Quibus Lusoribus Bono? A Classicist Shakes Things Up

Recently, in the Escapist, an article entitle ‘Quibus lusoribus bono?‘ appeared, by Roger Travis, a Classicist at the University of Connecticut. On his blog site, he argues that “video games are actually ancient, [...] they reawaken the anicent oral epic tradition represented above all by the epics of the Homeric tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey.” I am going to have to go carefully through his posts, because this is a great argument to make… anyway - in his Escapist piece, Travis writes:

The problem with game studies - the thing that gives rise to opinions like Wilson’s - is that the effort to create and maintain the discipline is keeping gaming from winning the respect it deserves. Against all appearances, scholars are pursuing game studies to the detriment of gamer culture.

By pretending that game studies stands alone as a unified discipline rather than at the nexus of various other fields, scholars of game studies (and those of departments that call themselves things like “digital media studies”) are institutionalizing exactly what Wilson feels: antipathy to the real culture of gaming. The more entrenched the notion becomes that gamers are abnormal and defective, the longer it will take for real works of art like Sins of a Solar Empire, BioShock and, yes, even Halo to vindicate gaming as a worthwhile pursuit.

Comments, critiques and a bit of old-style flaming are all over the games-related blogosphere; but for an interesting dialogue, see Ian Bogost - whom Travis refers to on a number of occasions in his piece - at “A Response to Roger Travis who misconstrues my work and that of my colleagues“.

For the most part, the discussion is moderate in tone, though clearly Travis has upset the apple cart - one commenter writes:

Whatever is said here, it boils down to this: Roger, do you let people with Marketing degrees tell you how to teach “Topics in Advanced Latin”? I’m guessing you don’t. Why is acceptable for you to tell Ian how to do his? I’ll give you a hint. It isn’t.

It’s one thing to question the legitimacy of a professional. It’s another to question the legitimacy of a profession. I really don’t think you want to open that can of worms. While I can see the worth of the classics and how they are basically the basis of all modern thought, I’m thinking it’s probably hard for payroll to justify paying your obviously bloated salary.

I suppose it’s only a matter of time before somebody invokes the Nazis. But in the meantime, the last word by Travis on Ian Bogost’s blog (and then the conversation switches to the forums at the Escapist):

“1. I see the analogy of a marketing professional telling me how to do classics as very unpersuasive. Ian and I work the same job, more or less, and we both (I’m sure) spend time on committees where we’re doing, intramurally, precisely what we’re doing publicly in this discussion. The suggestion that my salary is bloated would have made me laugh if my salary weren’t such a sad little thing.”

And finally, for completeness, here’s the link to the Escapist forum discussion.

So… what do I make of all of this? I admit, I got a bit lost in the original article, since I haven’t read all of the related pieces (nor indeed, the one to which Travis was originally responding).  In essence, it looked as if Travis was warning of the danger of academics sucking the fun out of games (which may be to simplify).  But that’s something every discipline or subject needs to watch out for, the people who take things too seriously. Archaeology sure has a hard time paying the bills, but at least it’s still fun to do…

All Rules Lead to Players

Aki Järvinen, of the University of Tampere in Finland, has just defended his phd thesis- his opening statements may be read here.

An excerpt:

[...]we arrive at the question concerning games’ nature as, supposedly, ‘mere’ entertainment versus something that has persuasive powers; powers to change and influence our beliefs, and possibly persuade us to take action once the game is over. If we accept a hypothesis according to which games, like any other form of communication, are able to persuade their players, in other words either shape their beliefs, responses, or even behaviour, then we have to accept the postulation that play may lead to many varieties of behaviour, even harmful behaviour.

Without resorting to populist rhetoric, this nevertheless is a thought that, in my experience, too few game developers, in their urgency to create business growth through ‘mere’ entertainment, contemplate upon. In the thesis under examination, I promote the idea of game design through metaphors that create emotional attachment - however, it is metaphors and simulations of death that get proliferated in games - and, deservedly in part, games with vividly designed metaphors of death thus gain public dissent.

His thoughtful musings are well worth considering for anybody interested in the nature of games, and their persuasive power. I haven’t fully explored his blog yet, but there looks to be a substantial amount of material from his thesis there.  Memo to all grad students out there: get yourself a blog, and use it to develop your thoughts and bounce them off others. Aki’s is a model to follow!

