I’m willing to admit it’s a poor abstract – because it isn’t really that close to the paper’s content. (by the way, not all citations were used, those were the references I thought I would need before writing the whole thing) I’m assuming you only read the abstract. If you read the whole paper, then I am completely puzzled. Through a study of Diablo, Morrowind, Splinter Cell and Knights of the Old Republic II (no 1982 there), I am showing how those game systems are different, and why they need corresponding narrative aims. The fact that a game released for christmas 2004 failed to succesfully match narrative aim and game system shows that it’s a relevant issue in modern video game development. Maybe you already know this stuff intuitively, but clearly some developers don’t. (as nick said with his Will Wright example)

By all means, give me your comments. They will either be going into my Master’s Thesis (as the comments of Eric Zimmerman) or in my trashcan (can’t say that happened very often, so go ahead).

Well, true. But I didn’t say exactly five.

We’ve given you plenty of new copy — if you want to consider yourself unconvertable, go ahead. But you still haven’t answered my questions about what it is that is wrong with those conferences or those papers. You’ll have to articulate what the atrocity is before we can offer any more in the way of explanation.

First of all, I’d correct him about how there’s 8.

But beyond that, I do in fact get that level of commentary; I have scripts that check referrers to the bbsdocumentary.com site and the other sites, and I definitely have that initial “shell shock” or “back away in horror” reaction.

What I do in those cases is study who is having this reaction, find out why as best I can, and either change my copy and explanation of the work so it suits them, or realize they represent an unconvertable group (possibly a majority) who won’t “buy in”.

I’m still not “buying in” over here. But again, people should either consider my unconvertable, or consider if they want to change whether they want the perception to change to include more people like myself. I don’t know.

Ian, my entire commentary was simply someone from the outside going “Man, I don’t quite get the point.” And then giving some reasons. Of course, I would expect that most people reading this entry/weblog/site would go “well, duh, there’s plenty of point” and wave a flag. Well, I hope so, anyway.

How does Andrew’s reply fail to answer your question?

There are multiple motivations behind the attendees at Digra (and it was interesting to compare and contrast them there). Some to purely better understand the nature of games and how they operate (while that’s been going on for quite a while, there’s a lot to understand, so we all should welcome this big new wave of effort), some to inform game design, some to study the culture of game players.

I see games study asking some really excellent questions about where games have been, what they’re doing now, and what they might do in the future if we look beyond the local maxima of our current commercial success function. Not all of the viewpoints that academics are studying games with will necessarily interest me, but many of them do, and even the ones I largely disagree with sometimes end up asking interesting questions along the way.

And besides that, I don’t think game studies exists solely to further the creation of better games, although probably it’s a healthy side-effect. Not everyone who studies literature writes a better novel; not everyone who studies history ends up changing it. But if no one studied them at all, I’m pretty confident that they would both degrade rapidly.

I think it’s useful for academics to explain what they do and why it’s important. But I still don’t know exactly why you object to there being lots of game studies conferences, or to those papers you mentioned.

What would you say to someone who said,

This guy did a five-episode documentary on some thing called a “bulletin board system” that people used to do with their computers years ago! I want to punch myself in the face until the hurting stops. Five episodes is way too many. The air is awash in people talking about, regarding, tangentially to bulletin board systems!

? I mean, presumably this hypothetical person has some objection to your endeavor, but you can’t really tell what it is from hearing complaints such as these. What’s the issue — that bulletin board themselves cause self-aggression for this person? It would be okay if there were four episodes, but not five? Why?

I don’t think anyone minds explaining the point – computer games are of major cultural importance and we should try to understand them, as we try to understand the rest of our culture. To do that, academics study them in principled ways and develop theories that neither the R&D branch of EA nor the popular press are going to come up with. And of course academic study doesn’t accomplish all the things that corporate R&D and popular writing does. So what’s wrong with the papers you mentioned or with the conferences you listed?

“It’s an academic gamer thing, you wouldn’t understand.” is a perfectly valid response to “I don’t get it.”

I still don’t get it.

I (over-?) interpreted it as “let’s keep fighting about this because conflict is fun, even we come up with some solutions”. While I don’t think the community has come up with complete resolutions or anything (and so I agree the debate / tension will probably continue, to some extent, for quite some time), I found that statement on the surface to suggest we should keep the debate alive for its own sake. That doesn’t make sense to me.

