Understand. Think. Then write. – Jennifer Hartshorn's blog for Major Debates in English Studies

Paper #6: Scholarly Identity, or “Wait, You Can Get a Degree In That?!”

Shakespeare....because Shakespeare is fun, at least if you're me. — Shakespeare….because Shakespeare is fun, at least if you’re me.

My journey to becoming a PhD student in English focusing on Game Studies has been convoluted. As a Master’s student, I focused on Professional Writing because that was my career, and Renaissance Drama because…well, because I enjoyed it. After a successful career that included game development, web design, professional writing/editing, and corporate communications, I started teaching first-year composition. When the opportunity arose to start a PhD program, my thought was to combine my teaching experience with my background in game design to develop educational games that would teach critical thinking skills. My investigations into this field have complicated matters, but I believe there is still a path toward that goal. However, it is one no less convoluted than the one that has led me here.

“Game Studies,” specifically the study of video games, is a relatively new field, one that has attracted scholars from many different disciplines. Formal study as a coherent field is typically traced to Aarseth’s “Computer Game Studies: Year One” article, which stakes out a place for games as an “emerging, viable, international academic field.” As such, a knowledge of professional practices and theory, which served me well in professional writing, is not enough. Likewise, knowing theater, literature, theory, and history, which I used effectively in Renaissance drama studies, is of little help here. My particular flavor of game studies may require a knowledge of composition theory, theories of learning and development, literary theory, psychology, and education (especially common core and the politics thereof), but also game design theory as a whole, the “canon” of popular and niche games, computer programming, visual rhetoric, digital rhetoric, and a host of other fields. Of course, few if any people can claim mastery of all these things, and I don’t claim that I will in the next fifteen or so semesters. But as an interdisciplinary field, unless I am going to stay in one tiny corner (which many successful scholars admittedly do), I need to have at least a passing familiarity with the majority of those subjects.

Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

There are many objects of study that can serve as a focus for game studies from an English studies perspective. My initial interest long before I applied for this program was the changing nature of “narrative,” in an environment where the reader/player/end-user is an active participant in the creation of the story. Janet Murray’s book Hamlet on the Holodeck (1999) is one of the works that kicked off Game Studies as a field of formal academic study, and it remains an area I am very interested in. The kind of skills I want to teach – research and critical thinking – benefit from an engaging, immersive narrative, where the player/student feels that their choices have real meaning and impact. Without narrative (and in some cases, even with it), we are left with little more than a low-stakes multiple choice test, the pedagogical utility of which is a subject of much debate and skepticism.
Other English/Game Studies scholars have focused on the role of writing in games, such as Dr. Kevin Moberly. However, as he rightly notes in his article, “

Other English/Game Studies scholars have focused on the role of writing in games, such as Dr. Kevin Moberly. However, as he rightly notes in his article, “Composition, Computer Games, and the Absence of Writing,” with the development and prevalence of more sophisticated VOIP technologies, the written word is becoming scarce in gameplay as players and designers alike rely more on the spoken word and sound design to convey messages among and to other players. There are many auxiliary texts to games, such as message boards, strategy guides, and player-created resources like wikis, and they may be useful subjects of analysis to see how players generate written content about gameplay, but it remains to be seen how relevant these informal documents are to gauging the average player’s skill with more formal writing or problem solving, since these tend to be created by only the most hardcore fans of a game.

Relatively late in this course, I discovered the world of Dr. Ian Bogost of Georgia Tech, through a mutual acquaintance. I confess to being more than a little embarrassed at having not been more familiar with his contributions to the field, and my only excuse is that I had been more laser-focused on articles than books. I have since remedied that, and found that his work on “procedural rhetoric” to be relevant to my own interests in a number of ways, not least of which is the way games have a rhetorical message to the player, whether intended or not. I believe that further study of his work may yield important insights into how educational games can be used to teach skills like critical thinking, and I look forward to delving further into this idea.

While I have encountered resistance to the idea of games in education in discussions with game developers, educators and game scholars alike, I see their objections more as obstacles to be overcome than brick walls. Gaming professionals have found it difficult to generate interest from schools or the general public in educational games beyond the preschool level, but I found in discussing this with developers at the SIEGE Atlanta ’16 conference that few of them had an understanding of core curriculum standards for different subjects and grade levels, and thus could not demonstrate and apples to apples correlation between the skills presented in their game and the skills students were required to master in particular classes. With an understanding of both game development and education, I believe that this is something that I can address more effectively than those who are only familiar with a single perspective.

The games I have enjoyed as a player, and have worked on as a developer, are highly immersive and require a significant investment of time on the part of the player. This time can be shortened to some degree with good design, but to achieve genuine engagement with the game itself requires more time than is typically available in a grade 6-12 class period, and educators might be understandably concerned about assigning hours of gameplay as homework. I think this can be overcome, however, especially as more content is delivered electronically and expectations for screen time as part of education continue to expand. To set up an interesting scenario takes time, and

Telltale Games' — Telltale Games’ “The Walking Dead” takes an average of 12.5 hours to complete

if the game is not enjoyable, at least to some degree, playing it will be just another rote exercise that students do not want to do. But perhaps that is part of the disconnect between designers and educators – the relationship between time invested willingly vs. unwillingly, engaged or obliged. In “The Motivation of Gameplay,” Marc Prensky states, “Remember, game designers focus primarily on motivation; educators don’t. The most important thing that educators can learn from game designers is how they keep the player engaged.” And that may be the area in which I can contribute the most.

