Contested Vocabulary in Game Studies

Original Post: February 23 2011

I want to take a moment to pour over the semantics of a few important terms/concepts often used in the context of videogame studies. These terms are fundamental to our study, but are in my opinion, abused. That is to say they are either given new or limited definitions, or claimed by game studies when up to now, they’ve been deployed with different meanings and in different contexts. So without further ado: Play, Rules, Learning and Goals.

Play: Play is a tough nut to crack. Huizinga and Callois wrestle with this word for two different books’ worth of exposition. These two seem to remember that play is not the exclusive property of “game theorists” as they nominate many other meanings of the word play, which I’d like to remind any game critics (or maybe just myself) of. A play is a dramatic, theatrical production. A play is acted out by players who occupy a role, which they also play. Musicians also play the music and their instrument with two slightly different meanings. Finally the meaning as in the play of the steering wheel, which I think is fundamental to our understanding: the space for free movement within a rigid mechanical structure.

If we take a step back, and use the’ free play within structure’ as a fundamental definition, I think it actually works for all the previous meanings. A musician can play his instrument, but only in so many ways according to the rigid physical reality of how the instrument works. He can find novel ways to do it, like knocking on an electric guitar to make percussive noises, but that’s still within the physical limitations. The same musician is playing the musical score, which like the character in a theatrical performance, is defined by the original author. Each player is free to interpret that role or score, to embellish or emphasize certain aspects, but there is a structure within which, or with reference to, they perform their free movements. Take the reinvention to far, however, and whether the character/song are in fact the ‘same’ as is described by the score or script. Play is a creative process, but located and contextualised by some kind of structure which can be game rules, a script, a musical score or the amorphous rules of child’s play.

Rules: Rules are not endemic to games. Rules do not, for example, define games as different or exceptional to ‘real life’ in that all our lives are governed by different rule structures. These are cultural rules of etiquette, governmental law, rules of physics, rules of corporate bureaucracy, etc. Rules are also present in supposedly non-rule based media such as novels and film. Early ludology claimed that it was a videogame’s rules that set it apart from other media, yet one can investigate two sets of rules that govern the details of any given narrative, especially obviously in science fiction or fantasy genre. Firstly, structuralism explored the rules by which all stories are crafted. Propp and Levi-Strauss in particular dissected myth to discover how each one did the work of meaning-making. Rules that govern the hero’s journey, for example, explaining the stages of narrative, and of narrative construction itself by Genette and Chatman.

The second kind of rule is internal, fictional so to speak. These are the rules such as Star Trek’s Prime Directive. The characters within the fiction must obey that rule. The speculative scientific rules of warp drive are consistent within that universe, meaning that Warp 9 should (if the narrative is well-formed) always be the same speed. Picard cannot suddenly read minds as to conveniently advance the plot, because that contradicts a rule that says he is not an empath. Like us in the real world,  characters in typical fictional works are subject to the rules of their world. Whether that world’s rules deviate far from ours or not is irrelevant, though the deviant, fantastical worlds make the rules more obvious to the audience. Returning to Callois, “Rules create fictions.” We may simply change the tense of a sentence such as ‘Some special humans have been mutated to possess strange new powers,’becomes ’some special human beings can mutate to posses strange new powers,’ to create worlds within which narratives occur–the world of the X-Men, for example. This applies equally in the mundane fictional world of Emma Woodhouse, who explores social rules and patterns.

Learning: Learning as abused in relation to rules. In A Theory of Fun Raph Koster uses the notion of learning as if it does not happen in any other way than in rule-based games. Though I agree with his premise that we are pattern-recognising animals, and that we seek patterns in most everything, the distinction between games and narrative as being based on the ability to ‘learn the rules’ is erroneous. As described above, narratives have rules too. Mostly we are interested in learning the fictional rules, as opposed to the structural ones. Learning the structural patterns is expressed in a negative way by labelling a novel or film ‘formulaic.’ What is a formula but a rule, and algorithm and structure for crafting a narrative?

Discovery is a term more likely to be associated with narrative experiences. We discover what happens as we read through a book, because we didn’t know to start with. By discovering events we extrapolate rules, the ‘why’ not just the ‘what’ of a drama. The reasons why Romeo and Juliet ‘happened’ are the rules of their society, of human nature, as well as the rules of tragic narrative form. Games are better equipped to teach us rules in that they can check our understanding in ways that novels and films cannot, not formally anyway. But games are, thus far, not very good at checking our understanding of the narrative/fictional rules, rather concentrating on the supposedly separate rules of gameplay mechanics. When designers master the technique of integrating these two things so they are the same rules, we may have some deeply satisfying experiences to play with.

Goals: Goals are implicated in my discussion above about learning and rules. In game studies the existence of goals seems to confirm or deny the ‘gameness’ of a particular object. The discussion of ‘player goals’ as opposed to ‘game goals’ has cropped up here on this blog a few times and I’d like to explore the difference. Game goals are the internally validated, hopefully consistent win state, or objectives which move the player towards the win state. These kind of goals implicate an objectively (or at least externally) justified win state. That is to say, among the possible ending states (should there be any) one is classified as better than the other based on game rules. If the game lacks discreet end states, then conditions or operant states such as an avatar’s state of mind (ie. Happiness) may be substituted this way. The game assesses performance against a rubric that cannot be explained within the gameworld’s fiction.

I have goals in real life, such as becoming a full-time university lecturer, but that does not make my daily activity a game. Commander Shepard in Mass Effect has the goal of stopping Saren and the Reapers, that does not make the narrative fiction within Mass Effect a game, to Shepard. A goal which is explained through means other than winning a game does not necessarily imply game-ness. It implies challenge, opposition, or conflict between active agents, but if all conflict is a game, then everything is a game and nothing more needs to be said. Like explored above, many (if not all) contexts in life can be articulated as conforming to a set of rules. That does not make all contexts of life games.

For the player of Mass Effect, goals can take the form of a role to play. Much like the player of a theatrical role, the player will project an identity into the gameworld as best he is able, by manifesting that personality through the choices BioWare have implemented. James Paul Gee helpfully outlines the projected identity in this way. The goal of playing a ‘paragon’ or ‘renegade’ Shepard does not imply a formally-defined win- or loss-state. It implies a manner of engaging with the fictional world of Mass Effect. Further, playing a compassionate Shepard, perhaps engaging in a romance with a crew member is an even more subtle goal, since unlike the Paragon and Renegade example, there is no meter for love. The human need satisfied by playing a role this way is more akin to the need that causes people to watch sentimental and romantic movies, the satisfaction is not one of victory, but of dramatic pleasure. The pleasure of witnessing a positive resolution within a human drama. (The same could be said in the inverse, horror films, tragedies and negative outcomes, these satisfy different human needs again, and further complicate associating these outcomes with ‘winning.’) The person who justifies a romantic sub-plot with the gamifying reference to extrinsic rewards exposes a great deal about that person’s understanding or appreciation of love.

So goals can characterise, influence the choices individuals make when presented with the free space within a contextualising structure in which to play. This is analagous to a musician deciding to play a mixolydian or phrygian scale–neither one ‘wins’ the playing of a song. They are expressive of the player’s feelings, personality, or mood. This is the case when the structure of rules doesn’t imply winning or losing, sometimes they do, so the goals are bound up in that. But the mere presence of structure, rules, the ability to make choices, does not necessitate the external validation of one choice as ‘right’ and the other as ‘wrong.’ No one can dismiss the experience of Hamlet because he didn’t ‘win.’ We learn about the rules of humanity through his motivations, choices and their consequences, just as players of Mass Effect do.