Is There a Ludologist in the House?

Is There a Ludologist in the House?Jerz’s Literacy Weblog)

Part of: Princeton Video Game Conference reflections.

The absence of European videogame theorists turned the Princeton Video Game Criticism Conference, at first simply by default, into a polite but noticeable anti-ludologist festival. I don’t want to give the impression that we were overrun by knee-jerk narratologists, of course, but the program was arranged so that it ended with those speakers who made it a point to disagree with the Scandinavian model.

Here at the Princeton English department, the narratologists had the home team advantage, especially when the last few speakers drew on the discourse of literary criticism.

Eric Hayot, Edward Wesp (who co-authored two presentations), and Barry Atkins, author of More than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form, deliberately positioned themselves in opposition to the Scandinavian ludologists — notably Gonzalo Frasca (who is, of course, not actually Scandinavian, but I digress).

Atkins began with the stereotypical image of the insanely focused gamer, hunched over and madly pounding on keys. Like the character Jack Nicholson plays in The Shining (who types endless variations of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”), the person in question is not having any fun. (Of course, neither is he accomplishing much work… )

Atkins recalled Aarseth’s observation that a cybertext requires “labor,” and notes that anything that you have to work at ceases to be fun. Note to self: Google for Tom Sawyer’s line about work, which consists if everything a body doesn’t want to do, and fun.

Atkins cleverly extended his “work” trope by examining the relationship between games and the workplace, noting that in an effort to control employee actions, employers are removing solitaire and other standard games normally installed as part of Windows. I don’t believe he explicitly mentioned the “boss button” (which interrupts a game by popping up a fake spreadsheet or text file in case your boss walks by), but he did note that each level of an action game is typically geared towards a fight with the level “boss.”

“Labor” and “work” are both reasonable interpretations of what Aarseth called the “non-trivial effort, required by readers if the “ergodic” texts such as videogames, interactive fiction, and literary hypertext. Such a text begins to reveal its contents only in response to actions of the user; this is an entirely different kind of effort from the effort one invests in interpreting those texts.

But there are plenty of kinds of effort that don’t qualify as “work.” Perhaps more to the point, as Tom Sawyer teaches us, in the right context, effort can be both work and fun.

I’m forgetting now how much of this comes from his talk and how much comes from the conversations we had in taverns and in cabs in and around Princeton, but Atkins feels that the European model of games scholarship is too serious — that is, the theory of videogames currently being formulated in ivy-covered halls pays far too little attention to the fact that we play games because we expect them to give us pleasure and we stop playing them when they cease to be fun. Without a theory of fun, scholarship is too dry, and risks becoming irrelevant to the common experience of gamers.

Note: Regarding the alleged lack of attention to “fun,” Jesper Juul writes:

That is so strange considering how much time I’ve spent on discussing fun.
Even my 1998 MA work discusses it: http://www.jesperjuul.dk/text/DAC%20Paper%201998.html
And here: http://www.jesperjuul.dk/text/WCGCACD.html And in relation to the experience of time: http://www.jesperjuul.dk/text/timetoplay/
At the 2002 Manchester conference I also presented a paper on gameplay and fun.
And a general essay about theorizing fun and the issue of focusing too much on games as being challenges: http://www.igda.org/columns/ivorytower/ivory_Apr03.php
I don’t really understand how this idea came to be, it’s just so patently untrue.

Point taken, Jesper, but see my clarification below.–DGJ

One reason for the disconnect is because younger scholars who don’t have the benefit of working in an environment that already recognizes new media objects as worthy of critical study [Note: Added for clarity. –DGJ] are, of necessity, courting the approval of their superiors. Mary Ann Buckles, whose 1985 study of “Adventure” seems to have been the first PH.D. devoted to the study of a computer game, does not seem to have had that kind of institutional support, and the result is worth examining: What Ever Happened to Mary Ann Buckles? (Ludology.org)

Just as the theologians, priests, congregations have significantly different roles to play on the inside, and more distant observers who can place a particular religion in a greater context have a role to play on the outside, the culture of games affords plenty of room for theorists, designers and consumers on the inside, but it seems to me game studies is a bit top-heavy — many theorists, but few who are doing the basic research that establishes cultural and technological influences on recent developments in game culture. I enjoyed the nostalgia books (such as Herz’s Joystick Nation), by my own recent examination of the “Colossal Cave Adventure” source code, and two presentations on the Atari 2600 have stirred the latent geek in me… I want to know more about the instruments and palette that the early game designers had available to them. I look forward to Matt Kirschenbaum’s book on the development of storage media; while he has more to talk about than just games, the creative ways early game programmers worked around severe constraints is definitely worth study. (If there are more places to look, and I just haven’t found them, someone in the know please set me straight.)

