Ludology.org

More on advergames

The New York Times has a new article on "advergames", games created to promote brands or products.
As I said before, this not only will become a new source of work for some of those new-media unemployed guys out there, but it will also help the medium to mature. As consumers realize that games are being used as advertisements, they will hopefully start looking at them with more suspicion. In other words, this will help people to understand that videogames are not ideologically-free and yes, simulation can be use for communication and manipulation. While I guess that we are still a bit far away from a "War of the Worlds" kind of coming-of-age event for videogames, advergames are leading into that direction. Videogames are growing up, at least as a medium, and that's always good news.

Mark Twain once said...

... that a game of golf is a "good walk spoiled". I still could not figure out if interactive fiction is a "good story spoiled" or "a good game spoiled". Probably both.

I have been playing two Playstation 2 games lately. The first one was "Onimusha Warlords", a Resident Evil clone with Japanese samurai and demons. The second is "Red Faction", an interesting game quite similiar to Half-Life. "Red Faction" is about a rebellion on Martian mines, a sort of Emile Zola's "Germinal" with science fiction and guns. Zola's novel is about a strike in the coal mines of Northern France at the end of the 19th century. While a strike is never just sitting on a chair waiting for things to happen, I played with the idea of how a strike simulation would be. Definitively, it would not look like "Red Faction".

Anyway, my main concern with these two games is that while the action is good, cutscenes drove me crazy. You can't skip them and you have to watch them several times while reloading in order to kill bosses and other monsters. Why, for god sake, we need cutscenes? Both game's stories are quite crappy, anyway. It seems as if most of videogame designers are dying nowadays for becoming Hollywood directors (Final Fantasy, anybody?). They should get a digicam and play around in their backyards and forget once for all about cutscenes.

Yeah, yeah. I can hear the complaints: without cutscenes, you can't tell a story. Well, you don't need a story to develop in detail through the game. Just a background story is enough at the beginning, to let you know that, surprise, you are the good guy and anything that moves is the bad guy. And then just set it wherever you want, Japan or Mars.

In my last log I failed to mention...

... that "Facade" is being developed both by Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas. While I am not a big fan of Aristotle, these guys are working hard on builidng an actual system, which is really great news. Take a look at it, and also check Andrew's links, at InteractiveStory.net.

Well, SIGGRAPH is gone now but it was really a fun time

In addition to the classical engineer approach: "we-have-this-cool-new-technology-but-we-can-not-figure-out-how-to-use-it-so-meanwhile-we-will-call-it-art", there was lots of interesting stuff. While I am not a 3D geek, I was pleased to be able to take a look at some of the new developments on the field.
I presented my talk on Boalian videogames along with Michael Mateas, who was describing the "theory engine" behind "Facade", his PhD project. While I disagree with his Aristotelian approach, Michael is definitively the kind of researcher that you want to disagree with: he's open-minded, brilliant and always ready to have a nice discussion. I am really looking forward to play with "Facade", which recreates the story of a couple that is about to split.

Nick Montfort was also at SIGGRAPH and the good news is that he is currently working on a book about the history of interactive fiction. I will be saving some space on my bookshelves...

Janet Murray gave an interesting talk about videogame design, alonside with researchers from Sony. It was good to have a humanistic approach among so many technicians -and some technocrats- with addition to the soulless people who design videogames for the military.
Probably the best demo around was Bruce Blumberg's wolf pack simulator. Characters do fit much better into simulations than plot and Blumberg knows it.

Another interesting fact is that it seems that everybody has something to do with pirates. Disney presented a virtual version of their Pirates of the Caribbean. I know that people from Carnegie Mellon also have an interactive drama about pirates. The guys from Nokia Research Group and Play also showcased a wireless pirate demo. And I am pretty sure that there are more examples of this. What is it with pirates and interactive environments?

Talking about Disney, they showcased ToonTown, an online massively multiplayer game where kids can play a burgerland version of Everquest. Everything looked shiny and happy. How I wished I was born at ToonTown! (remember that my sarcasm is biased; I am a Cartoon Network guy).

Another demo that caught attention was Georgia Tech's "Meditation Chamber", which used VR in order to help meditation. It was developped by Diane Gromala, Jay Bolter and Larry Hodges, among many others. Still, as most of you guys know, I am really looking forward for non-immersive virtual reality...

Noah did a great job organizing the panels and papers at the art venue. Everything went as planed and that's not a simple thing to do. Some presenters were "virtual". Phoebe Sengers could not attend, but Michael Mateas did a great job by impersonating her while reading her paper. I had my own deal of that since I also read Markku Eskelinen's paper.

Last, but not least, I met a.c. chapman and Camille Utterback and really enjoyed their company. They were both working on an art project in some haven for artist somewhere in beautiful California.

Well, that's about it. For you guys who missed SIGGRAPH, you may want to check Imagina
, an European equivalent that will be held at Monaco next February.

Just added Lars Konzack's blog to the list of researchers

He works at Aarhus University, in Denmark and this is how he describes his interests: "My main research are as you might have guessed computer games and role-playing games in an aesthetic and ludologic perspective". You definitively want to check his blog out.

