The Ludologist

If you recall the history of game definitions, you remember how Wittgenstein discounted the possibility that the things that we call “games” (or rather Spiele in German) have anything in common, and argued that they rather have family resemblances. Wittgenstein’s argument is basically to say that naive people/philosophers assume that words have definite meanings, but that if we consider his range of examples, from board, to card, to ball games, to Ring a Ring o’ Roses, it will be clear that the things we call games have nothing in common. My response to this has usually been to say that Ring a Ring o’ Roses is not a game since it does not have quantifiable, variable outcomes to which the game assigns values (also discussed in Half-Real), so that’s that – Ring a Ring o’ Roses is not a problem for the definition of games, since a game definition doesn’t need to include Ring a Ring o’ Roses in the first place.

But lately I have been thinking that Ring a Ring o’ Roses is (or can be) more of a game than I thought. For those of you who haven’t played in a while, here is a video of some children playing it:

And this is what Wittgenstein has to say – I have to quote it all, §66-67 of Philosophical Investigations:

Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? — Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ “-but look and see whether there is anything common to all. — For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! — Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships.

Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear.

When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.– Are they all ‘amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis.

Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared!

I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and cries-cross in the same way.-And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.

The strange thing always was how easy it is to come up with any number of things that all of Wittgenstein’s examples have in common – they all involve humans participating in a socially defined activity at the very least. That’s the thing with family resemblances – they are within a family, and families usually have shared traits, such as being carbon-based lifeforms and so on. In The Grasshopper Bernard Suits makes the snide remark that Wittgenstein didn’t follow his own advice of looking and seeing – “He looked, to be sure, but because he had decided beforehand that games are indefinable, his look was fleeting, and he saw very little.”

Perhaps that is a little hard on Wittgenstein, but the truth obviously is that he was a theorist of language, not games, and he doesn’t look very hard. This doesn’t detract from his value as a philosopher, I think.

Lately I have played a lot of Ring a Ring o’ Roses (or rather “Ring round the Rosie”) with my toddler son, and I suddenly remembered that Brian Sutton-Smith had once told me that Ring a Ring o’ Roses could be considered a game because it has variable outcome if you are 2-3 years old. At that age, it is really challenging to coordinate all the dancing and falling down as a group. It is a goal that all participants should fall at the same time (the valorization of the outcome), and the group sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails (variable outcome). This is very visible in the video above.

Seen that way, Ring a Ring o’ Roses is akin to tic-tac-toe which is also challenging and interesting up to a certain age, but ceases to work as a game once we understand the strategy. The reason we don’t remember the challenge of Ring a Ring o’ Roses is that we played it mostly before our earliest memories. At the other end of the spectrum, I guess old age will make Ring a Ring o’ Roses into a game for us again.

Only the other day we were discussing the possibility of creating a history of game genres by parsing data.

And here, NcikVGG has posted such a history on Reddit. This is scraped from Videogamegeek. The top part concerns genres, and the bottom part concerns platforms.

Looking at it, the truth is that the platform part is more useful since the data it concerns is less prone to changing interpretations: a SNES is still a SNES after all these years. But the genre chart really shows how genre labels change over time: “arcade” is no longer a useful category, “action” and “scrolling” even less so.

As a supplementary chart, NcikVGG has posted a platform release history with an absolute vertical axis (counting # of releases). This one shows just how many games are being released these days compared to earlier days. It also shows us how important mobile platforms have become (though Android seems to be missing).

Following the Tetris lawsuit and the ongoing EA-Zynga lawsuit, Greg Lastowka comments on the ruling in the Triple Town / Yeti Town cloning case.

Here is what Greg says:

So… to the extent that a game idea is embodied in “objective elements of expression” that resemble “plot, theme, dialogue, mood, setting, pace, and character,” those things are not an “idea” and may be within the scope of copyright.  But how do we distinguish between “objective elements of expression” and the “idea” in Triple Town?  The idea part of Triple Town seems to be set forth above, but what are the “objective elements” of Triple Town?  The court doesn’t spell this out in the abstract so much as it demonstrates its understanding by applying it to the facts:

“Spry Fox’s allegations are more than adequate to illustrate plausibly the objectively similar expression embodied in Yeti Town. The object hierarchy is similar. Progressing from grass to bush to tree to hut is similar to progressing from sapling to tree to tent to cabin. Perhaps more importantly, the object hierarchy coupled with the depiction of the field of play comprise a setting and theme that is similar to Triple Town’s. A snowfield is not so different from a meadow, bears and yetis are both wild creatures, and the construction of a “plain” is not plausibly similar to the construction of a “patch,” at least as the two games depict those terms. Whether 6Waves’s choice of language in its dialog boxes is similar enough to Spry Fox’s is a closer question, but it is a least plausibly similar. There are apparent differences between games (for example, yetis are not bears and “bots” are not campfires), but a court must focus on what is similar, not what is different, when comparing two works.”

Did you follow that analysis?  The court has said that “hierarchical matching” is an idea above.  But here the court seems to place the particular “object hierarchy” within the scope of copyright. Bears are not yetis — but Yeti Town resembles Triple Town in that it mirrors a “wild creature” object within the hierarchy.  Snowfields are not meadows, but again, this is just swapping out one object for a similar object that can fit in the same slot in the hierarchy.  And the end result creates a similar “setting and theme.” I think I get what the court is doing here, but Eric says it “isn’t entirely clear” and Marty concurs about the ambiguity.

And no, nothing is settled here, since it is not specified what “similar setting and theme” is. But it does give a little more protection for game designs (and we can continue to discuss whether or not that is a good thing).