A collection of influences and ideas and influencers that set me thinking. They have guided my study:
Ioanna Iacovides, Anna L. Cox, Patrick McAndrew, James Aczel & Eileen Scanlon
“Along with the rising popularity of games, there has been an increasing research focus on what makes game-play so involving (e.g., Sweetser & Wyeth, 2005), how to evaluate the player experience (e.g., Mandryk, 2008), and how games can be used for educational purposes (e.g., Harpsted, Mayer, & Aleven, 2013). Interest in the Game User Experience (GUX) includes the optimal experiences of involvement, such as game flow (Sweetser & Wyeth, 2005), and the more prosaic experience of being engaged in game-play, such as the Core Elements of the Gaming Experience (Calvillo- Gamez, Cairns, & Cox, 2010). Much of this research agrees that challenge is an important game-play component (Cox, Cairns, Shah, & Carroll, 2012). A challenge also offers an opportunity to learn, and therefore, as some designers have argued, learning is an integral part of game-play (Koster, 2005). However, the nature of the relationship between learning and involvement, often implied in game-based learning research, has rarely been investigated explicitly. GUX research also tends to focus on specific instances of play, that is, micro involvement, rather than longer term motiva- tions and the activities that occur around play, that is, macro involvement. Indeed the relationship between these two levels of involvement and learning is also not clear.”
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“One consideration of learning through games is how experiencing a breakdown during play may lead to learning” (Pelletier & Oliver, 2006)
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There is an idea of narrative, where we see people learn as they engage in the task at hand and become better at the task.
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Game-Play Breakdowns and Breakthroughs
make the game-play experience more complex.
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“The literature indicates that failure is a common part of game-play, where some breakdowns can lead to learning and others can influence involvement. However, it is not clear why these different breakdowns occur or what the relationship is between them. Further, the process by which they are overcome has rarely been considered. The concept of breakthroughs could also be useful for examining learning in the context of game-play.”
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Consalvo (2007)” defined external resources as paratexts, with games themselves considered to be the primary texts, and examples of paratexts include game-related walkthroughs, previews, YouTube videos, blogs, reviews, magazines, and so on. Player involvement is thus likely to be influenced by exposure to different forms of paratext.”
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“In terms of player actions, a breakdown occurs when the player fails to execute an action within the game successfully. This could be due to pressing the wrong button, getting the timing of an action wrong, or experiencing an in-game event, such as being hit by an enemy. In terms of player understanding, the most obvious breakdowns are when the player is unsure about what to do or where to go. ”
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“As in previous research, breakdowns, in the form of challenges or aporias (Aarseth, 1999), were found to be an integral part of play. “
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The ludic city quentin stevens
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“This discussion is organized around
the idea that people’s experiences in urban space are characterized by a range
of tensions: tensions between exchange value and use value, between the
needs and actions of the collective and the individual, between alienation
and participation, between the instrumental rationality of work and the
creative freedom of play. “
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JESPER JUULES A CASUAL REVELOUTION
“This is the moment in which the simplicity of early video games is being rediscovered, while new flexible designs are letting video games fit into the lives of players. Video games are being reinvented, and so is our image of those who play the games. This is the moment when we realize that everybody can be a video game
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The 1998 Dance Dance Revolution (figure 1.13) shifted the focus from 3-D space to the physical movement of the players on the game’s dance pads. The game does feature a display, but most of the game’s spectacle is in player space, the real-world area in which
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Following Beaudouin-Lafon, an interface can be evaluated on its degree of compatibility: this is a measure of the similarity between the physical action of the user and the action performed on the domain objects. For example, traditional tennis video games implement the action of serving in the pressing of a button at the right time when an energy meter on the screen peaks,38 meaning that there is a low degree of compatibility between the player’s actions and the events on the screen
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Concerning video games, independent game designer Kyle Gabler uses the term juiciness to describe the type of visceral interface that gives excessive amounts of positive feedback in response the player’s actions: ‘‘A juicy game element will bounce and wiggle and squirt and make a little noise when you touch it.
