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How Should Games Be Analyzed?
Thanks to the Electronic Book Review for its Espen Aarseth-authored article discussing what form academic analysis of videogames should take, part of a wider academic discussion on how games should be treated. Aarseth argues of the theme-ability of games: "The 'royal' theme of the traditional pieces is all but irrelevant to our understanding of chess. Likewise, the dimensions of Lara Croft's body, already analyzed to death by film theorists, are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently", before concluding: "The sheer number of students trained in film and literary studies will ensure that the slanted and crude misapplication of 'narrative' theory to games will continue and probably overwhelm game scholarship for a long time to come."
For those interested in ludology (the study of games), check out DiGRA. Its a discussion site where academics and games creators discuss some of the topics that cross their works. Quite interesting, although probably a bit high-brow for the slashdot masses ;^)
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I already had this discussion with my friends a long while back, and some of them completely disagree with me. I point out their bad taste in games.
I say that any game worth its salt will be equally good with any theme. For example, if you took super mario brothers and made mario a stick figure and replaced goomba's with circles, koopas with triangles, bricks with hashed squares, etc. The game would be equally as good gamewise. You wouldn't want to play that game, but the point is that you can imagine the game not losing anything from a lack of theme. The mechanic remains intact.
Now take a final fantasy game. Theme is everything. If you replace everything in a final fantasy game with a generic distinguishing shape the game would fall apart. Look at a board game like monopoly. Its be re-themed a billion times, but the basic game mechanic remains.
What does this tell us? Its quite simple really. If the theme of a game can be removed, just like a CSS can be removed from an XHTML, and the game mechanic remains intact, then what you have is indeed a game. Final Fantasy is not a game. It is a partially interactive movie.
Now, it is common sense that theme is necessary and desirable. Take Metroid. The theme of Metroid means a lot. But will the game work without it? Absolutely. And the theme of metroid goes so well with the exploratory gameplay and that's what really make it stand heads and shoulders above other games.
So what we do is this. First remove the theme of a game and examine the core gamplay at a fundamental level. Rate it on its own. If it falls apart then what you have is not a game in the strictest sense. Second examine the theme on its own. A sesame street theme is going to make a big difference. Third examine the combination of the theme and the gameplay. Does it fit well together? A Sesame Street theme on the Counter-Strike game wouldn't work too well together. I point you to Barney Doom.
If you want to prove it to yourself look at some german board games. Settlers, Puerto Rico, etc. They all have themes which are complementary to the gameplay, but the games themselves stand firmly without their themes. This can be seen easily by the constant re-theming of settlers. A game like Diceland doesn't even bother with a theme. Or you could say that its theme is in fact the lack of theme.
Oh, one last thing. This system of game rating will find you raw game quality. I will now use one of my favoriate analogies. Citizen kane is the "best" movie ever. You may hate it. You may think its boring and stupid. But film-wise it is unbeatable. Zelda 1 is the same way. It is the Citizen Kane of video games. You may hate it, but that's how it is. Which games are most fun is completely independent of this. You may love to watch the Matrix #1 over and over, but film-wise it isn't great. Just as you may love to play Starcraft, it still isn't the objective best game.
Actually I'm starting to think that maybe Tetris is the citizen kane of video games.
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, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently
So are you telling me that you've not played tomb raider enough to know all the best ways to get a good view of Lara Crofts tits ?
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People have actually done what you've suggested.
Final Fantasy suffers less than you imagine, Mario suffers more.
...through the use of funk!
I think what they're getting at is if the look of a game changes the feel of it. I think it does. For some reason, aiming a weapon in an FPS feels different when you change the crosshair, even if you change nothing else. That's one example.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Games are a form of entertainment. If you find a game fun, you play it. If you don't, you put it away. What is there to analyze?
Actually, Lara's "dimensions," especially her increase from large to Zeppelin-grade from Tomb-raider to TR2, totally put me off the whole franchise... I never bought another TR game. Frankly I view them with disgust.
They had this interesting, powerful female character, unusual in a game, and what do they do... they act like nerdy repressed 14 year olds and emphasise unrealistically, frankly off-puttingly (off-putting to me as a straight guy even - I can imagine what women think of it), large breasts. F'ing stupid.
So actually I think analysing Lara's dimensions is a pretty valid form of analysis - it tells you a lot about the psychology of game makers and players.
...and I've come to regard this as being similar to the person who says that choreography == dance. It doesn't, of course. The art of choreography is all about the movement of bodies, the stillness and the action, the timing and the relative position. The art of the dance, however, is choreography + costuming + music + staging + lighting + ... you get the idea.
:)
Can you take an identically choreographed dance and place it in a different setting with different costumes and have it be just as valid, just as "good"? Yes, of course. But the audience experience includes the whole of the performance, not just the choreography. To exclude the fact that the dance happens on a happy field of flowers versus inside a concentration camp is to miss key elements of examining the user experience as a whole.
Now, the narratologists are just as likely to make the mistake from the other side.
The difficulty arises from the term "game" which we use to both refer to the formal construction of rules, and the whole experience. To be more precise, we could say that Aarseth as a ludologist is like a choreographer in that he is interested in the formal construction of rules. There's a field for those who study "game rules" and a field for those who study "interactive entertainment" and one encompasses the other to a large degree. The latter one will be pretty broad (but not confine itself to narratology).
