Tag: Personligt

The triumphant return of… media studies

Okay, here’s an excerpt from a chapter I’m writing on the importance of how one chooses to conceptualize the “player”. I start (more or less) by pointing to the implications of various user/audience views in other fields. Here’s my draft take on the issue in media studies. Comments shall be welcome, here or by email. Continue reading The triumphant return of… media studies

A rare bird in these parts

The seldom-heard catharsis hypothesis gets aired by Steven Johnson, as a sort of spin-off of his recent book (in which it did not rear its much-criticized head).

I personally doubt if the idea is as dead as some people like to think. Hell, I predict its triumphant return in the near future. Beware.

Of course another interesting explanation for crime decrease has recently been aired.

Games and gamers

At the recent DIGRA conference the future of game studies was largely thought/hoped to be non-formalistic. I take this to mean that many of those present were somewhat fed up with general claims about game structure and form, preferring instead more situated and player-oriented approaches (see also Jesper’s discussion on essentialism/formalism)
While I agree that the balance today is too heavy on the formal side (forgive the confused metaphors) I don’t see formal approaches as invalid in any way. My disciplinary background is a combination of formal approaches (film studies/analysis) and user-oriented approaches (empirical media studies). The two approaches can supplement each other quite well, as I will attempt to demonstrate in my own dissertation.

Having unfortunately missed Erml and Mäyrä’s presentation I was reading their paper. As a small experiment here are my think-aloud notes.

They say:

There has been a relative boom of games research that has focused on the definition and ontology of games, but its complementary part, that of research into the gameplay experience has not been adopted by academics in a similar manner. This is partly due to the disciplinary tilt among the current generation of ludologists: a background in either art, literary or media studies, or in the applied field of game design, naturally leads to research in which the game, rather than the player, is the focus of attention.

Indeed, indeed.

Yet, the essence of a game is rooted in its interactive nature, and there is no game without a player.

A curious sentence. The ‘essence’ component is arbitrary, it makes no sense that I can discern. No game without a player? I have the board game Risk in the next room. There are no players nearby. But Risk is still a game. Weird.

Human experiences in virtual environments and games are made of the same elements that all other experiences consist of, and the gameplay experience can be defined as an ensemble made up of the player’s sensations, thoughts, feelings, actions and meaning-making in a gameplay setting. Thus it is not a property or a direct cause of certain elements of a game but something that emerges in a unique interaction process between the game and the player. This has also led to suggestions that games are actually more like artefacts than media.

Err.. implying that experience of media is not “an ensemble made up of the player’s [user’s] sensations, thoughts, feelings, actions and meaning-making”…? Odd.

People play games for the experience that can only be achieved by engaging in the gameplay

Do they? I’m not sure if I do, personally. What players?

After enough effort and repetitions the player can get to a point where she masters the game and game playing eventually reaches the point of automation and does not feel so fun any longer. Thus, games can be considered as puzzles that the players try to solve by investigating the game world

I think that’s much too broad, depends very much on the genre.

On the contrary, the children thought that the emotional immersion and involvement in fiction was typically stronger for them while reading a good book or while watching a movie.

The authors speak here of player experience which they have studied by observing/interviewing children and their non-playing parents. Interesting observation.

Our research suggests that the gameplay experience and immersion into a game are multidimensional phenomena.

Okay, this is a personal hobby-horse of mine: What data would you need for your research to suggest otherwise?
“Through in-depth participant observation of the details of playing we have found the gameplay experience to be a simple, monocausal one” – not likely.

It’s an interesting paper. The authors go from qualitive data to survey trying to “validate” the former results and find a way to ask players about immersion. The authors are well-read. For my personal taste, I would have preferred more discussion on the methods applied. Ask people about their level of immersion? Maybe, but I would have liked to see a discussion of alternative approaches.
Making rather strong methodological claims in the beginning it would have been nice with more discussion on how players can (and cannot) be studied.

I guess I’m generally skeptical of asking players/users/viewers to verbalize/rationalize something which is not normally a conchious process. People are really good at answering questions but the validity of asking someone how he or she makes judgements about credibility, forms trust, makes meaning, plays games etc. is questionable (not to say that I haven’t done it myself). It borders on attempting to outsource the analysis to the test subjects/respondents. In general, a respondent can answer questions but the researcher should analyze the data (e.g. interviews) in order to answer the research questions.

A brief history of cooperation in multiplayer games

Most early video games, of course, were multiplayer games. Games like Spacewar, Pong and Gunfight, however, were also simple one-on-one games in the tradition of classical board games such as chess. At the formal level, at least, such games do not inspire cooperation since one player’s gain is the other player’s loss.

Following the simplistic and competitive successes of Pong later games introduced the possibility of cooperative play. Two schools of thought competed for quarters and screen time. In games of the 1980s like Joust (Williams, 1982), Double Dragon (Taito, 1987) players could join forces against the enemy hordes but were also likely to be unstable allies as players were able to directly hurt one another (Double Dragon even ultimately employed last man standing scoring conditions. as players would fight each other for the glory of actually winning the game). Eliminating much potential for inter-player conflict Gauntlet (Atari, 1985) and its descendants cast players in complementary roles that needed to be handled appropriately for the group to succeed.