I think ODU’s program is uniquely suited to the subjects I need to learn more about to pursue this path as a scholar, allowing me to delve deeply into both the composition pedagogy and new media areas I need to learn more about. However, I am going to have to do significant work above and beyond my coursework – learning Unity and/or Unreal, getting familiar with the “canon” of games, and learning as much as I can about the business and development of games, as well as the scholarly literature. The good news is that, as a game designer myself as well as a scholar, I already have some degree of credibility with both sides of that divide, and a significant network of contacts to draw on. There is a lot of work to do, but I feel like I have both a plan for how to get there, and more importantly, a real contribution that I can make to both scholarship and industry. I know there are frustrating times ahead, and more work than I have ever had in my academic career. But I have now what I have lacked in other programs: a genuine purpose, and a calling.

Aarseth, Espen. “Computer Game Studies – Year One.” Game Studies, vol. 1, issue 1, 2001. Web. 20 Sept. 2016.

Moberly, Kevin. “Composition, Computer Games, and the Absence of Writing.” Computers and Composition 25.3 (2008): 284–299. Web. 15 Sept. 2016.

Prensky, Marc. “The motivation of gameplay or, the REAL 21st-century learning revolution.” On The Horizon, vol. 10, no. 1 (2002). Web. 14 Dec. 2016.

Paper #5: Objects of Study

Because Game Studies is both new and interdisciplinary, with scholars from many fields each focusing on the elements that relate to their own specialty, there are many objects of study, ranging from the technical, programming aspects and gameplay to the impact of the art and visuals, the spoken and written words, and the subculture (and economy) that has grown up around gaming. It is an exciting field to be working in, and in many instances the interdisciplinary nature allows scholars to go outside their comfort zone, to study things that are not exactly in their wheelhouse, but can be approached in a similar manner – or those that are familiar, but can be studying in a different way. Since the direction I am coming at this field is through English Studies, I will look at two of the most common approaches to study: the way narratives are constructed and the pedagogical underpinnings of using games in education

Creation and Communication of Narrative

One area of focus is the game’s narrative, or story. Of course, part of the reason games are so effective at storytelling is that they can use written and spoken text, music and sound, moving and still images and, of course, gameplay and mechanics in service of the story. Because the story is interactive, the player becomes more invested in and engaged with the story than they would as a strictly passive consumer of print or video media. Of course, different games will apply each of these elements in different ways.

One example of a game that benefits from both literary and rhetorical analysis techniques from an English Studies perspective is the Game of Thrones game

Screenshot - Telltale Games' Game of Thrones Dialogue Choices — Screenshot – Telltale Games’ Game of Thrones Dialogue Choices

by Telltale Games. As the following video shows, the designers use the full range of cinematic tools at their disposal to tell the story, and the inclusion of voice acting from several of the TV adaptation’s lead actors increases the sense of immersion. In addition, the player has to make both dialogue and action choices along the way, as well as there being a limited skill element, where players occasionally have to rapidly touch a particular spot on the screen (to punch someone in the face, for example, or put out a fire), which adds a sense of urgency. All of these elements are ripe for exploration by scholars, and allow the application of multiple approaches and theoretical backgrounds.

Games in Education
The impact of video games on education has received a great deal of attention. As previously stated, some people have focused on superficial “gamification” tactics, but game scholars have delved much more deeply into how people learn, and how games can be both informational texts and teaching tools, either

Onscreen text from Civilization V's "Civilopedia" — Onscreen text from Civilization V’s “Civilopedia”

analyzing existing games as objects of study (for example, Civilization to teach history, World of Warcraft to teach economics, etc. or “literary games” as studied by Astrid Ensslin), or developing new games. While the latter is certainly an area of interest for me, it strays into more interdisciplinary territory rather thanbeing more rooted in English Studies. In defining the OoS for Education, the focus is on what skills are applicable in an academic setting that are “taught” through the medium of the game, and the means by which the game encourages mastery of those skills.

In the case of games in English education, much of what is studied relates to any form of written text accompanying the game, whether it is on screen conversations among players, “help” text, in-game signage and interface labeling, or accompanying texts (written gameplay documentation, player or company-created strategy guides, etc.). These texts can be studied to determine what content is being conveyed, what a player’s mastery of that content is, and how the delivery method – the game itself, through storyline, mechanics, graphics, etc. – contribute to the learning process. Kevin Moberly’s essay, “Composition, Computer Games, and the Absence of Writing” addresses the way that real time audio chat eventually eclipsed written chat formats in online games like Warcraft, while also addressing the rhetoric and communication going on through non-written means, through the way the player crafts an identity for their character and the choices that they make. Likewise, Alexander’s “Gaming, Student Literacies, and the Composition Classroom” explores the paratexts that evolve alongside games, including strategy guides, wikis, message boards, and other peripheral game-related texts.

History/Future
Because the field of Game Studies is so heavily dependent on technology, as new tools and platforms are developed, so too will now objects of study present themselves. Virtual Reality gaming is becoming more widespread and affordable to consumers, and the success of Pokemon Go! has renewed interest in Augmented Reality Gaming. The history of the field has largely responded to the development of new delivery platforms and new styles of gaming (strategy, FPS, story-based, hidden-object based) as their popularity ebbs and flows, and so the field will have to continue to evolve just as rapidly.

Additional Resources:
Virtual Reality Gaming
CNBC provides a quick overview of virtual reality gaming.

Augmented Reality Gaming
Though best known for her book Reality is Broken and its explorations of the potential for gamification across education and many other industries, Jane McGonigal also holds a PhD in Performance Studies from UC Berkley. Her “I Love Bees” transmedia narrative showed the potential for gaming as promotion, serious gaming, and games that go out into the world beyond the computer.

McGonigal’s TED Talk on using gaming to change the world.

Gamification
While gamification is beyond the scope of this essay, it is an important concept in both gaming and education (and draws heavily on the work of Jane McGonigal). In this video, Extra Credits reviews the advantages and disadvantages of the approach.

