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JSONHalf-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds
My scavengings from Jesper Juul's book
Keywords | Text | Date | ID |
|---|---|---|---|
| Media: Videogames / Narrative / Game | "In having fictional worlds, video games deviate from traditional non-electronic games that are mostly abstract, and this is part of the newness of video games." --Jesper Juul | 07/06/07 | 8171 |
| Media: Videogames / Game | "[T]he question is not whether video games are old or new, but how video games are games, how they borrow from non-electronic games, and how they depart from traditional game forms." --Jesper Juul, 4 | 07/06/07 | 8172 |
| Game / Media: Videogames / Computers | "There appears to be a basic affinity between games and computers: Like the printing press and cinema historically promoted and enabled new kinds of storytelling, computers works as enablers of games, letting us play old games in new ways, and allowing for new types of games that would previously not have been possible." --Jesper Juul, 5 | 07/06/07 | 8173 |
| Game | "It is a basic paradox of games that while the rules themselves are generally definite, unambiguous, and easy to use, the enjoyment of a game depends on these easy-to-use rules presenting challenges that *cannot* be easily overcome." --Jesper Juul, 5 | 07/06/07 | 8174 |
| Game / Systems | "Emergence is the primordial game structure, where a game is specified as a small number of rules that combine and yield large numbers of game variations for which the players must design strategies to handle. This is found in card and board games, in sports, and in most action and all strategy games." compare against "progression," a "historically newer structure" in which "the player has to perform a predefined set of actions in order to complete the game." Juul, 5 | 07/06/07 | 8175 |
| Game | Juul's model for what constitutes a game: 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. [Hmm on this last one] Juul, 7 | 07/06/07 | 8176 |
| Game / Media / Narrative | Jesper Juul's game model (see previous entry) "does not tie games to any specific medium, and games are therefore *transmedial* in the same way that storytelling is transmedial." Juul, 7 | 07/06/07 | 8177 |
| Game | Linda Hughes, on girls playing Foursquare: "Game rules can be interpreted and reinterpreted toward preferred meanings and purposes, selectively invoked or ignored, challenged or defended, changed or enforced to suit the collective goals of different groups of players. In short, players can take the same game and collectively make of it strikingly different experiences." Thus "children's games cannot be meaningfully described only as the rules that make them up" Juul, 11 | 07/06/07 | 8178 |
| Game / Narrative / To Read | key texts in the narratology vs. ludology debate (cited by Juul) Murray 1997; Frasca 1999; Juul 1999; Eskelinen 2001b; King and Krzywinska 2002b; Atkins 2003; Aarseth 2004a; Jenkins 2004 aka Murray, Janet: Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997) Frasca, Gonzalo: "Ludology Meets Narratology: Similitude and Differences Between (Video) Games and Narrative" (available online) Eskelinen, Markku: "Towards Computer Game Studies, Part 1: Narratology and Ludology" (available online as PDF) King, Geoff and Krzywinska, Tanya: "Computer Games/Cinema/Interfaces" in Computer Game and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings (2002) Atkins, Barry: More than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form (2003) Aarseth, Espen: "Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation" in First Person (2004) Jenkins, Henry: "Game Design as Narrative Architecture" in First Person (2004) | 07/06/07 | 8182 |
| Game | "ludology" is a word first coined by Csikszentmihalyi in 1982 (although popularized by Gonzalo Frasca, starting 1999) | 07/06/07 | 8183 |
| Media: Videogames / To Read | Rune Klevjer's "In Defense of Cutscenes" in which Klevjer defends cut-scenes as providing "a unifying logic for the game and rewards for the player's actions" (Juul's paraphrase) article appears in Computer Game and Digital Culture Proceedings (2002) Juul, 16 | 07/06/07 | 8184 |
| Game / Narrative / To Read | Wibroe, Mads, K. K. Nygard, and Peter Bogh Andersen: "Games and Stories" appears in Virtual Interaction (2001), Lars Qvortrup, ed. cited by Juul as "a nuanced discussion of game/story relations" | 07/06/07 | 8185 |
| Media: Videogames / Narrative | "quests" as a concept a quest in a videogame provides "an interesting bridge between game rules and game fiction in that the game can contain a predefined sequence of events that the player then has to actualize or enact" Juul 17 | 07/13/07 | 8187 |
