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Games As Transformative Works

Posted by Soulskill on from the rigorous-game-journalism dept.

Deepa Sivarajan sends word that the journal Transformative Works and Culture has published an issue that focuses on games, containing a variety of articles which examine how games interact with modern culture. One essay takes a look at how developers gain an understanding of the systems and structures that drive gameplay, and another discusses motivation and "participatory culture" in games that have a substantial degree of user design involvement, such as mods and addons. There's also an evaluation of how the enthusiast press affects the perceived value of games. The issue includes game-related book reviews and interviews, which can be found at the bottom of the full list of articles.

44 comments

  1. You may be on first by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    but you're definitely not on the spoke.

  2. Re:Who's on first? by TDyl · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Naturally.

    --
    Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
  3. I'd ultimately argue... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...that video games are a richer form of entertainement than any other, since the interaction between a player and a game is much more deep and complex than that between a reader and a book, or between a viewer and a film.

    (yeah, there are shitty games out there, obviously, but there are also shitty books and shitty films, so shut up)

    1. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by CarpetShark · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Games are more interactive, yes. But are they really complex or deep? I don't think so. When you can turn an entire county back from a hellish war full of maddened characters by visiting every town and shown them the bodies of their children, and NONE of that was scripted by the game designers, then you'll have complex and deep interactions. Then, games will truly take the crown of entertainment (and more). However, when you shoot stuff and people say "I surrender" and an outro plays, then a book or even a good movie with decent portrayals of the human condition is still WAY a more interesting, complex, and life-changing experience.

      But on the bigger point here, that games, 3d art, and software in general are great creative works, that deserve more recognition by the traditional art community... right on. It's been a long time coming, and there's a long way to go yet before the digital world (and digital artists, including coders) have been properly recognised for their contributions.

    2. Re: I'd ultimately argue... by Steve+Franklin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Personally, I have found that video games, especially the adventure/puzzle type, have improved my ability to solve real world historical problems. The scary thing is, some of the solutions begin to look an awful lot like video game solutions, raising questions about the ultimate nature of historical reality.

      --
      Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
    3. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Same AC here - I wasn't talking about complexity in terms of scripted vs. procedural elements, but something much more basic. Controlling a character, the ability to look around at the scenery, being a part of the story rather than simply observing it... As gamers we take this for granted, but it's actually pretty involved.

      A good game will make the player feel like he's making the story unfold ; whether this is achieved through scripted behaviour or excellent IA is just a detail of implementation, and entirely irrelevant to the the player's enjoyment (or lack thereof).

      Even the best literary work is merely a static object, presented to the readers who can then observe and interpret it as they please. Same goes for architecture, films, etc. As a medium, video games have the potential to go further, much further than that.

    4. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by Jurily · · Score: 1

      the interaction between a player and a game is much more deep and complex than that between a reader and a book

      Clicking buttons according to visual stimuli is not really as deep as understanding Finnegans Wake. Ever played WoW?

    5. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      If you compare World of Warcraft to Finnegan's Wake, I'll compare Ico to a kitchen book.

    6. Re: I'd ultimately argue... by KDR_11k · · Score: 1

      Well, there is a reason The Art Of War is still a popular book.

      --
      Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
    7. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by KDR_11k · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I have to say I have yet to see a game where I feel like I effected the story rather than just having fulfilled some trigger condition to see the pre-written next part of it that could be shown even without the trigger if the developer had not locked it away.

      --
      Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
    8. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by Hurricane78 · · Score: 1

      It is scientifically well known, that every form of entertainment is in fact a subset of what games are. And it always will be. So your arguments are right.

      I think you can say that this is, because theoretically, a game can perfectly simulate the whole reality. Including watching movies, listening to music/radio, reading books/magazines, sitting in a rollercoaster, having sex, and so on, and so forth. (If they do this better or worse right now, is irrelevant to the point.)

      --
      Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
    9. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by grumbel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      since the interaction between a player and a game is much more deep and complex than that between a reader and a book

      The interaction between a player and a game is extremely simple and most of the time not much deeper then "press button, see character fall dead". Even worse, since the players view in a game is more or less 'locked' to the main character, games have a far smaller range on how to present things, since it would break the gameplay to move away to a non-playable character. Also because a game needs to fill the player with constant interaction, games tend to be pretty comical and unbelievable.

