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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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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).
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.