Jesper Juul at MIT
Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player
Jesper Juul is an Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen. He used to be a media scholar at MIT, turned his dissertation into a book.
He’s talking about the relationships between video games and reality.
What we’ll talk about:
* After “what is a game”
* After ludology and narratology
Where games come from, how they change, what happens when player picks up a game, and where do they stop? (uncertainty)
Interesting question, but undefined: how do we use games?
What’s wrong with this question?
Can a computer game make you cry?
Thousands of people ARE crying now. Characters die, thrown out of guild, lost game. People are crying over user-generated content, social status, NOT over predefined content. It’s about their social relationships.
Games are the most emotional of all media. Storytelling is about secondhand emotions; in games, we REALLY win or lose. We experience our own self-doubt, not someone else’s.
There’s a forgetfulness about the fact that games are really emotional.
You can frame video games as something very recent (Spacewar in early 1960s), but games go back thousands of years (image of Egyptian Pharoah playing Senet 3500 years ago). Players see games in relation to their whole history of games.
Why do we use computers, rather than cars, TV, microwave oven? There’s an affinity between games and computers. It’s a strange phenomenon that you can play a very old game on a very new device.
What are (and are not) games? Pizza chart: not freeform play, not conway’s life, not hypertext fiction. Definitely yes if it has fixed rules, variable outcome, valorization of outcome (winning is better than losing), player effort, player attachment to outcome, negotiable consequences (relationship between game and real world is defined by players — war is not a game). Borderline: gambling (skill or chance), pen and paper roleplaying, open-ended sims, games of pure chance. (This is the classic model.)
The Alluring Argument: Fiction does not matter:
Games do not need fiction to be games, or to be interesting. They can be purely abstract and still be fun, or they can be “themed”. Rules fall short compared to its fictional world, and players see through it (see Koster). Therefore, fiction is irrelevant or immoral.
The — form follows function, no ornament necessary.
But the conclusion is completely wrong! What about the Hello Kitty toaster? You don’t have to have it…but it’s cool. The argument posits all players as purely rational and strategic actors, but that’s not real life.
Most games are rules and fiction.
Rules:
- Sufficiently well-defined that players don’t have to argue about them and/or they can be implemented on a computer.
- Rule relates only to specified parts of the game and the game context (decontextualization).
- In non-electronic games, rules become unambiguous over time because players don’t want to argue about them.
Fiction: An imagined world (user focus)
Narrative: a fixed sequence of events
Fiction brings players into the game
Fiction explains the rules (a car probably acts like a car)
There is no world inside the game — but it’s the game designer’s job to help the player imagine the world. Graphics, sound, text, cut scenes, game title, game box, haptics, rules, rumors. In the original Battlezone, players thought they could get into the volcano and were writing fan letters about how cool it was…but it wasn’t true!
Burnout 3: you get a speed boost when you take down an opponent. Why? (It’s not real, but improves gameplay)
Mario: why does he have three lives?
Ask people: “Just the rules”, or “otherwise it would be too hard”. People have two frames of reference — one for the game world, and one for the game logic.
Diner Dash: why a combo for serving 3 customers at once? Washing dishes, you can actually get combos in real life; it’s a rush from being elegant.
Matching tile games: why do matched tiles disappear?
One never notices what has been done, one can only see what remains to be done.
– Marie Curie
The game lifecycle
- Picking up a game
- Learning it
- Playing it in new ways
- Discarding it (perhaps)
He’s never “finished” with a game.
Picking up a game: baseball or soccer. “It’s just a bunch of people and a ball.” The non-fan sees noise, disconnected events. It doesn’t seem meaningful. But a fan sees structure, and history. Maps to memories of other games at other times.
Chunking: from noise to structure. Chunking is combining a number of primitive elements into high-level chunks. Chess masters have acquired a huge amount of chunks, can process the game faster. To see structure from noise is to amass a collection of chunks. This is what it is to know a game.
He showed a Chu Chu Rocket demo and talked about chunking in that context.
The game lifecycle as chunking: Picking up a game, knowing the rules, learning individual chunks to identify situations, developing strategies, personal history (”I’ve seen this before”), larger history (”just like that pro match between…”).
Fiction cueing rules: the fiction helps inform what the game entities do. Starcraft much worse at this than Age of Empires (what does a Zergling DO?). There are also expectations for a genre that come into play for experienced players. AoE is easier for beginners than Starcraft.
But fiction fades over time. Their focus changes away from the fiction to the rules. An optimization strategy. The longer a player plays a game like Quake 2 or Unreal, the more likely they are to turn down textures and graphical stuff, because the simpler version actually plays better (more contrast). This is a problem for game developers; you spend huge budget creating a setting that people soon start to ignore.
What kinds of fictions become background?
Multiple multiplayer game settings in the same setting. MMOGs, themeable games like chess, fps, strategy games.
But are always toy people. Exploratory games are always exploring the same world. Physical space is never backgrounded.
Criteria: what’s the most convenient way of thinking about the actions. What pre-existing chunks can be used to play the game.
There’s also a desire for certain fictions.
Rules are real, but fiction has an optional quality. Depends on your personal sensibilities, as well as your experience. Can help a player imagine a game world.
Can’t easily separate the game world from the real world. There is a “magic circle” that separates the two — it always fails, but it never goes away. What is the relation between ingame and outside-the-game?
If you say “Brian is a pig”, in real world it’s an insult, but in the game world it may be realistic. It’s an ideal we don’t really live up to, like “don’t mix sports and politics”, or “don’t gloat”. The worst thing you can say to someone who lost is “it’s only a game”.
Failure and Punishment
The gamer ethic: Games should be hard and punish you for your mistakes.
The casual player ethic: why should I have to lose?
New failure styles: spectacular failures, no single action gives failure, distract players (Bejeweled). Implies a strong link between in game and out of game. Failure is relative.
Solitaire: if you win, “I solved it”. If you lose, “the cards were unlucky.”
Players navigate between the levels of real life and game life. We maintain the ideal, but constantly break it. Players add meaning by doing this. Remember: games are the most emotional of all media.
The future of game theory: understanding a game in the hands of a player.
Q: Is there addiction in gaming and is it an issue?
A: Define addiction: you lie about the level of your involvement. He generally feels that games are positive and benign, so isn’t sure that games are any more addictive than anything else. (Discussion of the meaning of play in different regions of the world; US seems to be more suspicious of childhood and play than other regions.)
Q: Why did you choose “rules” as your distinction?
A: Part of games is figuring out the rules. Games as virtual reality is not necessarily a desirable endpoint. Holodeck games were always based in real world games.