Game Research

I'm sure I've talked about this before, but it's a topic that's been on my mind of late: how to research videogames.

Planescape Papers: The Abyss at Last / Work in Progress: Chris Bateman's Imaginary Games

To inaugurate my return to regular blogging, I've got this sprawling piece. It's doing double duty as work-in-progress notes on chapter seven of Chris Bateman's Imaginary Games, and the culmination of my Planescape Paper series. For a bit of background, the book is essentially Bateman's explanation of Kendall Walton's make-believe version of mimesis; check out the review I did of Walton here if you want a primer on that subject before you begin. And see if you can spot the moment where this post switched from something I was doing for my own reading only to something for mass consumption. All that, and a strongly worded suggestion to Don't Stop Believin', after the break.

The Planescape Papers: Crossing the Rubikon, Pt 2: Satire and the Evil Wizard

Right--so the schedule of this series fell off the rails a little bit. What happened? Marking research papers happened. On the bright side, the students delivered a lot of pleasant surprises. It's always a risk to allow students the option to write about "anything," but if you work with them on narrowing the topic, sometimes you can get some real gems. Unsurprisingly, people tend to put a little more effort into papers where they feel they've got some expertise. Ask a health sciences student for a  research essay on Shakespeare, and they'll feel out of their league; let them do an essay on Alzheimer's, and you'll get something better.

But that's besides the point. Today: we enter the Rubikon, and discuss the nature of satire in videogames.

The Planescape Papers: Neo-liberalism and Art of Conversation

My postings have decreased at a point where my dissertation research has also been slowed, and the suggested correlation is the 1999 computer RPG, Planescape: Torment.  I'm currently working on the chapter on 1990s games, with the general theory that this is the period where "realistic graphics" became a driving force with videogames, as a result of the technological increase that made such graphics possible. Torment is the counter-case; arguably, it also strives for realism, but less through graphics*, and more through copious walls of text providing mood, background, and other bits of information. It's set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe, or rather, set in Planescape, which is the multiverse containing the Dungeons & Dragons universe, so there's a pretty damn big well of information to draw from. I love Torment. (Read that in both senses of the word.) I love its plot, its characters, its world. It's one of my favorite games, and I wouldn't change it for the world. But right now, it's killing me. It's a long game to begin with, and when you're stopping every few seconds to take notes on this conversation or that description, it takes oh so much longer. And an added problem is that I'm in such a rush to get through it, I'm not doing much beyond taking notes. I haven't let myself stop and analyze very much, which is really the point of the exercise.

Well, fine. I've got a blog to populate with content; I've got two notebooks full of notes; I've got a game that's STILL only 2/3rds done. Ladies, gentlemen, assorted undead immortals, welcome to the Planescape Papers. Today's topic: neo-liberalism and the PS:T overview, after the break.

*Planescape: Torment has some beautiful graphics, actually, in terms of its background design especially, but they're largely non-interactive, and not really the main event, so to speak.

Bibliophile: Porn, Pleasure, and Pop Culture at Arcadia University

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”
― Mark Twain

This week on Bibliophile: we look at the new books of New Brunswick's Acadia University.  After the break, of course.

Work in Progress: Nitsche's Video Game Spaces

I haven't done a Work in Progress post in a while.  Since they're basically copying and pasting notes I already have, they're pretty easy to do. So I figured I'd do one.  This particular one is from chapter 9 of Michael Nitsche's Video Game Spaces, "Effects of Narrative Filters." It's fairly brief, in comparison to a lot of these note summaries. And it mentions Sands of Time, God of War, and American McGee's Alice, if that entices you.

Does this post count as research? Probably. Why not?

I've been sitting in on a game studies graduate course this term, and one of the questions we keep coming back to is how we do game studies to begin with.  I'm not talking about adopting a methodology, or what it means to do university scholarship--I'm talking the basic, meat and potatoes, question of how you do research on a game, and how that differs from a book.  I've got the similar parts down pat, I think; I know where to look for game-related secondary sources, I know how to construct an argument, and I know how to write (I'm even actively writing every day, which is an oddly productive experience).  But my method for playing the game to get to the scholarly stuff has definite room for improvement.

