So, finally, the marks are in, and I’m able to post this thesis I’ve been rambling on about for far too long. I won’t say much by way of introduction, except to note that if you’ve got any feedback, I would absolutely love to hear from you, either in the comments here, or at dangoldingis [at] gmail [dot] com. So, without further ado:
Filed under study, videogames
At the close of 2008, videogaming academia finds itself in a decidedly odd position. The problem? In its furious attempts to disentangle itself from film academia and foreign invaders from the land of Narrative at the turn of the millennium, it has become confused. In the attempt to fend off these shadowy academic-colonisers, gaming academia became something it plainly isn’t: ludology.
Let me insert that I intend no offense to Gonzalo Frasca (whose writing proposed and popularised the term). I like his writing much more than a great many academics; he seems good-humoured and open to criticisms of his work, which is more than can be said for a great number others. I also don’t believe that he entirely intended for the whole discipline to be known as ludology. As he states in the essay, “Our main goal was to show how basic concepts of ludology could be used along with narratology to better understand videogames.”
However, it seems that somewhere, somehow, there became a general impression that ludology should be used synonymously with the general study of videogames in their entirety. Some anecdotal evidence: I used to do a short segment on the PALGN Podcast where I would briefly run through a segment of games studies; often the research for it was more illuminating for me than the end product and it was probably laughable to anyone who actually knew anything about the field. However, one week (the episode on the narratology/ludology storm-in-a-teacup) I had a minor shock when a Game Design student at a local University wrote to correct me that in fact ‘ludology’ meant the whole discipline of the study of games, and not just one perspective on the whole deal. He said that this was the way he’d been taught by his lecturers.
When did this happen? When did higher education institutions start teaching ‘ludology’?
There are problems with this. I have many complaints against the term (not necessarily the ideology behind it, however), but I’ll start at basics. Etymologically, it’s a ‘bitzer’ of a term; ludo from latin, –logy from Greek. Certainly, narratology is equally slapdash, with narrare from latin, but I’m not here to defend that. If anything, they are both etymologically silly. That’s English for you, though; it’s more a niggle than anything else. The issue is, though, that ludology then strikes as a self-aggrandising term, a humorous nonce word. For ludology surely has more in common with sexology than biology; wikipedia even has a perfect summation of what has occurred with the word under their -logy suffix entry:
As with other classical compounds, adding the suffix to a initial word-stem derived from Greek or Latin may be used to lend grandeur or the impression of scientific rigor to humble pursuits, as in cosmetology (“the study of beauty treatment”) or cynology (“the study of dog training”).
As far as I know, no-one needed a new word to define the study of film or of literature. Consulting my own University’s handbook of studies, I could only find schools of Cinema Studies or of Literature; no school of cinemology or literatology were apparent. Funnily enough, I couldn’t find a school of ludology either. The point is this: apart from being pretentious and another example of essential jargon, it essentially means nothing.
Of course, issues of semantics and pretension aside, the greatest problem of ludology is that it doesn’t actually encapsulate what it is gaming academics are often actually studying. ‘Ludology’ isn’t helpful because it overemphasises just one aspect of videogames – admittedly, a crucial aspect, but one limited aspect all the same. Videogames represent the lovechild of play, sport, film, software, architecture, theme parks, riddles and more. I have rarely seen an academic – even the most hardcore ludologist – study games with isolated and limited reference to their so-called ludic basis. Usually, at the very least some cursory examination is made of technology, or fictional contexts. What I’m saying here is that ludology might be okay (quibbles aside) for a discipline’s name if all we wanted to study was ludic elements. Admittedly, ‘Videogame studies’ or simply ‘Game studies’, my preferred alternative(s), may also have this problem; however, ‘games’ and ‘videogames’ are what this medium is known by in the ‘loose and popular sense’ (after Chisholm). In other words, I doubt you’d find your average consumer asking a cashier for their latest and greatest in ludic technology; and when dealing in academia, I find it is best to use as many ‘real’ words as possible. After all, videogames are actually the object of study here. Frasca, in fact, argues as much in his initial formulation:
We will propose the term ludology (from ludus, the Latin word for “game”), to refer to the yet non-existent “discipline that studies game and play activities”. Just like narratology, ludology should also be independent from the medium that supports the activity.
So how on earth did ludology end up becoming our discipline’s overarching title in some circles, and where do we go from here? As a mere recently-minted Cultural Studies graduate with a videogame-academic bent, I don’t feel qualified to offer anything other than guesses. However, my personal hope is that ‘ludology’ will one day die a quiet death while ‘Game Studies’ or similar alternatives take over in respectable institutions and academics not prone to intellectual hyperbole or point-proving. It’s a modest hope, but a man can dream.
