Tag: Min forskning

Games and gamers

At the recent DIGRA conference the future of game studies was largely thought/hoped to be non-formalistic. I take this to mean that many of those present were somewhat fed up with general claims about game structure and form, preferring instead more situated and player-oriented approaches (see also Jesper’s discussion on essentialism/formalism)
While I agree that the balance today is too heavy on the formal side (forgive the confused metaphors) I don’t see formal approaches as invalid in any way. My disciplinary background is a combination of formal approaches (film studies/analysis) and user-oriented approaches (empirical media studies). The two approaches can supplement each other quite well, as I will attempt to demonstrate in my own dissertation.

Having unfortunately missed Erml and Mäyrä’s presentation I was reading their paper. As a small experiment here are my think-aloud notes.

They say:

There has been a relative boom of games research that has focused on the definition and ontology of games, but its complementary part, that of research into the gameplay experience has not been adopted by academics in a similar manner. This is partly due to the disciplinary tilt among the current generation of ludologists: a background in either art, literary or media studies, or in the applied field of game design, naturally leads to research in which the game, rather than the player, is the focus of attention.

Indeed, indeed.

Yet, the essence of a game is rooted in its interactive nature, and there is no game without a player.

A curious sentence. The ‘essence’ component is arbitrary, it makes no sense that I can discern. No game without a player? I have the board game Risk in the next room. There are no players nearby. But Risk is still a game. Weird.

Human experiences in virtual environments and games are made of the same elements that all other experiences consist of, and the gameplay experience can be defined as an ensemble made up of the player’s sensations, thoughts, feelings, actions and meaning-making in a gameplay setting. Thus it is not a property or a direct cause of certain elements of a game but something that emerges in a unique interaction process between the game and the player. This has also led to suggestions that games are actually more like artefacts than media.

Err.. implying that experience of media is not “an ensemble made up of the player’s [user’s] sensations, thoughts, feelings, actions and meaning-making”…? Odd.

People play games for the experience that can only be achieved by engaging in the gameplay

Do they? I’m not sure if I do, personally. What players?

After enough effort and repetitions the player can get to a point where she masters the game and game playing eventually reaches the point of automation and does not feel so fun any longer. Thus, games can be considered as puzzles that the players try to solve by investigating the game world

I think that’s much too broad, depends very much on the genre.

On the contrary, the children thought that the emotional immersion and involvement in fiction was typically stronger for them while reading a good book or while watching a movie.

The authors speak here of player experience which they have studied by observing/interviewing children and their non-playing parents. Interesting observation.

Our research suggests that the gameplay experience and immersion into a game are multidimensional phenomena.

Okay, this is a personal hobby-horse of mine: What data would you need for your research to suggest otherwise?
“Through in-depth participant observation of the details of playing we have found the gameplay experience to be a simple, monocausal one” – not likely.

It’s an interesting paper. The authors go from qualitive data to survey trying to “validate” the former results and find a way to ask players about immersion. The authors are well-read. For my personal taste, I would have preferred more discussion on the methods applied. Ask people about their level of immersion? Maybe, but I would have liked to see a discussion of alternative approaches.
Making rather strong methodological claims in the beginning it would have been nice with more discussion on how players can (and cannot) be studied.

I guess I’m generally skeptical of asking players/users/viewers to verbalize/rationalize something which is not normally a conchious process. People are really good at answering questions but the validity of asking someone how he or she makes judgements about credibility, forms trust, makes meaning, plays games etc. is questionable (not to say that I haven’t done it myself). It borders on attempting to outsource the analysis to the test subjects/respondents. In general, a respondent can answer questions but the researcher should analyze the data (e.g. interviews) in order to answer the research questions.

Post Digra

The Digra 2005 conference has come and gone. It was about half the size of the previous one but otherwise similiar in form and scope.
To be sure there were interesting talks but also less exuberance than two years ago. The wild energy seems to have been channeled into more everyday work-life, for good and bad.
In particular I enjoyed Lin and Sun’s grief play paper and the Georgia Tech people’s work on space in games – the latter feeding into something I’m writing for the text-book project.
Also, Janet Murray’s keynote was entertaining and presented ideas for an interesting investigation into the “Why are there games?” question couched in the language of evolutionary biology/psychology. In book form, this would be quite worthwhile.

Of recurrent memes, ye olde ludology/narratology debate would not ease its grip entirely. I have no particular stake in this discussion and I guess I’m torn between finding the whole controversy rather entertaining (sure isn’t much controversy in the field apart from that) and finding the whole meta-ness of it all rather tiring (the discussion is now whether there was ever a discussion etc.).