The two major game-related research projects I've gone on were the Mass Effect stuff and the Lost Odyssey stuff, both of which I discussed on the blog in great detail.  And in both cases, I played through the game once to experience it, then played through it again taking lots and lots of notes.  And they're very good notes; they are extensive and detailed, and cover basically every approach I can think of, even months and years later.  But that kind of playthrough is just too time-consuming.  I need something better.  I don't know what other game scholars do (note: any game scholars reading this, comments on what you do would be welcome), but I figured there had to be a way to develop ideas without spending an eternity transcribing everything that comes out of Shepherd's poorly formed mouth (character creation is hard.).  So when I started playing Lunar: The Silver Star Story Complete, a classic PS1 adaptation of a classic Sega CD game, I thought I'd take a running collection of notes for my first playthrough.  And that worked great.  My little notebook filled up with comments on plot points, game mechanics, and RPG conventions, all of which I could pursue later at my leisure.  And because I'm looking at the game from an academic standpoint the first time through, I know where I want to make strategic savepoints so I can come back and flesh out points later.  It takes less time, it encourages me to condense my thoughts, and it encourages stream of consciousness developing.  There's only one problem.

Has anyone seen my game notebook?  It's small, ringed, and has a lot of pen marks on it....


Later Days.

Book Review: The Ethics of Computer Games by Miguel Sicart

“At the center of the whole discussion on the ethics of computer games, beyond developers and publishers and academes, we should find the players—not as inane inout providers, target groups, or research subjects, but as complex moral beings who will think, reason, and argue about the ethical implications and values of their actions within the game world. It is our moral duty to encourage players to behave ethically and to develop their moral strengths while better ethical games are produced, and we should encourage ourselves to dare to play ethically. Because nothing is ‘just a game’ anymore.” --Miguel Sicart, The Ethics of Computer Games. 

 As promised, here's the review of Sicart's book.  We're going to be talking about moral philosophy, player subjects, and ethical design, after the break.

When I play catch, I don't wait for the ball to tell me a story. I tell my own damn story about how I caught a ball.

I've been wanting to post more, but I'm swamped with work this weekend, so I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone, and do a Work in Progress. Longtime readers may remember the feature as "Watch Me Work,"  but I've decided I like this title better.  The idea is simple--I do a lot of note taking when I read, and when I'm finished a chapter, I tend to do one paragraph summarizing the chapter, and one summarizing my response to it.  So I those results, and post them here.  In particular, I thought it would be interesting (for me more than you, I'm afraid) if I did one on a book I was planning to do a full review of later.  The Work in Progress is sort of a micro-version of the book review, as it features the same summary/commentary pattern, but it tends to be a lot rougher, as it was written in a stream of consciousness flow for me, rather than something more for posterity.  In other words, if you thought the book reviews were rambling, then you're really going to have a fun time now.  This is Chapter 4, "The Ethics of Computer Games" from Miguel Sicart's book of the same title.

In this chapter, Sicart draws on the historically-established virtues ethics of Aristotle and the computer-based information ethics of Floridi and Sanders to form his own vesion of computer game ethics. He begins the discussion with a focus on the moral encounter with Sorrow in Metal Gear Solid 3, and outlines the chapter. First, virtue ethics can be used the situation between player-subjects and game object.  More generally, it means looking at how the world allows ethical aspirations; in games, it would mean how the games enable ethical player decisions and reflections. It occurs when the player-subject determines the best choice, and when the person realizes a disconnect between player-subject and their own decisions.  Virtue ethics also acknowledges the role of the moral object, the computer, in framing these moral decisions, though it’s the player who makes the choice.  The hermeneutic circle consists of the player, the game, and player community—it describes what happens when subject becomes player. And finally, it exists when subject interacts with the world outside of gaming. Virtue ethics acknowledges the presence of the player as more than just someone whom the game is inflicted on.  Its limitation is that if your focus is on community of game players, then you can’t tell if you’re looking at the community, or just its most vocal contributors, and virtue ethics is a little general. Information ethics comes from Floridi and Sanders. It’s digitally based, and argues that people and agents are information-based, and operate within infospheres. Everything is information, but not everything has agency. It considers not just individuals, but their relation to broader networks. Sicart believes it translates to games very easily.  It means that responsibility for an ethical game engagement is distributed, between designer, player, and play community. It’s limited in that it’s rather theoretically based, and still needs to be field tested. That brings us to Sicart’s framework, which is a combination of the two. He starts by downplaying the fictional element of games. But they must be studied in terms of the moral object, moral experience, and moral agent at work. Games are considered in terms of design, experience, and cultural object, with a distributed responsibility that overlays into a larger network.

