As contradictory as it is to read analogue, linear books about a medium that is essentially experiential and interactive, in MEDS/CMPU 389: Design, Production and Critique of Video Games, we’ve started with just that.    Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop and Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design, two intimidatingly thick tomes about the process of game design, are nevertheless excellent handbooks for beginning the creative process. Fullerton’s in particular elaborates on a “playcentric design process,” or, as she explains it, “continually keeping the player experience in mind and testing the gameplay with target players through every phase of development” (10).

Though we are only a week into the course, I have already found the “playcentric design process” to be a helpful way of organizing creative thoughts about video games. Both Fullerton and Schell use abstract, mechanical terminology to break down the creative process, thereby letting readers bring their own ideas to the format they provide.

However, we had one other reading assignment in the first week besides Fullerton and Schell: the first two short chapters of How to Do Things with Video Games by Georgia Tech professor and game theorist Ian Bogost.

Bogost’s book took a different approach than Schell and Fullerton.  He speaks as a game designer unconcerned with monetizing games by appealing to a wide audience. While Fullerton encourages game designers to always have their players–essentially, their buyers–at the forefront of their minds, Bogost’s conceptualization of games ” incorporates another feature of art more broadly: the pursuit of a particular truth irrespective of the demands of reception or sales. The sense that the artifact has something to relate and will not relent until that thing is expressed, rather than an experience to be optimized, is at work here” (17).

All three of these writers avoid using the word “art,” a controversial term in the world of video games. Instead, the word ‘aesthetic’ appears with far more frequency. But Fullerton and Schell employ a definition quite different than Bogost’s. To them, aesthetics are the emotions and reactions that a game provokes in a player: excitement, empowerment, frustration, awe, fear, anxiety, joy.

Bogost’s notion of aesthetics implies not  “what emotions are we trying to draw from the player?”  but “with what elements will we imbue this game world?”   Here, aesthetics are not designed to evoke specific emotions–they are elements that connect the player with the game world, the means by which an emotional and even empathic connection is forged.  Bogost’s  definition encompasses the beautiful art styles of Flower and El Shaddai, the proceduralist mechanics and minimalist art of Braid and Passage, and the powerful emotions of Hush and Darfur is Dying.

Fullerton and Schell speak from within “The Industry, approaching game design in terms of production.   Bogost speaks from without; , though he begins the book by rejecting the eternal “Are Games Art???” debate, treats his subjects as exactly that. His words hold the games he discusses like one would hold an Easter egg, or a dried flower: carefully, respectfully, intimately.

Fullerton offers a method of production, a tried-and-true means of creating good games. Bogost suggests that designers start not from the desire to entertain, but from the desire to craft a world as delicate and as beautiful as an egg.

At the last meeting of my Media Studies senior seminar last week, the class talked about songs that evoked a sense of nostalgia.  We played the songs on our laptops via YouTube and talked about the memories attached to the music, and as we discussed the links between memory and music, I began to think of video game music.

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In my last post I talked about the discussion that gamers and developers hate the second-most (first-most being the narratoloty vs ludology debate): are games art?  This week, I want to move past that question (or rather run past, my arms flung protectively over my head) and dive right into an analysis of the game Shadow of the Colossus (Team Ico, 2005). Caution: spoilers lie beyond this point!

“The purpose of playing… is, to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature,” said William Shakespeare in Hamlet Act 3 Sc. 2, and though he was talking about theater, the quote holds for video games as well. The great thing about both mirrors and video games is that when they’re not being used, they’re useless. Their existence depends on something to reflect, to play, to game.  They both leave gaps for others to fill. Because, really, if we wanted to see a static image, we’d look at a painting, not a mirror, and if we wanted to experience a static narrative, we’d watch a movie, not play a video game.  The beauty of interactive media like mirrors and games is in their blank spaces.

Shadow of the Colossus is a game that excels at leaving blank spaces.  Certainly, it provides a framework: the introduction is of a young man with a large bundle clutched in his hands, riding a horse through precarious, rocky terrain.

