Once a game comes along that figures out a way around the technical challenges … an altogether new form of storytelling might be born: stories that, with your help, create themselves. There is, of course, another word for stories that, with your help, create themselves. That word is life. –Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter
I have discovered that academics have a very chronic, very frustrating habit (aside from wearing cardigans no matter what the weather) of posing complicated, (relatively) profound, slightly vague, theoretically philosophical questions and then completely ducking them and refusing to offer any tangible answer or opinion to their own quandaries. This is what is known in certain circles (read: no circles) the Professor Paradigm. In mathematical terms it would be an conceived of as an inverse relationship: as level of educational instruction increases amount of comprehensible, coherent explanation decreases.
There are several possible explanations for this:
1) When you reach a certain academic level (eg, tenure) you are no longer legally or morally required to put forth the energy necessary to support and argue a defensible stance on anything and can rest comfortably on your laurels until an early retirement.
2) Academics gradually become enlightened beings who work from the transcendent viewpoint that there are no firm answers to be found in the universe: there is no destination, only a journey of self-discovery.
3) They want to encourage their students to “think for themselves” and develop their critical thinking skills that they can apply to new situations in order to make them into adaptable, self-sufficient beings ready to take control of their own destinies and become productive members of a capitalist society.
4) As you rise in the academic world you are invited to join a secret Satanic Cult of which every full-time professor in the Western hemisphere is undoubtedly a part, and the only sadistic joy you get is torturing the Lost Souls who haunt your classroom.
5) Academics are wildly insecure and desperately afraid of being wrong.
6) A favourite game of academics is to spout off strings of increasingly vague and complex terminology in increasingly vague and disjointed syntactical units that are so bafflingly bizarre that they must either be a) the ramblings of a complete madman/madwoman, b) totally random and meaningless, or c) so incredibly complex, relevant and groundbreaking that even though nobody else in academic circles understands what the hell their colleague is talking about, none of them wants to seem like they don’t understand (see: #5) and so go on extolling the brilliance of the proposed theory, not wanting to be the first to admit to his peers that he doesn’t understand, and reasoning that his colleague couldn’t have possibly gotten this far up the academic ladder simply by spouting tidal waves of nonsense. Right?
My final conclusion is that it’s mostly #6 with a bit of #1-5 randomly mixed in. Mostly it seems like a blind conspiracy of which everybody freely enters but nobody knows they are a part of. A game of intellectual chicken, in which nobody dares to blink first and which has no losers, and also sadly, no winners. Except for tenured professors making stacks of mad cash developing spinal conditions from wearing too much bling in their down time.
This whole sordid web can usually be ignored with strong doses of willpower, apathy, and large quantities of gin, but every once in a while I catch glimpses of it, or rather I get caught up in its silky, convoluted tentacles. (That last part sounded a lot more erotic than I had intended. What, nobody else finds tentacles sexy?)
One example that jumps to mind has to do with a fairly recent introduction to theorists discussing various Theories of Gaming, or Play Theory, or basically analyzing exactly what makes a game a game. What gives a game its gameness? (Yeah, I’m getting to you Heidegger. You’ll get yours, don’t you worry.) In a research paper last term I quickly realized that the official title Game Theory actually had little to do with games and a lot to do with complex mathematical formulas predicting the outcomes of yadda, yadda, yadda, Boring Math Stuff Here…
Games seem like such an easy concept to dissemble. However, like most “simple” things in life, they are not as “simple” as they seem. Like most cultural constructions (including the words we use in day to day communication) we have a general sense of what they mean -or signify, if we want to use Academispeak- yet when pushed to actually express that meaning we are usually at a loss. We know stuff because we know it. And what’s more we know it without actually knowing it. Imagine you are a teacher or parent and a some snot-nosed kid asks you what a circle is. How do you answer that question? We all recognize a circle when we see one (except for newborn babies who see mostly blurry outlines) but how do you quantify it? A mathematician might tell you that it is a simple shape of Euclidean geometry consisting of points in a plane that are a given distance from a given point, the centre with an area that can be defined by the formula a=πr2 where r=the radius. A theologian might tell you that a circle is a representation of metaphysical and religious concepts of infinity, like the infinite love/wisdom/power of [Insert Deity’s Name Here], or of an Infinite Ideal, like the unending love the traditional Western wedding ring has come to symbolize. To an artist a circle is one of a number of geometric shapes (rectangles, squares, crescents, cones) used as the basis or skeleton for more complicated depictions.
So what do you tell the kid? The easiest and most practical way is to tell him that the circle is the shape of a wheel on a bus (which is a risky move because it might lead to incessant singing), or the shape of the moon or or a plate, or a coin or (if it were still the 90’s) a CD. Which is not true because the concept of circle exists independently of those objects (plus a circle is two dimensional, but let’s not confuse the poor kid) but it kind of is true at the same time. When we look at a circle, we know it’s a circle because it’s a circle. We don’t tend to analyse (what seems to be) the obvious because, obviously there can’t be any deeper meaning to discover. Right?