Filed under study, videogames
Any readers who follow me on Twitter will know that I’ve recently been undertaking a task of mammoth proportions: watching one film per day in my collection that I haven’t yet seen. For those playing along at home, this numbers just over one hundred films, so it may well take some time.
My travels have already taken me through some great classics that I never got around to watching, but one genre I’ve been catching up on in particular is the Western. I’ve long been a fan (The Searchers and the Dollars trilogy number among my favourite films), but I wouldn’t have ever have gone so far as to call myself well-versed in the genre. A few days ago, it was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; tomorrow, I’m planning on sitting down with Red River.
While watching these terrific films, I began to wonder why there are so few Western videogames. Certainly, we’ve had Gun, Call of Juarez and even the completely reprehensible Custer’s Revenge, but the Western has never really established itself as a genre in gaming like the sci-fi or fantasy genres have. This might have something to do with the Western being seen as ‘old’ or outdated. Then again, fantasy was not widely popular before The Lord of the Rings films, and has nevertheless always been a recurrent game setting.
I therefore suspect that the prevalence of these genres has to do with their compatibility with the strengths of the videogame as a medium. A common trait of sci-fi, fantasy and videogames is a strength of world creation. All are held on the power of their ability to create minutely detailed worlds – at least two sci-Fi and fantasy franchises have coherent, fictional languages – and so it isn’t surprising they would intersect. However, when it comes to genres, I have come to believe that the Western is equally compatible.
There are several points that make the Western perfect for videogame form. Most obviously, the Western is easily converted into standard gaming conventions. Most Westerns feature, of course, activities that videogames have been doing well for over a decade: shooting and riding horses.
However, it is the approach that the Western takes to filmic space that makes me think that developers have been remiss in using the genre for videogames. The space in Western films can be broken down into two variants: structured and unstructured. Both play into videogame design perfectly. The wide open plains of the desert are remarkably close cousins of the dead wastelands of Fallout 3, the rolling hills of Oblivion, the occasionally nondescript terrain of the Zelda franchise. These are spaces that games do well, and it isn’t difficult to imagine riding a horse across a sweeping Western desert in a current-generation styled videogame. These are spaces of perspective and exploration, and they are thrilling in reality for the same reasons they are thrilling in games. The prospect of searching atmospheric, wide open spaces for a prize (as in The Treasure of Sierra Madre) or a quarry (as in The Searchers or 3.10 to Yuma) is an easy one to be excited about.
Importantly, though, the Western also deals with highly structured spaces. By this, I mean the reoccuring Western township. These are remote, hermetically sealed environments where ‘outside’ does not matter. These are focussed places, predicated on one or two factors that define their space. In High Noon, the town is a contested, treacherous place, pointed myopically, irreversibly and unavoidably at the arrival of that train. Every section of the town is outlined in relationship with the arrival of Frank Miller; he defines and owns the space well before he makes his cinematic arrival. Indeed, it often seems like the director has actually drawn up a map of the town in order to plot key events. All narrative is related to a central hub of places: the hotel, the railway station. This strategy of ‘mapping’ is a common ploy of the Western, and suits videogames nicely.
Further, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, we see the positive effects that Rance Stoddard has on the town inscribed in its very appearance for the early segments of the film. I know where I’ve seen that happen before – in videogames, like Fable II, perhaps?
These structured spaces are about the influence that one or two people can have over place. They are about power structures and power struggles – and again, these are things that games do very well. In A Fistful of Dollars, The Man With No Name enters a town at war with itself, and plays the two rival groups against each other. It takes almost no imagination to conceive of this idea converted to videogame form. A Bioware-style RPG, perhaps, with branching conversation trees and choices to make? Or even less imaginatively, Far Cry 2 transposed to the desert?
This post is therefore a plea to any designers out there: give the Western another go. I want to see a game where I can ride my valiant steed across lonesome plains, only to arrive in a township where no-one likes me and a price rests on my head. I want to have a shoot out in a grave yard and a dust-up in a bar-room. I want every moment of the game to come down to one final confrontation in Main Street, where he who flinches first loses his life and possibly more. And after it all goes down and I’m left standing, I’ll throw away my badge in disgust. But inside, I’ll be having the time of my life. I’ll pick up my controller and direct my gunslinger towards the next outlaw township.