It’s a good framework, although one that needs to be tested in a larger field, as Sicart notes. As I mentioned, the need to downplay the role of fiction in game seems counterproductive. I can understand not wanting to study games as if they were literature or film. But the story of a game isn’t something a cinema scholar imagines being there, or the much-mocked story Murray finds in Tetris. Some games have stories. To say that the Final Fantasy series should be considered entirely apart from its story is ridiculous. To say that Halo’s military setting isn’t relevant is to miss a large part of the game's appeal. Where is a GTA (or any Rockstar game) without its diegetic elements?  It's not an either/or proposition; game story and the rest of the game are intertwined  Juul’s book Half Real, which is where, I think, Sicart gets his argument that the story in a game is secondary to the rules, seems like a throwback to the ludologist approach.and it’s one that limits how a game can be perceived. I'll agree that the storyline usually shouldn't be considered the most important thing in a game, but I wouldn't lambast a narratologist who tried to argue it. More viewpoints in scholarship is a good thing; a discipline with a lot of voices is a discipline that's vibrant and changing. As a final point on the matter, yes, it is relevant that Mario is a plumber. It’s not something that comes up often in the games, but the character design is a part of his story, and thus relevant. If it was lizards fighting people, then people wouldn’t think they’re children’s games quite so easily. And to argue that Frasca's September 12^th lacks a story is ridiculous—its story is 9/11 and the resulting wars, which is one of the most relevant diegetic contexts that I can think of./end rant. Sicart’s framework is basically a fusion of these two forms and applied to videogames (which is exactly what the ludologists were supposedly originally against, but never mind). He gets a historical legacy from values ethics, and a specificity from computer ethics, which isn’t a bad way of doing things at all. I’m not entirely convinced that either is necessary for the framework, but it’s never a bad idea to lay one’s roots on the table. Anyway, information theory seems a little iffy in its totalizing definition of information. There were some things I liked about this chapter; Sicart doesn’t even give the magic circle a nod, which feels appropriate. And he points out that game research has failed to connect interpretation to the player’s ethical nature, which I’ll extend to playing in general, and vice versa. Players are exceptionally adamant that there’s no analytical thinking being performed when they play, that games shouldn’t be art and don’t cause responses, they cause experiences. And game research is quick to dismiss the notion that playing isn’t mindless. (Okay, not core game research, but there’s definitely some of that on the fringe.) I also like his idea that phronesis is about the deliberate break between player-subject and person, because it goes counter to the immersion side of theory.

That was fun.  Any thoughts?  Any thoughts you want to immortalize in post form?

Later days.

Friday Quotations: The whole book is like this.

"The decisive increase in importance and consequent proliferation of the logistical flowchart in the postwar period is the central element in the overlfowing of the military sphere into all other spheres of human activity.  The transformation of a nation into logistical potential leads to the transformation of the reality of the world of nations into a virtual reality.  That is to say, the traditional elements and relationships of sociopolitical and cultural reality become increasingly virtualized.  All walks of life and all institutions, while maintaining there conventional appearance, tend to be determined more and more by the dictates of the logistics of perception, communication, politics, strategy, economics and so on.  Accepted modes of reasoning, interpretation, and decision making in these fields are subordinated to logistical considerations--the anticipation of threat, coordination of resources toward the minimization of contingency, security (rather than defense)--and survive only to legitimate processes they no longer govern."  ---Patrick Crogan, Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture.

I really let the blog go to fallow this week, didn't I?  Ah well.  There's been a recall on four of my videogame related books, so the days ahead will be full of rushed reviews, which I'm sure will be a delight to all comers.  Crogan's book is in this number; it is simultaneously the best book I've ever read on the connections between videogames and military endeavors, and exactly six words too long in every sentence.