Only after we have traveled with him through lonely wilderness for several moments does the intrigue actually begin: the young man, aptly named Wander, has arrived at a desolate valley, wherein, in an ancient castle, lives a powerful being named Dormin. Wander reveals the contents of his bundle to Dormin: the dead body of a pale young woman.  Her name is Mono, and Wander wants to know how to bring her back to life.  Dormin offers you a deal: if you defeat the sixteen ‘colossi’ that live in the valley, Dormin will save her.  “But the price you pay may be heavy indeed,” Dormin warns. “It doesn’t matter,” responds Wander.

With that, the cutscening ends and the gameplay begins: go kill the colossi. Sounds simple. But then you find the first one, and when I saw that its fist was bigger than Wander’s whole body, I was more than a little freaked out.

This is the game’s first gap. You, the player, have to weigh your options.  First, the story of a fierce young man traveling far into the wilderness to save his love is a pretty compelling trope. But let’s be real–we’re playing a video game! After that first thrill of fear at the colossus’s Wander-sized fists, we want to know if we can really kill it. Let’s try! So you run up to the giant, you leap onto its ankle, and you start to climb.

The game offers little commentary as you proceed to face and defeat the other fifteen colossi. It allows you to react to its emotional cues: Mono’s body lying quietly in the deserted castle, the sparse loneliness of the wide grey valley you travel, the colossi’s shuffling attempts to escape your pricking sword, the mournful music that plays when they finally fall, and most jarring of all, the toll your battles take on Wander’s body.  The game doesn’t tell you what to make of this. Instead, in these spaces, you start to question Wander’s actions as the protagonist and your own actions as the player.  For me, the game is about death.  Will you kill to save another? How far will you go, and how much will you sacrifice? What value do you place on your own life, on your lover’s, on your faithful horse’s, on the colossi you kill, on the priests who are racing to stop you?

To understand Shadow of the Colossus‘s attitude toward survival and killing, I turn to the game’s predecessor and ‘spiritual sequel,’ Ico (Team Ico, 2001).  In this game, you play a little boy left to die in a (possibly familiar-looking) deserted castle. Together he and a strange, mute girl must escape the castle.  Again, the game’s narrative revolves around an opening cutscene that frames the action, and then gives control entirely over to the player.  This game, too, is about the will to survive: you have no other objective than to get the little boy on the screen safely out of the castle.  But the terms of survival couldn’t be more different. In Shadow of the Colossus, you are on the offense, and the game asks you how far you are willing to press your attack. In Ico, you are on the defense, but the game asks you if you are willing to put yourself in danger for others, too.

To illustrate this, let me describe what was, for me, the most poignant part of Ico. You, as the little boy, have finally succeeded at opening the castle gate by which you can escape over the bridge, with the help of a mysterious, mute girl. After triggering that last switch, as the gate rumbles open, you grab her hand and the two of you run through the gate to the bridge. But, halfway across–well, actually, here’s the video. Skip to about halfway through to see the moment I’m talking about:

A gamer would recognize the moment that the black frame disappears from the top and bottom of the screen as the moment when the player is back in control.  And, like the player who  made this video, as soon as the cutscene ended without thinking I leaped back for the girl.  Then, watching my little boy dangling over the chasm like that, I was shocked at what I had so instinctively done. Freedom was there!  The outside world lay beyond! And yet I leaped for her.  The game in which I was so invested had left a gap for me to fill, and I poured myself seamlessly into it.

This is why I would argue that Shadow of the Colossus and Ico both ask their players what they would do in the face of death, both their own and their friends’. The games’ narratives influence our decisions (seeing Wander’s ‘I-will-kill-you-or-die-trying’ face, for example, always inspired me to keep getting up every time a mountain-sized monster knocked me down), but in the end, we must deal with not only the in-game consequences of our choices, but the real-world feelings and reactions that come of them. If art, then, is that which “holds a mirror up to nature,” then Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are art.

The Call of Duty series, now, is another matter entirely…

Gaming blog Kotaku ran an interesting article today that addresses the perennially controversial question: are video games art? But Kotaku took a different take than I’ve seen before–their article positions game consoles in particular as the art.

