This report about Nintendo’s strategy for its next generation platform ties in nicely with a thought I had today. Namely, that the real conflict for the direction that videogames as an interactive media should take isn’t really that between narrative and ludos: it’s about different drives for participating in the media themselves based on the demographics, and in effect is a conflict between videogaming as agon (from Caillois’ typology of games and play) and videogaming under all other possible auspices.

This year’s E3 supposedly was about “the death of the hardcore gamer.” Summed up as the GWD segment (“guys without dates,”) the hardcore gamer is the canonical audience/market for the game industry to date: a dedicated fan who spends hundreds, even thousands of hours a year playing challenging videogames, developing skills, besting opponents real and virtual, etc.

The idea that games must challenge, must inherently be at least initially difficult, that the meta-narrative for the game interaction involve developing a kind of mastery over the game-artifact, is an assumption that underlies the more defensive posture of the gaming community in the US.

I think there’s a relationship between the function that videogames have in the lives, particularly, of young males, and what seems to me to be the socio-biological foundation for play in general. Play is a mechanism by which the young can develop the skills required for survival and mastery in relative safety, and once those skills are recruited to the needs of survival, the attraction of “playing” at them dissipates.

What I think this means is that the appeal of agon lasts until the instincts for competition, mastery and such are cathected into one’s social and/or professional life. If that cathexis never occurs, one could conceivably continue to find games of agon inherently appealing; otherwise, the joy of play migrates from being a realm of mastery to a realm of conviviality, or aesthetic experience.

The “tyranny of agon” seems stronger in the US than in Japan. Perhaps one might attribute this to a more competitive, individualistic culture in the US, but I sort of doubt it. Japanese society has intense competitive pressures of its own and traditions of competition as strong as any culture’s. Rather, I think this has more to do with the details of the market in Japan: my casual observation was that there was considerably more intergenerational participation in videogame purchase and play. Most game consoles are located in the family room. Virtually every Japanese household I know that reported having a game console indicated that play occurred with the whole family; parents knew exactly what their kids were playing to an extent that one doesn’t see in the US, and often played with them. Rather than this leading to sort of a cleaned-up “family friendly” game culture, it rather seemed to lead to one in which there was a larger market in games that weren’t necessarily motivated by the desire to demonstrate mastery over one’s peers. Not that those games don’t exist (after all, most all of the best fighting games are from Japan); rather, a substantial market for music and dance games, virtual toys, romance sims, and other non-agonistic games co-exists with the games of competition. It’s inconceivable, with the current dominant game culture in America, that Boku no Natsuyasumi could ever enjoy the kind of success that it has in Japan.

I think that’s going to be the upcoming source of discord: the conflict between the GWD and those whose motivations resemble them, who expect games to inherently be difficult and the pleasure of gaming to be about surmounting difficulty and besting obstacles and opponents, and those whose pleasures could lie in vertigo or simulation. At its root, it is a conflict of pleasures.

I’ve done a quick search for the literature for this Picasso piece, and one thing that struck me is that no one seems to have noticed the relationship between the content of the newsclippings in this piece, and the political activities of F.T. Marinetti. During this period of time, Marinetti was manifesting his doctrine of the hygenic value of war by participating in the First Balkan conflict; it was during the artillery assault on Adrianopoli that he wrote his seminal sound-poem Zang TumbTumb While the work wasn’t yet published (it was first published in Milan in 1914) one wonders if the inclusion of the clippings was a dig at the aesthetic nostalgia for war and the violent pretensions of the Italian movement, which were already a known element of the European art scene.

From a paper on games in art by Tiffany Holmes from the Digital Arts and Culture::2003 conference in MelbourneDAC 2003 conference in Melbourne, I found a reference to a flash game called Tropical America which discusses themes of exploitation and violence in Central America, focusing around the El Mozote massacre.

I’ve hoped for a while to see more videogames with Latin American thematics and settings (Malvinas 2032 is an interesting start, although it’s sort of Command and Conquer with a grudge), but I’m afraid that I was disappointed by this offering, and it goes a long way to explaining the limitations of the click-and-tell “interactive” narrative vis-à-vis a simulation model.

For one thing, almost all of this “game” is simply clicking on the one hot-spot on every scene. That’s not playing a game, that’s watching TV with a hand crank. And if you compare the story being told here with the complexities and nuances of the actual historical situation, you see just how much is lost by sticking to an “other narratives” approach towards game design with a social/political goal. There was so much material available in the actual historical event that simply gets left out by the somewhat melodramatic narrative: the sociopathic vendetta against the radical radio station, the interplay between El Mozote’s born-again Christian community (strongly anti-Communist and frankly more aligned with the military government than with the guerrillas) and their Roman Catholic neighbors (under the influence of liberation theology, Catholic villages were more likely than Protestant ones to support the guerrilla movement.) I have nothing against melodrama, and it has its valid, as well as suspect, political functions. Melodrama is a central element of the Final Fantasy games and other games that I think highly of, but in those cases it is at least problematized and often vacated by real game logics.