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In 1936, Alfred J. Barr created a diagram of the history of ‘‘Cubism and Abstract Art’’ for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (figure 4.22).47 Edward Tufte points out that Barr’s diagram only includes influences internal to the art world, and excludes influences from all other parts of society and history
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The mechanic of matching similar items is not new in game history: it can be found in a wide range of games including Solitaire, dominoes, and Mahjong. As in the discussion of Solitaire card games, matching tile games illustrate how a game design is not tied to a specific technological platform, and how usability and low barriers to entry are important issues for any game. Not everybody is happy with downloadable casual games. Game developer Eric Zimmerman told me the stor
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Here is the formula for the success of the Nintendo Wii and games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band shown in figures 5.1–5.4: they have physical interfaces that mimic the action in the games.
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Where traditional hardcore games focus on creating worlds, on 3-D space, and downloadable casual games focus on the experience of manipulating tangible objects on screen space, mimetic interface games emphasize the events in player space.
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Chaim Gingold has coined the term magic crayon12 to describe how taking away possibilities from the player can make it more likely that the player will produce something pleasing. Mimetic interface games are generally such magic crayons: they make it easy for players to experience competence—to play tennis well, to complete a rock song, to perform a choreographed dance.
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This duality of similarity and difference is common to all nonabstract games—all such games have a level of abstraction or simplification of what they represent:14 you may play a racing game in which cars can never run out of gas, a sports game where you can never be injured, or even a guitar game in which the guitar never needs tuning and the strings never break. Wii Sports tennis will infuriate a top tennis player with the simplicity of its controls, but it gives a non-player of tennis the experience of being skilled. While swinging my arm to swing a tennis racquet has a high degree of compatibility, the characters in Wii Sports tennis move by themselves, without my input; where regular tennis allows me to control ball direction by turning my body, rotating the tennis racquet, and so on, this has been reduced to a question of timing in Wii Sports tennis. Guitar Hero is similar in this respect: while the general pose of the player (left hand on frets, right hand strumming) has a high degree of compatibility with the actual playing of guitar, the left hand must press the five colored individual buttons rather than press the six strings of a guitar at the various fret positions.”
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McGonical “Super games The term “supergaming” is intended to invoke four key attributes of the
trend. Supergaming is massively scaled, as in supersized gaming. Supergam-
ing is embedded in and projected onto everyday public environments, as in
superimposed gaming. Supergaming heightens the power and capabilities of
its players, as in superhero gaming. Finally, supergaming harnesses the play
of distributed individuals in a high-performance problem-solving unit, as in
supercomputing gaming.”
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THE PARTICIPATORY MUSEUM A book by Nina Simon
“The goal of participatory techniques is both to meet visitors’ expectations for active engagement and to do so in a way that furthers the mission and core values of the institution. Rather than delivering the same content to everyone, a participatory institution collects and shares diverse, personalized, and changing content co-produced with visitors. It invites visitors to respond and add to cultural artifacts, scientific evidence, and historical records on display. It showcases the diverse creations and opinions of non-experts. People use the institution as meeting grounds for dialogue around the content presented. Instead of being “about” something or “for” someone, participatory institutions are created and managed “with” visitors.
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The Now vs. All display makes Free2Choose a powerful social experience. When you take a poll alone or walk into Facing Mars, there’s no suspense about the outcome. I voted yes for going to Mars, and then I saw that 65% of other visitors over time agreed with me. In Free2choose, I voted yes for headscarves, saw that 65% of all visitors agreed with me, but also saw that only 40% of the people currently in the room agreed with me. When the results for “Visitors Now” differed greatly from those of “All Visitors,” the surprise was audible. I was in one group where 100% of us voted that Protestants should be able to parade through Catholic areas of Northern Ireland, and we looked around with curiosity and complicity when we saw that only 60% of “All Visitors” agreed with us. Every group was different, so every outcome was different.
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The Experimentarium in Denmark took this one step further with EgoTrap, a game visitors can play onsite with their mobile phones. After completing three solo challenges, each player is linked via mobile phone numbers to another who is playing at the same time. The players are instructed to call each other, and then they meet up in person and play the rest of the game together throughout the science center.
