Blips: Playful Katamari

Source: Katamari Damacy and the return of “play” in videogames
Author: David Shimomura
Site: Kill Screen

The subject of what constitutes "play" is a frequent one around these parts, and judging by his recent piece over on Kill Screen, David Shimomura and I probably have a lot we agree on here. Shimomura attended the latest Indiecade East conference and tracked down game design professor Miquel Sicart, who seems to think games are losing their sense of playfulness. He cites games like Katamari Damacy and LocoRoco as playful games that encourage a more freeform sense of play in their mechanics, even when they outline objectives for players to complete. Luckily, it seems like upcoming games such as Hohokum may be ushering in a new generation of playful games.

I have strong feelings for the Katamari games, particularly the first two. When I went to college the PS2 was in full swing, but I found myself dedicating less and less time to playing games, and while I still kept up a general interest in them, I was really only playing multiplayer games in social situations. Katamari brought me back into the fold though by offering something different than the same old formulas I'd played a dozen times over. To play is to venture into the unknown to some degree, and so a game that presents me with unforeseen circumstances has the potential for a more genuine sense of play, which Katamari delivers in spades. It helps with the playfulness that Katamari is so funny and whimsical, though those components are not necessarily essential for a game to be playful. You just have to not know what you're getting yourself into.

Blips: Distant Boundaries

Source: Far Lands
Author: Timothy Hughes
Site: Unwinnable

Timothy Hughes' first piece for Unwinnable is a fascinating examination of the physical boundaries of virtual worlds, particularly focused on Minecraft's Far Lands. As someone who's never really touched Minecraft, but enjoys hearing the stories about all the crazy stuff that happens there, the Far Lands might be my new favorite. Basically, the world of Minecraft is procedurally generated as you move around the environment, making the horizon ostensibly infinite. Apparently there is a hard limitation of around 7 times the surface of the Earth, which is, well, stupid huge. Anyway, the Far Lands supposedly exist a 35-day walk from a given spawn point, and are an area where the game's code becomes unstable and visually glitchy. As someone who really appreciates a good glitch, I'm way into this.

For the rest of the article, Hughes talks about the outer reaches of games and why so many people set out to find them. I'm totally guilty of this too having walked out to sea in Proteus, and scoured the far corners of Xenoblade Chronicles' gigantic world. As Hughes lists, there are a number of different reasons for doing this, but where he sees a childlike petulance to go against the games rules, I see play and the game's code placing restrictions on what kind of play is acceptable. Not that all developers should build infinite landscapes for their games, but whether a world continues on forever, builds in a natural barrier, or puts up an invisible wall will change the player's perception of that world differently. In all cases, the discovery of physical barriers in games is disappointing to players. They thought they could do something a moment before, and then the game authoritatively says "no." I think it's worth it to make the collateral damage of that discovery as minimal as possible.

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Blips: The Age of Games is Upon Us

Source(s): Manifesto: The 21st Century Will Be Defined By Games
Notes on Eric Zimmerman's "Manifesto for a Ludic Century"
The Uncomfortable Politics of the "Ludic Century"
Author(s): Eric Zimmerman & Heather Chaplin, David Kanaga, Abe Stein
Site(s): Kotaku, Wombflash Forest, Kill Screen

Last week, game designer and academic Eric Zimmerman published "Manifesto for a Ludic Century" and made the case for why games and game thinking will define the next hundred years. Being a manifesto, he lays out a handful of bold points such as "Digital technology has given games new relevance," "There is a need to be playful," and "Games are a literacy." These points are each followed by a couple sentences of further explanation. As part of the piece being posted on Kotaku, author and professor Heather Chaplin provides some reflection and critique of the words that immediately precede her own. It may seem strange that something dubbed a manifesto would require further backstory and something outside of itself to provide proper context, but seeing as the manifesto is meant to be but a part of a new book by Zimmerman, the extra supportive material is helpful.

In the wake of the manifesto's posting, a flurry of responses has surfaced, covering a wide range of territory. Kotaku even pre-baked a few responses from industry luminaries and extracted soundbites for a separate response article. I wanted to focus mainly on two critiques though, one by sound art/game music composer David Kanaga and one by sports media researcher Abe Stein.

In Stein's piece, he wonders who will actually take part in the ludic century, and who will watch from the sidelines. The argument is about access, which all broad, technology-based initiatives must address. For whom are digital technologies like video games and the Internet fostering a surging interest in design thinking? Stein speculates that these are privileges afforded to the minority of the world population that has access to this technology. Zimmerman even admits that his manifesto is a bit serf-serving, both proclaiming the importance of thinking like a game designer and promoting his upcoming book, which, demographically speaking, sounds a bit like preaching to the choir as well. After all, people who don't play video games and who don't have computers or smartphones won't be reading articles about them on Kotaku either.

David Kanaga's criticism is an expansive, philosophically grounded, point-by-point evaluation of the manifesto's statements. There are a lot of pools of interest here (and plenty that was over my head), but I found a through-line in his criticism of Zimmerman's framing of "play." Zimmerman speaks of playing games as a part human nature, the same as telling stories, making music, and creating images. Kanaga posits that "telling," "making," and "creating" are all forms of play as well, and that any activity can be seen as a game. Speaking of "games" specifically he says early on that "games are both playful-irrational things and highly structural things, and integrating the reality of these apparently contradictory tendencies is maybe the most important/baffling work there is to do-- in design, theory, and play. Right now, the rational aspect of games is WAY over-represented." That rational aspect is tied up in "systems thinking," which while certainly useful, can be overemphasized at the expense of play.

