Concept Map: Agon through the Ages

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The Official GamerGate Strategy Guide

This short comic adapted from:

Cross, Katherine. "Press F to Revolt: On the Gamification of Online Activism." Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional Perspectives and Inclusive Designs in Gaming. Yasmin B Kafai, Gabriela T. Richard, and Brendesha M. Tynes, Eds. Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press, 2016. 23-35.

Sprites ripped from Square-Enix's Final Fantasy (1987) and Final Fantasy III (1990). All images used without permission.

I Dream Of Lanterns

My group’s game is built on a fantasy. It places in the player in the role of a little hooded lantern-lighter. The game’s (rather simple) puzzles create a kind of resistance that puts the single task of lighting lanterns at the center of play. Yet the primary interest of the game is, for me, sensuous. The first elements developed for the game were sprites for the protagonist, then the lanterns themselves. Before they could do much of anything interesting, the lanterns could emit flickering lights when activate, which dimmed over time. An early version included a short introduction sequence where a large crescent moon appears in the sky, timed to an 8-bit rendition of Claude Debussy’s Clair de lune. My interest in the game has always been its cool, nocturnal atmosphere, and the pleasure of dotting it with lights.

In our readings on game design I was taken aback by Chris Crawford apparent abhorrence of what he calls a “topic” driven games. “Don’t be dishonest with yourself,” he rejoins warmly, “if the topic really is the initiating concept in your game design, then you simply don’t understand game design well enough to do a good job.” This heartwarming passage is part of a wider argument that game designers must think first in terms of mechanics. Crawford puts gameplay at the fore – a fair enough point if one wishes to prioritize that which makes games, games. At the same time it is a blinding as any understanding of painting that limits itself entirely to shape and colour – and misses the centuries of religious, allegorical, and political representative painting that precedes the advent of such arguments. I think Crawford would scoff at my references to painting. In “Common Mistakes” he undertakes a “reductio ad absurdum” where he disclaims the importance of graphics through the example of a game where the sequence of play is intermittently interrupted by an image of the Mona Lisa. Graphics are only important, he argues, inasmuch as they inform gameplay – which is why an enemy’s shadow in a first-person shooter is a better use of graphics capacity than a Da Vinci jump-scare. 

I’d argue that the real victim of Crawford’s reductio is the reductio itself. A game which interrupts itself to show you something irrelevant is probably not going to play very smoothly - although, if the designer feels it necessary to throw the Mona Lisa in your face every few seconds, one may start to ask whether there’s a point they’re trying to make. The absurdity in Crawford’s example is not graphical elements which contribute nothing to gameplay, but rather elements which actively undermine the designer’s intended experience.

What Crawford misses is how layered the experience of a game can be. My group’s game leans on some established conventions – 2d platforming, puzzles – which frame the experience as a set of problems to be solved. But it does so in the tradition of Lieve Oma’s mushroom hunt – a goal to direct to attention to one’s surroundings and get the player exploring. Our puzzles ask players to light lanterns in order set various machines in motion, in order to move on to the next area. But the ultimate goal is simply to fill our little setting with light, and to witness that transformation.

Rollings & Adams have less trouble reconciling things like mood and visuals with game design. Starting with the conceit that games are interactive “dreams”, they allow fictive imagination to guide the design process – Game rules can help tell a story. In defining how the game is played and won, mechanics can be used to relate a dream. Fictional positioning, such as avatar and setting, help the player make sense of the situation before them and understand what they are supposed to do.

Rollings & Adams also take a more moderate stance on Crawford’s “topics”: “It is not the business of the game designer to tell stories, but to create worlds in which stories take place around an active player.” Within this framework, a story or topic is not some added layer, like Crawford’s Mona Lisa, but that “world” which grounds play. Mechanics and game structures, which shape the experience of play, take part in building that world.

To return to my group’s game, what captivates me most about it is its world, and a great deal of our design discussions have been about how to manifest that world for the player. A number of our early discussions had to do with our “dream” – what world does our lantern-lighter inhabit, and what is it they hope to achieve in turning on all these lights? In doing so we have asked ourselves thematic questions: Is this game a metaphor for depression? What does it mean to light these lanterns? If we are using such a metaphor, how should it influence our level design? We have not found these questions to be divorced from the pragmatics of implementation, but an important factor in guiding it. When we wish to present the “dream” in a certain way, how do we intend to do so? What assets and solutions would it require?

