Week 12: Games
Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca - History
There's an interesting distinction between pont-and-click versus text interfaces for story/adventure games. The authors mention that players were frustrated with finding the "right synonyms" for words, which is the problem that point-and-click solved. Because the primary purpose of the game was to move through the narrative, then the players felt hindered by the interface. I wonder if there would be a way to sell a story game based on the "fun" of having to guess the right word. That could be a game as well, right? There are games where the purpose is word-guessing, and that makes those games fun. So, part of what makes a game fun is the way that it is framed. Anything that doesn't further that frame or contribtue to it detracts from the fun of the game. I guess a simplistic way to put this is: what am I doing and how is the interface helping or hindering me?
I'd just like to complain that one of the greatest games ever -- Arena -- received absolutely no mention here. I thought Arena was huge. Now, mark my words, I never beat it (so long and tough), but I did have some friends make it all the way through.
Late in this chapter, the authors notice that many MMORPGs have remained confined to their area of origin. I find this to be an interesting contrast to Jenkins' theory of pop cosmopolitanism. Why haven't or don't these games make it across borders? This point becomes even more significant, given the fact that these games--with their emphasis on connectivity, collaboration, and communication--also provide a medium for intercutlural comomunication.
Turkle - Video games and computer holding power
I really lked Turkle's take that a successful video game player achieves a "meeting of the minds" with the program(mer). This rings true, and the programmer (designer) also strives for a meeting of the minds with the player. A good game programmer understands player's expectations and plays to those. A good player understands how a programmer might go about designing a game. Therefore, both parties are hinging a mutual meeting of expectations through/in the medium of the video game.
Turkle ruminates on the extent to which players will become designers of their own games. Players already have the abillity to mod their games, so what does it mean to design your own game? The ability to design one's own game is another level of interactivity. You are interacting with the game in a whole new way--as a designer, rather than a player. Therefore, if we think of video games as a meeting-of-minds, desigining your own game lets you take on that other role of the designer, much as you might take on a role in a game. What kind of games would you design? "Good" games? "Evil" games? Indeed, the medium of video games seems to be one of the last places where users have limited content creation ability. Nowadays we can much more easily use technology to compose (and I use "compose" intentionally here)--to compose print, music, film, web pages, blogs, and I'd venture to argue that video games are next. I couldn't find this article (read: I couldn't find it on my first or second google search and didn't feel like dedicating more time), but I recall a report I read about this interface someone had designed that would allow elementary students to create their own video games. It was like super object-oriented programming, I guess. It sounded really cool, so I can envision a future not far off where we'll all have access to an easy-to-use interface for the creation of our own video games. I'm sure they won't be as robust as commercial video games, but then again neither are those other popularized, easy-to-use forms of media.
Liestol - Computer games and the ludic structure of interpretation
Just reading Liestol's description (or, the preiconographical level of understanding) almost made me forget what made Duke fun in the first place. Really, that description does such poor justice to the game experience. And that--right there--is part of a point I hope to get to: that a game is an experience, the way seeing a live theatre show is an experience altogether different from reading a play. Anyway, returning to Liestol's description, I think some of the rhetorical questions he poses are ludicrous. For example, in referring to the bikini-clad pole dancers, he asks, "Is there an alliance between the owmen and the unearthly monsters?" While I want to give him the benefit of the doubt here--that he's playing his own joke on us--his previous question makes me interpret his writing here literally, rather than sarcastically-metaphorically, to which I reply: never once when playing this game in high school did I ever think to ask that question. I fully recognized the game as a satire of itself. Alternately, given my more mature and critical eye, I might today suggest that there is an alliance between the women and the unearthly monsters, and the monsters represent the typical strip-show today, I might suggest that the alliance between the women.
Liestol starts getting to some interesting stuff in the "retrospect" section, but I'm not totally sold on why the hermeneutics of video games differ from those of other media. Liestol tries to frame the argument for this difference around the subject-position of the media consumer, but I don't think the argument here is strong enough to warrant a clear distinction between the subject-position of an art critic and the subject-position of a game critic. Liestol writes that you can get kicked out of a video game (and, so a critic's subject position is less stable), and implies that you can't get kicked out of a painting, but I'm not sure about that. I feel pretty kicked out when I look at Magritte.
Jenkins - The war between effects and meanings
Part of the war Jenkins describes can also be understood as a war between literalness and metpahor. To what extend are we willing to ascribe literalness to metaphorical actions (withiin a videogame). Jenkins' argument is that an effects-perspective of videogames is adopted by critics, whereas meanings-based perspectives are adopted by people who critically examine videogames, because a discussion of meaning necessarily involves critical examination of the artifact. I like how Jenkins concludes his argument. He suggests that teaching video game composition can make students more critical consumers of videogames. This idea also ties into our own class discussions about the relationship between theory and application.