This is what I thought, or perhaps more appropriately didn’t think, when it came to games. A game is… a game. You play with some friends or by yourself and try and have some fun. I’d never really given it any thought at all before. Then I made the mistake of going back to school, which has a tendency as one progresses to higher and higher levels of destabilizing one’s sense of the concrete and throwing one’s worldview into a constant state of flux (you know, like the capacitor). What had previously seemed like a pretty simple concept -Games and Gaming- all of the sudden became an intellectual battlefield with no clear ground being gained on any one side and a veritable minefield of definitions.
Let’s start off with one Jane Mcgonigal. In Reality is Broken she outlines 4 traits shared by all games:
1) A Goal – the specific outcome that players work to achieve which provides a sense of purpose.
2) Rules – limitations on how players achieve that goal pushing players to explore previously uncharted possibility spaces and foster creativity and strategic thinking.
3) A Feedback System- tells players how close they are to achieving the goal (ie. points, levels, score, progress bar) and provides motivation to continue playing.
4) Voluntary Participation – everyone playing the game willingly accept the goal, rules and feedback. It establishes common ground for multiple people to play together and the freedom to enter of leave a game ensures that intentionally stressful and challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable activity.
At first glance this seems like a pretty good summing up of the TOTALITY OF GAMING FROM NOW UNTIL THE END OF ETERNITY, but let’s take a look at some other definitions. Ian Bogost gives a definition of play (which he actually have rips off/borrows from Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman) which is important when talking about games. Although in this particular article Bogost’s focus was interpreting video games rhetorically, some of it can still be twisted to our purpose. For example, consider the quotes below:
- “play is the free space of movement within a more rigid structure.” Understood in this sense, play refers to the “possibility space” created by constraints of all kinds.”
- “The possibility space of play includes all of the gestures made possible by a set of rules. As Salen and Zimmerman explain, imposing rules does not suffocate play, but makes it possible in the first place.”
- “We rely on the practice of procedurality to craft representations through rules, which in turn create possibility spaces that can be explored through play.”
What’s important here that we can infer about games which are all about play is that they
1) Provide “possibility spaces” which can be explored through play and
2) This exploration is facilitated by rules and procedures
Also important to this rant discussion are Bogost’s properties of digital artifacts which while not applicable to every type of game still offer valuable insights. The properties of digital artifacts are as follows:
1) Procedurality
2) Participation
3) Spatiality
4) Encyclopedic Scope
Another dude, Thomas Malaby, gives a pretty succinct yet devastatingly dense definition of games. (Get ready for this)
- A game is a semibounded and socially legitimate domain of contrived contingency that generates interpretable outcomes
Just to clear things up he gives us a definition of contingency:
- By contingency I mean that which could have been otherwise, that is, that which was not necessary, in a philosophical sense
He goes on, but I’m not going to bore you. I’m going to go ahead and put some words into Malaby’s (figurative) mouth and break down some important points for our discussion on games (Provided, of course, that you actually read this far (Chump!) and are waiting for this post to get more interesting again. Sorry to spoil things, but it doesn’t.)
1) Contrived Contingency – that is, in any game there is the possibility of unexpected outcomes, and these outcomes are mitigated by the rules and/or procedures of the game (what he later refers to as “just the right mix of the expected and the unexpected”)
2) A Set of Processes
3) A Game is a Semibounded Domain – the sources of contingency in a designed game (which he says are the same ones we encounter in our everyday lives) are only relatively separable from the game itself
“Yes,” you might say, “but what does this have to do with your genius?”
Well, I’m glad you asked. What I’m going to do now is give you my own definition of what a game is, borrowing from several other definitions and adding a few categories of my own to present a working theory on What Exactly A Game Is. Then I will proceed to explain to you exactly why I and every other scholar I have just mentioned are all wrong and why that’s important.
NathaN’s (Pen)Ultimate Theory of Gaming
The following are the characteristics of any game. For something to be considered a game it must qualify in at least all of the following categories:
1) Goal- obviously you need something to achieve and like Mcgonigal said it gives players a sense of purpose. Whether it’s tagging another player in a game of tag, or getting to the end of level in Super Mario Bros. you’ve got to have a reason to keep going.
