Ludus Ex Machina

Under the Mask: An After-Action Report

2011-06-17T23:34:00.002+01:00

I started writing this on the train back from Luton and that was over ten days ago. Life has been hectic but apologies anyway. UTM 2011 was my last videogame conference in the UK - probably. Almost six years of growing up as a games scholar is now at an end seemingly. I have a Lego sheep to remind me of UTM 2011 and it'll stay with me always. Of course, it's been changed to a spaceship now and I can also make C3PO out of it. Anyway, let's talk about the conference.

It was a conference where I heard the best keynote in many years (the last fab keynote that I'd heard was in 2008 by Richard Bartle). Jason Rutter keynoted on the twitter commentary of players post or during play. Rutter observed that player and gamer were different concepts and that analysing tweets by the players of Portal 2 is a useful way of identifying the meaning of being a 'gamer'. To quote Jason:

This was a great opportunity for me to develop a few ideas on what being a gamer actually means and how it is different from being someone who plays games. The presentation I gave, ‘Finding Gamers in 140 Characters: Talk of Games on Twitter‘, started by looking at differences in the use of ‘gamer’ and ‘player’ in the academic literature before turning to gamers themselves to see how the terms are used. This is did through Tweets about ‘Portal 2‘ before moving to look at the way the category of gamer is developed as a practice involving not only playing games, but not gaming and planning gaming.

There is a written draft of the paper which needs a few tweaks to fill a few gaps and smooth the worst of the rough edges after which I’ll post it online. The slides I used (and indeed quite a few I didn’t) for the presentation are available on my Slideshare page though.

(Jason Rutter, 'Made by Jase' blog)

In his blog, Rutter also praises the presentations by Caroline Jong, Ewan Kirkland and Steven Boyer - all of them my co-panellists. I particularly like Jong's presentation on the Let's Play archive (http://lparchive.org/) which had much in common with what I was doing with AARs. As the Let's Play people describe themselves, 'the Let's Play Archive focus on giving you the full experience of the games in an informative and entertaining manner. Just look at some of the great playthroughs below and you'll see what we mean'. Jong's introduction of the LP to academia is an useful addition to the studies of the paratext that are now increasingly coming into vogue. Unlike the AAR, however, the LP playthroughs are generally delivered as unedited although one might need to investigate this further. I was interested in Ewan Kirkland's presentation on Little Big Planet and also in Barry Atkins's question about whether LBP is a game. Although there were quite a few good presentations and some which I totally didn't agree with, the other notable presentation for me was Astrid Ensslin's talk on metaludic communcation. Ensslin applied speech act theory (Austin, Lakoff, Searle etc) to analysing communications in and around games. The paratextual angle was interesting for me and I hope she develops this further for me to plug into it with my research.

My presentation was perhaps my 'swansong' (as Gavin said) in the UK. I was happy with it and the after-action reports elicited interest. Barry's question about how constructed these 'reports' were and how they differed or were similar to wartime after-action reports was quite an interesting area that I need to follow up. Astrid's point about whether 'paratext' should replace 'cybertext' was an issue I had not thought about. Now, on hindsight, I don't think so ... firstly, I do not think that 'paratext' will be the umbrella term (if I am forced to pick one) of my choice; 'assemblage' would. In which case, the issue of replacing would not arise.

I answered the questions quickly and then ran off to lunch. And so from lunch to paper and paper to pub. More interesting conversations there: Tetris studies, Calcutta , Belgium, agency in games (Justin would have loved this), a Robert Graves anecdote from Esther and Lego (they gave me a Lego sheep).

Then it was time for farewells. Goodbye all you nice people. I'll miss you.

Moving away from the farewells, I would like to thank my friend Sonia for helping me during those moments of nervousness when I had those doubts about my last presentation in the UK.

Under the Mask 2011

2011-05-30T18:18:00.003+01:00

I never buy mementoes. I'm not sure why but I always manage to forget that I should buy stuff when I visit new places until I reach the departure area of airports and have nowhere else to go barring duty-free shops. On my way back from Athens, however, I did buy something and yes, it was from a duty free shop. It was a t-shirt with some Greek text on it and the image of a ancient Greek theatre mask. Here's what it said:

The mask hides the man
Shut up inside it, he sees
everything as if through
two dark holes;
from the darkness of the mask
he contemplates
the universe with detachment like a god.
In a mask you feel an ancient strength;
in a mask you dare things that the mind
cannot conceive.

I felt I had to buy it. It would remind me of the many masks that I have to wear always. It reminded me of videogames where I take on a mask - my real-life character interacting complicatedly with the mask that tries to hide it. Previously, I have said in Ludus ex and elsewhere that I do not believe in immersion but rather see the game persona as a becoming and the mask as another plugging in to the assemblage. The whole process fascinates me and the mask works so well as a metaphor of me as a becoming-game, becoming-avatar and simply becoming.

Which is why I think 'Under the Mask' is one of the coolest titles for a videogame conference. Readers will remember that I have been to all the iterations of this conference bar one. I'm going back again. Check out the link to the abstracts here (http://underthemask.wikidot.com/abstracts). I strongly recommend it if you are interested in videogames and can make it to Luton on 2nd June.

As for me, this is my last games conference in the UK and it will soon be time to pack my bags. Here's the abstract of my paper:

Souvik Mukherjee

Rewriting Unwritten Texts: After-action Reports and Videogames

Storytelling in videogames still remains a contentious issue and one that commentators have found difficult to agree on for over a decade. On the one hand, the multiplicity of possible events within the game narrative makes it difficult to employ traditional literary analysis and on the other, the stories themselves are often unfavourably compared to literary classics and criticised for lacking the depth and the significance. Despite these issues, however, players continue to enjoy playing videogames as a storytelling medium and the narrative exists, as it were, at an unstable and marginal level where it is recorded not only in the player’s memory but in walkthroughs, guides, wikis and the recent genre of fan-fiction based on actual gameplay instances and called ‘after-action report’ (referred to as AAR, hereafter). Studies of walkthroughs (Ashton and Newman 2010; Newman 2008) and cheat codes (Consalvo 2007) are slowly coming to the forefront; the after-action report or the game journal has, however, remained largely unnoticed in Game Studies. This paper explores after-action reports and the stories they tell.

Examples based on different game genres will be analysed here, such as the ‘Rise and Fall of the House of Jimius’, an AAR based on Rome: Total War (The Creative Assembly 2004), ‘The Amateur’, which is based on Hitman: Blood Money (Eidos 2006) and Ben Abraham’s ‘videogame-novelization’ called Permanent Death (Abraham 2009). The main aim here is to highlight the variety of the AARs, the creativity of their writers and to examine the conventions that the genre is building around itself. A comparison with older narrative media will be equally important. Indeed, the relationship between AARs and films based on videogames is worth investigating - the Hitman film and the AAR are cases in point. The same holds true for AARs and printed fan-fiction. With the combination of image, videos, game scores, strategy tips and imaginative rewriting of the game’s plot, the AAR combines many kinds of texts, ranging from the walkthrough to the graphic novel. It will also be argued here that the AAR is an important way of talking about stories in videogames.

Impact!

2011-05-30T14:16:00.011+01:00

Ever since my job title changed to ‘impact research fellow’ in February, I’ve been asked many times what I have to do at work. Well, to the Ludus ex reader, impact probably means the ‘stopping-power’ of your latest gun in Call of Duty: Black Ops or the thud when the racecar in Need for Speed bangs against a barrier. To me it means all that and also what has defined my role at De Montfort University in these last six months. It also means that I haven’t been playing too many videogames lately (honest).

So what do I do at work? I analyse ‘impact’ which the Research Excellence Framework (REF), UK, defines as ‘all kinds of social, economic and cultural benefits and impacts beyond academia’. I work on a series of very multiple projects about the application of social media to business practice and communities in Leicester. Mainly my work involves examining rich narrative data and survey data for observable trends and changes. So did you ever wonder whether your facebook and twitter usage improves your business practice? If you did, you might find my research to be of interest. How does social media affect cohesion in communities? Okay, enough hints. I’m presenting a paper on this at De Montfort University, on 8th June. If you are interested, here’s Professor Sue Thomas telling you more about it in her characteristically lucid way: http://travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com/suethomas/2011/05/mukherjee.html.

The talk will also focus on my experience of doing this impact analysis for REF - something that might be of interest to academic colleagues in the UK who are engaged in similar exercises. Mainly, I will focus on the REF indicators of ‘reach’ and ‘significance’ in the light of their relevance to the projects that I have analysed and more broadly, to any kind of transdisciplinary research. Finally, my recommendations for the project will highlight how Humanities research can be seen as having an impact in the current REF contexts.

Apologies to Ludus ex readers for the delays in posting. May has been a very busy month and a strange one. I'm still reeling from the impact.

The Philosophy of Computer Games - Memory and Athens

2011-04-17T00:12:00.006+01:00

Then it was a dream come true. To talk about videogames and philosophy in Athens, the seat of Western Philosophy, was an overwhelming experience in itself. This was probably my last conference presentation outside the UK so I was quite tense about it. Moreover, I was speaking about Bergson, memory and videogames and I felt I was on shaky and unfamiliar ground. With all this in mind and with concerns about my visa and the whole Indian-travelling-in-Europe malarkey, I set forth for Athens.

As my friend Sebastian Moering (whom you will have encountered in earlier posts) says, I attract all sorts of weird adventures. Of these I shall tell you later. For the moment let us pass the graffiti covered walls of Panteion University screaming their protest against the powers that be and enter the conference hall. Gordon Calleja opened the conference by announcing its aim of bringing philosophy and game design, otherwise loosely connected, together in the arena of theoretical Humanities. Yannis Scarpelos added the poignant reminder of the world around us saying that Greece is a gameboard and that its people are pawns in a game - an analogy that amply illustrated why games were so important to social sciences and the humanities.

I forgot to say, I met the entire Ludotopia crowd (Alison, Sebastian and Niklas) as well as Mark Butler whose wisdom I have always respected. Among new found friends I count Isaac Lenhart, Armin Papenfuss, Christophe Bruchansky, Adam Russell, Graham Matthews, Daniel Vella and Stefano Gualeni. Anyway, let us go back to the conference hall.

the 'Philosophy of Computer Games' mascots

As I started writing, I was thinking of making this a commentary on each of the papers. The further I got, however, the more difficult and time-consuming it seemed. So I'll switch from commentary to reportage. To start with the papers that I liked in particular.

Although we have very different theoretical orientations, Rune Klevjer's research has never ceased to impress me. Rune spoke about telepresence, embodiment and diegesis as relevant to the player's identity. His analogies ranged from Merleau-Ponty's 'blind man with a cane' to those who fly unmanned drones. He identifies a difference between being telepresent and being embodied. He also sees difficulties in having an embodied presence in a diegetic world. The player and diegetic character (story protagonist) are, for him, fellow travellers who share history and even memories but are not the same person. Readers of Ludus ex will know wherein I disagree with this - especially looking from the perspective of the player's involvement in the story as a 'becoming' (in the Deleuzian sense).

This brings me to Mark Butler's paper on 'Becoming-Zerg'. Mark-becoming-Protoss (as he confessed was normally the case) was now becoming-zerg. I have never seen anyone tackle the involvement / identity-formation in RTS games. I touched on this briefly in an earlier paper (and at more length in my thesis) but then left it there. So how can I become all the Zerg in Starcraft - do I become a Zerg, some zergs, the whole zerg-collective (these zerg things remind me of the Borg in Star Trek)? Mark brings in the Deleuzoguattarian concept of the assemblage. Identity is configured and de-configured (he replaces 'deterritorialise and reterritorialise' with these terms) and as such the borders between the player-experience are blurred due to a state of flow that is in place. The player's experience as a Zerg is a 'becoming'. Might I add here that the collective experience of identity in a multiplayer RTS game is also well explainable using this model.

Among the new researchers whose work I came across, Peter Day's Wittgensteinian reading of the relation between avatar and player impressed me. Like Mark (who made the comment), I am intrigued to see Peter's work moving beyond the Tractatus to other Wittgensteinian texts. I'm sure we will see more exploration of the connection between the metaphysical subject and the 'I' within the language of games. Felan Parker's application of Foucauldian aesthetic self-fashioning to expansive gameplay ( non-canonical things that players do with a game, e.g. playing Halo without killing any of the antagonists)was another interesting topic. Graham Matthews Lac(k)anian reading of Pacman and gameplay in general the restoration of lost unity in the progressive circuit of desire was another notable contribution. Graham is going to link his research on videogame to medical humanities and outside the conference walls (over a kebab, actually) he told me about his interest in analysing how health is perceived in videogames. Wonderful, I think!

The philosopher-theorists impressed and so did the philosopher-designers. Adam Russell (another East Midlands connection), known for his design of the identity mechanism in Fable, spoke on the underlying philosophical assumptions and problems of narrative-driven games. Like Rune, but approaching the question differently, Adam asked how we can be present in a game-world as an avatar who has personality and also memory. He invokes Heidegger's idea of 'thrownness' and brings in a comparison with our real selves where, he points out, we are always identifying with a character that we cannot fully control (ourselves). I was hoping Adam would say a bit more but tiredness and time-constraints clearly came in the way. I'm eagerly awaiting his paper online. From Adam to Stefano 'Digital Bat' Gualeni. Stefano is a famous game designer and on sharing a beer with him, I learnt loads about innovative game design - didn't know some cool people in some cool places were designing games based on biometric input. Stefano spoke about how we could use games to illustrate philosophical concepts. So next time, we won't present papers but build games instead.

Okay, looks like this is becoming a humongous post and I can see myself struggling to encapsulate everything here. Therefore, I'll steer towards more brevity. Some of the other papers that I see my work connecting with would be Daniel Vella's work on ruins and videogames, Mia Consalvo's keynote focusing on identification in social games (well this isn't my area but it was very interesting ) and Alison Gazzard's paper on perceptions of space in game worlds where she brings in Massumi in a way which seems to connect to my work on affect.

I haven't discussed the keynotes in detail but David Myers' biological naturalism based formulation of videogame identity was very interesting. Myers' paper engaged in a dialogue with Eric Olson, the other keynote speaker. Olson's paper was provocative but I felt that some of his points needed more justification and certainly, a more solid base in terms of gameplay experience.

This was also the first conference where other Indians besides myself presented. Samir Passi and Ranjit Singh had to leave early and it was a pity that we didn't get better acquainted. The next day, after an enlightening early-morning trek to Acropolis with Isaac, I too had to leave quite early. Halfway through Consalvo's paper in fact - unfortunately. So I have homework to do. Not for anything in the world will I miss the chance to ask Sebastian and Niklas questions about their respective papers, both of which turned out very well as I've been told. Among the papers that the severe brain fatigue after presenting my own paper forced me to miss, I'll be looking forward to reading Elina Roinotti's paper on identity and governance in WoW. Although not a WoW fan, Esther MacCallum-Stewart's sterling work has got me more than casually interested. Elina was also our tireless host at the conference and I'd like to thank her and her team for making this a memorable experience.

'Re-membering and Dismembering': the title of my paper

Speaking of memorable experiences, my own presentation at this conference was certainly a major one for me. This is almost my swansong - the trailing last few things that I'm probably going to say to Game Studies before I go back to India (and to possible game-research oblivion) in July. It's fitting that what I had to say was about remembering. I have made so many friends in my journeys in videogame research and I hope our shared memories remain. My paper too was about shared memories and about constructing identities through memory (re - memberings as opposed to dismemberings). I pondered the question of how multiple memories of the same game event can exist (created at each reload of a saved instance) and how these influence who and what we are in the game. I find the models suggested by Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze particularly useful. For a quick overview check out the abstract below and for the full paper, click here. Click here for the slideshow.

There were interesting responses to my presentation from various people. This is work-in-progress and suggestions are always welcome. Mark wanted to see a bit more of the dismembering unpicked in the paper. There were interesting questions raised regarding collective memories in games in comparison to the writing of history (from Christophe) and about how someone else's memory could be appropriated by the player (in that say I share my savegame with you, as Alison asked). Gordon asked if I had not considered psychological studies of memory and my response is that Deleuze covers some ground here in his Bergsonism which I use heavily but that I'm intent on doing more work on this. There is also the neurobiological angle that I've started looking at. The concept of collective videogame memory appealed to many and left me wondering if I should have concentrated more on this aspect. Serendipitously, on my way back I met Mara, a Psychology student from Italy and we fell talking about the multiplicity of memory. Now I have some more articles to read :)

Before that, however, I need to synchronise my memories with those of Altair and Ezio of Assassin's Creed. I'm playing after ages and I've clocked eight hours already today. Now to quickly post this and get back to my game.

For papers by other presenters, use this link.
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Abstract

Re-membering and Dismembering: Memory and the (Re)Creation of Identities in Videogames
[Heading: Identity, Artifacts and Memory]
Perhaps one of the most natural things in gameplay is to avoid the same tactics that killed the player in the last saved game when he or she reloads and play again. In fact, it seems so natural an element of gameplay, that the act of remembering is almost unnoticed. As scholars such as Michael Nitsche (2007) and Barry Atkins (2007) have observed, however, memory plays an important part in shaping videogame actions. Remembered actions educate the player against making some decisions and as Nitsche observes, narrow down the number of possibilities in each future iteration of gameplay. Simply put, based on memory, the player does not get killed in the same way twice. Atkins and also the present author have analysed how the remembered experiences in videogames complicate the temporal schema of the game plots, thus making them problematise linear chronologies. From these initial forays into looking at the relationship between the videogame and the player memory, one salient issue emerges. Remembered actions inform the future in-game deeds of the player and these, in turn, contribute to the construction of the in-game identity. Given its influence on in-game action and by extension of the player’s in-game identity, the role of memory can almost be seen as a ‘re -membering’ (from the original sense of the word ‘member’ meaning ‘body’) - memory therefore serves to re-embody and recreate the player-character.
The question, however, is further complicated because of the nature of the memory itself. Often, the memory is a collective construct. Digital artefacts such as walkthroughs and game wikisites host a massive database of remembered experiences uploaded by players. Future players ‘plug-in’ , as it were, to such a collective memory when they seek help or context while experiencing the game. Their experiences, arguably, are modified with the involvement with the collective memories in such paratextual material.
Remembered experiences can be instinctive and ‘gut responses’: for example, before entering a narrow lane in a First-Person Shooter where the avatar might have died in a previous instance, the remembered response might be to automatically spray the area with bullets before entering. At the same time, in-game memory is also a clearly defined entity that calls for reflective analysis. Some games consciously make memory a key trope in their plots and there they address issues like temporality and identity. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003) and Assassin’s Creed (2008) are prominent examples where the avatar’s lived experience is governed in various remembered experiences . STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007) is about a protagonist who plays out the game’s narrative in order to find out who he is - his identity and memory constantly inform each other.
The question of how the act of remembering (or re-membering) contributes to the in-game identity formation of the avatar might be problematic but whether it is an entirely new one is a moot point. A comparison with parallel concepts in philosophy would be useful, therefore, in exploring the role memory has in building in-game identities. Such a comparison would also provide concrete illustrations to support or refute philosophical models. Taking this approach, this paper explores parallels between Henri Bergson’s philosophy of memory and videogames. In doing so, particular emphasis is placed on the Bergsonian view of time and memory as a multiplicity. Like the mass of discrete yet inseparable remembered experiences that game walkthroughs, wikis and other records consist of, for Bergson multiplicity is qualitative and is characterised by both heterogeneity and continuity. Memory is categorised by Bergson into the automatic ‘habit-memory’ that is aligned with bodily perception and a ‘pure’ memory which involves thought and action.
The similarities with memory in videogames come out even in the comparison with the brief sketch of the Bergsonian model above. Despite the similarities, the process of identity-formation and its relation with the player memory still needs further clarification. Gilles Deleuze (1988) proposes a reading of Bergson that takes into account the Bergsonian multiplicity and also provides a more substantial model of perception, affection and action where in between the perception and the action, memory plays the important role where the character of the avatar can be seen to be constructed in the ‘movement of memory’. After a certain event in the game, how the player responds to it depends susbtantially on the past experience, whether it is his or her own or whether it is drawn from the collective wisdom of databanks or fellow players. The identity of the avatar is the result of actualisations that occur from within a complex space of parallel and interlocking possibilities. This space of possibilities is, however, constantly modified by the player’s previous actions as well as by what the player remembers of previous actions or in other words, his or her memory. Having analysed the function of memory in videogames and having compared it with Bergson’s concept of memory as well as Deleuze’s commentary on Bergson, this analysis will illustrate how player memory - both singular and collective - forms a key part of the mechanism of identity-formation.

Indicative Bibliography
Assassin’s Creed, 2008, Ubisoft Montreal, Ubisoft.
Atkins, B. 2007, ‘Killing time: time past, time present and time future in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time’ in B. Atkins and T. Krzywinska (eds.), Videogame, Player, Text, Manchester: Manchester University Press. pp. 237-253.
Bergson, H., 2004. Matter and Memory, Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications.
Deleuze, G., 1988. Bergsonism, New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, G., 1986. Cinema 1 : The Movement-image, London: Athlone.
Nitsche, M., 2007, ‘Mapping time in video games’. In DIGRA. Tokyo. Available www.lcc.gatech.edu/~nitsche/download/Nitsche_DiGRA_07.pdf. Accessed: 12 January 2011.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, 2003, Ubisoft Montreal, Ubisoft.
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, 2007, THQ, GSC Gameworld.

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My Bangor talk

2011-04-05T05:13:00.006+01:00

After that long twenty-eight year wait, India has won the Cricket World Cup once again and I cannot but help joining in the jubilation and euphoria in my country. Congratulations to the Indian Cricket team.

This is the first world cup that I haven't watched on television. British television is not interested in cricket, especially since the England team has been so dismal in its recent performances. 'It's not cricket', they'd have said back in the days but well... that's another story. As the team was battling the formidable Pakistan team in the semi-finals, I was not watching the match but giving a talk in lovely Bangor, far from the tense atmosphere at Mohali. I love going to Bangor University both for the place and the people. I would like to thank Dr Astrid Ensslin and Isamar Carillo Masso for inviting me to speak.

The Humanities building in the University looks something like Gryffindor Tower - ancient and dignified. It even has vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows. In such an august venue (although my talk, strictly speaking, was held in a more modern section of the building), I held forth on my pet subject - reading games and playing books. Yes, I'm still making a case for reading game narratives as seriously as literature and films. As I said in earlier posts, I use Deleuze and Guattari's concept of 'minor' literature to analyse game narratives and their place in literature. Here's the relevant section from my abstract:

Videogames are not the only such type of narrative; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari identify similar characteristics in the works of authors ranging from Franz Kafka to Lewis Carroll. They call this type of literature 'minor literature' by which they mean any literature that subverts and dislocates tradition. For Deleuze and Guattari, 'minor literature' is great literature and it does not necessarily belong to minorities, although this may be the case. Like other examples of 'minor literature', videogames contain multitelic and multiple narratives. Further, although they are seen to be at the periphery of narrative studies, they are nevertheless seen to occupy a central position as research in videogames progresses.

I also used examples such as Cortazar's Hopscotch and B.S.Johnson's The Unfortunates to talk about the ludicity of literature itself. Finally, I defined videogames as an 'assemblage' (following Deleuze and adapting DeLanda's definition of assemblages). Assemblages are characterised by rules of exteriority. A component of an assemblage may be detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage in which its interactions are different. The exteriority of relations implies a certain autonomy - 'a relation may change without the terms changing'. I've spoken about this before and this time I was a bit bolder in that I came up with a 'definition' of videogames.

Sonia Fizek, who is doing a PhD on videogames, picked up on this and very rightly asked why I called this a definition especially when many other things could be called assemblages. True enough - Deleuze himself describes other things as assemblages. So the 'definition' is in effect a non-definition. Its aim is to indicate the complexity of videogames as a phenomenon and the problem of identifying something as 'the videogame'. I do not believe in 'the videogame'; videogames are multiple and arguably they resist any easy compartmentalisation more than other media. Instead, the videogame-assemblage plugs into other assemblages and the boundaries give way to organic relationships. I may have more to say when I describe videogames as assemblages but I certainly have less to define. However, definitions provoke people and my guess is that a thought-provoking idea becomes more interesting when put forward as a (non)definition. Thank you Sonia for highlighting this.

The other main issue that rings in my head is that about the 'Canon'. Do videogames have a Canon? Should they have one? And if I were to choose my ten games for the A-Level videogames and literature syllabus (should such a thing ever come to pass), what would they be? Humanities in general now makes it its business to resist attempts towards sustaining the canonical. I do not see any reason why videogames should do otherwise. My personal theoretical orientation prevents me from singling out any specific examples for special attention. Instead of selecting individual games (although like everyone else I have my favourites), I'd go for concepts and ideas and leave the selection of related texts fluid.

There were other questions asked and my memory fails me as to the finer details. Someone asked about videogames and morality. Astrid Ensslin gave us a singularly problematic example of a game where the player as Berlin Wall guard has to decide whether to shoot one of those who tried to cross over. From this and other slightly unrelated meanderings, the session closed with a question about whether we can have a Paradise Lost in videogames. I'm wondering ... after all, I had Milton as my special paper in my Master's. I don't think we need to have a videogame version of Paradise Lost just as we don't know whether a film version will capture its charm. What we need, however, is a work of such epic proportions in videogame-narratives. Videogame storytelling is getting richer by the day and I'm optimistic.

Here's a message to the naysayers, videogames are maturing as very complex narrative media - face it or run away.

Videogames as Literature: Talk at Bangor University

2011-03-30T15:34:00.004+01:00

I’m going to Bangor today. Yes, loved it the first time and wouldn’t miss another chance to visit. In fact, I am admiring the lovely Welsh countryside even as I write. It’s raining and the bilingual signs and the unfamiliar names adding a quaintness that is unique to this place. On top of this, the train catering steward just brought his trolley announcing the delectable menu of ‘ice creams, albatrosses and ocelot spleens’!

I’m going to the University there to do a talk. On Videogames AS literature (note the ‘AS’ – I’m getting bolder with age). Yes, this is probably my last presentation in the UK so I might as well say my say. I'll be looking at comparisons between videogames and Deleuzoguattarian 'minor' literature.

I am an Assassin and I fly on fire

2011-03-30T15:29:00.003+01:00

Safety and Peace, traveller. The story I tell today is not of Altair, my illustrious ancestor. Those whom he removed from this world by the will of God, ever so glorious, have returned to our story. Such is the cyclic fate of man.

