For Tuesday’s class I attended Seamus Sullivan’s “Dramatic Storytelling” session. Over the course of the session, Sullivan briefed over different tips in building a successful story as relates to video games. He started the session by saying “Every game is a drama – whether simple or complicated.” In order to bring this point home he illustrated with Tetris as a remarkably simple drama, with the player as the main protagonist, and Assassin’s Creed II as a complicated web of narratives inside a larger story with Desmond/Ezio being the protagonist. While I quite enjoyed Sullivan’s expansive description of characters and dialogue, I would challenge him on this introductory point. To make this sweeping generalization about all video games seems to provide a narrow view of gaming. As we’ve read from Ian Bogost, video games can do much more than simply tell a story. If every game is a drama, where would that leave throwaway games, for example? What about casual games? Does solving a game of Scrabble against someone else really tell much of a story? It might, but it almost seems to broken down even to be considered, and it certainly wasn’t the goal of the game developers. Thus while Sullivan provided a very well laid-out format for how to approach games, using great examples such as Half-Life and Portal, I believe this doesn’t cover a wide enough platform that he claimed it did, but rather only certain types of games, namely the ones that focus on storytelling in particular. Part of this class’s goal is to figure out how to expand the world of video gaming to multiple different lenses. In this way, storytelling is merely one aspect.
Author Archives: cjon2
One-Play Stand?
After having a long class discussion on the use of casual games and its particular definition, reading Bogost’s Throwaways chapter may have finally put a firm grasp on what we had been exploring, yet at the same time it helped me realize that the lines between these definitions in reality tend to be very blurred. He does this by offering a new perspective on casual games: the one-play stand. These are games, also called “Newsgames,” that have enough content to be thought-provoking, but are fleeting and temporal in nature. You don’t return to them as you do with other games, but rather you linger on them for a matter of minutes and then throw them away, much as you would with a newspaper. This kind of definition gives a new angle into the world of casual gaming and I appreciated it for the mere fact that he accepts the fact that casual is indeed such a widely sweeping word that there really is no way of pinpointing down what it includes and does not include. For example, he points out that casual games (“as in Friday”) often cause the players to return to them over and over again, despite the fact that the level of gameplay and time commitment in the moment is minimal. Others, given their price, appear to be relatively casual in the sense that they are “easy to learn, difficult to master.” The time commitment on these types of “casual games” ends up being astronomical and costly. It is when we see stories like these that we begin to wonder when games that are “casual” really do fall under the definition. They’re meant to be quick, easy, and made for people who don’t particularly care, yet still they end up using up more time and energy than they realize. Newsgames, such as Airport Security, give a fresh perspective on the definition on casual games (“as in sex”), and how we can often enjoy the moment, then forget it.
Interruptibility
Looking and reading over mcovingt‘s post on Defining Hardcore and Casual Games, I could not agree more with the emphasis put on interruptibility in examining and considering how to define hardcore vs. casual games. Interruptibility is indeed a key factor. Where I diverge is if anything, often times interruptibility itself becomes so hard to define, and thus makes the casual vs. hardcore definition difficult to attain and blurred with each other. For example, though many of the more “hardcore” type games do demand a lot more time at once in terms of interruptibility, I think the pattern over the years is to blend and make things easier to do whatever they want with the game. For example, the use of the pause and save feature in campaign and single-player modes makes things a lot easier to interrupt with. I can find myself playing Assassin’s Creed and being extremely involved and focused in on the game, but having to pause, save, and come back the next day or so if necessary comes as easy for me and I assume would for most gamers as well. Does this aspect make it a more casual game? I don’t think so. The further development of the Auto-Save feature also helps with that. Knowing that I can leave at any time, regardless of how intense or engrossing the game is during gameplay, and still start right where I left off, adds a layer of complication to interruptibility. Even in online play, many games considered “hardcore” have menus in between matches that can take as much time to load up as the match itself. In a sense, adding more non-diegetic elements to the game make it easier to interrupt, but not necessarily any more casual.
In the same way, on the other side of the spectrum there are many games considered “casual” (Scramble with Friends, for example) that demand at least 2 or 3 minutes of your time and undivided attention in order to do well at or beat the game. In the way of interruptibility then, the game is harder to interrupt, so is it still considered casual? If anything, though certainly an important aspect indeed, interruptibility makes defining hardcore and casual games more difficult and harder to separate.
Science Fiction and Video Games
When reading through Kline’s chapter on the origins of the video game industry, one of the biggest claims that stuck out to me was about the necessity of literature and culture to shape the realm of the industry as we now know it. “Here we confront a little-understood aspect of the circuitry of technological innovation, especially within the digital disciplines: the role of cultural contexts and subcultural practices in the dynamics of innovation and design” (Kline 88). I could not agree more with his assessment, not only for the origins of the video game industry but continuing on even to today. Kline mentions Asimov’s 1950’s science fiction writing as well as Orwell’s 1984 and their depictions of futuristic societies, but I’d say go back even further to E.M. Forster’s short story, The Machine Stops. Published in 1909, Forster, writes about humanity enclosed off in rooms controlled almost entirely by a central, all-seeing machine. He predicts the use of social video messaging and conferences with almost frightening accuracy. Yet furthermore, when I first read that short story, I could not help but think of the many gamers who practically lock themselves down in their basement and play their video games for countless amount of hours at a time, or as Kline mentions, going back to the origins of RPG’s with Dungeons and Dragons (89) (of which the movie depiction shows when things that can get out of control in its own sense). In another example we see William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), a novel portraying (ironically) hackers who “jack into” a virtual reality in cyberspace (it was Gibson who coined the term “Matrix” as it is now used). That novel had a huge impact not only on the newly formed cyberpunk genre in literature, but on the video game industry of whom is constantly looking to expand to the latest and greatest ideas in technology. Needless to say, video games are and always will be wrapped around the culture and literature, particularly of the science fiction genre, that we read and encounter on a daily basis.