| Narrative / Media / Media: Videogames | Henry Jenkins "sees video games as part of a bigger complex of * transmedia storytelling ,* where content can move between different media" "Realistically, video games are to some degree part of a general * storytelling ecology ,* incorporating at least some elements of popular stories" see also Seymour Chatman, who claims that "The transposability of the story is the strongest reason for arguing that narratives are indeed structures independent of any meaning." | 07/13/07 | 8188 |
| Game | "Games provide context for actions: moving an avatar is much more meaningful in a game environment than in an empty space: throwing a ball has more meaningful implications on the playing field than off the playing field; a rush attack is only possible if there are rules specifying how attacks work; winning the game requires that the winning condition has been specified; without rules in chess, there are no checkmates, end games, or Sicilian openings." Juul 18-9 Perhaps one more reason why games are not reducible to rules alone? Because the context derives not only from the rules but from non-rule trappings? | 07/13/07 | 8189 |
| Game | Sid Meier: "A game is a series of interesting choices." Juul expands: "high-quality games are the ones whose choices provide high-quality mental challenges for players" | 07/13/07 | 8190 |
| Game | Juul's notion that a game contains "goals and conflict" is prefigured by Bernhard Suits (1978), who writes that a game is "directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs" and also in Chris Crawford's / Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's "conflict" Juul: "a conflict presupposes mutually contradicting goals between two entities or, in a broader sense, between a player and the difficulty of reaching a goal ... [A] game without a goal is a borderline case" | 07/13/07 | 8191 |
| Game / Media: Videogames | Bernard Suits' statement that game rules "prohibit more efficient in favor of less efficient means" "completely breaks down in the case of video games ... If we look at *any* video game, how can we say that the player is using less efficient means? Would this be compared to making the game yourself? Hacking the game? Using a cheat code?" Additionally, simulation games are generally "much easier to master than their real-life counterparts are" (in the case of soccer and tennis) Juul, 34 | 07/13/07 | 8192 |
| Game / Media: Videogames | Will Wright claims that The Sims and SimCity are "not games but toys" (because they have no explicit goals) | 07/13/07 | 8193 |
| Game | Juul: "In Roger Caillois's definition, games are *separate* in time and space from the rest of the world and *unproductive.* It is fairly easy to find examples of games that transgress the first aspect ... [T]he time span of [a chess-by-mail game] overlaps a non-game part of life and ... it is possible to consider the moves one wants to play while going about one's daily business. Likewise, many Internet-based strategy games stretch over months or even years." the claim for their unproductive nature is tricky, too, when considering the question of gambling ("[N]ote that it is possible to bet on the outcome of any game," writes Juul) | 07/13/07 | 8194 |
| Game: ARG / Game: LARP | Juul notes that Roger Caillois' concepts of games being "separate" in time and space from the rest of the world is especially problematic in the question of live-action role-playing games, because "the games may be played in spaces also used for 'normal life.' In these cases, specific descriptions have to be made as to what interactions are allowed between non-playing people and players." also true-- possibly even more true --in ARG / alternate reality games -- see Jane McGonigal's concept of "dark play" | 07/13/07 | 8195 |
| Game | continuing to critique Caillois (see other notes), this time on the notion of the voluntary / involuntary aspect of games, Jesper Juul suggests that because "all games are potential targets for betting and professional playing ... games [should be] characterized as activities with *negotiable consequences*" "That games carry a degree of separation from the rest of the world is entailed in their consequences being negotiable." This is what separates games from other rule-guided activities like "traffic" and "war" | 07/13/07 | 8202 |
| Game / Play / Concept | "[G]ame activity ... requires that the players *respect* the rules. Bernard Suits has described this as *lusory attitude* -- the player accepts the rules because they make the game activity possible." (Juul, 38) | 07/13/07 | 8203 |