I am Ezio of Florence of the House of Auditore born to the pleasures of the reborn Italian states and embroiled in the conspiracies that govern our troubled lives. I too am an assassin or rather, am training to be one. Training well I must say as the streets of Milan and Venice are abuzz with rumours about me. They paint portraits of me so that people can report me. The town-criers cry warnings. The guards are on high alert. There are rumours that I can fly. At other times I would have laughed but today I am dead serious about flying. I will fly into the Doge’s palace, otherwise impregnable and bristling with the spears of its thousand guards. Today my job is to save a life , not to take one. They say the Doge’s padre will poison him today. Like I saved Lorenzo de Medici, I must save this Doge. Else, the future of Venice lies with the Borgia scum.

Fly, I said and you did not take me seriously. After all, this is still the early Renaissance. I am sure your history books have recorded the story of my friend Leonardo, the artist and polymath, even though it has effaced mine. Leonardo has invented a flying machine. Yes, as stupendous as that. Our first test flight ended up as a major embarrassment and increased my resolve of not trusting men of learning. I landed amongst the rooftops and was very lucky not to have my bones turned into jelly. Leonardo has had a brainwave since then. We are going to use fires all over the city rooftops and heat the air. The heated air is going to lift up Leonardo’s contraption whenever it sinks down. Whenever it sinks , I have to steer it towards a fire and of course, steer clear of the archers or kick them off the roofs.

Meanwhile, back to my job of clearing the rooftops where I plan to have the fires. My hidden blade just slid smoothly into my palm as I wiped off the blood of the last dead guard. So back to Leonardo and then I will have more stories to tell.

2nd CFP for PhD seminar: "Worlds, Stories, and Games"

2011-03-03T19:32:00.000Z

This one's a cfp from Sebastian Moering. The guys at ITU Copenhagen have decided to have yet another stab at the contested ideas of storytelling in videogames. I mean, come on, everyone knows videogames tell stories. Yes, they tell them differently and because they started as pure fun, academics in the Humanities avoid them. They also avoid pariah literary scholars like myself who try to say that some of their precious texts are actually like videogames. I'm used to that by now. I'm also used to people claiming that games are games and nought else. Instead of bothering overmuch, I've been investigating and building alternative mechanisms of critical analysis that literary criticism does not provide. I've also been arguing the case for introducing these mechanisms into literary analysis so that we learn more about how narrative, in general, works. Anyway, to return to the cfp from my manifesto. Take over, Sebastian. Ludus ex is at your service.

Just before handing over the mike, are people who have completed their PhDs allowed? I love Copenhagen and also the chance of the very lively debate that Espen Aarseth's presence manages to inspire. Better check my calendar just in case. If you are a PhD researcher working on videogame narratives, please pack your bags ... DON'T MISS THIS!

-----
2nd CFP for PhD seminar***
"Worlds, Stories, and Games"

May 18-20, 2011 at IT University of Copenhagen
5 ECTS

Speakers from the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT
University of Copenhagen:
Espen Aarseth (Ludo-Narratology)
Yun-Gyung Cheong (Story generation)
Mark Nelson (Drama management)
Julian Togelius (Procedural content generation)
Georgios N. Yannakakis (User/Player modeling)

***ABSTRACT***

This seminar invites PhD students to investigate theoretical and
practical problems of interactive storytelling and interactive
storytelling techniques in computer games or related media from the
perspectives of computer sciences (part I) as well as humanities based
research (part II) and tries to find interconnections between the two
perspectives.

Part I: Computational Models of Storytelling and Interactive Storytelling

Narrative generation by computers has been actively researched for the
last two decades. In particular, various artificial intelligence
techniques have been used to model story creation and comprehension
processes. However, generating interactive stories is still challenging
due to the dynamics of user interaction. The user in story-centered
games is like an actor who plays a role in a story without the script.
Therefore, creating a seamless story that continuously interacts with
the player requires numerous storylines and tremendous authoring
efforts. In narrative analysis theory, story consists of two layers:
story world and discourse. The story world includes all the events in
the story including the events hidden from the reader while the
discourse contains only the selected events to be presented to the story
consumer. The author constructs the discourse carefully for particular
impacts and emotional experiences for the reader.

In games, the story consumer takes a part in creating the story world,
and thus story events that are not worth to tell can be conveyed to her.
The user’s dual roles as story producer and consumer in the game
environment have complicated the direct application of narrative
theories into interactive story generation.

This seminar is looking for approaches to problems like: How can we
efficiently use the interaction of a user into storytelling? Is the
interactive storytelling more like a story or a game? Should the story
components be present in the story world that the user navigates through
or be present in a retrospective way when she recalls the game play? How
much does narratology come into play in interactive storytelling?

Part II: Ludo-Narratology and Beyond

If games and game technology can be used for storytelling, what is
storytelling, really? How much can the standard theories and models of
narratology help us understand game-story hybrids and new kinds of
ludo-mimetic entertainment, and how great is the need for new theories
and models? A critical understanding of "story-games" is useful both for
the development of experimental systems such as FAÇADE (2005), as well
as for the study of commercial productions such as FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS
(2010), DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS (2010), or HEAVY RAIN (2010).

For years, game studies have tried to come up with an answer to the
question: Are these "things" games or stories, or both? Unfortunately,
the discussion got side-tracked on a meta-level, misleadingly termed
"ludology vs. narratology," and became an unproductive no-man's land. It
is high time to reboot the empirical study of story-game hybrids and
move the field forward.

The seminar will explore the ludological limits of narratology and
present some new models from recent game research, and examine the
utility of classical narratology. Through lectures, close-playing
analysis and discussions, the goal is to attain a better grasp of the
aesthetic challenges and solutions involved in game-story production and
analysis, through new models and concepts developed specifically for
these new forms.

The seminar will furthermore give introductory talks on the state of the
art in interactive storytelling techniques such as story generation,
procedural content generation, and automated camera control. The seminar
also includes an interactive session to demonstrate the use of
interactive story authoring tools.

***REQUIREMENTS***

PhD students from the fields of game studies, narratology, interactive
storytelling techniques, computational story generation and related
fields are invited to submit papers which offer new insights or
solutions for the presented problems. For participation please send an
abstract of your paper (300-500 words) to smam(at)itu[dot]dk.
In order to get 5 ECTS you only have to submit a paper and present a
position, a problem, a solution etc. from the given fields.

As an orientation:
- a humanities based paper should have about 10 pages in Times New Roman
12pt, double line spacing or 4000-6000 words,

- a computer science based paper: about 4000 words or max 6 pages following
IEEE double column formatting style (e.g. http://bit.ly/i2KdHK).

Knowledge in either computational interactive storytelling techniques or
narrative and computer game theory or both is preferable but not
obligatory. A refreshment of knowledge will be made possible with a
compendium of theoretical texts provided prior to the course.
Furthermore, it is advised to play at least three of the example games
(HEAVY RAIN (2010), FAÇADE (2005), FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS (2010), DRAGON
AGE: ORIGINS (2010), THE MARRIAGE (2006)) prior to the course in order
to have a comparable frame of reference in terms of examples.

The seminar is free of charge; travel expenses and accommodation have to
be comprised by the participants.

***TIMETABLE***

Deadline for abstract submission: March 22, 2011
Notification of acceptance: March 29, 2011
Submission of paper: April 29, 2011

Further information will be available in the “events” section of
http://game.itu.dk. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to
send an e-mail to Sebastian Möring, smam(at)itu(dot)dk, or Yun-Gyung
Cheong, yugc(at)itu(dot)dk.

--

Games and Philosophy Conference, April 2011

2011-03-03T19:18:00.000Z

My abstract has been accepted for the Games and Philosophy conference being held in April at Athens. Identity formation has always been a prime concern of mine and so has memory. Some games (and I'm thinking specifically of Assassin's Creed as the best example, here) engage deeply with memory as an entity that constructs the identity of the avatar. I consider this symptomatic of a quotidian phenomenon in videogames that is often overlooked. In the game that we play, we are what we are because of things we have remembered or others have remembered and retained for us (in some kind of collective memory storage or in simple words, a wiki) and we are also the creatures of habit and reflexes - memories that we don't even realise that we remember. Hence, I've fallen back on Bergson and Deleuze's reading of Bergson, both of which I see as pathways into this analysis. Writing the paper - well that will be a daunting experience if I know Bergson and Deleuze at all. As always in Ludus Ex, suggestions are welcome.

Ludotopia II: An Any-Space-Whatever?

2011-02-28T08:46:00.004Z

In-between spaces, holes, interstices, people milling around coffee tables and Danish pastries talking about space and the sliding from one reference frame to another. Copenhagen in 2010, Manchester this year - the Ludotopia game was reloaded and revealed a space throbbing with possibilities. Throbbing in the sense of a vibrating space where ideas constantly keep forming, get expressed or even suppressed and forgotten. Ludotopia is a conference / workshop or even what my boss Sue Thomas calls an 'unconference'. Last year a group of around 15 people convened in Copenhagen to discuss various aspects of spatiality in videogames. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and also managed to come up with papers of high quality (as we thought). Hence, the need for a second event to polish the rough edges, expose the papers to further scrutiny and to stimulate a general discussion that would result in a book proposal. I learnt much and can indeed give page-long glosses to some of the changes made in the papers (I reported on their contents last year). Much of these is work in progress at this stage so I shall not outline all the details. Instead I shall discuss in general some issues that struck me as well as the two new papers that were presented. Finally, I have no issues with revealing where my own work will go so I'll attempt to provide a preview of my own paper as it will look later on. As usual, Ludus ex always welcomes feedback.

Among the concepts that fascinated me last year, Espen Aarseth's 'ludoforming' stands out,. Marked with an incisive wit and yet an affable gregariousness, Espen's presentation of his ideas have always interested me mostly because of their contentiousness but this time because I was in full agreement. To ludoform, in Espen's Copenhagen presentation, was to construct a game's space over a real space and it was interesting to see how game meaning's formed / reformed / ludoformed real spaces. Back then, he had used examples from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games' version of Pripyat, the African savannah in Far Cry 2 (where he famously showed a pacman-like structure in FC2's map of its fictitious African landscape). It seems from his recent discussions that as a concept, 'ludoforming' will become much more robust and address even games like Monopoly (in the sense that places in Monopoly have their own specific attributes adapted from their real counterparts that are modified by the game). Sweeping across more games, this concept looks like it'll be an attractive one for Game Studies.

This year we also had a more distilled version of Stephan Guenzel's paper. Stephan explained his concept of trialectic space (first, second and third spaces) in more detail. Essentially, he describes how computer games symbolically exemplify concepts without missing out reality.

Almost all the papers have been developed and enriched but I'll let you read them in their final incarnations. My previous post on Ludotopia and Bjarke Lieborussen's blog will give you summaries of the papers as they were last year.

My own paper is on the use of the wasteland as a spatial metaphor in games and I see the wasteland as a space of possibilities from within which events are actualised (so from a mesh of possible events, one is made to occur depending on the influencing environment -whether this consists of the game affordances or the player's emotional state etc). At first glance, however, the wasteland seems to be a space devoid of meaning and human interaction. Like the railway stations and terminals that Marc Auge calls 'non-places', the wasteland too is a place for passing through. Here, there is no history no human relationships. The game wasteland is, however, not such a 'non-place'. Instead, it is a place that throbs with possibilities. It corresponds with the affective spaces or the vast public spaces where events form despite the apparent nondescriptness of these spaces. Gilles Deleuze calls this the 'any-space-whatever' in his Cinema 1. Whether Deleuze is commenting on Auge we do not know (despite a very problematic footnote in Deleuze) but in game terms, any-space-whatever certainly emerges as a better description for game spaces. Even the wasteland setting in games is not like a bus station where players just pass through Deleuze even in the bus station lies a space of possibility that is going to give rise to an event, an actualisation of a possibility. The wasteland setting in games is such an 'any-space-whatever'. This is a difficult concept to fathom and in spatial terms it is abstract. Some of the immediate criticism that I'd received focused on the fact that after a while, the any-space-whatever exhausts its possibilities in a videogame whereas I was claming otherwise. The any-space-whatever consists of possibilities that are structural (games are unique in that they have such a wide range of structural options) but also at the same time semantic and experiential (all media, including cinema to which Deleuze applies this, would have this plane of reference). A complex notion such as this when applied to a complex medium like videogames causes much controversy and worse, confusion. However, judging by the number of times the term was used in various contexts in the two days, it is a useful framework in game studies. A rewrite, therefore, is necessary where I need to expand on the primacy of the concept of any-space-whatever, tease out the various layers of meaning and pace O Deleuzians, simplify the concept in relation to digital games.

Having expounded on my grand plan for videogame wastelands (yes, I'm building a housing estate in Megaton - ring for bookings), I'll take you through two fascinating presentations by the new guys who joined our Ludotopian spaceship. Speaking of spaceships, the event was organised in the control cabin of the starship Uni of Salford. Lean back with me in your console in ThinkLab to see the two discussions unfold.

The first new paper was Stephan Schwingeler's study of perspective in videogames. He started with a comparison of Uccello's use of the checkerboard with that of the checkerboard base in Wipeout! thus pointing to the development of perspectival spaces in games. Illustrating the use of perspectival spaces through a discussion of Alberti and Brunelleschi with much reference to the art historian and theorist Erwin Panofsky, Stephan announced that videogames are still in their Baroque age and that other artistic movements like Romanticism and Cubism hadn't permeated the videogame world yet. He also pointed at the difference between videogame spatial perspectives and Renaissance ideas of perspective in that although both ideas of perspective 'turn the space of bodily presence into represented space', in digitising psycho-physiological space, spectators become users as well. Some of the questions in response were about non-visual videogame spaces (such as aural games) and about other forms of perspective besides the standard first or third person perspective, such as the Asmodean (Asmodeus is an intrusive devil that can look into people's houses from above) perspective in Sims or the God's-eye view in RTS games. I added to these the problems with the shift in perspective in games like Rome: Total War and also on another level, as Michael Nitsche clarified, in games like Max Payne where the view of Payne drugged and Payne sober are different. Finally, how about non-Western ideas of perspective that may have been used in games. Would games like Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy require a different understanding of perspective? Similarly, how about Echochrome ?

Later, on our way to the Curry Mile in Manchester, Stephan suggested similarities with my wasteland metaphor and Romantic images of ruins (in Friedrich's paintings - but I can think of enough English examples as well). An interesting parallel to pursue.

The second paper, by David Hancock, was equally interesting. Working on Henry Jenkins idea of transmediality, David is looking at scenes in videogames that remediate images from art (as in the Golden Compass videogame) and is then doing paintings based on them (for example, the painting of a sunset in GTA). He is also filming the practice of cosplayers and provided some interesting insights into the practice of local cosplayers. Cosplay, he says, is not a subculture in that it's not a 24X7 identity like the Gothic and Alternative groups have. Cosplayers are apparently more concerned with the character they cosplay than anything else. This also brings up issues in spatial terms. I was intrigued how the cosplayer switches spatial awareness from the game space (which should form the context for the character) to the city space in which they cosplay. There seem to be two levels of spatiality at work here. Stephan Guenzel made an observation about multilayered space existing as a directed space for those players whom Richard Bartle refers to as 'killers' and as a non-directed space for the 'explorers' in Bartle's categories. I'm not sure if Stephan made the comment in this connection but I certainly see two overlapping and interlinked spaces in cosplay - the game space undercut by the cosplayer's city space.

Ludotopia, however, is never about the formal. The in-between affective spaces rule here so here's a random list of trivia. Stephan Guenzel announced that 'Romanticism (as in landscapes that you can only contemplate) in games comes before the epoch of Far Cry'. David told us about the possibility of Zelda going for coffee at Affleck's (a coffee bar in Manchester I guess). We started wodering again about fiction and story as well as the sartorial elegance in British nightlife. Espen definitely has a prospective alternative career as chilly-taster - he ate three raw chillies without batting an eyelid (or maybe he did blink a little). I ate them too but I'm Indian and I have them for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Michael's designing this huge duck toy that feeds othher ducks with chocolate (I might be making this up by the way so ask him).

Last but not least, I met rapid cyclist on the way to Manchester. Thank God he was there; otherwise I would have read all the papers again and been over-critical. Rapid cyclist is a psychiatrist by profession whose first love is computers and guess what, computer games. He turned out to be an Elite aficionado, having played the game since his Amiga days and now plays Eve Online. We had so much in common. We are both from the Indian subcontinent and I am a games researcher who wanted to be a doctor whereas he is a doctor who wanted to research informatics. As it would happen, the so-called non-place (pace Auge) of a train compartment suddenly resembled an any-space-whatever in that it provided so many possible interactions. It was like having found a friend in City 17. By the by, I'm sure you know this but Rapid Cycling is said to be the favourite malady of artists.

The return from Manchester proved equally eventful. During a walk down the city's lanes (not very nice ones) and a flaneur -like journey around the remains of a Victorian fish market, we discovered a shop that sells PacMan cookie-cutters and Star Wars blasters. I think they also had Obi Wan's tooth but the thought of a Jedi toothpaste was daunting enough. A friend of mine did buy a PacMan stress ball. We ended up in this alternative pub and the behatted barman inspired me to buy a trilby yesterday. The place (or maybe it was just us) inspired us to think of a project where we'd all do peer-reviewed critical close-analyses of games for a journal or a some-as-yet-undefined-thing. Sebastian Moering brought this up and everyone was enthusiastic. As for me, this has been my dream since 2000 and there have been hurdles everywhere. I do a bit of this in Ludus ex as you might have noticed but for a formal project all I have to show is a disappointed face after the abortive funding applications. I've still not given up and Seb's plan is certainly a glimmer of light at the end of a dark tunnel.

The other Ludotopians dispersed towards the Manchester City Centre for more revels. I was on the tiny train to Nottingham again after having waited in the station. 'Welcome to City 17' , the loudspeakers said. No, it was actually, 'the next station is Nottingham' and the lady exhorted us to remove any remains of our existence - the compartment was gearing up to look like a non-place. Looks, however, are deceptive.

Reloads

2011-01-18T23:25:00.002Z

'Reload' has been the word of the week for me. In real life and the virtual world(s). A chain of events that I thought had terminated eight years ago suddenly swung around and like those moving staircases in Hogwarts, reconnected some things that I never thought of as possible. Reload. I've been working on my article on rebirth eschatologies, time and in-game death. I also reworked my other article on Sherlock Holmes called 'Sherlock Holmes Reloaded.' Reload. I've been thinking about memory and identity recently and a revisit to Deleuze's Bergsonism is called for. Reload. I've just reloaded a saved 'memory' of virtual ancestor, Ezio de Firenze, using his DNA chain in Assassin's Creed 2. Reload. In an in-game event, the protagonist of the first Assassin's Creed game, Altair, turns up.

Reload again. Think Ludotopia. Our workshop in Copenhagen is now coming closer home to Manchester. We'll be seeing the entire Ludotopia team again and I need to get back to my Videogames and topos discussion.

Time to exit game temporarily. More reloads are possible. Subsequently. Will this year bring lots of reloads, then?

Happy New Year by the way.

Game Philosophy Conference in Athens, April 2010

2010-12-18T14:52:00.002Z

Philosophy and games come together yet again in the place where Western Philosophy started and the Olympic Games were launched. Fancy a chance to ask Aristotle what his favourite videogame is? Come to the Games and Philosophy Conference being hosted in Athens, this April (6th to 9th).

I've never been to Athens. A few years back I could never have dreamt of going - let alone discussing identity in videogames in the hallowed ground of Greek philosophy. This is all too good to be true. And to miss. If you want to know more about the conference, here's the link to the cfp: http://game-philosophy.blogspot.com/.

Trust me, this is one videogame event you should not miss.

Souvik's Waterloo

2010-11-25T20:10:00.011Z

Waterloo, November 2010

Yesterday, I finally managed to beat Wellington and Bluecher’s combined armies near this little Belgian village called Waterloo. This happened on my third attempt when I finally decided to play on the easy skill level. Yes, I’ve bought Napoleon: Total War after reading all those rave reviews that dub it the best strategy game ever and although I haven’t gone very far with the campaigns, I’ve played all the historical battles that are available in the game. Waterloo, obviously is one of the most signficant. The historical battles begin with you playing as the British at Waterloo and end by putting you in the same battlefield as the French - talk about complex and nonlinear histories. Of that, however, another time. Here, I’m more concerned with strategy and with describing how I led Napoleon’s army to victory.

That's the man!

In the real battle of Waterloo, the British under the Duke of Wellington were facing Napoleon himself near Waterloo, an area that the Duke had visited and remembered from the previous year. The British army was actually a very mixed group of soldiers with many Dutch and Prussian units. They were stationed at a strategically advantageous position behind a ridge with only a fraction of their main strength exposed to Napoleon. Further, below the ridge lay three villages which they occupied: Papellotte on the left, Huguemont on the right and Le Hayes Sainte in the centre. The French forces were on lower ground within striking distance of the villages and with superior artillery. They had lost some vital time in beginning the attack on account of the ground being too muddy for the artillery to move. Wellington and Napoleon had never faced each other. The only way for the French to win was to defeat Wellington before his Prussian allies under Bluecher arrived to reinforce him. The Prussians did arrive in time and Napoleon suffered a devastating defeat after which he was exiled to St. Helena.

In Napoleon, the number of forces on each side are much less than in the actual battle. Nevertheless, the units that participate in the battle are all historical units and their placement on the battlefield is more or less accurate. The events, however, might be quite different because they depend on how you play the game. The battle is hard, very hard indeed. Quite uncannily you end up doing what Napoleon did in the actual battle and suffer the same consequences. I’ve watched Waterloo, the movie, countless times and read the battle plans as many times. Many a time had I thought that if I had a chance, I’d do it all differently. However, this didn’t quite work out in Napoleon and except on the easiest level, my troops were decimated to a man.

Waterloo: Battle Map in Napoleon Total War

Even though I say so myself, I’m no mean armchair general. I’ve conquered the other Total War games with relative ease, even at the hardest levels. Napoleon, however, is way too hard. The AI is quite good and the game cheats a bit and starts you off with unfair handicaps. The three farmhouses are virtually indestructible and after a constant barrage of 12-pounder fire on them for over an hour (game time), I was only able to cause 3% damage to Papellotte. Wellington’s troops have incredible high morale whereas even Napoleon’s Guard show their backs much more easily. Finally, Napoleon’s famed artillery is hardly present on the field. In Waterloo, Christopher Plummer (as Wellington) is heard saying that Napoleon moves his cannon as if they were pistols. In the game, Napoleon hardly has any cannon to move and those that he has are under sustained artillery attack seconds after the game starts. God, how I missed my 24-pounder howitzers from Empire: Total War.

The battle, however, was too big a challenge to resist - fighting in Waterloo against the heaviest odds which, as many forums testify, have beaten many good gamers was sheer glory. After the initial battle scene was revealed through a cutscene, the enemy cannon started blowing holes in the ranks of my fusiliers. Haste was required and I found myself frantically moving all my units save two corps of the Old Guard and Napoleon’s bodyguard. All this while, my stationed artillery fired at the British cannon, if only to draw fire away from my infantry units. Then, the siege of Papellotte began. Unlike Napoleon, I did not choose to tease the British at their strongest position and I did not tempt them out of the ridges that provided them with cover. I had attacked the British left, skirting around a hill towards Papellotte with the mass of my units and leaving two units of fusiliers to attack the farmhouse and one to wait as reserve.

The jaegers in Papellotte were overthrown after some initially effective resistance. The farmhouse in French hands, my reserve fusiliers moved in to provide the extra support against any troops that might emerge from hiding (from previous gameplay, I knew that there was a detachment of Rifles concealed nearby).

Battle Plan for Waterloo in my gameplay of Napoleon: Total War

As soon as I reached the far side of the hill near Papellotte, the Prussian army began to pour in. Marshal Grouchy who was sent to pursue them had clearly been as unsuccessful in the game as he was in the historical battle. I could almost hear Napoleon sighing, ‘Grouchy, Grouchy! How he tries my patience!’. Anyway, you don’t need to be a Bonaparte to get upset with incompetent colleagues. Seeing the Prussian move closer, I had my cannon unlimber and spray his front ranks with canister fire while my lancer cavalry dug into his rearguard which was already being harried by my grenadiers and fusiliers. The Prussian cavalry had by now come within range of my fusiliers who quickly formed squares to repel cavalry charges. Encouraged , and at the same time, not knowing what else to do I threw in my cuirassiers and Marshal Ney’s cavalry into the melee. My cavalry was, alas, destroyed to a man but by God, they managed to break the Prussians. Bluecher, their general, was dead and their artillery was being cut to pieces by my Chasseurs Cheval horsemen whom I had moved into this sector. The game AI here was quite spectacular in its stupidity. The British troops stood still and watched while I destroyed their allies. The Prussians destroyed, I had over four infantry divisions and the mounted Chasseurs to attack Wellington’s left flank with. Even more importantly, I had my horse artillery up on the mountain with Wellington’s flank at my mercy. Soon the Earl of Uxbridge’s horseman were scattered by volleys from my cannon. The dragoons and the Duke’s cavalry who charged to save their dying comrades were sliced to pieces by my fusiliers in square formation. Soon the British commanders were dead and my troops were proceeding to roll up the British lines like a carpet.

That, however, was not to happen too easily: the Black Watch intervened. Masses of these Scottish soldiers attacked me in waves, their red uniforms soaking up their blood but still their morale held and constant fire from two sides, canister fire from my artillery and two abortive cavalry charges could not break them. I had to throw my fresh division of the Young Guard against them as my other two divisions routed. The Black Watch was beaten at last but as the last tartan uniforms were edging away to retreat, they created time for waves of British infantry to move into position and harass my Young Guard. An advancing column of Rifles (anyone familiar with Sean Bean from Sharpe’s Rifles ?) was held back by my fusiliers in the Papellotte farmhouse. Time to send in the Old Guard.

The British finally attacked my left flank. Jaeger and Riflemen (remember Sharpe’s Rifles) attached my only Fusilier Regiment that remained intact - firing at will, they almost broke my ranks. The Old Guard had just started marching and one Corps was despatched to destroy the British light infantry. The Jaegers and Riflemen dissolved into the forest whence they had emerged. This time, however, they didn’t retreat in order: they routed.

I don't like St. 'Elena: going home after victory

My reserve was now poised towards attacking the British flank and my artillery kept firing ceaselessly. The Young Guard had held and the Fusiliers from Papellotte had given them some support. It was now the turn of the Old to replace the Young. Two companies of my elite Old Guard broke the British flank. I could now send Napoleon’s bodyguard to mop up the rear of the routing British and Dutch. They offered to surrender and I accepted. My men were exhausted and I couldn’t pursue. Shifting the camera further above the battlefield I actually saw the British soldiers running away - little red squares scattered on the mini-map while the blue squares representing my remaining army in a close formation on Wellington’s chosen hillock.

