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Academics Turn Their Attention To Videogames
Onyxviper writes "As one who is an avid gamer, an article by USA Today/AP discussing the growing academic study of games, or 'Ludology', makes some points about gaming that I had only begun to think about. Seems like the plots and composition of the game are starting to overtake the gameplay itself, and it is interesting to see that others are starting to look at it in a more serious light. What do the rest of you think, are any of you actually involved in one of these programs?" Is there plenty important being done in this field, or is it possible that academic study of videogames can tend towards overanalysis?
has been doing this for decades. Oh, wait a second...
Some in the industry, however, are not so sure that games will ever mature. They fear games could be a dead end like comic books ? valuable as a social phenomenon, but outside a select few titles like Art Spiegelman's Maus, not worth a great deal of individual study.
Anything that can produce a very large profit will always garner a great deal of study. This is the reason why the game industry is compared to the movie industry more then any other.
Like the film industry produces great works of art like Gone with the Wind, they also produce trash like Legally Blonde. The Video game industry has their Quake 2s and Final Fantasy's but they come out with way too much garbage like Gods and Generals, and Enter the Matrix (didn't mean to pick 2 video game adaptations of movies but those 2 just happen to suck)
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Maybe you could claim the old BASIC adventures from the 80s didn't have much a plot, but Infocom was famous for them, even Zork has a large background story - or it felt that way anyway, you didn't always know what or why but the feeling was that there was a large back ground. And the latter works got better.
If you look at the current winners of contests, you will see they are about plot and story, in some cases there aren't even puzzles. Graphics has a ways to go to get to this level, in part because there is so much more territory to cover before they get there, and in part because hardware isn't up to some of what is needed even yet.
Of course no graphical adventure can equal a good imagination when you come across a "breath taking view".
Of course overanalysis is possible in the study of videogames as art, but that's not really important. First, video games are nearing the point where, in a few years, it can begin to be considered an art form in the mainstream. However, we're not quite at that point yet so there's no real point in worrying about overanalysis. Second, any art can be overanalyzed so that's really not a concern. You could easily apply lots of analysis for a novel, painting, etc. and just go overboard.
I recently took a course on the history of video games and in the process, we explored a lot of the concept of games as art and I really think that it's the right path to take. When film first started out, it was not considered art and took a good few decades to be considered more than just entertainment. I think the same is true of video games and its transition to both art and entertainment is happening today.
The big concern that I see is convincing the mainstream audience that video games can be an art. Whereas film was widely accessible to all audiences, video games tend to cater to a specific market. The typical gamer is a 28-year-old male and games will need to broaden their base so that other groups (especially women and older generations) can come to appreciate them as an art. Will that happen in the near future? I think so but it's not looking too good when games, like Tomb Raider, that really challenge gender roles fall flat in sales.
However, if you look at the reviews on Amazon for their books, they are filled with grudging, negative reviews from school children who were compeled to read the books in class.
I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, but I would rather not see this repeat itself with video games. They were designed to make money for developer by giving their customers some enjoyment. By turning it into 'study' the fun will all be sucked out of it. Can you hear it now?
Teacher: "Johny! You are three days late in finishing Metriod Prime and the rest of the class has already begun Halo."
Johny: "But teacher.... I don't feel like it."
Teacher: "Maybe if you put that War and Peace down and focused on the t.v...."
But both of my points note something important. The gamer has to be able to step back and look at a game from this perspective to understand what the designer is trying to do with the plot. A large feat considering some gamers consider The Matrix and Half-Life to be original storylines (they're not, they've been done many times.)
Now as a producer for a company whos out to make money, what are you gonna do?
Sacrifice a couple million dollars, piss off the 'casual gamer' base, risk getting bad reviews, and bad press in exchange for a few words along the lines of "Well the game did a good job at trying something new but..."
Or...
Sacrifice whatever storyline or tradition a game/name/franchise, stick with a bread-and-butter gameplay, and the same ol crap that people seem to buy every year in exchange for a few million dollars?
In the end, yes there is a very small field in gaming which could be formed based on studing game storylines. However, games which fall into this catagory are few and far between (pretty much an easy 50% of anyone's gaming library fails to land in this catagory, with a 100% rate of sports games).
At a building just a few miles away from me as I type, if that, a study was released last year about the link between VGs and hand-eye coordination. They found that gamers had better coordination than non-gamers (contrary to popular belief).
I'm of the opinion that such studies are fundamentaly flawed. Seems to me that these college students who play games have kept with the hobby since childhood because they have always had some skill in it. That is to say, they were good at games to begin with. The hand-eye coordination was natural, not developed, and this is why they play games to begin with. This was just one study, of course...
Both are nice to have in a game, but it must be remebered that it is a *game*. Games are meant to be *played* by their very nature.
Frankly, there have been primarily story driven games known as 'point and click' adventures. They are all but extinct now since they aren't very engaging *as a game* as opposed to a form of *interactive media*.
At the end of the day, when someone plays a game they probably wish to play with it as opposed to interact with it. Its excelent seing new technology such as 'realistic physics' coming into games since this will allow players to play with the game in a new way.
