, the normal hierarchies and power relationships of the office are restructured into the more perverse and arbitrary ordering of the game."

Love it!

I learned about Suspicion when reading this writeup of the "What Is A Game?" conference in Utrecht, which contains other interesting tidbits such as the rules for how to play a massively multiplayer rock-paper-scissors game.

Eric Zimmerman's game company, GameLab.

Labels: game_commentary

Friday, December 12, 2003
9:02 AM
0 comments

Grand Text Auto has an article up about the problems with the Star Wars Galaxies multiplayer game. Lots of links to other people writing about the same thing.

One of these links points to a long, interesting thread over at Game Girl Advance. Buried somewhere in the stack of comments is this gem of an idea:

"Do you know what I want to see in a MMOG? I want to see an expiry date. I want to know that the game is going to have a beginning and a middle and an end. Every great game and every great work of fiction ends at some point. There should be a story arc that changes the world over time so that I have a reason to log in every day and see what's changed. I should be able to get involved in these changing events. There should be high-level, DM-run NPCs on both sides that give meaning and order to the lives of ttheir respective players. An Emperor DM telling the Imperials to attack X. A Mothma DM ushering the Rebels to secret base Y.

There should be epic battles that are announced in advance. Players log in and fight for their side. The results of those battles should affect which side controls which world. Eventually, there is a final month-long epic campaign to take over Base X and at the end victory parties for all and then the server gets reset. It would be like a television series."

I like it. It reminds me fairly substantially of the way White Wolf is ending their World of Darkness live-action roleplaying world, after a thirteen-year run.

Labels: game_commentary

Wednesday, October 29, 2003
2:32 PM
0 comments

Short yet interesting article on "transformative play," by Katie Salen, in association with an exhibit she curated at the Walker Art Center.

"Transformative play occurs when the free movement of play alters the more rigid rule structure in which it takes shape. "

This article specifically focuses on transformative play as a "powerful creative strategy within digital culture," focusing expressly on the way people use tools within the Quake and Sims games to construct their own narratives. Especially interesting is the discussion on "machinima," the use of the Quake demo recorder (or other game tools) as a means of cinematic production.

Labels: game_commentary

Wednesday, July 30, 2003
2:31 PM
0 comments

"Lose your first fifty games as fast as possible."
Go proverb

I've been getting to play a few games of go lately. I've mainly had to teach my opponents the rules before playing against them, and things might have been easier if I'd first paid closer attention to this useful page on how to teach Go that Nick sent me a while ago.

In any case, I hope my opponents will be willing to indulge my desire for occasional rematches.

In other news, my phone is working again, so if you've been expecting a call from me, it should hopefully come soon.

Labels: game_commentary

Saturday, July 26, 2003
5:36 PM
0 comments

Go tutorial links still in my bookmarks list from the last time I tried to learn how to play:

The Interactive Way To Go. Java-based interactive tutorial.

The Magic of Go. Archive of over two hundred Go columns from Japan's Daily Yomiuri newspaper. The later ones are quite advanced, but the early columns are oriented towards the neophyte.

Column One: How go is played / Four basic rules.

Column Two: The origins of go / The rule of capture.

Labels: game_commentary

Thursday, July 03, 2003
8:42 AM
0 comments

Had a nice dinner last night with Chris and Ray, and then played a game of Nomic.

Being the game dork that I am, I've played a lot of Nomic in this lifetime. These games have ranged from the very silly to the seriously hardcore, but I noticed (this time around) that I reliably try, usually early on in the game, to create a rule that serves no obvious initial purpose other than creating a mechanic off of which future rules can branch. I privately think of this as a "lateral" rule, in that it kind of directs the game sidewards, (mis-)directing the players away from the ("vertical?") purpose of accumulating the hundred points initially required to win the game.

Last night's "lateral" rule was "At the conclusion of a turn, a player shall receive a face drawn on a slip of paper from each of his or her opponents. The bank of accumulated faces will be referred to as a player's Population."

Worked great, by the way. A later rule someone passed specified that these little "people" needed to be named, and now I've got a pile of thirty cute little residents as a souvenir.

We also played a game of Eat Poop You Cat, which was fun, even though you really need more than three people for that game to reach its full potential.

Labels: game_commentary

Friday, January 17, 2003
3:39 PM
0 comments

Today's e-mail asked: What is it with you all and games?

My answer, slightly expanded, read: I think most human beings need some sort of competition in their lives. It's demonstrably psychologically satisfying. That's part of why I enjoy games: they allow their players to playfully enjoy that satisfaction, safely. I would guess that people who don't play games are more likely to compete with others in ways that are more socially destructive (capitalism, acquisition, elitist oneupmanship, stealing one another's spouses, etc.).

(Possible theory: excellence in the more destructive forms of social competition is often taken as a badge of success. Perhaps the common perception of gamers as "losers" has to do with an avoidance of these forms of competition?)

A second reason is that games are systems, and I'm interested in the way systems work, and have been for a long time, probably about as long as I've been seriously interested in games. Playing a game is an exploration of the way a system works—within the constraints and rules of the game "world", what moves are the ones that will produce the desired outcome? What are effective ways of manipulating this system? Playing Icehouse with Trevor when I was in New Orleans this fall really reminded me of how delightful this exploration can be when shared with another person.

(Making up games deals with the fun of the flipside—conceiving rule-matrices that might be fun to play within.)

A third reason, this one the brainchild of my friend Jon, is that games expose us to situations that we might not experience otherwise, which enables us to test out particular sets of behaviors without serious consequences. (Play in general fulfills this role, games are merely a formal method of doing it.) This testing-out process in turn can influence the way we behave when we leave the gamespace and return to daily life. Traditionally, it is children who need to test out behaviors the most-- since they're learning how the world works --which may be why play and games are generally considered to be childish pursuits. But a person who thinks of learning, growing, and evolving as a lifelong process might find value in continuing to play.

(Role-playing games are particularly unique in this regard; they allow us to test out aspects of whole new identities.)

Labels: game_commentary, play, pleasure

Wednesday, October 30, 2002
8:59 PM
0 comments

Spent the weekend out in Milwaukee, at Gen Con, the largest game conference in the world. Geeks of all ages and types were in attendance, making the visit worthwhile for people-watching value alone.

I spent my game budget for the year, naturally, purchasing trinkets like the three "catfight" decks from James Ernest's card game Brawl, and four tubes of mysterious and alluring Icehouse pyramids.

I had to pass on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer role-playing game, mainly because I don't know enough locals who'd be interested in playing. Too bad.

Labels: game_commentary

Tuesday, August 13, 2002
3:36 PM
0 comments