September 12
So I've recently taken on a small 'serious games'
project, my first of the type. And I've started doing
some research.
It all starts with... what the heck does 'serious games' mean, anyway?
Well from my very limited, outsider's perspective, I'm going to give it a try.
Ludemes
'Ludeme' is a pseudo-Latin word derived from "ludus" (Latin for "game"). This term has been coined and adopted by academics looking for a framework to study games, most notably Jesper Juul and Gonzalo Fresca. Using the Latin tradition, a "ludeme" would be a basic, core element of a game, such as how a "phoneme" is a basic element used to construct spoken language. Games are then constructed out of a variety and collection of ludemes (we often call this "game mechanics") to create the engaging, interactive experience.
Ludology, then, is the study of these ludemes, and how they come together to form a game, and to form the meaning that a game contains for its user. A direct contrast would be 'narratology' (another invented term), which is the study of meaning constructed from narrative. Much education in the humanities is focused on meaning derived from narrative, and rightly so. Narrative is unquestionably one of the most powerful and important ways the species has understood its world.
It's tempting I think, because narrative is usually the first and most powerful way we come to understand meaning, to apply narratological structures of understanding to any medium. Understanding musical "ideas" requires a study into unfamiliar territory, and the creation of a somewhat artificial language (which, interestingly, is a blend of narrative and mathematical languages) to describe the ideas. But we have become accustomed to the notion of "ideas" being present in music which have relevance and meaning, but no particular narrative content.
Especially since abstraction took real hold in visual arts, the same can be said for these disciplines. It's impossible to look with an open mind at a Pollock painting and not see meaning and ideas (as it turns out, Pollock's splatters were discovered many years after his death to be almost perfectly mathematically fractal). Yet, there is certainly no story to a Pollock painting, or a Kandinsky, or Jasper Johns...
So, we have ludemes to describe ideas in games outside of narrative.
This does not mean that narrative and games are necessarily a poor mix. Like music has opera, and painting has Broadway Boogie Woogie, games very frequently have engaging stories, and this is a good thing. But this is not the fundamental element of a game.
Serious Games are about Ludemes
Which leads me, in a roundabout way, to talk about what serious games are, or at least my simple understanding of what they might be. Serious games are using these ludemes to express or communicate ideas other than just entertainment.
Serious Games are not Simulators
I'm on a judging committee for an annual game design award, and this past year, the Microsoft Flight Simulator was submitted for consideration. After some discussion, we concluded that the flight sim, though immensely impressive in execution, is ultimately not a game. Though aspects were added to this year's version to make it more of a game, notably a 'mission' structure, it still didn't meet the threshold. Which I suppose begs the question, what is a game after all?
Games and simulators work on very different areas of the brain, and are distinct. An interesting point on this was made recently by a study by Dr. James Rosser who discovered that playing commercial videogames was actually a better predictor of good performance in laparoscopic surgery than even past experience. Clearly the games work in a special way on the brain.
I believe that games work in this way because of their encouragement of experimentation and risk-taking. Think for example of familiar board games like Monopoly or Chess. These games are abstract simulations of a capitalist economy, and a complex battlefield. But because they are played in the context of a game, the players can experiment and take risks in a way that is discouraged in a simulator.
Games and Bad Behavior
Games also allow the player to do things which would be considered inappropriate in real life, and even in a simulator environment. So though the excesses of Grand Theft Auto immediately come to mind, there is an opportunity as well to do things that are outside of the bounds in a different way.
A game I've been really impressed by is Defcon: Everybody Dies. In this game - not coincidentally similar to the old movie Wargames, the player engages in the remarkably bad behavior of planning for a nuclear annihilation. Attempting to get a high score at this game gives one an eerie sense of how seductive planning for an actual nuclear exchange must be.
More recently, I discovered September 12, which is pitched as a 'newsgame'. Though the game is four years old, it's certainly still relevant. This game plays something like an interactive political cartoon - it takes a strong point of view that belligerent response to terrorists tends to lead to destruction, death, and moreover, more terrorists. You might agree or disagree, but that's the whole point - it's a game which has a point of view, and this point of view is communicated via the ludemes of the game. Here are some examples:
- There is a substantial delay between the launch of the missile and its strike, allowing civilians to cross into the path of the missile. At first this causes you to curse the civilians, then you realize they're just wandering, going about their business. Very effective.