Paper #4: Theories and Methods

Because the field of Game Studies includes scholars from many different disciplines, the methods and theories of research are as varied as the approaches. It is, therefore, impossible to select a single theory or method of analysis as being dominant. A mathematician who studies their field’s version of game theory may focus on probabilities, analyzing the game engine’s method of determining failure or success in any given conflict. An economist may look at the out-of-game impact of Korean gold farmers on both the in-game and out-of-game economies. Sociologists have found fertile ground in gaming communities to study how the anonymity of online gaming impacts harassment, or how in-game gender effects interactions among characters. All of these are equally legitimate and authoritative within their own communities, and it is evident from the way that game scholars reference work in other fields that it enriches the interdisciplinary nature of the field. However, it seems that the “home” discipline from which a scholar approaches game studies largely determines what methodologies and theories they will apply to their chosen objects of study. While Aarseth’s dream of a “native” theory of game studies, divorced from its component fields, is not realized, we have traveled further in recent years than it seemed possible at first.

Of course, my own approach is grounded in English Studies, so the same theories common in analyzing literature are often applied: semiotics, discourse analysis, Marxist-tinged analyses of economies of power relationships, feminist or queer theory approaches to the gender of players and characters alike, and many more. Discourse analysis is one useful tool for studying interactions within games, and the way those interactions shape the player’s experience of the game world. Although Hendricks’ “Incorporative Discourse Strategies in Tabletop Fantasy Role-Playing Gaming” focuses on tabletop RPGs, he uses Fairclough’s model of discourse analysis to explore the way that players interact to collectively create a narrative, codeswitching between player and character speech and adopting an almost improvisational “yes and” approach to world building. Similarly, Bourgonjon, et al utilize Burke’s Pentad of dramatic analysis to explore meaning-making and narrative, also drawing on Bogost’s procedural rhetoric as a means of analyzing how game mechanics communicate meaning to players, and the ways designers can use mechanics to steer players down a particular narrative path.

As a woman who is both a player and a designer, I am not blind to the impact of my gender on my own experience, and the experience of other women who play and create games. As a result, a feminist critical perspective can also provide important insights into gaming, as a player, a designer and a scholar. While studies have reported similar results on what percentage of all gamers are women (48% in 2014 according to a Wall Street Journal article, and a 47:53 female to male ratio according to a 2012 Entertainment Software Association survey), a level of harassment and sexism exists in the gaming industry that is shocking enough that it has made national news, in the form of “Gamergate”. But for all the women who play games, and the amount of outrage on social and mainstream media, there

Adrienne Shaw's "Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture" — Adrienne Shaw’s “Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture”

remains a paucity of clearly feminist-aligned game criticism (as opposed to cultural criticism) in the field. Shaw’s Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture , for example, addresses gaming from the perspective of cultural studies and feminism – essentially, studying gamer culture but not games themselves. Due to a host of cultural factors, men and women may experience gameplay, and certainly experience game culture, in different ways. Even if my own work does not explicitly address gender, understanding the feminist criticism that exists – and the reasons why there is not more of it – will inform and enrich my own scholarship.

Part of what makes Game Studies such an exciting field is the depth and breadth of disciplinary approaches to the objects of study. As a scholar of English Studies, and one with an especial interest in utilizing games as a tool to teach the skills underlying effective writing – critical thinking, research, and communication – the tools I use will no doubt be heavily influenced by my own background as a scholar of literature and a practitioner of writing education, and as my own studies deepen into composition pedagogy, I look forward to adding those theories and methodologies to my tool box as well. If anything, the sheer range of approaches makes the field somewhat intimidating, but the multiplicity of perspectives and approaches means that the field of game studies will continue to evolve alongside the games themselves.

References

Entertainment Software Association. “Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry.” 2012. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.

Grundberg, Sven, and Jens Hansegard. “Women Now Make Up Almost Half of Gamers.” Wall Street Journal 20 Aug. 2014. www.wsj.com. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.

Hendricks, Sean Q. “Incorporative Discourse Strategies in Tabletop Fantasy Role-Playing Gaming” in Gaming as Culture: Essays on Reality, Identity and Experience in Fantasy Games (eds. J. Patrick Williams, Sean Q. Hendricks and W. Keith Winkler). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Inc, 2003. Print.

Further Reading – Feminism and Game Studies

Pop culture website The Mary Sue on applying feminist criticism to video games.

For a very different perspective, check out Breitbart’s article on “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart”.

Gaming journalist Anita Sarkeesian’s video on the Feminist Frequency website criticizing female depictions in video games led to her receiving death threats at the height of the Gamergate scandal:

PAB #8: Discourse Strategies in Tabletop Fantasy Role-Playing Games

Gaming As Culture: Essays on Reality, Identity and Experience in Fantasy Games

While the majority of my articles thus far have focused on computer-based games, the bulk of my own gaming experience is actually with other forms of gaming – namely tabletop roleplaying games and live roleplaying games. While video games rely heavily on the use of graphics and sound created as part of the game’s programming to establish the atmosphere, tone, and environment, a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) is played, as the name indicates, by a group of players sitting around a table. One of the group members is the Game Master (or GM, sometimes also referred to as Dungeon Master or Storyteller), while the others are players. Random number generation to determine success or failure at combat and other challenges are determined typically by dice, but the bulk of the work to create the game’s world, all communication among characters, as well as communication between players and game master to say what actions the characters are taking, are accomplished through

Fairclough (1992)'s model of discourse analysis — Fairclough (1992)’s model of discourse analysis

speaking and listening. As a result of this, TTRPGs are particularly well suited to using critical discourse analysis (CDA) techniques to better understand the shared world – and therefore consensus – building among the players.

