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How Should Games Be Analyzed? 47
Thanks to the Electronic Book Review for its Espen Aarseth-authored article discussing what form academic analysis of videogames should take, part of a wider academic discussion on how games should be treated. Aarseth argues of the theme-ability of games: "The 'royal' theme of the traditional pieces is all but irrelevant to our understanding of chess. Likewise, the dimensions of Lara Croft's body, already analyzed to death by film theorists, are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently", before concluding: "The sheer number of students trained in film and literary studies will ensure that the slanted and crude misapplication of 'narrative' theory to games will continue and probably overwhelm game scholarship for a long time to come."
DiGRA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:DiGRA, First Person (Score:1)
Already discussed (Score:4, Interesting)
I say that any game worth its salt will be equally good with any theme. For example, if you took super mario brothers and made mario a stick figure and replaced goomba's with circles, koopas with triangles, bricks with hashed squares, etc. The game would be equally as good gamewise. You wouldn't want to play that game, but the point is that you can imagine the game not losing anything from a lack of theme. The mechanic remains intact.
Now take a final fantasy game. Theme is everything. If you replace everything in a final fantasy game with a generic distinguishing shape the game would fall apart. Look at a board game like monopoly. Its be re-themed a billion times, but the basic game mechanic remains.
What does this tell us? Its quite simple really. If the theme of a game can be removed, just like a CSS can be removed from an XHTML, and the game mechanic remains intact, then what you have is indeed a game. Final Fantasy is not a game. It is a partially interactive movie.
Now, it is common sense that theme is necessary and desirable. Take Metroid. The theme of Metroid means a lot. But will the game work without it? Absolutely. And the theme of metroid goes so well with the exploratory gameplay and that's what really make it stand heads and shoulders above other games.
So what we do is this. First remove the theme of a game and examine the core gamplay at a fundamental level. Rate it on its own. If it falls apart then what you have is not a game in the strictest sense. Second examine the theme on its own. A sesame street theme is going to make a big difference. Third examine the combination of the theme and the gameplay. Does it fit well together? A Sesame Street theme on the Counter-Strike game wouldn't work too well together. I point you to Barney Doom.
If you want to prove it to yourself look at some german board games. Settlers, Puerto Rico, etc. They all have themes which are complementary to the gameplay, but the games themselves stand firmly without their themes. This can be seen easily by the constant re-theming of settlers. A game like Diceland doesn't even bother with a theme. Or you could say that its theme is in fact the lack of theme.
Oh, one last thing. This system of game rating will find you raw game quality. I will now use one of my favoriate analogies. Citizen kane is the "best" movie ever. You may hate it. You may think its boring and stupid. But film-wise it is unbeatable. Zelda 1 is the same way. It is the Citizen Kane of video games. You may hate it, but that's how it is. Which games are most fun is completely independent of this. You may love to watch the Matrix #1 over and over, but film-wise it isn't great. Just as you may love to play Starcraft, it still isn't the objective best game.
Actually I'm starting to think that maybe Tetris is the citizen kane of video games.
Re:Already discussed (Score:5, Insightful)
A strictly ludic approach to analyzing games is useful in an academic context, for cataloguing games based on their play styles. But I'd question how useful it is as a measure of the experience of a video game, as much as I'd question the use of a Dewey Decimal number to judge a book's quality.
Let's move out of the theoretical (Score:1)
Final Fantasy suffers less than you imagine, Mario suffers more.
Re:Already discussed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Already discussed (Score:4, Insightful)
Tetris is easy to memorize - thus it doesn't need too much of a story. However, games like Warcraft III are a bit too complex to dump the player in directly and therefore require introducing characters/units one at a time in an appropriate manner.
Another factor that has to be considred with game mechanics is that singleplayer and multiplayer don't use the same processes - what could work for one doesn't always work for the other. This applies to even the most common games - for example, Starcraft has average mutliplayer (the interface isn't optimally designed), while has a great singleplayer component due to its relativly strong AI for its time without being too unfair.
On the other hand, there are various online-only games that are only good for multiplayer and are fairly boring when played alone. The most notable example would be Purge - this game doesn't have AI player support, meaning that you have to rely on the fact that there are still other players playing the game.
StarCraft has 'average' multiplay ?!?!? (Score:2)
I think the entire country of South Korea would disagree with you there. Probably the entire Asain continent. Heck, to throw the racial jokes aside, just about every gamer on the face of the planet would disagree.