In the end, I'm not sure the manifesto format was the best way for Zimmerman to go, since many criticisms can be explained away by the adherence to that form (a criticism Zimmerman has acknowledged). The ludic century manifesto comes from a standpoint of assumed common ground, which is helpful when trying to convey ideas that, for many people, will be totally new ways of thinking about the integration of games and culture. However, Zimmerman chose a format that requires broad strokes, bold declarations, and positive vision, not nuance. You probably won't have a successful call to action if you can't sell people on it, so that's what the manifesto attempts to do. I wonder if Zimmerman sees the cascade of responses to his manifesto, both positive and negative, as part of design thinking in practice. Will we see a second iteration of the manifesto that incorporates this feedback? I hope so, though if anyone refers to this first go round as an "open beta," I might hurl.

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Blips: Cheaters Are The Real Players

Source: Cheating: Video Games' Moral Imperative
Author: Michael Thomsen
Site: Fanzine

Cheating remains one of the most fascinating issues in video games. Where do you draw the limits between "cheating" and "following the rules?" Everyone seems to have a different answer. You've got the laws of the game world that are bound to hard code, and then you have the more flexible rulesets that are socially determined that establish a level playing field for competitive environments. Rocket jumping in first-person shooters is exploiting the game's physics system, but doing so is strictly within the original tools given to the player, which hardly seems like cheating. However, competing with a modded character that has infinite rockets or some other advantage that other players do not have, would be cheating. The differentiation for me is that the act of bending or breaking the games' laws and boundaries in itself is not cheating, but when you violate the social contract between competitors, it becomes cheating.

Michael Thomsen sees cheating, as it's more broadly defined as a general disruption of a game's restrictions, as the most ethical way to play video games. Cheating in video games is about testing boundaries, which is what humans do when they play in every other setting. Most games don't actually encourage play though, instead asking willing participants to adopt a prescribed set of actions and to execute those actions when the game tells you. Playing video games without making attempts to subvert their rules is a tremendously submissive activity. Though linear, restricted play has opportunities for developer expression and player interpretation, most games take this opportunity to force players into a time-intensive struggle that makes players perceive their rewards as sweeter because of the effort required. However, the expressive and interpretive possibilities of these struggles are limited and rarely justify the considerable time and effort required to achieve them. Thomsen argues that cheating demonstrates just how cheap these rewards are, since players can acquire them all the same without undergoing significant struggle.

Now, I've previously defended JRPG Xenoblade Chronicles' immense duration (90+ hours) as an experience that builds an empathetic relationship with characters that is not achievable in short games, and do think that had I cheated my way through the game that I would have lost that connection to the characters. Cheating makes video game playing a first-person narrative experience, and subverts the story that has been written by the game developers. Sometimes the stories told by developers are actually worth experiencing in their unaltered form, but I'd like to ammend my Xenoblade defense by stating that I can only play a game like that once every few years. Struggling through hour after hour of predetermined roadblocks is not a healthy lifestyle, but I'm willing to submit to vice every once in a while. I don't know how MMO players do it.

Blips: Against the Rules

Source: Reign in Drool
Author: Michael Thomsen
Site: The New Inquiry

Is it accurate to say that we "play" games? The use of the word "play" to describe what game participants do when operating the mechanics of a game doesn't seem wholly accurate to the historical understanding of the term. To "play" is to engage in chaos, to let your imagination run wild, totally ignorant to the constraints of systemic rules. Games on the other hand, are logic puzzles defined by their rules. While the macro activity of participating in a game often aligns with the frivolity of free form play, the act of "playing" in games often feels like anything but.

This is one of many issues brought up in Michael Thomsen in his wonderful recent essay for The New Inquiry's Games issue. He goes on to rail against gamification as taking the complacency-generating aspects of games and applying them to just about anything. Instead of using game mechanics to subversively reflect the already game-like systems workplace and political hierarchy, gamification adds a new layer of abstraction that further distances "players" from the reality of the situation. In games where you play against the computer, where the goal is to win, there is always a power dynamic between the the rules of the game (the master) and the player. Upon beating the game, you've conquered all of the challenges, but you never overtake power from the game. The game allows the player to possess enough power to satisfy, but you can never become the master. Why would we want to invite this kind of system into non-game environments?

Where I'll be critical of Thomsen is in his scope of video games. The term "game" has been going through its own identity crisis as of late with several titles of note leaning away from the traditional goal oriented structures of win/lose scenarios. Ironically these games have been chastised by vocal connoisseurs as not being games at all, but something else. In general, games are in a taxonomical predicament right now, and the most sensible solution seems to be to expand the scope of the word "game" to include all comers. "Games" really are the new "art," it seems. In light of this Thomsen also dismisses the expressive possibilities of games too quickly, which seems shortsighted at a time when developers are making significant strides in that realm.

That said, it's all too easy to get caught up in a defensive position about something that you care deeply about, so I welcome Thomsen's critical look at games and what it actually means to play.