Some games bibliography for you

Things you should be looking at, if you’re interested in games:

The Ludologist

Games without Frontiers

Game Studies Download

Also:

The Ecology of Games

Today is obviously a blog-writing day. Last post for now - ‘The Ecology of Games‘ may be downloaded freely in whole or in part from this page here - and it’s legal! Many of the big names in game studies are in this volume.

The Ecology of Games
Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning
Edited by Katie Salen

In the many studies of games and young people’s use of them, little has been written about an overall “ecology” of gaming, game design and play–mapping the ways that all the various elements, from coding to social practices to aesthetics, coexist in the game world. This volume looks at games as systems in which young users participate, as gamers, producers, and learners.

The Ecology of Games (edited by Rules of Play author Katie Salen) aims to expand upon and add nuance to the debate over the value of games–which so far has been vociferous but overly polemical and surprisingly shallow. Game play is credited with fostering new forms of social organization and new ways of thinking and interacting; the contributors work to situate this within a dynamic media ecology that has the participatory nature of gaming at its core. They look at the ways in which youth are empowered through their participation in the creation, uptake, and revision of games; emergent gaming literacies, including modding, world-building, and learning how to navigate a complex system; and how games act as points of departure for other forms of knowledge, literacy, and social organization.

Contributors:
Ian Bogost, Anna Everett, James Paul Gee, Mizuko Ito, Barry Joseph, Laurie McCarthy, Jane McGonigal, Cory Ondrejka, Amit Pitaru, Tom Satwicz, Kurt Squire, Reed Stevens, S. Craig Watkins.

About the Editor

Katie Salen is a game designer and interactive designer as well as Director of Graduate Studies in Design and Technology, Parsons School of Design. With Eric Zimmerman, she is the coauthor of Rules of Play (MIT Press, 2003) and coeditor of The Game Design Reader (MIT Press, 2005).

“Making Dead History Come Alive Through Mobile Game Play”

In an earlier post, I mused on the possibilities for enhancing the experience at an archaeological site by mashing-up the physical and the virtual, and in a subsquent post I presented a lesson plan for doing that in a group setting. A related post concerns the use of Mediascapes to play games at the Tower of London. Seems I’m not the only one thinking along these lines - a paper presented at the Computer/Human Interaction Conference 2007 by researchers at the University of Bari explicitly details an augmented-reality game at a Roman site in Italy (full paper):

“Abstract: This work in progress presents a design approach to digitally enhancing an existing paper-based game to support young students learning history at an archaeological site, by making use of recent advantages provided by mobile technology. It requires minimal investments and changes to the existing site exhibition because it runs on the visitors’ own cellular phones. It is expected that game-play will trigger a desire to learn more about ancient history and to make archaeological visits more effective and exciting. “

Interestingly, they propose to use memory-cards with cellphones, rather than to try and transmit and download information on the fly. Their game (’Gais’ day in Egnathia’; Egnathia is a Roman city in Apulia) started life as a paper-based game played on the site. With the addition of the cellphones and the memory cards, the designers of the game hope to be able to collect data on the actual game-play data which will assist them in improving the learning experience.

Serious Games Canada Summit, Montreal

I’ll be speaking in one of the sessions at the Serious Games Canada Summit in Montreal on November 27 & 28th. The focus of my contribution will be on modding in the classroom - that is to say, exploring some of the potentials, perils, and philosophical underpinnings of using in-game world- or scenario-builders. My perspective is drawn from my experience in distance and online education.

A fantastic example of what can be accomplished by adapting commercial, off-the-shelf games is discussed on Henry Jenkins blog - Revolution, a game set in one pivotal day during the American Revolution. Why mod rather than build?

“Our first decision was to forego coding Revolution from scratch and make it as a mod of an existing game. Using an existing engine enabled rapid prototyping and design. Using an existing engine also improved production quality - graphics and sound would already be at a level students would associate with professional games. Since many game companies offer modification tools to consumers for sharing new content, we wanted to explore the advantages of modding for developing serious games.

After much consideration, we settled on the Neverwinter Nights toolset. Neverwinter Nights is an RPG series for the PC that was specifically designed by its makers, Bioware Corp., to support modding projects. There was already a very robust culture of player-made NWN mods, which we could tap for inspiration and experience. We wanted to create a socially dynamic world where students would interact with both player-controlled and non-player-controlled characters, and NWN was built for character conversation, a feature we felt was crucial to the social world we wanted to model.”