      That said, not every game has to be a typical current day first person shooter. We already have Tetris, Wii Sports, abstract stuff like Passage or story driven things like Monkey Island, Planscape Tourment and we will certainly see completly new genres emerge in future. But most stuff that would fall into the "deep and complex" category just fails mass-market appeal and thus never gets made in the first place, which leaves current day games fall quite a bit behind their potential.

    10. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by grumbel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      being a part of the story rather than simply observing it.

      But that is exactly where games today fail at. The player isn't part of the story, he is a passenger in a roller coaster ride. Giving him not only the non-interactivity of a book or movie, but also all the restriction that come from being locked to the viewpoint of a single character and of course the whole immersion breaking parts of pre-scripted events, bad AI and bad user interfaces.

      As a medium, video games have the potential to go further, much further than that.

      I don't disagree with that, after all everything from Tetris to the Holodeck falls into the 'game' category, so there is plenty of room left to explore. But so far games have at best scratched the surface of their potential, leaving a lot to be desired.

    11. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by bigbigbison · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Complex and deep in what way? It seems as if you mean in terms of story and character development. But what about in terms of the complexity of other things like say troop movement in war or something? The battles in something like Civilization not to mention the hardcore war games are a lot more complex and deep than anything in any film or book.

      --
      http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
    12. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by CarpetShark · · Score: 1

      How so? In most games, you can either control an army as a flock of sprites, or play individual characters. In a good book, you can read a chapter from a king's perspective, another from the perspective of a prisoner in a dungeon, another from a lowly soldier on the battlefield, another from a commander trying to strategise on the battlefield, and yet another from a frightened child hiding under a bush as her mother is raped by that noble commander's henchmen. If you know of games with that depth and complexity, I'd love to hear of them.

    13. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The interaction between a player and a game is extremely simple and most of the time not much deeper then "press button, see character fall dead".

      If you're going to simplify things to that extent, you might as well say that watching a film is "nothing more that sitting and staring at a screen for a couple of hours". Then we'd be comparing apples and apples, and the comparison would still end up in favour of video games.

    14. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by KDR_11k · · Score: 1

      Well, "art" lacking mass-market appeal isn't unique to gaming, you don't see much deep thinking in a hollywood blockbuster either.

      --
      Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
    15. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by grumbel · · Score: 1

      If you're going to simplify things to that extent,

      Thing is, its not a simplification, its what you do in most games. If you want to be picky, sure you also have a reload button and a button to change your gun and maybe you can jump to, but none of those help to give the story much depths or complexity.

      you might as well say that watching a film is "nothing more that sitting and staring at a screen for a couple of hours"

      That is a perfectly true statement, it however misses the point. The problem isn't how much or little I have to waggle the controller to get my in game character moving, but how much meaningful ways you have to drive the story forward. A movie doesn't need those since it progresses on its own. A game on the other side is about interaction and thus it becomes important how you can interact with the game world and in very many you simply don't have any other means of interaction then your gun. Games are simply extremely primitive when it comes no non-violent character interaction, in the best cases you have a multiple choice dialog tree to walk done, which is fine, but doesn't leave much freedom, in the other case you have nothing at all or blunt "yes/no" choices or not even that. All the complexity of real human interaction either completly prescripted or simply non existant in todays games.

    16. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What the hell, have you played nothing but FPS games? I've had plenty of games that were totally satisfying in terms of interaction... Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was the latest one (finished it yesterday), and other examples include Fallout, Arcanum, Morrowind, Psychonauts, GTA, Civilization, System Shock, Cave Story, and that's just off the top of my head.

      Even a dumb shooting game is more rewarding than a dumb action movie... I've had indecent amounts of fun playing Serious Sam.

      All the complexity of real human interaction either completly prescripted or simply non existant in todays games.

      The claim was that games offer richer interaction than other forms of personal entertainment (e.g. books, films, music, etc.), not that they offered richer interaction than real life. No matter how you look at things, even the most straighforward "run-shoot-kill" game is more interactive than the most intellectual book. Sure, a book can show complex interactions, but that's 100% scripted, and no different from a game's cutscene.

    17. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by cibyr · · Score: 1

      But that is exactly where games today fail at. The player isn't part of the story, he is a passenger in a roller coaster ride.

      But then you have masterpieces like Bioshock which centres its narrative around that very phenomenon, and still gives you some freedom of choice to affect the outcome of the story.

      And then you have games like Fallout 3 which give you a rich, detailed environment and let you run wild in it, giving you the freedom to make choices which affect your entire world as you continue to play.