That’s how the Battle of Waterloo was won by Napoleon … by me.

GameCity in Retrospect: Polemics and Playgrounds

2010-11-07T18:01:00.004Z

It's been a week since GameCity and I'm finally able to collect my thoughts on the event after getting through an extremely busy week. This is not a report but a few reflections on what impressed me most and what didn't.

Newport and Narratives

Once again, on the top of the list will be my conversations with the academics and students from the Uni of Newport's game design department. For the last three years, busloads of students from Newport have come to GameCity and this time they showcased their games to hundreds of visitors. I didn't get to see the games themselves but managed to chat with some of the designers (now famous as Angry Mango Games) over a curry lunch. They are designing games about concepts that are offbeat in game design terms: Mush is a platform puzzler for Windows Mobile 7 where the player controls an orange fluffy character by tilting the phone. Even more unique is that by drawing a smiley or a sad face on the screen with your fingers makes the creature move. As the Blitz1UP website describes it:

The beauty of this system is that you really feel like you're affecting the little guy's emotions as you play, you find yourself smiling when you make him smile and growling when you make him angry - it really is fantastic fun.

I think I'll love this game. Obviously, in terms of narrative the experience is rather ambiguous but as I've always said narrative is experiential and how we construct it around a series of potential events depends on us. I wish I could experience the game first-hand but meanwhile there's a video of the gameplay on Youtube:

From the pupils to their lecturers: the previous evening I met up with the Newport teaching team, namely Corrado, James and Richard. This was the first ever occasion when I had a very serious discussion on videogame narratives in a Wetherspoons . Facing tremendous opposition from each other in a debate between James and myself that was moderated by Corrado and Richard, we came to an agreement about the need to redefine / understand what narrative means and to move towards an experiential model of narrative. Perception, affection and action - does that sound familiar at all (check Deleuze in Cinema 1)? The experiential notion of narrativity (if such a word exists) is something that I have highlighted extensively in my research and of course, it is sooo hard to disagree with a polite person like me. Anyway, Corrado has played STALKER (or valiantly tried to) and we both remembered having discussed the gameplay in relation to ludic agency about a year ago at DiGRA. We were dangerously close to another polemical discussion of agency when both the food and the drink had run out and it was time to leave.

Playgrounds

I've written about Keita Takahashi sometime ago. For those who don't know him, he's the designer for the ever popular Katamari Damarcy and Noby Noby Boy games. Very offbeat, very artistic and not at all like videogames as they are commonly understood.

Anyway, Keita's dream is to design playgrounds. And thanks to Iain Simons (GameCity Director) and the Nottingham City Council, he's re-designing Woodthorpe Park on the outskirts of Nottingham. As Keita demonstrated his transition from designing virtual worlds to physical spaces while retaining all the creativity, the talk on Keita's playground became for me the highlight of GameCity. Imagine having benches in parks that move on rails (which means you can't ask your gf to meet you at a certain bench at a certain time), a doughnut-shaped slide that lets you slide eternally (might sound like a punishment invented by the Greek gods but it seemed to be fun as it was described), a swing that is operated in a partnership with people on other swings and finally, a slide combined with a see-saw. Some of Keita's concepts might not pass muster with health and safety but I must say these are some of the wackiest ideas that I have ever come across for parks and playgrounds. It was interesting to see some very gamey creativity translated into more tangible play experiences. I wish Keita and the Woodthorpe Park project the very best. Finally, if he ever designs an entire city, I will go and live in it.

One of the many fun things in Keita Takahashi's playground

Networking Not working

The 'Notworking' event where I met the Newport guys among others was supposed to be a networking space for game professionals. Hosted in a hard-to-find bar called Nihon the not working title was quite apt for it. Nevertheless, the nature of the event meant that that despite the lack of any 'event' as such people did get to meet and chat so it turned out okay, I suppose.

Romantic Encounters

After a full 8.30 to 5 Thursday, I was in no mood for any encounter however romantic but curiosity got the better of me and I went to check out the only GameCity event by an NTU student. Doing her PhD on interactive media, Rebecca from the College of Art & Design organised a virtual meeting place within its real counterpart in Lee Rosy's Cafe in Nottingham. I was allowed to talk to some of the participants in the 'romantic encounter' to find out what they thought of the event. The environment looked very Second Life -ish ... it probably was an SL scenario. The event had participants adopt fictitious personae and interact with each other in the cafe in a sort of group chat. While initially interested, some of the participants I interviewed seemed to have been tired towards the end --- the need for virtual seats was strongly felt. Also people wanted to sit down in pairs and talk to their partners instead of talking to everyone in the cafe. Finally, there were some clamours for more freedom - people wanted to touch things, order coffee etc. Personally, although I've seen this done before in other places but such 'encounters' between the real and virtual worlds are always intriguing in the variety of responses that one can get.

What I missed ...

I missed a lot, sadly. My one big gripe against the festival is that it does not think of people who have to do a day job but are also interested in videogames. So what did I miss? I missed a great event on the soundtrack of Limbo, another one on the music for the forthcoming Harry Potter game, a very popular demo event for the Kinect and let's see ... yes, Jonathan Blow on game design. Quite a lot of misses considering that this might well be my last GameCity.

CEDAR: After-action report

2010-09-18T14:45:00.006+01:00

Report on CEDAR. So much to say. Not sure how to say it best and what to leave out.

I'll start with Sonia Fizek's presentation. This was the first time I saw Sonia present - I missed her paper in the last Under the Mask. She spoke on how Second Life can work as an academic platform and after introducing us to virtual worlds via a preliminary typology, she pointed out how these, through their reliance on user experience, could be used to host lectures and seminars. I was much impressed with the Second Life Poly University Campus from which Sonia showed us snippets of her experience. Looking forward to experiencing this for myself. In my own practice as Technology Learning and Development Adviser at NTU, I think her videos can prove a very useful introduction for potential online learning and teaching. Sonia also introduced us to Tom Boellstoeff's Coming of Age in Second Life and it looks like a very promising read.

From Second Life to ship life. Avast ye landlubbers - did you know how many words in your day-to-day speech are borrowed from maritime jargon? Simon Isserlis enlightened us on this in his presentation. Words and phrases like 'skyscraper' and 'loose cannon' are some of the examples that he discussed. Simon is building corpora of maritime language that has made its way into English usage. In his talk he spoke about various repositories that he uses, such as Project Gutenberg for out-of-copyright texts, the mudcatcafe.com for traditional English songs, Hansard for British Parliamentary Proceedings' records dating back to 1640 and so on. He also gave us an overview of corpora building software such as Wordsmith tools.

Claire Warwick of UCL described her idea of Digital Humanities in her keynote presentation. The impetus of digital humanities is collaboration instead of the individual research that is sometimes the norm in Humanities research, she said. She insisted on the importance of interaction and consultation between Humanities and Computing researchers and also on the move towards project-based work as favoured by scientists. For those in their early academic careers, the good news is that the REF 2012 (this is a British research evaluation process - gives universities their money and academics their jobs) will also consider digital research as valid submissions.

After Claire's presentation, the unexpected happened. Lorenzo (my netbook) ran out of battery so I was left to jot down pen and paper notes, rather reluctantly. Can't be sure now if the new version of Jolicloud (my OS) is all that good. Anyway, the rest of the report will be rather short.

Anastasija Ropa described how she has built a google site to supplement her project on a comparative study of the Holy Grail motif where she compares L'Morte d'Arthur (Malory) with 20th c. Grail fiction (she did assure us that The Da Vinci Code is not in her list). Anastasija pointed out the pros and cons of using Google sites as well as the perennial problem that academic websites have of getting inputs from academia. She has also created a Renpy game to provide an easy access to her research. Renpy is a visual novel building software. An idea for us all to consider?

Following our Grail quest on Google, we had Isamar Carillo Masso and Lyle Skains presenting their separate versions of research toolkits. Isamar described how she would think using The Brain (the mind map tool), plan further using Mindomo and present using Prezi. I used a Prezi for my own presentation but am still dubious about how effectively I can use it for my purposes. In fact, most presenters at the sessions stayed with powerpoint - still Prezi's a tool to explore. Lyle's presentation was a virtual one - recorded rather than live (although maybe a quick skype appearance to take the questions would be great - blended learning at its best). She spoke about various websites for sharing your creative writing and critiques as well as tools like google docs and prezi. The presentation was on a video clip so maybe we'll get it on youtube Lyle?

The other presentation in this session was Maggie Parke's presentation on how fan websites affect the reception and development of films based on books such as Twilight, Harry Potter books etc. She described how her participation on blogs and fansites raised her 'fan capital'. Simon made an interesting comparison with the fansites for games and this linked back quite well to my own talk on walkthroughs and after-action reports.

After that, a five-hour journey back to Nottingham and eventually, bed. CEDAR is officially over but then all good things come to an end much too soon. I'm sure, however, that we will carry on talking about using web 2.0 tools for research. Finally, I hope my university (at least for a few months longer) will follow this course and make research easier and more fun.

Of Bangor and the CEDAR mash

2010-09-17T03:03:00.003+01:00

Back at CEDAR. This time in beautiful Bangor. I've arrived a day early because it takes aeons to get here from Nottingham (four changes on the train and an easy four and a half hours journey). I'm sitting in a hotel room and writing this while trying to focus on my presentation tomorrow and to forget about my day job. Research time is a luxury nowadays and I'm thoroughly grateful that I've been allowed this time by NTU.

So back to de-stressing and chillaxing. Also back to videogame theory - rusty as I am. The programme, however, encompasses the full breadth of web 2.0 and recent social media technology. Here's what it looks like:

Registration and coffee

Welcome

Participant presentations (10-15 minutes for presentation; 5-10

minutes for questions):

Sonia Fizek

Second Life as an Academic Platform: Experiencing Virtual Conferences.

Souvik Mukherjee

Writing the Disappearing Story: Wikis, Walkthroughs and the Digital Narrative.

Simon Isserlis

The MariTime Text Corpus (MariTeC): The construction of a specialised digital

text corpus of Maritime English.

Short coffee break

Guest lecture (Claire Warwick)

Lunch buffet

Participant presentations:

Anastasija Ropa

Bridging the Gap Between Medieval and Post-Modern Audiences of the Grail

Quest Literature with the Aid of Google Sites.

Isamar Carillo

Three Stages of a Research Project: Advantages of Using The Brain, Mindomo

and Prezi.

Maggie Parke

TBA

Lyle Skains (video presentation)

Exploring Multimodal Creativity: Writing Stories for the Printed Page and the

Digital Screen.

'Jam session' / hands-on activities (exchanging and test-running

software/online tools for humanities research)

Discussions over afternoon coffee

All of these topics are extremely interesting for me. Google sites and the Grail (Did Sir Galahad google?) and using Prezi and the Brain - fantastic. Even relates to my present job. I'm really looking forward to tomorrow. As for my presentation, here's the abstract:

Writing the Disappearing Story: Wikis, Walkthroughs and the Digital Narrative

‘Do videogames tell stories?’ Although it might be possible now, after almost ten years of academic debate, to answer the question with a resounding ‘yes’, a seemingly innocuous query is bound to bring back the doubts: ‘so where’s the story?’. Digital narratives, especially some videogames, disrupt traditional expectations of the narrative. Operating in complex temporal planes, these digital stories do not lend themselves to standard endings or structures and their plurality makes it next to impossible for researchers to analyse the ephemeral narrative(s). Where older narratology (in the sense applied to the work of Gerard Genette and others) struggles to fathom such phenomena, philosophies of the multiple and the affective such as that of Gilles Deleuze engage quite well with the plurality of digital narratives viewing them as actualisations within a mesh of potentialities.

What might be otherwise construed as abstract philosophy can, however, be experienced in more accessible ways: player themselves have developed ways of recording and analysing the otherwise ephemeral narrative actualisations. The ‘walkthrough’, albeit mostly neglected by game research, has nevertheless established a niche for itself as a form of ludic ‘paratext’ that captures individual actualisations of the game narrative. However, walkthroughs can hardly exist as individual accounts: as they are created mainly as guides to resolving in-game difficulties, the need for player-collaboration and multiple responses is quite plain.

Players have therefore tapped into Web 2.0 and the transition from walkthroughs to rapidly growing and rhizomatic wikis has now begun. Player observations are now being recorded down to the minutiae of character description, narrative, quests, maps and individual experiences. These are constantly updated by the player community but at the same time they give us a narrative to analyse culled from various recorded actualisations. This paper will study the beginnings of this new type of response to videogames using the examples of ‘The Vault’ (the wiki on Fallout 3) and the ‘Call of Duty Wiki’.

In relation to this, it will also analyse a specific genre of game-related blogs which has been named ‘after-action report’ by fans. In these blogs, gamers keep a diary of their in-game experiences often making them resemble literary or historical accounts. ‘The Rise and Fall of the House of Jimius’, an after-action report blog created as a record of the gameplay of Rome:Total War by a player who calls himself Jim. Again the blog format allows more player responses that supplement the narrative created from Jim’s individual actualisations of the gameplay events.

These new types of digital responses to videogames indicate that the idea that videogames cannot tell stories is a myth. This paper will examine how they tell stories differently and how Web 2.0 technologies influence the way in which the stories are read/played.
------
And here's my presentation.

Interview published on the Theory, Culture & Society Blog

2010-09-16T16:55:00.000+01:00

I've been involved with TCS for over three years now. For those who don't know TCS , it is one of the leading journals in social theory, cultural studies , media studies and philosophy, with names like Baudrillard, Stiegler and Deleuze in its contributors' list. Besides the printed journal, TCS now offers a wealth of supplementary texts, interviews, podcasts and discussions on its website, blog and Facebook group. Over the last three years, I have been involved with redesigning the TCS website and setting up the blog. Now we welcome more input from the readers of TCS and people who are generally interested in the areas it covers.

Given the array of famous names who have interviewed by TCS, I felt extremely happy at being asked for an interview. On videogame theory, of course. I've always maintained the need for game studies to make stronger inroads into mainstream theory - so far, it's been the other way round. The TCS interview was, therefore, a very welcome opportunity.

Simon Dawes, editor of TCS webs, and I have a mini discussion on whether (for me it is 'why') game theorists should have some experience of playing videogames before theorising. This has been something I've maintained for a long time and Simon got me proselytising yet again on my pet topic. I also speak about how game studies has 'grown up' and how useful it is to see videogames as being a multiplicity rather than , essentially, just one entity. I also speak briefly about my thesis and how I find a Deleuzian framework useful in analysing games.

If you find any of this interesting, here's the full interview.

An Unintended Manifesto

2010-07-17T10:08:00.005+01:00

Today I was thinking about the future of videogames and game design. Whenever I am asked questions about this or given t-shirts saying 'Save the Videogame' to wear, I sink into the couch and get all philosophical. Not so today. It seems that ages ago, GameSpot had interviewed me for an article on narratives in games. Just bits of what I had to say went in because of the context of the article but there was quite a lot left in the questions that they asked. Today, almost a year since, I've found that email of mine. Seems like a mini manifesto. Let's see what the Souvik of a year ago had to say about games:

Questions for Storytelling Feature

Tell me a little about your background and how long have you been researching video game narratives?

My first brush with game studies began in 1999 after I came upon a demo of Age of Empires in a pc magazine. This was in Calcutta in the late nineties and pcs had just begun to appear in middle-class homes. Videogames were still a novelty for the Indian man in the street. As a student of Literature, however, I couldn't help noticing that I was playing and replaying a story (actually history, in AoE) and in a way, writing my own story even as I read it. Since this was quite close to my theoretical orientation, I saw some obvious connections between non-linear and ludic texts (like the Alice books and Borges's short stories) and videogames. In 2000, I presented a paper exploring the links between American McGee's Alice and the Alice books by Lewis Carroll, which received a fair share of attention in my university. Unfortunately, I had little access to the works of Ludologists and Narratologists and related literature. Neither did I have much encouragement in terms of funding or infrastructure to pursue this. So while I developed my ideas in my MPhil dissertation, I also saved up to come to the UK and started my PhD in Nottingham Trent University in 2005. Thereafter, I have developed my ideas within a more sophisticated theoretical framework and had the opportunity of testing my ideas at international conferences before I finally received my PhD in April 2009.

2. What research have you most recently done?

My PhD thesis explores the narrative aspects of videogames, stressing the importance of viewing them in relation with older narrative media and related theoretical frameworks. I strongly argue against binarisms such as ludology-narratology and player-studies vs game studies, opting instead for a framework where the game , text and the machine are viewed as intrinsic to the understanding of each other. Simply put, videogames are not conjuring up something terribly new --- they merely point to a more sophisticated idea of reading that has existed through millennia. Videogames, whether you see them as complex ludic stories or narrative games, point to the need for a more nuanced way of engaging with texts. My research explores some of the complexities of videogame narratives particularly controversial and/or confusing issues like their multiple endings (made even more complex by the save and reload function), immersion and agency (I am uneasy with both of these terms and am using them as a shorthand). I use some ideas from the philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze as my main theoretical framework.

Recently, I have started working on videogames and trauma and am simultaneously developing my work on the multiple endings and the complex time structures that videogames present. For the forthcoming DIGRA conference, I intend to analyse the save and reload functions in videogames in comparison with the cyclic notion of endings and telos in Eastern philosophical traditions.

3. What are the results of this research?

The results ? Well, in tangible terms they would be 120,000 words on videogames, millions of dead zombies and terrorists (pixellated), endless levels completed, undiscovered pathways and many more worlds (games) still remaining on my exploration wishlist. Academically speaking, my research is yet another small step in raising the awareness of videogames as an important narrative media and also an attempt in moving game studies beyond the simplistic theoretical parameters that define it, so far. Finally, it also aims to bridge the gap between the academia, the gamer and the industry in general. Quite a dream, I know but I am one of the many people who share it and I hope to chip in with my bit.

4. Do you think video games are an effective storytelling medium? Why/why not?

For me some are and some aren't. Some are effective enough to keep me hooked on to a narrative which I read as well as bring into existence (of course different games have different limitations for this). Think of a game like Max Payne and I don't think there should be any doubts. Do you not remember what happened to you in City 17 when you were Gordon Freeman? The term 'effective', of course, brings in a value-judgement that I do not subscribe to. I view videogames as a multiplicity and, therefore, cannot comment on the phenomenon of 'the Videogame'.

5. The way people tell stories has evolved, and continues to evolve. Would you be ready to call video games the new storytelling medium? Why/why not?

The way people tell stories has evolved although people still tell stories in every way they can and using every medium they can use, whether old or new. Likewise, they way people respond to stories has also changed. Videogames mark both of these developments. I wouldn't call them (or any other medium for that matter) the new storytelling medium; however, they are certainly significant as storytelling media inasmuch as they point to certain hitherto neglected but key aspects of telling and responding to stories.

6. Some people believe that traditional forms of narrative don’t have a place in the interactive medium, and if placed there, will not work. What would you say to that?

Depends on what they mean by traditional forms of narrative. If they mean the Aristotelian plot with the clear-cut beginning, middle and the end, then certainly videogames will struggle to conform. However, even older narrative forms exhibit a considerable degree of multiplicity, which is often not adequately focused on. With the advent of videogames and their subsequent usage of plots and generic conventions from novels and films, this multiplicity is coming more and more to the forefront. Deleuze's idea of the 'rhizomatic text' is quite useful in understanding this. I am quite surprised that people still make such extreme claims and I believe more research needs to be done in the area before coming to quick conclusions.

7. Similarly, what do you say to the view that that video games should only focus on creating good interactive gameplay (instead of focusing on story) because at the end of the day, games are supposed to be fun?

Aren't stories fun? And isn't there a link between the story and the gameplay? Pace the Ludologists, gameplay includes the narrative potential of those videogames that tell stories. The story and what an earlier GameSpot definition of gameplay calls 'how well a game plays' really go hand in hand. Consider, the Prince of Persia games or Assassin's Creed without the context and without the Prince and Altair. Difficult, isn't it?

8. Do you think that what you are doing in your role as an academic looking into video game narratives is helping video games progress as a storytelling medium?

I certainly hope it is. I have answered this somewhat in the earlier question on the results of my research. I should clarify, though, that videogames are already a narrative medium. All I'm trying to do is to make this more obvious to academics and designers alike so that there is a deeper and more serious engagement with videogames and so that people stop dismissing the gamer as a geek and the videogame as a teenager's toy. Really, it's high time people realised.

9. Do you find yourself actively trying to change the medium in the way described above? If so, how, and why?

I am not trying to change the medium as such although I earnestly desire better games that explore the narrative potential of such digital media. I was asked in a recent conference about what I thought of the Sherlock Holmes adventure games and I answered that I was greatly disappointed with their restrictive interface. I am looking at ways of tying together storytelling and design in a more efficient manner. My Sherlock Holmes should be able to hail a Hansom and wander around London looking for clues but without getting thoroughly lost and getting away from the game.

10. What’s the opposing view to video games as effective storytelling mediums? What does this view say and suggest about games?

Well, in the early days of game studies, the field was was marked by what is known as the Ludology-Narratology debate. Ludologists would often make extreme claims about videogames being only games and not stories. Markku Eskelinen famously said that when you throw a ball, you don't expect it to rebound and tell you a story. The so-called Narratologists (the term usually applies to a group literary critics who have very little or nothing to do with videogames) counter this by a claim that videogames are the same as literary texts. Both of these positions are problematic and recent scholarship in videogames acknowledges them as being so.

11. Do you think that video games can, and will, one day have the same reach as books, films and TV (i.e. other traditional storytelling mediums)?

I think they will. The industry (if I am rightly informed) has done well despite the recession. Games are fast becoming popular outside the West and Japan. From another angle, they are being used for a variety of purposes and are impacting people from all walks of life. We must remember that the initial hostility towards videogames and the difficulty in understanding them were also experienced by other narrative media such as the novel and cinema. Look at how influential these are, today.

12. Some video games have great stories, and others have great gameplay. But it’s very rare for a game to successfully marry the two and make players strengthen their engagement with the narrative through gameplay and vice versa. Why do you think that it’s so hard to make a game that has good balance between story and gameplay?

Well, making a game that is fun is always a difficult task and this holds true even for non-digital games. Similarly, there must be millions of novels being written every month the world over and we only come to know of a few of these. Videogames bring the two together and it is quite obvious that this isn't easy. It depends on the designers and what they want to achieve. If you are making a racing game like NFS then I suppose you won't think much about a story or say, you make a super-gory shooter like POSTAL (apologies to fans who think otherwise) then the story element won't be a terribly important factor. However, if you consider the Half-Life games, Max Payne, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear, Assassin's Creed, Fable (the name says it all) or Fallout 3 , the story and the gameplay go hand in hand. I'm sure there will be gamers who will disagree with me but then again, that's the point about texts - they make you think and engage with them at various levels. Videogames clearly do this.

13. Do you think new technologies and a growing appreciation of video games in society are helping video games to become better and more effective storytelling mediums?

Yes to both. Good graphics and game engines can enhance storytelling possibilities (although they do not necessarily do so always). Certainly, if more sections of society are involved with videogames then that increases the reach and the range of the medium. This impacts on the storytelling as well.

14. Finally, please feel free to add anything else you think is important for this story!

Very good questions. I've tried to answer them as best as I could but I'm sure a lot more remains to be said. Some day, I think, videogames will be analysed in classrooms much like other narrative media and some day, not very far away, I'll play my 1000th videogame.

Well, that's that then. What do you think?

note: I have since this interview done all the things that have been reported on this blogspace. Right now, I am thinking about working on walkthroughs and 'docugames' as future projects - watch this space for more. Meanwhile, I have done some research on morality and ethics in games and I will soon be writing a paper on reading Sherlock Holmes as a videogame!

Ludotopia 2010, Copenhagen

2010-05-31T10:28:00.028+01:00

Space: the final frontier. The aim was to travel in ludic spaces to where no game researcher had gone before. I think that we did it ... well pretty much!

Ludotopia, for those who missed my previous post on it, was a workshop on spaces and spatiality in videogames. The workshop ran for two days and had twelve game studies scholars from institutions in Europe and the US participating. We had all shared our papers and had two-member panels which interwove their presentations together. The topics ranged from cartography in games, pervasiveness of game spaces, narrative and spatiality, theories of space as applicable to videogames, space as threat and analyses of videogame space in terms of older conceptions of topology.

Copenhagen: the topos for Ludotopia

Given the erudition and depth of the papers, it will be difficult to summarise everything here and it is also important not to miss out some of the ever-important questions raised in the ensuing discussions. Bjarke Liboriussen (from the Uni of Southern Denmark) has already done a splendidly concise report in his blog. Bjarke's reflections are much fresher than mine and I will consult them from time to time as a supplement to my notes. After having a few days to reflect on what was said, I will, therefore, just try to capture the sense of the papers as I understood them. Okay, so here goes.

Friday, early morning session: Bjarke spoke on cartography in terms of maps and renderings. He has since summed it on his blog:

My own presentation also hinged on structures – “structures” in a specific sense taken from architectural theory. My point was that the special-purpose cartography performed by players of game worlds such as “World of Warcraft” is aimed at explicating, and attuning oneself to, structural flows of transportation, resource gathering etc., and that such cartography is indicative of what the virtual world “is” in the mind of the player. The 2D maps and the 3D spaces on screen are “renderings of the same f***ing thing”, as Nitsche concisely summed up my argument.

I was also intrigued by his comparison of videogames to Le Corbusier's Chandigarh where the 'flows' of the city are mappable on a separate layer - i.e. the sewage, electricity etc are at a distinctly separate level. I liked Michael Nitsche's question about how the code (as also needing to be reflected on a separate layer as a 'flow') should be represented in the game mapping. I also remember thinking about RTS games and how their maps would complicate the renderings but for the life of me, I can't remember the exact question. Anyway, my point was that we should avoid concentrating overmuch on shooters and give due attention to RTS (where maps are very important indeed). Finally, I had another (persistent!) comment, this time on Nek Chand's Rock Garden in Chandigarh as a response to Corbusier's Chandigarh. Any comparison of Corbusier's architecture to videogames needs to take into account the Nek Chand's who complicate things.

The next session was on the immensely interesting (for my Medieval/ Renaissance Lit training) itineraria scripta / itineraria picta relationship in videogames. Matthias Fuchs (from the Uni of Salford) presented on the complexities of mapping in videogames. Citing Kant's Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?, he illustrated the very newness and the subjectivity of the conception of orientation. Fuchs spoke on the interplay of the text and image in videogame maps. What interested me most was the discussion that followed where he cited historical opinion that space is the organ through which God perceives the world. He ended on a nicely Derridean (yes!!!) note saying that 'there is differance , an active movement involving spacing and temporalising'.