Crawford and Rollings & Adams approach the same question from different angles: How do graphics, sound, and narrative fit into game design? Crawford sees these as secondary to the core question of compelling gameplay, being the primary level at which the player engages the game. Rollings & Adams see gameplay as embedded in, and informed by, a game’s fictive dimensions. Audiovisual elements and story frame the player’s interactions, giving rise to a world which emerges at the intersection of fiction and play. While they do not say as much explicitly, their notion of “dreams” presents games as fundamentally communicative works, rather than the primary mechanicity of Crawford’s interpretation.

It is for this reason that Rollings & Adams work aligns more closely to our own design values, although we may not see eye to eye with them on all counts: They warn against “art-driven” games, as these tend to allow gameplay to fall by the wayside. In the tradition of Lieve Oma and many walking simulators, we argue that simply exploring a sensuously rich space can be gameplay enough – and have added some puzzles for good measure.

Works Cited

Crawford, Chris. "Common Mistakes." On Game Design. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Publishing, 2003. 107-124.

Rollings, Andrew, and Ernest Adams. "Game Concepts." On Game Design. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Publishing, 2003. 30-53.

Veltman, Florian. Lieve Oma. Videogame. Itch.io, 2016.

Play Nice, Now: How Three Feuding Scholars Learned to Get Along

At first glance, the articles discussed in class about theoretical takes on videogames and learning would seem to be at odds: James Paul Gee’s “Why are video games good for learning?” contends that videogames allow players to develop perceptive, intellectual, and practical skills through simulation and mediated social interaction. In “Why gamers don’t learn more,” Jonas Linderoth argues that Gee misconstrues how learning works, and points to qualities of videogames that hamper their potential to teach, raising the need for further study. In “Reconceptualizing gamification,” Rowan Tulloch argues while videogames are useful for education, the games themselves need not necessarily enter the classroom. Yet there are grains of consensus among these authors – and understanding where their arguments align may provide a useful starting point for further enquiries into the place of games in education.

Gee and Tulloch agree on the manner in which videogames teach: Gee argues that through simulation, videogames provide a kind of perceptive training, whereby players learn “embodied empathy for complex systems” by actively taking part in their functioning, and in this way come to understand the system as a whole (5). Tulloch makes a similar claim when he writes that “video games ask players to […] perform tasks and understand logics with which they are have little to no prior skill […] [T]hese are not skills players simply have naturally, these are skills that need to be learned, and consequently that the games need to teach” (322). According to Gee games are good for developing cognitive skills in particular, as simulations train players to understand the kinds of action belonging to certain to roles and recognize situations where those actions are useful for the achievement of certain ends.

Tulloch and Gee also have similar ideas about games as pedagogic tools that structure behaviour. In discussing cross-functional affiliation, Gee discusses how multiplayer videogames like World of WarCraft can teach players to delegate tasks according to areas of personal expertise in order to work together more effectively. Tulloch would see this kind of collaboration not as an inherent property of videogames but a quality of collaborative games in general that might be appropriated for the classroom. Tulloch’s approach to games is to see them as pedagogic practices with lessons to be gleaned for formal education: “If we understand gamification as a form of training built upon the techniques used in, and heritage of, games rather than traditional pedagogy, then we find not only a framework that incorporates difficulty but a rich academic discourse for understandings its complexity” (328). World of WarCraft, in other words, can be a useful object lesson in staging situations where people learn to collaborate, even if the game itself is not used.

Tulloch’s emphasis on games as a field of pedagogic practice, rather than particular objects, may help resolve some of Linderoth’s objections to Gee. Linderoth questions the effectiveness of videogames as vehicles for skill acquisition: “[O]bservations of someone being able to play and progress in a game cannot be taken for granted as constituting the outcome of the advanced learning processes” (58). He later adds, “games can give us the sensation of progress and empower us without demanding that we develop the kind of skills that many other domains require” (59). His argument is supported by references to tools which flatten the difficulty curve, creating the illusion of progress. For this reason he questions the use of videogames as learning tools. I believe Tulloch would agree – again, while he is interested in games’ potential to train and motivate, he does not necessarily promote Thief as good instructional tool, as Gee does. Instead, Tulloch encourages the use of game-style difficulty curves to find ways of maintaining engagement in learning by managing challenges and rewards, even in a non-game context (328-9).