Jesper just sent me this link

It's an article that uses the term "ludology" in 1982. This is part of an archeology of the origin of the term. Some people wrongly believe that I coined the term: that's absolutely untrue, as this link proves (and many other information about ludology and ludologie, that is generally related to board games). All I did is use to use the term in order to contrast it with narratology, which was the main discipline that was being used in order to understand videogame studies. While it is true that at the time I was not aware of the other meanings of the term, its construction is pretty basic: ludus + logos. Anyway, the term ludology is not new, but I still think that it is a good one in order to describe the newborn discipline of formal studies of games, an equivalent of what narratology is to narrative.
Check back soon for my impressions from SIGGRAPH 2001.

SIGGRAPH

I will be presenting part of my Thesis research at SIGGRAPH 2001 on the "Narrative Games" panel on Tuesday August 14th at 11am. The panel is part of the Art Venue. See you in Los Angeles!

Slashdot has Most of them are negative or just cautious, but if you are interested in how gamers perceive academic studies about videogames, this is a must read.

Most of them are negative or just cautious, but if you are interested in how gamers perceive academic studies about videogames, this is a must read.

Why people keep insisting on the fact that games are narratives?

During the last couple of years I got engaged into the same old discussion in every single conference I attended. No matter what you do, when you are dealing with videogames, you will end up by hearing the same old arguments about if videogames are narratives or not. The truth is that I am getting a bit tired of the whole discussion, mainly because it prevents theory to move on to more specific problems.

However, I am still convinced that claiming that videogames are just extensions of narrative is not only wrong, but it is pure nonsense. If you are reading these words, chances are that you are already familiar with some of my ideas and the ones of colleagues such as Aarseth, Eskelinen or Juul, so I won’t take your time but repeating the basic points why I think that it is useful to distinguish between simulation and representation (or between games and narrative).

But the reason why I am currently writing this is because I have been thinking a lot on the reasons why most of the academia and industry are so reluctant to drop their view of videogames as narratives.

Economical reasons: the industry behind major videogame development is either directly or indirectly connected to the film and TV industry. Games get remediated into movies and TV shows and a lot of merchandising. These marketing folks feel at easy with the narrative paradigm because they are familiar with it. Viewing videogames as narratives makes their lives easier.

Political reasons: Most of the academics who do research on videogames have a literature, drama or film background. All these disciplines have a big set of tools that are easy to apply to “new media”, without having to come up with new concepts and without daring into the foreign land of the unknown. In addition to this, hi-tech has brought new air into drama and literature departments, because they can now apply to more interesting funding if they deal with such things as games, VR, hypertext or any equivalent “humanistic” technology.

Cultural reasons: I think this is the more important one and because of it, it may take generations for our culture to be able to make a clear distinction between games and narratives.

This is the deal: narrative and semiotic representation have been the main way in which humanity has dealt with reality since its beginnings. We are familiar with them and we use them in order to explain and understand our world.

Simulation is a different beast. Of course, simulation has been around for ages. People have used toys and machines as a way of dealing with reality, too. As Aaseth pointed out, textual machines such as the I Ching have introduced cybernetic modes of representation way before the invention of computers. Toys and playgrounds have also been used to simulate certain systems but, until the 20th century, those simulations were extremely limited mainly because of their mechanical characteristics.

Nowadays, we are starting to have new tools that will allow us to create much more complex simulations. Before, we developed great technologies for representation (the alphabet, painting, sculpture, photography), but now we started working on technologies for simulation. Because simulation relies on dynamic systems, this form requires a higher degree of technology than traditional representation. Again, I am not claiming that we should consider simulations as brand new stuff but quite the contrary. But we were blessed with the ability to witness the development of simulation to a degree that was never possible before. The ability to simulate instead of just representing may change for good the way that humanity deals with reality. I am not saying that simulation will replace representation, but it will be able to model things that representational forms simply can not deal with.

My point is that videogames are a harbinger of a new representational form. Think of them as Giotto’s paintings announcing the next big thing in painting. Believe it or not, videogames are the first cultural product of a new way of modeling knowledge that not only portrays characteristics but also behaviors. Simulation is definitively going to change our civilization. Guttenberg allowed to us to easily record and deliver information. Simulation will allow us to record and deliver dynamic systems of information.

Trust me, I do not like wearing any prophet hat, but I really think that there are ontological differences between representation and simulation, and thus between narrative and games. And as simulations evolve, they will take us onto a fascinating new territory where authors will not deliver descriptions but rather script behaviors and they will set rules rather than fixed plots. A simulation author is not interested in transmitting information as in creating an environment where players can experiment and take their own conclusions.

Simulation carries a lot of changes that will definitively have a profound impact. And changes are usually scary to most people. Right now, most scholars just try to look at simulation using their representational googles. They see some points in common (both are ways of portraying information), but fail to understand the consequences of their differences. In order to embrace simulation we have to leave behind the main representational paradigm in the history of humanity. And that’s not something that happens in a couple of years, but will take generations. So, don’t expect to see the full potential of videogames until a couple of centuries go by. It is not a technological difficulty, but a cultural one. No matter how many polygons you have, we won’t be able to push the envelope if people continue to view games as narratives.