Friday, late morning : Alison Gazzard (from Uni of Bedfordshire) and Niklas Schrape (University of Film and Television Studies “Konrad Wolf” in Potsdam, Germany) presented two very convincing papers. I'm going to let Bjarke describe Alison's paper because he does it so succinctly:

[Her] work is informed by a blending of RL and VW, with her fine-grain morphology (or topology, depending on your terminology) of the structures allowing movement in game spaces (tracks/paths, gates, bridges, loop-backs, loop-alongs etc.) informed by field studies of RL mazes (e.g., the one depicted below).

We went into an extremely interesting discussion on how theme-park mazes work on this - with light and shadow, elements to confuse, dead ends etc. While I am slightly resistant to typologies of any kind, this structure obviously seems to allow the fluidity and isn't restrictive (or so I think). On another level (purely in the in-between spaces), I learnt more about Alison's ideas on warps in videogames - at DiGRA, her paper on warps was just before mine and I missed most of it out of sheer nervousness when I saw all the big names in the audience!

Now on to Niklas and his fascinating presentation on the rhetoric of Global Conflicts: Palestine. My grasp of Lotman is rather thin admittedly but Niklas's explanations were spot on and I liked the Deleuzian trend that his paper was taking. However, to drag myself away from my hobbyhorse: his paper illustrated how the topology of the game deconstructs the antithesis between Israelis and Arabs in the game.

Friday afternoon: was my own panel and Sebastian Domsch (from the Uni of Munich) presented after me. Let's talk about Sebastian's paper. I was asked to respond to it formally but although I did read it over a few times, I will still stick to my more casual response. Sebastian brought up the important distinction between spatial and sequential narratives, indicating that the spatial narratives are more suited to videogames. He also established the key importance of the 'event trigger' in understanding how narrative spaces are formed. One further point that interested me was the inclusion of the NPC's perception of space in his analysis.

The waste land in Fallout 3.

My abstract (posted earlier) will give you the gist of my paper. I was basically expanding on the importance of the concept of 'any-space-whatever' in videogames, following up from my paper in Potsdam. For me, the 'any-space-whatever' is a philosophical concept that maps very well with the space of possibility in videogames and it is not only spatial but also temporal; rather say spatio-temporal. Basically I created a description of videogame space using Auge's model of non-spaces to show how videogame wastelands conformed to the fragemented and identityless characteristics of non-spaces and pointed at earlier critical voices doing the same. Then I broke down this argument on the grounds that it was too rigid for videogames and replaced it with the friendly neighbourhood 'any-space-whatever'. All the questions that I was asked were very good ones. Some which stand out in my memory are :

Espen Aarseth (paraphrasing): I was surprised that you didn't use FEAR as an example. It seemed that was an even better example than the ones you used.

Me: True enough. I do have a discussion of FEAR in my notes but for some reason, I went for the more obvious examples of waste lands (so as to make the association more direct).

Niklas and Sebastian (Domsch): What happens to the any-space-whatever after all the quest options have been exhausted?

Me: The any-space-whatever is as much a temporal construct as it is spatial. It is an affective space that comes between the stages of perception and action. Deleuze descibes the affect as a motor impulse on a sensory plate. Basically, it is the space of possibility where a zone throbbing with possibility finally sees the creation of an event. So each time you encounter the affective any-space-whatever, there is a mesh of possibilities to actualise into an action. If in a single gameplay instance, all the quest options are actualised, the game space has moved from the state of affect into action. The player has made his or her choices.

I shan't dwell on the other issues here because I need to capture some of the ideas from the extremely rich paper by Stephan Guenzel. Stephan, for those who don't know him, is an expert on space and his presentation analysed up the various perspectives from which videogame spaces have been viewed. In the main, he described videogame spaces as exemplification. For example, he started with Aristotelian space which is the difference between two objects (ergo, there is no empty space in this paradigm) and showed Tetris as being more complex than this. Videogame space is topological rather than just topographical - as soon as one begins thinking of space, the topological element comes in. He mentioned how space in games has been seen as relational as in Leonard Euler's solution to the Koenigsberger Bridge problem, as folding space where space is seen to bend and then loop back to the start (I think one of Alison's space-types would correspond to this), as hodological where space is experience through the change in paths and in terms of field theory where the space is seen as a field with certain affordances (perhaps somewhat like the any-space-whatever but I'm not entirely sure). As opposed to the idea of any one privileged perspective characterised by a singular denotation, Stephan presented a plurality using Goodman's theory of exemplification. As Bjarke comments in his blog,

One comes out from such a dip into the philosophy of space (and this was just a dip, I’m looking forward to a full splash) with sharpened attention to the wide range of possibilities inherent in screen-based, digital media (Günzel stresses the “video” in “video games”).

Personally, I had a couple of questions about Deleuze's smooth and striated spaces (which Stephan responded to with the example of a map layer over an FPS game space - just think of when you bring up the Chernobyl map on your PDA in STALKER, although he used a better example where it shows directly as a layer on top of the map). The second I haven't asked yet: it's about Eric Soja's 'thirdspace' and how it fits to describe videogames , if at all. I remember Stephan mentioning it, but the memory's like a sieve these days ...

After that proverbial 'dip' into the philosophy of game spaces, there was another really lively presentation on meta-chronotopes and ludoforming by Espen. Chronotope is the Bakhtinian term for spatio-temporal matrix that governs narrative acts. Espen described videogames as a 'meta-chronotope' . He also modified the concept of terraforming to describe the shaping of videogame spaces as 'ludoforming'. Espen used the STALKER games as an example of ludoforming - especially, how Pripyat has been treated in the various episodes of STALKER. Obviously, the games edit quite a lot of the real-world maps to construct their ludic space. While the concept of ludoforming was more directly applied to game design in the paper, I couldn't help but wonder how it might be useful also to think of ludoforming in terms of the player's spatial experience. As in when the player starts playing a game and experiences a map (designer-created) is there a possibility of ludoforming here (based on past experiences with the map, perceptions, affections etc?). I love this concept although I am not sure if I am reading it too much in own way. Also think of the ways in which ludoforming influences the way in which we see maps in RTS games.

Saturday: Another early morning start and we were straight into Karla Hoess's presentation on games that play with the perceptual spaces especially in games such as Portal and Echochrome, where she points out how these games play with the perception of spaces. Karla's presentation also explored links with conceptions space in Renaissance art.

Michael Nitsche's presentation which followed was on the pervasiveness of game spaces. Again, I'll rely on Bjarke's concise summary:

Whereas Aarseth deals with editing of the real world, or “optimisation” for ludic purposes in Nitsche’s view, Nitsche himself focuses on “inclusion” of the real world, and the “adding on to” the real world. His work is part of the Next Generation Play project that aims at realising the “convergence between established media, such as television and print, and locative social media such as cell phones”, e.g., Andrew Robert’s (a student of Nitsche’s) location-based “Kitsune” game [this is a game that is played simultaneously on Piedmont Park, Atlanta as well as on a fictional map resembling the park on your Android device].

Michael also showed how gaming furniture is changing the real world spaces - especially living spaces. Finally, he used another example which I thought was fabulous - a Coke machine that vends a cola based on your dance / music performance! I'm not going to get many Cokes if vending machines get their way.

Michael's presentation was followed by Teun Dubbelman's (from Utrecht Uni). Like Sebastian Domsch, Teun also approached the question of narrative in videogame spaces. For him, rather than ludology or narratology, the term to be used is 'presentology'. Teun plays with the terms and brings up three logics - the ludo logic , the narrative logic and the logic of presence. According to him, when games tell stories, they do so by enhancing the spatial experience of the player. As for narrative, 'the merits of these spatial arts [whereby he means experience theatre, architecture, landscape painting and by his definition, videogames] clash on a fundamental level with those of narrative arts.' Obviously, readers of Ludus ex and those familiar with my research, will know that I disagree with the 'fundamental difference' concept. Teun, of course, is looking at a very interesting concept: the present-ness. The being present in space can be further complicated if one were to bring in the being present in time. Narrative, is being seen in strict narratological terms in the 'cinematic storytelling' that is described here (e.g. Chatman et al.) and I understand why such a conception might pose restrictions but then again, if one were to use a different method of analysing cinema (using a more affective method of perceiving cinematic narrative), the discussion might be less restricted albeit more complex.

Just realised that the previous sentence sounds very cryptic and vague. Basically, I have a sense of what I want to say but am afraid that it will end up being a mega-ramble. So maybe in a future post. The final presentation, by Sebastian Moering (from the Uni of Potsdam), was on Heideggerian conceptions of fear as applied to spatial perceptions in games. Moering used examples ranging from Pacman to the latest shooters to illustrate his point about the threat level in games being related to the nearness to an object on which you focus. This theoretical framework is obviously new to me and thereby interesting. However, I had a few questions (typically!): I was curious to know about how this affects the perception of threat from the unknown? I suppose I have an answer now combining both Sebastian's and my response but again, let's leave it for a future post. Another issue I had with this (raised also by Michael) is about how this fear-factor works for RTS games.

Very many interesting ideas here and this was probably the only workshop that kept my attention riveted for all the presentations. I was quite tired as well as being really worried about jobs and other mundane issues that I keep out of here but Ludotopia never failed to interest me despite all these. I must say that I was well impressed with ITU Copenhagen and I hope that someday I will get to work in a uni like this. All plus points here - content, presentation, environment, organisation and the list goes on. I shouldn't forget the impressive barbecue that we had after the workshop and that I partly missed.

One little thing comes to mind, now that I try put together a report exactly a week after the event. I'm not sure we focused much on RTS games and there was again a characteristic bias towards the first-person space or what have you. Perhaps next time.

I squeezed in a short tour of Copenhagen somehow. Photos here.

Borderlands: My First Foray

2010-05-12T20:17:00.002+01:00

Not much to tell really. I hope the game hasn't been overrated. I spent my first thirty minutes in it killing baby skags - ugly carnivorous creatures. Oh and I also fixed a vending machine, fired at some bandits, heard some of the same dialogue repeated and of course, respawned using a dna-technology that charged me $30. There is a friendly robot called Claptrap and some npcs but I still feel the marginalised outsider. That's okay I guess , considering that I'm writing a paper on this but I don't want to constantly have to kill mutated pittbulls to gain XP.

Seriously hoping it turns out better. So Ladies and Gentlemen, this is not a pipe ... er, I meant review.

HALO and Philosophy

2010-05-12T20:01:00.002+01:00

I'm going to miss this, sadly. Luke Cuddy put forward a cfa for a collection of philosophical essays on Halo. Great topic and I'm sure I'll have loads of linkages to make but I've seen this too late and am tired from my last battle with Deleuze and videogames for the Ludotopia paper. Three days are just not enough for me to get an abstract together given the turmoil that's ongoing at my day-job. Other game-philosophers (or anyone else who's interested) please have a think. This looks like it's going to be a book in the must-have's category. See below:

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS!

Title: Halo and Philosophy

Editor: Luke Cuddy

Abstracts are sought for a collection of philosophical essays related to the Halo series of video games, particularly the First Person Shooters (though an essay on Halo Wars will not be turned away). While the focus of the book will be the Halo games, I would like to extend the possible themes covered to other First-Person Shooter games in general such as Wolfenstein, the Doom series, Half-Life, Golden Eye, Time Splitters, etc. Discussions of the Halo universe that reference existing Halo fiction (The Flood, First Strike, etc.) are also welcome.

This volume will be published by Open Court (the publisher of The Simpsons and Philosophy, The Matrix and Philosophy, etc.) as part of their successful Popular Culture and Philosophy series. This is their third foray into a gaming-related book, the first two being The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy andWorld of Warcraft and Philosophy (which I edited and co-edited, respectively). I am seeking abstracts, but anyone who has already written an unpublished paper may submit it in its entirety. Potential contributors may want to examine other volumes in the Open Court series.

Please feel free to forward this to anyone writing within a philosophic (or philosophically-inclined) discipline who might be interested in contributing.

Possible Topics Include (but are not limited to):

Halo and Religion (Forerunners, the Halo structures as salvation, etc.)
Science fiction and gaming
Life as parasitic, different forms of intelligent life
Considerations of Personhood (Cyborg’s and Personal Identity, etc.)
Storyline Play vs. Live Play
Limiting choices to enhance gameplay (e.g. limiting weapons, grenades)
Teamwork
Levels of Freedom
Halo and Art/Creativity (atmosphere, music, etc.)
Is Cortana conscious?
First Person Shooters as cathartic
Politics: Humans vs. the Covenant (“us” vs. “them”)
The learning of virtual skills and abilities
Death/Resurrection/Infinite Lives
The power of game addiction
Halo and Violence (as it connects to violence and video games generally)
Other ethical issues
Cultural Influences and Crossover (upcoming Halo movie, etc.)

Contributor Guidelines:

Abstract of paper (100–750 words)
Brief paragraph biography for each author/co-author of the paper
Submissions must be by e-mail with MS Word attachment

Abstract Submission Deadline: Currently open until May 15th, 2010 (my initial decisions will be made around this date, with abstracts (or papers) received afterwards being considered on an as-needed basis). Email Submissions to: lcuddy12@gmail.com

Going to Ludotopia 2010

2010-05-03T11:28:00.000+01:00

I am going to Copenhagen. Yes, to Ludotopia. Ludotopia is a rather unique workshop on videogame spaces where contributors actually group together in pairs and prepare presentations on each other's papers. What a great concept!

Here are the details: Ludotopia – Workshop on Spaces, Places and Territories in Computer

Games at the IT-University Copenhagen, 27-29th May 2010.

And, here's my abstract:

Working title: Videogame Wastelands as Non-places of Possibility

Keywords: videogame spaces, non-places, wasteland, possibility, actualisation, perception

Recently, post-apocalyptic wastelands have become a favourite setting of many blockbuster videogames. Fallout 3 (Bethesda, 2008), the Stalker (THQ, 2007) games and Borderlands (Gearbox, 2009) all use the wasteland environment as a backdrop and other games are very likely to follow in their steps. Videogame spaces have been famously described as 'spaces of possibilities' (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004) because they are characterised by change, both procedural and random, as well as by the construction of a narrative and ludic environment as an ongoing process rather than as a fixed entity. Given their potential for flux and nomadic and unsettled experiences of their inhabitants, it can be argued that wastelands in Fallout 3 and Stalker can also be seen as non-places.

The concept of ‘non-places’ introduced by the French anthropologist Marc Augé describes places like airport terminals, supermarkets and others that are not 'relational, historical and concerned with identity'. (Augé, 1995) Void of relations and identity, these spaces are characterised by solitary individuality and the ephemeral. In games like Fallout 3, for example, the various points that the player can visit in the wasteland can be seen as non-places: the historical connections have been lost or subverted and the player, aptly named the 'lone wanderer', is an outsider everywhere. However, Augé’s definition does not fully represent videogame spaces. The wastelands in Fallout 3 and in Stalker actively shape gameplay when events are actualised from a series of possibilities that videogame spaces consist of. Considering this, it would be useful to extend notions of ‘non-place’ to include Gilles Deleuze's concept of the 'any-space-whatever' or a 'virtual space, whose fragmented components might be assembled in multiple combinations, a space of yet-to-be actualised possibilities.' (Bogue, 2003)

Although the relation between Deleuze's and Augé's ideas on space has been debated by critics, the wasteland metaphor describing videogame space explores this connection in-depth. Conversely, the connected notion of the non-place provides a route for researching the lack of identity and the multiplicity that are characteristic of videogame spaces. This paper, in viewing post-apocalyptic wastelands as non-places, argues that the wasteland scenarios not coincidental choices for game-environments but metaphors that describe how emergent types of videogame spaces are perceived.

References

Augé, M., 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London: Verso.

BORDERLANDS (2009), Gearbox Software, PC, Xbox, PlayStation 3

Bogue, R., 2003. Deleuze on Cinema, New York: Routledge.

Deleuze, G., 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, London: Athlone.

FALLOUT 3 (2008), Bethesda Softworks, PC, Xbox, PlayStation 3

Salen, K. & Zimmerman, E., 2003. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R: THE SHADOW OF CHERNOBYL (2007), THQ, PC

(446 words)

Ada

2010-03-24T23:35:00.003Z

Today is Lady Ada Lovelace's birthday. She is one person I respect hugely and I'm surprised that she wasn't remembered today as much as I expected her to be. In fact, I don't think anyone in my university remembered despite the fact that we have a building called 'Ada Byron King'!

Anyway, here's a paper that I wrote a while ago on Lady Lovelace and multimedia (I think I've even tried to imagine her as a gamer).

Play as Excavation of Meanings

2010-03-21T02:20:00.011Z

A casual glance on the Edge Magazine's website brought this to my attention:

Ian Bogost presented to the audience of the GDC Microtalks session that players play games can be crafted with meanings that players can interpret through play.

Using Ezra Pound’s 1913 poem In a Station of the Metro as his keystone (“The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.”) Bogost explained, “The poem doesn't tell a story of any kind. Instead, it presents two sets of clear yet unrelated images. The poem creates equivalence, but performs no synthesis. It is up to the reader to reconcile them.”

This technique - leaving it to the reader to “answer” the questions the poem raises themselves, is something that Will Wright had most embraced of current game designers, said Bogost, quoting Wright’s claims that while “there are a lot of limitations with what we can do with character simulation” abstraction can allow designers to “offload” the missing simulations into the player’s head. (read the full article)

That Ian Bogost has taken the message to such a prominent level is impressive and heartening. It is important to consider the narrative aspect of games and to recognise that this affects the way in which we reach the very heart of narrative itself. This multiplicity of meaning creation and the fact that much of it stays with the reader is not a new element as the example from Pound's poem illustrates. The Edge article goes on to say how the narrative creation by the reader is not an abdication of authorial responsibility but that authorship itself is redefined here. There is very strong authorship but the authorship is that of creating situations with behaviours where meaning is constructed by free play with the things that the author leaves behind. Bogost uses the emphatic metaphor of excavating a ruin to describe this. Ruins (and this reminds me of Borges's 'The Circular Ruins') are loaded with unexplored meaning and can become rich spots of history when these meanings are interpreted. In themselves, ruins are spots of immense potentialities where the excavation can yield myriad different meanings (I am thinking of Shelley's Ozymandias). It is great that these ideas are finally percolating through the boundaries of academia into wider expanse of videogame culture.

Ian's talk embodies something that I have been trying to emulate, albeit not as successfully. Today was a case in point. I went to GameStation today and used my student card to get a discount. The shop assistant was probably not convinced about my being a student (and rightly so :-) ) so she asked me what I studied. 'Videogames' - pat came the reply. Then she asked me (as I'm often asked) whether I made them. After this of course things didn't so well. I said that I researching the stories in videogames and analysing videogames as texts. She looked lost and handing me the receipt, she said, 'Yes, I understand ... it's very difficult to explain what you are doing.' Well, I had my answer.

This has happened to me time and again but this time, I've vowed not to let it happen again. As a game researcher and a long-time gamer, some things are so evident to me that I forget that there are millions of people who do not know the basics about videogames or think that these games are instruments of evil or whose experience of videogames is restricted to Wii tennis. Surely, if we need these people to appreciate the merits of researching games, we need to simplify concepts and use lucid metaphors with whom they can identify. Pretty much like Ian does in his talk.

After all Souvik, it's unfair to assume that people are as bothered about temporality in game narratives as you are ... even if they work in GameStation.

Modern Warfare 2: Review.

2010-03-19T02:59:00.014Z

Unimpressed. It was good to be 'Soap' MacTavish again but then again, I guess that was the problem - I didn't find any novelty in the game. The plot was pretty stale and I'm tired of having to be an American Ranger / Marine or British SAS. At least, in the older CoDs one got to play as the Russians as well - Enemy at the Gates style. Are there no other armies in the modern world that are worth fighting in? I'll go for a Foreign Legion game! If I want to court controversy, I'll go for a Hurt Locker videogame or a Battle of Algiers videogame. Now that would have all the tension of a violent FPS but with a complex plot and multiple viewpoints. Not the viewpoints of the good anglo-saxon world versus the bad everything else. CoD 6 could well be renamed 'Blame it on the Russians' - typical Hollywood Cold War plot that's been done to death a hundred times over. Seriously, the invasion of Washington D.C. by the Russians was the ultimate tacky element. Sadly, it also reflects the paranoia of a superpower. Anyway, perhaps the tackiness was the result of an intentional subtext by the designers: I noted that I spent the same time and effort in defending and dying for a) a Burger King outlet, b) a sample American residential area and c) the White House (Whiskey Hotel!) , of course. So the equation seemed liked a+b+c = America and embody the American dream that you stand for. At the end of American campaign, my companions (or is it me?) say that we'll bring Moscow to ruin: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, disturbingly. Of course, the whole fracas is the result of a misunderstanding created by two rogue characters in the USA and Russia. All the familiar formulae for a successful Hollywood movie are punched together here but the game very predictably leaves off the 'making sense of it all' to the next part. I really wish Activision invested more in the actual story but then that's me and I'm sure loads of people enjoyed being part of the US and British forces and changing the world through an on-sofa shootfest. Actually, the game reminds me of Die Hard: thoroughly enjoyable for what it is but something that has become the too common and bulk-standard entertainment which could be exchanged for something that explores the issues in greater depth.

The graphics and sequences are good but not better than Modern Warfare 1 I thought (but I played both on Direct x 9, Geforce 8800 GTX and XP Prof 2). MF 1 excels and far surpasses the second game in its sequences and its plot. The Al-Assad plot (although a tad tacky but quite enjoyable , almost like 24, which also has an eponymous character), the spine-chilling Pripyat sequence (especially where a whole battalion walks past while you hide in the grass), the sniper sequence where you try to kill Zakhaev and of course, those unforgettable moments on the gunship where you blow up pixellated enemies still haunt me. I can recollect nothing as impressive as the above in the second game. Except ...

Except the one bit I was not supposed to play for moral reasons. Yes, I was the US infiltrator in the terrorist squad that gunned down all the people in Moscow Airport (now renamed). It was really disturbing, very disturbing. I tried killing one of my terrorist comrades in rage but then the game would kill me off and not let me progress. So it made me a bystander to the carnage but I felt I needed the lesson. This would certainly have made a valuable addition to my trauma paper (co-written with Jenna Pitchford) had I experienced this sequence when I was trying to address the criticism. Play this sequence if you have any doubts about the moral trauma that videogames give rise to /point to. You're not shooting zombies or aliens any more and turning an automatic on people, baggage and glass (somewhat scarily reminds me of the Bombay massacre in 2008) - yes, that makes a difference. To me it does.

The other thing I liked about the game was that whatever you do, your player-character is killed off by the game-plot in a few sequences (opposed to the one in MF 1). For me, this does quite a few things: it highlights the complex phenomenon of death in games and by subverting success shocks the player in his or her state of involvement.

I have quite roundly chastised the designers but I am not so sure now that I remember how the game's credits are designed. These are by far the most innovative credits I've seen in a game for a long time. I was reviewing the game not the credits so the comments above stand; however, in this case, one is left feeling that if one ignores the credits, one misses the point. The credits show the Activision studio where the designers (their virtual selves) walk around the lobby and various parts of their office amongst seemingly alive models of the game-characters who are constantly acting out bits of their in-game roles while standing in areas with a placard about their role in front of them like in a museum or art gallery. The whole place is some kind of videogame Hollywood. Or even a gallery of movie art (there is a section called the Call of Duty museum in the game). Activision is certainly showing the game as an artifice and the plot for what it is - a consumer-friendly tale that the public is assumed to love. I thought when I played the game, that it was way too stereotyped and at times, couldn't help wishing there was some reason behind this. For the first time, I think, I watched the full credits: the designers made their point; they messed up your involvement yet again, made it a meta-experience and left you with a critique of the entertainment industry. That's how I like to read it ... I haven't asked any of the designers.

As a game, I definitely rate the first game higher but that's not to say I didn't enjoy this one at all. I definitely wouldn't put it in my list of ten best gameplay experiences. However, reading the game like I do, from cover to cover, I think I'll take back the 'unimpressed' that I started this post with.

Commenting on a comment

2010-03-05T04:55:00.004Z

Recently, commenting on my post 'Qwerty futures' Andrew said...

It is a problem with any control interface, the granularity, the fact you're working on a 2d plane.

Precision is a major thing to have fun. Or rather, it prevents frustration. No one likes bad control schemes (or poor controllers) - they mean whatever the player does, they fail, lose, or simply take more time the necessary to do things!

Just see the reason why there are no real precise things with the Wii, and you'll see why certain things are pretty impossible with gestures. Even humans are terrible at guessing without stringently precise gestures (Signal flags, deaf sign language, drivers hand signals...) what someone is indicating. It's kind of going backwards using gestures of any kind!

1 March 2010 12:38

I like this and I think it should be a post in its own right. The limitations of signs (especially in the day and age of the 'floating signifier' and the problematised signified) is something that people never highlight when they open vistas of promise with new gesture-based gaming technologies. As Andrew says, the keyboard provides a degree of granularity that is not yet matched by gesture-based technologies. Strangely enough, it is the latter that people consider to be more liberating ... well, all I can say is 'not yet'. If you wish to talk to Andrew here's his site. This last paragraph, however, is not something I have discussed with him so our views may differ.

Heavy Rain and What I'm Missing

2010-03-05T04:04:00.003Z

I first came across Heavy Rain in a Games TM review and I loved the concept of the origami killer. With such plot concepts coming into games, the number of people questioning the role of narratives in videogames cannot be too high. I can't play Heavy Rain because I don't have a PS3 and they won't release for the PC. More's the pity.

Was a bit surprised when David Cage commented that Heavy Rain was best experienced when played once (or something to that effect). Given that the game is reported to have reasonably good branching narratives and twists, I am not sure about how true the comment is even though it comes from the guy who conceptualised the game. As I've always argued there is no The Videogame but rather videogames and the variety and range of the medium needs to be kept in mind always --- so if Cage is after a linear concept for a videogame or is moving towards interactive fiction (or in his case, cinema - because I believe he described his earlier work Fahrenheit as such), I have no problems. Nevertheless, like books are generally considered to have pages (I speak of the codex here), games have an inherent level of branching in them that makes every other attempt different - albeit to a different extent. I've never said that this doesn't happen in other media but that it's quite obvious in games. So if I had Heavy Rain, presuming I could afford a PS3, I would play it many times and I'm sure enjoyed it differently each time. If ... then .., if ... then ...

