Archiv der Kategorie: games

About the virtuality of media

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One of mankinds greatest achievements is also one of its greatest obstacles in furthering the means to represent and thus reflect and understand ‚reality‘. Languages provides us with a seemingly simple way of assigning words to concepts to reality: Language, photographs, film, hypertext, games – all seem to be clear cut and distinguishable in their forms. All have a specific relationship to time and space in their acts of creation and those of reception.

Language flows linearily, like a string of pearls coiling around the topic it tries to grasp, like the touches of a blind man trying to shape a sculpture out of thin air. Photography resembles an afterimage of a landscape illuminated by lightning, freezing a changing, moving world into one to behold in all it’s details, for once unchanging. Film moves our view like a puppet on a string, taking us relentlessly by the hand to follow what is laid out for us. Hypertext gives us some choice to choose between forking paths, maybe trace back and forth, like an idle or searching wanderer. And games – games provide us with language, images, moves, and choices, though it can not be found in these but in the rules that let us interpret them, interact with them. Games are what we turn into them by adding rules that differ from, yet resemble those given to us, ingrained in our identity and society.

Mercifully, the first rule of a game is: You don’t have to play, and if you want to play you do not have to accept the rules as they are. This could also be seen as the first rule of all media, of all medium, but is never as clear as in games – or as in arts.
One task suits both very well: Showing the limits and rules of media, of its beneficient and problematic potential, and that a word, a concept, a meaning, a rule system of production and reception, that these may may be altered by the artist, the game designer, the viewer, reader or player in an act of creation.

Causality in history: Chrononauts

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„Chrononauts is a fascinating, whimsical exploration of time travel, causality, and possibility covering many fascinating and significant events of the last century or so.“

– Andrew Looney

„Chrononauts“ by Anrew Looney (2000) is a card-based game where the players play time travellers able to alter historical events by flipping specific cards, linchpins of the timeline. Those altered events may cause a ripple effect by altering follow-up events, some quite obvious, some funny and nifty: Why would the New York World Fair 1939 have German Cake in an alternate timeline?

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Visual analysis of gamebooks

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Gamebooks were, during the 80ies and before the rise of PCs and the internet, a staple of interactive fiction. Back then, the next best thing to sitting together with some friends and playing a face-to-face roleplaying game was reading these branching, directed hypertexts in the form of books.
Each paragraph had a number on top, and at the end there was the number of the next paragraph to be read. Sometimes a decision had to be made, e.g. doing something or refraining from it, that would lead to two different parapgraphs.

Two medium-relevant motivations drove me, back then: I wanted to ’solve‘ the text, i.e. bringing the path to a satisfiying ending; and I wanted to know what would have happened if my decisions earlier on were different ones. The latter one would usually take over when the text had been solved – a classic example for the replayability of a simplified narrative possibility space („The Tree“).

Meretzky_TheMysterysOfTheSecretRoom

Screenshot from the animation of the pathways of „The Mysterys of the Secret Room“.

For a beautifully visualised and animated depiction of a reader’s possible paths of ten gamebooks, a description of specific path-formations, and an evolutionary analysis of „Choose your own adventures“ narrative structures – or if you simply had been a fan yourself in the heydays of gamebooks – visit this site: CYOA.

There’s also a path, beautifully documented on the webpage, to second order gaming, to systemic theory or to radical constructivism to be found in one gamebook:

„This ending was not just an easter egg for the obsessive reader who didn’t mind skimming every page looking for telltale words. Instead it’s hard to miss in even a casual riffling. A two-page illustration showing what could only be paradise (or perhaps a theme park) leaps out as the only spread in the book without any text. Flipping to the page before brings you to 101, where you discover that your curiosity has been rewarded.
You have found the planet, not by following the constraints of the system, but by going outside of them – a fitting moral to the story and an encouraging reminder that any game should be a starting point for the imagination, not the end.“

Some things can’t be chosen from within the system of rules one adheres to, but has to be discovered or invented by breaking or transcending those boundaries.