Later Days.

Book Review: The Meaning of Video Games by Steven E. Jones

"McGann and a number of other textual-studies scholars have been experimenting with using gamelike environments to study the interpretive universe surrounding texts; the implication is that the social text is like a game.  I simply want to suggest that the converse is also true: games are examples of the social text, and they can and should be studied in the same way Ivanhoe can be.  Games are already complex digital models of engagements with their own possibilities" (96).

Steven E. Jones' main argument for his book The Meaning of Videogames: Gaming and textual strategies is pretty much exactly what states it to be in the quotation above.  A Professor of English specializing in textual-studies, he wants to use the basic tenants of contemporary textual-studies and apply them to videogames.  Since textual studies (I've made an executive design to drop the damn hyphen) as a discipline may not be familiar to anyone reading this, I think a discussion of it might be a good place to start.

When I was doing my Masters, a class on the subject was mandatory.  It was very much the black sheep of the department course offerings.  Professors hated teaching it, and students hated taking it.  I certainly hated taking it, for example, although in this case, it's a good thing I did, since it grants me at least a basic familiarity with what Jones is talking about.  Textual-studies, or bibliographic studies, is a little off the beaten path from many forms of literary studies, even though almost everyone in the field practices it, to some extent or another.  Essentially, it's the study of everything about a book that isn't the book itself.  To illustrate, the book for the course I took was G.C. Greeetham's Textual Scholarship, and it included chapters on the history of written records, the composition of paper, the development of script, the varieties of typography, and what it means to produce a variorum edition.  And until you've read 50 pages on the difference between uncial and Caroline minuscule scripts, you do not know what boredom is.  Of course, boring doesn't mean not useful, and the histories of the technologies in play in a work allow a much better understanding of that work, and what's at stake in its connection to a historical context.

 Anyway, to get back to Jones, he's using a very specific, recent movement in textual studies.  Historically, textual studies' focus was reconstruction and preservation.  Through compilations of all the variations of a medieval manuscript, for example, a textual scholar would move backwards, weeding out all the corruptions and errors in subsequent texts until he or she reconstructed an ur-text that more closely resembles the author's original intention.  This aim run afoul in the second half of the twentieth century, however, when scholars such as Foucault and Barthes were very loudly declaring that the original version doesn't exist (or at least doesn't matter) and the final word on an issue is rarely the one the author intended to be there.  Textual scholars took up the call to arms, and Jones cites two scholars in particular as influential on the subject as it currently stands: Jerome McGann and D. F. McKenzie.  In one form or another, the two both argued  that a wider definition of text was needed, one that took into account the variations and considered them not as corruptions or replications, but as texts that also stem from a unique and important social text.  What that means when applied to videogames is that they can't be considered purely in terms of the game mechanics, the player interaction, or the designers' intentions.  Rather, all three of these need to be considered, in juxtaposition with the game's larger social history.

After presenting this premise, Jones spends the rest of the book pursuing it, with each chapter of the book furthering it in the context of some specific game or game-like thing.  Chapter 1 is on Lost, the TV show.  Not only is it game-like (the characters go on quests, the puzzle of something like the hatch is a game-like mystery) and it calls (well, called) for its fans to treat it as if it was a game, a sort of ARG they discuss and theorize.  The theoretical approach he applies here is Gerard Genette's notion of paratext, which can be loosely considered anything that shapes the reader's interpretation of a main text. (Mia Consalvo also uses the notion of paratext extensively in regards to videogames, in her book Cheating.)   A movie trailer is a paratext for a movie (both the movie it advertises and the movie it appears before), and so is the fan forum discussing the film--as well as the composition of the audience viewing the film.  In terms of Lost's paratext, Jones considers the novel by fictional Lost character Gary Troup, the ARG Lost Experience, and the fan interaction.    Chapter 2 is on Katamari Damacy, a game that has a little boy gathering up balls of junk so that his father, King of All Cosmos, can turn them into stars.  Jones' argument for this game is that is that it parodies and glorifies the gamer acts of fan participation and collecting.  The theory in this case is Walter Benjamin's discussion on collecting, that those who once collected artifacts for those unique auras are now forced to fetishize collection, since objects are now interchangeable and mechanically reproduced.  Katamari Damacy is a parody of that fetishized collecting, but one that presents it not as something to be considered seriously, but a form of play.