Lara Croft Blog

2010-02-24T12:26:00.002Z

Just came across a Lara Croft blog. The random next blog feature in blogger is to be thanked. The blog is called 'Adventures of Lara Croft' and is a sort of after-action report on Tomb Raider games. The author is quite passionate about Lara and posts videos of his games and Lara Croft's adventures in mods. He tells stories, offers advice on gameplay and tests out mods.

Another entry for my walkthroughs and AAR database.

A sample story cited by Ashley (the putative author of the blog) begins thus:

In the snowy mountains of Alaska Lara has to make a forced landing with her helicopter because of engine trouble. Now she does not know how to get home on time for Christmas...

The rest is to be found here. There's so much of meta stuff that game researchers like myself miss. Videogames are still a very young area and they are growing very fast in different directions. The AAR and walkthrough are examples of areas that are in urgent need of research and exploration.

Boing Boing Reports on a Post-Apocalytpic Lego City

2010-02-23T13:10:00.008Z

Nice one from Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing:

"Flickr user DeGobbi's 'Crawler Town' is an insanely detailed and most magnificent rolling cyberpunk city executed in Lego: "Crawler town roams the barren wastes of a post steam-punk world after cataclysmic climate change do to excessive coal use. Several such cities exist but Crawler town is the most popular due to the Aero 500 hydrogen fuel cell Air races that are held. Many people travel the wastes to Crawler town for vacation and to enjoy rare luxuries like Pizza, fresh vegetables and Beer. Travelling the wastes in search of minerals and aquifers ( vital for survival) the mobility of the city keeps it away from the vicious sand storms of the wastes."

Click here to read more and see Crawler Town. If you get some photos be sure to send them to Ludus ex. I wonder whether Crawler Town has miniaturised the difference engines and whether there is some kind of Teilhardian noosphere that its denizens can plug into (I've just talked about the noosphere commenting on a post, today). Just found the actual Flickr photos here. Apparently the town runs on solar and wind power so the difference engines would have to be 'fired' in a different way. The aero500 races look cool and the crawlers on which the town moves are the envy of many. A Flickr commentator wants to integrate them into a project of his.

Crawler Town kinda reminds me of Rivet City. Wonder why ...

CoAE!

2010-02-21T17:00:00.005Z

Nottingham's suddenly become more of a happening place for me as far as videogames are concerned. In an earlier post, I mentioned GameCityNights that's being organised by the inimitable Iain Simons (he of the 100 Videogames and GameCity fame). Besides this, Nottingham Trent University has offered me a role in designing a postgrad course on games as part of the Champions of Academic Enterprise programme. The name's a tad too grand for me but it's great that I have some role in game research at NTU. Anyway, I prefer calling it CoAE (Kwa!) - sounds nicer.

I've got some great team members: Russell Murray (he wrote the 'Poirot' screenplays) and Simon Schofield (artist, coder and PKD fan: Simon's got a multimedia installation called 'Kipple Pond' in Sheffield Museum - go see it!). I'm probably still not allowed to say what exactly we have planned but this course is going to aim at exploring unconventional uses of videogames.

Qwerty futures.

2010-02-18T23:44:00.005Z

I've always played videogames using the qwerty keyboard. Well, almost always because when I was around six, someone took me to a videogame arcade and put me on a racing game machine that had a steering wheel. I've won many races since but it was always with frantic taps on the arrow keys of my pc. Yes, the consoles have never appealed to me and I will only use the joystick for the occasional flight sim. To make matters worse, I'm pathetic at the Wii because, somehow I don't like the games in there (maybe Wii Cricket would make me happier). Come December, we'll have Project Natal and will be playing games with gestures in air. I'm not sure how I'll be able to adapt to this entirely new way of playing. I'm also thinking if I'll need to. The reason for this is a conversation I had yesterday evening about how we communicate online and in general through computers Jim Morrow from Theory, Culture & Society was discussing whether it is at all possible to displace the qwerty keyboard with some other medium such as touch, thought etc to communicate between ourselves. Obviously, videogames are seeing many changes and will see more. However, the games that I like (strategy games for example) still don't play very well in consoles (Empire: Total War doesn't have a console version) and almost all console games can be played equally well in the pc. I know there are many who will disagree and they have a right to since I am a console newbie comparatively. Anyway, that's my perception. I like games that tell stories and while the days of adventure games and text-based games are history now, the keyboard is still holds sway in in-game multiplayer speak and is a pretty versatile delivery device for communication with the pc. Of course, there is always the voice and now, the gesture and together they will prove a powerful combination that can revolutionise how people play videogames. The keyboard, however, is hardly on its way out. In online MMOs and systems like Second Life , the mode of communication is generally the keyboard and SL even has the typing animation as representative of communication. The other thing I was thinking of was the way the freelook functionality (with the mouse) has revolutionised possibilities in gaming - how will it translate into the Natal screen? What will it do to the sense of involvement to feel the illusion of reality snap with the realisation that on turning your face sideways the game world disappears (in the free-look mechanism, the eyes are supposedly within the screen but from the videos I've seen, the Natal experience seems to have the eye outside - but I may be wrong).

No, the keyboard isn't going - not even if we replace the clicks by hand gestures. Unless we devise a way off talking to others through the computer and of talking to computers by some other means ... maybe thought. Anyway, I'd better get ready for work --- mind-controlled devices are too blue skies for a Friday morning. I've got the weekend for the daydreams. I'll plug myself into a game (Existenz-style) and enjoy thought-control.

The Avatar Experience

2010-02-15T21:16:00.031Z

I'm struggling to keep up with things. I watched Avatar about three weeks ago and I would settle for no less than the much-feted 3-D version. Since then, I've been meaning to write about it. I found the film riddled with cliches to the extreme. War on terror, battle for resources, environmental issues and colonisation - all the boxes were ticked. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it - specially the fun way in which Hollywood constructs everything that's not Western as quaintly primitive (blue skin, long ears and the capacity to link with ancestors through your ears) but bizarrely pristine and mystical. However, that's not what I'm going to talk about.

It's the title that intrigues me. Avatar: not many know that it's a Sankrit word meaning reincarnation, especially the famous ten incarnations of Vishnu. In recent cyber terms, 'avatar' has taken on a slightly different meaning - thanks to Neal Stephenson's novels. It is an 'incarnation' literally but excluding the sense of temporal recurrence that accompanies the Hindu use of the word. The movie uses 'avatar' just so - as the cyber embodiment of a character. As a game researcher (and long time gamer), I am quite familiar with this meaning as well. In my DiGRA paper I've argued that the understanding of avatar in game terms remains incomplete if we do not consider its temporal aspect as well. I won't shout about that now ...

What I do want to talk about is the film's use of the concept from the gaming scenario. On the CNet News site, David Terdiman quotes virtual worlds expert Bruce Damer as saying, "If you combine the Wii or (Microsoft's Project Natal) with augmented reality glasses or...just (hold) up your smart phone, you will 'see' into the virtual world that is cast all around you," Quite possibly.

If Natal delivers what it promises that will be amazing, there is no doubt about that. Whatever be the level of engagement with the 'virtual' world, the awareness of the player is not totally immersed in the experience of the videogame. Instead, there is what Gonzalo Frasca calls 'outmersion' (the awareness that you are not immersed or completely in the game world) and meta-outmersion (the awareness that are aware of being outmersed).

The film, Avatar, does not, contrary to many, simplify the process of identification of the avatar-body and the human operator. In a way, there is a similarity as well as a difference between this film and the slightly earlier release, The Surrogates. The humans in the latter seem more absorbed in their surrogate existence. The whole world lives and plays out in their surrogate existence or using their avatars, barring a small enclave which refuses to use surrogates. Jake, the protagonist in Avatar, however, is always aware of his other existence because the avatar he uses / inhabits is also aware that he is on a fact-finding mission. Further, in his avatar he is actually dealing with real creatures. In Surrogates, the protagonist (Bruce Willis) gets to encounter real humans as well, although other characters don't experience this as much. In Surrogates, people use their avatars to do things in their real day-to-day world whereas in Avatar , the use of avatars is restricted to a unexplored alien world. The externality of the avatar depends on this to an extent. In both cases, the real world interferes and clashes with the avatar. In the movies, real-world characters attack the avatars as well as their real world selves - sometimes simultaneously in the two different zones of real and avatar activity. An example of this in Avatar is when the US Marines move in to destroy Pandora and have to fight one of their own, Jake, in his avatar-self. Almost at the end of the movie, the chief antagonist tries to kill Jake's real and virtual selves simultaneously thus demarcating the differences while showing how they function together. There are scenes in both movies where it does seem that the involvement of the real and the avatar self are seamless but both the movies, albeit to a different degree, question the seamlessness that they point towards in their own way. The involvement with the avatar is not one of straightforward immersion and 'flow'; rather, it incorporates an experience of outmersion and meta-outmersion. The endings of the movies, of course, move towards extremes: Surrogates ends with the rejection of avatars and Avatar ends with the total passage of Jake into his avatar self. Taken together, both movies complicate our understanding of the 'avatar' as understood in current videogame parlance: the fact that two movies linked with a somewhat similar entity end in such diametrically opposite endings makes it difficult to deem any of the endings as a plausible way of understanding the avatar-experience. Instead, this reiterates the point that the experience of involvement in a virtual world through a mediated self is complex and varied. Immersion in the sense of submergence in a virtual reality does not explain this situation and it is great that a much contested idea in videogames (however involving and realistic) is being discussed by older media such as cinema with due attention being paid to its complexity.

In sum, I'm quite happy that both the films throw open more questions about the mediality of the avatar. As for the temporal aspect, I believe that although it is intrinsic to the understanding of the avatar, we will see it emerging in discussions and representations by the media in due course.

Newsmap search: Videogame, date:14.02.2010

2010-02-14T16:14:00.007Z

I think Newsmap is cool. Above is today's newsmap for videogames.

My FaceBook tells me that it is GameCity Night on 25th Feb!

2010-02-14T13:24:00.008Z

GameCity organisers have brought yet another fresh idea to the Nottingham gaming scenario: GameCityNights. This is a monthly event comprising'a series of brilliant liveshows, bringing some much needed GameCity magic to the months that don't begin with 'O'.

This month's event is being hosted at Antenna (not sure where that is but check out this link). Hello Games, creators of the forthcoming IGF nominated thrill-fest ‘Joe Danger’, will be sharing secrets and I am going to go. Can't stay till 1:30 am though - have a 9 to 5 job to go to the next day.

Check out details on FaceBook.

Playing with Empire

2010-02-08T19:55:00.044Z

I've been playing Empire: Total War (read the review at GameSpot) since Christmas. Almost for an hour every day. No surprises therefore if I am getting bored of it now. I'm playing as Great Britain and am now master of almost all of mainland Europe and a considerable part of America. I've been putting off my invasion of India even though the year is very near 1757 (when the historical Battle of Plassey happened) but I'm not sure whether it is because I am reluctant to attack my country (in real life) or whether things haven't just been expedient enough. Britain, under me, is as strong a power on land as on the sea and I've been able to march my armies into most places so far making sea landings unnecessary. That is not to say that I neglect the naval side of things as I've got a powerful flotilla of all kinds of ships and various fleets sailing the different oceans. The navy, however, is mostly busy fighting other navies and raiding trade routes - hence, the deviation of historical fact. I've not attacked India and I'm already too bored to play any more.

Screenshot from Empire: Total War. Note how a large chunk of Europe is now part of the British Empire (the red colour on the map at the bottom-left). The open window shows the basics stats that are needed to keep the population of Dublin happy. Empire, here, is about a statistical balance and a rule-bound game. I am surprised that it is possible to think of it in these terms about real empires.

As I ponder what it would have been like if this version of alternative history were to have happened (after all talking about games and temporality is my hobbyhorse), it is hard to shake off what I know had happened in reality. Playing with Empire can be an intriguing experience for someone who comes from a country that was colonised for over 250 years. This is as much because of what the game does as because of what it misses. A few days ago, I was reading Plain Tales from the British Raj and watching an old TV serial called The Jewel in the Crown (for the uninitiated, this the name for India in the days of the Raj). These popular attempts to describe Empire are obviously depictions of the Raj as seen by coloniser - albeit sometimes in retrospect. Despite the best intentions of portraying the less visible aspects of Empire, these accounts miss the voice of the subaltern (if the subaltern can speak at all, that is). It is not surprising that games based on empire miss much of what it was all about.

Obviously, the people, both individuals and the collective social sectors, are discounted. The intricacies of commerce and of supplanting the extant system of government with a foreign one are not reflected or greatly simplified. However, I believe that even the perhaps all too simplistic presentation of the workings of Empire is nonetheless of vital importance to any reading of imperialism. Age of Empires (similar title to E.J. Hobsbawm's book) is one of the older examples of games based on Empire. There have been many similar games before it but it is one that I keep returning to since it was amongst the first computer games that I played. The demo version which had reached me through a friend ran with some hiccups on Pentium 1 pc and I was trying to build the Hittite empire in Kadesh with a god's-eye view of my part of the world. The reality of the game consisted of armies, some key buildings and resources such as stone, gold and food. With stone I could build walls to keep out enemies while food and gold gave me my army. In the first sections of the game, I needed these to keep others from destroying me while in the subsequent sections, the main purpose was to capture other people's resources and increase my line of sight over the map. What I could see also , therefore, became a source of my power in a somewhat Foucauldian sense. As the Age of Empires series matured, the armies and their capabilties grew and so did the historical grasp of the games. Soon Kadesh was replaced by William Wallace or the armies of Genghiz Khan. The importance of trade increased and the buildings grew more and more complex in their types and functions. There were civilians in the games but they served mostly to chop wood, farm and mine stone or gold. Governance was mostly a military preserve and although the clergy was an important unit, its purpose was to heal soldiers and convert enemy soldiers. Conversion was accompanied by audio sounding like incantations and happened almost like magic. Entertaining as the games were, they were like huge databases involving micromanagement. Adding bits of data and destroying others' access to the data was the strategy for winning the game. While these games highlighted the perspective of viewing empires as giant databases and large armies as the means of maintaining access to resources and land, the association of empire with the control over rock , food and stone made empire seem like a simple resource-management game. There was one clear omission: no allowance was made for dissent from those captured or converted. So in a sense, an empire once established would remain forever.

Empire: Total War is different. As a turn-based game, it lets the player see the world as a flat navigable map on which it is possible to play on the 'macro' level in deciding troop and resource deployment, researching technology and having the computer 'autoresolve' battles. Conquered sections of the map get coloured by your nations colour. Under me (well the king is George III, the game says), almost the whole of Europe is a big red blur: England has her European empire at last! Unlike in Age of Empires, this game is turn-based and therefore, there is more of a sense of time --- and of history. Armies and navies can move only a certain distance during a turn, research takes a number of turns to complete and the mood of the populace can swing after a turn. There is resistance from the colonised peoples, armies run away without fighting to the end and diplomacy can tilt fortune in your favour. An elected parliament governs England and the fortunes of its empire but beyond the traits of the individual ministers influencing some set policy outlines, the government doesn't seem to matter. Most of the game concentrates on the army and the navy. Although, there is a 'philosophy' tab in the section where the empire researches its technology, most of the philosophical advancements are detrimental to the maintenance of empire and there is little incentive to research them: I am currently having my 'gentleman scientists' research the 'light infantry doctrine'. Very sound for an aspiring imperialist. Cities and towns are important for their special attributes and are places that form the hubs of trade and popular activity. Having certain buildings, some specific levels of taxes and popular satisfaction (these being interlinked) and of course, a garrison will keep conquered areas under control. If these are altered due to other circumstances (such as having to move an army away from its barracks in the city), disruptions may occur in the empire. Other nations also constantly threaten the balance.

There are obvious areas where the developers could improve the game: diplomacy, trade and economics still remain quite rudimentary. One significant omission would be any method creating alliances whereby allies could agree to share their spoils; another one, would be ways to implement realpolitik or divide et impera and the list goes on. However, instead of what the game doesn't do, let's focus on what it does.

It creates an environment for modelling empires. As letting other nations amass resources will be detrimental to the player (as he or she will soon be attacked), the game's logic justifies empire as a necessity. Empire forms the main element of the game's title but the next part is equally important. 'Total War' is the definitive way of maintaining Empire. The two entities seem almost interdependent. As a model, although deficient, the game seems to capture some of the salient features of the mechanics of Empire. Empire depends on control of cities and towns and these are maintained by stabilising some parameters in the games database. There is a certain amount of money required to maintain control over a region and the rest goes into the imperial coffers - sometimes to be spent on creating more soldiers or technology to support more expansion. When a region is first conquered, it seems more resistant to the conquerors - over time, this resistance seems to weaken in the game. As far as research of technologies goes, it seems totally harnessed to the empire's martial needs - other developments that come with a cost to imperial stability although of huge benefits otherwise will be rejected by the ordinary player. No doubt the game does not think of how technology designed to serve Empire could be used against it - but then again, neither did the imperialist officialdom. The game also encourages the building of imperial bases or hubs and a reasonable control of the sea. Basically, the game works on the logic of the need to expand to maintain power and obviously, the need for power as the way to survive. The whole game is set on the assumption that the abovementioned parameters need to be maintained constantly and that they can be maintained by a set of corresponding processes. Empire is a rule-based system that functions only when certain assumptions are made and certain factors taken for granted. Military might is often relied on as a standing solution for all problems and nations with strong standing armies (and empires) are given nation status. Anything not corresponding to the above is legitimate territory for being carved up by empires. Finally, the game also requires a forced assumption of sameness among all the conquered nations - although there is some diversity in traits, the conquered nations are treated as one common factor. For example, anyone opposing the imperialist rule becomes a rebel and usually (not always though) has weaker forces .

As we think of Empire as a game, it might be worth thinking about whether nineteenth century politicians were also making similar assumptions and playing their politics by similar kinds of rules that we see in the empire videogames. Whether it be Metternich and Castlereagh in Europe or Richard Wellesley in India, not to mention the chain of diplomats who followed in their wake, the concept of Empire has depended on the assumptions that ignored or discounted the colonised populations except as resources and certain time-tested methods of governance supposed to be effective in administering any part of the world that came under Empire: certain practices such as the annual tour of the districts that the British developed in India were applied in very disparate conditions in regions like the Malay Peninsula. The result, obviously, was not promising but that is another story. Another key characteristic, besides the imposition of a rule-bound framework, whhich prompt a comparison of Empire with games is the competition that always marked Empire. Taking the British Empire as a case in point, we might note that its rivalry with Russia in the Eurasian region came to be known as the 'Great Game' - again, no coincidence as it was a rule-bound race for regions.

However, games are not without their problems. The essential premise of a game is that it takes place outside/alongside reality (I won't bring in the magic circle debate here but I'm sure I can make the point without it). So in playing Empire like the 'Great Game', the assumptions and the rules constantly get subverted by the diversity and the randomness of the constituents of Empire. Even in Empire: Total War , the random element constantly subverts the rule-bound strategies. As the player struggles against the game in his attempt to maintain his empire, there is a constant feeling that Empire is not as stable as it is made out to be.

Return to Ludus Ex

2010-01-31T12:43:00.002Z

It's been quite a while since I have blogged. In fact, Ludus ex has missed a lot that happened on the gaming scene. GameCity (I came away with mixed feelings from the few events that I managed to attend), my first and last attempt to play Lego Rock Band (again in GameCity where I thoroughly made a fool of myself onstage), another games and philosophy conference at Potsdam (missed because I didn't get the visa on time), several DIGAREC talks that I had planned to attend and loads of other things which have simply slipped the radar. I did, however, 'finish' Fallout 3 in seven sleepless nights and I am conquering Lithuania and Mexico in Empire: Total War. I badly injured my wrist right after I bought COD 4-2 so I couldn't pick up the M-16.

Most of my time has been spent at more mundane jobs and the hellish experience of writing applications. No more needs to be said. One very faint silver lining to the cloud is that Nottingham Trent Uni has very recently given me a small opportunity to work on designing a videogames course - 4 hours a week but it's a start.

Anyway, I've just written a piece on Fallout 3 and posted it below. It's something I've always wanted to do : a close reading of a videogame narrative much as I would do for a literary text. I've been preaching the theory for the last seven / eight years now with hesitant attempts (most of them during my Masters degree) to speak my mind through practice. So here goes. The piece obviously is wanting in academic rigour, references, bibliography and stylistic polish - this is a draft of a draft of a draft but I'd be grateful to hear what you think. Just wanted to get the thoughts down and point to what can be done with videogame texts. Most of the piece has been written on buses, in pubs and in the brief interstices of time that I could manage during the day.

There will be more postings soon - both academic and just totally ludic.

'The Water of Life Freely': Water and the Wasteland in Fallout 3

2010-01-31T12:18:00.004Z

'I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely'.

King James Bible, Revelations 21:6

'Shantih shantih shantih'

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (l. 433)

T.S. Eliot's The WasteLand ends with the ancient Hindu incantation for peace repeated in triplicate. In Hindu ritual, the chant of peace is always accompanied by a sprinkling of water from the river Ganges. Water has always been of vital importance in the sustenance of the threefold virtues of fertility, purification and peace. At the same time, however, it is also the cause of death – in Eliot's poem there are many allusions of drowning and death. Like The WasteLand, the videogame Fallout 3 brings to us yet another tale of water and wastelands. Set in an irradiated wasteland roughly located around a nuclear war-ravaged Washington DC, Fallout 3 is all about water. Water is seen as the panacea for the restoring the badly damaged values of humanity. The wasteland landscape, like Eliot's, seems to be crying out for the ritual sprinkling of water and the consequent restoration of peace.

Fallout 3, despite its high popularity ratings, has not received the critical attention it deserves, arguably by gamers and non-gamers alike. On reading it as a wasteland narrative and focusing particularly on the game's implicit preoccupation with water, it is evident that Fallout 3 brings a further complexity to the treatment of similar themes in current Humanities' genres. Connecting the game's narrative with literary genres such as nuclear-holocaust fiction and SF or to literary classics reveals a deep exploration of a wide range of themes, which, cross-link with each other in relation to the protagonist's quest for purification, peace and of course, water.

The Lone Wanderer, as the protagonist is called, is the subject of legends after he brings pure water to a world partially destroyed by nuclear war where almost all the water is irradiated. However, the legends may vary given the multiple endings of the game, some of which have darker associations of selfishness, cowardice or even racism. Water, for all its associations with purity, is after all only a resource and as such, a way of wielding power. Another close association, already indicated, is that with religion. The key argument of Fallout 3 comes from the book of Revelations: 'I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.' The other and more obvious connection between water and the vast area of the Capital Wasteland (roughly present-day D.C and outlying areas) is, ironically, the absence of water in the stony rubbish reminiscent of Eliot's poem. There is, obviously, a section of the game that features the Potomac river and others that show areas submerged in water. This, however, is 'dirty' water – deadly, irradiated and often the home of dangerous mutants appropriately named Mirelurks. Pure water, although in extremely short supply, is available in small quantities throughout the game and before the Lone Wanderer manages to fulfil his quest, the only source of purified water in the game is seen in the town of Megaton which is fighting a constant battle to maintain its water purifying plant in working condition. Indeed, one of the minor quests that the player finds in Megaton is to repair its leaking water pipes. It is not clear whether the other large human habitations in the game, such as Rivet City (an erstwhile aircraft carrier) and the Citadel have any store of pure water.

The player's / Lone Wanderer's journey begins, not far from Megaton, in an underground vault built to protect humanity against nuclear destruction. The vault is a hermetic area where the self-contained society is cut off from the wasteland outside. Even here, although not too obvious, there is a mention of the game's key water theme: the text of Revelations 21:6 is framed and displayed in the Overseer's office. The protagonist's father is a scientist who almost perfected the research for purified water and much of the game is a quest to find him after he has escaped the Vault – unknown to the player, this also implies that he or she is now on the quest for pure water.

Water is used to highlight a gulf between pure and impure. As a game, Fallout 3 is a shooter and it also corresponds to many generic criteria such as those of survival horror games and roleplaying games. As such, it is game fraught with the need for violent survival strategies. The latter, are employed against those who are morally placed as 'impure'. The game also has a moral aspect where there is a penalty for committing some actions using a system that awards or deducts karma as points in the overall score. There are often situations when the categories of pure, impure and evil become problematic. For example, there are various mutated creatures in the Wasteland that are dangerous but their violence is often not a reasoned-out evil action but rather a territorial instinct aimed at survival. The ghouls, or humans who have been horribly mutated by the nuclear fallout, are a case in point. As the player enters Megaton, he or she might come across Gob the ghoul bartender at Moriarty's pub. Gob, now ill-treated and insulted by his master, will reminisce about the city of Ghouls where he comes from. Gob is good-natured, hardworking and in all respects save his mangled features, he is human. In much of the Wasteland, however, the ghouls are wild and feral. They have lost their capacity to reason and will attack on sight. They are the zombies that one encounters in most first-person shooter games. The super-mutants in the game (with the possible exception of Fawkes, if you have him as your friend) are hostile and deadly creatures and although they seem to have more intelligence than the feral ghouls, their badness definitely does not exceed that of humans, such as the technologically advanced humans who form the Enclave or the marauding groups of raiders who roam the Wasteland. The boundaries, however, are constantly maintained even though who is pure and who is impure is a problematic decision. The human residents of Tenpenny Tower want to keep the ghouls out of their building because they are disgusted by their physical appearance. This decision-making between pure and impure is carried to another dimension when the scientist Dr Zimmerman wishes to terminate an android who perceives that he is human. Reminiscent of Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the game merges the dichotomy of impure-pure with that of human-machine. In all of the above cases, the impure-pure problem takes on the aspect of racial superiority and selection.

At a crucial stage of the game, the player is given a choice (and indeed, made to promise) by the supercomputer/President of the United States, President Eden, that he will inject a virus into the supply of pure water that will be lethal for all forms of life that have been mutated by radiation. What Eden is suggesting here can be read as a way in which the pure water would be an instrument of a different kind of 'purification': an ethnic 'cleansing'. Eden suggests a selective virus which will work to destroy all creatures with mutated genes. The transmitter for this virus would be the purified water. In a way, the 'purification' is subverted because the water is made impure by the addition of a lethal agent. The question now arises as to how far the promised 'water of life' can be a panacea for the Wasteland in the game and the wasteland as a concept.

