Fourth Week Journal

This week we are talking about Gaming through the work of Jesper Juul (excerpts from his book Half-Real; Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds) and Henry Jenkins' essay "Game Design as Narrative Architecture".

Who are these men? According to Wikipedia, "Henry Jenkins is recognized as an expert in the influence of the digital popular culture on behavior, especially political behavior in a participatory media age." "Juul is a theorist in the new field of video game studies. He holds a PhD. in video game theory from the Center for Computer Games Research in Copenhagen". Also, Jesper has a blog called “the Ludologist”.

My first thought is that I need a good definition of game. Luckily, Juul has already visited this line of thinking and gives a lot different definitions on his website Half Real which includes his handy dandy dictionary of video game theory http://www.half-real.net/dictionary/ How lucky is that? He gets to make the whole thing up. Could be room for some more discussion? Is he the only pioneer?

From the website, I like Juul's own definition best which is also from the Introduction and Chapter 2 of Half-Real, "A game is a rule-based system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable."

My second question is what is ludology and what is narratology in the game context? Also, from Jenkins' context prior to the essay, I get the feeling that is there is some contention between the two. Why does it divide game theorists between Narratives and Ludologists? Why does it have to one or the other? It seems that are many different time of games and have more of one aspect or the other. But, most games it seems to me Jenkins argues have both. Juul also talk problem of “the discussion taking a form of simple dichotomies.”

Wiki's definition is as follows: "Ludologists: the perspective is that a video game is first and foremost just that, a game, and that it needs to be understood in terms of its rules, interface, and in terms of the concept of play. Narratologists apply the theory and study of narrative and narrative structure and the way they affect our perception to game theory."

Ian Bogost is another player to investigate.

Henry Jenkins makes a good argument in his essay that the argument between the ludologists and the narratologists is unnecessary and that games use a mixture of both.

What was particularly useful for me was the description on page 679 Jenkins gives about micro narratives, steps that are contested space and each of these units building the characters and situations. He goes on to discuss Eisenstein use of the word attraction as anything which produces a profound emotional impact. Jenkins goes on to describe two types of narratives one an enacted exploration of the game which is unstructured and controlled by the player and the pre-structured with embedded narrative elements.

Finally he describes a fourth model of narrative which is an emergent games by which the player.

My focus then turns to Jesper's work. He begins his book well with an overview of different types of games, the very definition of game and the history of games and the state of game theory today, the context for the arena in which these competing theories get argued in.

On pages 19 and 20 he illustrates problematic elements of games that are specifically my challenges with my project. First, the quality of game greatly depends upon the gameplay which is the pure interactivity of the game or “in other words, the quality of game hinges on its rules.” Another challenge is “to create a game about emotions because emotions are hard to implement in rules”. Luckily for me theater has been creating big emotional reactions for thousands of years. Aristotle gives us the rules and exact step by step directions on how to not just stimulate emotional reactions but stimulate empathy in the Poetics. Later in Chapter 5, on page 190, Jenkins gives us (and specifically what I need) good definitions the terms the ideal immersive virtual reality, “would be a perfected virtual reality system that was indistinguishable from the real world”. Turing said this much earlier. He goes on to quote Murray “immersion has commonly been described as the feeling of being transported to a fictional world.”