Chapter 3 is on the Halo universe, and once again, it's a discussion of paratext.  Only a small fraction of Halo players bothered with the ARG for Halo 2, I Love Bees.  But Jones argues that it's things like I Love Bees that demonstrate best how Halo is more than just a videogame; it's a cultural artifact without discrete boundaries that exists in multiplayer matches, game interviews, scholarly discourse, ARGs, novelizations, comic books, and other videogames, from Space Invaders to its current contemporaries.  Jones' "theory" for this chapter is a mash of various game scholars, including Jane McGonigal (who deserves no small amount of credit here, considering she led the team that designed I Love Bees), popular culture scholar Henry Jenkins, and others ranging from Jesper Juul to Ian Bogost to McKenzie Wark.  Chapter 4 is on a lesser known game (in gamer circles, not game studies circles), Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern's Facade, a game where the definition of game is questionable, as it's just you, interacting with a NPC couple that have invited you over drinks.  The big theoretical text here is Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck, and, following her dramaturgical argument, Jones argues that games should be considered more like the performances of a play, in that every performance is a little different, and no script captures the complete nuance of the experience. 

Chapter 5 is not on a game, but a platform, as Jones considers the newly launched (well, new when the book came out) Wii.  Somewhat briefer than the other chapters, Jones here argues that the Wii needs to be studied not just in context with the hardware it possesses in comparison to its contemporaries, but also the culture Nintendo created for the Wii, positioning it as a system that was for everyone, of all ages and genders, not just the "hardcore" gamers that most systems at the time seemed to cater towards.  The theoretical comparison here is a little odd (even for this book), as Jones compares the development of the Wii to the Jerome McGann's study of 19th century gift-book annuals for young British women in the first half of the 19th century.  The final chapter is on Spore, a game which hadn't even been released when Jones had written the chapter.  As such, Jones focuses on its projected intentions and the incredible amount of fan fervor generated by these intentions (and as someone who wasn't/never was that interested in Spore, I can confirm, I can still remember the enormous hype machine the game prompted).  He closes the book with the argument that what Spore does is create a space for exploring interesting possibilities, and in this sense, perhaps it's time for textual studies to take a page from videogames.

As a bit of a digression, one of the questions that is perennially asked in game studies classes I've taken is "how much of a game do have to play before you're qualified to write scholarly papers on it?".  It's not an easy question.  With a book, you'd probably want to finish it.  But a game such as Mass Effect can take 40+ hours to reach the ending, if you do all the sidequests.  And that's not counting the multiple choices and paths the game can take.  Other games, such as SimCity, have no ending at all, but a player's perspective after playing it for an hour is very different from the one who's played it 10 hours--which is different again from the one who played it 100 hours.  An MMO changes radically based on when you play it--it's a very different thing to have played Everquest when it was first launched as compared to a week before its servers were stopped.  Personally, my answer to question is "you've played enough when you've decided you've played enough for what you want to talk about," but I appreciate other circumstances might require other approaches.  Considering the book at hand, though,  Jones answered the question with the smallest amount of time possible, dedicating a chapter to a game he never played at all.  Such an approach plays up his own argument, which is on the relevance of the culture and hype surrounding a game, and how it starts long before the release of the game itself.  I felt, however, that when discussing what the game could potentially be, he was going a step too far, trying to comment on the hype surrounding Spore, while at the same time, perpetuating that hype through his own predictions.  One of the worst indulgences of game studies--and new media studies in general--is a tendency to be so focused on the artifacts we want to exist that we ignore what does, and Jones comes close to that here.