The other two panelists in the session are Kevin Kee and Richard Levy (participants list).

“Kevin is Canada Research Chair of Digital Humanities, Associate Professor, Brock University, and Adjunct Professor, McGill University. He was a Director and Project Director at the National Film Board of Canada from 1999-2002, where he lead various productions, one of which received Honor able Mention at the 2002 International New Media Awards. As a university-based researcher and developer, he has lead numerous productions, including: A Journey to the Past: A Quebec Village in 1890.

Richard Levy is a Professor of Planning and Urban Design at The University of Calgary, where he serves as the Planning Director (Chairman) for the Planning Program. Since 1996, Dr. Levy has also served as Director of Computing for the Faculty of EVDS. Dr. Levy is a founding member of the Virtual Reality Lab. Dr. Levy speaks at international and national conferences in the fields of virtual reality, 3D imaging, education, archaeology and planning. His published work appears in journals such as Internet Archaeology, IEEE MultiMedia, Journal of Visual Studies, and Plan Canada. “

Towards a Theory of Good-History-through-Good-Gaming for Historians and Educators

What do you get when you bring together educators, historians, and new media specialists to discuss what constitutes best practice for history simulations & gaming?

Well, everything from turtles, termites and traffic jams to life, the universe, and everything! Kevin Kee (of Brock University’s Centre for Digital Humanities) and I have recently put that conversation up on the ‘Simulating History‘ project website for your consideration. Enjoy!

<snippet below>

Games that have been designed by academics, with little grounding in theories of good gaming, are typically of the boring drill-and-response type. As academics, we run the risk of ruining what makes a good game, if we do not consult with professional game designers. At the same time, gamers are good at figuring out what makes a game ‘fun’, but will not make games that are paedagogically sound if we do not engage with each other. “The answer is not to privilege one arena over the other but to find the synergy between pedagogy and engagement” (Van Eck 2006:18). Commercial game designers do not set out to be historians. But interestingly, many students trained in history or the humanities have ended up becoming game designers (Don Daglow, Keynote address Future Play 2006 conference)

We can detect therefore some areas of overlap between ‘good history’ and ‘good gaming’ in our survey of literature we believe to be the foundation for developing a theory of good-history-through-gaming. Recently, we brought together historians, educators, and gamers to try to find Van Eck’s ‘synergies’, and to discuss the literature that each considered to be seminal for their own work in games and history. We wanted to join together our previously separate lines of inquiry, to understand one another’s disciplinary perspectives for research into simulations and games, and to explore the intersections between these perspectives. The resulting (free-wheeling and free-associating) conversation took place over two days. Here, we have collated the different contributions to gather our thoughts under (more-or-less) coherent headings, but have left the editing to a minimum to allow individual voices to retain their idiosyncrasies and individual approaches to teaching, gaming, and the past….<more>

Persuasive Games

If you’re in doubt over the power of games, you may want to consider ‘FatWorld‘. You may have seen something in the press recently about this game

[...] about the politics of nutrition. It explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S. Coming Fall 2007.

We naturally equate ‘games’ with ‘fun’, but, as has been pointed out before, we don’t necessarily use ‘fun’ as a yardstick to measure novels, paintings, or other creative works. The creator of this game, Ian Bogost, has recently come out with a book that should add some ammunition for those of use who want to explore games for our teaching and research. The book is entitled Persuasive Games and it comes from the MIT Press:

 

Videogames are both an expressive medium and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this innovative analysis, Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. Drawing on the 2,500-year history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, Bogost analyzes rhetoric’s unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric.

Bogost calls this new form “procedural rhetoric,” a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt and change those positions, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. Bogost looks at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and education. Bogost is both an academic researcher and a videogame designer, and Persuasive Games reflects both theoretical and game-design goals.

I have yet to read it - but I will as soon as I have some denaro to spend - but the people over at Grand Text Auto have some good things to say about it.

Next Generation Storytelling

In a recent article for the Escapist Magazine, Warren Spector argues that storytelling had better catch up with the graphics etc or else games are not going to get better… he writes :

“In the short term, at least, next-gen hardware will allow us to make prettier games (at great cost) but not better games, and there’s nothing inherent in the hardware that makes better stories more or less likely.