Tulloch also seems to share Linderoth’s position that “the matter of games and learning needs to be seen primarily as an empirical question” (58). He argues that existing studies do not properly understand difficulty, and therefore are not qualified to say whether the player is learning. Tulloch understanding games as carrying on a distinct pedagogical tradition, proposes that educators pay attention to games as a source of empirical knowledge: “Game design and game studies offer innumerable other important frameworks expansions and challenges to traditional pedagogic discourses” (329). Tulloch argues that we should consult academic knowledge on games as a way of discovering how they do teach, rather than attempting to fit them into existing frameworks.

A thread running across all three texts discussed here is the matter of whether games teach in ways compatible with the aims of formal education – whether games can help players develop real practical and cognitive skills. What Tulloch’s emphasis on gamification rather than games highlights is that games engage structures of learning which may be useful in and out of a gaming context – and that there already exists a wealth of data through which these structures may be discovered and adapted. The question facing educators is how to use this information. This recognizes Gee’s claims that videogames can teach through play, while also addressing Linderoth’s concerns that more rigorous study is needed. Tulloch’s article offers a perspective from which Gee and Linderoth’s work can be seen as compatible.

Works Cited

Gee, James Paul. “Why are video games good for learning?” 2005.

Linderoth, Jonas. “Why gamers don’t learn more: An ecological approach to games as learning environments.” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 4:1 (2012). 45-62.

Tulloch, Rowan. “Reconceptualizing gamification: Play and pedagogy.” Digital Culture & Education 6:4 (December 2014). 317-333.

Intersectionality and More Inclusive Communities in Kishonna Gray's "Solidarity is for White Women in Gaming"

Kishonna L. Gray’s “Solidarity is for White Women in Gaming” analyzes a dispute that broke out on a feminist anti-GamerGate forum on Xbox Live in 2014, when a group of women of colour began discussing the concurrent shooting of Mike Brown and the emergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Throughout the article, Gray examines how discussions of race and gender produce divisions in online communities. For Gray, race is a discourse whereby subjects and their bodies are racialized, often in a process of othering in opposition to a white default. Racialization operates by targeting appearances, speech patterns, and other physical and communicative traits (and therefore persists in ‘disembodied’ interactions online). Race can also be engaged critically, as a way of pointing out racial prejudices at work in arguments and actions.

            The main question in Gray’s article is how critical racial discourses interact with White or colorblind Feminism in online communities. In an overview of the history of feminism, Gray argues that it has historically singled out womanhood as the primary site of oppression, to the exclusion of race and other markers of identity. In Gray’s case study, the racial character of the efforts of the #BlackLivesMatter supporters was perceived by white feminists to undermine the community’s focus on solidarity for women by race baiting for special concern; conversely, the BLM supporters see the white women in the group as privileged by their proximity to white men and unwilling to oppose racial oppression. The result of this conflict was a split that undermined the aims of both parties. At the heart of the problem was the encounter of two critical discourses that failed to recognize their commonalities with the other.

            Gray seeks a way forward in intersectionality. While online communities have been instrumental in organizing social and political movements in recent years, divisions such as these create conflicts within communities and limit their effectiveness while drawing backlash from oppressors and potential allies alike. Gray argues that digital feminist communities need to recognize that oppression takes on multiple forms, and that it is possible to be oppressed in one power dynamic while privileged in another. Conceptualizing power in this way allows for more inclusive communities able to serve the needs of diverse memberships and creates new bases for solidarity and alliance.

References

Gray, Kishonna L. "Solidarity is for White Women in Gaming." Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional Perspectives and Inclusive Designs in Gaming. Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press, 2016. 59-70.

An Education Journal Assesses "Deep Assessment" on Education

[Audience: An education publication aimed at teachers and administrators in Canadian secondary schools.]

As educators, we are constantly interrogating the efficacy of our teaching methods. Lately there has been a lot of discussion over whether video games have a place in the classroom, and research has brought forth conflicting accounts. Jennifer Jenson, Susan de Castell, Kurt Thumlert, and Rachel Muehrer’s article “Deep Assessment” provides a novel take on this question and come to some enlightening conclusions.

Jenson et al. brought a videogame called Epidemic to two Ontario mid-high schools. The purpose of the game is to teach students about public health. The researchers tested the game with three student groups – a “standard” group, instructed on the game’s teachables through lectures and in-class assignments, an “experimental” group, which would be instructed using the game, and a “baseline” control group which got neither. All three groups received subject-based pre- and post-tests, graded according to standard knowledge retention metrics.