I’m inclined to be suspicious of a game-designer who makes a politically-inclined game without giving me options. The designers of America’s Army make it impossible to play the “terrorists,” nor to look under the hood of terrorist activity in any way. The opponent is always seen as a terrorist, even though they are required to see themselves in the same uniforms and identities as the Army. The hood of the car is weld shut; pay no attention to the man behind the screen.

Though I share the political concerns of the designers of Tropical America, their reluctance to give the player any freedom – or rather, either their technical inability to do so or, more likely, the habit of the stance of the didactic artist who wishes, consciously or unconsciously, to micromanage to emotional and ideological processes of the audience, disappoints me. It’s unplayful, in more ways than one. That’s an idea that could endure in a radical ludology: playfulness. Playfulness unravels somber rhetorics and, I’d argue makes the horror of real horror – the facts of buried bodies, all the more lucid. The open play aspect of good games can generate a Verfremdungseffekt – a distantiation effect – which Brecht considered central to the mobilization of peoples in their own political interest, and which respected their agency. The “click-and-tell” model of interactive narrative doesn’t exhibit the same faith in the viewer. The melodrama-artist is going to tell you where we are going: they only choice you have is how hard you press the accelerator. I very much like the visual aesthetics of the piece, with its Mesoamerican-inspired figures and woodcut aesthetics. There’s a debt, I think, to Eduardo Galeano’s Las Palabras Andantes illustrated with the woodcuts of J. Borges (and the theme of the corn which occurs in both). I also think that the works of Galeano are a perfect springboard for a videogame, with their dissembled logics, their short scenarios, the implicit yet inaccessible arch-structures of history played out over the bodies and lives of the inhabitants of the land and of the cities. When I see a failure of vision wed to such a visual wealth, the feeling of disappointment is sharper.

I just noticed this paper by Andrew Stern which also gives some voice to this kind of dissatisfaction. I suppose I should read the comments to my own blog more!

I’m at E3 now. Fewer booth babes: that’s good. Fewer academics: that’s odd. A relative lack of inspiring games: that’s bad. I’m becoming convinced that the game industry, left to its own devices, is unlikely to achieve the potential of videogames as the engine for the development of new media.

Thinking more about the agent/actor/character distinction, and how this triadic structure of the simulated character makes interpretive readings of games that have them a problem. We don’t attribute agency to characters in traditional narratives (that is, we attribute the intention to act to an actor – his actions are always mimetic, and attributed to that of the character he is portraying. This isn’t the case with a simulated agent, whether that agent is in a game, as a simple bot, a non-player character, a monster or even a strategy-making AI.

My earlier post about the MASSIVE software being used to make the Lord of the Rings film suggests that this problem has gone “upstream” to film. The agent responds to that subset of game-space that are its percepts and generates action accordingly; the actor may be the interface component of the agent, a virtual player reaching for a gun or walking through a door or laying seige to a fortress; the character is the unifying logic of the executive function, to which the player attributes the intelligent pursuit of a goal described in some narrative aspect of the game or determined by the overall context of it (in a war-game, the desire to conquer; in a murder mystery, the desire to avoid detection.)

[On edit:] and it looks like Michael Mateas has been looking at these problems for a while now, under the rubric of “believable agents,” from an AI and IF perspective.

Some general notes towards a lexicon of videogame theory:

paidea – From Caillois: spontaneous, unelaborated, unstructured play activity, either competitive (spontaneous foot-races) or uncompetitive (spinning in a circle, heads or tails).

ludus – Structured play activity; institutionalized; rule-based, requiring planning. Can be competitive (chess) or non-competitive (tightrope-walking, theater). Insofar as any videogame will require a substantial technological development, sophisticated programming, and has a very clearly defined context in the contemporary market, as forms of play videogames are inherently ludic, even if within any given session a player takes a “paedic turn.”

classification of games, from Caillois – he posits four essential rubrics for games, with a theory to explain the possible and impossible relationships between them (a theory that is squarely irrelevant to video games, but which irrelevance is, itself, relevant). Different classifications are populated with games with greater or lesser elements of paedia or ludus.