Despite the problems of deciding on the way to make the wastelands fertile again, water is still most commonly seen as the solution as perhaps embodied by Gerald Manley Hopkins's famous line, 'God, send my roots rain'. Hopkins is speaking of the wasteland of his mind and he places himself in the tradition followed by many others (including Eliot), where the wasteland is an allegorical device. In a way, Fallout 3 is an allegory as well as a literal chilling reminder of a possible physical wasteland that might be the result of our failure to keep peace with each other. In one of the side-quests, the player comes across a region known as the 'Oasis', which, perhaps, is the only green area in the whole game. The sudden appearance of foliage after having constantly seen vast stretches of the treeless wasteland makes one assume that this is where one finds pure water. However, here too, the water is as radioactive as elsewhere in the wasteland and the Oasis is revealed to be just another distortion of nature. The people who inhabit the Oasis, however, believe that they live in an area purer and better than the rest of the wasteland: it is only when the player performs the side-quests in the area that he or she finds out that the so-called 'pure' zone is only another aberration.

Water is connected to other examples of promise (and its subsequent frustration) in the game. If the player comes across the McClellan Townhome in Georgetown West, he or she will meet a Mr Handy robot that reads aloud the post-apocalyptic poem, ' There Will Come Soft Rains' by Sara Teasdale (Ray Bradbury uses the title for a short story set in a world destroyed by nuclear war).* Rains symbolise hope; however, even in Teasdale's poem, the promise brought forth by water is ambiguous. In her poem, nature remains as pristine as ever even after humanity dies out. That hope, however, seems ironic if the rains come as part of nuclear fallout. Nevertheless, in Fallout 3 and in the other texts, the 'soft rains' are connected to purity and a return of fertility.

In Eliot's Waste Land, the thunder leaves us with a promise of rain to the 'endless plains stumbling in cracked earth'. The thunder's speech is a threefold utterance of the syllable 'Da' (similar to the ritual utterance of shantih): in the Hindu Upanishads it stands for datta, dayadhvam and damyata – 'Give, sympathise and control', which rings as the final message in Eliot's poem.

The Waste Land also has strong associations with the Grail legend and in this sense, it also employs the quest motif which, in Fallout 3, is of even greater significance as the Lone Wanderer's entire story is that of a quest that branches out into further quests. The end of the Lone Wanderer's quest can be manifold. It might end in failures in the many instances of incomplete gameplay or in-game death. When the player succeeds in reaching the water-purifying mechanism, a multitude of options open. It is possible to inject into water supply, the virus that will kill all but genetically 'pure' humans and in the penultimate scenes when the player is required to sacrifice his or her life to start the purifier, it is possible to avoid this by sacrificing a friend's life. The ideal ending is where the player has good karma throughout the game, destroy's the evil army of the Enclave and then sacrifices himself or herself for the good of all. In this ending, as long as the player manages to activate the purifier in time, pure water flows out into the wasteland and the narrator tells us that the 'waters of life flowed at last – free and pure, for any and all'.This echoes the promise in Revelations 21:6 where it is said, 'I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.' The promise of water, in some sense or other, is fulfilled and the wasteland is fertile again. However, as the narrator tells us, ' the tale of humanity will never come to a close, for the struggle of survival is a war without end, and war – war never changes'. Whether there is another nuclear war we are not told but it is clear that the promise of plenty and purity that water brings to the wasteland is one that eludes humanity even as it is being realised. Like other narrative genres that speak about wastelands anf fertility, Fallout 3 also makes this point. Finally, because of its way of saying this in various permutations of the narrative events, it presents this message in manifold ways.

* I would like to thank Dr Dan Cordle of Nottingham Trent University for bringing this to my attention.

Agency: Responses to the DIGRA session

2009-09-05T21:56:00.004+01:00

Okay, agency is not simple. While we know that it is much debated in other fields, most of us in game studies concern ourselves with very specific applications of the term. That's one problem.

These applications of the term aren't uniform. Another problem.

We keep coming back to it in circles. Yet another problem.

However, some good work is being done on it.

At least, we recognise that all the “satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” etc isn't really an explanation. Neither is the formal and material cause idea useful mainly because it still leaves too much to human volition.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin brings in the discussion of the machine's agency and sort of links with the actor-network theory (see his paper). I kind of like the ways in which he identifies the 'waxing and waning of agency' and how he slashes the simplistic proportionality equation of realism and agency.

However, I do not think that this approach adequately discusses the aleatory element in games (especially for me, in RTS) and how that affects and upsets the choice equation. Also not sure it accounts for the process of moment-to-moment perception of choice by the player and also the perception by the player of choices exerted by the machine (connection also with involvement and also context: a deeply involved player thinks he is fighting the Roman army and not a program on his pc). Further, I think that the term 'agency' itself is problematic especially with its humanist connotations (and indeed the morass of other connotations that relate it 'free will' and a whole lot of other things). In any case, it is problematic whenever it implies 'pure' choice. In videogames, the human choice is also a non-choice (on the level of the machine). Justin Parsler's very lucid explanation of how he uses the concept of weak agency (and strong agency) is useful here. In a very inspired smoking break, in the presence of Miriam Eladhari, a very informed academic whose name I forget and yours truly, Parsler described 'weak' agency as the choice to choose between a certain number of shirts in a shop and not to make the initial choice of what shirts are going to be there. In a sense, I think that this is the case on even other levels of freedom and choice. For example, even the number of shirts that can be made for you depends on the availability of the material and labour and so on. Choice is never the absolute free will claimed by Renaissance Humanists like Pico della Mirandolla ('Oration on the Dignity of Man'). Neither is it free will given by Divine Grace as a one time dispensation (i.e. God as Supreme Being makes a one-time grant of a mechanism of free choice that humanity can use until Doomsday) . Nevertheless, we experience the sense of choice and do not live in a wholly deterministic world, whether that of a Calvinist God or that of Agent Smith. Please, a subtler understanding of agency is required.

An 'extra value' airtight definition of agency might be available soon on superstore shelves in varicoloured cans. The cans, however, may be empty most likely, caveat emptor. If game researchers wish to use the term 'agency' in a qualified sense that accounts for the process of experiencing choice while recognising machine constraints, then the sense in which they define agency needs to be spelled out with no ambiguity. Wardrip-Fruin does this quite well and this sets his analysis apart from the sweeping generalisations made by some earlier commentators. However, it is important that game researchers don't only speak to themselves. When we talk to outsiders, the sense of what we say should not mislead them into construing the process as one of human-centred choice. To avoid any liberal humanistic connotations, I use the value-neutral term 'action' as the starting point for my analysis of the processes (choice-making/acting/experiencing) that go on in the game-machine-human complex.

I find it easier to look at agency from a Deleuzian perspective in my PhD dissertation. After yesterday's session, I feel I must at least state the issues I perceive with the problem of 'agency' in videogames and especially so, since recent scholarship is also tending to move in a similar directions. The aim is to enter the discussion- with yet another point of view.

Below is an extract from Chapter Seven, 'Playing in the Zone of Becoming I: Agency and Becoming in the Videogame, from my PhD thesis, The Zone of Becoming: Game, Text and Technicity in Videogame Narratives (Nottingham Trent University, 2009), pp. 220-260. Please cite with my permission.

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Murray’s conceptions of agency have provoked much critical response. The above analysis of procedural authorship clearly shows that the action in videogames occurs in a process of interaction between player and machine rather than being located as embedded agency. Further, contrary to Murray’s anthropocentric model, the player as the protagonist or subject is not homogenous and absolute; neither is the participation in a game just a wearing of a mask or a journey into the Holodeck, as will be shown subsequently, here, and in the following chapter. In fact, how much of the playing-subject is human and how much machine is a moot question. Considering these issues, a theory of an anthropocentric and embedded agency is insufficient in explaining the process of action in videogames. Recent commentators, therefore, argue against this model and also take into account the issue that Murray calls attention to but does not pursue: the ‘call of the machine’. Critics like Atkins and Krzywinska express their scepticism about earlier conceptions of agency and Atkins briefly refers to these as the ‘illusion of individual agency’,i a phrase that will be significant in the subsequent sections of this chapter. A more sustained criticism, however, has been made by critics like Poremba and Susana Tosca who approach the problem from different perspectives. It will be instructive to identify these approaches first because they create the base for creating the model of ludic action in the subsequent sections.

Poremba quite clearly argues against the earlier conception of ‘embedded agency’ which is how she identifies the model proposed by Murray and followed by theorists like Klastrup. Commenting on GTA III, Poremba concludes that its agency is ‘difficult to attribute [and can be seen as] lying somewhere in a nebulous region between player, designer and system’.ii Though an issue such as agency, which has always been hotly debated in other contexts, obviously attracts a lot of controversy, recent game studies criticism generally is in consensus with the description above. The so-called nebulous region has, of course, attracted much critical attention and this chapter will also attempt to locate and explore the zone of ludic action and agency.

In fact, though she does not mention it, Poremba’s account clearly illustrates a Derridean supplementarity between the various situations in which agency might be possible within a game. The phrase ‘situations in’ has been purposely chosen over ‘types of’ as a reminder that this description does not aim to divide agency into separate types with different ‘ordered centres’. The various elements associated with agency — the player, the designer and the machine — are not distinct entities. In fact, Poremba’s analysis reveals that they cannot be characterised as originary and derivative as Murray’s model does. Poremba states that ‘further work needs to be done to explore new models of agency that accommodate a more complex relationship between game designer, player and the game itself’.iii While the issue could not have been better expressed, the term ‘agency’ still poses problems especially because of its connection with human-centred choice and the problems of reconciling this with the bipartite process of action in videogames.

Murray’s conceptions of agency have provoked much critical response. The above analysis of procedural authorship clearly shows that the action in videogames occurs in a process of interaction between player and machine rather than being located as embedded agency. Further, contrary to Murray’s anthropocentric model, the player as the protagonist or subject is not homogenous and absolute; neither is the participation in a game just a wearing of a mask or a journey into the Holodeck, as will be shown subsequently, here, and in the following chapter. In fact, how much of the playing-subject is human and how much machine is a moot question. Considering these issues, a theory of an anthropocentric and embedded agency is insufficient in explaining the process of action in videogames. Recent commentators, therefore, argue against this model and also take into account the issue that Murray calls attention to but does not pursue: the ‘call of the machine’. Critics like Atkins and Krzywinska express their scepticism about earlier conceptions of agency and Atkins briefly refers to these as the ‘illusion of individual agency’,iv a phrase that will be significant in the subsequent sections of this chapter. A more sustained criticism, however, has been made by critics like Poremba and Susana Tosca who approach the problem from different perspectives. It will be instructive to identify these approaches first because they create the base for creating the model of ludic action in the subsequent sections.

Poremba quite clearly argues against the earlier conception of ‘embedded agency’ which is how she identifies the model proposed by Murray and followed by theorists like Klastrup. Commenting on GTA III, Poremba concludes that its agency is ‘difficult to attribute [and can be seen as] lying somewhere in a nebulous region between player, designer and system’.v Though an issue such as agency, which has always been hotly debated in other contexts, obviously attracts a lot of controversy, recent game studies criticism generally is in consensus with the description above. The so-called nebulous region has, of course, attracted much critical attention and this chapter will also attempt to locate and explore the zone of ludic action and agency.

Poremba’s account is representative and thorough. She argues for a model of agency that will account for the game designer’s agency, player agency and the emergent and artificially intelligent system’s agency. Besides making conscious choices to explore, configure, experience and react with the guided environment of the game system, the player often subverts this environment by using external tools (additions or modifications to the game’s code) or by exploiting latent possibilities in the game’s code (as in the ‘Hot coffee’ mod in GTA: San Andreas) or in its logic (the ‘hooker cheat’ in GTA III, as mentioned by Poremba). In all the cases mentioned above, player agency is possible only in response to the ‘call of the machine’. The modification and subversion of gameplay certainly falls under the category of constructivism described by Murray but in that case it is necessary to realise that this is a machinic constructivism. An awareness of the machinic affordances is not only required for modifying and subverting gameplay; it is essential for the process of play itself. As Wright, Boria and Breidenback, in their analysis of creative player actions in online FPS videogames, make it clear, ‘Playing is not simply mindless movement through a virtual landscape, but rather movement with a reflexive awareness of the game’s features and their possible modifications’.vi Poremba supports their conclusion in her essay on agency in GTA III and maintains that this is indicative of the fact that agency in games needs to be seen in terms of newer models which move the analysis beyond the limitations inherent in the notion of embedded agency. She also states that player agency and designer agency are not discrete binaries but rather they exist as interdependent categories. According to her,

Game designers have expressed pleasure in player’s creative actions — even ones that clearly go against design intention and extend the boundaries of the game. Conversely from a player perspective, gameplay is often about determining what the game designer wants (i.e. how to play the game) rather than a constant drive for increasing agency.vii

This assertion illustrates a clear shift in the understanding of procedural authorship from Murray’s separation of the design perspective and the gameplay to a more supplementary relationship between the two. In fact, though she does not mention it, Poremba’s account clearly illustrates a Derridean supplementarity between the various situations in which agency might be possible within a game. The phrase ‘situations in’ has been purposely chosen over ‘types of’ as a reminder that this description does not aim to divide agency into separate types with different ‘ordered centres’. The various elements associated with agency — the player, the designer and the machine — are not distinct entities. In fact, Poremba’s analysis reveals that they cannot be characterised as originary and derivative as Murray’s model does. Poremba states that ‘further work needs to be done to explore new models of agency that accommodate a more complex relationship between game designer, player and the game itself’.viii While the issue could not have been better expressed, the term ‘agency’ still poses problems especially because of its connection with human-centred choice and the problems of reconciling this with the bipartite process of action in videogames.

Commentators such as Atkins suggest that the experience of agency is illusory; the chief reason for this is a reaction to Murray’s notion of agency as free choice. Susana Tosca examines this issue in detail through a critical analysis of the Blade Runner game (1997) created by Westwood Studios. Blade Runner is an interactive adventure game — one of the last of its kind; though it wasn’t commercially as successful as its FPS rivals such as Quake 2 (1997) and Half-Life (1998), it still has a considerable fan-following and figures in many game studies analyses. It requires the player to play as Ray McCoy, a blade runner employed to ‘retire’ replicants; McCoy is similar to Deckard, the protagonist in Ridley Scott’s film and Philip K. Dick’s novel. The issue of whether to have sympathy for the replicants or to kill them, a major philosophical question in both the book and the film, is incorporated into the game as player choice. The game has thirteen different ‘official’ endings which depend on what chain of actions the player follows in the game. Player choice is, therefore, responsible for determining the player’s character within the game as well as the fate of the various characters. This is how it looks from the player’s point of view but that, however, is not the only perspective. Louis Castle, the designer of Blade Runner, in an interview with Pearce, describes how this works from the point of view of the game:

If you play the game as if you are a replicant, then the game treats you as a replicant. If you play the game as if you were a Blade Runner human, it treats you like you’re a human. So people perceive that at some point they’ve made a choice that puts them on one track or the other, which isn’t the case at all. It’s based on how you play the game, whether you hunt the replicants, whether you kill them, whether you let them go. Those things give us clues as to what you think you are—and at any given point, you can switch over. You can go halfway through the game and go "Oh, my gosh, I’m really not a human after all, I’m a replicant." And just turn mid-stream and start saving the replicants. And that’s okay. The game lets you do that.ix

In the above comment, the way the game constructs the playing subject is important. Castle’s language, especially his usage of phrases like ‘the game treats you’ or ‘the game lets you do that’ clearly indicates that the game is also an actor or a player. For the (human) player, the choices she makes may seem all important- they may even seem to reflect the player’s character. For the game’s logic or algorithm, the case is different. Here the response is input-based, as Castle states.

The subject is determined by the actualisation of technical choices. Tosca makes a similar point in the following comment:

Each action matters towards the end and that we contribute to the evolving story as we go. Trying to guess which actions those are, and how they lead to each conclusion, is a sort of narrative reverse engineering where, in my opinion, the pleasure of the game lies. And once we know, of course, we can always exert our free will and choose another path.x

Tosca’s statement is important because it highlights a dichotomy. First, there is the idea of each action contributing to the evolving story. This is part of the process of configuring and interacting with the game’s algorithm. Hence agency seems to involve both the player and the game algorithms together with their technical affordances. Tosca’s idea of the process of back calculation or as she calls it ‘narrative reverse engineering’ is also in consonance with this kind of agency in that such activity still involves the game’s logic as an equal partner in the process. The problem arises, however, when she speaks of exerting free will to choose another path. This sounds as if it is arriving at the same conclusions as the earlier conceptions of embedded and anthropocentric agency. Tosca’s qualifying comment in a later statement, however, shows a contrary position: ‘Blade Runner creates a digital suspension of disbelief that players are willingly drawn into through the excitement of the different moral choices, where trusting our implanted memories will bring us the illusion of free will’.xi

This is a statement that needs careful attention: the memories that allow the player to reverse engineer or, in simpler words, to reconstruct a narrative actualisation, are not just human memories. They are also a part of the machinic memory in that they are steps in the algorithm that the game follows. In the example of Sands of Time in Chapter Six, the saved games were attributed as the Prince’s (and therefore the player’s) memories. The ‘free will’, in this context, is an illusion simply because the choices made by the player are not entirely free but rather bound to the affordances of the machine algorithm.

Once the player returns to the point of deviation in a game that is being replayed (for example, from a saved game), she encounters a series of choices and has the opportunity to exercises choice yet again. Beneath the apparent vital nature of the player’s emotional choice, which the game convincingly portrays, lie the game choices and these are primal in determining the path of actualisation. The player perceives moral choices and memory whereas the game algorithm contains its algorithmic choices and pathways. The two coincide when, as Tosca says, there is a ‘suspension of disbelief’. The suspension of disbelief, intrinsically related (in the nature of the supplement) to agency, will merit a separate analysis in Chapter Eight.

The present discussion will return to the question of memory. Not surprisingly, Tosca uses the phrase ‘implanted memories’, a concept that is all too familiar from Blade Runner texts, to describe the experience of memory in videogames. Those familiar with the Blade Runner movie will remember the famous scene where Deckard (Harrison Ford) administers the Voigt-Kampff test to Rachael (Sean Young). At the end of the test, it is revealed that Rachael, unknown to herself, is really a replicant. She does not know that some of her memories are not real: they are ‘implants’ from Tyrell’s sixteen-year old niece. While the player’s memories are literally not ‘implants’ as in Dick’s novel or Ridley Scott’s film adaptation, they are reconstructions of a series of in-game choices: they are as much memories as part of game algorithm. Hence, after accessing these to replay a game sequence, the player willingly becomes part of game system and executes another algorithm.

For the player, to choose not to kill replicants may be a moral choice, but it is also a choice informed by the machinic attributes of the game and its specific algorithm. For example, the player in Doom does not have the choice not to kill the monsters that appear in the game. It is of course possible to subvert the original game using cheats and mods but as noted earlier, to do even this involves restrictions in the game program.

Tosca’s conception emerges as more complex than mere non-agency. The ‘illusion of agency’ most certainly includes and allows for choice. Here, choice is, however, a decentred phenomenon: it is not the prerogative of either the (human)player or the machine algorithm. These entities themselves occur as supplements to the other, as already observed in earlier chapters. The element of choice therefore occurs within the (human)player-machine algorithm complex. Given this supplementarity within which choice operates in videogames, it is possible to relate this to the earlier examples of supplementarity between writing and reading or game and play where the elements in the relationship are all in-play. Even in conceptualising agency and choice in videogames, it is possible to see them as being in-play. This notion has significant implications in the way the phrase ‘illusion of agency’ can be read. By ‘illusion of agency’ something different is to be inferred. The use of the word ‘illusion’ here is perhaps fortuitous but it serves the purpose marvellously. The etymology of ‘illusion’ (as derived from ‘illude’, which can mean ‘make sport of’, albeit used pejoratively) contains the Latin root ludere or ‘to play’.xii It is possible to read the term differently from what was perhaps the intended meaning: one can read ‘illusion of agency’ as the "making ludic of agency" and this reflects the process of interaction and response between the (human)player and the game algorithm. In the case of videogames, it is important to remember that the game is also an artificially intelligent machinic algorithm. The possibility of choosing the action in videogames is therefore always related to the ‘call of the machine’.

From Agency to Becoming: A Deleuzian Understanding of Choice in Videogames

The altered conception of agency, as described above, marks a major shift from the earlier human-centred concept of free will to a relationship between the player and the machine that can be more clearly understood in terms of a bipartite process of action. Commentators such as Galloway already have already started thinking about the bipartite process as being a supplementary one. For him,

One may start by distinguishing two basic types of action in videogames; machinic actions and operator actions […] Of course, the division is entirely artificial — both the machine and the operator work together. […] The two types of action are ontologically the same.xiii

Galloway quite rightly identifies the importance of studying the action in videogames as a more accurate way of analysing gameplay. He stresses, almost axiomatically, that ‘if photographs are images, and films are moving pictures, then video games are actions. Let this be word one for video game theory’.xiv While maintaining the importance of an action-based approach for game studies, Galloway notes that there is no clear division between machine and operator actions. This account also illustrates the supplementary relationship described above. In the first chapter of his book, Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture, Galloway launches directly into a discussion of action, in digital games as being performed ‘step by step [and] move by move’xv by operator and machine. As the base foundation of his analysis, he reads games in terms of the ‘action-image’ as described by Deleuze. However, he does not engage with the concept of videogame action within a Deleuzian framework in any detail. The importance of the concept makes it merit further analysis and it will be seen in this and the following chapter that the process of involvement of the player and the ludic action that characterises gameplay finds its best explanation when analysed within a Deleuzian framework.

The analysis of ludic action within a Deleuzian framework, however, may be opposed by various commentators. As mentioned earlier, Bogost’s objection to such an analysis was that the ‘local operations’ within such a ‘nomadic’ structure would deny any factor of deliberation in digital games. For him, it is difficult to locate agency in the workings of the Deleuzian manifold since he sees the multiplicity as being characterised essentially by the element of the aleatory. Such a reading of Deleuze is open to contestation.

Bogost, however, is not alone in his objection. Hayles, quoting Mark Hansen, notes that ‘Deleuze and Guattari are much more thoroughgoing in their deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject and of "subjectification" in general. As Mark Hansen comments, "D+G do not shift the locus of agency [... but] dissolve the role of agency altogether"’.xvi She, however, adds that ‘they too recuperate agency at crucial points […] They warn the reader against giving up agency altogether’.xvii Hayles agrees with Hansen that Deleuze and Guattari wish to deny agency but she maintains that they cannot avoid it because ‘through their performative language, they exercise agency even as they deny it […] Deleuze and Guattari cannot avoid inscripting into language, the agency implicit in their performance of desire’.xviii While she is right in stating that Deleuzoguattarian theory does take into account the exercise of agency, her assertion regarding its intention to deny agency is controversial. Hayles’s argument is drawn from her reading of A Thousand Plateaus where Deleuze and Guattari do not directly address issues of agency. Such a reading misses the more direct analyses of agency and subjectivity in Deleuze’s earlier works, such as his treatises on Hume and Spinoza, which also play a key role in shaping the main body of his work including the texts where he collaborated with Guattari. Aurelia Armstrong, commenting on Deleuze’s modification of the Spinozist conception of agency states that in Deleuzian (and indeed, Deleuzoguattarian) thought, quite differently from earlier notions, ‘agency is conceived of as a movement, which evades the definition of the individual in terms of forms and functions and the delimitations of its capacities, whether such a definition is biological, psychiatric or political’.xix Armstrong further maintains that the ‘growth of agency is shown to consist in a becoming-active, in the increase and enhancement of “individual” powers through their combination with the powers of other, compatible individuals and things’.xx This is obviously quite different from liberal humanist notions in which agency is situated as the free choice of the individual; it is also equally different from the totally aleatory scheme of events.

In the analysis of temporality in Chapter Six, the Deleuzian idea of the manifold was compared to phase portraits of molecular movements where the population of trajectories as a whole influence the course of any action. Agency should be seen as an analogous and related experience. In an emergent structure, agency can only be thought of in terms of the options for acting within a framework of the constraints imposed by the actions of connected elements. Further, the concept of ‘becoming’, which runs as a key theme throughout the whole thesis, is equally important in speaking of agency. True, agency is action but it is actually the ‘becoming-active’; in this process, the individual’s subjectivity is experienced in a complex manner due to the actions performed by her within the system. ‘Becoming’ has already been introduced in Chapter Two as the ‘zone of indiscernibility’xxi occupied by the subject: the player in the computer game does not act as if free of her machinic persona and neither does she get totally absorbed in such a persona. Instead, as explained in the subsequent chapter, her experience can be described as a ‘becoming’. In game studies, the concept that corresponds most to this is well-known as ‘immersion’. The subsequent analysis will, however, indicate the problems in seeing this as being a separate phenomenon. Instead, both immersion and agency need to be viewed as merged concepts that constitute the core of the process of ‘becoming’. As already discussed in the context of videogames, an altered conception of agency is being put forward here: this conception is based on action and on movement or ‘becoming’ and it moves beyond the more traditional ways in which game studies and other analyses of machinic media conceive of agency.

However, it is obvious that despite their apparent differences with Deleuze, both Hayles and Hansen are in agreement regarding the two aspects of agency described in Deleuze. Total free will for the (human) player is not the case in videogames because of the pervasive presence of the (machine) algorithm and because during gameplay, the machine can also be considered a player and the human player a part of a certain algorithmic sequence. The first issue would be the emergent patterns present in videogames that preclude any totally determined act on the part of the human agent. Secondly, the human agent, in becoming part of the game experiences a complex subjectivity that any conclusion of pure agency difficult to envisage. Both of these issues are described in Deleuze’s formulation of the action-image in the ideas of action as actualisation and as resulting in a ‘new mode of being’ for the agent.

In fact, it might be argued that Deleuzian ideas of agency are not so different from Hayles’s own, especially when seen in a broader Deleuzian context. Hayles maintains that ‘if the posthuman implies distributed cognition, then it must imply distributed agency as well, for multiplying the sites at which cognizing can take place also multiplies the entities who can count as agents’.xxii Her position is similar to that of Poremba and Tosca, described above. It is also the point of entry to Galloway’s application of the Deleuzian action-image to videogames and to its extension to discussions of agency. Distributed agency is seen as resulting from distributed sites of cognition. This is similar to the Deleuzian explanation provided by Armstrong: agency can only be conceived of in connection with the actions of connected elements; hence, to use Hayles’s term, it is ‘distributed agency’. More needs to be said about distributed agency in the subsequent discourse on the action-image. From this analysis, it is possible to conclude that the Deleuzian framework used in this thesis does not support a denial of agency as some critics suppose; instead, it effectively brings together the different aspects of the discussions on agency and helps view the process within a more representative framework. Nevertheless, within this framework, the earlier approaches need to be sufficiently modified and some significant changes must be made. The first of these would be to replace the term ‘agency’ itself.