  That seems like a good segue to start into my negative feelings regarding the book.  Coming from an English background, I'm not much of a ludologist.  But if I was, I'd hate this book.  It's the quintessential example of subjecting game studies to outside perspectives, in this case, saying game studies amounts to little more than a form of textual studies, only not done as well.  In his defense, Jones' scholarship demonstrated in the book clearly shows he's more than a lit scholar "slumming" in videogames, and even if he is more textual studies than game studies, it shouldn't detract from his argument.  But at the same time, if you're going to argue that paratext is important, then the paratext for this book is textual scholarship and encroaching disciplines, and I think that game studies can be more open to paratext without necessarily becoming involved with textual studies (again, see Mia Consalvo).  This connects tangentially to my other complaint of the book, its organization, or lack thereof, which doesn't help with the feeling that Jones is a scholar dabbling in game studies.  I recently finished Alexander Galloway's Essays on Algorithmic Culture, and one of my criticisms was that the book wasn't really a unified discussion, but four rather separate ones (which, to be fair, is an intention signalled rather plainly in the book's title).  Jones' book doesn't have that problem; the basic argument is consistent throughout.  It's hard to argue that there's much progression of that argument, though, as it's all pretty much encapsulated in that quotation above, and that comes about midpoint through the book.  And the individual chapters themselves are rather scattered.  Take the one on Katamari Damacy--it's about the game, and collecting, and Benjamin, but it's also about otaku culture, eBay, D. B. Weiss' Lucky Wander Boy, and the flaneur.  Jones does very well to keep everything together, but the connections do feel a little arbitrary at times (chapter on Wii and 19th century gift books, I'm looking at you.)

If those criticisms sound half-hearted and nit-picking, that's because they are.  Jones' basic premise is that we should study videogames without isolating them, and I'm behind that sentiment wholeheartedly.  I would argue that we sometimes need to focus on just the formal elements or just the social aspects of a game for the sake of the unity of discussion, but the larger context should always be acknowledged in some form.  And I have to say, I did love Jones' choice of games and game-like objects; it was an excellent mix of popular forms and more auteur artifacts.  I'd recommend the book to those who don't mind a more esoteric approach, and those who are interested in the paratext that surround the social milieu of videogames.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: And Don't Get Me Started on "Presence!"

"I would argue that typical video games, not experimental art projects or political interventions, are non-immersive in important ways--just in terms of their formal structures and conventions of interface--and at least a large number of players seem to want them that way.  Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, for example, is potentially more effective than other forms of discourse at exploring social constructions of race and media identities (such as 'gangster') because it is a game in which you play these constructions, configure them rather than just talk about them, and because it engages these constructions as constructions, roles and moves under the control of the controller pad buttons of the PS2, the player's moves in response to the game's AI and highly-charged urban maps.  Brecht's theatre, created in part in response to the Frankfurt school's debates, was based on the idea that normalized formal innovations, and the collective experience of formal effects for what they are, are the prerequisites for a truly critical and revolutionary theater.  The aware audience should not ideally lose themselves in the illusion but should as a matter of course engage the drama."
--Steven E. Jones, The Meaning of Video Games

 Jones is arguing here a point I've been championing for years.  Immersion is often held up as the holy grail of videogames, by developers, players, and scholars alike.  But for my money, it's not being immersed in a role that makes a game so interesting, it's being aware that you're playing a role, and pushing that role to its extreme.  That's why it's interesting, to take one example among dozens, to try to win a fight it seems you're being forced to lose in Disgaea, or replay Mass Effect without getting Wrex or Garrus on your team (you can pull off the latter, but not the former, BTW.)  The awareness that you're playing a game allows you to game the system, and get a better sense of how it's designed and fits together.  That's not to say that there is no immersion, but that the balance is more complicated, and should be more complicated, than a lot of people give it credit for.

Later Days.

Book Review: The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford

"How can SPACE INVADERS and PAC-MAN be classified as art?  How can TEMPEST or MISSILE COMMAND compare with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Michaelangelo's Pieta, or Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms?  Computer games are too trivial, too frivolous to be called art; they are idle recreation at best.  So says the skeptic.
"But we cannot relegate computer games to the cesspit of pop culture solely on the evidence of the current crop of games.  The industry is too young and the situation too dynamic to dismiss computer games so easily.  We must consider the potential, not the actuality.  We must address fundamental aspects of computer games."  --Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design

It's been a while since we've done a book review.  And yes, this is yet another game on videogame design.  And it's yet another argument that games could and should be considered art.  But this one is a little different from the others, for one simple reason:  it was written in 1984.

