The Ludologist

Who says theory is boring? In Jorge Luis Borges’ famous & funny short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, the writer Pierre Menard sets out to write a novel identical to Cervantes’ Don Quixote; not another Don Quixote, but the Don Quixote. He succeeds admirably, actually producing an all-new word-for-word copy of Don Quixote:

It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for examples, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX):

… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the “ingenious layman” Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth! – the idea is staggering. Menard, contemporary of William James, defines history not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened.

Now, game studies is finally catching up, compare a quote from this 2002 article:

Activity Theory offers a theoretical framework with strong intuitive appeal for researchers examining educational games. Growing out of Vgotsky?s discussion of the mediating role of artifacts in cognition (1978), Activity Theory provides a theoretical language for looking at how an educational game or resource mediates players? understandings of other phenomena while acknowledging the social and cultural contexts in which game play is situated.

… with a quote from this new, 2003 article by a different author:

Activity Theory offers a theoretical framework with strong intuitive appeal for researchers examining educational games. Growing out of Vgotsky?s discussion of the mediating role of artifacts in cognition (1978), Activity Theory provides a theoretical language for looking at how an educational game or resource mediates players? understandings of other phenomena while acknowledging the social and cultural contexts in which game play is situated.

… and draw your own conclusions.

The program for the DiGRA games conference in Utrecht November 4-6th is now available.
In something as new as game studies, there is always an open question on whether it will suddenly dry up or whether we will continue to see more in-depth and more interesting research. Fortunately things are looking good, and everybody does seem to get more savvy and clever all the time. Makes me happy.

Yours truly will be speaking on The game, the player, the world: looking for a heart of gameness.

Edward Castronova has a new paper online about the real-world (EBay) pricing of avatars in EverQuest based on various factors such as sex.

This paper explores a unique new source of social valuation: a market for bodies. The internet hosts a number of large synthetic worlds which users can visit by piloting a computergenerated body, known as an avatar. Avatars can have an asset value, in that users can spend time to increase their skills; these asset values can be directly observed in online markets. Auction data for avatars from the synthetic fantasy world of EverQuest are used here to explore a number of questions, especially those involving the relative value of male and female avatars. In EverQuest, about 20 percent of the avatar population is female, and there are no sex-based differences in avatar capabilities. Many avatars (about one-fourth to onefifth of the population) are cross-gendered, being piloted by a person of the opposite sex. Nonetheless, relations between avatars are gender-based, and include chivalry, dating, and sex. Female avatars tend to be concentrated in highly sexualized Human and Elven races, with very few being present among such aesthetically-challenged races as Ogres and Trolls. Hedonic analysis of the auction price data suggests that gender labels are a less important determinant of avatar values than the “level,” a game-design metric that indicates the overall capabilities of the avatar. Thus, ability seems more important than sex in determining the value of a body. Nonetheless, among comparable avatars, females do sell at a significant price discount. The average avatar price is 333 dollar; the price discount for females is 40 to 55 dollar, depending on methods. The discount may stem from a number of causes, including discrimination in Earth society, the maleness of the EverQuest player base, or differences in well-being related to male and female courtship roles. We do know, however, that these differences cannot be caused by sex-based differences in the abilities of the body, since in the fantasy world of Norrath, there are none.

Slate has an enlightening piece on using games to rebuild Iraq.
Lord British suggests applying the lessons from Ultima Online where the original anarchy turned into a social structure (tip: communicate clearly to the users that you’ve heard their complaints).
Edward Castronova suggest remaking an old board game called KingMaker to reflect the muddled political conflicts in present-day Iraq.

While the word “game” can make everybody uncomfortable, it does make sense: Iraq (and the real world in general) is the kind of place where clear-cut ideologies fail because they think that reality can be reduced to a simple root cause (economics, power structures, language, the joy of being liberated, national pride, god) whereas it in actuality is complex and packed with emergent and unpredictable events. Games, however simplistic their models, can be a soothing reminder that the world is full of emergent “gameplay” and events that we can’t master or fix with a simple sleight of hand.

My long-time cool colleague, Lisbeth Klastrup has succesfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation on virtual worlds today in Copenhagen!
Congratulations, Doctor Klastrup!!!

(My own dissertation is due October 1st, btw.)