In Sean Hendricks’ “Incorporative Discourse Strategies in Tabletop Fantasy Role-Playing Gaming,” he uses critical discourse analysis, but also post-structuralist theory to examine the way the participants work collaboratively to create a narrative. While video games, including massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) are frequently competitive, setting player against player (PvP) as well as player against the environment (PvE), tabletop games are typically primarily played with a team of player characters going up against obstacles and foes created by the game master. Hendricks explains that post-structuralist analysis and CDA are predicated on the assumption that “elements of the social space, such as organizations, institutions, social categories, concepts, identities and relationships are determined by language use” and that “individual selves and identities are constantly restructured and repositioned through discourse” (40). As such, TTRPGs and the accompanying books that serve as source material are, perhaps, even more fertile ground for exploration from an English Studies perspective than are video games, given that the world building is collaborative among a group of people, and is created entirely through language, rather than computer graphics.

To put TTRPGs into the contexts I have previously explored in game theory, there is an undeniable emphasis on story, and game mechanics serve purely as a means of conflict resolution when character abilities that involve interaction with obstacles or antagonists arise. There is no game engine to govern movement, for example; the player describes the character’s actions. As such, games of this sort have ludological elements, but are often slanted very heavily toward narrative. Within that, there are games that skew further to one side or the other; Warhammer was

The Warhammer RPG grew out of a miniatures wargaming system, and battles between armies remain a major part of the roleplaying version of the game.

primarily a miniature combat wargame that eventually evolved to have a roleplaying component as well. On the other side of the spectrum are White Wolf’s aptly named Storyteller system games, including Vampire: The Masquerade, Wraith: The Oblivion, and others.

The analytical part of Hendricks’ article analyzes selections of a voice-to-text transcript of a gaming session in which he was the game master, and there were four players. He provides examples of using “discourse to create a shared culture, or set of beliefs and understandings about the fantasy frame” (43), and explores the linguistic repercussions of the way players switch between first- and third-person pronouns when describing their actions, as differentiated from and contrasted with in-character speech. Hendricks address this, stating that “the ambiguous usage of ‘me’ and ‘you’ by players during game play indicates a blending of player and character that can signal a level of extension by the player into the game world” (41).

Even the game’s mechanics and setting are learned through language, often by reading rulebooks and players’ guides which often dwarf the kind of documentation provided to players of computer games, where visual cues and the kinetic experience of interacting with a game controller of some kind allow the player to learn-by-doing, without necessarily translating their observations and actions into written or spoken language. Surprisingly, perhaps, the amount of scholarship on TTRPGs is small in comparison to what has been written about video games, although the comparative popularity of computer games, as well as the sheer economic weight of the industry compared to tabletop games is doubtless a major factor. Prior to the turn of the millennium, games were often not seen as appropriate objects of study for academics beyond the occasional social scientist. However, TTRPG gameplay may prove to be a fertile area for study for those who wish to approach computer game design from an English Studies point of view, or on its own as a way of examining the collaborative process of world building, immersion and engagement.

Further Reading:

For anyone unfamiliar with TTRPGs in general, Crash Course has an excellent 10 minute video explaining the concept, as well as some of the colorful history of the hobby.

James Wallis’s “Making Games That Make Stories” argues that in TTRPGs as well as computer games, “the essential plot and structure of the narrative is predetermined before the game begins and cannot be altered” (para. 1). First published in 2007 in Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, it is reproduced in full on electronicbookreview.com.

PAB #7: From Counter-Strike to Counter-Statement: Using Burke’s Pentad to Analyse Video Games

Bourgonjon, Jeroen et al. “From Counter-Strike to Counter-Statement: Using Burke’s Pentad as a Tool for Analysing Video Games.” Digital Creativity 22.2 (2011): 91–102. Web.

In From Counter-Strike to Counter-Statement: Using Burke’s Pentad to Analyse Video Games, Jeroen Bourgonjon et. al. use rhetorical theory, and

Burke's Dramatic Pentad: Act-Agency-Scene-Purpose-Agent — Burke’s Dramatic Pentad:
Act-Age-Scene-Purpose-Intent

specifically Burke’s concept of the pentad as a methodological tool for the analysis of video games. Rhetorica.net describes the pentad as a series of questions, stating that “Burke believed that all of life was drama (in the sense of fiction), and we may discover the motives of actors (people) by looking for their particular type of motivation in action and discourse.” From the perspective of narratology, then, this provides a useful way of looking at the reasons behind the actions people take in video games. The authors also explain that utilizing the pentad can help the researcher to understand the game from multiple perspectives, including that of the designer (author) and the player (reader).

The authors also use what Ian Bogost terms procedural rhetoric, which they define as, “based on meaning making through the selective simulation of speciﬁc rules. Games do not as much persuade players by telling them things (games as representations), but rather by confronting them with the results of their actions through the game rules” (91). Published in 2011, this shows one of the ways the field has moved past narratology and ludology into a methodology that uses game mechanics, or rules, as a way of communicating meaning, which in turn is given context through the narrative being told by the game.

Ian Bogost, researcher and author of "Persuasive Games" — Ian Bogost, researcher and author of “Persuasive Games”

What is most fascinating about this article is the way in which it applies traditional English studies methodologies and theories as a way of analyzing games. The statements made by early game researchers that games were too important to be left to scholars of other disciplines is squarely put to rest by this, as the authors utilize traditional rhetorical theory, dramatic analysis theory first applied to literature, and Bogost’s procedural rhetoric notion, which was first explained in Persuasive Games: the Expressive Power of Video Games (MIT Press, 2007), which is considered seminal in modern video game scholarship. Procedural rhetoric, as applied to this situation, addresses gameplay as a form of procedure, that can then be applied for rhetorical purposes.