At first I thought “No way!” If I were to argue that video games are art (and I wouldn’t say that all of them are) I would certainly argue that the virtual world the game houses is what constitutes art, not the console or even the disc. The art is in the programming, the visuals, the dialogue–the feel and atmosphere of the game.

Saying that a console is art is like saying the bound codex in which Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is written is art.

Well, but now that I think about it…

That’s not a fair comparison. Better to compare game consoles to mass-produced paperback books, right? Such a vessel could hold a masterpiece like The Sound and the Fury or pop culture fluff like Twilight.

But today’s media scholars are starting to think of the programs and vessels we use to transmit information differently than we have been, because the sheer complexity and interactivity that these new media allow is blurring the line between, as Marshall McLuhan would say, “the medium and the message.” Lev Manovich, in his article “From Borges to HTML: The New Media Field,” positions programs like FinalCutPro or PhotoShop as the greatest artistic achievements of the 21st century, arguing:

The Web, he argues, is a hypertext that not even James Joyce could have written. “The greatest avant-garde film is software such as FinalCutPro.” I’m still not sure if I agree with this. I think I will always privilege the story, the ‘world’ to which media like the Atari or FinalCutPro or a book give us access over the access point itself. But it’s an interesting point. What do you think?

Before I finish, in the spirit of Pre-Registration Week, I’d like to plug Professor Tom Ellman’s Media Studies and Computer Science cross-listed course 389b: Computer Games: Design, Production and Critique.

Here’s the description:

Anyone interested in video games from a scholarly, creative, or business perspective should check it out!

One day, walking through the basement when I was twelve years old, I saw a little boy standing in a forest inside our television. The image was almost entirely stationary, too static to be a television program, and yet the boy was moving–shifting his shoulders, scuffing his shoes, as a glowing fairy bobbed around his head.  As I watched, the boy stretched his arms and yawned.  He looked like he was waiting for someone.

I picked up the controller lying on the ground (I must have seen my brother or someone else use a game system), and imagine my delight when, at my slightest nudge of the control stick, the boy leaped forward!  I promptly set the boy to running in circles, throwing rocks, jumping off ledges. And the best part was: if I directed the boy to run into a wall, the screen would shake and the controller shudder in my hand as the boy fell backward with a cry!

I quickly learned there was more to this world than wreaking havoc in sylvan elf-villages, however. Beyond the forest there was a kingdom in danger, an evil warlock seeking power, a magical princess who wanted my help!  Instead of knocking the little boy into walls, I realized I had to start taking care of him. That meant treading carefully in dark caves, finding and restocking my weapons and ammunition, and making sure the boy was healthy and uninjured by replenishing his ‘heart meter.’ One way to ensure his health, I found, was to store magic potions in one of the four bottles in his inventory.  The problem, however, was that I often found other needs for these bottles as well, and I couldn’t let the boy drink from a bottle that had held bugs, fish, fairies, and dead spirits! Thankfully, I figured out a solution. Though the game didn’t have a specific command for cleaning bottles, I had the boy take an empty bottle in his hand, and then jump into a river or lake and swim around a bit. That was the best I could do; only after that would I let the boy drink from those bottles.

The boy didn’t speak. In fact, he usually had his back to me. I had to wrangle with the controls to let me catch glimpses of his face. But I wasn’t bothered by that. I knew we had a connection that transcended words. He was obviously a quiet, serious person, committed to this mission we had undertaken, brave but, I knew, not without anxiety, for although he didn’t flinch or shriek when a monster leaped out of the shadows to attack him, my alarm was manifested in  the moment of delay before his sword was drawn.

I write this to contrast to my last post about the iPhone game Raise the Village, a sort of FarmVille variant that purports to operate in the ‘real’ world instead of a digital world.  Gameified life simulators are a fascinating manifestation of digital technology capabilities, but they are not what first attracted me to video games. The ability to both befriend and inhabit, to become and to care for, a child dressed in green, my “Link” to a virtual world nestled in a corner of my basement.

Why do you play video games?
 

Hello once more Vassar. The leaves are turning, the air is cold and crisp, and my Floridian self is freezing to death, which means that fall is here! And with fall comes one of the biggest conventions on the east coast, the New York Comic Con. I’ll be sharing pictures and anecdotes from that wonderful weekend of weirdness.