Here’s Matteo Bittanti frozen in a rare moment of semi-mobility during his interesting speed-talk on Manhunt.


And here’s Celia Pearce taking questions about the alleged non-existence of participants in a debate that never took place.

More pictures? Check out Mirjam’s collection.

The Project takes a new direction… – or: At least the sub-title is still reasonable

Okay, I wasn’t kidding when I said this was a research blog of sorts. Not fully kidding, anyway.
Elsewhere on this site I have claimed to be researching the issue of social order/control in multiplayer gamespaces. That’s still an interesting topic, of course.
But recently I have drifted towards another main issue: How can analytical game theory help us analyze video games? What predictions as to player behaviour does such a perspective entail? And how do these prediction fare when confronted with empirically real players?
I approach the latter part by analyzing the behaviour of players who play a small series of multiplayer console games. The players are videotaped while playing (as hinted at here) and their behaviour/communication is then analyzed (for more details send me an email).

One thing quite interesting about this approach is that my study seems to be fairly unique. Of course, whenever people say that no-one else has done X one may follow the rule of thumb that they haven’t looked properly. But at least I’m working with the hypothesis that no-one has done really micro analyses of the interaction between video game players on a small scale (that is non-ethnographic) working with questions like: “What do players say to each other?”, “Do players play to win or to make sure everybody has fun?” etc.
Prove my hypothesis wrong and I’ll buy you a beer.

Update: Unrelated to this post both Jesper and Bryan have actually alerted me to XEODesign’s report “Why We Play Games” (11mb download) which in fact reports a very interesting (and ambitious) study of player behaviour – even if targeted at “why?” and not “how?”. Not sure what the rules are exactly, but I might owe both of you a beer.

Final cut

My protracted battle with the department video cameras has come to a temporary end. Right this moment I’m transferring the final gaming session recordings to a hard drive.
This little project has taken longer than I had expected. Not in the sense that your supermarket shopping drags out but more in the way that your brief foray into World of Warcraft just-to-check-it-out is likely to destroy your RL social life.
Next is the final editing/rendering after which the actual transcription and analysis can begin. Considering how my time estimates – although pessimistic – have proven highly unreliable I’ll probably be hiring one or more students to help with the transcription.

DIGRA paper wrapped and delivered

My paper (“The problem of other players – in-game collaboration as collective action”) for the upcoming DIGRA conference now resides on some benign Canadian webserver. The brief abstract runs as follows:

“This paper explores the development in game design of collaborative relationships between players, proposes a typology of such relationships and argues that one type of game design makes games a continuous experiment in collective action (Olson, 1971). By framing in-game conflict within the framework of economic game theory the paper seeks to highlight the importance of already well-developed models from other fields for the study of electronic games.”

A frame in a frame


Are you a techie? I want to combine two video signals – one shows players in a couch, the other shows on-screen game action. And I want to do it with a minimum of post-recording hassle (I don’t care so much about the complexity of the set-up).
Right now, what I’m going for is two cameras – and then synching the two signals in Premiere and showing both signals at once in the final movie (as shown in the illustration).
If anyone has better ideas I would just love to hear them.

The reliability of the Zahavis

Carrying on my interest in trust and signaling, I just finished reading Amotz and Avishag Zahavi’s “The Handicap Principle“.
Briefly, the handicap principle is the idea that to send a trustworthy signal one sometimes has to accept a handicap. Taking on this handicap proves to the receiver of the signal that the transmitted statement is true.
For instance, in order to convince a skeptical observer that you’re a world-class swimmer you may have to get wet. You could choose to just say it (“Seriously, I am a world-class swimmer”). But that signal would not be reliable.
Similarly, the Zahavis argue that the male peacock lugs around his beautiful tail (handicapping himself since he is more easily spotted, less agile etc.) in order to reliably signal to the female that he is made of strong genetic material. He could have “told” her in other ways, but the tail is an unfakable signal.

There’s a decent intro to the theory of honest signaling here.

Now, Geoffrey Miller, reviewing the book for Evolution and Human Behaviour said it well:

“Depending on your viewpoint, they [the Zahavis] act like (1) dangerous hyper-adaptationists even more extreme than Steven Jay Gould?s worst caricatures of Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett, weaving just-so stories out of thin air, (2) harmlessly entertaining, pseudo-scientific fabulists in the tradition of Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead, (3) classical Victorian natural historians (somehow displaced to contemporary Tel-Aviv University) using the same hypothetico-deductive methods as Darwin himself, or (4) ardent, creative biologists who, whatever one?s qualms about their methods and examples, deliver a revitalizing shock to animal communication theory, sexual selection theory, kinship theory, reciprocal altruism theory, and evolutionary psychology. “

Miller adds, as I would have done from the comfort of my layman’s armchair: “I favor this last judgment“.