The analyses of the computer game narrative show that the process of gameplay is not deterministic from the point of view of either the human or the machine, but the use of the term ‘agency’ gives it that connotation, especially when considered in the light of its liberal humanist history. The subsequent analysis will, therefore, use a more representative term for the process and one that is well supported by the Deleuzian framework that provides adequate tools for studying the process; the concept in question is ‘action’.

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Well, that's pretty much what my position is and I am posting this in response to yesterday's speakers as well as to share ideas with Justin. I am happy to enter into a more extensive discussion.

DIGRA 2009: My Paper - excerpts

2009-09-05T19:36:00.005+01:00

Here, I attach excerpts of my DiGRA paper - a reworked version has been submitted for publication.

Remembering How We Died: Telos and Time in Videogame Narratives

Dr Souvik Mukherjee
Nottingham Trent University

‘Time is like an Ocean, not a river’, says the Prince of Persia. This reflexive comment by a videogame character describes the multiplicity of temporal experiences in the game narrative, also including the many times a player has to die before learning how the game ends. Such an eschatology transgresses against accepted Christian conceptions of the linear movement of the soul from birth to the afterworld. As evident in the writings of St. Augustine or Joachim of Flora, however, there is considerable speculation in Christian theology regarding time and telos. However, by allowing the player to replay the life of his onscreen avatar, videogames defy Christian expectations of the finality of telos by making it a multiple and repetitive event. Effectively, the implication of this multitelic structure is that Death itself becomes multiple.

Early discussions of game studies believe that this multiplicity 'trivialises the “sacred value” of life'.[1] It will be argued here that this is a limited reading of the issue, especially when considered in respect to pre-Christian eschatologies, whether Hindu, Buddhist or Ancient Greek. These, in themselves, are, of course, quite disparate and this paper does not aim to engage with their complex theological nuances. Rather, concerns itself with specific ideas from Indic theologies that highlight the importance of the alternative conceptions of Time in videogames while developing on the earlier research done by commentators like Barry Atkins and Michael Nitsche, and analysing the phenomenon of in-game death from philosophical perspectives that have hitherto been virtually unexplored in game studies.

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Instead of trivialising death and telos, it is evident from the above examples that videogames actually add to some of the oldest discourses on Time and endings. Neither is their role fortuitous. Atkins illustrates this through his example of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. He observes that 'Sands of Time accommodates something close to the save/reload inside the game-space, and within the game's internal logic. Fatal decisions and actions are reversible, quite literally with the player able to “rewind” play.'[5] Of course, the player is not literally re-born and certainly does not occupy a different body as some karmic proponents describe. Further, the karmic schema does not involve time-travel into the past. Similarities, however, exist. Often, after restarting a level, the player ends up with the same situation in the story that he has earlier encountered; it is only too likely that he does not have the power-ups and weapons that he was accustomed to using in his past 'life'. In this sense of restarting a ‘life’ in the game world, then, he is reborn into the game. Regarding the journey back into the past, some karmic notions, especially Hindu beliefs, support the idea of being able to remember past lives and as Swami Abhedananda states, it is a power that can be achieved in the higher levels of Yoga.[6]

The word 'remember' plays a twofold part, here. The more obvious meaning is that associated with memory. As Atkins points out, from the second iteration of gameplay onwards, the shift changes from 'How do I do this' to How did I do this last time?' Memory plays a vital role in giving us cues for gameplay and at the same time, it complicates the temporal scheme because we remember our past 'life' in the same scenario while re-living it in another iteration. The second meaning of 'remember' is less usual. 'Remember' could be read as 're-member' where 'member' is used in its old sense connoting body parts. The act of remembering (as re-membering) could be likened to a putting together of a body (as opposed to dismembering). This dual connotation is well evinced by Assassin's Creed.

For those unaware of the game, the setting is that of a laboratory where, sometime in 2012, kidnapped bartender Desmond Miles's memory is being scanned for his experience in a secret group of assassins, in a past life. Before proceeding any further, two things need to be pointed out. Firstly, in the game, there’s a similarity with the yogic concept described above: only instead of the extraction of memories of a previous life, here the machine extracts ancestral memories through genetic code and to ‘re-live’ his ancestor’s life (again, almost like reliving a past life). The second point is about the protagonist or rather his ancestor called Altair ibn-La’Ahad (literally, 'the Eagle, son of no one'[7]). Altair is killed by his master for failing in a mission and then miraculously revived and given a second chance to redeem himself. Altair, the 'son of no one' is not born and does not die. The player playing Altair dies manifold within the game but lives again and plays out other instances of his narrative. Finally, Assassin's Creed consciously connects memory, death, multiple temporality and rebirths through an element in its gameplay. The protagonist, through his memory, recreates the body and the actions of Altair – as explained above, he 're-members' Altair. In a rather nice touch, Ubisoft illustrates this in the moments where, in an intentional glitch, the player's memory struggles to recreate Altair's image, which breaks up from time to time into a mesh of DNA patterns and nucleotide chains. Altair himself does not seem bothered with death – he dares to jump from the top of high towers and monuments in what is called a 'leap of faith', in the gameplay. Even when he dies, it is possible to move on to another seemingly parallel memory, where Altair is not dead and can continue on his further adventures. Neither is Altair the only life that Miles can remember – Assassin's Creed II will tell the story another descendant of Altair, this time a noble called Ezio di Firenze. These multiple strands of Time and the parallel lives and 'rebirths' of Altair and Miles, further explain the Prince of Persia's comment about Time being like an ocean and also prompt a comparison with the eschatologies of the Indic religions. Perhaps, it is not a coincidence that the Prince of Persia unleashed the Sands of Time in an Indian palace.

That the player's avatar necessarily does not die and can saved and reloaded in the game is a fact that reflexively allows videogames to engage in discourses on the multiplicity of Time. Earlier connections of the ludic with the philosophy of Time have existed for long in Hindu or vedantic traditions where Time (kala) and Karma are all subservient to the divine cosmic play or Lila. This play is beyond mortal comprehension and also beyond the limitations of the karmic cycles. Rather, this is more in the realm of the gods. Besides the cyclic comprehension of Time in the karmic cycles, there is a further conception of cyclic temporality that is uniquely associated with divinity. This is the concept of reincarnation or the avatar.

--------------------------

As previously observed, the iterations of gameplay are not the same thing as the rebirths in the karmic eschatologies. However, they bear a marked similarity with these in that they are involved in a multiplicity of temporal structures, often concurrent and certainly without a fixed teleology. Like the avatars in the Hindu pantheon, the player's avatar is at a given moment the same character and yet different. In one instance of gameplay, Altair is really weak and unable to face up to challenges while in another, he takes on a dozen Templars and vanquishes them. Both of these temporal strands might be located at the same point in the same narrative and yet they tell different stories. It is also possible, as Nitsche points out, to have multiple events portrayed simultaneously on the same screen and in the same game event:

XIII includes multiple frames that, like comic novels, tell an event over time and are framed in certain panels that overlay the main game view. At the same time, players stay in continuous control of the main character. Players have no difficulties understanding the situation although the temporal conditions are different from panel to panel to game world.[9]

Both Nitsche and Atkins, observe how Sands of Time allows the player to 'rewind' Time, as a necessary part of its narrative, thus reflexively recognising the multiple temporal frames that the save and reload function that is part of most videogames allow anyway. For example, after reaching point B from point A in the game, the player (as the Prince) can choose to rewind Time and return to point A. Thereafter, he can again travel to point B', with added knowledge of the situation (there is, of course, the possibility of random changes made by the AI to the game environment experienced in an earlier instance). In the story that the game tells, both of these strands are equally valid and there might be many more than two such instances (depending on the difficulty of the game and the number of times one needs to replay an event), which effectively creates a very complex mesh of temporality. The question also arises as to how the player's action(s), as occupying many separate chronologies and yet describing one event, is to be described. Finally, is the instance of the replay the same action (as in the replay of a goal 'event' in a football match) or is it different? It would perhaps not be wrong to say that it is the same difference.

This phrase obviously brings up an important issue in analysing the game-narrative. Considering how many times players 'die' in the course of the game and the number of replays involved, this issue ties in with other complex discourses on the multiplicity of telos and Time in philosophy, both ancient and modern. It is possibly because of this complexity that when the Buddha is posed questions about the mechanism of rebirth, he replies with a resounding silence. Unlike the Hindus, he does not accept the imperishable atman but at the same time, stresses on the doctrine of rebirth. Later Buddhist philosophy, tries to interpret Buddha's silence on how karma can pass on from one life to another. McDermott analyses the explanation of the Buddhist monk Nagasena as follows: 'The act (kamma) itself does not pass from one state to the next; it cannot be said to exist here or there. But since its potential cannot be prevented from actualising itself in due time, it may be considered to follow man like a shadow.'[10] Nagasena's concept contains the key ideas of the potential and the actual, which prove useful in analysing the event in videogames. It also captures the sense of how the player's action in a previous iteration of gameplay can have an effect on later instances.

Nitsche brings up this idea of repetition of play through his comment on Brenda Laurel's 'flying wedge' figure where Laurel proposes to explain the player's learning process as a 'gradual development of player behaviour from the possible, via the probable towards the necessary.'[11] For Nitsche, players experience the same event in the game's fictional time differently, because the later iteration of gameplay has already been influenced by the earlier (that is, in most cases, the second time the player has some idea about the obstacles ahead). This effectively skews the 'wedge' because players do not return to their former state and instead know more about the probable behaviour. These observations bring up a few questions. How is it possible to explain the multiplicity of time and of different instances of the same event? Are the later iterations of a videogame event contingent on the experience that the player carries forward, and finally, are all these instances different or the same?

Nagasena's reply to the questions posed by King Menander, mentioned above, argues against karma being carried by a fixed agent and with fixed results. So his scheme is quite different from the far simpler Hindu belief of karma where one's next birth is rigidly codified according to one's actions in this one (in this there are strange formulations, such as, if one steals green leafy vegetables, he will be reborn as a peacock). Similarly any game experience is not literally carried forward as a sort of karma (in its original sense, meaning 'action'). However, it forms part of the changing potentiality that is variously actualised in every event in the game. This later Buddhist concept is not easy to explain but it can be examined at greater length through another complex philosophical perspective. The ideas in question are those on difference and repetition as stated by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
------------------
The complexity and gravity of both Deleuzian philosophy and Hindu or Buddhist theology is well recognised and it is not surprising that a connection with a seemingly disparate entity like the videogame is not the most obvious of things. However, the associations with such philosophical systems need to be made to explain multiplicity of Time in gameplay. Instead of trivialising the multiplicity of endings and death, based on the linearity Christian teleology, the full complexity of the issue needs to examined from other perspectives, ranging from pre-Christian theologies to modern philosophy. Finally, when analysing videogame narratives, it needs to be remembered that older methods of narrative analysis often miss point. Instead of solely basing the analysis of the 'tying and untying' of the plot (desis and lusis in Aristotelian dramaturgy), videogames show how criticism should also seriously consider the 'dying and undying'.

[1] Gonzalo Frasca, ‘Ephemeral Games: Is It Barbaric to Design Videogames after Auschwitz?’ [accessed 23 November 07]
[2] Gananath Obeyesekere, ‘The Rebirth Eschatology and Its Transformations: A Contribution to the Sociology of Early Buddhism’ in Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, ed. by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1983), pp.139-49
[3] James P. McDermott, ‘Karma and Rebirth in Early Buddhism’ in Karma and Rebirth, p. 175
[4] Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, ed. by Donald A. Yates and James E.Irby (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 53.
[5] Barry Atkins, 'Killing Time: Time Past, Time Present and Time Future in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time', in Videogame, Player, Text, ed. by Barry Atkins and Tanya Krzywinska, vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 243
[6] Swami Abhedananda, Reincarnation, (Project Gutenberg), [accessed 29 August 2009]
[7] ‘Assassin’s Creed wiki’, [accessed 29 August 2009]
[8] Bhagavad Gita , Chapter IV-7.
[9] Michael Nitsche, 'Mapping Time in Video Games' in: Situated Play: Proceedings of the Third International Conference of the Digital Games Research Association DiGRA '07 ed. by Akira Baba (University of Tokyo, Tokyo, 2007), p.145-152
[10] McDermott, ‘Karma and Rebirth’, p.168
[11] Nitsche, ‘Mapping Time in Videogames’.
[12] Souvik Mukherjee, ‘Gameplay in the Zone of Becoming: Locating Action in the Computer Game’ in Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, 2008, ed. by Stephan Gϋnzel, Michael Liebe and Dieter Mersch (Potsdam: University of Potsdam, 2009), pp. 228-241
[13] Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London, New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 28
[14] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: The Athlone Press, 1994)p. 358
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Deleuze, p. 353
[18] Deleuze, p.105; emphasis mine.

You Played That? Yes, I've been playing that game criticism game for ages

2009-09-04T03:38:00.002+01:00

Just read about the 'You Played That' panel at Digra on Andrew's site (he is blogging his detailed notes on whatever he's attended so is high on my recommendation list - far better than the desultory tweets). Am very happy that the senior academics are finally interested in close-reading games. Something I've been trying to for ages (Reading Games and Playing Books, ergo). Hoping that this increase in interest in close readings of walkthroughs etc will improve research in the area.

Responses to Some of the Questions at my DIGRA Paper

2009-09-03T20:08:00.016+01:00

Presenting at DIGRA was a dream come true.Back in them days, when I used to I used to wait for ages for my dial-up to download a DIGRA paper and suddenly the infamous Calcutta power-cuts would frustrate all my endeavours... II never thought I'd be at one of these conferences.

Well, I made it and now my paper's done. As my earlier post said, the paper was on Indic eschatologies and the multiple temporality in videogames. Not surprisingly, I re-traversed my favourite topic of difference, repetition and endings. Again, not surprisingly, I went back to Deleuze.

I am quite satisfied with the paper - in the way I never am, because all I aimed to do was to open up some perspectives and not to defend a thesis. The upshot of it all was that seen from alternative viewpoints (theological and philosophical), the multitelic instances of gameplay complicate the very idea of narrative itself. Through its obvious presence videogames, this complexity is also revealed in earlier and more canonical forms of narrative. Indeed, coming from a literary background, my prime concern happens to be narrative in the videogame.

The paper itself is not in the conference proceedings - because I messed up and did not submit on time. So I'll put it up here. I still use (and will forever use) the very idiosyncratically British MHRA citation system but I'm sure you can put up with it. Fact is, it took me almost three years to get the hang of it.

Now, for some answers to the questions I was asked:

Q1: how can the difference and repetition (and Karma as actualisation of potentialities) idea be squared with recorded instances of the game (i.e. in games where you can switch on the recording mode and replay your record - not 'replay' as in reloading a savegame but an action replay as in a football telecast)?

I view even that as a different event that paradoxically is the same. the difference here lies in the fact that the event is actualised under different factors (singularities) , for example, the pressing of the record button.

Q2: I don't remember the exact question since I was half-dead with fatigue by then - in short, why is all this linking with karma etc useful? We already know that games have repeating instances.

Well, I am interested in narratives in videogames and one of the reasons why game-narratives are considered problematic is because of their multiple instances - which effectively confuse the hell out of formalist narratologies. To analyse the story(ies) in the game is to grapple with the problem of repetition. And no, the problem of repetition is not a given and is far more complex than game studies yet can tackle. Fresh perspectives are therefore necessary. This, however, has not fallen from the sky ... ancient philosophies were already engaging with this : games add to this serious philosophical discussion. another reason why games are important. my conclusion was pretty clear about this. And yes, Deleuze is very important in engaging with this. Game theorists the world over are now beginning to approach game studies from the Deleuzian perspective (read Bogost and Galloway for a start). I was also heartened that the commissioning editor of MIT Press, Doug Sery, made the obvious connection with DeLanda (himself an important commentator on Deleuze) and videogames --- something that academics in the field have often missed.

This also partly answers another question I don't see death in games as being trivial - because I'm looking at the narrative aspect. Even if you look at it like Frasca does ('it trivialises life' etc), as I say, this is a limited response based on a linear theology.

And after that little lecture, a question which though answered somewhat clearly at the time, is beginning to make me think in retrospect:

Q3: Is there a connection between videogames and the religious experience?

I'm not sure and i think I need to think this through. The paper, however, uses the theology in its philosophical aspect and shies away from religious commentary. This question, however, opens up a whole new angle (by the way, The Escapist was supposed to do an issue on games and religion).

Jesper Juul's comment on board-games also involving similar issues is interesting. I know I need to do something on Indian conceptions of play (Lila and khel/ krira etc) but am hesitant because this will involve a rather heavy study (parallel to the work on Huizinga etc) that I am reluctant in undertaking just yet, especially with my scant knowledge of the field.

Arnav Jhala's comments backing up my response about the Indian gaming situation were helpful: I didn't know that some people have tried making a Mahabharat game.

Anyway, got to get some sleep before leaving home at an ungodly hour to attend the last day of DIGRA. Apols for the stacatto writing. And I'll upload the paper tomorrow after cleaning it up a bit.

__________________________________

DIGRA Day One

2009-09-02T00:02:00.010+01:00

DIGRA at last! When it almost looked like all chances of getting the day off were forfeit, my colleagues at work came to the rescue. Thanks Elaine and Sanj.

The troubles were worth it. Day One at DIGRA was a rewarding experience. Of course, there was much that I missed (e.g. Bernard Perron's paper). The sessions that I went to, however, were brilliant. The Bad Games panel led by Jesper Juul started with the discussion of 'camp' games and a discussion of para-gaming. Juul defined four categories of 'taste': traditional, casual, indie and 'good' (academic) taste. A 'bad' game would be breaking with the requisite elements of the above, as the case may be. Juul highlighted the need for researching 'the great unplayed' comparing this with similar work on the 'great unread' going on Literary Studies (interesting comparison coming from a Ludologist, Jesper). Having come from a department with a strong recovery research presence, the literary side of this I am only too familiar with. I certainly agree with the need to research / resurrect interest in the games that suffer years of neglect and are even tagged as 'bad'. Of course, there's a historical perspective to the creation of the videogame canon. The reasons that the prolific 'bad' game creator Ian Gray's (Anglo-Saxon , mind you) China Miner has been tagged as bad and yet draws many an addicted fan to it are worth investigating.Anyway, I dwell too long on this. All in all, I think this is a great initiative taken by Jesper and co. If your forthcoming book explores more of this, I'm certainly buying it. The two other papers in the panel were also interesting. The comparison between full motion video in earlier games and the way this remediated / even copied B-movies is interesting. The social aspect of these so-called 'bad' games is also a thing to look into.

In the second session, I mistook the panel on film and games for the session on horror games (wonder how) but luckily for me, it was a great one. Michael Nitsche brought back the issue of Ludology and Narratology; although I hope not in the old way (well, i think not) with the famous 'versus'. I have blogged about such watertight categorisations earlier and written endlessly against such positions. Michael, as far as I understood, is doing something much more intellectually informed. He says that the problems that the L-N debate brought to light should not be ignored. I agree. He mentioned the problematics of doing and telling; to me the problem is much more complex than a (mis)reading of Genette on description and narration. Michael identifies the need for a performance studies approach to videogames. Incidentally, there was another lady at the conference who told me about her work on this. Both she and Michael mentioned Richard Schechner whom I now must read / read about. We are probably moving near Frasca's work on 'live theatre' Augusto Boal and games, which I much admire. Michael's uniqueness comes from his deep knowledge of both the theory and praxis of film. He used examples of camera usage in games (read his book for some nice examples) to illustrate how the framing of the action was important in the conflation or otherwise relating of the action and the telling. For me, of course, this is a form of actualisation of the potential. Two things that Michael mentioned struck me as quite important and I'll just copy out these points straight from my notes:

Aram Barthollie FPS glasses

In Natal, how do we control the camera?

After Michael's presentation, there was another nice one by Eric Campion. Again a few points from my notes (i'm tiring out now):

Architecture is narrative

Biofeedback

Game uses different parts of brain unlike film.

Not sure I agree with everything Campion says but then again, food for thought.

I went to some other sessions and listened to quite a few papers but either they weren't particularly relevant to my interest or else I was too zombiefied from the tiredness and the tension of having to present.

Gamespot Article on Games and Narratives

2009-08-10T23:22:00.003+01:00

(read the article here: http://au.gamespot.com/features/6214951/index.html)

Laura Parker of Gamespot Australia interviewed me a few days ago about that most contentious of subjects in videogame studies: the role of storytelling in games. Every time I speak about this, I do so with mixed feelings: I anticipate rising degrees of opposition, easy acceptance and finally, the risk of being scoffed at yet again for daring to equate videogames with the established and lofty notions of literariness. However, as the days have gone by since I first started thinking of videogames as storytelling media, academia has stopped considering videogames in the earlier pejorative light and pockets of research are emerging in the unlikeliest corners and adding academic respectability to videogames. Even as videogame studies has moved far beyond its earlier coaxial locations of some Scandinavian universities and Georgia Tech in the US, game studies has not yet decided on whether it wants to admit to the narrativity (another game studies coinage, I think) of videogames. Some of the so-called Ludologists have now softened their earlier anti-story positions and some like Jesper Juul, in his book Half Real and as quoted in Parker's article, have altogether re-evaluated the situation. I find it difficult to disagree with the spirit of Jesper's comment and I admire how much his position has developed in these ten years. By beginning to ask the important questions (particularly relevant to my interests are his notions about time in videogame narratives), he has opened up many avenues for other researchers. To comments such as that of Professor Dutton, all I would say is that they are not new. Robert Wilson was making a similar case against the ludicity of narratives and the narrativity of games as long ago as the 1960s. The Ludologists, especially those like Markku Eskelinen, Like his notions of Physics, Aristotle's conception of the plot (as might be inferred from his Poetics) have achieved a rather questionable sense of finality that most students of literature learn to question in their first undergraduate year (or so I hope). The formula of distinct beginnings, middles and ends is not universal. Neither do stories necessarily have predetermined endings. I could go on at length about how this applies also to Dutton's example of Homer's Odyssey (thinking about the Homeridae etc) but of that another time. Eastern (or shall we say non-Eurocentric) notions of narrative have always been at variance with such set parameters. Recent developments in literary theory also point towards multitelic stories. I will make another quick point here against Dutton's description of the story element in videogames as a 'window dressing' and his comparison of BioShock and GTA 4 with 'a tea-party for teddy bears'. While these make me laugh, it is quite clear that such conclusions are extremely contestable. The teddy-bear bit quite intrigues me - a very unusual metaphor considering the plots of the games he cites. As for the 'window-dressing', oh well, I think that the whole context of the games involves a supplementary narrative experience (for the Derrideans out there, the word 'supplementary' was used on purpose - read the right hand column of Ludus Ex). Finally, whoever said that we do not get inside the characters we play - I know of people (and can see at least one in the mirror) who often feel as if they are Max Payne or Gordon Freeman. Shan't say any more on this.

Anyway, I really liked Laura's article. She doesn't take sides and presents the case lucidly while also reminding people that this is important stuff. I learnt a lot from the article - Rhianna Pratchett's comments being my favourite. Am eagerly awaiting the next part of the article (coming out next Friday) - check out Gamespot Australia or watch this space. I had so much more to say on this but then my 9 to 5 job usually kills all my enthusiasm by the end of the day (game research is increasingly becoming a luxury , yet again) and I am struggling to keep my eyes open. Thanks a lot to GameSpot Australia for discussing this issue and for featuring my comments.

Graduation Day

2009-07-28T07:30:00.014+01:00

I am now finally and undisputably Dr Souvik Mukherjee after being awarded my PhD scroll at a grand (and expensive) graduation ceremony at Nottingham's Royal Centre on 22nd July. Later on, in between the 'official' ceremony and my celebrations with close friends, I had a mini ceremony of my own, befitting the spirit of my research so far.

Visiting GameStation in my doctoral gown.

In August Company: (from right) Dan, Phil, John and me. Dave I missed you at this one.

With my parents

DIGRA: forthcoming paper

2009-07-12T19:33:00.002+01:00

Here's my DIGRA paper abstract. Here, I develop a salient point in my thesis and, in a dialogue with earlier commentary, explore the pattern(s) of time in videogames. The paper itself is work in progress and early comments are most welcome.

'Remembering How We Died': Memory, Death and Temporality in Videogames

Death is an intrinsic part of gameplay. On considering the role of killing, dying and negotiating the 'undead' in videogames, one cannot be faulted for noting in them an obsessive engagement with the act of dying. It is almost a prerequisite that the player's avatar has to 'die' many times in the process of unravelling the plot. Instead of the traditional tying and untying (desis and lusis) of narrative plots, held sacrosanct since Aristotle, videogame narratives are characterised by 'dying and undying'. The sense of an ending, as literary theorist Sir Frank Kermode calls it, is constantly frustrated by its absence in videogames. Western conceptions of ending, whether Hellenic or Judaeo-Christian, are based on telos and a linear temporality. In a culture where death is a grim finality and where resurrection is only possible by the divine, videogames seem to shockingly trivialise death by adding to it the perspective of multiplicity. Videogame theorist, Gonzalo Frasca, observes that from the perspective of real life, this reversibility can be seen as something that 'trivializes the "sacred" value of life'. This paper argues against such a conception and in doing so, it points to how videogames to a different but equally serious view of death and endings that has so far been largely ignored due to an occidental bias.

In Vedantic and Buddhist philosophy, belief in reincarnation is the norm rather than the exception. The multiplicities of death(s) is, therefore, not trivial. This, however, is not to claim a straightforward connection of the videogame endings with the rebirth cycle in these world-views, especially since there are many differences within and between them. Not to consider them at all, however, would skew the analysis, given that the characteristics of videogames though considered 'trivial' in a Western paradigm, actually connect to ideas that pre-date Christianity. The videogame protagonist, also called avatar (which requires a separate discussion), dies, lives and lives again; thus replaying the cycle of his or her existence. Within the context of the game-narrative, each death or ending is important: often, as Michael Nitsche states, death can be a way of exploring the game or of obtaining information about 'future' possibilities. That apart, each ending is connected to the assemblage that the game narrative forms. Despite their other mutual differences, in Vedantism and Buddhism the key idea of rebirth does not trivialise the event of death. Instead of a transmigration of an essence, Buddhism believes in a moment-to-moment process of rebirth dependent on the encompassing circumstances. The Gita states that 'the newly moulded inner nature will express in a new form.' The 'new' form is called avatar in Hinduism; gods are often (re)born in different reincarnations or avatars and this is part of the divine play or lila. The term avatar is rather freely used in game criticism as meaning 'player embodiment' which is but part of its original significance; its key connotations of reincarnation and immanent existence have so far been ignored.

