A breakdown of “Genre Trouble”

The “Genre Trouble” article by Espen Aarseth was packed with interesting ideas that had my mind firing off in different directions throughout the piece. Below are some of the big ideas of the article and the connections I made to other areas of the course and my own experience with gaming.

“Games are games”. Aarseth talks about the tendency of academics from other fields to apply their respective tools of analysis to the genre of gaming. As a gamer this has always struck me as a bit out of place, and odd. A literary analysis of a story driven game is interesting, and can sometimes fit, but it tells me nothing about how fun it is to play the game. Some games take the literary aspect too far. In these games, single simple repeatable strategy will get you past all “challenges” in a narrative driven game. “Super Press Space to win” is a parody of such story driven games.

“Games…are about the self.” Games make personal retrospection for me easy. Novels, films, and play’s require me to step through someone else’s shoes to look back on myself. Going back to Kostner, how I play games shows me how I approach problems. In the future I will start paying more attention to how I approach challenges in games, and which challenges feel more fun.

‘Players represent a barrier for authors trying to tell a story through games.’ This made me think of freeman’s mind, a half-life machinima series that plays through the game while a player voices thoughts as if they are the main character. It doesn’t break the 4th wall, but it takes the intended story and adds a layer that gives everything a completely different meaning.

“A randomly generated map can be just as satisfying to play as a human-authored gameworld or campaign, and this tells us that the real aesthetic quality of these games is in the design of the rule system, rather than in the design of the gameworld.” This quote made me think of two highly successful indie games in recent years: Minecraft and Dwarf fortress. Both are procedurally generated worlds that allow a high level of player creativity to define what the game-play experience consists of (after the basic rules are known). They are gaming masterpieces that clearly diverge from all other art mediums and at the heart of both games is a complex simulated game world.

The computer game is the art of simulation” – Aarseth offers up another definition of games, and it is very similar to Kostner’s definition. It is good to see some convergence on a definition among different scholars on the subject, and the common thread in their definition is that these game worlds simulate a set of rules that the player must learn and master.

Finally some lingering questions for anyone who wants to comment: Are there other similarities between the readings of Kostner and Aarseth? Are there games (other then minecraft, dwarf-fortress, and Aaseth’s examples) that fit the role of simulation/game, and cannot be grouped into any other more traditional artistic mediums? Has anyone else had the “press space to win” experience in a specific game (I was having trouble thinking of specific examples)?