Introduction to Game Studies: Games in Culture
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Transcript Introduction to Game Studies: Games in Culture
Introduction to Game Studies:
Games in Culture
Chapter 3: Play and Games in History
© Frans Mäyrä & SAGE Publications
Challenges for Game History
Needed both aesthetic and formal study of
games, as well as social and cultural study
of play and players.
Challenges for studying games in history:
lack of archives and museums - no public preservation,
not easy to play old games with original devices
lack of professional historians working with games
challenges for public recognition of the cultural value
and significance of games - seen as questionable ‘low
culture’ or industrially-produced ‘mass culture’.
Perspectives for Digital Game History
Digital game history not yet academically
established as a domain of study.
Multiple perspectives available:
art historical perspective
software industry perspective
technology history perspective
social historical perspective
history of mentalities perspective
games historiography, or meta-history.
Art Historical Perspective
Aims to describe in formal and aesthetical
terms the development of digital games.
Gives grounds for what the artistic and
aesthetic criteria are for games’
audiovisual and interaction design in
different decades.
Provides perspective on how the concept
of a ‘good’ or original game has changed
over the years.
Software Industry Perspective
Focusing on the industry’s historical events and
developments in the market place.
Some alternatives:
a case study approach; e.g. David Sheff, Game Over
(1999), a book about Nintendo
positioning games industry within the larger historical
context of the software industry; e.g. Martin CampbellKelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog
(2003)
industry critique; e.g. Kline, Dyer-Witheford and Du
Peyter, Digital Play (2003)
biographical studies of industry luminaries.
Technology History Perspective
Fans are already engaged in cataloguing
the various gaming devices of the past.
Academic history of gaming technology
would attempt to understand the wider
social and cultural dynamics behind the
changing hardware.
c.f. published work in journals such as
Technology and Culture, from the Society
for the History of Technology.
Social Historical Perspective
Studying technology in relation to the social
history.
e.g. how changes in the family or working life,
the amount of leisure time and money
available to people from different social
backgrounds, are related to the rise of a
phenomenon like digital games.
In more detail: social history of science and
technology, the social-technological
developments in different countries, the
alternative or subversive histories of
technologies as socially-constructed reality.
History of Mentalities Perspective
‘Mentality’: loosely means ‘collective
consciousness’ of a time.
Histories of mentalities try to make sense of how
certain kind of ideas or practices become
prevalent in some contexts.
Often done as ‘micro-histories’: studies that
focus on small scale.
A small group of people who at some point
played or designed computer games might be a
focus of such a micro-history.
Games Historiography
Games historiography is creating metahistory.
Making sense of how we write about the
history of games: what kind of activity it
actually is, and what are the narratives,
interpretations or other ‘discursive rules’
that govern this kind of writing.
Defining Games
How to define the ‘digital game’ as an
object of study?
What was the first digital game?
Early digital games were closely related to
earlier, non-digital games.
Bolter & Grusin (1999): digital media
‘remediates’ earlier forms of media.
The boundary between the digital game
and earlier forms is not clear or absolute.
Definition Game
Formalist studies aim to capture the key formal
characteristics of digital games.
A formalist is not as interested in the ‘content’ or
value of the game for some individual, as to the
functions of the artistic form.
Aristotle claimed that scientific knowledge
should be based on a set of first principles that
are necessarily true and directly knowable.
Constructing and debating different definitions
for digital games can easily look like a ‘language
game’, an activity governed by rules of its own.
Some Definitions: Caillois
According to Roger Caillois, game playing
is:
an activity which is essentially: free (voluntary),
separate [in time and space], uncertain,
unproductive, governed by rules, make-believe.
(Caillois, 1961: 10-11)
Playing with toys can be part of game
playing according to this definition.
Range of play behaviours become large;
‘game’ as a category becomes loose.
Some Definitions: Costikyan
According to game designer and researcher
Greg Costikyan:
[game is:] an interactive structure of endogenous
meaning that requires players to struggle toward a goal.
(Costikyan, 2002: 16)
The ‘endogenous’ part of this definition points
back to the ‘magic circle’ of Huizinga.
According to Costikyan, game’s structure
creates its own meanings - the meaning grows
out of the structure.
Some Definitions: Jesper Juul
According to the synthetic definition by Jesper
Juul, in ‘classic game model’:
a game is 1) a rule-based formal system; 2) with
variable and quantifiable outcomes; 3) where different
outcomes are assigned different values; 4) where the
player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome;
5) the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome;
6) and the consequences of the activity are optional and
negotiable. (Juul, 2005: 6-7)
Informed compromise between generality and
specificity - identifies several ‘borderline cases’.
Borderline Games
According to Juul there are several borderline
cases that share some, but not all, of the
criteria with the core of ‘classic game model’:
gambling
games of pure chance
open-ended simulations
pen-and-paper role playing.
Discuss: how do each of these break games’
definitional criteria?
Multiple Layers in Games
Juul: “video games are real in that they consist
of real rules with which players actually interact”;
yet the digital game worlds are fictional - thus
games are ‘half-real’.