OK, I'll stop being facetious. Seriously though, StarCraft has supurb multiplayer gameplay. It's one of the best balanced RTS *ever*. New strategies are formulated and refined long after the game's release. But y
Re:StarCraft has 'average' multiplay ?!?!? (Score:2)
I would have said excellent multiplayer if it weren't for the fact that it is being compared to more advanced interfaces more suited for RTS games. My main gripe about Starcraft (which is not easily fixable) involve unit commanding - the fact that you can only select 12 units distracts the play
Re:Already discussed (Score:2)
Constant re-theming of Settlers? Yeah, they changed the theme of settling an island to settling space in Spacefarers of Catan, or to settling the ancient world in Stone Ages of Catan. Clearly the game is solid since the mechan
Re:Already discussed (Score:3, Insightful)
That's silly. It wouldn't fall apart because theme is everything, but because you'd have no clue what the hell you were doing or why you were supposed to be doing it. All of the Final Fantasy games (and console RPGs in general) have varying amounts of gameplay; the theme just butresses it. You could say the same thing about Super Mario Broth
Re:Already discussed (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it's not quite the same. Zelda 1 is certainly a more significant game, in a historical sense--it was vastly more unique when compared to its predecessors than Starcraft. It is far more worthy of attention to video game historians.
But if you take the game mechanics themselves, seperating them from both their theme and the history of games development, and especially our sense of nostalgia, I think Starcraft comes out the winner. You're comparing a fairly basic action/exploration title to a deep, mature, and well-balanced multiplayer RTS. At the very least, they're in the same league. I'd say Ocarina of Time, or even Majora's Mask and Wind Waker are, ignoring the chronology of development, deeper than the original Legend of Zelda, but none of those titles really puts Starcraft to shame. I say this despite personally liking every single one of the Zelda games better than every single game Blizzard has made.
This just isn't true in comparing The Matrix to Citizen Kane--even if Orson Welles were lived several decades later than it had, and had released Citizen Kane in color at the same time as The Matrix, Kane would still likely be a "better" film than The Matrix.
Re:Already discussed (Score:2)
11 entries found for game [reference.com].
1. An activity providing entertainment or amusement; a pastime: party games; word games.
If the intent of the software is to entertain or amuse, then it is a game. Period, end of story. Stop trying to make words mean things they don't, it's annoying. A video game is a game played on a video monitor or an analogue thereof. Whether you call a final fantasy game an interactive movie or a roleplaying game, either way, it's a video game.
Oh, and, barney doom was a classic. Maybe
Hmmm , i beg to differ (Score:4, Funny)
So are you telling me that you've not played tomb raider enough to know all the best ways to get a good view of Lara Crofts tits ?
Re:Hmmm , i beg to differ (Score:2)
Re:Hmmm , i beg to differ (Score:3, Funny)
"Many people" meaning "you and about three other people"? Lara Croft moves like a shopping cart with a defective wheel.
Rob
Re:Hmmm , i beg to differ (Score:1)
In the words of the great Paul Mooney, "You must be on crack."
And it's au contraire. So no, many people would not say that, and likewise many people would not say Tomb Raider's controls were anything short of terrible.
I think games should be analyzed... (Score:2, Interesting)
I think what they're getting at is if the look of a game changes the feel of it. I think it does. For some reason, aiming a weapon in an FPS feels different when you change the crosshair, even if you change nothing else. That's one example.
Re:I think games should be analyzed... (Score:2)
What the fuck? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:What the fuck? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What the fuck? (Score:2)
Re:What the fuck? (Score:2)
Rob
Re:What the fuck? (Score:2)
Sure, if you're the kind of guy who also prefers The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies over Yojimbo.
Re:What the fuck? (Score:2)
Re:What the fuck? (Score:2)
And unless you could come up with a reasoned argument as to why Star Trek 6 has a better story than Citizen Kane, you'd be wrong. "Better" in this case means "better written" and so forth.
Greatest is also subjective.
Incorrect. Greatness is measured by influence, which is quite objective.
Rob
Re:What the fuck? (Score:1, Funny)
Re:What the fuck? (Score:2)
Lara's dimensions do matter! (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, Lara's "dimensions," especially her increase from large to Zeppelin-grade from Tomb-raider to TR2, totally put me off the whole franchise... I never bought another TR game. Frankly I view them with disgust.