      Yes there are a lot of games with simple, linear storytelling but that is a limitation imposed by the writers/developers - NOT the medium. And games can be a very powerful medium for linear storytelling too even if the majority (just like most of what airs on TV) is trash, or simply exists to be fun without telling a story or emotionally involving the player.

      --
      It's not exactly rocket surgery.
    18. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by Belial6 · · Score: 1

      Maniac Mansion.

    19. Re: I'd ultimately argue... by PitaBred · · Score: 1

      Because it looks good to have on the bookshelf next to other classics that no one actually reads?

      I have The Art of War on my bookshelf... I'll get to it one of these days. Gotta get through a few others that are higher priority first ;)

      --
      My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
    20. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by tsa · · Score: 1

      Try an adventure game with multiple endings.

      --

      -- Cheers!

    21. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by Boronx · · Score: 1

      The sheer complexity of games makes depth impossible at this point. Heck, just look at the effort it took to create a medium length choose your own adventure book.

      Asking for deep games right now is like asking a caveman to paint The Brothers Karamazov on his wall.

      --
      Play Command HQ online
    22. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by Jarik_Tentsu · · Score: 1

      I think the problem is that it's one or another:

      Either the player is a character on a ride through the story - really just killing baddies and whatnot on the way.

      Games which try to have a 'choose your own story' kinda thing - freedom to do what you want, usually either just have multiple paths you can go, or have very basic, non-complex plots (which revolve around quests or not) which are very 1 dimensional.

      It's hard to get a nice, interesting plot with true interactive gameplay freedom.

    23. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by grumbel · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I've had plenty of games that were totally satisfying in terms of interaction...

      So have I, that doesn't mean that I don't see the inherent limits games today have.

      The claim was that games offer richer interaction than other forms of personal entertainment (e.g. books, films, music, etc.)

      No, the claim was that they offer "richer forms of entertainment" due to interaction. Now one can have of course different definitions of "rich", but for me its mainly the amount of variety in terms of what stories can be told and I see plenty of more of that in movies and books then I see in games.

      Games are simply for most part a matter of "There are monsters, go kill them". Even the good games, while they might have better storys and dialog, follow the same underlying mechanics and are still not far away from Space Invaders. A large part of that is because the interaction is extremely primitive and no good for actual storytelling, at best it can be used to trigger a pre-scripted story event, but it does little to let an interesting story evolve out of actual gameplay.

      There are of course a few exceptions with things like The Sims, which allow a rich set of actions and which allows dynamic stories to evolve, but then its still kind of at the level of mix of slapstick comedy and soap operas at best and doesn't get all that much deeper at this point in time.

      The point I am trying to make isn't that books or movies are somehow better, but that the interactive parts of games doesn't really help that much when it comes to storytelling, in fact it often does exactly the opposite.

      To phrase it another way, there has yet to be a single game that gets me emotionally involved due to its interactive parts. It just doesn't happen. The involvement comes due to cutscenes and predefined sequences, but not due to my own doing and those games that get close, just to often spoil it due to bad AI, stupid NPCs or simple save/reload cycles that can undo any dramatic event that happened.

    24. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by grumbel · · Score: 2, Informative

      But then you have masterpieces like Bioshock which centres its narrative around that very phenomenon, and still gives you some freedom of choice to affect the outcome of the story.

      Bioshock, just like many Bioware games, has completly black&white choices, it is "kill sisters" or "save sisters", there is no grey area in between. I don't feel that this gives me freedom, it just makes the limits so more obvious. The little freedom that Bioshock has is that it allows some non-linear exploration of the levels, which is a nice touch, but its not exactly a new thing, Doom1 had that and just like in all other games Bioshock still restricts you to those areas where it wants you to go, you are not allowed to roam around freely through Rapture. Neither does Bioshock allow any communication with NPCs, its all just monologue.

      That Bioshock is hailed as a masterpiece, just shows how primitive the story telling in games is and how little it has progressed over the years. Maniac Mansion, which is over 20 years old and run on a C64, was much more advanced in many areas of storytelling then many of the stuff that is thrown at us today.

    25. Re: I'd ultimately argue... by Steve+Franklin · · Score: 1

      "I've got a copy of the Bushido,
      But it's just for show."