In a way, the storyline is actually becoming a hinderance to gameplay, with more frequent and longer non-interactive 'cutscenes' (not necessarily CGI/movies, but also including those damn 5 second snippets which are in-engine).
A good example of this is in Prince of Persia: Sands of time: At the end of a battle the prince puts away his sword. Slowly. In an in-engine cutscene. I can't begin to articulate how frustrated I was by the end of the game with that. A for more preferable solution, by my reckoning, would have been to have the sword put away automatically whicle I retained control of all of the other properties of the prince, or even better, if I had to manually put away the sword.
Most seem to think that as games increasingly approximate real life they get better (not necessarily a good thing, as games "in principle" games with dragons are better than those without). I tend to agree with how games are heading as well, and I enjoy the reality provided by realistic sound, light and physics. But I note that not once in my life I have experienced a cutscene, or any other situation where I have consciously not been in control of my body (drunkeness is just reduced control!)
The one line summary: Story and plot are good, but not at the expense of gameplay and interaction.
DEATH TO CUTSCENES!
"favors syntagmatic causality over descriptive explication"
I went ahead and looked these up for everyone's benefit. (all from dictionary.com)
syntagmatic: Of or relating to the relationship between linguistic units in a construction or sequence, as between the (n) and adjacent sounds in not, ant, and ton. The identity of a linguistic unit within a language is described by a combination of its syntagmatic and its paradigmatic relations.
causality: 1. The principle of or relationship between cause and effect. 2. A causal agency, force, or quality.
explication: The act of opening, unfolding, or explaining; explanation; exposition; interpretation.
okay, so basically the guy was saying that sdilent hill did not describe the events that happened, but rather made little n-related sounds to cause something or other. I'm pretty sure he never played the game, and I'm also pretty sure he was trying to pass himself off as smarter than he was. (perhaps banking on the idea that if we didn't know the definition, it must be not only true, but also intelligent.) It's like it was awritten by a child trying to impress someone, so he uses big words that he doesn't fully know.
what a dope! teehee!
You say that like its a bad thing.
For a while, at least, I'm confident we won't see any really great work done from academic gaming. There are two reasons for that:
1. No established directions or sides to support. With no idea of where to start, all the early work is just a lot of useless pontification and attempts to steer around developing any lasting field of study. The "literary criticism" of games that we see a lot of I consider to be among the latter - I mean, really, the fact that you start with three lives in most games using lives does not make it a Biblical reference or some other statement on the human condition...that's an invention of *gameplay mechanics*, dammit. There are plenty of ways you could talk about how games are meaningful without immediately reaching for the bag of techniques used to analyze traditional storytelling.
2. Most of the first people in this field will be mediocre, because of the conditions in 1. No idea of where to start, nor any real curriculum. This won't help attract the people that really might know something, so it'll have to start slowly at first.
But there's no question that there are plenty of things to discuss...especially from a historical context, something which seems to get overlooked a lot even though games tend be more evolutionary than anything else.
If anyone still thinks games are not artistic they simply don't understand the nature of art. Art is meant to be open to interpretation and interaction.
There is a philosophical dichonomy within art of the high(intellectual and low(popular) variety, video games definitly fall into these catagories(1vs1 high, DM low?).
A simple example of games as art comes with the map paradox within the game SiN. Download it or read a review of the map. Basically it represents an area with crossed dimensions (think Escher).
Having just started creating games I am starting to really appreciate how much of game creating is directed towards the perceptions of the gamer.
On the other hand, I've known academics to study DOOM. I, frankly, think they're nuts (games that are popular because they made graphical advances tend to be terrible on the literary end). But the point is there's a lot more to study than just the literature aspect of games. From a mathematical and psychology/education perspective, for instance, play control is interesting. Mathematics gives us game-theory to study it, and Education gives us insight into what is "intuitive" for play control.
..."A Postmodern Analysis of Slashdot Editor's Comments" and plan to use the following quote as an example of the phenomenology of desperate attempts to start a flamewar that are so transparent they inevitably fail:
Is it possible that there is plenty of important work being done in a field of study which can tend toward overanalysis? You mean, like statistics? Or philosophy? Or biology? Or literary criticism? How about the humanities? Or law? Or history?
How about the latest news on the SCO lawsuit? Or the value of Open Source technology?
I'm so glad the readers didn't rise to the bait here (obviously intended to re-ignite the non-controversy started when skotos criticized a single chapter from Richard Bartle's densely significant book).
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
It's all social sciences - no real meat to the gaming discussions.
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Second, the plot lines will never be open until you have a sentient computer that makes up stuff on-the-fly. As a game developer, multiple plot threads are a nightmare to develop satisfactorily. You can't have the player leave the games setting because you a) can't define the rest of the world b) sell a game where it's possible to get into a situation where the player never completes the game.
In conclusion, I think that studying games and gamers will produce nothing more than useful marketing info. Whether Gaming has a cultural longevity is up to the people who make and market games (What you thought TV Ads didn't change your behaviour?).
Sorry if this is post seems aggressive or obvious.
Thankyou.
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