Such experiments were obviously predecessors of the team-based Counter-Strike and are evident in many other highly popular online PC games such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Gray Matter Interactive Studios, Inc., 2001) and Battlefield 1942 (Digital Illusions CE AB, 2002).

In terms of gameplay (disregarding for now the broader social context in which the game exists) those games all invite social tension albeit on a modest scale. In the case of in-game resources (health potions in Gauntlet, special weapons in Double Dragon) each player may be tempted to simply gobble up as many goodies as possible. And the Battlefield 1942 player may feel the urge to indulge in personal military heroics (such as semi-suicidal air-raids) without bothering with the carefully pondered strategies of her team. This tension, however, may clearly be part of the appeal and cannot feasibly be countered without seriously jeopardizing the enjoyable player freedom offered and enthusiastically flaunted by the game worlds in question.

A remarkably different approach to game design was displayed in 1978 when Rob Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote the lines of code that was MUD. The system drew inspiration from earlier adventure games as well as pen-and-paper role-playing but what should interest us here is the fact that MUD was, in effect if not by intent, an experiment with social dynamics in game worlds.

Being multiplayer at heart, MUD was a virtual world in which players pursued individual goals but also shared the responsibility of keeping the world useful and enjoyable. Thus, the cooperation required by the players here is analogous to the joined effort that must be undertaken by members of real-life societies. In an important sense, then, the task of the game world designer is comparable to that of the political philosopher, attempting to describe institutions that ensure the desired levels of freedom, fairness and happiness. Experienced virtual world designer, Raph Koster, who co-manages Sony’s MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies acknowledges this:

‘I think anyone who doesn’t think that MMOs are social experiments hasn’t tried
running one yet. It’s not that you set out to create a social experiment-we don’t have test plans for our subjects, formal hypotheses to prove, or anything like that. You set out to make a game, and quickly discover that you’re suddenly a politician running a game the size of a city. You’re suddenly a social architect worrying about issues you never had a clue about.’ (quoted in Pika, 2004)

Although designers of pioneer virtual worlds such as Habitat were specific about the difficulties of reconciling the preferences of various player types (Morningstar & Farmer, 2003) many subsequent systems apparently did not fully anticipate the potential tensions between users/players. Famously, Ultima Online, in its initial incarnation, did very little to discourage anti-social behaviour among its citizens. Thus, the game world soon became rampant with grief play, a term now used to cover various types of deliberately anti-social behaviour (see discussion in Foo & Koivisto, 2004). Particularly the number of players who enjoyed preying on other players reached levels where other types of play (i.e. advancing through the game’s craft system) became hard to enjoy (Kim, 1998) as the game world began to resemble ‘Afghanistan after the Soviets left‘ (Rollings & Adams, 2003 527). The mounting in-game tension was attributed to the game’s design. In this spirit it was decided to graphically single out player-killers and to designate certain areas of the game world as safe. Thus, player-killers would be marked by a red aura and it was no longer possible to die at the hand of another player in Ultima’s urban areas. It other words, while Ultima Online did not eliminate player-killing on the code level (as many of its successors have done) the game had raised the stakes involved in blatantly anti-social behaviour, which was soon notably diminished.

Killing another player character in Ultima Online, of course, is arguably not against the spirit of the game. In a medieval world populated by monsters and assassins the case can obviously be made that killing is actually in-character, i.e. consistent with the role one has chosen to play. Such arguments fare more poorly when it comes to technical cheats. A pervasive problem in online gaming has been the creativity put to use by some players in order to exploit bugs in the games or to gain various advantages by tinkering with the game code. A measure of the problem can be gained by the proclamation by game developers Blizzard in September 2003 that they would shut down 400.000 user accounts at their game portal Battle.net. These accounts had been associated with ‘a hack or a cheat program‘ and were eliminated to ensure that the portal would remain ‘a fun and safe place to play Blizzard games’ (Battle.net, 2003).

If games were all about conflict, grief play and technical cheats would not receive such intense attention and would not give game designers sleepless nights as they attempt to foresee the next counter-move by ingenious (if immoral) players. Notably, no developer sleep is lost over the intentional conflict manifest in the aggressions of Tekken players or the drive towards mutual destruction in real-time-strategy games. Such discord is intentional and entertaining while social dilemmas emerging from human interaction are often not.

  • Battle.net. (2003, 30th of September). StarCraft, Diablo II, and Warcraft III Accounts Closed. Retrieved 14th of November, 2003, from http://www.battle.net/news/0309.shtml
  • Foo, C. Y., & Koivisto, E. M. I. (2004). Defining Grief Play in MMORPGs: Player and Developer Perceptions. Paper presented at the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE 2004), Singapore.
  • Kim, A. J. (1998). Killers Have More Fun. Wired, 6.05.
  • Morningstar, C., & Farmer, F. R. (2003). The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat. In N. Wardrip-Fruin & N. Montfort (Eds.), The New Media Reader. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
  • Pika. (2004, 2nd of Februrary). Interview with Raph Koster, Chief Creative Officer for SOE. Retrieved 13th of May, 2004, from http://www.warcry.com/…
  • Rollings, A., & Adams, E. (2003). Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design. Boston: New Riders Publishing.