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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.
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).