The Con is enormous. To give you a sense of scale, it takes up the entire Jacob Javits Center, a grand total of 675000 square feet. That’s about the size of Vassar. Yes, the entire campus. Filling that space was every possible diversion available to the nerd community. Comic books? Well it wouldn’t be much of a comic con without them. Anime and Manga? Technically a different con, but the tickets get you into both so who cares. Video games? Of every conceivable sort. Fantasy and Sci-fi? On sale by the hundreds. Webcomics? A number of prominent web comic authors had booths. Anyway, on to the pictures and stories.

Jack Skellington, reveling in the halloween-esque amount of cotumes.

Wondering why he’s so tall? Stilts.

They didn't believe me about the droids.

There were a fair number of Star Wars related cosplay this year, perhaps because Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamil, was a guest of honor.

Holger, class of 2014, with his trusty street sign.

Some readers may recognize this sharp dressed man from my anime recommendations. He’s Shizuo, the perpetually angry superstrong former bartender from Durarara. (Basically, make the Hulk a blond Japanese man and you’ve got Shizuo.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO1y7WQfD9c

Here we have the Master Chief and Cortana, just in time for the tenth aniversary of the original Halo.

Robots in disguise! We never said their disguises were good.

Bumblebee, of the Transformers franchise. There is actually a person in there, despite the fact that the suit towers over everyone.

Any good quality pictures (Jack and Bumblebee, specifically) can be attributed to Rae, NYU class of 2015. Thanks Rae!

It wasn’t just new costumes that caught my eye this year. Some familiar faces popped up as well. Two of the costumed featured in pictures found in my Anime Boston post, specifically sexy Professor Layton and the guy in the giant mech suit (the other giant mech suit, you know it’s a con when you have to specify which one), were in attendance, as well as some others who I didn’t get pictures of.

Fittingly, E-Sports was on full display at Comic Con. The Intel Extreme Masters tournament, or IEM, had it’s New York tournament throughout the weekend. League of Legends, Starcraft 2, and Counterstrike were all played to breathtaking victories and crushing defeats. Seeing these games cast live, by well known personalities no less, is incomparable to simply watching it over the Internet. Getting to chat with some of the pros who were wandering around was equally awesome, and somewhat enlightening as well.

Until next time, may your Halloween be the best kind of spooky.

Nick Michel is a Junior STS major of Cushing. He wishes he had another 5 blog posts to talk about Comic Con.

The question of how to define a game is one that has occupied philosophers from Socrates to Johan Huizinga to Bernard Suits to the illustrious denizens of just about every video game news site forum ever.  So I won’t get into it.  What I would like to do, however,  is look at one game in particular.

It’s an iPhone game called “Raise the Village.”

Basically, it’s FarmVille, except the idea is that, when you build a house in the game, you’re building a house in the real world–specifically, in Kapir Atiira, Uganda.  Or at least performing a service that has some proportional value in the real world, such as providing food, livestock, or building materials.

It’s interesting to think about the many virtual Kapir Atiiras that must now exist. Just as no two peoples’ FarmVilles look the same, no two peoples’ Raise the Village will look the same–and yet the game is based around a purported link between game space and the physical world. It lets us pretend we’re in an African Village, but in reality we’re playing FarmVille with a different paint job.

And via the app, players can see pictures of the people in the real village as new supplies arrive and new buildings are constructed.

It markets itself as a charity game. It’s unapologetically voyeuristic. It builds on the success of today’s most popular social games (FarmVille) to make a political statement.

All other problems aside, what I’m wondering is:  can we still call it a game? Or has the “magic circle” (as Huizinga puts it) that circumscribes game space been ruptured? Edward Castronova, working from Huizinga’s idea of the magic circle, calls it “a shield of sorts, protecting the fantasy world from the outside world.”

We can’t deny that protection is important to us. The idea of professional sports players throwing matches for financial reasons, of bots making avatars in our favorite MMOs to plaster us with commercials, of game companies forcing us to buy extra DLC (content) to continue a story or goldfarmers trying to make a living off of what we do for fun–of anything, in short, that reminds us of any possible motivation other than pleasure–is infuriating.  The idea of game space is something that we take for granted, something that we expect–and yet here is a game that pierces the magic circle from the inside out.

