I've added a new link on the right hand sidebar, to Jesper Juul's blog, The Ludologist.
If you've got time before our next seminar, take a look at his site to get some kind of background to his work.
Monday 5 February 2007
Juul
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I've just read a brilliant text by Juul called "Without a Goal". It's worth a read because it deals with a few things we've been discussing recently over on the thread about scriptwriting.
In it he shows his roots by discussing games as principally ludic practices, rather than situating them within a broader cultural context. But then he goes on more interestingly to talk about some of the non-goal or expressive-goal types of games where the player has more of a personal input into the direction of the game, exemplified by The Sims (which I'd point out is an exception to the generally more linear, goal-oriented games of the Western market.)
Juul also carries on a revealing textual semiotic tendency in his approach to the subject, comparing video games to languages.
He discusses a "complete theory" of video games, but this is conspicuously lacking an embodied cultural position. i.e., this is a principally textual theory, rather than hermeneutic, ethnographic or sociological consideration of the relationships between the game, player and society they're playing in.
Juul's text is also interesting because he seems to be talking about something similar to one form of the narrative 'frame' I mentioned in our other thread. But this definition again only concerns itself with the narrative of the game-world, which is probably the most common sense as its usually understood in videogames: a rather diluted appropriation from other media analyses; a salad accompaniment to the meat of gameplay.
To think of the Tetris Limit again, it makes me wonder about the activity of Tetris fans. Do they produce fan material? Does imagery from the game get used outside the game (IRL) - content spillage from the virtual to the actual! A sure indication that the boundaries to what we consider with a 'complete theory' might need to be re-evaluated.
In an attempt to support this argument, I did a quick bit of googling (did I hear that they're trying to prevent use of that word as a verb? something to do with copyright?) and came up with some goods. Firstly this from Wikipedia,
"Tetris has made its way into the media on several occasions. It was referenced prominently in the video-game oriented cartoon Captain N: The Game Master. It was also referenced in Muppet Babies episode "It's Just a Pretendo", The Simpsons episode "Strong Arms of the Ma", Family Guy episode "Prick Up Your Ears", and Futurama episode "Fear of a Bot Planet". Commercials also occasionally parody the game. Police Academy: Mission to Moscow alluded to Tetris by depicting the Russians trying to hypnotize Americans through a puzzle video game referred to as "The Game" in the movie."
Doing an image search also proved fruitful as I got this funny cartoon, an artistic influence, a Tetris shelf, and it's even had a syndrome named after it.
Go and read the article yourself (it's not too long and has pictures!) and post your thoughts below:
I've just been swotting up on some more Juul material which explain his position on narrative and play/games.
"My background is from literature"
This is a bit of a hint as to the textual nature of his analyses.
"Games exist in a formal/algorithmic domain, stories in a domain of interpretation, and this means that games resist the evocative themes of stories, because they cannot be formalised."
Another interesting explanation for why narrative in games is often disappointing. Juul is arguing from an essentialist perspective, whereby there is supposed to be something integral to interactivity (as formal/algorithmic) which resists conventional narrative expression. This is not quite technological determinism as his discussion includes (ludic) games generally, not just video games.
"I should note that some formal games based on imperfect knowledge, such as card games and especially Poker are formal in their structure, but actually playing revolves a lot around interpreting the signals of the other players. I.e. only humans can do it."
This is the most interesting point for me, and I would argue that while games-as-texts are formal in their structure, their non-formal qualities are equally important. This includes the level of gameplay which occurs above or outside the formal level described by the rules of poker, but also the level of gameplay which exists outside the formal structure of video game code and data: developers create structures and rules for them, but the uncertainty introduced by a human player is a prerequisite for gameplay.
"I want to create a theoretical framework that can tell us A) what is a game, B) what is not a game, C) give us the terminology and distinctions needed to describe historical developments in games."
This is what Juul was working towards during his PhD, and which he clearly succeded in accomplishing. What he didn't attempt was a fuller, cultural analysis of gameplay.
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