:)

games and ludology

If you know anything about me, you know that I don’t play games. Perhaps it was my early start in ballet school when I was 6 that led me to never take part in organized sports or have the time at home after school to play video games. I vaguely remember playing Atari with my friends Rose and Adrianna, but Pac-Man, Kaboom!, and Space Invaders seem so straightforward and innocent compared to The Sims or any of the other games discussed in First Person. Maybe I don’t like rules, although ballet and folk dancing have their own techniques to master, but I’m sure that might be the reason I also liked the Ludology chapter. The intro to this section simply states that these researchers “want to work toward an understanding of new media text on its own terms rather than as a reflection of the already understood.” They want their own discipline to emerge and why shouldn’t it? Isn’t that shiny newness what we like about technology in the first place? And if games are the new entertainment, and cyberdramas the new novels, why shouldn’t we create new theories rather than rely upon others? Of course, that might be me being lazy, antitheoretical, and ahistorical, but because I don’t play games, I don’t know what narratives they might spin or what agency, immersion, or transformation that can occur when sitting on a couch. I don’t mean that to sound as snooty as it does and while I understand remediation as much as the next person, I really like the distinctions Murkku Eskelinen’s makes among the following:
A sequence of events enacted constitutes a drama, a sequence of events taking place a performance, a sequence of events recounted a narrative, and perhaps a sequence of events produced by manipulating equipment and following formal rules constitutes a game (37, emphasis mine).

I could problematize these distinctions, though, and ask can we not consider the act of writing a “game” with its own equipment and formal rules, but I am at work and need to ponder on this a bit more before class. See you soon!

posted by phdaisy @ 3:49 PM