I’d like to leave the question open–is “Raise the Village” a game? If not, what is it? Simulation, interactive virtual space, gameified social interaction? It’s not an easy answer. Several reviews of the game in notable game publications displayed a bit of anxiety over whether the term “player” was appropriate for this app.

And even if Raise the Village is not a game, so what? It’s still doing something in the real world–something in a lot of ways more tangible than the entirely virtual geographies of FarmVille. Is there something important about games, about play space, that’s worth protecting with a magic circle?

Welcome back, E-Spectators. I’m still Nick, and this is still the E-Sports article. Last time, I did a run through of the history of E-Sports, and today I’m going to talk about the modern scene.  The release of Starcraft 2 in 2010, more than 10 years after the original, has reinvigorated E-Sports, not only in Korea, but in America. A match fixing scandal had shaken the Starcraft community in Korea to it’s core, but the sequel provided a new start, and many of the best Starcraft pros made the jump to Starcraft 2, along with pros from other games such as Warcraft III. In America and Europe, where E-Sports was never more than a niche nerd activity, Starcraft 2 propelled it to full on mainstream nerddom. (An oxymoron, perhaps, but still true.) In Europe, especially, E-Sports has been gaining steam, with a weekly column appearing in Sweden’s largest newspaper dedicated to the latest in the scene, among other promising signs.

Some of the major tournaments and leagues from prior to Starcraft 2 remain intact. Although the aforementioned scandal resulted in the KeSPA, or Korean E-Sports Association, shutting down, a new league, the Global Starcraft 2 League or GSL arose to take it’s place. The World Cyber Games are still around, and have replaced the original with Starcraft 2 as their real time strategy game of choice. Another such league, Major League Gaming or MLG, has survived and gained quite a bit of prominence and acclaim for their dedication to quality, to the point of holding a mostly glitch free tournament during Hurricane Irene. There are also a number of Western based tournaments that have arisen recently. Dreamhack, a European league, boasted one of the largest online viewerships for an E-Sports event ever, with 120,000 people tuning in to see a foreigner (anyone not from Korea) take down one of the top Korean pros in a spectacular best of 5 match. Gaming website IGN has started the IPL, or IGN Pro League, for Starcraft 2 and another game, League of Legends. (More on that in a later post.) Tech giants and Nvidia and Intel have also sponsored tournaments.

A large part of the increasing popularity of E-Sports, especially Starcraft, can be attributed to the excellent emerging class of professional commentators. I, personally, got into E-Sports through Youtube personality HuskyStarcraft, caster of the linked video. Here are some other suggestions for where to go to find E-Sports

http://www.youtube.com/user/day9tv

One of the most prominent casters, and a former pro himself, Day9 can be said to represent the emerging E-Sports scene.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TotalBiscuit

The Starcraft channel for Youtube celeb and cynical Brit, TotalBiscuit. Search for his main channel at youtube.com/TotalHalibut

And finally, http://www.youtube.com/user/HuskyStarcraft

The one who got me into pro Starcraft, his casts are always entertaining.

Until next time, may your midterms go well and your break excellent. Join me next time for my recount of the madness that is the New York Comic Con.

Nick Michel is a Junior STS major of Cushing. He is SO EXCITED FOR COMIC CON!

by Jillian Scharr

For many video game designers, the goal is to create a virtual world that is indistinguishable from the ‘real’ or ‘analogue’ world in which we live. And in a lot of ways, they have been successful: from the days of 8-bit Space Invader we’ve progressed to the graphics and physics engines of major titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

But as Media Studies CFD Post Doctoral Fellow Stephanie Boluk pointed out when I interviewed her for my last post, in some ways we’re reaching a threshold of graphical realism. “There’s only so many pixels we can see…[because of] these hardware issues with our vision and our bodies we’re reaching the limit about how realistic something can look to us. And what do you do when you get to that limit? You establish the rules of perspective, then you break them.”

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