Filed under videogames
Few videogames had more words written about them during 2007 than Valve’s Portal. Not only was the game outstanding, but it had just the right amount of wit and oblique humour to make it go viral on the internet. How does the following sentence end? “The cake is a…”
It ends, of course, with me shoving a companion cube down your throat to keep you from ruining a perfectly funny game. So much has been uttered about Portal‘s successes and triumphs that it seems futile, irritating even, for me to try and add any more. There isn’t a lot that remains unsaid about Portal, and when the game’s creators have also said so much, I don’t have a lot to add to the conversation.
That being said, I do want to talk about Portal‘s game space. This is because Portal‘s game space is simply exceptional in the context of my continuing discussion of great game spaces. The portal gun might have been a great eye-catching mechanic, the GLaDOS humour might have been the internet-wildfire fuel, but it was the game space of Portal that was its real triumph. This is pure design through architecture. I used Portal as my primary text for my recent thesis, so a lot of the ideas here are cribbed directly from that document (which is forthcoming, I promise; results are in on the 12th and after that it’s free range).
Every inch of test chamber after test chamber in Portal is designed for a specific behavioural purpose. In an article for Gamasutra, Kim Swift, Jeep Barnett and Eric Wolwap say exactly what I was trying to say in my thesis clearer than I ever did:
Navigating the environment is Portal‘s primary gameplay challenge; In effect, the environment is your enemy.
That the player doesn’t notice this so obviously throughout their first playthrough of the game is telling. I suspect that the linear, puzzle based design of Portal was accepted by players more easily due to the test-chamber fiction of the game and place. In this sense, there is definitely a doubling between Portal‘s designers and GLaDOS. They perform similar functions: GLaDOS’ function is to test her subjects, and Valve’s function was to test their own labrats in order to predict and mould player responses. Playtesting was crucial for them, to the point where Walpaw and Swift claim that a single moment of confusion on the part of the player – any player – was their fault, and that “[they] failed you.”
This is almost entirely because the game space, coupled with a select few other factors, is designed to elicit a predictable response on the part of the player. For example, in one early room in the developer commentary (required listening; if you’ve played Portal and not taken the time to go back and play it again, you are missing one of the most illuminating gaming experiences you’ll ever have), Jason Brashill draws attention to what he calls “gates”. This is simply a strategy of putting a time-locked door between the player and the next area, which forces the player to take stock and process their options before charging ahead. This occurs at a number of points throughout Portal, and all work perfectly.
There are many similar examples of such focussed spatial design. In that memorable first room, the ‘relaxation vault’, Kim Swift notes:
It’s absolutely critical that players quickly wrap their heads around what a portal is. We noticed early playtesters grasped the concept much more quickly when they caught a glimpse of themselves through a portal, so we deliberately positioned this first portal to ensure that players will invariably see themselves.
Did you also know, for example, that the third test chamber is designed to teach you, the player, that the function of a portal is not tied to its colour? Apparently, during testing, there was a common misconception that, maybe, an orange portal could only be entered and not exited. Therefore, chamber three was created, and the space designed so the player may only complete it by entering and exiting the same portal. There are so many examples of this littered throughout Portal, from the design of the space in order to get players to look up, to the elimination of ‘incorrect’ solutions, to even the visual aesthetics cuing function. According to designer Paul Graham, “the [visual] design is essentially a balance between round objects and sharp objects; the sharp objects representing background elements, and the round objects [are points of interest like] doors and moveable props.”
This design even extends to creating emotion in the player. In the eleventh test chamber, players gain the fully powered portal gun. In order to build up anticipation for the moment of receiving this upgrade, two strategies are employed. First, as designer Lars Jensvold notes, the room is designed so that it brings players “in a circle around the device, so that it’s virtually always in sight” until the puzzle is solved and the portal gun is received. Secondly, once the puzzle has been solved, players may only access the upgraded gun via a slow-moving platform. The movement of the player is therefore limited to a slow, anticipation-building speed.
Clearly, Portal consciously organises environment through spatial strategies in order to influence player behaviour, emotion, and generally, experience and gameplay. Other games have done this many times over, but few have done it with such incredible focus and economy of design. Of course, as I’ve already admitted, few other games have had the benefit of placing you in such a ‘designed’ space as suspension-of-disbelief inducing test chambers, but there are surely many lessons to be learned from the level design here. Most importantly, Portal proves that it is almost possible to make a game work through sheer brilliance of level design and testing. It may well be the ten per cent of plot and other over-quoted aspects that made Portal the great game that everyone says it is, but it was the ninety per cent of spatial design that got it there to begin with. Portal might not embody many of the spatial qualities that I love (exploration and perspective to name just two), but it might just be my favourite game space ever designed.
Filed under Great game spaces, videogames
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