Andrew is always much nicer than I’m inclined to be, probably a testament to his better character. But I’m with Espen here — if you want to read those or other papers (all the papers are online) and make specific objections or commentary, this is a great forum for it. If you just want to point to the existence of the papers and the conferences and object to them on the principle that their very existence is flawed, then I’m disinclined to listen.

Andrew — I’m not terribly pleased by Greg’s latest comment in the comment thread, “if the conflict produces interesting intellectual sparks, shouldn’t it continue? Peace can be dull.” He’s being sarcastic?

Isn’t he saying that we shouldn’t squelch intellectual debate on the grounds that the debate should be “resolved?” I’m not sure why you’re bothered by this sentiment?

FuturePlay: The Academic conference on the future of game design and technology
http://www.futureplay.org/
Michigan, October 13-15, 2005

International Conference on Computer Games: Artificial Intelligence, Design and Education
6th International Computer Games Conference: CGAIMS 2005 Louisville USA, July 2005
7th International Computer Games Conference CGAMES 2005 Angoulême, France November 2005
http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1822/cgaide.htm (Two in one year!)

Playing the Past: Nostalgia in Video Games and Electronic Literature
The 1st Annual University of Florida Game Studies Conference
Gainesville, FL
March 18-19, 2005.
http://www.academic-gamers.org/gsg/index.shtml

Game Design & Technology Workshop 2005 (8/30/05; 11/8/05-11/9/05)
8-9 November 2005
Venue : Liverpool Mariott Hotel
Queen Square, Liverpool, L1 1RH, UK
http://www.cms.livjm.ac.uk/gdtw/GDTW2005/CFP.htm

GAPPP Workshop
19-21 AUGUST 2005: GAPPP Workshop
IT University Copenhagen, Department of Digital Aesthetics & Communication
(DiAC), Denmark
http://igw.tuwien.ac.at/gappp05/

The Education Arcade Games in Education Conference
Sunday, 15 May – Tuesday, 17 May 2005
Los Angeles Convention Center
http://www.educationarcade.org/

….come ON. The herd is way too thick; this is just the stuff I found as low-hanging fruit and I’m sure there are a dozen more out there. The air is awash in people talking about, regarding, tangentially to gaming. Again, I am a non-academic huckleberry who is possibly asking fundamental questions as one who attends a truck rally goes “why are they crushing those nice cars”. But from out here, I see a lot of minds doing a lot of work that is redundant.

Do you seriously want me to go after those three papers I cited, Espen?

The ceasefire may be in trouble: Narratology and ludology are engaged in fisticuffs once again at Greg Costikyan’s blog

Actually in the Greg Costikyan section above in my original post I had linked (perhaps too subtly) to Greg’s post when it first went live. But an extra explicit link is good to have, although I’m not terribly pleased by Greg’s latest comment in the comment thread, “if the conflict produces interesting intellectual sparks, shouldn’t it continue? Peace can be dull.” He’s being sarcastic? Here’s someone fed up with it all, including GTxA.

Again I’ll say I wish Greg had come to our talk, where we attempted to make progress on at least one aspect of the L. vs. N. debate.

Also, man, I wish I’d been at DiGRA. If one day I manage to get a new media/IF/video game studies post, I’ll be able to go…

Go on the cheap, as I did! while registration was a bit of a hit at $250 (I requested a starving artist rate, no luck), otherwise I took the train/bus there ($100 r/t from Portland), and while most attendees had posh rooms at the conference hotel, I was a 20-minute walk away in a youth hostel, staying in a 4-bed shared dorm, for $20/night. Turned out to be perfectly fine – actually I was the one in the role of the annoying person going to bed after everyone was already asleep and making noise. (Admittedly the room would’ve been awful had it been in a different part of the building, next to the all-night disco.) And the 20-minute walk was a nice one, considering it was June. Total cost, about $500. Nick, you’d have had to pay more to get yourself to the west coast of course.

Jason writes, I see some of these panels … and I want to punch myself in the face until the hurting stops.
I see a lot of this as enormous wheel-spinning. … I don’t know what the ultimate “get” is. Improve game design? Expand the grip of Electronic Arts to new audiences? Cull back the number of games whose primary plot line is “and then he beat the shit out of and shot everybody nearby”? Help me here.

