Philosophy

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The Neurotic Joy of Gaming

August 31, 2010 in Game Psychology, Philosophy | 3 comments

Nels Anderson recently pointed out a post over at Jamie Madigan’s Psychology of Video Games blog. While Madigan’s post does not really say anything new (and is based on the kinds of experimental social scientific research that went out of style in the 1960s – sorry, couldn’t help myself), it does bring up the most important unanswered question that we have as gamers: Why do we play video games?

Nels takes us a large step in the right direction towards understanding this problem when he observes (in his own response to Madigan’s post) that, “We need better ways to talk about what makes games enjoyable.” Gamers, I’ve found, lack articulacy when it comes to understanding our own experiences playing games. Sure, we can go on for hours about what we like/dislike about the game’s rules or design, which characters we found empathizable and which we could not connect with, or how “immersive” the world is. But that’s not the same as being articulate about our own experiences and what they mean to us. Speaking articulately about ourselves requires some kind of language to put things into perspective, especially when it comes to sketching out what makes playing games so darned enjoyable.

Towards that, I want to play with the idea of “mastery” that both Madigan and Nels mention, and how mastering a game is its own enjoyment.

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The Changing Nature of Gaming Interfaces

July 9, 2010 in Game History, Game Psychology, Game Research, Philosophy | 23 comments

The other day I was having coffee with friends who brought their 2 1/2 year old son over for a visit. He was bored, looking for anything to do in our (boring) house – so I handed him an original Game Boy with Super Mario Land 2. I figured that a toddler would enjoy smashing the Game Boy’s bulletproof buttons, making Mario run and jump, and hearing the ear-piercing four-channel music. He took the Game Boy from my hand with interest, and held onto it in the familiar way that all of us hold portables. He looked at the cabbage-green screen and squealed, “MARRIOO!” I asked his mother if he had played games before, and she said, “Oh yeah. He loves playing kiddie games on our iPhone.”

I turned back to her son, and he was frowning intently at the Game Boy. He reached out tentatively and pushed on the plastic screen. Nothing happened. He pushed again, in a different spot. Nothing. I reached over and pushed a button – Mario jumped. He looked at me with a puzzled expression, and turned back to the game. I eventually had to slide his fingers over to the D-Pad and buttons, pushed them down a few times to show him how it worked, and he started to “get it”.

I realized in that moment that we are now living in a time when the standard D-PAD + Buttons layout can no longer be assumed the “standard” way of playing a game. A new generation of players are growing up with motion-based interfaces from Sony (the upcoming Playstation Move), Nintendo (Wii MotionPlus, Balance Board), Harmonix (Rock Band), as well as touch based devices from Apple (iPod Touch/iPhone). Where the 1980s and 1990s almost always guaranteed a familiar mediating interface – whether it be a keyboard, mouse, or D-Pad – I wonder at how the recent explosion of alternative interfaces has changed the way gamers understand what a game is?

For instance, can we really say that Myst or Monkey Island 2 SE for PC are the “same games” as their iPhone variants? On what basis could we distinguish between our experience of playing the two (temporarily setting aside differences in sound quality, resolution, etc)? Is the “touch” aspect really that different from a point-n-click interface using the mouse?

I’m going to waffle here, because I just don’t know. And here’s why:

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When do you call a game a Game?

March 11, 2010 in Game Industry, Game Psychology, Game Research, Irritating Rants, Philosophy | 14 comments

Yesterday I happened across an article about comic books in a local newspaper (See Magazine for fellow Edmontonians). In his fantastic article (please, read it first!), When Do You Call a Comic a Comic?, Kenton Smith reasons out the essence of comic books. Kenton laboriously works through all of the usual options: it is an expression of the imagination through illustration, a “juxtaposition of words and pictures”, a non-linear narrative medium, a dynamic moment expressed in a static frame?

All of those answers – yes they are, and no they aren’t, X – get us no closer to answering his initial question. And that’s the same question we’ve been trying to face for years in the gaming world. When do we call a game a game? Michaël Samyn and Auriea Harvey’s (Tale of Tales) creations The Endless Forest, the Graveyard, and The Path all provoked a response from gamers. Some praised their willingness to experiment with what has become a starkly conventional medium. Others simply raged with incredulity at what they saw lacking in terms of gameplay, while others said things akin to, “I want to tell you that, in its most banally distilled form, The Path is a game about exploration, risk, patience and vulnerability – but I’m hampered by the obvious fact that The Path is just not a game. At all.”

That last response is the one that interests me most. In some ways, it reflects the problem that Kenton Smith runs into in trying to define comic books in terms of their essential structure. Although Kenton is obviously sensitive to the importance of a reader’s experience in defining what a comic book “is”, he does not approach the question that way. Similarly, I think that most of us get caught up in using language that tries to define a game as “a thing” rather than as a kind of experience that we have. We create a problem for ourselves when we think of games only as things with definable properties separate from ourselves, when really no problem exists at all. We continue to try defining games as objects with properties – as Igor Hardy attempts to do in this recent article on adventure games – and end up confusing ourselves over what they really are for us. (Edit: Be sure to read Igor’s article and the comments below it, as well as the exchange between Igor and I. We have a lot more in common than I originally assumed!) In this article, I provide an alternative to the current understanding of games, and hope that it gets us out of this foxhole.

(Note: Chris Crawford’s wonderfully written The Art of Computer Game Design is a step in the right direction I think, but not a complete one)

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The Humble and Valiant (ie. Filthy Rich/Powerful) Hero

November 26, 2009 in Artful Games, Game History, Game Psychology, Irritating Rants, Philosophy | 22 comments

keef-thiefInto my first 10 hours of Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, I’m already flush with gold. My gnomish gunsmith, despite his commitment to doing only good deeds in the world, has a silver tongue and he’s already bedded one of the girls at Madam Lil’s (a bawdy house) in Tarant for free. He struts around Tarant with not a party of likeminded adventurers, but groupies attracted by his charismatic charm.