While these non-Western perspectives indicate an alternative reading of death in videogames, their heavily moral and religious implications make any easy equation problematic. Their ideas of immanence, nevertheless, connect well to games where the same avatar re-experiences the game-world but differently, each time – a complex case of difference and repetition. This, importantly, also connects with current ideas in Western philosophy, such as Gilles Deleuze's understanding of immanence and temporality. The avatar in the game experiences events, including death(s), as actualisations of a virtuality of events. The actualisation takes place from within a combination of possible events, which in turn are determined by their spatial and temporal environments. Further, even as an actualisation takes place, the other iterations of the gameplay (such as other instances where the same section of the game was played) still remain quite 'real'. In the Deleuzian sense, this is a real virtuality or one that is 'never past either in relation to a new present or in relation to a present it once was.' For Deleuze, the different actualisations are like the dice-throws in a 'Divine Game', where they are multiple but at the same time partaking in the One. Following this, he proposes that the idea of death be treated 'less as a severance than an effect of mixture or confusion'. Traditional conventions of death are influenced by the idea of time as a chronological progression. When faced with phenomena such as videogames, where chronological progression gives way to more immanent structures; firmly believed in conceptions about death, memory and event are greatly problematised. With this in consideration, this paper will attempt to build upon the discussions on temporality already started by critics such as Jesper Juul, Barry Atkins and Nitsche. Carrying these forward both in terms of game studies and contemporary philosophical discourse, it will attempt to understand the importance of in-game death: as both immanent and imminent.

Sherlock Holmes Reloaded

2009-07-05T21:37:00.002+01:00

Apologies again for the long absence especially to regular readers and PKD-Day 3 attendees. This has indeed been a rather difficult time both on personal and professional fronts. Today's post is an attempt to make up for the silence and also to record the memories of a singularly entertaining conference. I mean the The Afterlives of Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes conference held in the University of Hull today. I went despite the intense stress of this week's workload and after literally writing my 'paper' and preparing my presentation in a single evening!

A brief outline of the papers as culled from my notes. For me the conference started with papers on Laurie King's Mary Russell stories – for the uninitiated, in these pastiche novels Sherlock Holmes gets married to Russell, who is a formidable detective in her own right. The discussion ranged from cross-dressing, feminist perspectives to the nature of Holmes pastiches. Sabine Vanacker's paper, while providing learned perspectives on various other aspects, particularly interested me with the analysis of the Holmes stories as taking place in a repeated presence. Sabine also pointed to the chronological anomaly in the Holmes stories and how Carole Nelson Douglas and King establish a clearer chronological relationship in their Holmes pastiches. The best part of her paper, for me, was the description of Holmes's stories as a virtual palimpsest of texts and context. Palimpsest --- that's how I would describe gameplay.

I also particularly liked Annushka Donin's first-time paper on metafiction in the Holmes and Poirot novels. She established a network of textual relations through a comparative analysis and drew out interesting parallels. This is apparently Annoushka's undergraduate work being developed here – I wish I had even one such undergrad in my seminars. She seems to be on her way to engage with more theoretical perspectives and I was obviously thinking of post-structuralist viewpoints.

All the papers that I heard were great. M. Lee Alexander made an interesting case about detective figures being 'wounded' or disabled in some way or other. She provided a long list (to which I added Max Payne) but surprisingly, all of the names on the list were male! Patricia Pulham and Jennifer Palmer both looked at aspects of historicising fiction. Patricia discussed Julian Barnes's novel on Doyle's one and only attempt at detection – I must read it. In my own panel, Harvey O'Brien entertainingly presented on the variety of filmic responses to Sherlock Holmes including 'The Great Mouse Detective' and the Christopher Plummer Sherlock Holmes ('Murder by Decree'). The other panelist, Sally Widdowson, interestingly explored the link between Sidney Paget's Sherlock Holmes illustrations and modern graphic novels such as the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Very interesting, all said and done.

What I missed though was more of a chance to socialise and chat. Though I did make up for it by joining some other presenters on a stroll through Hull. Finally, like all the conferences that I have been to recently, this one ran simultaneous panels and I missed some of the papers that I was keen on listening to. Bran Nicol's paper on Bayard, Eco and conjecture seems really interesting from his abstract and on talking to him after my session (which he chaired). Interestingly, he too describes the structure of the Holmes novels as 'rhizomatic'.

My own paper did what I expecteed it to do – I felt that it opened up Sherlock Holmes scholarship in different aspects and developed on the connection between the multiplicity of narratives and videogames. One of the questions that I was asked was how I would make a Sherlock Holmes videogame. A storyboard is already building up within the recesses of my head and it certainly isn't elementary.

Anyway, here's my abstract:

Sherlock Holmes never faced his final problem. Just as he re-emerged from the Reichenbach Falls after being 'killed off' by his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes has lived on in a multiplicity narratives ranging from the new Holmes tales told by the likes of Anthony Burgess to adventures on the Holodeck of the starship Enterprise. It is this multiplicity combined with that makes the Holmes tales key predecessors of more recent forms of storytelling, especially the story in videogames. The videogame player after 'dying' in an attempt to 'complete' the multitelic narrative, does a Sherlock Holmes and replays his existence in a different way. The Holmes stories can be viewed as proto-videogames by analysing them side by side with Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened (referred to as The Awakened hereonwards), a videogame based Holmes investigates an as-yet-unsolved mystery. Created in the adventure game genre, albeit with attempts to include different visual points-of-view, The Awakened, is characterised by a multitelic structure; it also emphasises its multiplicity by placing Holmes in the Lovecraftian world of the Cthulhu mythos.

Theorists of so-called New Media have argued for multiplicity as being a key factor in determining the novelty of hypertexts, interactive fiction and videogames. However, this conception can be challenged by a closer look at earlier forms of multiple narratives such as the Holmes stories. Analysed in comparison to The Awakened, the Sherlock Holmes stories as told over the last century, emerge as far more multiple than was earlier assumed and reveal greater complexities of authorship, plot and telos. To do so, this paper will engage with Gilles Deleuze's concept of multiplicity, which makes it possible to view the stories as actualisations of a mesh of virtual narratives, where Holmes continually emerges from his various endings only to start again – almost as if he plays a videogame.

Oh yes, I called my paper 'Sherlock Holmes Reloaded'.

PKD-Day 3@NTU is a Huge Success

2009-06-14T09:45:00.010+01:00

My absence from Ludus ex this time was due to the fact that I was co-organising PKD-Day with Prof John Goodridge from my department. NTU had another fab event: the third successful PKD-Day. We did it again.

PKD-Day, as regular readers of Ludus ex, will know is a small and offbeat event for those who enjoy the works of Philip Kindred Dick, the legendary Science Fiction writer. For the absolutely uninitiated, he's the guy who wrote the Blade Runner book (called do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). This time's event had an interesting mix of papers featuring Baudrillardian responses to Dick's work, the Dickian response to ideas of humanity, the police-state in Dick's novels, samizdat responses to Dick on YouTube and a Gnostic reading of PKD. My own paper was on how the Phildickian world is actually like a videogame because of the alternate realities and parallel tracks of time that Dick (in a very Deleuzian way, I argue) presents in his books and discusses at length in his talk 'If You Find This World Bad, Go Take A Look at Others'. I used the obvious example of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time to start my discussion. self-reflexively states that time is not linear like a river but like an ocean. Then I looked at Dick's novels The Man in the High Castle and Ubik in terms of the alternate realities they posit.

There were two highlights of the day. One was the lovely lunch that John had laid out for us and the other was the key attraction: a Skype conversation with Tessa Dick, PKD's last wife. This, although effected using improvised means (since the university apparently doesn't support Skype), worked out really well in that the audience were able to ask Tessa questions and hear her live, without our having to pay the loads of money for airfare or telephony that our small event cannot afford. Tessa spoke on A Scanner Darkly, PKD's philosophy and even PKD's cats.

Besides these events, we also had a workshop to discuss the reading experiences of the participants and thereafter, a chance to reconvene at a local pub (which took us 30 mins to reach on foot, courtesy my superb planning!). Anyway, the ale was good (even though they ran out of Bombardier) and the event came to a fantastic close. The papers and more details about PKD-Day will be available on the event's website. We also aim to create a mailing list to keep the PKD-Day community active and involved.

Shall We Kill the Pixel Soldier? Paper at Under the Mask, 2009

2009-06-06T18:27:00.006+01:00

This was my first collaborative paper and I must say a big 'thank you' to my co-presenter Jenna Pitchford for her thorough work and cooperation despite tight schedules and other problems. In one of Jenna's presentations in our university, I realised the wider definition of trauma that she was using was vital in analysing videogame experiences and in countering the false politically motivated allegations against games. This is changing now; as Ernest Adams told us, the first console has now been installed in the White House and polemic might now turn to policy in favour of games. However, whatever happens, the need to understand that games do not merely desensitise and that they cause a different level of trauma (some can even raise moral concerns) is imminent. We are not psychologists or trauma specialists but Jenna's work on Gulf and Iraq War narratives and mine on gameplay experiences come together in stating that the problem is more complex than has hitherto been understood.

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Shall We Kill the Pixel Soldier? : Perceptions of Trauma, Morality and Violence in Combat Videogames

It felt like I was in a big video game. It didn't even faze me, shooting back. It was just natural instinct. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

Sgt. Sinque Swales quoted in The Washington Post

Sergeant Swales’ comment provides an easy link from the so-called moral desensitisation of soldiers in the 2003 Iraq War to their experience of videogame combat, an apparent connection that is eagerly picked up on by Western media. Videogame criticism, surprisingly distancing itself from contemporary challenges to the notion of media effects, persists in conflating the technologically-mediated experience of the Gulf War with the increasingly face-to-face interaction in recent Middle-Eastern conflicts. Contemporaneous accounts have compared the Gulf War to the electronic experience of ‘a child playing atari’; despite vast developments in gaming, commentators still contend that ‘thus far, games have avoided engaging the real-life issues to which they are responding’. A key issue that games are accused of avoiding is that of combat trauma. Contrary to such positions, many videogames already simulate the trauma in their gameplay experience; this paper will explore this concept from Laura Brown's definition of trauma as ‘outside the range of human experience’. This evokes recent work in games studies on in-game involvement and identity-formation. It also opens up further questions against ignoring the role of morality in gameplay, especially in multiplayer interaction in combat games like Counter-Strike, Call of Duty 4 and America's Army. Working from these hitherto overlooked aspects of trauma in gameplay experiences, our analyses challenge the oversimplified association of videogames with the desensitisation of US troops in recent conflicts, and by extension, with wider issues of violence.

read the full paper here

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Under the Mask 2009

2009-06-06T13:09:00.025+01:00

Once again at 'Under the Mask'. Can't believe that a whole year has passed since I first tested out my ideas on 'egoshooting' and 'becoming' in videogames. This year's conference was better organised and even more enriching and entertaining than it was last year. Some of the presentations, particularly Gavin Stewart's, Steven Conway's and Alec Charles's, I liked and benefited from more than the others. I missed Esther MacCallum-Stewart's paper because I went to hear Steven and Jenna, my co-presenter, later told me that I had missed the best paper in the conference. My loss, but the paper is online so I presume I can read it now. On the entertainment side of it, the constant repartee between Alec and Gavin was already expected from my experience of it last year. The philosophy of computer games as recounted by Ernest Adams (the keynote) certainly entertained although I strongly disagree with most of it. There was one of the usual 'magic circle' debates among the panelists; only this one led to Pride and Prejudice and speculations about whether it was possible to find Darcy's grave. I also enjoyed Esther's description of her WoW battle with the great Espen Aarseth himself. Last but not least, perhaps the most entertaining part was Jenna's adventurous GTA-style driving on the way back. (this is a long post so if you are just after the papers download them from here)

This posting will be in part a response to some ideas I either contest or wish to develop. It will also attempt to provide a general summary of the conference.

Philosophising on Computer Games: An Alternative Response to Ernest Adams

I do not know if there is a 'philosophy of videogames' but I work with two philosophers, in the main, to formulate my own thoughts on games; so though I won't go as far as to point to a 'videogame philosophy', I'll certainly agree that there is an imminent need to think about videogames philosophically. I went to (and presented at) the Games and Philosophy Conference at Potsdam, last year and I was happily rewarded with some of the most philosophically oriented discussions on videogames. When Ernest Adams opened his keynote address on the philosophical roots of computer games, I was expecting more of such discourse. Adams has always appealed to me in the way he bashes the academia for needlessly engaging in the ludology-narratology (non)debate and in the way he understands gameplay as 'difficult to define' rather than trying to define it within a set formula. Therefore, I was surprised when he tossed game studies (if there is such a thing) between the binaries of English and French philosophy as well as the classical and the Romantic.

Videogames, he says, are number-driven and logic-driven. Their orientation is more classical than Romantic. For Adams, videogames (those that tell stories, that is) do create a tussle between the classical and Romantic identities but even these can at best compare to Norse Saga or Victorian novels. Videogames have not had their Modernist or Postmodern text. To back this up, he considers the oft-cited 'postmodern' experience of the break in the fourth wall / magic circle (or whatever you will) and claims that it is not a break in the immersion ( how i hate the word ... shall we call it 'involvement' or something else, please?) because the player is never really immersed. So much for 'flow' and Cszikzentmihalyi (pronounced 'Chicks send me high') then, if one listens to Adams.

As I said earlier, I so disagree with a lot of what he says. Against the French / English philosophy binarism: according to Adams, the philosophy of videogames has nothing to do with Derrida, Bergson and Sartre (because they are French and inductive) and everything to do with Locke, Hume and Whitehead (because they are English and deductive). I am being flippant here but this is how such a binarism sounds. I am not sure what aspects of Bergson's works, Adams considers but he certainly does not take into account how Gilles Deleuze uses, quite effectively, Bergson, Whitehead and Hume to engage in supplementing each other's concepts. The watertight binarism certainly isn't a product of nationality; nor is there a clear-cut binarism of inductive versus deductive. Or even of Classical versus Romantic for that matter. Nietzsche, whom Deleuze reads deeply, says in Ecce Homo that The Birth of Tragedy is his 'most offensively Hegelian' book because of its dialectical opposition of the Apollonian and Dionysiac (roughly corresponding to Classical and Romantic). Nietzsche clarifies that he understands 'Greek tragedy as the Dionysiac chorus which ever anew discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images.' Adams's binarism, therefore, has been challenged and disproved in philosophical terms, over a century ago. He refers to David Thomas's (of 'Buzzcut' fame) article on gaming as belonging to Pre-Socratic philosophy, which Thomas understands as 'all is number' in a very limited sense. As Keith Ansell-Pearson comments, Nietzsche explicitly connects the Dionysiac with the concept of flow and Becoming as stated by Heraclitus, a key Pre-Socratic philosopher. Deleuze goes on to develop Nietzsche's reading into an idea of Becoming that is now of legendary proportion. In my last year's paper at UTM (as well as in many other papers), I have applied the idea of Becoming to videogames, especially to describe the involvement of the player and the machine. However, I digress ...

Adams's claim about the player's immersion, i partly support. I have often likened immersion to a dip in the Ganges - under water and fully out of contact with the outside world. That does not happen in games, says Adams and I totally agree. However, if it does not happen in games, neither does it happen in books and movies as Adams seems to claim. Normally I have to challenge the other extreme argument that claims that games are like the Holodeck - hence, this new claim is rather amusing for me. Typically, then this would problematise even the relocation of the fourth wall (after Steven's paper, I shan't say 'breaking' ever again) - for Adams, the experience does not include the deep involvement that Esther pointed to while describing her deep gaming experience which made her oblivious to other passengers on the train. In sum, Adams makes a rather extreme claim for the game experience and it is one that does not account for the deep involvement. I believe that extreme and dialectically opposite positions should consider the experience as being more processual and engage with ideas such as Becoming to explain this.

These problematic conceptions also prompt Adams to conclude that videogames are sans their Modernist or Postmodernist examples and should rather be compared to Pre-modernist literature. However, any literature student will know that chronology does not work as a categorising element in literature - not any more. Consider the Modernist and Postmodern implications of Tristram Shandy or Tom Jones. One more point that I cannot resist making although it is a sort of digression.

Adams claims that Victorians did not use their machine to create art. He has probably forgotten Ada Lovelace who wished to use Babbage's Analytical Engine for 'poetic programming' or weaving artistic patterns with music (in other words, being a computer DJ). Babbage himself used to impress his guests with automata built to entertain. Cultural Babbage offers many examples as does my own article on the subject. Even in the 'steampunk' novels that Adams refers to, there are ample examples: in The Difference Engine, John Keats (otherwise famous in our world) earns his living as a 'clacker' (hacker/programmer) who programs for the cinema.

To return to my main contention, however. Adams neglects many videogame titles that do not correspond to the Norse saga structure that he sees in Duke Nukem or Quake. Many games problematise the idea of good and bad binaries. Max Payne, Stalker (which Adams was consulted on), Fahrenheit, GTA etc in their own ways relate to current theoretical and philosophical positions. In yesterday's conference, ironically most of the philosophers discussed by the presenters were French and postmodern (i use this term loosely and rather unhappily). I've just found out that Adams' paper was first published in 2004 - a year before I started my PhD. It is to my discredit that I did not find it earlier - or else I would challenged it more substantially within my thesis. However, even in in 2004, there were games like Blade Runner that would, in essence, challenge the simple story structure that Adams claims for videogames. It just shows how important it is to start studying the stories in videogames in more depth instead of endless quibbling over things like player studies versus game studies.

Steven Conway Relocates the Fourth Wall

Steven if you are reading this, then you'll see that the masthead of Ludus Ex is all about what you said in the conference. 'I was in a computer game. Funny as hell it was the most horrible thing i could think of'. In fact, even in RL (which one of Sherry Turkle's respondents calls 'another window') I sometimes feel a relocation of an imaginary 'fourth wall' (or nth wall) which in a Phildickian way seems to surround us (assuming that life is an ARG, ha ha).

Back to academic blogging (see i've already relocated the fourth wall).Snap!

I liked the way in which Conway spoke of the relocation of the fourth wall rather than the breaking of it. He basically proved previous commentators wrong in one neat slash and numerous examples from other media that many game critics hadn't considered. The examples are too many to recount and I sincerely wish I could share his presentation with the readers of Ludus Ex. However, he spoke of how Max Payne refers self-reflexively to its identity as a videogame and how Psycho-Mantis 'reads' the player's mind in a faux-psionic way and makes the player perform acts outside the game in order to defeat him. Other critics would call this being pulled 'out of the game' but Conway contends that it is instead an extension of the game. It could be a contraction or the expansion of the fourth wall but it is still the maintenance of the 'as if' that the play involves. I am not one for magic circles or Hamlets on Holodecks, but Conway, if I read him right, is not either. As far as the play is concerned, I think the idea of the relocation is spot on. To illustrate this in terms of Brechtian 'alienation effect' (Snap! Correct me if I err, Steven. I am not writing like an academic now. The punctuation is intentional and many 'rap' poets relocate the fourth wall thus), in the game, the spectator is being reminded of a reality A that is different from the game's reality B while existing in another reality C which corresponds closely and almost resembles reality A. I agree with the concept of relocation also because it implicitly negates any final watertight (or even semi permeable) boundary which we have to 'break'; instead it shifts the experience to a different level of Becoming. This fits in with my conception of a Deleuzian Becoming, as well.

I was only intrigued that Conway does not refer to Gonzalo Frasca's use of the concept of the 'spect-actor' as borrowed from the drama of Augusto Boal. In a sense, Frasca also seems to support the relocation argument on a more general scale. Frasca talks of 'outmersion' where the player is conscious of being involved in the game and then he describes 'meta-outmersion' where the player is simultaneously conscious also of being 'outmersed'. If the spectator is simultaneously the actor, this is a constant process and the wall (or whatever imaginary membrane) of the act does not really break but it is relocated. All said, however, this is was a very interesting paper from Conway and I would certainly like to read more.

Shifting Boundaries: Gavin Stewart's Presentation on Paratexts and 'Inanimate Alice'

The other paper that I will briefly discuss in Gavin Stewart's. I had never heard Gavin present but I always had a deep respect for his work when he was at my university (i even called him 'sir' for the first two times i met him, he reminds me). Gavin spoke about a website called Inanimate Alice, Genettian ideas of paratext (as (mis)used by Mia Consalvo) and Bioshock game covers. The talk woke me up to the fact that I usually unconsciously take in so much from game covers. Must add this to my post-doc plan. Gavin also eloquently pointed to how even non-game objects are ludic to a degree, as they require. Inanimate Alice can, therefore, be a ludic entity at times. Similarly, ARGs can be a 'real life' entity as well as a ludic entity. It is also interesting to note how the paratexts of games affect our readings and play and also how games themselves work as paratexts. Finally, the often neglected (in my previous theoretical work, especially) element of the market needs to be considered in-depth. I will need to explore this further in my own research and thinking.

General Observations

First, I'd like to thank the organisers for having invited us (Jenna and me). The interest that the event evoked among the many gamers (you wouldn't use this term if you were there at yesterday's debate) was very encouraging. Among the other papers, I enjoyed Alec Charles' paper (thanks for thanking me about 'egoshooters'; credit also goes to my friend Mark Butler). The concept of 'hailing' in Althusserian terms has already been used by Will Slocombe in his essay on ludic agency (Digital Gameplay ed. Nate Garrelts). I am not sure I agree. I've said a lot of about agency already. Click here for an example. Of the others, I thought Maria Baecke could have developed her interesting study a bit more and also that the paper on gamer mothers could have been more representative and supplied more details. I was happy to meet Philip Lin who presented on a somewhat similar topic as ourselves -- the US Army and 'militainment'. Philip is developing his PhD plan now: all the best. Adrienne Shaw presented a interesting case study of Finnish gaming and how it relates to the global experience. We should see more of these coming up... soon, hopefully. Finally, I must say I was slightly disappointed by Vicente Gandasgui's paper on spectatorship. I am not sure King Kong is the best example for game-film comparison and Gandasgui did not seem to be aware of ground-breaking work on cutscenes (such as Rune Klevjer's) and dismissed them by saying that his friends find them boring so they really don't count as parts of the game. He also missed key research in the area – especially by Tanya Krzywinska (who is also a film theorist in her own right) and Michael Nitsche. I am sure he will develop his research further as he progresses with his research in what is a very interesting topic.

And so we came away from 'Under the Mask' driving through the heavy spray, tired but quite satisfied with a great gaming day.

All the papers are now available here.

Catching Up ...

2009-06-03T01:06:00.010+01:00

Haven't blogged in ages now. In fact, I have even had a rather long period of ludic stagnation. 'This gaming life' has been eventful in other ways - some good and some not. Two events that I have attended deserve special mention. One was the LINK event held in Loughborough University in mid-May where the gathered academics and postgraduate students provided me with some important insights on publishing the PhD thesis. Besides this, there were some interesting postgrad papers - the one that interested me most was, predictably, on cyborgs and disability. The hybrid identity of the cyborg was flagged up as the connecting link for discursive alliance for women and the handicapped. What particularly intrigued me was how world war 2 disfigurement was seen as cyborgean and how people were seen as being regendered (remasculinised). My notes have to be aided by faded memories and I am afraid that I do not do justice to the paper. I've learnt my lesson about why one shouldn't leave things unblogged for too long.

This was the very thing that Jess Lacetti, prolific blogger and new media researcher at De Montfort, told us at the CEDAR workshop. Lacetti, interestingly, calls weblogs 'online academic business cards' and asks academic bloggers to concentrate on topical content. Good advice, for sure - in fact, I was pulled up slightly for suggesting something more in the nature of 'Ludus Ex'. Lacetti's solution is to maintain different blogs and not conflate their purpose. She gives the following three reasons for academic blogging:

i exist online

i participate with other scholars

i am able to think through writing

Nice. One thing I know and keep forgetting is the importance of tagging. There are no tags to this post but there will be more in any future post ... i promise. Tagging obviously gets the web-crawlers attention with all the meta-data and also helps create easy links between topics. My external examiner, Will Slocombe, was also one of the speakers at the event. He spoke on the importance of blogging as a teaching tool, how it is important for 'keeping in shape' for writing and how it enables peer-review. Astrid Ensslin, editor of the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, also spoke on her blogging experiences as a PhD student, about the importance of blogs in disseminating ideas, sharing posts, networking with other academics and the importance of rss feeds. Together with the rest of the team from Bangor (researchers Lyell Skains and Sonia Fizek), she showed us how to use Google Sites and Google Forms. Very useful for me - I was even able to use these examples for a job interview!

All said and done, however, much as I agree with the need for academic blogging and find the tips provided useful, I personally find it immensely more pleasant to read about someone's research and thoughts in a non/quasi-academic blog like QBlog (maintained by Richard Bartle , mentioned in an earlier entry). It's about the style and also the way it points out something very different to what I would normally expect in my real, virtual and possible lives (getting a bit too Deleuzian already) that I like so much more than some very dreary academic blogs that I have to plough through occasionally. For me blogging is about the in-between spaces of one's research and thinking. Of course, this is a very personal view and I know I need to be more of a disciplined and organised blogger.

Speaking of 'in-between spaces', as always these were for me the best part of the event: as I've always maintained, the smooth spaces of interaction that exist alongside the striated organisation of events are extremely important. In between the talks or (rather rudely) even during them in whispered conversations, I learned more about other people's work on game design, new stuff that people were doing and (importantly) where to get good Indian food in Leicester.

After the nice food (idli and sambar rather than Biriyani though), the final event was a demonstration of a mathematical tool designed for mapping creativity. I must say I wasn't convinced and was rather too vocal about it. At least, it shows that scientists and artists are still happy to talk to each other. I had almost lost hope after hearing a science PhD (a rather stuck-up one, as well) student, who is unfortunately an acquaintance of mine, say a million times how worthless the people who degrees in the Humanities are ... Well my friend, at least some of your colleagues recognise our importance although I squirm at the methods they use to 'map' us.

Finally, the pathbreaking event in my life: I learnt that some people, somewhere in the world actually think that I am a little turtle (in Polish, apparently my name means 'little turtle').

No actually that's not the pathbreaking thing that's changed my life ... it's the fact that I've begun to believe that what these people think is true. Yes, I am a little turtle.

Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo and Souvik ....

Pacmania Live

2009-04-21T00:02:00.002+01:00

The comment about Pacman in my previous post reminded me of this fab video that I found on the Ludologist.

http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/x9003r

Enjoy!