• agon (competition) – Paedic: informal wrestling and play-fighting; spontaneous footraces; Ludic: chess, organized sports.
• alea (chance) – Paedic: eenie-meenie, coin-tossing; Ludic: poker, organized lotteries.
• mimicry (simulation) – Paedic: children’s play-acting, tag; Ludic: theater, mass spectacles
• ilinx (vertigo) – Paedic: children’s whirling, energetic dancing; Ludic: skiing, mountain climbing, tightrope walking

Caillois mapped a preference for agon and alea to “societes a comptabilite”, or “rational” (in a Weberian sense of rationalizing ends to means) societies, and a preference towards mimicry and ilinix to the “societes a tohu bohu” or “Dionysian” societies. Of course, this is highly questionable, but it does give a certain sense of the logic of the terms.

game – This term can be left as ambiguous. Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” used the problem of the definition of the (English) word “game” as an illustration of the inadequacies of Aristotelian logical models of necessary and sufficient conditions for definition: any attempt to create a systematic definition will be frustrated by a counter example. (Wittgenstein proposed that semantics was a function of family resemblance to exemplary or prototypical cases – the question is now a matter of cognitive linguistics pursued by George Lakoff, Eve Sweetser, Eleanor Rosch and others.) In a very constrained sense, taken from formal game-theory and AI, a game is a “formalized incentive structure,” a system of (usually) finite outcome-states that are more or less favorable to different agents in the system.

play – ???

intelligent agent – From artificial intelligence, an autonomous system (usually refers to a software system, but can mean biological ones) capable of (variably defined) intelligent actions, including the ability to percieve and identify objects, reason, learn, plan, and develop models, (including agents with combinations of such abilities.)

actor – the textual effect of some agents; the “exteriority” of the agent. the interstice between agent and character. The structure of the relationships between actor, agent, and character may be essential to the distinction between traditional narratives and games that seem to avail themselves of the elements of traditional narratives

mise-en-abyme – directly taken from literary theory, a duplicating of the whole of the text in miniture within the text. Apparent in a straightforward way in mini-games that are framed as games in the episteme of the game: Final Fantasy mini-games that have significant consequences for the game at large.

deixis – from linguistics, the language of relative space – general process by which three-dimensional models of inhabitable space are mapped symbollically.

agency – the ability to act; in game-terms, the ability, of a player or an element in the system, to change game-state.

diegesis – The fictional world, the epistemic world in which the narrative occurs. World-building functions of a traditional narrative – expository information. “Telling,” rather than “showing.”

fabula – From Russian formalist theory, the chronological story suggested by the chain of events referred to, directly, indirectly, or explicitly, in the narrative text. In general game-terms, “arc story” – or that which the simulation models. [Discussion in the making – what kind of distinction should be made between the traditionally fabula as story and the object of simulation, “the real.”]

sjuzet – From Russian formalist theory, the narrated events in the sequence they are presented to the viewer. In a videogame, the elements which constitute the fabula as they are presented to the player – the sequence of game-events.

game-session – Self-explanatory. However, implicit is that the narrative of the game is not the narratives that may or may not be in the game; the actual play-narrative is “I began, and fell off a cliff. I started again, and got eaten by a lion. I started again, and figured out that I need to get the Rod of Light before I go past the zookeeper’s hut.”

game-space – in artificial intelligence and formal game theory, the set of all possible outcomes of a game. If the game is “heads or tails,” there is a game space with two possible states. If the game is rock-scissors-paper, there are nine states in the game-space. In a videogame, it is the theoretical space of all possible game-sessions that could occur, each of which will have a discreet representation in code in the processor.

state – From computer science, the value assigned to a variable is its state. A foundational element to object-oriented programming and part of most any modern program (completely functional or procedural programming style does not have assignment or state as such.) A variable such as “hitPoints” which has an integer as a value; the x/y coordinates of any object at any given moment in the game; any such variable which can be set by call to a method in an object is an example of state. A player often at least partially understands the dynamics of artificial elements in a game towards the player’s avatar as a matter of state.

somatization – Usually refers to the occurance of physical symptoms in response to mental or emotional disorders; here extended to the migration of higher-level game-responses and interactions into loco-motor skills and reflexes. Called “routinization” in some learning models. (The case of Henry M. demonstrated that skill-acquisition type learning occurs even when the brain loses the ability to form new memories; reflexive skill-acquisition is an essentially different type of knowledge from a brain-function perspective.

subitization – In cognitive science, it is the limit of ability to comprehend cardinality at an instant – most people can subitize up to about 5 items without engaging in mental “counting.” The idea can be extended to include the instantenous, perhaps sub-liminal perception of game-material in such a way as to facilitiate a reflexive, “twitch” reaction.

suture – How the player locates himself in the game text, both thematically/psychologically (“You know, I’ve always sort of identified as the ghost in PacMan; PacMan himself reminds me of my mom”) and interactively (“of course, I’m Pac-Man.”)