I'll tell you how games should be analyzed. There is one circumstance which will make many games absolutely fantastic and mindblowing. That circumstance is having ingested some LSD beforehand. Having done so myself and played Warcraft 3 and gazed for many minutes at a time upon the beautiful trees waving their arms about, I can thoroughly recommend the experience to all game reviewers. If the graphics don't look good after you've taken LSD, that game is really shit.
To answer it is difficult. How do you measure the success of a game? Is that even the right question? This starts to venture into territory that is pragmatically and empirically unapproachable. How do you measure the play that arises from a particular game? How do you measure the quality of said play? It's duration? The physiological effects it has on its players? The psychological? At some level, play springs equally from the intuition of the designer and the willing participation of the players. Never fully-formed; games are much more iterative and require far more tinkering than other mediums. I agree that sales figures aren't necessarily telling (Enter the Matrix) but I'm going to have to side with Raph and with my college game instructor, Steve Librande (Lead Designer, Blizzard North and co-speaker at this years Game Tuning), here and say that what really matters is the player's experience. That is, the way that every part of a game harmonizes to create an experience for the player. The theme, narrative, structure, and platform included. This is what I'd consider a holistic or pragmatic approach to game design, and one that game 'scholars' would do well to examine. It works.
Aarseth has some interesting points about the technology, the 'platform' of games, being too ephemeral to be realistically criticized by any sort of traditional means. Unfortunately he falls short of really examining why this might be or to propose a solution, which I think would be a very profitable avenue of study. The perennial inability by the critical multitudes to define 'play' (or, to bitch-slap the World's Deadest Horse, 'fun',) is central to the problem of studying games. I'd really like to see him expand on said idea and suggest an academically acceptable solution. Because, honestly, 'intuition' can only get us so far.
I guess most academic persons will mess this up like they mess up when discussing science fiction.
Maybe my experience is just tainted by this discussion I had with someone who insisted that science fiction was nothing but pulp fiction/space opera/gadgets.
I guess there are a lot of SF books that are like this, but there is nothing that keeps a science fiction author from writing a book with as much "depth" as normal fiction. Also sometimes the "gadgets" are what the author wants to talk about(see Arthur C. Clarke and satellites), the gadgets not always are just a means to keep the story going and cool.
Applying this to games this would mean giving recognition to games that do more than the basics, have a good background story, or include gameplay ideas from other game genres.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
He talks about narratives in video games, yet nowhere does his article mention either RPGs(esp FFVII) or Metal gear solid, possibly the two greatest examples of narrative in the entire genre.
Clearly someone who has jumped on the idea of a 'new medium' (which it is) without doing ANY homework. Every game he mentions was a massive one. From the sound of it he's never even played one.
Sorry to be so negative, but I really hate the trend recently. Since games have gotten big, people have started to notice and comment on them a lot more. Unfortunatly, a lot of the academics who comment, frequently never play games and have a poor understanding of the entire medium. Does anyone know of someone who can give proper(i.e. researched) debate on the medium.
May the Maths Be with you!
Starcraft has average mutliplayer (the interface isn't optimally designed)
I think the entire country of South Korea would disagree with you there. Probably the entire Asain continent. Heck, to throw the racial jokes aside, just about every gamer on the face of the planet would disagree.
OK, I'll stop being facetious. Seriously though, StarCraft has supurb multiplayer gameplay. It's one of the best balanced RTS *ever*. New strategies are formulated and refined long after the game's release. But you are correct in saying that single and multi play are two different elements. What makes StarCraft such an excellent game when played against another human is not the same that makes it enjoyable to play the campaign.
--LordPixie
Accepting Aarseth's argument that computer games aren't just another kind of narrative process (which most of the other comments here seem to agree with), I'm led to think that treating them as a genre seperate from other single player games is probably a fairly fundamental error. If you think about it, what are single player games other than complex realisations of the solitaire group of games? The process of playing single player games in any genre (on a computer or not) is to learn the rules and then attempting to acquire the skills to master them, whether the game pieces are playing cards, marbles, Gordon Freeman or Lara Croft. Whilst the computer game medium is different, the process is the same.
It seems to me that there are can be valid critical approaches to the semiotics of computer games (in my analogy, the playing cards themselves), the games' rules and players' experiences (and probably many others) but - and this is my problem with the article - to mistake one of these for any other is never going to get very far.
The question "How should games be analyzed" is meaningless even within the [limited] context of the story submission. Analyzed for what purpose? Evaluating their value as art? Writing a game review? Crafting a prospectus to seek funding based on prior work?
If you're talking about artistic merit, the work should be characterized in the same way art is already characterized, which I will not go into as I am pretty ignorant of it, but it seems to me that you also must consider the interface. This separates video games from most forms of art and is, generally speaking, the thing that divides good games from bad. Even a limited game that has obvious and numerous shortcomings can be fun to play, but an amazing game with poor play control is no fun whatsoever. It becomes work.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's also worth noting that the basis of the thread at electronic book review that contains Aarseth's essay is the project First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game that Pat Harrigan and I edited. A First Person book has been published by MIT Press, and includes a wide variety of views and responses on this and related topics, from 25 essayists and a group of respondents ranging from Will Wright to Brenda Laurel.