ABSTRACT

As game education programs grow, educators face challenges bringing formal study of games to students with varied backgrounds.  In particular, educators must find ways to transition students from viewing games as entertainment to exhibiting deeper insights.  One approach is to expose students to a wider variety of games, particularly German-style board games.  We hypothesize that greater familiarity may lead to improved understanding of game mechanics and test this hypothesis with a study involving students in an introductory game design class.  Initial analysis of the results shows increased understanding and changes in the student’s view of games.  From this we may suggest directions for future research and game education pedagogy.

INTRODUCTION

Introductory computer game design students have difficulty transitioning from being fans to scholars of games [9]. Indicative of this is a tendency to describe games by genre or theme rather than core game mechanics [8].

Hunicke et al. suggest the aesthetic level is the most visible to players [3].  This is particularly true in computer games, since the machine performs the execution of game mechanics, while board games players execute the game mechanics themselves.  Sicart argues understanding of game mechanics is core to the formal study of games [6].  Woods argues the social nature of board gaming fosters a more reflective atmosphere for deeper understanding [7].  Hands-on study of non-computer games is used in game design courses, increasing student’s engagement and understanding [1, 5].

German-style board games are characterized as having simple rules and innovative mechanics. We hypothesize that students exposed to this type of game may exhibit greater understanding of game mechanics than students who are not.  We also predict they will apply this understanding to their study of computer games.

Study Design

We conducted a study on students in an introductory game design class, recruiting an intervention group of volunteers to participate in a 1 hour seminar that met 8 times.  These students played and discussed several German-style games selected to represent a range of game mechanics and variations on those mechanics.  All are considered gateway games, i.e., good introductions to the genre for novice players.  These are listed in Table 1.

Table 1: Games used in study

Name	Designer(s)	Mechanics
Bohnanza	Uwe Rosenberg	Set Collection, Negotiation
Carcassonne	Klaus-Jürgen Wrede	Tile Laying
Pillars of the Earth	Michael Rieneck, Stefan Stadler	Worker Placement
Puerto Rico	Andreas Seyfarth	Economic
Ra	Reiner Knizia	Auction
Settlers of Catan	Klaus Teuber	Set Collection, Economic
St. Petersburg	Bernd Brunnhofer	Card Drafting
Ticket to Ride	Alan R. Moon	Set Collection, Route Building
Transamerica	Franz-Benno Delonge	Route Building

Our survey questions assess understanding of computer game mechanics and familiarity with German-style games.  A control group was formed from the students whose surveys indicated the least familiarity with German-style games.  Sample questions are shown in Table 2.  Students took the survey twice: at the beginning and end of the class.  Difference in responses between the initial and final surveys show the change to the student’s understanding of game mechanics.

Table 2: Sample survey questions

Design a player aid for a computer game of your choosing. What information would a novice need to play the game?

Describe how you would create a board game version of a First Person Shooter [2]

Pick a game where the story is an important part of the playing of the game. Name the game and describe it without making reference to the story.

We are analyzing the survey responses using systematic text analysis [4].  Initially, categories of possible responses are formed inductively from the theoretical background.  As the survey responses are observed, the categories are revised, resulting in a coding that combines the existing theory with empirically derived insights.  Initial results show the intervention group’s responses are consistently in categories indicating greater understanding.

Conclusions

We have described a study to show the effects of familiarity with German-style board games on students in an introductory game design class.  Initial results of this study show a difference in understanding of game mechanics between the intervention group and the control group.  From this result we encourage game educators to include more hands-on exposure to German-style games in their courses.