Anyway, many aspects of the book are fascinating (as are the author’s regular jibes at colleagues who spend too much time arguing against the “obvious” using fancy mathematical models and too little time in the real world).
But two sections struck me as particularly interesting. My limited understanding of evolutionary biology had it that there are essentially two complementary explanations of cooperation among animals (discounting group selection theories that are frowned upon).
The first is kin selection (and the related idea of inclusive fitness). Here, the idea is that individuals should behave altruistically to the extent that other individuals share their genes (or to the extent that other individuals are likely to share your genes). And what-do-you-know? Parents often care about their offspring.

The second is reciprocal altruism. Here, the individual is expected to be altruistic to the extent that he or she expects this altruism to be reciprocated in the future. So, a vampire bat should share its meal with another bat if it believes that this other bat will reciprocate the favor. And Hallejujah! This seems to be the case.

I was somewhat surprised to see that the Zahavis consider both theories to be flawed. Kin selection, the Zahavis argue, is really just group selection among relatives. It may be true that an individual “would like” to increase its inclusive fitness, but wouldn’t it just be much better if your brother did the work instead of you? So, kin selection is vulnerable to social parasitism (the bane of group selection theories).
Reciprocal altruism, on the other hand, seeks to explain something which does not really warrant such fancy models, the Zahavis feel. Many individuals gain prestige by performing altruistic acts, which increasestheir standing in the hierarchy, which increases their reproductive success. Altruism, then, is a signal of superiority – look!, I can share my food, that’s how strong a bird I am (marry me!).

Very interesting even if I don’t entirely know what to think.

A brief history of cooperation in multiplayer games

Most early video games, of course, were multiplayer games. Games like Spacewar, Pong and Gunfight, however, were also simple one-on-one games in the tradition of classical board games such as chess. At the formal level, at least, such games do not inspire cooperation since one player’s gain is the other player’s loss.

Following the simplistic and competitive successes of Pong later games introduced the possibility of cooperative play. Two schools of thought competed for quarters and screen time. In games of the 1980s like Joust (Williams, 1982), Double Dragon (Taito, 1987) players could join forces against the enemy hordes but were also likely to be unstable allies as players were able to directly hurt one another (Double Dragon even ultimately employed last man standing scoring conditions. as players would fight each other for the glory of actually winning the game). Eliminating much potential for inter-player conflict Gauntlet (Atari, 1985) and its descendants cast players in complementary roles that needed to be handled appropriately for the group to succeed.

Such experiments were obviously predecessors of the team-based Counter-Strike and are evident in many other highly popular online PC games such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Gray Matter Interactive Studios, Inc., 2001) and Battlefield 1942 (Digital Illusions CE AB, 2002).

In terms of gameplay (disregarding for now the broader social context in which the game exists) those games all invite social tension albeit on a modest scale. In the case of in-game resources (health potions in Gauntlet, special weapons in Double Dragon) each player may be tempted to simply gobble up as many goodies as possible. And the Battlefield 1942 player may feel the urge to indulge in personal military heroics (such as semi-suicidal air-raids) without bothering with the carefully pondered strategies of her team. This tension, however, may clearly be part of the appeal and cannot feasibly be countered without seriously jeopardizing the enjoyable player freedom offered and enthusiastically flaunted by the game worlds in question.

A remarkably different approach to game design was displayed in 1978 when Rob Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote the lines of code that was MUD. The system drew inspiration from earlier adventure games as well as pen-and-paper role-playing but what should interest us here is the fact that MUD was, in effect if not by intent, an experiment with social dynamics in game worlds.

