The 'win' (or at the very least its spectre) is needed as an indicator of the border between play and the real, it both initiates the player's entry into the game, and achieving it (or being aware of one's own relative position to it) signals the end of play. All of the activity undertaken within those two bracketed moments are generally defined as 'play' and are actions that all exist within the frame of the potential 'win'. What the win is contextualises the actions themselves, and the meaning of 'wining' may not be as simple as "being first".
The problem i find is that winning is often boring, winning requires discipline, and a strict belief and fidelity in the mechanics of play., and most importantly winning means coming to the end and is a much shorter and less rewarding experience than 'play'.
Live play and board games are at their most interesting when rubbing up against that breaking point, putting themselves in negotiation with their players and each other. Digital games i feel exist in that border land mush less comfortably, partly because the membrane between the real and play is far less permeable in traditional digital games (computer games).
Live play and board games are at their most interesting when rubbing up against that breaking point, putting themselves in negotiation with their players and each other. Digital games i feel exist in that border land mush less comfortably, partly because the membrane between the real and play is far less permeable in traditional digital games (computer games).
When i played Monopoly as a child without the presence of adults (who do tend to want to adhere to rules) i would get bored and coulld simply not understand why there wasn't the option to rob the bank. I know i'm not alone in this, but imagine the thrill (and much more exciting game that it would be) of the abstracted urban layout of Monopoly giving way to police chases as you screech your way around the four sided London geography with your stolen money. The point is you can't, the anarchic break down of rules and abandoning the economic mechanics results a general breakdown of the game (perhaps in and of itself an interesting economic point). The live nature of play however means that groups of players can create and conceive of alternative rules and interactions, often known as 'house rules' these agreed variants are generally designed to improve play from each individual group of player's perspective as they are often created organically through a completely accidental iterative process.
These are rules designed to improve the play process based on individual experience, less concerned with the idea of winning and rather with the experience of playing. Live and Board games often play out in a relatively short space of time, four hours generally being considered a 'long' game, although there are exceptions:
But generally these are game activities undertaken to be finished, generally with a winner at the end of it. But when it comes to digital games i have left more games unfinished than i have completed them. Partially this is due to time, when a game requires upwards of twenty hours of your time i don't have the time to commit to it, or is it perhaps that the game itself does not keep me interested enough for me to want to put in twenty hours of play? Hard to judge. I find that my interest is cyclical, i picked up an copy of the original Fallout and played it a lot for a week and it really stuck in my head.
Then it just got to a point where i wasn't interested any more, is this Fallout's problem or my attitude as a player? I recently stopped playing Call of Duty World at War
I'm interested in how we show and perform war in games, and have written extensively on CoD Modern Warfare on this page. WW2 is obviously a conflict that is mediated and textually engaged with very differently to contemporary warfare, however the idea of re-performing reality (or at least a version of it) is one that i'm thinking about a lot at the moment, and this led me to a bunch of WW2 games. But whereas i played through Modern Warfare in a couple of days i just can't stay interested in World at War, and i suspect that its for a very similar reason as to why i lost interest in Fallout, I'm just not that bothered about winning or finishing, i am however bothered about the experience the game puts me through and the story that the game is performing. When it became clear that World at War was just putting me into another level of jungle with no real narrative or emotional drive to continue other than the opportunity to shoot more Japanese soldiers (whose portrayal the game got in quite a bit of trouble for) i just couldn't muster any energy to continue on with it, it was boring.
the mission in the video is actually still interesting because its still early in the game, but it mainly signals in more of the same.
In his book "A Theory of Fun" Ralph Koster talk about hat we perceive as fun is largely our brain enjoying patterns, recognizing them and processing them. So did these games simply offer up all the patterns that they had to offer very early on and were no longer providing me with enough stimulation to want to finish them, maybe, or maybe it goes back to why i suspect i'm a bad game player.
I think that the patterns i look for in games and in experiences i interact with are all too often emotive or narrative ones, and i particularly take pleasure from narratives and experiences that emerge through play, or so called 'emergent narratives'.
This often gets in the way of the games i'm playing, or at least means that my practice of play is not the one that was perhaps intended. A recent example of this is a brief foray on my part into the world of Starcraft.
For those of you who don't know about Starcraft it is a RTS (Real Time Strategy) game set in a science fiction world where you control and build armies and basically have to destroy your enemy.