I also found their recap of other existing methodologies (all aligned with the ludology side of the force) for analyzing games especially helpful, as they reference Aarseth, with whom I was already familiar, but also works by Konzack, whose approach focused on the analysis of, “hardware; program code; functionality; gameplay; meaning; referentiality; and socio-cultural aspects,” (98), as well as Maillet who suggested that the analysis of a game may include more than just gameplay, such as walkthroughs, cut scenes, and forum postings, thereby expanding the scope of games as objects of study.

Bioshock, the popular first-person shooter with overtones of Ayn Rand and George Orwell

The authors utilize Burke’s pentad as a way of seeing “ratios,” or relations between different aspects of a game – in this case, Bioshock. In their conclusion, they show how this kind of analysis can be used in education, and to connect the analysis to curricular goals.

Ultimately, this article provides an analysis model that includes both rhetorical theory and traditional literary theory to analyze gameplay and storytelling, using the tools of multiple sub-fields within English studies to better understand one of the most popular games of the last decade.

Additional Readings:

Professor Andrew Cline’s site, Rhetorica.net, defines a number of useful concepts, including “Burke’s Pentad: Dramatism.”

Bioshock is the primary focus of the article, and this wiki entry covers the basics of the game.

Ian Bogost’s website, covering his books, games, and research.

Paper #3: Epistemology

My first job after graduating from Wesleyan University was as a tabletop roleplaying game designer at White Wolf, and it was there that I developed what has remained a pillar of my own approach to game design: namely, the idea that game mechanics – the rules by which the game is played –

Vampire: The Masquerade roleplaying game (1991)

must meld seamlessly with the themes and setting of the game. In the game Vampire: The Masquerade, the core theme is the struggle between “The Beast” (one’s vampire nature), and one’s “Humanity.” These are primarily abstract roleplaying concepts, however, so in order to make the game more than purely narrative, the game assigns two key statistics to each character – their blood pool, and their Humanity score. Let the blood pool go too low (due to wounds, using vampiric abilities, or not feeding), and the character frenzies, loses control, and the evil acts they commit lowers their Humanity score. Of course, this is a simplification, but the core mechanic of the game supports the theme, determines the kinds of stories that will be told, and guides the player’s roleplaying.

How does this relate to epistemology? When game studies were formalized as a field of academic study, the two opposing camps were narratology and ludology – in essence, focus on story or mechanics. The latter does not preclude the presence of story in games, but it does require there to be game elements there for something to be considered a game. Of these two epistemological perspectives, I align myself more closely with narratology, as ultimately I find the story more interesting. Coming from an English studies background, that is the toolbox I am accustomed to using.

As I read more deeply on narratology, however, I recalled my own background. You can tell players that it’s important to the story to do something – retain one’s Humanity, for example – but if you do not attach a number, a game mechanic to it, they are free to ignore it. Mechanics are how you tell the player what is important, and what you want them to do. My own approach as a game designer, then, is a melding of narratology and ludology: the mechanics exist to guide the story. As a scholar of English studies, my approach is to look at the mechanics and gameplay through the lens of the story; the way that the game is played is a part of the story, whether that is the narrative being created by the game’s designer, or the self-created narrative of the player: the story of their character’s adventure in the world of the game. While not identical, my method is very similar to that of Harrison Pink, who puts forth a model of game design in which the designer identifies the feeling they want to evoke first, and the rest of the game design process is guided by that.

Of course, not every game has a story, and defining what should be considered a game was one of the earliest disputes among scholars of game studies, and as new forms of games are created this definition must be constantly reevaluated. I enjoy Spider Solitaire and Word Streak with Friends as much as the next GenXer, but when it comes to academic objects of study (OOS), I prefer games that have story as a central element. My ultimate goal is to create games that will teach critical thinking and research/documentation skills, and the best way to do that is by getting the player (student) invested in the story being told. To be successful, the game mechanics have to seamlessly fit the setting and convey to the player what is important, what their goals are, and how to achieve them.

Game journalist Brianna Wu threatened on Twitter during #gamergate

As a secondary approach to study, I somewhat reluctantly align myself with feminist theory. Gender is something of an elephant in the room when it comes to video gaming in particular, whether it deals with who plays what kind of game, design for specific demographic groups, or the industry-wide collective dumpster fire that was Gamergate. As designer, I want to believe that the games I create can be enjoyed by anyone regardless of gender; as a scholar, I know that we have not yet evolved as an industry or a subculture to the point that we can be blind to something that is so divisive in the games and communities I study. To understand the way we play and use games, we first have to understand who “we” is, and gender differences are relevant to this; thus, applying feminist theory will give important insights into the way we play, design, and criticize games.

Pink, Harrison. “Can I Borrow a Feeling?” Gamasutra.com, 3 Mar. 2013. Web. 14 Oct. 2016.

Hartshorn, Jennifer, Ethan Skemp, Mark Rein*Hagen and Kevin Hassal. Vampire: The Dark Ages. Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1996. Print.

Additional Readings:
Extra Credits’ episode on Harassment addresses the issue of bullying in the gaming community, and while it predates Gamergate, the victims of harassment in and out of the game are often women.

Quantic Foundary examines what type of gameplay is most interesting across genders and ages, and finds that the desire for competition is a higher priority for male, younger gamers, while strategy games appeal to people across all age groups and genders.

Vampire: The Dark Ages (1^st Edition) is my most well known game, and adjusts the mechanics of the basic Vampire game to fit a different setting. In it, we sought to make the mechanics and the setting/story meld seamlessly, which shapes my approach to both ludology and narratology.