- I discovered that a good strategy is to level the buildings, so that you don't kill civilians who are occluded behind the buildings. Definitely a political point behind that ludeme.
- The latency between attacks (clearly communicated using a stopwatch metaphor) forces the player to listen to the disturbing crying woman audio, and to watch the generation of new terrorists.
- I found that another good strategy if you really wanted to kill terrorists was just to try to make the whole population terrorists. Then you could shoot away and pretty much only hit terrorists. Hmm.
Games are Still Entertainment
Like I said, this is all new to me, and I'm curious to learn more. But I find these examples fascinating, because they go far beyond just applying game technology to known simulator problems. It seems to me that the best way to understand the difference between simulators and serious games is to remember that games are entertainment, and that entertainment succeeds when it has a point of view... an author. And it turns out that games are surprisingly good at communicating certain ideas, especially raw sort of emotional ideas, that are unclouded by character or story or other narrative inclusions.
Good stuff.
It all starts with... what the heck does 'serious games' mean, anyway?
Well from my very limited, outsider's perspective, I'm going to give it a try.
Ludemes
'Ludeme' is a pseudo-Latin word derived from "ludus" (Latin for "game"). This term has been coined and adopted by academics looking for a framework to study games, most notably Jesper Juul and Gonzalo Fresca. Using the Latin tradition, a "ludeme" would be a basic, core element of a game, such as how a "phoneme" is a basic element used to construct spoken language. Games are then constructed out of a variety and collection of ludemes (we often call this "game mechanics") to create the engaging, interactive experience.
Ludology, then, is the study of these ludemes, and how they come together to form a game, and to form the meaning that a game contains for its user. A direct contrast would be 'narratology' (another invented term), which is the study of meaning constructed from narrative. Much education in the humanities is focused on meaning derived from narrative, and rightly so. Narrative is unquestionably one of the most powerful and important ways the species has understood its world.
It's tempting I think, because narrative is usually the first and most powerful way we come to understand meaning, to apply narratological structures of understanding to any medium. Understanding musical "ideas" requires a study into unfamiliar territory, and the creation of a somewhat artificial language (which, interestingly, is a blend of narrative and mathematical languages) to describe the ideas. But we have become accustomed to the notion of "ideas" being present in music which have relevance and meaning, but no particular narrative content.
Especially since abstraction took real hold in visual arts, the same can be said for these disciplines. It's impossible to look with an open mind at a Pollock painting and not see meaning and ideas (as it turns out, Pollock's splatters were discovered many years after his death to be almost perfectly mathematically fractal). Yet, there is certainly no story to a Pollock painting, or a Kandinsky, or Jasper Johns...
So, we have ludemes to describe ideas in games outside of narrative.
This does not mean that narrative and games are necessarily a poor mix. Like music has opera, and painting has Broadway Boogie Woogie, games very frequently have engaging stories, and this is a good thing. But this is not the fundamental element of a game.
Serious Games are about Ludemes
Which leads me, in a roundabout way, to talk about what serious games are, or at least my simple understanding of what they might be. Serious games are using these ludemes to express or communicate ideas other than just entertainment.
Serious Games are not Simulators
I'm on a judging committee for an annual game design award, and this past year, the Microsoft Flight Simulator was submitted for consideration. After some discussion, we concluded that the flight sim, though immensely impressive in execution, is ultimately not a game. Though aspects were added to this year's version to make it more of a game, notably a 'mission' structure, it still didn't meet the threshold. Which I suppose begs the question, what is a game after all?
Games and simulators work on very different areas of the brain, and are distinct. An interesting point on this was made recently by a study by Dr. James Rosser who discovered that playing commercial videogames was actually a better predictor of good performance in laparoscopic surgery than even past experience. Clearly the games work in a special way on the brain.
I believe that games work in this way because of their encouragement of experimentation and risk-taking. Think for example of familiar board games like Monopoly or Chess. These games are abstract simulations of a capitalist economy, and a complex battlefield. But because they are played in the context of a game, the players can experiment and take risks in a way that is discouraged in a simulator.