| Game / Concept | Juul's conception that games have a "variable, quantifiable outcome" helps to explain the reason why players may "feign ineptitude" when playing against more novice players -- part of their desire when playing is to "ensure suspense about the outcome of the game" Juul calls this "player-organized criticality" (39) | 07/13/07 | 8204 |
| Game | when Juul writes that games need to have a "quantifiable outcome," he means that "the outcome of a game is designed to be beyond discussion ... the goal of Pac-Man (Namco 1980) is to get a high score, rather than to 'move in a pretty way'" note that this quantifiable outcome can sometimes be flexible [?]. See notes on "player-organized criticality" | 07/13/07 | 8205 |
| Game | More on "negotiable outcome" "Elections are not games since the consequences of the outcome are defined and not subject to negotiation, but the rules governing the execution of the election are potentially usable for game purposes." (Juul 42) | 07/13/07 | 8206 |
| Game | More on the question of professional athletes (who Roger Caillois says are working, rather than playing) due to Juul's "negotiable outcomes" clause, we can say that "even professional players are *playing* a *game,* but that in this specific *game session,* the consequences have been determined to be financial and career-determining." | 07/13/07 | 8207 |
| Game | "It is possible to take anything with rules, variable outcomes, player effort, and negotiable consequences and turn it into a game simply by assigning value to the outcomes between players. For example, two people walking down the street can decide to turn it into a race by describing it as *better* to reach the destination first." (Juul, 45) | 07/13/07 | 8208 |
| Game | Juul : "Most of the things described as games are sufficiently well defined that they can be played again. This indicates that there is a loose idea that games are repeatable." (45) | 07/13/07 | 8209 |
| Media: Videogames / Concept | Juul distinguishes between "implementations" and "adaptations"-- "Card games on computers should be considered *implementations* since it is possible to unambiguously map one-to-one correspondences between all the possible game states in the computer version and in the physical card game. Sports games on computers are better described as *adaptations,* since much detail is lost in the physics model of the computer program because it is a simplification of the real world and in the interface because the video game player's body is *not* part of the game state." Juul, 49 | 07/15/07 | 8212 |
| Game / Computers / Media: Videogames | "[V]ideo games are just as rule-based as other games, [but] they modify the classic game model in that it is now the *computer* that upholds the rules. This gives video games much flexibility, allowing for rules more complex than humans can handle; freeing the player(s) from having to enforce the rules; and allowing for games where the player does not know the rules from the outset." | 07/15/07 | 8213 |
| Game | Juul (52): "[G]ames that are formally equivalent can be experienced completely differently." (see his Tic-Tac-Toe / magic square example-- although one could argue that these games are not truly formally equivalent since their rule-sets are fundamentally different). The argument about context, noted elsewhere, is perhaps a more forceful proof of this claim | 07/15/07 | 8214 |
| Game / Art: Algorithmic Art | Juul: "[R]ules of [a] game constitute a *state machine*, a 'machine' that responds to player action ... The state machine of the game can be visualized as a landscape of possibilities or a branching *game tree* of possibilities ... To play a game is to interact with the state machine and explore the game tree." (56) Also, 60: "A game is a machine that can be in different states, it contains input and output functions and definitions of what state and what input will lead to the following state ... In a board game, this state is stored in the position of pieces on the board; in sports, the game state is the score and the players; in computer-based games, the state is stored in memory and then represented on screen." | 08/04/07 | 8270 |
| Game / Education | Juul: "Games are learning experiences, where the player improves his or her skills at playing the game. At any given point, the player will have a specific *repetoire* of skills and methods for overcoming the challenges of the game. Part of the attraction of a good game is that it continually challenges and makes new demands on the player's repetoire." | 08/04/07 | 8271 |
