Half-Real nominated for Game Developer Front Line Awards

OK, for that I am honored. Game Developer Magazine has nominated Half-Real for best book in the Game Developer Front Line Awards. Half-Real is obviously not a book about game development, but it was certainly intended to be useful in many of the discussions that pop up around games and development.

The book nominees are quite different, so let’s see what happens.

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SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 28 /PRNewswire/ — The editors of CMP Technology’s Game Developer have named the finalists for the 2006 Front Line Awards, the magazine’s ninth annual evaluation of the year’s best game-making tools in the categories of programming, art, audio, hardware, game engine, middleware, and books.

The final award winners, plus one inductee to the Front Line Awards Hall of Fame chosen for its outstanding contribution to the game development industry for five years or more, will be announced in the January 2007 issue of Game Developer, available on newsstands beginning January 17, 2007.

The finalists for the 2006 Game Developer Front Line Awards are:

ENGINES
Torque Game Builder 1.1.1, Garage Games
Valve Source Engine, Valve
Unreal Engine 3, Epic
HeroEngine, Simutronics Corporation
Gamebryo 2.2, Emergent

BOOKS
"Better Game Characters By Design,"
Katherine Isbister, Morgan Kaufmann
"3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop,"
Luke Ahearn, Focal Press
"ShaderX4,"
Wolfgang Engel (ed.), Charles River Media
"Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames,"
Chris Bateman, Charles River Media
"Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds,"
by Jesper Juul, The MIT Press
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Games have Rules

I am at the State of Play symposium in New York, and by the end of the first panel, we witnessed a discussion about rules.

I have heard this discussion many times by now, but it tends to follow the exact structure that it did here. According to my notes:

Richard Bartle: In games, everyone must play by the rules, and people play by the rules because this gives fun that you wouldn’t have without those constraints. At the same time, there will also be people who cheat.

Conference participant 1: No no, there are many studies that players don’t play by the same rules, and don’t agree what the rules are.

Conference participant 2: Sure soccer has rules, but there is also a large aspect of cheating, so why not make the rules to accommodate this cheating?

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I think I understand it now. Let’s say there are two positions here: 1) Pro-rules, and 2) anti-rules. Pro-rules people generally make pragmatic descriptions of the gameplaying activity, and anti-rules people commonly apply a general poststructuralist skepticism towards descriptions of structure. Here’s how the discussion plays out:

  1. The discussion typically begins with a pro-rules pragmatic statement along the lines of “games have rules”.
  2. The anti-rules person interprets this as saying “games have perfect rules created by an authority, the rules are always perfect, are never ambiguous in any way, players never cheat, and players are always in absolutely perfect agreement about all aspects of the rules, including written rules, house rules, and unwritten rules” and objects on all these counts.
  3. Pro-rules response: Eh yes, players cheat, and people may be in disagreement about what the rules are, but that doesn’t change the point that players engage in games well-aware that they have rules; players negotiate rules and tend to have a clear distinction between what is playing by the rules and what is cheating.
  4. Other anti-rules response concerns the idea that game designers should make the game more open, let players create rules themselves.

Here’s what I think: I think the pro-rules people (such as myself) make general pragmatic descriptions of games and gameplaying. And I think that these descriptions just push a very well-defined button for the anti-rules people that then hear something very different from what I believe is being said.

The anti-rules position additionally tends to claim to be uniquely taking the player’s side, and to uniquely be interested in how players actually use games. Eric Zimmerman once pointed out that talking about rules tends to get you pigeonholed as “anti-player”. This is obviously wrong.

I think a much better starting position for rule research would be to say you want to look at how rules are negotiated, constructed, upheld, and broken. But not to begin by a priori privileging (oh yes) rules being upheld, or rules broken as the preferred conclusion you hope to arrive at.

MIT November 28: Half-Real, A Video Game in the Hands of a Player

I will be speaking at CMS / MIT in Boston on November 28, 2006 at 5:00 PM.
Location: 1-136

Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player

What happens when a player picks up video game, learns to play it, masters it, and leaves it? Using concepts from my book on video games, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, I will argue that video game players are neither rational solvers of abstract problems, nor daydreamers in fictional worlds, but both of these things with shifting emphasis. The unique quality of video games is to be located in their intricate interplay of rules and fictions, which I will examine across genres, from casual games to massively multiplayer games.

Research for the Industry

John Hopson has a quite critical article on academic game research over at Gamasutra: We’re Not Listening: An Open Letter to Academic Game Researchers.

But honestly, even I walk past most of the academic presentations at industry events. Even I have trouble really getting excited about most of the games research being done out there. From the perspective of someone on the inside, the average piece of academic games research just doesn’t get the job done. It’s not a question of the quality of the research or the intelligence of the researcher or the game makers; it?s a question of bridging the gap between the academic and business cultures.

I must admit that I am a “cup is half full” kind of guy on these matters. It just isn’t possible to make everybody happy all the time. Of course, when I really am trying to make developers happy, I would like them to be, and the article has some good ideas for that. But there is still work to be done on the managing of expectations:

The researcher must lay out the entire impact of the idea, from the cost of implementing the proposal to the resulting changes in player experience and the metrics for measuring that impact. Getting players to identify with the main character is great, but researchers have to finish the rest of the sentence: “This will help players identify more strongly with the main character which will result in an improvement in measures of overall player satisfaction and an increase in total playing time.”

Actually laying out the cost of implementing a change on a specific project – I would be happy to help, but I need more data than what’s publicly available.

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That said, I am actually working on some research that is intended to both satisfy a purely theoretical curiosity, and to lead to recommendations like the one above – “do this, and player satisfaction will increase“.

Do that, and game developer satisfaction will increase.