Oh, snap.

Book Review: Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska

“Realism might, in one sense, be intended to create a relatively transparent effect, based on not drawing attention to the deficits in the level of representation achievable in the playable parts of games, or reducing somewhat the gap between visual resolution of the game and audio-visual media such as film and television. But it also offers what can often be termed a 'spectacle' of realism: degrees of graphical realism that are flaunted and designed to be admired as striking or impressive images in their own right. As a form of spectacle of this kind, as in other respects, realism can be a source of appeal in the realms of either real-world reference or more outright fantasy.” --Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska.

Every time I finish a book on video game theory, I feel obligated to write a review of it, for posterity's sake, if for no other reason. And so, we come to Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska. Published in 2005, this book has had a relatively modest (to be generous) effect on videogame scholarship as a whole. And that's a shame, because while many of its claims are a little too widely accepted to be really innovative, and its organization could use some refinement, in general, Tomb & Space (my oh-so-clever shorthand) has some very useful ideas on subjects such as immersion and realism.

The book starts with a very brief introduction that establishes a continuity between the two title games, then segues into the authors' main argument: that games need to be studied in terms of both their gameplay and their wider context. Again, not exactly an approach that is very controversial, but their dedication to the stance throughout the book is admirable. The first and longest chapter is loosely on explicitly that subject: gameplay and its context. More specifically, they cover a very wide variety of subject matter. It starts with some definitions of gameplay and games, taking some well known definitions from Johan Huizinga and Roger Callois. The play vs. game notion is explored in some detail, with the conclusion that play occurs within a system, allowing them segue nicely into the next topic, how games function in larger cultural contexts. This leads them to examine gameplay in terms of hooks that motivate the player, and a very thorough discussion of the concept of flow, as defined by the commonly cited Mihaly Csikczentmilhalyi. That leads to the official discussion of game context, with a discussion on how games draw on common cultural narrative frameworks and genres, such as the quest motif or the fantasy setting. In general, they argue, this setting helps with establishing immersion, though it tends to disappear from attention once that flow is established. (Jesper Juul argues something very similar in his book Half-Real.) To put their work in context with the narratology/ludology debate (is a videogame a system of rules or a story?), they're essentially arguing that while games vary greatly, in general, narrative is used as a secondary element, but a really important secondary element. And its effect depends on the background of the player as much as the game itself. And that's chapter one. Yes, that's all chapter one.

Chapter 2 examines the notion of gamespace, and how a game offers the player opportunities for exploration and presence. The amount of freedom offered in a game vvaries greatly; on a most basic level, there's the range from the single screen representation (Pac-Man) to fully 3D worlds (Mario 64). There are hard boundaries, which are impassable, often invisible, boundaries in the game world, as well as soft boundaries, which are temporary, and used to direct player's progress (ie. you need a key to open a door in Tomb Raider.) There's also a variety of navigational aids, ranging from game maps to NPC advice to the presence of enemies. Familiarity with game space is a form of knowledge that can be leveraged for power in game communites, especially for players in MMO games (online games such as World of Warcraft). That brings us to presence. They distinguish between perceptual and psychological immersion--particularly, the closer the presence in the game world, the greater the perceptual immersion, the feeling that the player is actually there. Thus, a game in first person view is more perceptually immersive than an overhead view. But because you can't see behind you in a such a game, it would be harder to play, which creates frustration, which disrupts the psychological immersion, or flow, as it was defined last chapter. It's one of the many useful distinctions that King and Krzywinska make, one that I can't recall being made elsewhere. The chapter covers other issues of presence as well: sound, camera control, player death, and HUD (head's up display--the information the game presents on screen), concluding the chapter with a brief section on how, following Kendall Walton, we turn games into objects that enable imaginary play, and thus psychological immersion may be more significant than sensory immersion.