2) Negotiated Constraints – basically a fancy way of saying “rules.” However, in any game rules are in a constant state of flux. Even though throughout the course of a single game the rules might never change, rules are only theoretical and as such are subject to dynamic interpretation and are capable of being changed (or at least slightly bent) at any given moment during play. The basic form of this is cheating. Another example for those of you familiar with board games (Check out A Touch of Evil. Totally kick-ass) you might have heard the term “house rules” which are agreed upon rules specific to a certain circle of geeks friends. Even the rules in video games aren’t set in stone. There are the obvious glitches which allow players to do things they weren’t “meant to,” but then there are always ways to subvert the programmed rules (like in Skyrim by Bethesda Studios where a player can ignore the main quests and set up his own constraints like becoming a mass murderer or building up a potato collection). Like Ian Malcolm says in JURASSIC PARK: “Life will find a way.”
3) Feedback System – a measurable, quantifiable way to determine how close the players are to achieving the goal. There has to be either a sense of progress or progression as well as a feeling of validation for getting closer to reaching the goal.
4) Procedurality – basically some process or processes that occur over and over in a game. This lends both a sense of predictability and a common language for players within the game to communicate. It’s necessary to create patterns which offer the basic structure of play. It’s the procedurality, the sense of repetition and control that produce this framework into which the negotiated constraints can then be added.
5) Spatiality -See #7
6) Agency -a key ingredient that is (to me) curiously absent from other definitions of games. A sense of agency, that the player has more relative power over his environment than he actually does, is absolutely necessary for the enjoyment of the game. Each player has to feel like the constraints afford him powers that are typically beyond his grasp (ie. Ordering around troops in a game of Risk). A player must also feel that at any given time the negotiated constraints and the procedures level the playing field and any player at any time is capable of winning the game. A player must believe that success is readily within his grasp or else why keep on playing?
7) Avatarization/Hybrid Identity – in any game the player takes on an identity that is not his own, but also kind of is. This is obviously the case with video games where a player interacts with a “virtual” world through the use of an avatar. While the avatar is also “virtual” it is controlled by the player and the player experiences the game world through that avatar. So in a sense one develops a hybrid identity. The same argument is also easily seen in a game like Monopoly where each player experiences the game world both as the physical avatar of the game piece (go car!) and also in the (partial) guise of a real estate tycoon. Even in “real life” games like, say, hockey the player takes on an identity such as defenceman or goalie which is a hybrid identity because even though the player is essentially the same being he also has to take on the roles and the constraints of the character he is playing at the time. Basically it comes down to role-playing. Within a game we always take on a role that both invites and denies the identity that we assume outside of the game.
Now that you’ve read all of my (admittedly genius) theory I will (as promised) tell you exactly why it is wrong and why it -and any other definition of games- is essentially useless. As one of my professors astutely pointed out in class as we discussed Mcgonigal’s definition of a game we could take those same criteria and apply them to any situation whether it be waiting in line to buy tickets to THE DARK KNIGHT RISES or sitting in a classroom or going to work or pouring yourself a bowl of Almond Oatmeal Crisp. When it actually comes down to it the reason all the criteria outlined above is practically useless for differentiating games is because of one simple fact:
Games and life are basically the same thing.
Games are not microcosms for life: they are equivocosms for each other. Games don’t represent an escape from our world but rather encapsulate how our culture views the world. How do we deal with the day to day minutia of life? We set quantifiable goals within a set of mutually accepted social constraints giving ourselves a sense of agency. We design our own feedback and reward systems be they physical or mental and we participate in certain social spheres according to the socially acceptable guidelines thereby creating hybrid identities everywhere we go: the Work You, the Home You, the Family Gathering You, the Naked In Bed With A Total Stranger On Friday Night You. We create hybrid identities based on the given social constraints of a situation. (That’s why I left out the Voluntary Participation contingency because we are all culturally created creatures whose participation is implied and since we are culturally constructed beings nothing is truly ever voluntary anyway.)
We are all gamers. We all play games every day, with ourselves and with other people. Human beings live and die by procedures of all types. We need that predictability, the ruts we dig for ourselves or that others have dug for us in order to provide that framework to explore the “possibility space” of life. We search for and identify patterns for many reasons whether it be to integrate new social frameworks into our lives and extrapolate socially acceptable behaviours for that particular social setting or to cope with the banality of everyday life. When I do the dishes I play the Do the Dishes game, seeing how fast I can get them done. In the corner of my eye I see the Dirty Dish Meter slowly going down. When I go to class I play the Go To Class Game, I operate according to the rules of academia and the specific constraints (ie. syllabus) of that particular class and try to get the highest score I possibly can so I can post my initials on the High Scores screen for future gamers to try and beat. When I send out a resume I play the Send Out a Resume Game with its own bizarre sets of constraints.
The reason these theories about games are mostly useless when describing games is that we cannot separate out life from games and as we try it becomes increasingly apparent that there really is no discernible distinction, no concrete boundary between the two. While my Theory of Games failed as a theory of games, where it might come in useful is as a tool for dissecting all aspects of life (yes, even the Morning Urination Game (check out SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD)). And you can quote me on that.
Error Management 