Wraith: The Oblivion (2^nd Edition) was the first game I developed. Well, not entirely true – first edition is now out of print, which was my game; the second edition was developed by my successor, Richard Dansky. It’s far from the perfect game, but it’s not bad for someone who was new to design.

The Only Guide to Gamergate You Will Ever Need to Read is the Washington Post’s summary of the scandal that rocked the gaming industry and pulled back the covers on the widespread misogyny within the industry and the subculture.

PAB Entry #6: “Game-Based Curricula, Personal Engagement, and the Modern Prometheus Design Project”

Barab, Sasha, Patrick Pettyjohn, Melissa Gresalfi, and Maria Solomou. “Game-Based Curricula, Personal Engagement, and the Modern Prometheus Design Project.” In Games, Learning, and Society: Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age, edited by Constance Steinkuehler, Kurt Squire, and Sasha Barab, Cambridge UP, 2012, pp 306-326.

In “Game-Based Curricula, Personal Engagement, and the Modern Prometheus Design Project,” authors Barab, Pettyjohn, Gresalfi, and Solomou explore the possibility of basing an entire curriculum around games. Their ideal curriculum “involves trajectories or missions that include rich storylines, multiple tasks, …and interactive objects…that require the player to make conceptually informed choices” (307). The game that they created is a single player exploration of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which the player is exploring the world of the novel, and must solve problems make both practical and ethical choices that have persistent impacts on the game world.

Key terms they establish early on include intentionality (player choices impact meaningful goals), legitimacy (methods utilized are relevant beyond the context of the game), and consequentiality (player actions have a meaningful impact on the game world). When all these elements are present, they term this kind of participation transactive engagement. This term captures an important element in any immersive experience – the notion of the transaction, which makes the player an active participant and not merely a spectator.

Intentionality is important, because without a context, goals are not meaningful; busy work is work for the sake of work, without a purpose. Legitimacy is something that is gaining widespread attention in education, because if students do not see a real world application for a skill, if it seems like something abstract that just has to be learned because there will be a test, they will not engage with the skill as deeply. If they see transferrable applications, and have the opportunity to use the skill in context, there is a greater potential for deep learning. Consequentiality is something that requires extremely responsive game design, which means time and money on the development side. For that reason, many games do not have persistent environments – but setting a game in a persistent world where player actions can have meaningful, lasting impacts on the environment and the responses from other characters increases immersion and engagement.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the basis for the — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the basis for the “Modern Prometheus” game

While much of the article understandably deals with the specifics of their Modern Prometheus project, it’s iterations and why they made the choices they did in its creation, the part that is the most interesting to me is the way that they establish the educational value of immersion and engagement. They state that “supporting transactive engagement involves fostering a deep sense of immersion in which the learner enters into a situation conceptually and perceptually, has a goal, has a legitimate role, and engages in actions that have a consequence – whereby both the learner and the situation with which he or she is engaged become transformed” (307). By getting the player to buy in to the game setting, rather than remaining detached from it, their choices have context and meaning.

There are many techniques that can be used to create that sense of the game world having meaning and consequences (some of which are also addressed in Extra Credits’ “What Makes Us Roleplay” below), but this feeling can also be fostered by everything from the interface design to the soundscape players hear, and the art style they are seeing. The game’s mechanics also play into this, although these elements are not explicitly addressed by Barab, et al. Ideally, these elements are all so seamlessly integrated into the game experience that they are not consciously perceived, because to do so brings the player out of the experience and makes them aware of the artificiality of the environment. For players, and students, to feel that their choices have meaning, they need to be invested in the game world.

Additional Watching and Reading
The Extra Credits episode “What Makes Us Roleplay” deals with immersion and how games make the player’s choices matter. Roleplaying (taking on the personality of a character that may or may not make the same choices that they would in a real world situation) can be a distraction from learning in some situations, but the design choices dealing with it also create an immersive environment in which the decisions you make impact the game world – the consequentiality described by Barab, et al.

Marshal G. Jones’ (apparently?) unpublished paper, “Creating Engagement in Computer-Based Learning Environments” is what it says on the tin – an exploration of how designers get players engaged and invested in learning games. Jones explains that in this case, engagement refers to “the notion that the program makes the learner want to be there.”

The Education Business Blog has an article on an early iteration of the Modern Prometheus game.

PAB Entry #5: Harrison Pink’s “Can I Borrow a Feeling?”

Pink, Harrison. “Can I Borrow a Feeling?” Gamasutra. 2014. http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HarrisonPink/20140303/212088/Can_I_Borrow_A_Feeling.php

While Harrison Pink’s article is written from the perspective of a designer as opposed to a purely academic critic, his practical and pragmatic approach is informed by years of successful game design, as well as an academic grounding in the MFA program in Game Design and Development at the Savannah College of Art and Design, placing him among the rare designers who can speak to both theory and practice with equal credibility. His design process is very similar to that used by designers at White Wolf, a primarily tabletop roleplaying game company where I worked in the mid-1990s, which made it of particular interest to me.

At the SIEGE 2016 conference in Atlanta, Harrison Pink gave a presentation titled “Crafting an Experience: Designing a Game Feelings First.” It was a slightly expanded version of an article he published on the Gamasutra website in 2014, prior to his being hired in his current position at Hangar 13 Games. In both, he presents a new perspective on one of the ongoing debates within game studies – which is more important (or, alternately, which comes first): mechanics or theme?