Salen & Zimmerman: “A game is a system in
which players engage in an artificial conflict,
defined by rules, that result in quantifiable
outcome.”
This ‘core’ game becomes realised
during meaningful play at the multiple
levels or schemas of rules, play and
culture.
RULES
PLAY
CULTURE
Primary Schemas. Image credits: Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman & The MIT Press.
Prehistory of Games
Games and play appear to be cultural
universals - they are found everywhere.
Anthropologist Edward Tylor (1879)
suggested that dice games have their origin
in divination.
Sacred and profane use of games have
existed side-by-side.
Warning tales about games’ power, and laws
regulating gambling and gameplay have been
recorded from multiple societies.
Games’ Holding Power
Games are capable of capturing attention
and energy, and holding them for extended
periods of time.
Societies have found it necessary to control
this power of games in multiple ways.
The holding power of games is one of the
major research problems in Game Studies:
why do we play games?
Earliest Digital Games
Impulse to ‘hack’, or play around with computers’
possibilities.
Even in 1945, Alan Turing used chess playing as
an example of what computer could do.
The first functional chess program was written in
1950.
UNIVAC, the first commercial computer, had
construction costs close to one million dollars in
1951 - its use was extremely expensive and
controlled.
Tic-Tac-Toe (A. S. Douglas,1952)
Early demonstration of
computer game with
graphical user interface:
‘OXO’, a version of
tic-tac-toe for the British
EDSAC computer.
Tic-Tac-Toe, created by A. S. Douglas, 1952. Image credit: Martin
Campbell-Kelly, Department of Computer Science,
University of Warwick.
See: http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/
Other Early Demonstrations
In January 1947, a patent application for a
‘cathode-ray amusement device’ was recorded.
The patent was granted to an electronic missile
firing game, designed by Thomas T. Goldsmith
Jr. and Estle Ray Mann.
In 1958, Willy Higginbotham, working for
Brookhaven National Laboratory, implemented a
two-player tennis game using analogue
computer and an oscilloscope for display.
See ‘Tennis for Two’ video:
http://real.bnl.gov/ramgen/bnl/pong.rm
Early Commercial Video Games
Commercial disputes surround the question
of who ‘invented’ video games.
Electronic games appear to have been
implemented in various forms by multiple
groups and individuals.
Engineer Ralph Baer developed a
commercial television game system in 19661969.
The system became known as Magnavox
Odyssey - it came packed with twelve games.
Games of Magnavox Odyssey
Source: http://www.pong-story.com/odyssey.htm
Magnavox Odyssey Game Overlays.
Image credit: David Winter, PONG-Story.
From Spacewar! (1962) to Atari
Stephen ‘Slug’ Russell, with fellow students,
implemented an early ‘space shooter’ game for
DEC Digital PDP-1 computer.
Nolan Bushnell, with Ted Dabney, developed
coin-operated arcade game Computer Space,
released by Nutting Associates in 1971.
Bushnell and Dabney founded Atari, Inc. in
1972, and released their tennis game, PONG,
developed by engineer Al Alcorn.
Sanders/Magnavox sued Atari, which settled out
of court and paid licence fees to produce
electronic ping-pong games – the video game
industry had been born.
Study of Play in Culture
Romantics considered play as something
that demonstrated free human behaviour
and that essentially belonged to human
nature.
The surplus energy theory: holds that play
has risen to consume the extra resources.
Practise theories: learning is the root of
play; play increases behavioural flexibility,
Ambiguity of Play (Sutton-Smith)
Almost anything can take place within play.
Diverse forms of play: mind play, solitary play,
playful behaviours, informal social play, vicarious
audience play, performance play, celebrations
and festivals, contests, games and sports, risky
and deep play.
Rhetorics of play: Play as Fate, Play as Power,
Play as Identity, Play as Frivolity, Play as
Progress, Play as the Imaginary, Play as the
Self. (Sutton-Smith, 1997)
Play as Performance
According to sociologist Erving Goffman
(1959), performance is “all of the activity of
a given participant on a given occasion
which serves to influence in any way any of
the other participants”.
Richard Schechner (2002) has provided a
continuum of performance-related
phenomena:
play – games – sports – pop entertainments –
performing arts – daily life – ritual.
Games take place as play, and this can
mean very different things depending on
how the game is performed.
Fantasy Play and Liminality
Play has an important role in children’s
development, as well as in adult life.
Violent fantasy play is also considered important.
According to child expert Vivian Gussin Paley
(2002), play is based on pretending; escaping to
the world of ‘what if?’
In various societies, rites of passage organise the
transitions between cultural roles.
The space of passage (limen, threshold) means
momentary freedom from the rules of common
behaviour and reality - as expressions of liminality.
Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin called this
ambiguous area carnivalesque.
Assignment:
Remediation of a Non-Digital Game
Pick a game that exists both as a digital
and non-digital version.
do a comparison and write about the different
versions’ similarities and differences, strength
and weaknesses.