And again, none of this is to reject what you’re saying. Right now I think the tensions over disciplinary application are more about the dynamics of the formation of game studies, for which it would be beneficial to downplay, but not wholesale reject, the application of other disciplines, so game studies can get its bearings without having to continually fight off absorption into other disciplines. That would indeed be a possibility if no one was emphasizing the way in which games (and videogames) are unique and deserving of their own approach(es). A certain degree of formative isolation / game-as-game-centric research is needed, and that can’t happen without vocally downplaying the use of other disciplines, channeling resources.

(And if all this should prove to be a bunch of BS, please remember that I’m an amateur in all things academic….)

there is occasionally crossover, but for the most part, it’s safer to assume that games are their own medium, and must be treated as such, rather than just an offspring of movies, or novels, or whatever the fuck else.

I have to take issue with the laxity of this implied definition of “medium.” Yes, certainly V.G.s are their own medium, but have you asked yourself what defines a medium? It’s not just a matter of “occasional crossover,” but of the strategy of remediation (cf. Bolter and Grusin, then Raymond Williams). It’s simply wrong when formally inclined scholars say that it’s inappropriate to talk about the game “camera” in filmic terms; after all, designers think of fimlic effects when implementing camras, player’s experience of perspective is going to be unavoidably inflected by the training we receive as cinematic subjects, and, most importantly it would be downright irresponsible not to see what film scholars like Bordwell and Thompson have to say about point-of-view and perspective independepent of filmic structures like montage or the jumpcut. Just because games aren’t films doesn’t mean that they don’t refer to and remediate filmic techniques. Just because they are rigidly structured experience-engines doesn’t mean that we (the players) don’t have to have some psychological access to and context for the structured experience. And to ignore the theoretical resources afforded us by theorists and critics of other media is to inexcusably ignore the ways in which the “content” of a game is essential to the affect. (Pace, Markku)

On a related note, perhaps the idea of narrative in games wouldn’t be/have been considered so anathema if writers had chosen a model of narrative whose originator hadn’t declared it unsuited for the analysis of narrative forms more complex than fairytales and detective stories. (Pace, Markku)

Ben B.

In the player’s mind, I think it is often the case that the divisions between strategy and implementation are paper-thin if not totally invisible. When you’re in the thick of any fast-paced (or alternately, more slow-paced but deeply engrossing) game you’re not consciously aware of the strategic thinking behind your actions. Even a barely competent player of Street Fighter 2 will be able to pull off a sonic boom, dragon punch whatever without really thinking about it. This is not to say of course that strategizing doesn’t occur.

The Strategy-Action dichotomy is just a way of thinking about the player’s mental model that is often useful when you’re designing, and it meshes well with the larger concept of interaction as a feedback loop, with Input > Interpretation/Processing > Output, or the encoding/decoding process in media theory.

It’s also worth noting that strategizing occurs at many levels:

Win Game
– Get Frags
– Kill Opponents
– Damage Opponents
– Manoeuvre to Advantageous Position
– Run, Jump
– Fire Weapons
– Specific Considerations for Using Particular Weapons
– Ammo management
– Ambush Opponents
– Understand Level Layout
– Gather Information on Enemy Whereabouts
– Deprive Opponents of Resources
– Stay Alive
– Dodge Enemy Attacks
– Run, Strafe, Jump
– Collect Items
– Time Powerups
– Collect/Eat Armor and Health
– Know Locations of Stuff
– Navigate to Those Locations
– Walk Over Items

… might be a (admittedly very crude and scattershot) model for expressing the different levels of strategizing that go on in a Quaker’s mind. As you can see the more specific you get, the closer you get into action and the further you get from conscious, higher-order intellectual strategy. “Strafe left so I can avoid a rocket that’s sailing towards me thus sparing me damage” is, technically, a strategy, but it’s the sort of thing that would be carried out with very little brain-mediation – an almost totally pure action/reaction. I think at some point it becomes difficult to separate one from the other.

By saying that DDR (which I admittedly haven’t played much) was more about implementation than strategy, I guess I was pointing out that the actions you take don’t reach as high up the chain of “consciously devised plan of action” as they might in, say, a game of Civilization. But maybe conscious thought doesn’t even have anything to do with strategy.

Again, I have to insist that this is a gross oversimplification, unless you’re SOLE priority in playing DDR is simply to match your feet with the arrows. But for many players, this will simply not be the case, and they’d probably even scoff at you if you told them that’s how you played. You can’t even say that’s how the designers intended it to be played. Like reading a book, DDR admits of multiple interpretations, and both the recognition and negotiation of those interpretations throughout an entire song requires more than simply matching feet to arrows.

I can only guess that none of you have ever been enthusiastic DDR players. :P

That said, I’m happy with the distinction between the planning skill (strategizing) and the motor skill (whatever the bridge is between the player’s mind and the actual game state), but mainly because it fits sungly in the whole Anatomy of Games structure :)

Note that there’s ways to make both strategy or action wafer thin (although they always have to be there in some form). In DDR, as explained before, the strategizing is essentially done for you, and the motor-control does its best to do as told by the DDR machine, through the proxy of the strategizing mind – the higher strategizing part of the mind is almost undermined since it needs to do little other than tell the motor control parts of the brain to do as the DDR machine says!

The opposite would be something like chess, where HOW you interact with the board is largely irrelevant – the only physical rules are something along the lines of 1) tip up the table or knock over your own king and you accept defeat 2) let go of a piece after moving it and you confirm your move. (I could be wrong about #1). Strategizing vs. Putting-Strategy-Into-Action (the latter needs a better term =/. Any suggestions?) is still a distinction I can get behind.

But no. I’ve no clue how to start to define “skill”.

I’ve always thought of “skill”* as the expression/implementation of a strategy – all the physical machinations used to apply the strategy (which is just a mental plan). It’s the link between the player’s will and the actual game system – the act of interaction. (In the same way, the link between the metaphysical gamestate and the players’ interpretation of that game state is visual/audio/haptic/whatever feedback).

*There’s gotta be a less loaded term than this. I hate hijacking words.