| Game / Instructions | Jesper Juul makes a subtle distinction regarding game rules, distinguishing between "Rules limit player action" (as in Salen and Zimmerman) and rules setting up potential actions: "actions that are meaningful inside the game but meaningless outside" "Rules specify [both] *limitations* and *affordances*." | 08/04/07 | 8272 |
| Game / Sport / Game: ARG | Juul: "The main difference between the rules of a video game and the rules of a sport is that sports use the preexisting systems of the physical world in the game." Interesting. Isn't the same also true of ARGs? | 08/04/07 | 8273 |
| Game / Information | Juul: "Game theory ... distinguishes between games of *perfect information* and games of *imperfect information*: In the former case, all players have complete knowledge of the game state at any given moment. In the latter case, players have only partial knowledge of the game state." (59) | 08/04/07 | 8274 |
| Game | In Counter-Strike, there is an unsportsmanlike strategy known as "camping" -- staying hidden for most of the game simply to snipe unsuspecting players camping is not explicitly prohibited by the game rules, but Juul categorizes the agreement among players not to camp as a kind of non-explicit rule it reminds me of the disdain towards "cheese decks" in Magic: The Gathering | 08/04/07 | 8275 |
| Game / Systems / Generative Art | Salen and Zimmerman: "Every game [of Pong] is unique. Because the ball can travel anywhere on the screen, Pong is an open-ended game with endless possibilities. Pong rewards dedicated play: it is easy to learn, but difficult to master." Juul: "Pong has very few rules, yet it provides the players with a large possibility space." what Juul calls an "emergent game" or a "game of emergence" | 08/04/07 | 8276 |
| Media: Videogames / Systems / Computers | Juul paraphrases Chris Crawford: "Crawford argues that since the computer is a data-processing device, a game should take advantage of the computer's strengths by emphasizing processing over data storage." (71) | 08/04/07 | 8277 |
| Media: Videogames / Systems / Narrative | In Juul's distinction between emergent games and progression games, he writes: "The progression structure yields strong control to the game designer: Since the designer controls the sequence of events, this is also where we find the games with cinematic or storytelling ambitions." | 08/04/07 | 8278 |
| Game / Systems | Juul: "Games of emergence exhibit a *basic asymmetry* between the relative simplicity of the game rules and the relative complexity of the actual playing of the game." See other entry, on Pong | 08/04/07 | 8279 |
| Media: Videogames / Systems | Another way emergence shows up in videogames is in "emergent gameplay," where creative players play a game "in a way the game designer did not predict" (Juul) see designer Harvey Smith, who argues for "systemic level design," a style of level design that allows for emergent gameplay. Smith distinguishes between "desirable emergence" (which leads to interesting gameplay) and "undesirable emergence," which hacks the system in a way that makes the game less enjoyable | 08/04/07 | 8280 |
| Systems | Stephen Wolfram, circa 1994: "Whenever you look at very complicated systems in physics and biology ... you generally find that the basic components and the basic laws are quite simple; the complexity arises because you have a great many of these simple components interacting simultaneously. The complexity is actually in the organization -- the myriad of possible ways the components of the system can interact." | 08/04/07 | 8281 |
| Game / Systems | Jesper Juul distinguishes between four types of emergence in games: "emergence as variation, as patterns, as irreducibility, and as novelty or surprise" variation = "the variety of possible states and game sessions that a game's rules allow" patterns = "patterns that players cannot immediately deduce from the rules of the game" irreducibility = the way the outcome of a game system can only be observed through actual playtesting novelty = "when several rules or objects in a game are combined in a hitherto unforseen way" | 08/04/07 | 8282 |
| Systems / Computers | Stephen Wolfram, circa 1998, on cellular automata: "The behavior of the system can thus be found effectively only by explicit simulation. No computational short cut is possible. The system must be considered 'computationally irreducible.'" | 08/04/07 | 8283 |
| Media: Videogames | In Grand Theft Auto III there are certain missions, but the emergent elements allows player "to complete the mission in the way he or she wants. ... The advantage of structuring a game like this is that the player experiences a predefined story by completing the missions, *while* having the freedom to solve the tasks in different ways." (Juul, 82-3) | 08/04/07 | 8284 |