‘twitch’ – Game-play at a reflexive level. Somatized game-play.

——————

Concepts which either need a lexeme, or actually do have a lexeme and I just don’t know about it yet:

a. the mapping of player activity – button pushing, joystick mashing, key pressing – onto consistent events in the game-environment; the unspoken agreement between game and player that game mediation of player input will be consistent throughout the game-session

b. the assignation of agency and intention to either the system as a whole, or to agents, bots, and other functions within the game system, by the player. Not quite the same as anthropomorphism, because that term fails to respect the sense in which the effect is an intended consequence of game design and development.

c. the provisional, tested models of game-space consciously or implicitly generated by the player through interaction; one model of a game-session could include the sequence of player-generated models for game-space over time. Walter Kim referred me to the idea of intentional space: the apparent range of possible actions that an agent (I would presume, typically, the player, but I also presume that a well-designed agent that simulated a non-completely-informed actor to also make provisional and incomplete models, in order to simulate limitations.) Some way of describing the relationship between game-space, intentional-space, and the testing of hypothetical intentional-spaces in game-play might be helpful.

This is definitely a tentative, student, working document – I welcome any suggestions, additions, corrections, or comments.

From Simone Weil, 1939:

“We need first of all to have a clear conscience. Let us not think that because we are less brutal, less violent, less inhuman than our opponents, we will carry the day. Brutality, violence, inhumanity have an immense prestige that school books hide from children, that grown men do not admit, but that everyone bows before. For the opposite virtues to have as much prestige, they must be actively and constantly put into practice. Anyone who is merely incapable of being as brutal, as violent, and as inhuman as someone else but who does not practice the opposite virtues is inferior to that person in both inner strength and prestige. And he will not hold out through such confrontation.”

From a piece by Edward Said, this insight is vital to anyone who wants to model history and culture in some sort of simulation. Sid Meier should take note:

The great fallacy of Fukuyama’s thesis about the end of history, or for that matter Huntington’s clash of civilization theory, is that both wrongly assume that cultural history is a matter of clear-cut boundaries or of beginnings, middles and ends, whereas in fact, the cultural-political field is much more an arena of struggle over identity, self-definition and projection into the future. They are fundamentalists when it comes to fluid, turbulent cultures in constant process, trying to impose fixed boundaries and internal rules of order where none really can exist. Cultures, specially America’s, which is in effect an immigrant culture, overlap with others, and one of the perhaps unintended consequences of globalization is the appearance of transnational communities of global interests, as in the human rights movement, the women’s movement, the anti-war movement and so on.

A comment by John Beeler on Greg Costikyan’s blog entry about GDC and the agonies of independent game development:

As a postscript, I think we’re being fairly PC-centric here. Japanese publishers are generally embedded with some kind of “stuff” that American pubs aren’t; a kind of belief that video games are inherently _art_ on the highest level. Take a gander at Panzeer Dragoon Orta, or Gunvalkyrie, or Guilty Gear XX (as indie a game as one can get with Capcom’s monopoly), or ICO, REZ…the list goes on, and sadly it’s all Japanese.

Two science fiction writers display a sophistication and thoughtfulness that put them head-and-shoulders above anyone else I can think of – Samuel Delany and Stanislaw Lem. Aside from both being intelligent, highly literary, and philosophically rich, the two have little in common. Lem addresses himself to questions in the cyberneticist tradition; he has a weathered and considered faith in the cultivation of knowledge and the scientific project – his works address the possibilities of artificial intelligence and symbolic processing, the conflicts between knowledge/science and political power, the limits of knowledge, and the powers of memory.

Delany writes about language and power; he has a Foucaultian stance towards the creation of knowledge by and through power. Knowledge and representation are never pure or ideal – he is consistently anti-teleological. He casts an insightful eye at questions of race, sexuality and sexual dominance, and economics. His sense of the utopian and dystopian is illuminated by heterogenic notions – he describes the optima expressed in “Triton” as a heterotopia (which inspired my own understanding of the goal of progressive politics, namely the creation of a free society as a society which pursues the proliferation of a wide array of viable options for living to as broad a number of its members as possible.)

Again from Delany, I see science fiction as the literature of the episteme (he described it as literature – or, while rejecting any devalorizing connotations, a para-literature – in which the episteme is the secondary hero, just as the landscape is the primary hero.) That is what science is, after all – a range of episteme, and technology (which is the sign of science fiction for many) is the material and social consequence of certain types of knowledge in the context of human needs and desires.