Its very famous as being the best in its genre, having a strong narrative based solo player mission in which you get to play as all three races of aliens and humans, and a notorious multiplayer mode where you play against another player. It is considered so good that in Korea they play is as a competitive sport:
Then it just got to a point where i wasn't interested any more, is this Fallout's problem or my attitude as a player? I recently stopped playing Call of Duty World at War
I'm interested in how we show and perform war in games, and have written extensively on CoD Modern Warfare on this page. WW2 is obviously a conflict that is mediated and textually engaged with very differently to contemporary warfare, however the idea of re-performing reality (or at least a version of it) is one that i'm thinking about a lot at the moment, and this led me to a bunch of WW2 games. But whereas i played through Modern Warfare in a couple of days i just can't stay interested in World at War, and i suspect that its for a very similar reason as to why i lost interest in Fallout, I'm just not that bothered about winning or finishing, i am however bothered about the experience the game puts me through and the story that the game is performing. When it became clear that World at War was just putting me into another level of jungle with no real narrative or emotional drive to continue other than the opportunity to shoot more Japanese soldiers (whose portrayal the game got in quite a bit of trouble for) i just couldn't muster any energy to continue on with it, it was boring.
the mission in the video is actually still interesting because its still early in the game, but it mainly signals in more of the same.
In his book "A Theory of Fun" Ralph Koster talk about hat we perceive as fun is largely our brain enjoying patterns, recognizing them and processing them. So did these games simply offer up all the patterns that they had to offer very early on and were no longer providing me with enough stimulation to want to finish them, maybe, or maybe it goes back to why i suspect i'm a bad game player.
I think that the patterns i look for in games and in experiences i interact with are all too often emotive or narrative ones, and i particularly take pleasure from narratives and experiences that emerge through play, or so called 'emergent narratives'.
This often gets in the way of the games i'm playing, or at least means that my practice of play is not the one that was perhaps intended. A recent example of this is a brief foray on my part into the world of Starcraft.
For those of you who don't know about Starcraft it is a RTS (Real Time Strategy) game set in a science fiction world where you control and build armies and basically have to destroy your enemy.
Its very famous as being the best in its genre, having a strong narrative based solo player mission in which you get to play as all three races of aliens and humans, and a notorious multiplayer mode where you play against another player. It is considered so good that in Korea they play is as a competitive sport:
Now the idea of playing it competitively is completely anathema to the motivations that i find to play. As part of my "i really should play all the games that are considered genre defining if i really want to engage in a game discourse" i found a copy for mac and had a go. It is good, its really good, and was up until a point. I got too caught up in the emergent narrative on the battle field and found myself working against the game's main function. In a mission i was playing the enemy base was situated just across from a body of water from where i was amassing my troops. So i loaded a bunch of marines up into a dropship:
And i set off for a quick raid on the enemy's resources across the water. Now i sent the ship carrying its full amount of marines and backed it up with a couple of fighter planes too, they swept in cleared the landing zone and the slower drop ship trundled in behind them. The marines unloaded as the fighters provided covering fire protected by their cloaking devices making them invisible to the enemy troops, just as their cloaking ability was about to run out i sent them back to base out of harms way, leaving the ground troops to hold the position, the plan was to send the drop ship back to base and bring more men over and hopefully taking and holding this enemy outpost. However, the enemy could not see my fighters but he could see my slow and very visible dropship and he sent his own fighters to intercept it and take it down, his ships appeared out from a dark area of the map and took out a dropship full of marines, and a lot of the ground troops who i had dropped behind a bunch of large rocks which were giving them cover and providing surprisingly effective positions from which to defend themselves as they were taking out the enemy troops rushing towards them, they were only a small group of six marines by now and as they are relatively cheap troops to produce i should probably just have left them to it, but the whole thing had been too exciting up until now. The game was providing me with an emergent narrative unfolding in my head i had never expected. The situation was clear i had men behind enemy lines and they needed rescuing:
I began the process of building new dropships to send over to pick them up and enough fighters to clear the Landing Zone. By a strange glitch my stranded marines were insanely well fortified in a way that was simply impossible, so although the computer was pouring troops and robots at them they were maintaining their position incredibly successfully, and although pinned down they were inflicting heavy damage. But gradually they were being picked off one at a time falling under a hail of bullets, until there was only one left. Things were becoming unbearably intense now as i watched the progress bar of the ship build move towards completion, amassed the troops i would be sending over as part of the rescue mission, this was turning into my own Black Hawk Down
The dropship was completed, i loaded up the marines and sent it and a wave of fighters over the water, the fighters piled in first, clearing out some of the heavier opposition and the drop ship dropped its load in the whole that the fighters cleared, a wave of marines who took out the remaining computer skirmishers securing the site. The last surviving marine was safe loaded into the dropship and taken back to base to an internal soaring soundtrack.
The whole thing took a good ten minutes and was brilliant fun, a great piece of emergent storytelling, which although allowed by the game was really a waste of time in terms of the game's objective as during my rescue mission i'd failed to do any of the task and tend to my army's general development which put me a bit behind in terms of the arms race that is a game of Starcraft and i really had to claw my way back, but i did win the mission. The problem however is that the one Marine i had fought so hard to save, who had really ben the best bit about my game was now lost within the rest of the relatively faceless army i was controlling on the field, possibly dead i had absolutely no way of turning this into the epic space opera that was burgeoning in my mind.