| Game / Concept | Jesper Juul's concept of "gameplay" involves the interaction of three things: "1. The rules of the game. 2. The player(s)' pursuit of the goal. The player seeks strategies that work due to the emergent properties of the game. 3. The player's competence and repertoire of strategies and playing methods." | 08/06/07 | 8285 |
| Game | Sid Meier's "interesting choices" are fleshed out thusly: "1. No single option should be the best. 2. The options should not be equally good. 3. The player must be able to make an informed choice." quoted by Juul, 92 -- although Juul rightfully points out that Meier's choices are "strategic rather than skill-oriented" see also Juul 115, in which he writes about Vib-Ribbon, which, according to Meier's classifications "does not contain any interesting choices whatsoever [but] is still an enjoyable game" | 08/06/07 | 8286 |
| Puzzles | Marcel Danesi: "[S]ome puzzles are more intellectually pleasurable than others are. The *aesthetic index* of a puzzle ... seems to be inversely proportional to the complexity of its solution or to the obviousness of the pattern, trap, or trick it hides." | 08/06/07 | 8287 |
| Game / Education | Juul: "[A] game changes the player that plays it." "Improving skills at playing a game involves expanding and refining the repetoire. A quality game must present the player with challenges, continually letting the player develop a better repetoire for methods for playing the game, while continually preventing the player from playing the game just using a well defined routine." | 08/06/07 | 8293 |
| Game / Mind / Patterns / Information / Systems | Juul: "[T]he element of surprise in games of emergence is due to the way humans think about the world. ... Humans are tricked because we play games not by going through every possible position in the game tree, but by finding patterns in the game by chunking or ignoring information." | 08/06/07 | 8294 |
| Game / Patterns / To Read | the "game design patterns project" attempts to codify game features in the style of Charles Alexander their book, Patterns In Game Design, is at the UIC library: QA76.76.C672 B56 2005 see also the 400 Project or the "Formal Abstract Design Tools" group | 08/06/07 | 8295 |
| Game | Game designer Harvey Smith uses the term "orthogonal unit differentiation" [!] to describe the way certain "units" in games have strengths and weaknesses along several different axes. Consider the character types in Gauntlet, or, even more simply, Rock Paper Scissors | 08/06/07 | 8296 |
| Media: Videogames | Chris Crawford: "Any game that requires reloading as a normal part of the player's progress through the system is fundamentally flawed. On the very first playing, even a below-average player should be able to successfully traverse the game experience." | 08/06/07 | 8297 |
| Media: Videogames / Boredom / Fear | Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow" is applicable to thinking about videogames, esp. in regard to "aesthetics of frustration" stuff a "flow channel" exists between anxiety and boredom Juul: "According to the flow framework, the player will enjoy playing if the challenges match the player's abilities and thereby lead to a state of flow." | 08/06/07 | 8301 |
| Media: Videogames | Juul: "Playing WarioWare involves identifying the challenge of a given game within a very short time frame, and the repertoire needed to play it is a meta-repertoire of being able to identify different game types and the methods needed for playing them." | 08/06/07 | 8302 |
| Game | Juul: "Games are an interaction between the algorithmic game rules and the human players who often enjoy themselves. Games are formal systems that provide informal experiences." (120) | 08/06/07 | 8310 |
| Game / Narrative | Juul: in games, "[r]ules and fiction compete for the player's attention ... [R]ules are designed to be objective, obligatory, unambiguous, and generally above discussion. With fiction in games ... a strong part of the attraction ... is that it is highly subjective, optional, ambiguous, and generally evocative and subject to discussion. Rules and fiction are attractive for opposite reasons." | 08/07/07 | 8311 |
| Narrative / Information | Juul: "[A]ll fictional worlds are *incomplete.* No fiction exists that completely specifies all aspects of a fictional world." some of this information will be filled in by a reader, using what Marie-Laure Ryan calls the "principle of minimal departure" Juul summarizes thusly: "[W]hen a piece of information about [a] fictional world is not specified, we fill in the blanks using our understanding of the actual world." | 08/07/07 | 8312 |