Chapter 3 is the one most useful to my own work, a chapter on realism, spectacle, and sensation. Here's another handy distinction: the authors distinguish between visual realism, which is how closely the graphics resemble the real world, and functional realism, which is how closely the gameplay resembles the real world (ie. an enemy combatant dies with a single head shot, or the player character has to eat regularly). Much of game design and commercial promotion revolves around claims of superior graphics, but the authors note that it's not so much real-world versimilitude that's being pursued, but accepted mediated versions of the real world. For example, a sports game doesn't present the game as experienced in real life so much as how it's experienced through TV cameras. And the functional realism has to maintain a balance--familiar enough that we can relate it to the real life equivalent, but not so identical that it's as difficult as its real-life equivalent. Think Guitar Hero--it presents playing a guitar, but a simplified, less difficult version. Finally, there's a brief section on spectacle, and how games use various forms of spectacle--expansive vistas, big explosions, dizzying sequences--to direct player experience.

The fourth and final chapter examines games within cultural and political contexts. After briefly mentioning overt political games such as Frasca's September 12th, they take a broader approach, noting that games follow conventional Western notions of the power of the individual, the evils of science amok and shadowy corporations, and a hodgepodge of myths cribbed from various cultures, especially fantasy. Character representation tends towards reinforcing white masculine fears. The female heroine straddles a line (a very familiar line, in video game arguments) between empowerment and sex object. And race is almost erased entirely, with few games allowing any focus on racial difference in their protagonist.

The above covers the "visual" part of the ideological context; the rest of the chapter looks at ideology in terms of gameplay. Again, going as broad as possible, the competition aspect of games fits nicely with late capitalism, especially the imperialist model found in your basic strategy game such as Civilization. In the discussion of game violence, they raise the notion of Althusser's interpolation, that video games are ideological apparatuses trying to assign players subject positions. The complication here is that they distinguish between the player's subject position and the player character. Generally, the player-character is put into a position of the hero fighting evil; the player is put in the position of someone playing a game in a particular manner. Thus, a shooting game doesn't turn the player into someone who's likely to shoot things in real life, but into someone who's likely to shoot things in the context of a videogame. I should be opposed to this idea, because it really wrecks a paper I wrote on Mass Effect, but it's actually rather appealing. they continue in this vein for a bit, and then end with a section on game industry, largely derived very explicitly from De Pueter, Kline, and Dyer-Witheford's excellent book, Digital Play. The brief afterword reminds us that game studies is very big, and there was no way for them to cover everything.

I have a few niggling points with some of their choices. For example, they argue that hardcore players prefer to focus on mechanics and it's casual players who want better graphics, which doesn't really work as an argument in face of the massive casual player embrace of less graphically superior things as phone games, browser games, and the Wii (in comparison to other current consoles, at least). And ending your book on a section that relies very, very heavily on someone else's book is an odd decision, to say the least. But overall, I agree with their arguments. I don't think you'll find many who dispute that games need to be considered within wider contexts, and the study of narrative and genre is broad enough not to ruffle any but the most steadfast ludologists, while still being applicable enough to be useful. And many of their distinctions I know I'm going to find very useful--player vs. player character interpellation, pscyhological vs. preceptual immersion, and most importantly, visual vs. functional realism. So that's all good.

What's less good is the way the information is portrayed. Let's start with the use of games. It's rare that King and Krzywinska focus explicitly on an individual game for an extended period of time. Rather, they bring the game up, move on, and bring it up again, in the next section or chapter where it happens to be mildly relevant. It creates an unfocused feeling. Moreover, there's no real sense or argument that the specific games they chose were particularly significant for what they wanted to discuss. For example, while I personally have very fond memories of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds, with the best intentions in the world, I wouldn't hold it up as exemplar for promoting cooperative gaming, just based on the fact that its characters talk during cutscenes and you play as different characters.

But for my largest complaint, let's go back to the issue of focus. My main problem with the book is that focus exists only on the macro level, and even then, in very broad strokes. Within a single section, the authors will switch from setting to character to gender to race to violence, all with nothing but a brief segue that sometimes ranges on a non-sequitor. It left me with a constant uncertainty over where the argument was going, and how everything fit together. It's a shame, because it's really a problem in terms of editing and presentation rather than the argument per se. A longer introduction or a few chapter subheadings could have made a world of difference.

So yes: it's a good book, with useful ideas, but its content is hurt somewhat by its disorganized form.

Later Days.