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SFZero is a “collaborative production” game in which people perform creative tasks in an urban environment. The players design the tasks, perform them, and keep score by assigning points to others’ documentation of their task fulfillment. The players are also the audience for each other’s tasks and their attempts to complete them. Tasks tend to be short, evocative, and a bit transgressive, such as “distract the mailman,” “reverse shoplifting (insert an object into a store),” or “create a permanent and visible neighborhood tattoo.” Some tasks are personal, like “make a sound portrait of yourself,” while others encourage people to explore new places or learn new skills. The antiboredom team does not design the individual game tasks. Instead, the staff manages the community website on which players propose new tasks and share stories about the ones they have completed. This allows the antiboredom team to focus on encouraging new players, providing guidelines, and improving the tools that support the game. Staff members provide the scaffolding that empowers players to co-create their gaming experience. In response to the task: “Install a door in a public place,” a group of SFZero players constructed Doorhenge in Golden Gate Park. The artwork stayed up for two months, aided by occasional cleanup and reconstruction by dozens of SFZero players. Photo by anna one aka”
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Liminal, threshold between fantasy and reality.
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Sutton Smith has rhetorics of play, seven of them, as they are ways for people to live by.
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HAKIM BEY Temporary autonomous Zones
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“A T.A.Z. is a liberated area “of land, time or imagination” where one can be for something, not just against, and where new ways of being human together can be explored and experimented with. Locating itself in the cracks and fault lines in the global grid of control and alienation, a T.A.Z. is an eruption of free culture where life is experienced at maximum intensity. It should feel like an exceptional party where for a brief moment our desires are made manifest and we all become the creators of the art of everyday life.”
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The Depth Project
“Game characterstics……The size of a game’s skill chain is the number of distinct steps in the ranking of all players, where players at each step beat all the players at lower steps some significant percentage of the time.”
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Proceed with Caution: Process and Contingency in Games and Art
In Beyond Play: a New Approach to Games, the anthropologist Thomas Malaby expresses his interest in discarding the formalism and exceptionalism underlying most game definitions. Instead he suggests that games can best be understood through two qualities, their ‘processual’ nature and their inherent ‘contingency.’ For Malaby a game is not an object, a collection of props or code, but a process that begins and ends with each session of play. In other words, the game of chess only exists when two people sit down to maneuver pieces across a checkered board according to their mutual understanding of the rules. Once they have stopped playing, that particular instance of chess disappears, and the pieces and board become merely trinkets. Central to any of these processes, whether chess or baseball or World of Warcraft, is contingency. For Malaby the outcome of a game can never be known ahead of time, or else the process can no longer be defined as a game. The end of any game must always be indeterminate at the beginning.
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Malaby remarks on the idea of “shared engagement of contingency [as] a powerful means for developing trust and belonging.” It was not always typical, however, of the Conceptualists to focus on this notion of affecting a major impact on the relationships of spectators/participants to one another (though there are many exceptions). The phenomenon of shared engagement – and the related notion of the collective interpretation of outcomes and meaning generated from shared experience – is core to the much more contemporary notion of ‘relational art,’ which, in the words of its chief definer, Nicolas Bourriaud, “acquires [its] formal and theoretical marks in Conceptual Art.” Bourriaud’s text Relational Aesthetics helps us to triangulate the position of games in relation to the art practices of the present and the Conceptual art that preceded them.
In following with Malaby’s insistence that games do not occupy an entirely separate space from life, relational artworks by Bourriaud’s description “take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” The artworks of this school are necessarily tied to, and react to, real life, and the relationship between the art and the world is layered and complex, defined through the experience of the art. Relational art is not as purposefully anti-object as Conceptual art – dismissal of the object is not part of a contemporary agenda — but it is not object-centric either. Much as a game of Chess is nothing but the bounded actions of two players with a set of props, the focus in relational aesthetics for Bourriaud remains on “the collective elaboration of meaning” arising from the encounter.
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In elaborating on the encounters in relational art, Bourriaud explicitly mentions games, saying, “the figures of reference of human relations have now become fully-fledged artistic ‘forms.’ Meetings, encounters, events, various types of collaboration between people, GAMES, festivals… all manner of encounter and relational invention” (my emphasis).
