Category: meta

Today is the 10th anniversary of The Ludologist blog. Here is the very first post, Welcome to Blogdom.

10 years sounds like a long time, but the blog also feels like it has been operating on its own separate time scale all along. I started blogging while I was working on my PhD, but now I have been a full-time academic for almost 9 years. I am also married and a father now (but I could never get myself to blog about personal things).

• I started blogging when “video games” almost exclusively meant AAA games sold in boxes.
• I started blogging before cell phone games had taken off.
• I started blogging before casual games took off.
• I started blogging before art games, indie games, and personal games.
• When I started blogging, experimental game (or interactive art) creators used to emphasize that they were not making games in any way. Now they emphasize that they are.
• Book published since I started blogging: 3.
• Blog posts: 635.
• Blog comments: 2142.
• Best hosting service used: Hostgator. Worst: Dreamhost.
• When I started blogging, there were few books on video games. We were still going over Huizinga, Caillois, and Sutton-Smith, looking for secret knowledge from the past.
• I recently made a list of must-have video game books … got to 100. (I may post the list later.)
• I started blogging before game jams were a thing, and when experimental video games were still considered weird and exceptional.
• Twitter and social media are poor replacements for blog posts and discussion. Because: Twitter comments invariably become snarky and/or misunderstood. Facebook comments disappear in the stream of time.
• Game studies is a big field now. I think we managed to construct the field, and to launch game educations (vocational or otherwise) at a surprising speed. I think that some of the better work and discussion show that we really are getting smarter.
• Though there can also be a sense of history repeating at times. And yet, many of the basic questions (i.e. games and narrative, games and players, design and industry, what is a “good game”) are different questions now than they were 10 years ago. They appear against a different background.
• Becoming smarter seems to entail that many of the discussions that were assumed to be resolvable on a high level … turn out to contain smaller discussions and questions inside.
• Knowledge accumulates, but not in the way you thought it would.
• Blogging and game research remain fun (in a much more pure and unambiguous sense than games are fun, strangely).

Thanks for reading!

Peter Wojcieszuk has graciously translated my paper What computer games can and can’t do into Polish: Co potrafią,a czego nie potrafią gry komputerowe.

This paper (from 2000) was the first time I made a position statement about the need for video game theory, for a ludology.

Many of the things the paper asks for seem to have come true, but we are not exactly done (and it probably not technically possible to be done, we can just get further).

This week I am keynoting at the Philosophy of Computer Games conference in Potsdam, May 8-10.

My talk is Who Made the Magic Circle? Seeking the Solvable Part of the Game-Player Problem.

If the early days of game studies concerned the issue of games and stories, recent discussions appear to be focused on the issue of games and players. This is a discussion of methods and of the object of study: Should we discuss players or should we discuss games? There are two possible perspectives on this: The common “segregationist” perspective implies that games are structures separate from players, structures that players can subsequently subvert. In this talk, I will make the case for an alternative “integrationist” perspective wherein games are chosen and upheld by players, and where players will happily create formal rule systems and boundaries around the playing activity.
I will argue that the question of games and players must therefore be decomposed into a set of smaller problems, each of which must be answered with different methods.

It’s a meta-talk! Looking forwards to the conference.