Successful games have been developed that began from either choice, though each presents its own challenges. Pink suggests that rather than starting from either of these, the designer should instead start with the question of what feeling(s) they want to elicit in the player. Ultimately, feelings drive engagement, and engagement leads to continued play and increased enjoyment. Pink states that, “Every design begins with the goal of evoking a specific feeling from the player. A game uses both the theme and mechanics to evoke that feeling.” Whether you prioritize story or gameplay more (and most successful AAA titles include both), an understanding of what feeling you want to elicit from the player will guide successful development of both.

Theme - Feeling - Mechanics diagram — Rather than theme and mechanics supporting each other, Pink suggests that both support feeling instead

Pink references the widely praised MDA model of game design explored in “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research” by Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubec, which focuses on Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics. In it, the authors explain that the order in which designers create games using these elements is the opposite of the way that players experience games. In his piece, Pink reframes dynamics as theme, and feeling replaces aesthetics. However, as seen in the triangle diagram above, Pink’s model does not fit the linear format of the MDA framework. This is a somewhat misleading equivalency; dynamics are significantly broader than specifically theme, and have a clearer relationship to mechanics. Likewise, aesthetics can and do strongly influence the feelings that are generated as a result of gameplay, but it would be inaccurate to imply that mechanics and theme create aesthetics. Pink’s reinterpretation of the MDA model, while dealing with similar components, reinterprets the design process and does not address the player experience.

Although I don’t believe that the game design process can ever be entirely simplified down to three components, Pink’s model is a useful one. In many, if not most circumstances, one of the primary drivers for the creation of a game may be market analysis and business expediency, which can lead to early determinations of elements of theme, mechanics, or feelings (though given that the latter is not as easy to quantify in a business analysis, it is less likely to be a stated objective). These business requirements place expectations and restrictions on the development process. Constraints can spur creativity, though, and these requirements may lay out a framework, but the design process is necessary to go from business objective to game concept.

The value of player engagement, and the study of how to create that connection between player and game, is one of the great challenges facing the industry right now, and is an important foundational concept for my own interest in creating educational games. Designing “feelings first,” as Pink puts it, gets the player invested, and students who are engaged with material can achieve mastery much more quickly than if they are learning out of a sense of obligation, resentment, or the threat of failure. Whether or not the reader buys into Pink’s vision of the design process or the more traditional MDA model, his argument about the value of feelings in determining a player’s enjoyment of a game provides an important missing piece in the ongoing struggle between story and mechanics.

Further Reading (and Watching):
From Stanford University’s Interactive Media and Games Seminar Series, Katherine Isbister from the Center for Games and Playable Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz discusses her book, How Games Move Us: Emotion By Design

Wired‘s “Her Story and Papers, Please are changing gaming forever” describes two recent games that are designed to evoke strong emotions in the player.

EDIT: Late breaking addendum! SIEGE just posted a few of their sessions online, including Harrison’s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ7pljOIO9Q&feature=share

Paper #2: Big Questions

The field of computer game studies is a relative newcomer to the scholarly landscape, but it is not without controversies. Even the words used to define the field have been challenged, defined and redefined – is “computer game” the best term, when many of these games are played on game consoles and phones? Is “game” accurate, if no skill or agency is involved?

If we trace the formal study of game studies to the late 90s, as established in my previous paper, one of the earliest conflicts with the field was between the camps of Narratology and Ludology. Jasper Juul, writing in 2001, laid out the differences between games and stories, which essentially came down to the idea of interactivity. A story is something you consume passively, while a game is something in which the player (no longer just a reader) is a co-creator of meaning. He allows that there is a role for the study of narrative in games, but states that, “relying too heavily on existing theories will make us forget what makes games games: such as rules, goals, player activity, the projection of the player’s actions into the game world, the way the game defines the possible actions of the player. It is the unique parts that we need to study now”. When combined with Aarseth’s statement that games are “too important” to be left to the scholars of other areas, the ludologists staked out their territory. Leave narrative, an inessential part of games, to the literature and film studies people. They were going to address the more important aspects of games – the structural elements that helped to define something as a game.

Janet H. Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace focused on the evolving role of narrative, though at that time the struggle between narratologists and ludologists was in full swing. Her title is important, though – she was examining the future of narrative, and already in 1997 allowed for not only the possibility but the necessity of it becoming interactive. Rather than the “game” elements being the main point and any narrative elements merely providing a context or pretense for the gameplay, Murray, although limited by the technology at the time when explaining what was possible at the time, incorporated science fiction elements into her prediction of the future direction of narrative. Cyberspace was a far cry from virtual reality, and further still from Star Trek’s holodeck, and Murray’s book dealt explicitly with interactive stories, which need not necessarily be games. Given the definitions they were working with at the time, the two camps’ positions make sense. But in the nearly two decades since then, our definition of what a narrative is has shifted.

Certainly, there are still people who take an arguably formalist approach and focus on games-for-games-sake, but as the role of storytelling is acknowledged in fields far beyond games – marketing , health literacy, and education – denying the value of storytelling in games becomes more difficult. In the years since ludology was first established in contrast to narratology in the study of games, fewer and fewer articles have been published. The initial conflict – whether or not games had stories – is less of a focus, because the definition of narrative has expanded. While Juul explained some fifteen years ago that games were not simply narratives, because narratives lacked interactive elements, the goalposts have been moved. It is generally accepted that narratives can be interactive. That doesn’t mean that things like mechanics and gameplay do not matter – on the contrary, they have been subsumed as part of the overall definition, and now are the vehicle through which stories are made interactive. Even in Henry Jenkins’ 2006 article “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” the line has blurred, and game elements are pressed into service to create narrative spaces, in which a non-linear narrative can be uncovered by players as they move through the game space.