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His placement of games as artistic forms and figures of reference seems to be in concert with Malaby’s description of games’ definitive function in generating meaning through their activation by players, and also to generate a “distinctive disposition”, as he calls it, about how to act within the domain of engagement.
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THESE GREAT URBANIST GAMES: NEW BABYLONAND SECOND LIFE
Thomas M. Malaby, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA
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Bouriad in his opening to realtional theory says that art is a game.
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GAME RESEARCH METHODS
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Close reading of game structures.
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Components are the game entities that can be manipulated by players or the game system (Järvinen, 2008). Other names for them include game design atoms (Brathwaite and Schreiber, 2009) and game elements (Björk and Holopainen, 2005), but basically, these all describe individual entities define by a game that has values and can be manipulated. In addition, components are used to define game space. An important aspect of these components is that it also provides the boundaries which game components cannot move outside. Ship, aliens, UFO, bullets, and bunkers in Space Invaders (TAITO, 1979) are examples of components. Chess board and the maze walls of Pacman (Namco, 1980) are examples of components that define game space.
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A game’s designer is therefore simultaneously creating the artifact and the potential play that it facilitates(Wardrip-Fruin, 2009). Nevertheless, players may impose their own play systems on top of the artifact (or at least parts of it), trespassing the limitations expected by the designers (e.g., Myers, 2010). As game complexity—especially the number of
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Reflexivity means both having the capability and language necessary to justify the methodological, theoretical and practical/pragmatic steps undertaken during data collection and analysis (Mason, 2002), and also the awareness of the researcher’s relationship to the field. For computer games research, this type of reflexivity requires acknowledgement of when the researcher is, and is not, an embedded member of the community being researched. For example, early on in Raising the stakes, TL Taylor (2012) is reflexive of the fact that although she uses methods associated with ethnography, she does not consider the research she conducted within the e-sports community to be ethnographic. She admits that she “was always fairly outside” what she was studying by virtue of her status as “a noncompetitor, a woman, and a bit older” than her research participants (Tay
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The second solution I will discuss is autoethnography. Autoethnography, as the name suggests, is a type of ethnography centred on the self. As a method, it acknowledges the subjective self as part of the process of doing ethnography and seeksto document the feelings, thoughts, and experiences generated by research and embodied by the researcher.
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Dennis Harper, a sociologist famous for his autoethnography of railroad drifters, writes, “researchers learn to eliminate editorial or subjective elements from their writing by writing in the third person or the passive voice and by using qualifiers. In the narrowest sense, the point of the research report is to describe ‘objective social facts’ […]” (Harper, 1992, p.155)
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When committing to an ethnographic research design, researchers are committing themselves to see the world as their participants do. To ignore the bonds which develop, even negative ones, and the individual relationships between researcher and participant which assist in this way of seeing is to ignore the process of
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Boundary management was discussed as being close to every day emotional labour. In other contexts, this method might be simply called professionalism. T
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Authoethnography likewise requires the researcher to be honest about their process and it additionally requires researchers to open themselves to being researched. Authoethnographies are one of the most genuine, detailed, and richly descriptive ways to account for the social nature of doing research. As evidenced in Jenny Sundén’s (2012) account of intimacy within World of Warcraft, autoethnography enables researchers to provide a first-hand account of not only “[…] what happened ‘out there’, but also what happened ‘in here’” (Harper, 1992, p.155). As a methodology, autoethnography is usually a part of initial research design. I
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ween the player and their character, the player and the content, and even players with one another. What this means is that while games are developed in a studio, at least part of their meaning and significance is created at the moment of play and through the people who play them
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stimulated recall.
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I have used stimulated recall when researching educational larps (Pitkänen, 2008) as well as in an ongoing study at Østerskov. However, the method has not been used when studying traditional larps. Traditional larps would be a fruitful research ground with the stimulated recall ground, since many larpers aim for immersion, and immersion aims for the loss of self and making the game world even more real than the real world (Balzer, 2011, pp.33). One could imagine that seeing the in-game actions on video afterwards would the players to describe their reasons behind their actions better than an interview without any stimuli.
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research 