Academia's Relationship with Games

Gamespot recently featured an article titled "Redefining Games: How Academia is Reshaping Games of the Future". This is a pretty large article for gamespot's standards, but does provide some good insights into (somewhat shaky) relationship between academics and the game industry. In an attempt to stay somewhat short, this post only highlights the first half of the article.

The first thing that caught my highlighter was the statement "...academia can teach everyone a thing or two about what motivates a person to play games, why they are important, how we can make them better, and what we learn from them overall." I think this is somewhat true, and I'm glad this point got across in the article. But this got me thinking in the opposite direction, particularly when it comes to UI design and user flow. Game designers have a huge pool of knowledge to contribute to academic application developers and designers when it comes to unser interface (UI) design and user flow. If a game doesn't make this simple and intuitive, the players get pissed off, gamesites trash the design of the game, and the game doesn't sell. In the game industry, this represents life and death for a title. In the academic environment, UI and user flow is often sacrificed for functionality, which thoroughly frustrates the users. But hey, the users are forced to use the system anyway, so lets just put as many features in it as possible, and let them sort it out. Ugh.

One thing that Henry Lowood from Standord is trying to do is put together an accurate history of games, by archiving not only software, but also hardware. But he makes an interesting point that never occured to me. He talks about why player a game like Everquest 10 years from now won't be the same game as it is now. "It's not going to mean much, because its a game that was dependent on a community of players. We have to give a lot of thought to how we're going to preserve what happens in these virtual worlds and multiplayer games...because those will be the artifacts that document the experience." Interesting perspective, and for those game historians, provides a lot to digest.

Michael Mateas, who runs Georgia Tech's Experimental Game Laboratory, discusses innovation in games. "A lot of what I'm interested in is genre innovation..", he explains "One theory, at least among gamers, is that true innovation is thwarted by developers' needs to build games that fit within the ordained genres for sales purposes." I think Mike is right on here, and I'm glad people like him are around to try and innovate new ideas in games. I posted some ideas about innovation in games a while back at the old blog.

One thing academics are rolling over is the actual definition of a game. This seems somewhat silly at first, but there really is no technical definition of what a game is. One person states "Games are a contested source. It definitely has something to do with rules, and it has to do with the magic circle -- being in a world that is self-contained and without consequences in the real world." Hold up! Now this definition would exclude nearly every MMO out there. With ebay and the OGM, these 'games' have one of the biggest consequences in the real world: financial consequences. Also, in one extreme case in EQ, death (a player committed suicide after being manipulated and beaten in the game world). These are huge consequences, all stemming from one type of game.

One of Mateas's focuses is to create large, open-ended games that also contains non-scripted progression. He goes on to explain games like GTA: Vice City are great in terms of the open gameplay, but they are still script-based when it comes to progressing in the game. You can go out and explore, run taxi missions, etc. for 5 hours, but the game itself does not progress. You need to go accept a mission (a scripted event) for the story to move forward. Mateas hopes to devise a better relationship between progression and open gameplay, where no matter what you do in the game, the world will progress somehow or another. One way I can think of this happening is through NPC character's AI. In most games now, NPCs have prioritized objectives that drive their actions. For instance in UT 2004, you can prioritize the bots AI to perform certain fuctions like support, offense, defense, etc. That sets the AI's internal objectives on how they bots will act for that game. But maybe by creating dynamic objectives, such that the AI's priorities change over time, could drive progression of the game. For instance in vice city, if you don't go and meet a gangster for a mission assignment, maybe one of the gangsters will come after you for ignoring him. Now you've gone from working for the gangster, to being chased by the gangster. The story has progressed, but it's in a non-scripted sort of way. I'll need to put more thought into this, but it sounds like it could lead to some fun game mechanics.

Lastly, there was a blurb about Ludology and Narratology. In its most watered down, basic form, ludology deals with game mechanics, trying to decipher what exactly makes a game a game. Then, narratology (in relation to game design) attempts to study games alongside other story-driven media, like film. Henry Jenkins has a great article about this debate between the two camps when it comes to games. Two of my favorite quites - "Interactivity is almost the opposite of narrative; narrative flows under the direction of the author, while interactivity depends on the player for motive power" from Ernest Adams, then "Outside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball at you I don't expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories." from Markku Eskelinen. After doing some reading up on this debate, I'd consider myself more on the ludology side. Games are interactive, sometimes with narratives. Film, TV, books, and other forms of narrative are not interactive...so it's somewhat difficult to try and use narratology to look at games in a similar vein as those other non-interactive, story-driven media. And a good games doesn't even need a narrative, from Pac-Man to UT 2004 (<- has a narrative, but pretty weak and I bet half the playerbase doesn't even know about it).