Carolyn Handler Miller's Digital Storytelling: A Creator's Guide to Interactive Entertainment — Carolyn Handler Miller’s Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment

Carolyn Handler Miller’s book, Digital Storytelling is subtitled A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment. Storytelling is now interactive. Narratives can allow for agency on the part of the reader/player/end user. Rather than focusing on games, the book explores the nature of interactive stories, with a primary focus on what you can do with them, and how they can be applied to the burgeoning field of transmedia storytelling.

The more pertinent question now seems to be not whether or not games have stories, but how stories can be used in combination with other game elements to create an immersive experience, in which the player (for lack of a better word) is invested in the outcome. Not only does this deepen the player’s connection to the game’s outcome, this can be transferred to apply to a consumer’s connection to a brand, a student’s desire to master a skill, or countless other interactions that apply to games, but also beyond them. In spite of some early game theorists’ desire to stake out their own territory separate from that of other fields, the floodgates are open, and computer games – which always incorporated multiple disciplines in their creation – now are a part of countless other industries. There is certainly still a role for game theorists, but meaningful contributions can now come from many fields, and the work of game studies scholars has implications far beyond that of entertainment. Game elements and story elements are both pressed into service into the creation of interactive narratives, of which traditional computer games are one among several forms that they can take.

Sources and Further Reading

Aarseth, Espen. “Computer Game Studies – Year One.” Game Studies, vol. 1, issue 1, 2001. http://gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html. Accessed 20 September 2016.

Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”. In The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, Ed. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. MIT P, Cambridge, MA, 2006.

Miller, Carolyn Handler. Digital Storytelling (3^rd ed.). Focal Press: New York, 2014.

Juul, Jesper. “Games Telling Stories?” Game Studies, vol. 1, Issue 1, 2001. http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/ Accessed 5 October 2016.

PAB Entry #4: “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” by Henry Jenkins

Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”. In The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, Ed. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. MIT P, Cambridge, MA, 2006.

In the introduction to “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” Henry Jenkins states that when first presented at a conference, the essay, “provoked strong reactions from the so-called Ludologists and resulted in my being falsely (in my opinion) identified as a Narratologist.” He goes on to explain that his ideas are more centered on game spaces, “ripe with narrative possibility,” while story itself can be deconstructed as “less a temporal structure than a body of information.”

While he devotes considerable time to finding common ground between Narratologists and Ludologists, his primary point is that games are spaces. This is true whether it is the board of Monopoly, which he alludes to, or the vast outer space reaches of the 2016 release No Man’s Sky, with it’s 18 quintillion planets to be explored. While he says that he was “falsely” lumped in with Narratologists, the main gist of his article does deal with narrative – but not necessarily linear narrative. His description of games, or perhaps ideal games, allows for a great deal of player agency to discover a narrative and piece it together on their own, rather than being forced on rails to live the narrative themselves, along a linear path that the author/designer wants them to follow. He explains the game world as “a kind of information space, a memory palace,” if the designer intends a more linear path, or a space in which the player can “explore the game space and unlock its secrets”. Either way, it is about discovery of an existing story, rather than the player character’s own heroic journey.

Screen shot of — Screen shot from “No Man’s Sky” (2016) showing one of the many alien planets that players can discover and explore.

He cites the work of Don Carson, who has written on the lessons game designers can take from the work of theme park designers, observing that “the art of game design comes in finding artful ways of embedding narrative information into the environment without destroying its immersiveness and without giving the player a sensation of being drug around by the neck.” This single sentence encapsulates what is perhaps the most important concept in this article as a whole – the importance of immersion in the experience of a game, the need for player agency in

Image from interior of Disney's — Part of the physical space that Guests walk through in line for Disney’s “Expedition Everest,” demonstrating the storytelling power of detailed space design.

exploring an environment and uncovering the story for themselves, and the reason why standard models of narrative borrowed from literary and film studies are of limited use when applied to (some) game stories. And while some resist (and others embrace) the idea of games as “art”, in a traditional sense, Jenkins is speaking more of artful design – the creation of something functional in a way that is seamlessly integrated into its environment, as opposed to something that stands out as unique within its own context.

Interior of Disney's — Another interior image from Disney’s “Expedition Everest” ride, creating an immersive environment for Guests waiting for the ride.

While some games do have linear stories, and some have no stories at all, if a designer wants to tell a story that is unique to the medium of game design, it is necessary to do so using a framework that goes beyond that of traditional print and motion media.

So while Jenkins seemingly bristled at the idea of being called a Narratologist, his perspective is an interesting middle ground, seemingly doing exactly what Aarseth calls for in his essay “Computer Game Studies, Year One”. While Jenkins is interested in the idea of narrative (with a small “n”), which would cause some to place him in with the Narratologist camp, his concept is decidedly non-linear and as such goes beyond what traditional scholars of narrative could apply existing models to. Just as Aarseth has challenged game scholars to carve out their own niche, independent of existing fields, Jenkins has done just that.

The article situates the field of game design studies as being separate from, but arguably both complimentary and adjacent to that of English studies. While his concept of narrative spaces is unlike the linear narrative structure familiar to scholars of literature, and even that of nonlinear hypertext narrative, English scholars who are open minded enough to look beyond existing theoretical models will find fertile ground in analysis of these narrative spaces. Within the bounds Jenkins sets in this article, he defines a theoretical space between Narratologists and Ludologists, outside of the domains of literary and cinema studies scholars, but also scholars of computer science, animation, and art. His notion of narrative space works equally well to imagine a flag being planted in a new domain belonging to computer game theorists.

Additional Reading
The ubiquitous Extra Credits video I’ve paired with this deals with “Negative Possibility Space” – dealing with player agency and how that relates to the physical space being explored by characters.

Jenkins mentions The Image of the City, a book dealing with city planning and urban design, as being useful for designers in understanding how people live, work, and play in designed spaces.