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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."
The problem with your analysis (and, to some degree, Aarseth's) is that the term "video game" has come to define a medium, not a particular style of play. Video games include fairly traditional goal-directed play, but also elements of story and simulation.
A strictly ludic approach to analyzing games is useful in an academic context, for cataloguing games based on their play styles. But I'd question how useful it is as a measure of the experience of a video game, as much as I'd question the use of a Dewey Decimal number to judge a book's quality.
What you are calling 'game' here (as distinct from 'theme') is in fact the mechanics. While I do agree with analysing a game based on the mechanics and theme independantly, and then looking at how well they work together, I do not feel that theme can be stripped so nonchalantly from the game, and that the theme is in fact an integral part of the game, just as important as the theme. Good mechanics can support a number of themes, just as a good theme can support a number of mechanics. A game is more than just mechanics tho.
Playing poker with a joker and some Uno cards
Tetris is easy to memorize - thus it doesn't need too much of a story. However, games like Warcraft III are a bit too complex to dump the player in directly and therefore require introducing characters/units one at a time in an appropriate manner.
Another factor that has to be considred with game mechanics is that singleplayer and multiplayer don't use the same processes - what could work for one doesn't always work for the other. This applies to even the most common games - for example, Starcraft has average mutliplayer (the interface isn't optimally designed), while has a great singleplayer component due to its relativly strong AI for its time without being too unfair.
On the other hand, there are various online-only games that are only good for multiplayer and are fairly boring when played alone. The most notable example would be Purge - this game doesn't have AI player support, meaning that you have to rely on the fact that there are still other players playing the game.
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.
That's silly. It wouldn't fall apart because theme is everything, but because you'd have no clue what the hell you were doing or why you were supposed to be doing it. All of the Final Fantasy games (and console RPGs in general) have varying amounts of gameplay; the theme just butresses it. You could say the same thing about Super Mario Brothers. You yourself say that a person wouldn't want to play a game where all of the SMB objects were replaced with generics, but why would that be if it wasn't due to the lack of a theme?
Rob
...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).