8 thoughts on “Is There a Ludologist in the House?

  1. Sam, I’d tend to agree. That’s why I tried to indicate that the shape of the conference was anti-ludologist only by default… there weren’t any ludologists who answered the questions raised by the last few papers, but that’s okay, there will be other conferences and other papers to carry on the discussion. You’re right, it wasn’t a unified gang of narratologists constructing a ludologist straw man to beat up on.

  2. well, on (careerist) Jousting and the hope of the re-spawning of player one by remembering that “we’re all in the same gang” (see west coast rap allstars)
    I think the conference reads as an anti-ludology pro narratology affair if the last speakers? comments are seen as the culmination of the day. Even if only the last group is looked at Atkins’ call for work to be done on play and fun was not so much narratological, at least in my understanding, if anything it was for an understanding of gameplay that was not beholden to a specific ??ology? (and yet without being a-historical: Caillois Schiller etc). Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp?s response to Gonzalo Frasca was the narratological moment of the panel; (and the day) but I?m not sure this made the whole thing a factional rally. Tevis Thompson?s excellent paper held what I think is a promising path for games studies, studying how play works in videogames by talking about just that, concretely and directly and in a manner that can take form English departments (close reading) without ?set-tripping? as a narratologist or ludologist. Anyway I thought it was a great day over all and really well run conference.

  3. That looks fascinating… I remember a contest for the best web page under 5k, and I ask my students to write 50-word fiction and blog in blank verse from time to time, so I appreciate the value of working against constraints. Thanks for pointing your “scene” out to me.

  4. Just a quick note on “(If there are more places to look, and I just haven’t found them, someone in the know please set me straight.)”
    There is a subculture, mainly in northern Europe, called the demo scene. A creative culture focused on the computer as artistic tool its participants have squeezed every inch and then some from the vic-20 and everything in between, up to the PS2 and beyond. The forms and genres are based on the need to squeeze as much as possible into as little space as possible on single-sided floppys, printer memories, 320×200 pixel screens, etc. Long story, but these people have done things with computers that not even the manufacturers thought possible.
    If you are interested, check out http://www.scene.org or contact me. I am both a participant and a researcher of the field, as well as an organizer. I might have a chapter on this in an upcoming US published book on new media art, so keep your eyes peeled. Until then I recommend the fifth chapter “SUBCULTURE OF THE SUBCULTURE” in the book “COPYRIGHT DOES NOT EXIST” (http://svenskefaen.no/cdne/).

  5. Ah, thanks for the e’labor’ation, Dennis. This is very flattering, but I do think Barry gives me far too much credit. Sometimes an etymology is just an etymology.
    To me at least, work and fun in the context of games is a false dichotomy. Perhaps I do need to “get a real job…”

    By the way, I am still waiting for someone to take me to task for suggesting that games are texts; but I guess it would take a ludologist to do that, and they are far too polite.

  6. Espen, I guess if I had spelled it “labour” I would have made it clearer that I was quoting Barry’s term. ;)

    Anyway, here’s that passage of his paper, which he posted at watercooler.org:

    In the case of digital games Espen Aarseth, once again, might be considered to have led the way, and his arguments from Cybertext have established a trend in game criticism that few have since questioned. His coinage of the term ?ergodic? (from the Greek for ?work? and ?path?) to describe those texts in which ?nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text? (1) certainly set up an initial and hugely influential paradigm where the focus is not so much on ?play? but on its antonym ?work?. Inevitably, this has meant that much of the language in which videogames have been discussed has been the language of labour.

  7. To be a bit pedantic, I believe the word “Labor” was never used in my book. Except as part of “laboratory”.
    What I did say was that the real fun was in participation…
    As amusing as the construction of a “Scandinavian model” is to watch, it does seem to be made mostly of straw.

  8. “…he did note that each level of an action game is typically geared towards a fight with the level ‘boss.'” Loved the notion this raises — has Marxist overtones: gaming as class struggle!
    +
    “Without a theory of fun, scholarship is too dry, and risks becoming irrelevant to the common experience of gamers.” So what? Psychoanalysis is irrelevant to the common experience of brains; literary criticism is irrelevant to the common experience of everyday readers; etc. etc. I think it’s probably a good thing that game theorists are hyperconscious of their status — gaming is a part of leisure culture and critics will have to “work” for a while to get critical legitimacy.

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