| Media: Videogames / Narrative | Juul: "[M]any video games present game worlds that are *incoherent worlds,* where the game contradicts itself or prevents the player from imagining a complete fictional world." or "games that project some kind of world, but where it is impossible or very difficult to imagine a complete world from the game ... because there are events in the game that cannot be explained without referring to the game rules." For instance, the "three lives" rule in Donkey Kong (among other games), functions this way: "Mario is not reincarnated (fiction); the player just has three Marios (rules)." "I think the best explanation for incoherent world games is that by *game conventions,* the player is aware that it is optional to imagine the fictional world of the game." (141) Also, the failure of rules and fiction to seamlessly sync can have positive effects: "working as a way of playing with the player's expectations, as a way of creating parody, and finally as a way of foregrounding the game as a real-world activity." (163) This incoherence "does not mean that video games are dysfunctional providers of fiction, but that they project fictional worlds in their own flickering, optional, and provisional way." | 08/07/07 | 8313 |
| Game / Representation / Narrative | David Parlett (game scholar): "[N]o hard and fast distinction can be drawn between abstract and representational as a classification of games. How representational a game is depends on the level at which it is being played and the extent of its player's imagination" Juul agrees, but nevertheless makes a list of five levels of representation in games (see next entry) | 08/07/07 | 8314 |
| Game / Representation / Narrative | Juul's list of five levels of representation in games 1. Abstract games ("a game that does not in its entirety or in its individual pieces represent something else") 2. Iconic games ("individual parts have iconic meaning: The king of hearts in the standard deck of cards suggests a king") 3. Incoherent world games ("a game with a fictional world but where ... some game events cannot be explained as part of the fictional world") 4. Coherent world games ("where nothing pervents us from imagining them in any detail") 5. Staged games ("a special case where an abstract or somewhat representational game is played in a more elaborate world") | 08/07/07 | 8315 |
| Game / Narrative | Juul: "any game can potentially be read as an allegory of something else" he mentions Janet Murray's famous read of Tetris, and is careful to qualify that "Murray's reading does not say that Tetris was *intended* as a comment on American lives or that Tetris *is* a comment on American lives, but only that it is *possible* to make this allegorical reading." (133) | 08/07/07 | 8316 |
| Game / Narrative | Juul: "A game cues a player into imagining a fictional world. Games can do this in a number of different ways: using graphics, sound, text, cut-scenes, the game title, box, or manual, haptics, and rules." | 08/07/07 | 8317 |
| Game / Narrative / Time | Juul: "[A]ctions [in non-abstract games] have a double meaning. We move a piece around a board, but this *also* means we are invading Scandanavia with our troops." "[T]he *actions* that we perform have the duality of being real events and being assigned another meaning in a fictional world. Additionally, since our actions take place in time, that time shares the duality of being both real time *and* fictional world time." | 08/07/07 | 8318 |
| Media: Videogames / Artifacts / Narrative | Juul: "the basic detective game model" is one where "artifacts in the game world (fictional time) that tell the player what happened at a previous point in fictional time." see the books in Myst (1993) | 08/10/07 | 8346 |
| Media: Videogames / Time | Juul points out that many videogames have "incoherent time" -- a fictional version of real-life time but which is not in sync with actual play time For instance: "an hour of fictional time lasts one minute in play time" in Grand Theft Auto III -- "sixty times faster than ... play time" However, "most of the events in the game appear nevertheless to proceed at real-time speeds. The cars [appear to] drive fairly fast, but they are excruciatingly slow in fictional time." "[T]his makes it impossible to decide how [much] time [has] passed in the game world ... the fictional time of the game world is incoherent." | 08/10/07 | 8347 |
