Play

1. Play

2. Three categories of play • Game play • System • Players engaged in artificial conflict • Defined by rules • Quantifiable outcome • (write on board) • Ludic activities • Being playful

3. Play is… • Free movement within a more rigid structure • Emerges both BECAUSE OF and IN OPPOSITION TO more rigid structures

4. Roger Caillois - Forms • Anthropologist • Four “fundamental categories” of play • Agon = competitive • Alea = chance-based • Mimicry = make-believe • Ilinix = vertigo

5. Caillois - Types • Break down further into two types: • Paida (free-form, playfulness) • Ludus (structured, games)

6. Types of play

7. Meaningful play • Two ways to define: • 1. Game actions result in game outcomes, meaning i.e. “I threw a grenade and blew some stuff up. It cleared a path.” (descriptive) • 2. Evaluative - Relationship between action and outcome is Discernable (you can tell what happened) and Integrated (action affects play experience immediately AND at a later point)

8. Transformative play • When the free movement of play alters the more rigid structure (the system) • Not all play is transformative • Ex.) Quake game engine to make movies • Ex.) Game patch that replaces Lara Croft with a transexual version of the character

9. Transformative Play • Game play: Basketball – new rules • Ludic activity: Children playing Cops and Robbers – new session to session as improvisations are made • Being playful: Wild style, counterculture fashion

11. Narrative

12. Dramatic Arc • Aristotle analyzed in 335 BCE in Poetics • Beginning, middle, end • Gustav Freytag refined to five parts in 1863, intending his variation to apply to ancient drama • Let’s draw it • What’s underneath it? • Joseph Campbell created new term in 1949 to describe the basic pattern found in many narratives.

13. Narratives • Games TELL STORIES

14. The Hero’s Journey

15. Games as theater • Theatrics • Aristotle’s Six Elements of Drama: • Plot • Character (physical, social, psychological, moral) • Thought/Theme • Music • Spectacle • Diction/language

17. Neg. Element of Theater • Deus ex machina

18. Game Narratives – The How • Embedded • Emergent • Balance of the two – you decide • Cutscenes • Character vs. avatar

19. Game Narratives – The How • Goals – structure narratives • Conflict – tie to narrative conflicts • Uncertainty – tension • Space • Core Mechanic

20. Core Mechanic • Experiential building blocks of player interactivity (not just in games) • Create patterns of behavior • Can be single activity like running or compound like resource management • Try to get it to match game movements: • Loop • Mortal Kombat?

21. Narrative Descriptors • Instructional text • Cutscenes • Interface elements • Game objects • Other visual/audio elements

22. Games as play of simulation

23. Games mimic real life • Simulation – “an operating representation of central features of reality” • 1. Actual situation/conceivable situation • 2. Operational – on-going process

24. Simulation • Can’t simulate all aspects of something • You pick which aspects are most important

25. Procedural representation • Games are representations • Games can represent smaller processes

26. What to simulate? • Games: • Are a system • Players engage in artificial conflict • Defined by rules • Quantifiable outcome • Simulate conflict • Simulate narratives

27. Metacommunication • Seemingly opposing forces • Dogs play fighting • Communication about communication • Games actions refer to real world actions but they in fact are not real world actions

28. Immersive fallacy • Immediacy (transparency) • Hypermediacy(opacity) = REMEDIATION (both transparency and opacity, immediacy and hypermediacy)

29. Immersive Fallacy • Example: • Characters • Agency (puppet of player) • Empathy (representation of player)

30. Immersive Fallacy • “Why does the phrase “the player will be able to go anywhere and do anything” sound like nails on a chalkboard to me? It’s based on a very naíve and unsophisticated understanding of how simulation, how representation works. You have a thing, a part of the world, and you have a simulation of that. • There’s a gap in between, the gap is made up by all the differences, the way that this is not this... the immersive fallacy is this idea that computer simulation allows us to close this gap and makes these things identical. But this gap is an essential part of how this representation works, this gap is where the magic happens. Let’s say a bear is attacking a friend of yours and is about to kill him. The word “bear” will warn your friend. The word “bear” would not be better if it had teeth and could kill you! The same thing is true of the bear mask that the tribal priest puts on, or the bears on the wall of the cave, and of the game “Bear.” Statues wouldn’t be better if they could move. Model airplanes would not be better if they were the same size as airplanes! • By the same token, if you think about it, the incredible sense of freedom created by GTA is created by carefully limiting the actions of the player.(…)Even if you could by some magic create this impossible perfect simulation world, where would you be? You’d need to stick a game in there. You’d need to make chess out of the simulation rocks in your world. It’s like going back to square one. I don’t want to play chess again. I want to play a game that has the dense simulation and chess combined. This requires a light touch. This requires respect for the gap. The gap is part of your toolset.” • Frank Lantz, 2006