REFERENCES

1. Brathwaite, B., and Schreiber, I. (2009). Challenges for Game Designers. Boston, Massachusetts: Course Technology.
2. Fullerton, T. (2008). Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, 2nd Edition. Burlington: Morgan Kaufman.
3. Hunicke, R. & LeBlanc, M. & Zubek, R. (2004) MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research. http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf.
4. Mayring, Philipp (2000). Qualitative Content Analysis. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 1(2).
5. Ryan, M. (2007) Eleven Programmers, Seven Artists And Five Kilograms Of Play-Doh: Games For Teaching Game Design. 2007 Australasian conference on interactive entertainment,   Melbourne, Australia.
6. Sicart, M. (2009) Defining Game Mechanics. Game Studies 8:2
7. Woods, S. J. (2009). (Play) Ground Rules: The Social Contract and the Magic Circle. Observatorio (OBS*) Journal 3(1)
8. Zagal, J., Bruckman, A. (2007), GameLog: Fostering Reflective Gameplaying for Learning. Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Videogames, San Diego CA, 31-38.
9. Zagal, J.P., Bruckman, A. (2009) Novices, Gamers, and Scholars: Exploring the Challenges of Teaching About Games.  Game Studies 8:2.

This is just a very general, high-level description of the study, as that’s all we had room for in the abstract submission. The final paper will have much more in-depth discussion of the study and analysis of the data.

Some selected reviewer comments:

• The paper could be improved by providing references and validity for similar surveys (methodology and analysis) used generally to demonstrate effectiveness of various educational interventions.

Anyone know of any?  I consider Zagel et al.’s various game studies education to be related work, but they didn’t do any studies of this nature.

• a key area to expand in the full paper is demonstrating the importance of understanding game mechanics for game designers

Again, I can refer to the related work, in this case Sicart’s papers, Fullerton’s book, Brathwaite and Schreiber’s book.

• I am not completely convinced of whether German board games are better than “non-German” board games.  This should have been incorporated into the study (perhaps as the control).

Not sure of the best response to this.  Early in the study design we decided to narrow the focus to German-style games.  The original plan was to do a wider variety of table top games, including RPGs, traditional card games, etc., but that jsut seemed to broad.  I suspect thsi is related to the previous point – we have to argue that German-style games are fundamentally about mechanics, and that understanding mechanics is crucial for game designers.

Any comments/thoughts/advice are appreciated!

—

Future directions… well, this show feels like some kind of funky vision of the future. Giant mutated joysticks… VR cave texts… a novel physically pasted around the world… a first real taste of the Holodeck… I’ve never seen such a cross-section of games/art/literature in one space. Many thanks to the Beall Center for hosting the show, and for Noah for organizing and curating it. It’s truly exciting, and I’m honored to be part of it.

For me, future directions for digital fiction continue to be shaped by its varied but somewhat bumpy and awkward past. There are a million ways to skin this virtual cat, and many have been tried, and continue to be tried. There are many interesting approaches, of course, and in fact a diversity of forms is what we should hope and expect to see — as witnessed by the varied exhibition here today. Although, anyone who has followed our blog over the years and read our rants — well, my and Michael’s rants at least — knows we feel each approach has its share of problems.

But thinking about future directions is a stimulating and enjoyable thing to do, because besides the potential for digital fiction to be a premier artform of the 21st century, running with the baton taken from cinema and TV — who took it from the novel before that, and drama before that — in addition to that potential, digital fiction can be a very hard, very challenging, and therefore very frustrating and rewarding problem to work on. There are so many frontiers to pursue, so many directions digital fiction can be taken, we could spend our whole lives working on it, if we want.

Unlike some of my more amiable colleagues here — whose more generous spirits lead them to celebrate the multitude of praiseworthy digital fictions already out in the world — my motivation as a practitioner, and blogger discussing and critiquing the field, is largely defined by what has *not* yet been done.

The thing is, it just really, really bothers me that there is not yet an interactive story that I truly enjoy. It drives me crazy sometimes, but it also drives me to spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to build one.

Part of my lament, is that among the digital fiction and virtual worlds out there, there hasn’t been much to offer about the themes I enjoy — communication between people, domestic life, intimate relationships, and the messiness, nuance and complexity those brings along with them. My own work, past and future, is all about attempting to seriously do justice to these themes.