The modest artist/writer doesn’t explicitely states his name, but from the story presented I take it to be Steve Meretzky.
This is an extraordinary, and extraordinary beautiful website.

Further readings:

Lecture „First and Second Order Games“ at the HAW

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On tuesday, December 15th, from 18:00 to 19:30 I will give a lecture with the title „Spiele erster und zweiter Ordnung – Lernen zwischen Konvention und Innovation“ („First and second order games – Learning between convention and innovation“). I will present i.a. the concept of playing with a game’s boundaries, as a means of reflection on the medial nature of games and to challenge a critical view on the presentation of content. The framing is a cycle of lectures, „Games als Motor der Innovation“ („Games as motor of innovation“), held by gamecity at the HAW (University of applied sciences).

Learning facts and rules

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Facts are man-made, as the etymological origin ‚facere‘ suggests. The creation of this kind of knowledge, facts, follows certain meta-facts, called rules. One can see a vague anaologon to declarative and procedural knowledge, „knowing that“ and „knowing how“, both calling for different ways of transfer respectivly acquisition.

While a fact may be taught ‚as whole‘, a rule will stay in it’s dormant stage as just another fact if treated alike. This, too, is already known: To effectively teach or learn a rule, its application has to be an integral part of the fact.

Games and serious simulations both provide for the learning of rules with a „what if…?“ approach. But while a serious simulation approach in the end usually aims for a correct application of rules, games, due to their experimental and fun character, sometimes allow for or even challenge aberratic cognitive behaviour: Misusuing the game (cheating, changin of rules etc.) or enjoying unwanted or dismissed behaviour. While in a serious simulation the final goal may be to be able to safely land a plane, in a playful state-of-mind it may be to crash it in the most enjoyable way.

Compared to Ernst von Glasersfeld’s metapher of cognition, of a blind man who wants to get through a dense wood and bumps against unseen trees, learning with games resembles blindfolded playing tag and hide-and-seek within this very wood: Its character is more mapmaking than pathfinding.

Thus using games just to transfer facts – like in quiz games or linear adventure games, the mainstay of commercial edutainment – forfeits the possibility to present rules and render them experiencable as something cognitively ‚tangible‘.

Games and the „best way“ to tell stories

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Torsten Meyer (thanks!) just sent me a link to a recent interview with game designer Peter Molyneux, published in the „Tageszeitung“, the title translates as „Fable-Gamedesigner Peter Molyneux: A visionary and charlatan“

Molyneux is quite enthusiastic about interactive-adaptive stories as games, but omits other aspects of the relation of „story“ and „game“ resp. „play“ which I think are quite important.
If there’s the question „How can stories in games ever compete with books and movies?“, one may have fallen to an error of categorisation. Stories in games have to deal with similar problems as texts in the digital medium: They are easily seen as simple transfers from previous technical media, but basically the same as before, a linear progression of meaningful – or dramatically arranged – information.
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Kategorisierung(en) von Computerspielen

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Kategorisierungen von Computerspielen gibt es meiner Ansicht nach so viele, wie es bestimmte Verwendungszwecke vorgeben: Das reicht von sehr persönlichen bzw. subjektiven Ordnungen (die leider häufig in die politische Diskussion einfliessen) bis zu ernsthaften Versuchen objektiver Taxonomien.

Eine Kategorisierung ähnelt insofern Theorien oder Methoden, als dass sich ihre Brauchbarkeit am jeweiligen Verwendungszweck messen lassen kann. Übliche Kategorisierungen richten sich meiner Ansicht hauptsächlich nach den marktüblichen Genres und den ’sichtbaren‘ Rahmenerzählungen, deren Bildern bzw. abgebildeten Handlungen.

