Game Studies 13/1 is out

For your theoretical pleasure, Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research has just published its latest issue (Volume 13, Issue 1, September 2013). All articles are available at http://gamestudies.org/1301/

A Kinesthetic Theory of Videogames: Time-Critical Challenge and Aporetic Rhematic
by Veli-Matti Karhulahti

http://gamestudies.org/1301/articles/karhulahti_kinesthetic_theory_of_the_videogame

This article looks into the mostly unexplored difference between kinesthetic and nonkinesthetic videogame challenge. The difference is refined into a challenge-based theory for understanding the videogame and its peculiar rhetorical character.

Sonic Mechanics: Audio as Gameplay
by Aaron Oldenburg

http://gamestudies.org/1301/articles/oldenburg_sonic_mechanics

The work discusses the past and potential future intersections between game design and theories within contemporary sound art. The author will describe his design process in the creation of several experimental audio games. These range from music composition based on chance game events to silent games that simulate aspects of sound.

Automatic-Play and Player Deskilling in MMORPGs
by Stefano De Paoli

http://gamestudies.org/1301/articles/depaoli_automatic_play

The concept of automatic-play refers to the use of game bots, macros and other software that allow a total or partial automation of gameplay and in particular avatar levelling. The paper theorizes a key aspect of the automation of gameplay: the deskilling of players with the transfer of human skills to automatic-play software.

A Review of Ludoliteracy: Defining, Understanding and Supporting Games Education
by Siobhán Thomas

http://gamestudies.org/1301/articles/zagal_book_review

Ludoliteracy: Defining, understanding, and supporting games education (2010). by José P. Zagal. Pittsburgh, PA: The ETC Press. ISBN:978-0-557-27791-9.

Game Developer Magazine, complete archive 1994-2013

I felt it a bit sad when Game Developer Magazine closed down in July. Though it was for a long clear that specialist magazines were threatened by, well, the internet, GDMag did provide an edited sense of what was happening in the game industry at any given time (with a North American slant, of course). I also remember poring over introductions to network programming in (it must have been) 1995 or so.

Now the entire back archive of the magazine is available directly for free, in PDF form. http://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag

It is pretty good as a document of 20 years of video game history. Remember when we were all (and all students were) aspiring to be AAA developers? It really happened, and here is the documentation.

Well Played: volume 2 number 2 – Theories

And here is volume 2, number 2 of the Well Played Journal titled Theories, John Sharp et al. 2013.

Inhabiting Games Well (If not Uncomfortably…) – Casey O’Donnell

Critical Literacy: Game Criticism for Game Developers – Yotam Haimberg

Well-played and well-debated: Understanding perspective in contested affinity spaces – Sean Duncan

On justification: WoW, EQ2 and Aion forums – Thibault Philippette, Baptiste Campion

Why we Glitch: process, meaning and pleasure in the discovery, documentation, sharing and use of videogame exploits – Alan Meades

The Deletionist: Erasure Poetry from any Web Page

Announcing The Deletionist, a project by Amaranth Borsuk, Nick Montfort and myself.

This is a bookmarklet (added to the bookmark bar in one’s browser) that automatically creates erasure poetry from any page on the World Wide Web, revealing an alternate mesh of texts called the Worl. Amaranth and Nick presented The Deletionist for the first time this week at the E-Poetry festival in London, at Kingston University. http://thedeletionist.com/

For every page, The Deletionist weighs 30 different principles of erasure to see which is most appropriate for a given text.

Please post any interesting examples that you may find by tweeting @thedeletionist or posting here!

Examples

Games Telling stories

This is the alliteration rule – this guy’s clearly obsessed with the word “narrative”!

Waxy.org (example by waxy.org)

The “it’s not you it’s me”-rule.

Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation

The Steinian Continuous Present rule.

Bioshock Infinite ending spoiler

Readable, without spoiling much! The “I am Interesting” rule.

Greg Costikyan’s new book, Uncertainty in Games

Bringing your attention to Greg Costikyan’s new book Uncertainty in Games. This is the second volume in the Playful Thinking Series that I co-edit with Geoffrey Long and William Uricchio.

Get it from MIT Press, Amazon US, UK. (Sorry about all the stores I am not linking to.)

Description

Uncertainty in Games In life, uncertainty surrounds us. Things that we thought were good for us turn out to be bad for us (and vice versa); people we thought we knew well behave in mysterious ways; the stock market takes a nosedive. Thanks to an inexplicable optimism, most of the time we are fairly cheerful about it all. But we do devote much effort to managing and ameliorating uncertainty. Is it any wonder, then, asks Greg Costikyan, that we have taken this aspect of our lives and transformed it culturally, making a series of elaborate constructs that subject us to uncertainty but in a fictive and nonthreatening way? That is: we create games.

In this concise and entertaining book, Costikyan, an award-winning game designer, argues that games require uncertainty to hold our interest, and that the struggle to master uncertainty is central to their appeal. Game designers, he suggests, can harness the idea of uncertainty to guide their work.

Costikyan explores the many sources of uncertainty in many sorts of games—from Super Mario Bros. toRock/Paper/Scissors, from Monopoly to CityVille, from FPS Deathmatch play to Chess. He describes types of uncertainty, including performative uncertainty, analytic complexity, and narrative anticipation. And he suggest ways that game designers who want to craft novel game experiences can use an understanding of game uncertainty in its many forms to improve their designs.

10 years of the Ludologist

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.
Blogging and game research remain fun (in a much more pure and unambiguous sense than games are fun, strangely).

Thanks for reading!

Fake Challenges; Call of Duty as an Experimental Game

Not a new video, but I keep thinking about this video of a level in Call of Duty: Black Ops where the game goes out of its way to make the player think that he/she is playing a major part in driving the action forward, as well as as being constantly on the verge of failing.

Except you aren’t. Apart from two scripted moments, you can play through this 15-minute section without doing anything.

Question #1: is this wrong? Is it bad design?

I think there is an impetus to denounce this as overly slick, commercial and dishonest design.

But wait! Note how poorly this game example fits with some of the recent discussions (1 2 3) concerning the importance (or non-importance) of choices. I think we currently associate denials of player agency with experimental, subversive, art or personal games.

But Call of Duty probably rates among the games least likely to be described as “experimental”, yet we can also compare this video’s lack of player choice and consequence to some of the discussion of Proteus, whose status as a game is questioned on the Steam Forums, and defended vigorously as such by designer Ed Key.

Question #2: Are there honest and dishonest ways of breaking player expectations? Good and bad? Interesting and uninteresting? How can we tell the difference?