But as much or more than theme, I’m concerned about form. One of the first posts I wrote, in the month we launched Grand Text Auto — May 2003, over four years ago now — was titled I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, and it reads like I could have written it yesterday. I wrote about my desire to break away from what I called “the tyranny of discrete, delineated choices” offered in virtually all interactive stories — whether those are multiple-choice dialog menus in a video game, hot-linked words in a paragraph of a hypertext fiction, or a modest set of commands in an interactive fiction. I wrote how I felt straitjacketed when an interface of pre-defined choices is forced upon me by the authors — how, if a story is going to be interactive, I want to be able to freely express myself in my own way and on my own terms.

And along with that, as much or more importantly, I want to have a meaningful, rewarding impact on the fiction. For me (and this is my personal bent), if a fiction exists on a computer, with all of the potential that implies, it’s not enough to only explore a virtual world or networked narrative, without having an effect on it. And when there are effects, they need to build upon themselves, and be significant throughout the experience — not just selecting one of a few different endings, or worse, having my interactions get discarded in order to return to the story’s unwavering, linear plot. Yes, I’m talking about the a-word, agency.

I should say, I’ve felt guilty at times about this position, because I’ve felt that my dissatisfaction could be viewed as a disapproval of the excellent efforts of my fellow bloggers, several of whom make interactive fiction and hypertext fiction. So let me take this opportunity to thank them for graciously putting up with my axe-grinding, quite patiently I think.

Actually the good news is, over the past four years of reading their blog posts, papers and books, as well as from the too-rare real-life encounters with them, I’ve learned to really appreciate hypertext fiction and interactive fiction! In fact, I see more similarities than differences in all of our work, and I feel like we’re more cohesive as a group than I first thought.

In fact, sometime in year two or three of blogging, after writing a particularly satisfying post in which I profusely linked back to a bunch of my and my co-bloggers’ older posts, each of which linked to other posts, and other sites around the web… I realized I’d been tricked into writing a massive collaborative hypertext! And that was a really great feeling.

So, in terms of future directions… A big goal for me, also unlike my fellow bloggers, is to try to make a living exclusively building digital fiction, full-time. I’ve done it before, actually — believe it or not, people paid me a salary, plus stock options, over a 5 year period, to make two of the pieces here in the show, Petz and Babyz. For that I feel very lucky, and I’d like to thank my mentor, Rob Fulop, for giving me that opportunity. (Of course, I followed that up with 5 unpaid years to work on Façade, but anyway.) It’s actually pretty fun to be the sole industry guy on the blog (though I’d welcome others); I feel like a liason between the game industry and academia. I love having a foot in each world.

Simultaneously with making a living at this, I have the compulsion and need to build that digital fiction that will finally satisfy me, as a player. To get there means more R&D — building upon what worked in my past projects, improving upon what didn’t work, and pushing towards that holy grail of a high-agency interactive story with a highly-expressive interface.

Technology-wise, that’s ultimately going to mean building systems that can truly generate language and story. Why generativity? A critical component of agency is having the story respond to what the player wants to do, to go where the player wants to go, to be a capable improvisational partner and collaborative writer with the player. This requires so much story content, that it is impossible to pre-write it all. The system is going to need the narrative intelligence to write its own dialog — an ability endowed by the rules and knowledge that will be supplied by us, the human architects and authors. This is will be a key part of the solution to the combinational explosion problem in interactive narrative.

I could spend my entire career working on this. And I might — it’s certainly the most interesting thing I’ve found to work on, something that so many people in the world want and are asking for. I might burn out on it eventually, but right now, I’m full steam ahead. (Well, I’m a part-time stay-at-home dad right now as well, which I love.)

R&D towards interactive story generation may be my long-term future direction — but in the short-term, I’ve got to make commercial products that can get the necessary funding to be produced, and are fun enough to play that they will sell in the marketplace, hopefully funding the next production and future R&D.

I’ll briefly describe one of the products I’m hard at work developing, an interactive comedy-melodrama called The Party. I’m leading the design, engineering and fundraising efforts of The Party. Michael plans to contribute to the production as his already over-committed schedule permits; eventually the full team will be around 10 people.

I’ll illustrate my description of The Party with some concept drawings.

