Ludology.org

Video games beating up banner ads

While my work on "serious" videogames has been mainly targeted to aesthetics and education, advertising videogames will probably become a good trojan horse towards non-trivial, Tolkien-infested games. If as this article suggests, videogame ads are going to be a big thing on the Net, both designers and marketing people will have to start thinking about videogames rethorics. The rethorics of simulation is a fascinating topic because it is not as much based in "delivery" of information -to use a cliche and certainly rather naive way of looking at it- but rather on experimentation. A videogame ads is not about somebody telling you that X is Y, but rather of letting the player to discover it by herself - or, more exactly, to think that she discovered it by herself. The problem is that players are not dumb, so the limit between manipulation and information is a very thin one.
Videogame and simulation rethorics is going to introduce a tremendous change in communication, because it is the first time in history that we have a mass medium that allows to model complex systems and this way of representing reality is essentially different than narrative. Obviously, narrative will remain a powerful rethorical tool. But simulation has certain communicational powers that narrative lacks and this will lead to a social need of becoming familiar with the ideology of simulation. By enhancing simulation-literacy both designers and players will be able to better understand and criticize such things as videogames or videogame ads. If you are interested in knowing more about videogame and simulation ideology, you can take a look at my recent thesis.

Virtual actors

"Final Fantasy" is a painfully boring film. However, most of the people just go and watch it because of the eye candy. Eye candy is a real crowd-driver - just think of the "Aqua" interface in Mac OS X. Anyway, while the movie sucked and the graphics were not 100% realistic, the main point is clear: we will see more and more digitally rendered movies. However, some people are not very happy with this. And those people are, as you can guess, human actors. Digital actors have all the benefits of cartoons: they don't get sick, they don't ask for raises, the don't go on strike and, yes, they always sign the studio's contract without caring about the fine print. Anyway, it seems that Hollywood actors are afraid that they will lose their jobs. My two cents: this won't happen at all. While it is true that virtual actors will become more and more present in movies -mainly in amateur, low and mid-budget films- to think that pixels with replace humans implies a total misunderstanding of how the star system works. Actors are not just guys who lend their skin to characters. Yes, you will be able to have a 100% digital replica of Robert de Niro, but the referent is always going to be there and he is a human. What is the different between Cameron Diaz and a virtual Cameron Diaz? Well, hmmm... men fantasies are not going to be the same with the virtual one because they know that, hmmm, they can not actually, I mean, "know" her in the Biblical sense of the term. My point is that actors are not just avatars. Stars are stars because their life continue once the screen goes off. Zillions of tabloids and tv shows tell us what happens between Julia, Brad, Tom and Arnold. They get divorced, they get married, they die, they become junkies. All that stuff is not going to be there with virtual actors, because there is a high degree of projection and peeping-tomness that simply can not happen in the virtual world. Stars is what most of the people would like to be and, no matter what Negroponte believes, Romanticism is still strong and people prefer being human rather than being digital.

Coming soon

I am currently working on a re-launch of ludology.org. I plan to add more stuff and my goal is to transform it into a ressource for videogame researchers, with updated info, news and links to articles. Make sure to check back soon.

Videogame Construction Kit.

Alice Yang and other people from the Lifelong Kindergarten at MIT are working on "new computational tools to enable children to create their own videogames that can run on many computers, ranging in size and power from handheld devices like Color Gameboys and PocketPCs to laptop and desktop machines, and can interact with a wide variety of devices in the environment. We are developing a new programming environment with graphical and text-based design tools and components that make it easier for children to design and describe the behavior rules for the various elements in their games".
There is not much info about the project, but I am definitively looking forward to reading more about it.

Hacking for Human Rights

Game Developers Conference - Europe

London, August 31st - September 1st. If you are interested, register before July 31st for getting a discount. http://www.gdc-europe.com/

Videogame researchers unite!

"Today we have the possibility to build a new field. We have a billion dollar industry with almost no basic research, we have the most fascinating cultural material to appear in a very long time, and we have the chance of uniting aesthetic, cultural and technical design aspects in a single discipline. ". Espen Aarseth, on Gamestudies.org, the first academic, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to computer game studies.

Se habla español

I have received many requests about videogame theory articles in Spanish. Since this is a new field, chances are that most of the available texts are in English. I promise my fellow Spanish-speaking readers that I will write an article in Spanish soon. Meanwhile, if anybody is aware of interesting articles in Spanish, I will include a link to those (just email me). For the English-speaking readers, here is a list of how stuff would look in Spanish: "Ludología, Teoría de los videojuegos (o juegos de vídeo) [ludology, videogame theory]", "cibertexto [cybertext]", "Videojuegos de los Oprimidos [videogames of the oppressed]", "Estudios sobre juegos [game studies]".

More on ludology

As I previously said, the term ludology has been generally refered to the study of board games (and sometimes RPGs). Here is a link to an interview to Professor Ludwig Schöh, the only academic that has a Chair in ludology. I also received an email from Lars Konzack (Danemark), who in his Thesis "Softwaregenrer" (Software Genres), claimed for the necessity of a "ludology" as an alternative for narratology and game theory in videogame studies.

What is ludology? A provisory definition.

I have been asked several times to give a concise definition of ludology. This is a first try, that I have just included in a new link on the right navigation bar. Since it is just provisory, I encourage everybody to email me with thoughts and comments.

Here is the short definition: Ludology is the discipline that studies games. As I see it, ludology studies games and playing in general, leaving videogames a just a particular branch of study.

The first time I used this term was in my paper “Ludology meets narratology”. I argued that one of the reasons most researchers try to use narratology to explain videogames is that there is a lack of a formal discipline that focus on games. I argued that videogames are not new construction that one day suddenly appeared on Earth, but they heavily draw upon traditional games (among other cultural artifacts, such as comics, film, television, sports, etc). Thus, in order to understand videogame, we first need to understand games. Sadly, there is very little work on this discipline (some classic authors include Caillois, Huizinga, Piaget).

Ludology is constructed upon the latin word “ludus” (game). The term has historically been used to describe the study of games and particularly of board games. I would not necessarily include “game theory (a branch of applied mathematics) as part of ludology, mainly because it usually requires some ideal situations that are better suited for applications in fields as economy and decision-making rather than traditional games. But, again, “game theory” is not a single theory, but a group of them.

As I understand it, ludology includes videogame theory, but it goes beyond it to include all games and forms of play. The current state of videogame research is mainly driven by scholars who try to explain computer games through previously existing media. For example, Brenda Laurel’s work is based on drama, Janet Murray’s on storytelling, drama and narrative, and Lev Manovich's on film. While I do not necessarily discard these approaches, I think that they are incomplete and that by studying videogames as something else than games, they are denying its main potential. This potential is not narrative, but simulation: the ability to represent dynamic systems. A picture of a dog represents a particular dog: we can learn about its shape, color, etc. A simulated dog as Sony’s Aibo or Mindscape’s Dogz is not only made through signs but also through rules of behavior. In order to understand Aibo we do not only interpret its signs, but we also must experiment with it in order to be able to infer some of its behavioral rules. To make a long story short, representation is about signs, while simulation is about signs and behavior. This is the ontological difference that makes me claim that games cannot be understood through theories derived from narrative.

Last, but not least, the goal of ludology is to understand games and videogames, both in a formal way and also as part of the media ecology. While a formalist approach to games will surely be rejected by academia (it's not in vogue anymore because postmortemism tells us that everything is anything ;), I will still take that risk. A formalist approach is needed, at least during the first years of ludogical development, in order to understand that particularities of games and videogames. Sure, we will have plenty of time later to discard these concepts and replace them with a more "modern" theory.