There are multiple motivations behind the attendees at Digra (and it was interesting to compare and contrast them there). Some to purely better understand the nature of games and how they operate (while that’s been going on for quite a while, there’s a lot to understand, so we all should welcome this big new wave of effort), some to inform game design, some to study the culture of game players. Eric Z suggested we should start studying the culture of game developers (which I’m sure would help us better understand the all-too-common skeptical attitude of developers towards academic game studies ;-)

Note I’m guilty of occasionally aggravating well-meaning game studies folk myself.

Rather, I was trying to say that I don’t think it’s useful to judge the merits of some artistic or intellectual endeavor – video games, video game studies, science fiction, blogging, etc. – by pulling out the silliest-sounding or worst-seeming examples and pointing to those.

I haven’t looked over the DiGRA papers a great deal, but I’ve read Jesper Juul’s dissertation, on which his talk was based, so I can point to his short paper as one that makes a pretty obvious contribution, describing how computer games differ from previous sorts of games and how the rules and fictional worlds that constitute them interrelate. This helps to explain particular puzzling things about computer games and how people engage them. Will Wright no doubt already knows this fundamental idea or something like it intuitively, but there’s still value to articulating it precisely so that others can figure it out as well, and so the theory can be further developed in the future.

But yeah, my point was mainly that reverse-cream-skimming doesn’t help you figure out whether a particular field or practice is worthwhile. I haven’t looked over the papers you cited and wouldn’t judge them myself, but some video game studies papers being bad (or perhaps “hard to learn much from,” as I would say) doesn’t mean that writing such academic papers at all is worthless.

I will be the first to admit I am an errant huckleberry in this context, wandering into a cinematic forum wondering what the big hullaballo is about these discussions about the “Bi-joo”. Take my questions as they are; someone who has just seen an enjoyable album of many people gathering together, in a very nice location, to spin an awful lot of wheels at very high speed for a sustained period of time.

I’m also questioning how new the field is; I’ve seen academic and similar studies going back into the 80’s, but maybe by new you mean less than a couple decades old. Either way, Chris Crawford’s been making “whither gaming” noises for at least 20 years that I know of, and the paper wargames guys have been at it for half a century, discussing how to go about it, approaching it academically in articles and magazines….

Likely, a lot of this is just a functionality of the Internet’s ability for guys like me to jump through a lot of pages and get a lot of information on a lot of events/work that, ultimately, is likely redundant but previously wasn’t so easy to find. It didn’t matter if two people were working on the same patch of ground or that a third guy had eclipsed both their efforts, because they weren’t as likely to stumble on each other.

I see some of these panels and I feel like it’s 1982 and someone’s spent six months writing a thesis called “Eat or Be Eaten: The subtle interplay of digestive economics of Pac-Man”. I look at an abstract like http://www.gamesconference.org/digra2005/viewabstract.php?id=90 and I want to punch myself in the face until the hurting stops. Especially with the citations: the phrase “Echo Chamber” comes to mind. http://www.gamesconference.org/digra2005/viewabstract.php?id=368 is a study on girls and video games; welcome to 1985! Also, keep her away from http://www.gamesconference.org/digra2005/viewabstract.php?id=50 or we’ll have a fight on our hands.

I suspect this is why I never did well in academia (2.1 GPA from Emerson College, baby!) is because I see a lot of this as enormous wheel-spinning. Until game companies are actually hiring R&D think tanks to redefine their game plans as opposed to “make Mortal Kombat and Doom again”, I don’t know what the ultimate “get” is. Improve game design? Expand the grip of Electronic Arts to new audiences? Cull back the number of games whose primary plot line is “and then he beat the shit out of and shot everybody nearby”? Help me here.

William Huber’s notes on DiGRA can be found at Ludonauts.

Wow, it has been a hectic June! A big contributing factor was my recent jam packed trip to Vancouver (arguably one of the largest game-development cities on the planet). While in town I participated in Vidfest, DiGRA and a local…

Yes, those particular panelists were brought in from fields outside game studies (with the exception of Robin, who is from computer science), to take a look at games, and offer their fresh perspectives on it.

Am I missing any mitigating factors? I admit I’m no game academic, but this sounds… kinda poor.