[Warning, you might find yourself walking on familiar and well traveled ground. This post, sparked by recent conversation, is part notes, part rehashing of old thoughts, and some rambles towards additional ones. Comments, of course, always welcome.]<\/p>\n
In the recent discussion (aka, as the front page reads, Morpheus is fighting Neo in the Construct!<\/strike>Alien vs. Predator vs. Ludologist vs. Narratologist!) about games, ludology, narratology, and whether or not games should make you cry (psychological depth of games) at Grand Text Auto, a subthread emerged on who studies what kinds of games and what role commercial or noncommercial games should play in the discussion.<\/p>\n
\nEspen Aarseth’s describes Max Payne 2 as<\/p>\n
perhaps the most lavish and successful story-game hybrid out there. I absolutely enjoyed playing it, yet it left me completely cold in terms of its psychology, and I cared about the main “characters” much less than I care about an individual ant in my garden.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Nick Montfort responds:<\/p>\n
I would hate to characterize video game scholars as being people who, if you throw them a story, begin to dribble, but there has been great neglect of some of the recent interesting computer game work that relates to literature – probably because it has happened mostly in a slew of innovative non-commercial games. Restricting your attention to commercial games is a reasonable (and perhaps financially sustainable) policy, but making claims about what all computer games can’t do, based on such studies, is really rather tenuous.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Behind both statements – and throughout the thread – are several recurring questions:<\/p>\n
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- Is psychological depth or player emotional response an accurate measure of success for games or, in fact, any media?;\n
- What types of games do or do not lend themselves to stories? Are such narrative attempts successful, and does narrative function in the same way in games as it does in other media (in other words, just because it looks like a story – is it a story in the way we commonly understand it)?;\n
- Is it possible to create a ‘theory of games’ that is both useful and can account for the wide range of game-types or media-types associated with games?;\n
- and the always present, What is the relationship of games to literature (or narrative), or is the comparison even useful?\n<\/ul>\n
But what caught my eye was the subthread focusing on the commercial<\/i> aspect of games. In some respects, we can perhaps tweak Nick’s statement to read:<\/p>\n
Restricting your attention to
commercial games<\/strike> any one genre of game<\/i> is a reasonable(and perhaps financially sustainable)<\/strike> policy, but making claims about what all computer games can’t do, based on such studies, is really rather tenuous. [strikes and italics mine]<\/p><\/blockquote>\nAnd that would probably be a fair statement (and speaks to the second question, above, though it by no means answers it). But the vexing question remains – how do we deal with the commercial\/industry attachments of many games? This is particularly important to me as I continue work on my dissertation, which over time to focuses more on specific – and specifically commercial – games and less on literary works I saw as related to games – although my approach continues to draw from a blend of narrative and textual studies as well as ludic and interface design principles.<\/p>\n
Aarseth counters Montfort’s criticism above by stating that<\/p>\n
literary critics would not be having this conversation – “so, you only analyse commercially published novels, how opportunistic of you”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And while Montfort’s response holds true to a certain degree –<\/p>\n
A comparison to a film department that only considered Hollywood movies would seem more apt. Or, perhaps, to an Emily Dickinson scholar who only studied the seven poems she commercially published during her lifetime. If we’re going to make the cross-media comparisons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
– Aarseth’s point is well-taken. After all, Jack London’s Martin Eden<\/i> is but one of many literary explorations of the business side of ‘creative writing.’ Many film studies have, in fact, considered only “Hollywood-style” movies. And instead of using Dickinson’s published work as a counter to her unpublished, I think the more accurate comparison might be between the relatively unpublished (in a traditional sense) Dickinson and the published – and very public – Whitman. I’m being a bit pedantic, but I am intrigued by the intersections of business and art, of commercial independent game (and film) development, of Barnes & Noble and the ‘vanity press.’ What institutional differences account for independent game designers’ – from the IF writer to the mod and plugin designer – ability to avoid that last (often disdained) demarcation?<\/p>\n
Where is the fine line that divides the commercial and the independent? Under which category would we file Turbine’s Asheron’s Call? Published by Microsoft (until recently), but developed in a studio apartment by a team who paid the CEO with insurance money he received when he was hit by a car (read Jon Monsarrat’s story of Turbine’s creation<\/a> – click on Business, “A Company I Founded”). Alongside the rags-to-riches stories, what do we do with the mod designers whose work gets repackaged and sold on the shelves? The plug-in designer whose ideas get built into the next generation engine? The independent developer who uses a commercial engine, like Bioware’s Aurora engine?<\/p>\n
I suspect part of what is needed (conveniently, since it’s part of what I’m writing my dissertation on) is a ludo-textual-studies-style examination and contextualization of the various game engines, an exploration of how rules discourage and encourage certain aesthetic choices, how specific<\/b> engines help define the formal features of their associated games. Doing so also helps us examine the distinction between commercial and independent games that use (or are based on\/enhancements of) commercial engines. Importantly, it also seeks to address the issue of speaking towards one type – platform, genre, commercial\/noncommercial, etc. – of game as representative of the whole (as in Montfort’s quotation above). Just because something is game-like doesn’t mean it must overwhelmingly share properties with other games, a point made forcefully enough in literature that it is seemingly odd for Nabakov or Danielewski or Eggers to use conventions of critical works (footnotes, etc.) as fictional devices. Their very oddity speaks to our expectation of and familiarity with convention within particular genres.<\/p>\n