What Do We Do About It?
Those of you who know me - or know my games - know I can’t have just one endgame. That’s too limiting for players.

Similarly, I can’t have just one conclusion to this article. Buckle up, read on and pick the conclusion that best fits your prejudices and beliefs.

Conclusion 1
Stories have been around forever. The success of story games tells me current players are vitally interested in them and will reward us for taking story games to greater heights.

But we want to look beyond current gamers to the vastly larger potential audience of (current) non-gamers - an audience we have no chance of attracting if all we have to offer are prettier, louder versions of what we’ve done before.

To grow our audience to match our ballooning next-gen development and marketing costs, we have to broaden the range and increase the quality of stories we tell. We need to lure people in with things that are familiar and comforting, and we must take interaction out of the realm of the abstract and into an area they already understand - emotionally satisfying stories about recognizable people, stories that illuminate and enrich their lives.

[...snip...]

We need outsiders, indie developers, academics, two guys in a garage somewhere, to point us in new directions, to show us a new way to involve players in stories and take this medium to a new level. And there are academics, researchers and even some expatriate game developers like Chris Crawford working on some cool stuff. Frankly, a lot of industry types, even the most creative industry types, look askance at the work of the outsiders, but I’m finding myself more and more drawn to the schemes some of these guys are coming up with.

When you find yourself reading whitepapers and interviews and such with these guys, and feeling more kinship with folks with the letters “P,” “H” and “D” after their names than you do when you hear what your peers have to say, there’s something weird going on. I’ve been arguing for years that industry and academia need to work more closely together and this - the need to develop tools for collaborative and truly interactive storytelling - seems like a great opportunity to do so.

I’m not going to pretend to understand how universities work, but I kind of get that academics have as profound a need to find funding as game developers. I believe there are, however, a couple of things they don’t have to worry about - commercial success and 12- to 36-month development windows. And that positions them pretty much perfectly to tackle hard problems that will take a long time to solve - longer than we industry-types can afford to devote.

We’re already seeing some of this in the work of folks like Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, Chris Crawford, Ken Perlin and Katherine Isbister (and others I’m sure I’ve just offended by not mentioning them). These people are asking great questions, tackling many of the right problems and making some progress.

Even if you think these guys are nuts, or their belief in procedural storytelling is misguided, or their specific approach is a dead end, you have to respect the fact they’re tackling hard problems. You have to respect their audacity and their commitment. And I, at least, respect them for looking further downfield for their inspiration than developers typically can. Even our most “out there” story efforts are still mired in action-movie tropes - our rallying cry might as well be “Let’s make an interactive Star Wars! Yeah!”

The Outsiders are looking to Moby Dick, to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, to Scenes from a Marriage. That takes chutzpah of a sort I find sorely lacking in even the most daring “insider” efforts to transform storytelling in games. These guys may strike out, but they’re swinging for the fences, and to a guy another of whose mottoes is “Fail gloriously!” that’s worth a lot.”

That makes me - an academic who loves games - feel like I’m not wasting my career with this obsession…

The Trouble with Civilization

A lot of the things you’ll read about Civilization concern its conception of history, progress, its meta-narrative and so on. I just came across a nice piece by Dianne Carr at the University of London that is rather refreshing in its approach, and reminds us that what players get out of a game is not necessarily what its creators put into it…. the piece is called ‘The Trouble with Civilization‘ and I’ve taken the liberty of copying its opening below… you should read it!

“What follows is an exploration of meaning, information and pleasure in Sid Meier’s Civilization III. Various theorists, including Poblocki (2002) and Douglas (2002) have argued that games within the Civilization series perpetrate a reductive folk-history that positions Western-style technologically orientated progress as ‘the only logical development’ for humanity (Poblocki 2002: 168). Such critiques are warranted, but they share a tendency to focus on the game’s rules and pseudo-historical guise, at the expense of its more playful, less quantifiable aspects. The intention here is not to redeem Civilization or save it from its critics. The point is, rather, to examine aspects of the criticism that has calcified around the series to date, and question some of the conclusions that have been drawn.

Given the complexity and volume of information in this game, and the fact that games are played, and re-played, it would be quixotic to pursue a single, definitive account of the meaning of Civ III….”