Games and Bad Behavior
Games also allow the player to do things which would be considered inappropriate in real life, and even in a simulator environment. So though the excesses of Grand Theft Auto immediately come to mind, there is an opportunity as well to do things that are outside of the bounds in a different way.
A game I've been really impressed by is Defcon: Everybody Dies. In this game - not coincidentally similar to the old movie Wargames, the player engages in the remarkably bad behavior of planning for a nuclear annihilation. Attempting to get a high score at this game gives one an eerie sense of how seductive planning for an actual nuclear exchange must be.
More recently, I discovered September 12, which is pitched as a 'newsgame'. Though the game is four years old, it's certainly still relevant. This game plays something like an interactive political cartoon - it takes a strong point of view that belligerent response to terrorists tends to lead to destruction, death, and moreover, more terrorists. You might agree or disagree, but that's the whole point - it's a game which has a point of view, and this point of view is communicated via the ludemes of the game. Here are some examples:
- There is a substantial delay between the launch of the missile and its strike, allowing civilians to cross into the path of the missile. At first this causes you to curse the civilians, then you realize they're just wandering, going about their business. Very effective.
- I discovered that a good strategy is to level the buildings, so that you don't kill civilians who are occluded behind the buildings. Definitely a political point behind that ludeme.
- The latency between attacks (clearly communicated using a stopwatch metaphor) forces the player to listen to the disturbing crying woman audio, and to watch the generation of new terrorists.
- I found that another good strategy if you really wanted to kill terrorists was just to try to make the whole population terrorists. Then you could shoot away and pretty much only hit terrorists. Hmm.
Games are Still Entertainment
Like I said, this is all new to me, and I'm curious to learn more. But I find these examples fascinating, because they go far beyond just applying game technology to known simulator problems. It seems to me that the best way to understand the difference between simulators and serious games is to remember that games are entertainment, and that entertainment succeeds when it has a point of view... an author. And it turns out that games are surprisingly good at communicating certain ideas, especially raw sort of emotional ideas, that are unclouded by character or story or other narrative inclusions.
Good stuff.
|
GDC Talk is Available
May 14, 2007 production methods
Permalink
After a long absence, there's an update on methodblog!
Hopefully more are to come. It's been far too long.
Meanwhile, I have some material for you to check out, based on the talks I've given recently at the DICE and GDC conferences.
First, a video of the DICE talk has been posted at AOL videos here:
http://video.aol.com/video/aol-gamedaily-dice-lectures-7-michael-john/1857347
The DICE speech was my first ever public talk, so it... wasn't great. But the quality is very good, and it got this whole ball rolling so worth checking out.
Second, you can get a copy of the audio from the GDC talk here:
http://store.cmpgame.com/product.php?id=2110
I also put the slides up as a flash file on my own website here:
http://www.methodgames.com/gdc/
The audio and the flash files go quite nicely together btw.
Last but not least, I re-wrote the "Apron Strings" portion of the GDC talk and published it as a .pdf file here:
http://www.methodgames.com/gdc/mj_gdc_2007.pdf
The file there is only half the presentation (it omits all the discussion of a union), and is kind of rewritten and abridged from the actual talk. But the key points are in there.
Enjoy!
Hopefully more are to come. It's been far too long.
Meanwhile, I have some material for you to check out, based on the talks I've given recently at the DICE and GDC conferences.
First, a video of the DICE talk has been posted at AOL videos here:
http://video.aol.com/video/aol-gamedaily-dice-lectures-7-michael-john/1857347
The DICE speech was my first ever public talk, so it... wasn't great. But the quality is very good, and it got this whole ball rolling so worth checking out.
Second, you can get a copy of the audio from the GDC talk here:
http://store.cmpgame.com/product.php?id=2110
I also put the slides up as a flash file on my own website here:
http://www.methodgames.com/gdc/
The audio and the flash files go quite nicely together btw.
Last but not least, I re-wrote the "Apron Strings" portion of the GDC talk and published it as a .pdf file here:
http://www.methodgames.com/gdc/mj_gdc_2007.pdf
The file there is only half the presentation (it omits all the discussion of a union), and is kind of rewritten and abridged from the actual talk. But the key points are in there.
Enjoy!