They had this interesting, powerful female character, unusual in a game, and what do they do... they act like nerdy repressed 14 year olds and emphasise unrealistically, frankly off-puttingly (off-putting to me as a straight guy even - I can imagine what women think of it), large breasts. F'ing stupid.
So actually I think analysing Lara's dimensions is a pretty valid form of analysis - it tells you a lot about the psychology of game makers and players.
Re:Lara's dimensions do matter! (Score:2)
This a very ludological thing to say (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you take an identically choreographed dance and place it in a different setting with different costumes and have it be just as valid, just as "good"? Yes, of course. But the audience experience includes the whole of the performance, not just the choreography. To exclude the fact that the dance happens on a happy field of flowers versus inside a concentration camp is to miss key elements of examining the user experience as a whole.
Now, the narratologists are just as likely to make the mistake from the other side.
The difficulty arises from the term "game" which we use to both refer to the formal construction of rules, and the whole experience. To be more precise, we could say that Aarseth as a ludologist is like a choreographer in that he is interested in the formal construction of rules. There's a field for those who study "game rules" and a field for those who study "interactive entertainment" and one encompasses the other to a large degree. The latter one will be pretty broad (but not confine itself to narratology).
Pragmatic game design... (Score:3, Interesting)
To answer it is difficult. How do you measure the success of a game? Is that even the right question? This starts to venture into territory that is pragmatically and empirically unapproachable. How do you measure the play that arises from a particular game? How do you measure the quality of said play? It's duration? The physiological effects it has on its players? The psychological? At some level, play springs equally from the intuition of the designer and the willing participation of the players. Never fully-formed; games are much more iterative and require far more tinkering than other mediums. I agree that sales figures aren't necessarily telling (Enter the Matrix) but I'm going to have to side with Raph and with my college game instructor, Steve Librande (Lead Designer, Blizzard North and co-speaker at this years Game Tuning), here and say that what really matters is the player's experience. That is, the way that every part of a game harmonizes to create an experience for the player. The theme, narrative, structure, and platform included. This is what I'd consider a holistic or pragmatic approach to game design, and one that game 'scholars' would do well to examine. It works.
Aarseth has some interesting points about the technology, the 'platform' of games, being too ephemeral to be realistically criticized by any sort of traditional means. Unfortunately he falls short of really examining why this might be or to propose a solution, which I think would be a very profitable avenue of study. The perennial inability by the critical multitudes to define 'play' (or, to bitch-slap the World's Deadest Horse, 'fun',) is central to the problem of studying games. I'd really like to see him expand on said idea and suggest an academically acceptable solution. Because, honestly, 'intuition' can only get us so far.
games analysis vs. fiction analysis (Score:1)
Maybe my experience is just tainted by this discussion I had with someone who insisted that science fiction was nothing but pulp fiction/space opera/gadgets.
I guess there are a lot of SF books that are like this, but there is nothing that keeps a science fiction author from writing a book with as much "depth" as normal fiction. Also sometimes the "gadgets" are what the author wants to talk about(see Arthur C.
Obviouly an Amatuer (Score:3, Interesting)
Clearly someone who has jumped on the idea of a 'new medium' (which it is) without doing ANY homework. Every game he mentions was a massive one. From the sound of it he's never even played one.
Sorry to be so negative, but I really hate the trend recently. Since games have gotten big, people have started to notice and comment on them a lot more. Unfortunatly, a lot of the academics who comment, frequently never play games and have a poor understanding of the entire medium. Does anyone know of someone who can give proper(i.e. researched) debate on the medium.
Re:Obviouly an Amatuer (Score:3, Interesting)
He is the author of Cybertext [hf.uib.no] which is cited in practically every paper on videogames.
He is also the co-founder of the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen as well as the co-founder of Games Studies [gamestudies.org] an academic e-journal about videogames.
Finally, he is Associate Professor, Principal Researcher [game.itu.dk] at the Center of Computer Games Research at the Department of Digital Aesthetics & Communication at the IT Univers
Re:Obviouly an Amatuer (Score:1)
Re:Obviouly an Amatuer (Score:2)
What kind of question is that? (Score:2)
The question "How should games be analyzed" is meaningless even within the [limited] context of the story submission. Analyzed for what purpose? Evaluating their value as art? Writing a game review? Crafting a prospectus to seek funding based on prior work?
If you're talking about artistic merit, the work should be characterized in the same way art is already characterized, which I will not go into as I am pretty ignorant of it, but it seems to me that you also must consider the interface. This separates