Power Up

The Play Research Group, UWE, Bristol
studying the technologies and cultures of games and play

More chess... there was an interview on Radio 4 last month with Marilyn Yalom, whose book Birth of the Chess Queen (London: Pandora 2004) argues that the introduction of the queen - and subsequent changes to her status as a piece within the game - was inseparable from changes in the status of women in the Middle Ages. The game's current form used to be known as 'Mad Queen's Chess'.

posted by: sethgiddings at 22:29 | link | comments (2) |

Inspired by Particle Stream....   if Power Up were a videogame character, it would be...

 

 

 

 

a Chain Chomp

posted by: sethgiddings at 16:34 | link | comments (2) |

Is it okay if I comment here with a few words about chess? It follows my comment to Seth and Helens’s post on the First Person debate.

 

Dear game-specific-oriented theorists (you know who you are): Is it possible please to stop using chess always as the prime example of game+fiction?  If we are interested in the relationship between a computer game as a rule-based system and computer game as a fictional world, chess is a rather misleading example. It supports well the idea that games are formal systems which are ‘themable’ i.e. they are always ‘dressed up’ in some fictional framework or another. Why?  - Simply because chess is not a very good example of a simulation (even if it is, obviously, a good example of a game). The pieces in chess simulate human actions as an aspect of the sequence of events taking place on the board (- recounted as narration: 'the king protected the queen'). Chess therefore includes the dimension of simulation - unlike for example Tetris (hence it will always create theoretical confusion to lump the two together in the same category). The point is that the simulation of chess is highly abstract, and this fact does make a significant difference. When the behaviours of objects in a simulation become more specific and less abstract (as they often do in computerised simulations), these objects become significantly less ‘themable’ in terms of appearance.

 

In chess, the possible actions of the queen (within the rules of the game) can quite easily be decoupled from their fictional meanings _as if_ performed by a queen. Play the game with a potato for a queen and all you would loose is what we might call ‘added value’, a bit of culture and tradition (which may or may not be important to the players). There is in chess a considerable degree of arbitrariness between function and appearance. However, let us say that you mod a tactical shooter so that you use a potato for the sniper rifle. You could say that the game would remain exactly the same, because the rules and behaviours are the same. The sniper rifle just hides under the – unimportant - appearance of a potato. But exactly in what sense is an appearance not part of a simulation? Is it external or accidental to a simulation if for example people can fly and birds drive cars?

 

Simulated behaviours transferred from a sniper rifle to a potato do create a different simulation, with new (absurd) meanings. Why does the potato function as a magnifier lens and kill instantly at a distance? With the notion of ‘themability’, always supported by chess as a favoured example, the relationship between a simulation and the world it simulates turns into a kind of external ‘overlay’, a ‘theme’, an afterthought. Hopefully such a static and limiting theoretical perspective will not be academia’s biggest contribution to creative game design.

posted by: Rune at 12:56 | link | comments (4) |

Another point I think is relevant to these discussions is the confusion over the term 'text'. It is dismissed in ludology in its (traditional?) literary studies sense of written words (and so conflated with narratology), whereas in cultural and media studies it tends to be used in relation to any cultural product or artefact whether verbal, written, painted, simulated, etc. All can be 'read' and all are 'intertextual' with culture at large (Barthes' Mythologies being an early, but influential example) and all are therefore, in some way or other, ideological.

Whilst I would want to assert that this latter sense is essential - the prevalence of linguistic metaphors in cultural studies is problematic, particularly in relation to new media. If non-verbal (or not-only verbal) software applications (such as videogames) are 'texts' 'encoded' at the point of production and 'decoded' at the point of consumption (Stuart Hall), then their distinctiveness is lost. Software is not just 'read', it is 'used' (or, of course, played) - it is technological not (or as well as) textual.

So... a question: can anyone suggest a more productive term than 'text'? Lev Manovich uses 'object' - linking the Russian avant-garde's embracing of industrial production with the paradigms of computing (object-oriented programming, etc.) - which emphasises the materiality of software but seems to suggest 'black boxes' rather than the mutability of code and the interactivity of interfaces. Any other ideas?

posted by: sethgiddings at 13:15 | link | comments (6) |

I’ve just read Espen’s essay with interest. It contains much that I agree with (his emphasis on the centrality of simulation for example), but seems to miss a number of important points. Firstly I don’t recognise his picture of the virgin territory of ‘game studies’ being colonised by incompetent film and literature students. Of course there are examples of heavy-handed application of narrative theory to games, but all the conferences I have been to over the past few years (Game Cultures, Playing with the Future, the Challenge of Computer Games, Level Up, and of course Power Up.) were packed to the gunnals with work from a near bewildering range of disciplines (as well as contributions from without the academy: developers, designers and journalists) the vast majority of which seemed very attentive to the specific form of games and many of which offered new analytical and conceptual frameworks for the study of games. These incompetent narratologists are straw men.

 

Secondly he assumes that digital games and non-digital games are the same. Computer and videogames are games and as such demand specific modes of analysis, however they are also popular media objects. To say that it doesn’t matter what Lara Croft looks like to the player of Tomb Raider is nonsense. Our attention may not always be focussed on the appearance of the avatar, but the game as a ludic media experience is structured and inflected by its environments, styles, music, effects and characters (and intertextually with other games and non-game media texts). Chess can be played with different sets of pieces and remain fundamentally the same game, but the further we get from the abstraction of chess (or, of course, Tetris) the less this holds true.

 

In his reply to Stuart Moulthrop, Espen argues that to start with the assumption that games are cultural texts is to risk that we will 'have very little chance of finding out what is unique about them'. This is a risk of course, but to occupy a 'fundamentalist' position (however strategic) is to rule out any chance of finding out much more about the uniqueness of videogames precisely because the are cultural texts. Putting aside the question of whether this fundamentalist, ludologically-pure, non-appropriative, non-discipline is actually possible (it certainly doesn't exist yet), this begs the question - why would we be interested in videogames if they weren't cultural objects, i.e. part of a cultural economy, everyday lives, pleasures and anxieties? The most productive work in 'game studies' is that which recognises what 'other' disciplines (whether film studies, economics, or geography) can bring, but in so doing challenges and transforms these disciplines?

posted by: sethgiddings at 23:46 | link | comments (3) |

posted by: helen at 17:02 | link | comments |

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