| Film / To Read | Is it David Bordwell (of Film Art blog) who pioneers the distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic events in film? See his 1985 "Narration In The Fiction Film" (at UIC -- PN1995 .B6173 1985. Checked out, due 11-29-07) | 08/10/07 | 8349 |
| Narrative / Media / To Read | Henry Jenkins: "Increasingly, we inhabit a world of transmedia story-telling, one which depends less on each individual work being self-sufficient than on each work contributing to a larger narrative economy." see his 'Game Design as Narrative Architecture' in the First Person anthology | 08/10/07 | 8350 |
| Narrative | One way to think about narrative structure is to think about it as consisting of two parts: "Story, denoting the events told, in the order in which they were described as having occurred." and "Discourse, denoting the telling of events, in the order in which they are told. This is the narrative as a sequence of signs, be it words or shots in a movie." This is Jesper Juul summarizing Seymour Chatman's theory from 1978's "Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film" Juul: "To read a novel or watch a movie largely consists of reconstructing a story on the basis of the discourse presented." I'm not sure I agree that this is, in fact, a fruitful way to think about narrative. How widely is Chatman's theory accepted as the governing one, I wonder? | 08/13/07 | 8351 |
| Media: Videogames / Emotions | Juul: "It is hard to create a tragic video game -- tragedies are about events beyond our control that are then transformed into something more meaningful through the tragedy, but games are mostly about having power and overcoming challenges." (161) Similar to Will Wright's claim that the emotional centers of video games are "pride, accomplishment, and guilt." [Will Wright, SXSW 2007: "Pride and accomplishment, guilt, these things are felt in games, but are not felt in watching a movie. I once beat the hell out of my creatures in Black & White, I felt terribly guilty. I’ve never felt guilty watching film."] | 08/13/07 | 8352 |
| Media: Videogames / Narrative | Juul: "Game fiction is ambiguous, optional, and imagined by the player in uncontrollable and unpredictable ways, but the emphasis on fictional worlds may be the strongest innovation of the video game." | 08/13/07 | 8353 |
| Media: Videogames / Narrative | Juul on level design: "The level design of a game world can present a fictional world *and* determine what players can and cannot do at the same time. In this way, space in games can work as a combination of rules and fiction." For instance, in "Battlefield 1942" (2002), gameplay takes place on an island: "The shape of the island determines ... what strategies will work for either side on this map [but also] prompts the player into imagining an island in the Pacific. As such, level design, space, and the shape of game objects refer simultaneously to rules and fiction. This is a case in which rules and fiction *do* overlap." | 08/13/07 | 8354 |
| Media: Videogames / Play | Juul takes the so-called "magic circle" concept and incorporates it into the more normalized concept of "game space," a subset of "the space of the world" one of the things that is interesting about (some) videogames is that they retain this model via simulation: although technically the "magic circle" should be equivalent to the screen, in many games "[a] fictional world is projected and a game is played in a part of that fictional world." A game like FIFA 2002 "itself projects a fictional world quite similar to the real world ... inside which a game space is delineated by a magic circle and a soccer game is played" | 08/13/07 | 8358 |
| Media: Videogames | "invisible walls" in videogames are places where the game space ends without giving a [fictional] clue that the "world" is going to be ending see the distinction between two Miyamoto games: Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine (165-66) Juul: "It is a hallmark of a coherent world game that the bounds of the game space are reasonably motivated by the fictional world" | 08/13/07 | 8359 |
| Media: Videogames | Juul: "[G]ames are often *stylized simulations*; developed not just for fidelity to their source domain, but for aesthetic purposes. These are *adaptations* of elements of the real world." "Only selected aspects of our assumptions about [a] fictional world are implemented in [a] game ... the car [in Grand Theft Auto III] never runs out of gas" Juul compares this against the stylization in comics, as theorized by Scott McCloud (170) | 08/13/07 | 8360 |