And that broke it for me. Now i had taken most pleasure from my own personal engagement with the game, and developed my own game practice that was in friction with the game's own demands. I've not really played it much since then as i suspect that i would simply go looking for re-occurrences of potential emergent narratives and would only get frustrated with it. Does that make my take or practice of Starcraft wrong, well only in the sense that i won't b competing in a tournament anytime soon, but not in the sense that i found my own rules of engagement for the game, and the best interactions should find room for this to happen. Whereas with World At War i basically became frustrated by the narrow corridor 'fish in a barrel' style of play that left no room for me the player.
I am fascinated by the idea of transgressive play, players developing their own meaning and shifting the paradigm of a particular game through alternative play practice. Open world games like Grand Theft Auto encourage this just 'messing about' in the world but this is inbuilt into the game, i like the idea of finding your own spatial and narrative practice carving out your own engagement and meaning.
This has long been a key tenent of interactive work for me that it must allow room for the audience/ player to configure or reconfigure the space they are sharing with the work otherwise the interaction is merely a binary gate no more interactive than clicking a button.
We are currently embarking upon making a new piece called 'The Agency', a live piece influenced by board games but purposefully removing the procedural mechanics, in an attempt to create a truly emergent space for the live players to interact both with the world of the game and each other. The game is the outcome of a lot of the thoughts i have been having on this blog and hope to use a lot of the emergent practices that board games and RTS games employ and bring these to a live setting... please send me any thoughts or anecdotes of your own.
And i set off for a quick raid on the enemy's resources across the water. Now i sent the ship carrying its full amount of marines and backed it up with a couple of fighter planes too, they swept in cleared the landing zone and the slower drop ship trundled in behind them. The marines unloaded as the fighters provided covering fire protected by their cloaking devices making them invisible to the enemy troops, just as their cloaking ability was about to run out i sent them back to base out of harms way, leaving the ground troops to hold the position, the plan was to send the drop ship back to base and bring more men over and hopefully taking and holding this enemy outpost. However, the enemy could not see my fighters but he could see my slow and very visible dropship and he sent his own fighters to intercept it and take it down, his ships appeared out from a dark area of the map and took out a dropship full of marines, and a lot of the ground troops who i had dropped behind a bunch of large rocks which were giving them cover and providing surprisingly effective positions from which to defend themselves as they were taking out the enemy troops rushing towards them, they were only a small group of six marines by now and as they are relatively cheap troops to produce i should probably just have left them to it, but the whole thing had been too exciting up until now. The game was providing me with an emergent narrative unfolding in my head i had never expected. The situation was clear i had men behind enemy lines and they needed rescuing:
The dropship was completed, i loaded up the marines and sent it and a wave of fighters over the water, the fighters piled in first, clearing out some of the heavier opposition and the drop ship dropped its load in the whole that the fighters cleared, a wave of marines who took out the remaining computer skirmishers securing the site. The last surviving marine was safe loaded into the dropship and taken back to base to an internal soaring soundtrack.
The whole thing took a good ten minutes and was brilliant fun, a great piece of emergent storytelling, which although allowed by the game was really a waste of time in terms of the game's objective as during my rescue mission i'd failed to do any of the task and tend to my army's general development which put me a bit behind in terms of the arms race that is a game of Starcraft and i really had to claw my way back, but i did win the mission. The problem however is that the one Marine i had fought so hard to save, who had really ben the best bit about my game was now lost within the rest of the relatively faceless army i was controlling on the field, possibly dead i had absolutely no way of turning this into the epic space opera that was burgeoning in my mind.
And that broke it for me. Now i had taken most pleasure from my own personal engagement with the game, and developed my own game practice that was in friction with the game's own demands. I've not really played it much since then as i suspect that i would simply go looking for re-occurrences of potential emergent narratives and would only get frustrated with it. Does that make my take or practice of Starcraft wrong, well only in the sense that i won't b competing in a tournament anytime soon, but not in the sense that i found my own rules of engagement for the game, and the best interactions should find room for this to happen. Whereas with World At War i basically became frustrated by the narrow corridor 'fish in a barrel' style of play that left no room for me the player.
I am fascinated by the idea of transgressive play, players developing their own meaning and shifting the paradigm of a particular game through alternative play practice. Open world games like Grand Theft Auto encourage this just 'messing about' in the world but this is inbuilt into the game, i like the idea of finding your own spatial and narrative practice carving out your own engagement and meaning.
This has long been a key tenent of interactive work for me that it must allow room for the audience/ player to configure or reconfigure the space they are sharing with the work otherwise the interaction is merely a binary gate no more interactive than clicking a button.
We are currently embarking upon making a new piece called 'The Agency', a live piece influenced by board games but purposefully removing the procedural mechanics, in an attempt to create a truly emergent space for the live players to interact both with the world of the game and each other. The game is the outcome of a lot of the thoughts i have been having on this blog and hope to use a lot of the emergent practices that board games and RTS games employ and bring these to a live setting... please send me any thoughts or anecdotes of your own.
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