The L.A. Times has an interesting article on the standards of game censorship in different countries: How sex in video games is off-limits in the US but violence is OK, whereas sex is OK in Germany but violence is not. (Famously, the human soldiers in StarCraft became androids in the German version and their red blood became some kind of green guck.) Germany of course has a special history, but there is a general tendency (exception below) where sex in Northern [Protestant] Europe is seen as less awful than violence, whereas in the US it’s the other way around. Which is one of those situations where Northern Europe is clearly right. (Thanks to Zhan Li for the link.)

In related news, the Norwegian department of culture wants NRK, the Norwegian state television network, to remove two, well, sexually oriented & wildly ironic games from their web site. (Norwegian language article,
short English article.) Feel free to see for yourself, the language barrier shouldn’t pose a problem: 1 and 2.
Here in Boston, everything bad (bars closing early and such) gets blamed on the Puritans, and people tend to assume that Scandinavia is this wildly free and progressive place, but Norway clearly has its own kind of puritanism.

Tried Burnout2 for the XBox the other day. While technically a racing game, it also contains a crash mode, the object of which is simply to cause maximum mayhem by crashing your car into traffic. There is a strange kind of beauty in the slow motion movement of busses crashing into cars, drivers failing to stop in time and huge pileups of wrecked vehicles:

Similarly, there’s a 9-11 simulator coming out [link now broken apparently]. Gonzalo Frasca is quite sceptical because he would have preferred it to be about economics in the Middle East, but I think Burnout 2 and this simulator are both about facing something terrible not by watching someone else go through it as in a movie, but experiencing it in the sort-of-first-hand mode that is called a game.
The flying arcs of crashing cars are fascinating stuff because we worry about road accidents but seldomly see them as they happen. Likewise, I am pretty sure that most people tried imagining how they would have escaped from the WTC. In that perspective games as well as storytelling can be about facing and surviving death …

P.S. Videos of Burnout2 crashes here.

It had to happen, and I’m glad it did: The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit overturned a previous ruling and determined video games to be protected speech under the U.S. constitution. (Article here,
actual court order.) It’s not every day you see courts dealing with basic research questions about games, but this one is not stupid at all and touches on some interesting issues. First of all, the court points out that the freedom of speech covers a rather broad range of expressions:

If the first amendment is versatile enough to "shield [the] painting of Jackson Pollock, music of Arnold Schoenberg, or Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll," Hurley, 515 U.S. at 569, we see no reason why the pictures, graphic design, concept art, sounds, music, stories, and narrative present in video games are not entitled to a similar protection.

What is missing from this list? Yep, gameplay. The things protected are the ones we find in traditional media, but the dynamical aspect of games are missing. It does open a somewhat hypothetical loophole in which a game might be banned due to its ruleset, independent of its graphics. Would somebody want to ban Tetris or the underlying ruleset of Age of Mythology? Stranger things have happened.

Up till around 2 years ago, I would be making the case that the graphics and back-story of any given game was subordinate to the all-important gameplay (hey, I was young then). Having since thought better of this, I think it is rather the case that graphics have varying degrees of importance in different games, but that their importance typically fades in multiplayer games. The ruling goes for this directly and points to the fact that you can’t have it both ways: You can’t claim that games don’t contain any "content" while claiming that this content is important:

Our review of the record convinces us that these "violent" video games contain stories, imagery, "age old themes of literature,? and messages, ?even an ?ideology,? just as books and movies do." See American Amusement Mach. Ass’n v. Kendrick, 244 F.3d 572, 577-78 (7th Cir. 2001), cert. denied, 534 U.S. 994 (2001). Indeed, we find it telling that the County seeks to restrict access to these video games precisely because their content purportedly affects the thought or behavior of those who play them.

Some people would frame this as a "ludology vs. narratology" conflict, but in actuality ludology means "the study of games" which can include content, and narratology means "storytelling" which is only one kind of fiction and content.

The only major flaw in the court’s reasoning is that ancient mistake of thinking that "everything is interactive":

We note, moreover, that there is no justification for disqualifying video games as speech simply because they are constructed to be interactive; indeed, literature is most successful when it "draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader’s own,"

Interpretation (processing the signs that you are presented with) is not the same as interactivity (you get different signs in reaction to your actions), no matter how clever it makes you sound, OK?

Still, a good day for games, and the first time I’ve seen reasonable arguments about computer games in court.