The results were not promising for videogames: The standard group outperformed the experimental group in a conventional testing environment. They retained more information on the subjects they were lectured on, even accounting for their better performance in the pre-test.

However, the standard and experimental groups were also asked to make comics or posters, which were evaluated within Green’s “3D” assessment framework. This looks for understanding on three levels: Operational, cultural, and critical, with a critical understanding signalled by an ability to apply knowledge dynamically to one’s own ends. Only the experimental group demonstrated a critical understanding.

Research on games in education tends to operate within a conventional assessment framework. What the 3D framework demonstrates is that videogames produce forms of knowledge to which traditional evaluations are not sensitive. Videogames cannot be neatly dropped into the classroom, but demand a reflection on what and how we want our students to learn.

Intellectual Production #1

Note: I am using an eBook edition of How to Do Things with Videogames. Quotes are referenced with eBook locations, rather than page numbers, as these were not available to me.

Games as Media micro-ecology

In How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost discusses games as media micro-ecologies. Bogost argues that medium-oriented theories about games are overgeneralizing, and miss out on the specific ways in which games enter everyday life. “We can think of a medium’s explored uses,” he writes, “as a spectrum, a possibility space that extends from the purely artistic […] [to] purely instrumental uses” (127). Bogost claims that understanding a medium involves studying both its formal qualities and its particular uses.

To study games, then, he turns to media ecology, which examines how media “work individually and together to create an environment for communication and perception” (162). Through this lens games become technologies that engage human activity in a variety of way and in diverse contexts. They do not constitute an intellectual realm apart from ordinary life, but rather interweave with it. Media ecology understands technology as relational.

Microecologies have to do with the relational dynamics of specific situations. The connections drawn by media ecology become configurational, and the contingencies of a given configuration become as significant as the general dynamics at work. The macro manifests in the micro. As microecologies, games both operate within the conditions of everyday activity and subtly influence it. The Super Smash Bros. franchise, for example, constitutes at once a media work designed to provide a certain kind of accessible yet deep playful competition, a heavily branded consumer product marketed to Nintendo fans using popular characters, a console game made for play in the home, and a piece of software that can foster certain social interactions amongst friends. As part of a microecology, Smash Bros. is shaped for and by the situations in which it is played, while itself playing a role in shaping those situations.

Bogost’s framework

Starting from his understanding of games as microecologies, Bogost develops an analytic framework for their study. If games exist in dynamic relationships to the contexts in which they are played, understanding a game means understanding those contexts, and how the game figures into it. Through this lens play becomes a form of use, and games functional objects.

Understanding games, then, involves an understanding of a particular game’s content as it relates to the game’s function in a given situation. His own analytic process tends start by identifying a function – something like “art”, “titillation,” “relaxation”, etc. He then considers the demands of that function – what does it mean to titillate? Next he examines various games that might be said to fulfill such a function, and looks at how they engage the player in such a way that the function might be said to be fulfilled. (That said, games are not always “about” play – his analysis is sometimes more concerned with, for example, whether people buy a game, than whether they play it.) By comparing several games with respect to the same function, Bogost draws conclusions about the effectiveness of various qualities.

Chapter 13: Relaxation

In this chapter Bogost considers how games can allow us to relax, using Zen meditation as an operational model of relaxation. He raises the following three points:

1. Games can relax us through repetitious, undemanding tasks. There is something meditative, for example, about the no-stakes play of Bejewelled’s “Zen Mode”, which allows players to tap and swipe colourful jewels endlessly, without worrying about scores or losing.

2. Games might also enable meditation through meandering – by providing calm, extensive spaces to explore. Proteus, which involves exploring a peaceful virtual landscape without any kind of challenge or goals, may provide such an experience.

3. Challenges, conflict, loss states, fast motion, and other elements requiring attention and focus break relaxation. Many games intended to be relaxing fail because they fall back on these (more conventional) structures,  Bogost raises the example of thatgamecompany’s Cloud, which promises soothing, meditative cloud-drawing play, but requires precise and careful control in order to progress. 

Representative quote: “The outcomes […] matter less than the acts that created them. [These games] are akin to doodling on a napkin, or skimming through a magazine, or knitting in front of the television” (1434).

Discussion question: What do you think of Bogost’s idea of relaxation? What other games could we discuss if we were to alter it?