      Line from the Fat Blue Man song "Back to Winnipeg": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ushsCQ2OIqw

      --
      Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
    26. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      It's not hard to think of games that offer wildly differing perspectives (Spore, anyone?). And yet, nothing a book's reader does will affect the outcome on the last page (unless it's a "choose your own adventure" book). The book achieves it's depth through lack of interactivity, focusing exclusively on narrative. Games typically have to make a choice between narrative and player freedom and interactivity.

      I'm not saying videogames are anywhere near the level of sophistication of literature (although I think they're catching up to movies pretty quickly). After all, the medium of videogames is still very young - we're already starting to see videogames that stretch the traditional bounds of storytelling and gameplay, and do new and innovative things. Yeah, 90% of them are crap, but you have to remember that 90% of *everything* is crap, including books.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    27. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by Psychochild · · Score: 1

      No, the claim was that they offer "richer forms of entertainment" due to interaction. Now one can have of course different definitions of "rich", but for me its mainly the amount of variety in terms of what stories can be told and I see plenty of more of that in movies and books then I see in games.

      Many people consider "entertainment" to be more than just stories. There are some things that are very entertaining without having any stories, including many games such as Tetris.

      [T]he interactive parts of games doesn't really help that much when it comes to storytelling, in fact it often does exactly the opposite.

      The interactive parts don't help when it comes to linear storytelling. Yes, games can tell a story, so can a painting, but neither are as well adapted to linear storytelling as books or movies. However, once we start considering non-linear (or interactive) stories, then games shine. The problem is that we've had a strong focus on linear storytelling for a very long time; the printed word replaced much of the oral traditions we had in the past. Games are now trying to re-capture some of that, mostly with clumsy results. In addition, games are going through a growing period where it tries to copy a previous medium poorly, just as movies tried to copy theater before developing its own techniques for telling stories. That's why some "epic" games feel like a mediocre movie with some combat button-mashing thrown in at odd times.

      So, yes, you're right with some qualification. But, that doesn't mean it will always be the case that games suck at storytelling; I think they just haven't hit their stride yet. Personally, I think the realm of multiplayer games is the most fertile area, which is one reason why I'm an MMO developer.

      --
      Brian "Psychochild" Green
      MMO developer's blog
    28. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by bigbigbison · · Score: 1

      Again, you are talking in terms of narrative or emotional attachment. There's nothing wrong with that but that wasn't what I meant by the complexity. In a war game you can keep track of every movement of dozens if not hundreds of units and get the big picture of how a battle unfolds.

      --
      http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
    29. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by cibyr · · Score: 1

      Are you deliberately ignoring the "A man chooses, a slave obeys" scene or did you just not play that far into the game? It was pretty much the whole point of the narrative that the choices you can make are limited and cannot actually affect the game. Which makes the player actually empathise with their character for once, which is what makes Bioshock a masterpiece. Well, that and the incredibly immersive environment, fun gameplay and beautiful art.

      --
      It's not exactly rocket surgery.
    30. Re:I'd ultimately argue... by grumbel · · Score: 1

      "A man chooses, a slave obeys" scene or did you just not play that far into the game?

      I didn't ignore the scene, it just didn't exactly impress me much, because it had *ZERO* impact on the actual game. You could tack that on to any random FPS or game for that matter, since pretty much all allow you no freedom of any sorts and it would "work", but a sentence spoken close to the end of the game doesn't turn it into a masterpiece. I don't deny that Bioshock is a good game, hey I had fun playing it, but it wasn't exactly a mind blowing experience. It was just another FPS, certainly one placed in a more interesting setting, but still just a FPS, you run around shooting dudes and thats pretty much all you do.

  4. Re:Wise words by berend+botje · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yeay! We're getting a pony!

  5. "Transformative"? by Bazman · · Score: 1

    Hmmm, why does that word ring bells... Oh yes:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

  6. But... by M-RES · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...does TFA let us know when Duke Nukem will be released?

    1. Re:But... by genner · · Score: 1

      ...does TFA let us know when Duke Nukem will be released?

      WHEN IT'S READY!

      ....and not a moment sooner.

  7. New major by Brandybuck · · Score: 2, Funny

    I can see it now, a new department at universities, for those unable to cope with the rigors of being an Art or Communications major: Game Studies.

    --
    Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
    1. Re:New major by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hey, I studied Games for all 5 years you insensitive clod!

  8. Re:Wise words by Boronx · · Score: 1

    Only the poorest of governments cannot afford ponies, and even those can still chop of your wiener. So what's the downside?

    --
    Play Command HQ online
  9. Re:Wise words by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is it as bad as sex with a mare?