I’m nearing the end of Fallout 3, and my wasteland ranger who has spent most of his adult life trying to free the wastes from oppression and slavery, is loaded with every kind of ammunition and ranged weaponry imaginable. Despite his meek and non-aggressive social demeanour, there is nothing humble about someone who’s packin’ a Fat Boy – a shoulder-launched nuke weapon – around all day.

While both of these games always offer a “high road” approach to moral choices in conversation as we would expect in a contemporary RPG, the games still rely upon a highly individualistic and egocentric play structure. In this article I try to understand how games supposedly devoted to allowing moral choices, in fact offer highly hypocritical experiences for the do-gooder player. (Spoiler-alert for Planescape: Torment and Ultima IV near the bottom of the article.)

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Re-thinking Interface “Design”

April 16, 2009 in Game Psychology, Mainstream Games, Philosophy | 18 comments

notoolsMatthew Gallant posted an interesting commentary that confronts video game interfaces with Donald Norman’s ubiquitous book on design, The Design of Everyday Things. There is some sense in the three design principles that Norman distils from his analyses of well-designed everyday objects, and Matthew has done a wonderful job of translating them for game designers.

In this article I try to plead a case against ”good” interface design. Rather, I would like to see interfaces that frustrate the gamer and encourage them to explore the game’s world creatively, rather than instrumentally.

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Searching for Imaginative Space? Apply From Within.

April 15, 2009 in Artful Games, Game Psychology, Philosophy, Retro Gaming | 12 comments

infocom_ad1The recent excitement, and subsequent furor, over the new Legends of Zork browser-based online roleplaying game inspired me to think about how much we have changed as a gamer culture since the days of text-based adventure games.

For many of us, Zork hangs among our earliest memories of computer games. In many ways the series’ massive fanbase – in its entire gamut of casual and hardcore and obsessive players – is our miniature equivalent of the Star Wars fanbase: it is rabid.. it demands quality.. it cannot tolerate any deviation from canon.

So designing a new game based on the Zork franchise was a dicey and dangerous decision, especially considering the close ties the series has with the history of video games in general (it was among the first games derived from Colossal Cave Adventure). Stakes were high for everyone involved.

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New Games Journalism is Dead. Long live New New Games Journalism.

February 9, 2009 in Game History, Game Writing, Irritating Rants, Mainstream Games, Philosophy | 33 comments

tonetownIn this article I confront the New Games Journalism movement, and take a look at where it went. As a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek article over at Hardcasual.net parodies, it is becoming obvious that we produced a dysfunctional and narcissistic child. While I cannot pretend to have the “answer” or “fix” for our current crisis, I do offer what I think is a credible alternative. We need to open a dialogue on this issue, I think, instead of diagnosing and treating it like an out-patient. This involves our very identity as gamers, and without a hard look at ourselves we are at risk of repeating a long, uninteresting, history.

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The Joy of Role-Playing

June 29, 2008 in Game History, Game Research, Game Writing, Philosophy, Retro Gaming | 11 comments

Sketching out dungeon maps on graph paper, marveling at the trinkets or “feelies” in Infocom and Ultima games, vigilantly reading every manual and printed material in the box, and writing pages of quest notes. Whenever my girlfriend sees me meticulously doing any of these kinds of things I get the same befuddled smirk my parents gave me when I played games as a 10-year-old: only another nerd could truly appreciate this. Yet, these are exactly the kinds of things that draw me closer to games and give me a sense of intimacy that allows me to appreciate them not just as works of art, but as worlds.

Recently, Michael of the Brainy Gamer wrote a brilliant (yet terribly misunderstood) exploration of the phenomenology of keeping a scorecard at a baseball game. Sounds a little boring eh? You bet… until you understand the level of intimacy that he creates just by writing down a few numbers and thinking through the game. In this post I’ll try to do justice to just what Michael might have meant by the word “engagement” by talking a little bit about what people do when they “engage” themselves with a game. Before you read this, it’s critical to read Michael’s post first… because I’ll be referring to it throughout. Trust me, it’s worth it.

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The Medium is Not a Message

June 18, 2008 in Artful Games, Game History, Irritating Rants, Philosophy | 14 comments

This is a short response to Michael Abbott’s latest post over at the Brainy Gamer, on the topic of understanding video games as artistic works. While I couldn’t possibly put his eloquent words into finer poesy, perhaps the following few points are worth thinking about. I admit that they’re controversial points, but I don’t offer them for the sake of controversy – I simply want to extend the “language” for video games in whatever way I can. The best way to do this, I think, is to make some distinctions between the kinds of language often used in video and computer games, which are often mixed up and conflated with each other. This is my first official crack at it.

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‘> The Painting is Firmly Attached to the Wall’: The Frustrating Art of Art Games

June 7, 2008 in Artful Games, Game Research, Philosophy | 4 comments

Gamers are notoriously bad at dealing with loosely-termed ‘art games’. Myself included. With the recent releases of The Graveyard by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn, and The Jackyard by Richard Hofmeier, I thought I’d attempt to take a somewhat broader view of ‘art games’, and try to understand exactly what an art game is.

In this article I take on the very common problem of players becoming bored or frustrated by “art games”. I try to spin some new language around games that help us understand how they relate to art, and vice-versa, all in the hope that more gamers have the opportunity to take on any kind of game without quitting in frustration.

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