Ich sehe darin zwei Probleme, für die ‚offiziellen‘ Kategorisierer und die, die diese Kategorien später als Werkzeuge anwenden:

Erstens: Eine strikte Kategorisierung qua Genre hat Probleme mit den zunehmenden Mischformen. Shooter enthalten heute z.B. häufig Adventure-Elemente. Multiplayer-Online-Rollenspiele sind meist sowohl taktische, Aufbau- als auch Gesellschaftsspiele. Sandbox-Spiele, in denen das Spielziel bzw. die Handlungsweisen nicht dezidiert vorgegeben sind (z.B. „Fable“, „Sims“) bzw. die anderer Genres ermöglichen, sowie emergierende, ’neue‘ Genres (z.B. ARGs) sind damit kaum bzw. nicht mehr ‚in Gänze‘ zu erfassen.

Zweitens: Wenn wir die Wirkungsweise bzw. Wirksamkeit von Spielen betrachten wollen, müssen wir – gerade weil es interaktive Medien sind – auch hinter die Bilder und Erzählungen schauen und die verschiedenen Spielmechanismen betrachten, denen sich der/die Spieler/in unterwerfen muss, um erfolgreich zu spielen bzw. überhaupt erst spielen zu können.
Unter der Oberfläche liegen die Grenzziehungen anders: First Person Shooter haben hier mehr mit Autorennspielen zu tun als mit Kriegssimulationen; Aufbausimulationen mehr mit Kriegssimulationen als mit kampfbetonten Multiplayer-Online-Rollenspielen; und die wiederum mehr mit klassischen Gesellschaftsspielen. Weiterlesen →

Serious game „Tiebranimes“ to download

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Nearly ten years ago I attended a seminar about „Kinderspiel – Kinderspiele: Theorie – Empirie“ („Children’s Play and Games: Theoretical and Empirical Views“), where one possible task was to create a learning game. I was flabbergasted that the three other groups came up with – quite adorable, I have to admit – variations of games similar to „Trivial Pursuit“ for pupils: Roll a die, draw a card, answer correctly and go on. This seemed to me like an unfortunately quite realistic representation of schooling.

Depressed and feeling slightly challenged, I and a co-student went to work on a game suitable for students of pedagogy: It should be usable to give new students an overview on historic and contemporary educators, but also deliver a tongue-in-cheek view on the study of educational science in the cogs and wheels of the university.

So, here’s a serious game about historic educators, where you can cook your fellow students‘ goose while competing for the scarce ressource of books in the department’s library. Testplayers enjoyed the game and found the short descriptions, categorisations and quotes on people like Comenius, Flitner, Socrates etc. quite helpful.

You may now download the card game (german texts, 88 cards, rules, and a nifty box to store the stuff) in 300dpi-print quality. This game was my first attempt on an educational card game, a labour-of-love as well as a proof-of-concept: You know, not all learning games have to work like quiz games!

By the way: „Tiebranimes“ can be read backwards, then it spells „Homework assignment“ in german.

First Faculty Research Day

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This wednesday there will be a presentation of projects and initiatives stating research interests of members of our faculty. As it seems, my poster (german) will be up, too, to give a slight and very superficial overview on Game Based Learning and its implications, as expressive medium, ethical playground, experimental simulation, metagame and cultural mirror. The first feedback so far: Nice idea using Tetris. And having a certain yellowpress-appeal in its brutal bluntness. Well, one can do worse, I guess.

All initiatives can be found at
http://www.epb.uni-hamburg.de/de/forschungstag2009.

Topological Metaphors for Structuring Games (I): Storyspaces

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Wey-Han Tan (April 2008)

StorySpaces

Stories give in-game experiences context and contingency. There are abstract games like „Tetris“ or „Add’em up„, which rely exclusively on game mechanism and aesthetics to hold the player’s attention. But in the end, a player of an abstract game can retell it to interested listeners just in terms of general adjectives, and not about the none the less exciting events and situations in it.

Connected to Situated Cognition, Anchored Instruction and Cognitive Apprenticeship, one can say that a gripping story that’s deemed worth to be retold by the player/learner, is also one most likely to be remembered – including the facts and skills contextualised with and situated in it. Weiterlesen →