Design and Play: How Games Create Meaning

There are two distinct strains in academic game studies, player-centric and design-centric. Design-centric thinkers do not deny the role of the player, but choose to put their emphasis on the functional aspects of games. As well, the play theorist is not blind to the importance of design, but instead concentrates on the experience of the player. What I propose is that if a serious critical tradition in games is ever going to take hold, it will need to examine both these elements of games.

As I sit here and write this I will not be the first to suggest that gaming, and the culture that surrounds it, is going through an identity crisis. The importance of this crisis cannot be underestimated, for it is not limited to the relatively large but disperate communities that are typically thought of as gamers. No one in the industrialized world has never engaged or observed an athletic competition. Very few people on this planet have grown up without ever playing a board or card game. Of those of us who do not play some kind of sport in an amatuer or professional league, some of us play one on the weekends with our friends. Of those of us who do not play videogames at our homes, some of us play them on our cellphones during our ride to work, or on the computer at work during our down-time. For the understandable purposes of solidarity a group of us separted ourselves from the rest by calling ourselves "gamers". For the uncharitable reason of stigma, everyone else embraced the distinction. That distinction has served its purpose, and serves now only to confuse marketers and deepen a divide that does not exist. We are all gamers.


However, if we accept that gaming is one of the most entrenched and important aspects of culture, and that the state of a society's games reflect its health; if we are indeed to accept that we are all gamers, then we must then ask ourselves 'Why?'. Why do we play games, and why do we play particular games and not others? Of two roommate, why does one play Hearts obsessively at home and at work, and the other play Tennis once a week at the gym? Why does the accountant own an expensive console to play one or two games a year, while the secretary owns a handheld to do nothing but raise virtual pets, and their teenager doesn't dain to play anything made after 1993? These questions measure the height and breadth of our current crisis. We still do not know why some audiences respond to certain games while others do not, and why everyone seems to like Tetris. That is because most developers of games and their audiences cannot articulate what a game is, the underlying structure that links all games, both analog and digital, together, or the qualities that it does and does not share with other forms of human expression.


We, as a community, an industry, and as a culture, are experiencing an identity crisis because we do not understand the way that games create meaning, for their players or their spectators. We conceive and consume experiences haphazardly, on the basis of instinct, anecdote, and sometimes shaky historical precedent. Part of every artistic endeavor is a shot in the dark, but because we lack a critical vocabulary that speaks to our unique aesthetic, it is often difficult to defend our choices, and even harder to impart our lessons learned. Yet there is also a great bliss that accompanies this ingorance. The exhiliration of flying, head-first into a great white space at the beginning of each project, with everything you know behind you and possiblity stretching infinte before. This is a fantasy that we are understandably reluctant to give up, as designers and, most importantly, as players. There is a rapidly growing realization though, that this fantasy cannot be maintained. With the expansion of the gaming industry, our growing audience and influence means that our decisions can no longer be defended with pat declarations of the freedom of our speech. As gaming becomes a larger and more celebrated part of culture, the more discerning of us must defend to ourselves the games that we play. "Fun" will no longer be a satisfying answer.


I have struggled to resolve this crisis within myself. My search has led me in and out of the works of others. I have turned and turned again on countless subjects and points, trying to find the logical argument that felt reflected in practice. More and more I have come to understand that the logic of my single human mind cannot encompass so vast a problem. The effort, then, is to mark the infinite space that we all explore, to draw the boundaries of the walls with which we all collide, in order to save from unnecessary bruising. Understanding that these walls may be collapsed, or over-stepped, by those that follow. The answers that I have produced have not been verified or vilified by the minds of succeeding generations, and, in truth, these questions will never be resolved in their entirety. All creative endeavors live on the edge of crisis, the liminal space between experience and possibility.

Books:
Understanding Media (Marshall McLuhan)
Cybertext (Espen Aarseth)
Orality and Literacy (Walter Ong)
Relational Aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud)
Computers as Theatre (Brenda Laurel)
The Birth of Tragedy (Friedrich Nietszche)
The Making of Homeric Verse (Milman Parry)

Works: Final Fantasy Tactics (Yasunori Matsuno)
Resident Evil (Shinji Mikami)
Ico (Fumito Ueda)
Pale Fire (Vladamir Nabokov)
On the Ground (Boris Mikhailov)
Two Gentlemen of Verona (William Shakespeare)
itp.licio.us (Rocio Barnes, Adam Asarnow, Josh Knowles, Charles Joseph Pratt)
Jamaica (Thomas Duc)

Thesis Outline


Design and Play: How games create meaning


| Design


- The Work of Shinji Mikami [Mar.04.07]


> Resident Evil and Resident Evil Remake

> Resident Evil 4

> ?God Hand?

> Killer7 (influence on Goichi Suda)

> Gears of War (influence on Cliff Blezinski)


- Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh, Metaphor in Games

- Ian Bogost, Unit Operations


| Play


- Player ethnographies [Apr.13.07]


> Avalanche

> Risk

> ICO


- Tim Rogers, Alone in an Empty Room, Life Non-Warp

- Craig Lindely, Gameplay Gestalts


| Macro/Micro


- Irresolvable Tension [Maybe cut this section][Mar.30.07]


> Risk, expressive aggression

> Metal Gear Solid, moral ambiguity

> EVE Online, "The Great Con"


- ?Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics?


What is the responsibility of a game designer?


| Morality


- The Ambiguity of Players [Mar.23.07]


> God of War

> Shadow of the Colossus


- Dave Hickey, The Heresy of Zone Defense

- Geertz, Notes from a Balinese Cockfight

- Dunne and Raby, Design Noir