I’m off to the DIGRA 2005 conference in Vancouver, where I will be giving a paper on Rules and Fiction in video games. The paper presents my core point about games being half-real. There will be examples as well as high concept theories :)
Half-Real: The Interplay between Game Rules and Game Fiction
Video games are two rather different things at the same time: They are real in that they are made of real rules that players actually interact with; that winning or losing a game is a real event. However, when winning a game by slaying a dragon, the dragon is not a real dragon, but a fictional one. To play a video game is therefore to interact with real rules while imagining a fictional world and a video game is a set of rules as well as a fictional world.
In this paper, I will examine how rules and fiction interplay in different game examples, how fiction can cue the player into understanding the rules of the game, and how rules can cue the player into imagining a fictional world. The paper aims to explain the two things that video games are made of: real rules and fictional worlds.
After that it’s the Games, Learning, and Society conference in Madison. At GLS I am doing a joint session with Eric Zimmerman:
In this unusual and provocative session, Jesper Juul and Eric Zimmerman will explore a cluster of issues surrounding social game play, game meaning, and the ways that players learn and use rules. Juul and Zimmerman are both game creators and game theorists, and for this session they bring their design and their scholarly interests to bear. Through an audience exercise, participants will not just play a game, but embody and perform games and game cultures. The game will serve as the touchstone for a presentation and discussion about the difference between game rules and game fiction, social roles that players take on during play, the role of a game’s goal in social learning and play, the relationship between learning game rules and learning the “rules of culture,” and the ability of game design as a critical too reflect upon itself as well as on important questions of games, learning, and culture. Come to this session prepared to play like you mean it.
Hope to see you there!