| Media: Videogames / Concept / Education | Juul discusses the "difficulty metaphors" seen in many videogames -- in a tennis game like Top Spin (2004) you can do a perfect serve by pressing a button and releasing it at a precise time. The action bears no real resemblance to a serve, but the connection "seems to be that both tasks are *difficult*: instead of performing a serve by mimicking the actual tennis activity, the serve has been replaced by another difficult task." (172-3) see also something like "The Typing of the Dead" I wonder if the Wii will put a dent in the prevalence of "difficulty metaphors" as a game standby | 08/13/07 | 8361 |
| Media: Videogames / Narrative / Genre | Juul: "Even though fiction and rules are formally separable, the player's experience of the game is shaped by both. The fictional world of a game can cue the player into making assumptions about the game rules [and, conversely] the rules of the game [projects] the fictional world. The way a given object or character behaves will characterize it *as a fictional object*; the rules that the player deducts from the fiction and from the experience of the playing of the game will also cue him or her into imagining a fictional world." Not always true: "the rules [of a game can] allow for actions that the fictional wor[l]d does not cue the player into expecting." For instance the first-person-shooter "crate" thing, comprehenisble only to "the trained player knowing the conventions of the game genre" (179) | 08/14/07 | 8365 |
| Media: Videogames / Narrative | Juul: "It is a mixing of fictional levels when an object in the fictional world knows about things in the real world and knows [for instance] that it is part of a GameCube game." Although this may be an example of a clash that has a positive effect: "When an in-game character talks about how to use the controller, it rhetorically befriends us, not just as in-game characters, but also as real-world players. The breakdown of fictional levels is a positive emotional experience." | 08/14/07 | 8366 |
| Media: Videogames / Environments / Play | some people describe video game play as a process of immersion -- perhaps thinking of virtual reality, or the systems outlined in Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck Juul describes this as "misleading" -- "[A] player may be completely absorbed by [a] game *as a real-world activity,* and the player may for the duration of the game or in isolated parts of the game also strongly *imagine* the fictional game world [but] [f]ocusing exclusively on coherent worlds and well formed storytelling is a misunderstanding of what games are about." (190) Salen and Zimmerman refer to the "exaggerated focus on immersion" as the "immersive fallacy" (see Rules of Play 466-471) | 08/14/07 | 8373 |
| Game / Play / Narrative | Juul: "The classic game model describes games on three levels: the game itself, the player's relation to the game, and the relation between playing and the rest of the world." the game itself includes "the rules of the game, the state machine, and the game tree" -- in the "fictional" dimension it includes the "signs that project a fictional world" the "player and the game" covers "gameplay, learning, and the player repertoire" -- in the "fictional" dimension it includes "the way the player actually imagines the fictional world" "the world" covers -- "rule negotiations, repertoire of skills the player brings, social interaction, winning and losing, consequence negotiations" -- in the "fictional" dimension it includes "film conventions, game conventions, world knowledge, [and] interpretation conventions" Pretty comprehensive! I think the individual conventions, rules, and signs here might be roughly what Ian Bogost is referring to as "unit operations" | 08/14/07 | 8374 |
| Media: Videogames | Juul: the "optional" quality of game narrative perhaps "places games on par with songs, opera, and ballet--cultural forms that can project fiction but can also be enjoyed even when one does not imagine the worlds that they project." (200) | 08/14/07 | 8383 |
| Narrative / To Read | Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds (not in UIC Library) | 08/14/07 | 8384 |
| Game / To Read | Celia Pearce, "Towards a Game Theory of Game" (in the First Person anthology) | 08/14/07 | 8385 |
| Game / Pleasure | Juul: "something not challenging can still be a positive experience—executing a plan; hitting the beat; performing the final kill; doing a routine to perfection." (113) | 01/05/08 | 54592 |
| Game / Pleasure | Juul refers to a piece by David Myers "Time, Symbol Transformations, and Computer Games" (from 1992 -- early) that discusses repetitive tasks in games that are not boring. Useful | 01/05/08 | 54611 |