Comments on: Goals and Life Itself (DiGRA Column)

By: Avery

Avery — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 07:46:50 +0000

Your article has been printed on a fake newsprint pattern and is now used as wrapping paper for Japanese sweets and stuff… cool Internet.

By: Jesper

Jesper — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 17:19:55 +0000

I am not at all sceptical towards studying user in context, promise!

By: industry model and talent, industry models and talent

industry model and talent, industry models and talent — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 14:09:56 +0000

But as to your general skepticism towards the situationist critique I think you?re being unfair.

By: Jesper

Jesper — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:21:14 +0000

It wasn't meant as a criticism of situationism as much as a criticism of the general rhetorical figure where somebody claims that "I understand actual life in all its complexity and warmth, but everybody else is just promoting lifeless theories. The situationist critique as you call it has just been the best example of recent, and hence the easiest target. Here I am mocking myself doing the same: "The outlines of the stance can be seen when researchers reject theories from other fields in favor of their own brand new theories of games". I should say that I am always promoting practices such as playtesting in game design & development, so the idea of studying actual users is not particular alien to me.

By: Jonas

Jonas — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 09:08:27 +0000

Nice one.
On the whole I agree with your account – in particular your claim that “a theory of goals can give the tools to examine a wide range of games and game playing practices, including potential tensions between designer goals and player goals.”
Talk about systematically ignored methodological truths.

But as to your general skepticism towards the situationist critique I think you’re being unfair. Because:
1) Examples of formalist analyses that make claims beyond their methodological reach are pretty easy to find
2) The situation in game studies does look much like that of media studies before various situationist approaches presented highly important and (back then) very counter-intuitive results regarding the consumption/reading of media texts. Empirical gaming studies surely have been extremely rare and are likely to yield truly interesting and unexpected results.

But – and here’s where I think you may not be tough enough on the situationists – such a development will NOT occur by complaining about some alleged formalist supremacy. And it will not occur by going local to attempt to make observations about the complexity of social life among gamers.
In media studies, the development pretty much began with David Morley’s study on TV audiences. Morley set out to examine

“the degree of complementarity between the codes of the programme and the interpretive codes of various sociocultural groups… [and] the extent to which decodings take place within the limits of the preferred (or dominant) manner in which the message has been initially encoded”.

The point is that this is a structured study of a relationship; something completely different from a “thick description” of some practice. Variables, hypotheses, models and the like are the tools most likely to provide noteworthy results of a general nature.
I’ll paraphrase your sentence quoted above: If you deny the existence of goals, you’re blinding yourself to the interesting ways in which players use these goals.