(Apologies, I’m not going to post The Party images on the blog — it’s way too early to get the hype machine rolling. Consider that the benefits of attending the symposium live!)

Finally, it arrives.

EXHIBITION: Grand Text Auto

LOCATION: The Beall Center for Art and Technology, UC Irvine

OPENING RECEPTION: October 4th, 6:30pm-9:00pm, Beall Center

SYMPOSIUM: October 5th, 1:00-5:00pm, Studio Art Bldg. 712, Room 160, UC Irvine

PERFORMANCE: October 5th, 6:00-8:00pm, Winifred Smith Hall, UC Irvine

GENERAL CONTACT: (949) 824-4339 or http://beallcenter.uci.edu

OVERVIEW

Many blogs have become books – from The Baghdad Blog to Belle de Jour. But Grand Text Auto is the first blog ever to become a gallery exhibition. It opens October 4th and runs through December 15th at UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art and Technology. The exhibition features the work of Grand Text Auto members Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and their collaborators.

Grand Text Auto is a blog about the potential of digital media, from literary websites to experimental computer games. At the exhibition, the blog members will put these ideas into practice, showing a variety of cutting edge works. Some use the latest in artificial intelligence technology, such as Mateas and Stern’s interactive drama Façade — of which The New York Times says, “This is the future of video games.” The Beall exhibition will feature the first public showing of a life-sized “augmented reality” version of Façade, created in collaboration with Georgia Tech’s GVU Center. Virtual reality is also on display, as with Wardrip-Fruin’s collaborative work Screen, a literary game played with 3D text — never seen before outside of a research lab and presented with support from UC San Diego’s Center for Research in Computing and the Arts. On the other hand, some works in the exhibition use decidedly do-it-yourself techniques, such as Montfort and Rettberg’s Implementation, an experimental novel distributed around the world on mailing labels. Others are quirky, such as Flanagan’s [giantJoystick], a replica Atari 2600 joystick so large that two people must work together to play (this has its North American debut at the Beall show).

In addition to the gallery show, the members of Grand Text Auto are working together with the Beall Center to present a live symposium and performance evening, both on October 5th. The afternoon symposium (1-5 p.m.) will discuss the power of collaborative blogging, new directions for computer games, and the place of language in digital media. The evening performance (6-8 p.m.) will feature the disturbing and humorous interactive cinema experience Terminal Time (which automatically creates outrageously biased documentaries of the past millennium) and a live performance of the award-winning hypertext novel The Unknown (which tells the tale of a rollicking cross-country book tour). Parking for these events is available in the Student Parking structure at the corner of Campus Drive and West Peltason.

Online, Grand Text Auto (http://grandtextauto.org) is a blog with more than 200,000 visitors a month, collectively authored by six artists and scholars. Offline, Grand Text Auto members have been shown in major art museums, been written about in leading national periodicals, and shipped games that have met wide acclaim and sold millions of copies. The Grand Text Auto exhibition is the first time that these artists will show their work together. Delve into Grand Text Auto’s digital depths October 4 – December 15, 2007 (closed November 22-26) and witness the live debut of blog-meets-reality.

Abstract Submission Deadline: October 15, 2005

The present call for papers is for chapter length essays (5,000-7,500 words) that address one or more games in the Grand Theft Auto series…

The Grand Theft Auto series of digital games is one of the most popular, innovative, and provocative game series to date — and rightly so. The games feature voice acting from stars such as Dennis Hopper and Burt Reynolds, and the soundtracks are provided by artists like Rick James, 2Pac, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Willie Nelson. Beyond this, gamers have been continually impressed with the freedom to explore and exploit the game environments, which have grown exponentially in size and complexity. At the same time, games in this series have also presented gamers with options for gameplay that range from misdemeanor illegal acts to psychopathic criminal behavior.

For this reason, popular media outlets, parents, and politicians have criticized the potential gameplay that Grand Theft Auto games offer. (Of course, very few criticisms acknowledge the freedom of the gamer to abstain from criminal or violent behavior. Nor do detractors mention that the games in this series are sometimes insanely funny satires of American culture.)

