The Critical Study of Computer Games: A Brief IntroductionJerz’s Literacy Weblog)
Part of: Princeton
Video Game Conference reflections.
While I mostly wrote those conference reflections for the benefit of game theorists who weren’t able to attend the conference, if you’re new to the subject, you might appreciate a general introduction.
Over the past few years, a very exciting movement in Europe (and particulary in Scandinavia) has been carving out a new field of game studies; it looks like the name “ludology” is going to stick (ludus being Latin for “game”).
The mainstream press has covered this trend with bemusement (“Off to College to Study… Videogames?“), but the general thrust of the article is usually something along the lines that computer games are now too deeply embedded in our culture to ignore.
The ludologists reject the idea that games are primarily a kind of variable storytelling, a kind of interactive movie, a kind of educational role-playing, an occasion for pathology, etc. Instead, games are games — objects in their own right, with an aesthetics, a rhetoric, a cultural history, and a discourse of their own (so far as it has been shaped right now).
I don’t intend the following to be definitive, or limiting. I’m just doing my best to describe what I see, in a framework that my humanities colleagues and students will be able to understand.
Of course, I wouldn’t say ludology necessarily denies that the storyline or cinematic elements of a game might be part of its value. A great story or great visuals is not enough to make a game successful; in fact, plenty of games with no narrative content, blocky graphics and horrid bleepy sound, and which seem to have no point, are nonetheless fun (at least, to the people who play them). In order to get at that core — what makes a game worth playing — a theory of computer games has to get really geeky, drawing on the mathematic principles of what might be called classical game theory , which basically atomizes games into abstract principles such as risk, payoff, strategy, objectives, agency, and equilibrium. Gonzalo Frasca boils all this down to one concept: rules. These are foreign concepts to narratologists (who want to think in terms of stories, or potential storeis), film theorists (who concentrate on the visual grammar that is used to represent the game state), psychologists and sociologists (who are concerned with what games do to us when we play them), though they are probably very familiar to business people (who want to know the secret formula for an addictive game, so they can make it just hard enough to be a challenge, but not hard enough that people don’t think it’s worth the money).
Whew.
While my literary background and my chosen subfield within games (interactive fiction) would seem to naturally predispose me towards narrative, I think my work with text games shows me just how poorly the vocabulary of fiction applies to other types of games (such as simulations or game-like social spaces, where the narrative content, such as it is, is mostly improvised by players interacting a shared virtual space).
Thank you for your patience.
Yes, one of the arts of designing a game is to make it challenging enough not to be boring, and to provide rewards (perhaps in the form of upgrades, access to new abilities, and new virtual spaces to explore). I wouldn’t call that sort of thing “bells and whistles,” because that term typically denotes decorations that aren’t integral to function, and which risk detracting from an object’s usefulness. The code writer does implement certain solutions, and in some of the most recent games, not just one solution but several (so that, in Deus X, the player can try to kill enemy guards or sneak past them; either approach requires skill, which can be developed over the course of the game). Once you achieve a local goal (that is, once you complete a level), you might get a bonus of some sort that can affect the way the game is played. Or, even if your on-screen avatar stays the same, the set of puzzles on the next level changes just slightly… for instance, you might have learned in a previous level that only a particular type of bomb is large enough to destroy a particular enemy robot. On the next level, there might be two of these robots and just one bomb. You might have to first lure the two robots so that they are close enough that you can destroy them with one bomb. And in some of the most sophisticated games, people figure out ways to solve puzzles that the designers never imagined they would.
Computer games are in essence code writing programs with enough intelligence from the people doing this to add enough loopholes, bells ,and whistles to make it interesting? Whatever the programmer wants you to see you will see? So while the code writer knows how the game should play out, it is up to the participant to figure out how to benefit from the game, and as long as it’s not seriously repetitive it could be a learning and entertaining process. If the one writing the game adds more and more challenges that are just out of reach, does it make the game more interesting for the player or tediously frustrating? I know there’s much more to it than this, but am I even close?