Being multiplayer at heart, MUD was a virtual world in which players pursued individual goals but also shared the responsibility of keeping the world useful and enjoyable. Thus, the cooperation required by the players here is analogous to the joined effort that must be undertaken by members of real-life societies. In an important sense, then, the task of the game world designer is comparable to that of the political philosopher, attempting to describe institutions that ensure the desired levels of freedom, fairness and happiness. Experienced virtual world designer, Raph Koster, who co-manages Sony’s MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies acknowledges this:

‘I think anyone who doesn’t think that MMOs are social experiments hasn’t tried
running one yet. It’s not that you set out to create a social experiment-we don’t have test plans for our subjects, formal hypotheses to prove, or anything like that. You set out to make a game, and quickly discover that you’re suddenly a politician running a game the size of a city. You’re suddenly a social architect worrying about issues you never had a clue about.’ (quoted in Pika, 2004)

Although designers of pioneer virtual worlds such as Habitat were specific about the difficulties of reconciling the preferences of various player types (Morningstar & Farmer, 2003) many subsequent systems apparently did not fully anticipate the potential tensions between users/players. Famously, Ultima Online, in its initial incarnation, did very little to discourage anti-social behaviour among its citizens. Thus, the game world soon became rampant with grief play, a term now used to cover various types of deliberately anti-social behaviour (see discussion in Foo & Koivisto, 2004). Particularly the number of players who enjoyed preying on other players reached levels where other types of play (i.e. advancing through the game’s craft system) became hard to enjoy (Kim, 1998) as the game world began to resemble ‘Afghanistan after the Soviets left‘ (Rollings & Adams, 2003 527). The mounting in-game tension was attributed to the game’s design. In this spirit it was decided to graphically single out player-killers and to designate certain areas of the game world as safe. Thus, player-killers would be marked by a red aura and it was no longer possible to die at the hand of another player in Ultima’s urban areas. It other words, while Ultima Online did not eliminate player-killing on the code level (as many of its successors have done) the game had raised the stakes involved in blatantly anti-social behaviour, which was soon notably diminished.

Killing another player character in Ultima Online, of course, is arguably not against the spirit of the game. In a medieval world populated by monsters and assassins the case can obviously be made that killing is actually in-character, i.e. consistent with the role one has chosen to play. Such arguments fare more poorly when it comes to technical cheats. A pervasive problem in online gaming has been the creativity put to use by some players in order to exploit bugs in the games or to gain various advantages by tinkering with the game code. A measure of the problem can be gained by the proclamation by game developers Blizzard in September 2003 that they would shut down 400.000 user accounts at their game portal Battle.net. These accounts had been associated with ‘a hack or a cheat program‘ and were eliminated to ensure that the portal would remain ‘a fun and safe place to play Blizzard games’ (Battle.net, 2003).

If games were all about conflict, grief play and technical cheats would not receive such intense attention and would not give game designers sleepless nights as they attempt to foresee the next counter-move by ingenious (if immoral) players. Notably, no developer sleep is lost over the intentional conflict manifest in the aggressions of Tekken players or the drive towards mutual destruction in real-time-strategy games. Such discord is intentional and entertaining while social dilemmas emerging from human interaction are often not.

  • Battle.net. (2003, 30th of September). StarCraft, Diablo II, and Warcraft III Accounts Closed. Retrieved 14th of November, 2003, from http://www.battle.net/news/0309.shtml
  • Foo, C. Y., & Koivisto, E. M. I. (2004). Defining Grief Play in MMORPGs: Player and Developer Perceptions. Paper presented at the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE 2004), Singapore.
  • Kim, A. J. (1998). Killers Have More Fun. Wired, 6.05.
  • Morningstar, C., & Farmer, F. R. (2003). The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat. In N. Wardrip-Fruin & N. Montfort (Eds.), The New Media Reader. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
  • Pika. (2004, 2nd of Februrary). Interview with Raph Koster, Chief Creative Officer for SOE. Retrieved 13th of May, 2004, from http://www.warcry.com/…
  • Rollings, A., & Adams, E. (2003). Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design. Boston: New Riders Publishing.

A circle within a circle

Quite a bit of confusion stems, I’m beginning to think, from the fact that when debating games it is easy to be unclear about one’s level of analysis. Three levels tend to be intermingled:

A) The Core Game
This is the more or less hypothetical ideal game defined by what Salen & Zimmerman call the operational rules. This is the level on which chess, Pong, Gun-Fight etc. are zero-sum games.

B) The Game System
This is the game in its broadest sense including the game’s matching system, the particularities of its communication features (if any), whether it is generally played against physically distant opponents etc.

C) The Concrete Game
This is any concrete instance of the game played by actual players who may have all sorts of utility functions. No matter what type of conflict is specified by the core game, players of a concrete game may feel that they “win” or “lose” by entirely different standards.

There is no magic circle, only different levels of analysis. But my point is that one must specify one’s perspective. Claiming, for instance, that playing zero-sum games is bound to make players unable to cooperate (a hypothesis often aired) entails a disregard – or failure to acknowledge – of the fact that actually playing the game may be anything but a zero-sum experience.