The present call for papers is for chapter length essays (5,000-7,500 words) that address one or more games in the Grand Theft Auto series, including: Grand Theft Auto, Grand Theft Auto 2 Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Grand Theft Auto Advance, and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories.

Prospective contributors should e-mail a brief abstract or complete essay to ncgarrel@svsu.edu by October 15, 2005. At the top of the abstract please include the title of the essay, your name (and the name of any co-authors), school or work affiliation, mailing address, and e-mail address. Contributors will be accepted on a rolling basis and receive a detailed e-mail with more information as soon as a decision is made. Materials received after October 15 may not receive full consideration.

International perspectives and essays on the following subjects are particularly encouraged: the appeal of Grand Theft Auto games; the ways in which gamers engage or do not engage the controversial content; the intersection between games in the series and other popular media texts; the connection between the cities and time periods depicted and history/nostalgia; the culture of the game world; the impact of the series on game design, game culture, and society.

A large commercial publisher has approved this project. A contract will likely be issued after I have secured abstracts from all contributors.

Nathan Garrelts, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
Saginaw Valley State University

I find it charming that Nick (and others?) are studying the assembly code of Combat and other early computer games. I think they’re worthy of study because of their place in history, they have some elegant features, their necessary use of abstraction (as opposed to the ever-increasing realism of today’s games), their extremely constrained operating systems (so little memory, CPU speed, squeezing in computation in between drawing of frames when the raster gun was travelling back to pixel 1, etc.). I find it amusing because I’d bet the mindset of the folks making those games at the time was simply to get a dumb little tank to move around and shoot the other tank.

At the risk of biting the scholar who appreciates me, there were some things I wanted to comment on in Andrew’s reply. He uses visual art vocabulary (abstraction/realism) while not mentioning in any way that Combat is a game, and his ideas about why such programs are interesting have to do with “elegance” and the extreme constraints of the platform. He also seems to think, to some extent, that the self-conscious reflection of programmers or other creators about the place of their work in history is relevant (at least for purposes of amusement). Andrew’s not alone here, either. The usual way of taking about Atari VCS games (on rare occasions when they’re discussed) involves using visual art concepts and more or less ignoring that they’re games, and mainly praising them as engineering feats accomplished with limited resources – cf. Mark Wolf’s article in The Video Game Theory Reader and Mark Lamoreux’s article in Gamers.

The usual attitude also places early work outside of history, as a practical matter, despite the nod to historical importance. “Serious” work like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is somehow part of video game history – presumably because the GTA:SA creators, despite working under very similar corporate pressures as Atari programmers were to produce a popular console game, are consciously creating a work for the ages? There isn’t much evidence that I know of that even Cicero thought his actual writing process would be studied two thousand years later, or that changes in the appearance of the icon of Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story were consciously engineered by Joyce and Eastgate as a puzzle for future scholars. (I’m referring to Matt Kirschenbaum’s work on the materiality of electronic literature, here.) A lot of the subject matter textual studies has considered was not of self-professed importance. So I’m hardly going to wait around for permission from Atari VCS programmers themselves before looking at some of the actual games and code from the most important early game console.

Since we’ve started thinking about visual art, we might as well compare Combat to The Great Train Robbery, the 1903 film directed by Edwin S. Porter. While I think film studies is overemphasized in game studies, it does have something simple but important to show us here. When people study The Great Train Robbery, they don’t usually start and stop by saying “what a great feat of compression! A single reel, black and white film stock, no sound! That leet film hacker Porter sure did a lot with his highly constrained resources! Too bad this film has nothing to tell us about modern cinema, which has color, sound, digital special effects, large-scale camera movement, and so on…” Instead, they explain how techniques pioneered in The Great Train Robbery, however different it might have been from a modern feature film, influenced the history of film.

Why isn’t it more obvious that techniques used in Combat and other VCS games influenced console gaming in important ways? For one thing, we’re fixed on the surface (”their necessary use of abstraction”) rather than the workings of the game. If we’re trying to figure out how the visual appearance of the Combat biplanes or the Yar in Yars Revenge relates to Lara Croft, of course, we’ll meet with limited success – although even there, there are things to be said if we’re willing to talk about the gaming function of these visual elements: indicating the direction that your “man” is facing is always important, for instance. The interesting questions have to do with these systems as programs and as games. How did the dynamics of multi-player console gaming develop and change on the Atari VCS? How was the space of play spread across a virtual world larger than a screen, in Adventure, Pitfall, and other games? How were “properties” like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. – not to mention arcade games that were ported – presented on the VCS in a way that made the franchise owners happy? How does the platform, and previous code for that platform (including source code you can access, from your own company, and code you can only look at in binary form via your competitor’s cartridges) influence what you do?

Specific study of Combat and other games tells us a lot about the VCS, which tells us a lot about computing in the late 1970s, which tells us about the history of computing; it also tells us a lot about video gaming in the late 1970, which tells us about video games overall. Film studies awakened to the importance of early works in that form quite a while ago – I think it’s really time for game studies to do the same.

The discussion left me feeling disappointed with San Andreas. With all the positive reviews, I had expectations for an even higher-agency GTA III experience. While there are some hilights (the rhetoric of poverty implied in only being able to eat crappy fast food, the character-appropriate accessorizing, the gang reputation system), I actually felt like I had less agency in this game than in previous installments. The fundamental gameplay is almost identical to GTA III: now the game is just really really big, with a simple RPG stats system attached.

The effect of a really-big world, with most of the buildings being facades that you can’t enter and that have no game-specific function, combined with characters you can’t really effect (ok, you can kill them or increase your reputation with your own gang) made the world empty and hollow � there’s no reason to really do anything. Sure, joyriding is fun, but I’ve already been joyriding for two previous games. Now I want more. Particularly, after three installments, the lack of more sophisticated NPC interactions is really starting to bother me. Some examples:

• I recruit several of my gang members to go riding with me. I stop a car that happens to have another member of my same gang driving driving, throw him out of the car (with the standard reaction), and take off in the car. None of the characters find this strange.
• Matt pointed out that, in the small towns, the NPCs have the same reactions to you as in the big city. You’d expect reactions to be different in the small towns, e.g. perhaps more racism.
• Ian pointed out that reactions to you aren’t significantly different in the ghetto vs. the fancy part of the city. You get the same negative BO reactions, etc.

Matt said that one of the things he likes about open-world games like San Andreas is the lack of edges. The world has no edges; it’s impossible to fall off. I countered that there are lots of edges; every NPC is a cliff you fall off when they respond in an entirely predictable, mechanical, context-free way. The physical space is large and relative edge free, but the social space is tiny, hemmed in on all sides by edges. Sure, you can spend the 5 or 10 minutes to drive to the top of a mountain, find a parachute, and jump off. But, as a gameplay mechanic, this feels like an endless hunt for easter eggs. You can hide a lot of easter eggs in a huge virtual world. And while easter egg hunting has a long and venerable history (as recent examples, look at any of the crazily detailed guides for Zelda Windwaker or Kingdom Hearts, two games I’ve played somewhat recently, and no, I didn’t exhaustively search for all the secrets), I don’t see how it has any legs as a fundamental game design approach. What’s the next installment: a continent with hundreds of large, empty cities in which all the inhabitants act exactly the same, except now you can go to Cape Canaveral and carjack the space shuttle?

On the way home, Ian and I chatted about why San Andreas felt disappointing. Part of the problem is that, while GTA III introduced a major design innovation, San Andreas feels like more of the same (a lot more of the same). Without being able to bring more life to the world, richer NPC interactions, dynamic, generative mission (story) structures, and long range effects of your actions, there’s nowhere for large open-worlds to go. Bigger is not better.

Sounds like one of the richest virtual worlds that’s ever been built. Between San Andreas and Katamari Damacy, I might just have to buy myself a PS2… (My copy of Sims 2 for the PC also still sits on my desk, waiting to be installed…)