Intellectual Thoughtdump (or Masturbation): On Parsing Games

Sulphur on 4/2/2012 at 18:06

There's this guy whose work I'm ridiculously fond of - Eric Lockaby. He writes intriguing concept pieces on gaming - a (http://nightmaremode.net/2011/06/your-homosexual-lover-is-in-another-castle-a-year-of-interviews-with-jeffrey-auburn-1-6558/) couple (http://nightmaremode.net/2011/08/_____-on-the-planet-x-a-year-of-interviews-with-jeffrey-auburn-2-8751/) of interviews with an indie game dev and his games, who and which may or may not exist, (http://nightmaremode.net/2011/09/deliverance-3ds-review-10226/) reviewed a game that doesn't exist, and proposed that (http://nightmaremode.net/2011/11/gaming-in-the-dark-13092/) everything is interactive.

So you might say he's a bit of a pretentious twat. Well, he's got (http://nightmaremode.net/2012/02/how-you-got-videogames-wrong-3-youre-pretentious-as-shit-16100/) something to say about that too. Not directly, because it fires a tangent off into the gaming ionosphere and silently loops back around to the point. But that's not important: what is is the tangent.

So, in a nutshell, he proposes that interpreting an entertainment medium is the method you differentiate them by; and here's where he makes this point that everybody's going to leap on (with me included, probably): gaming can be differentiated not by the fact that it's interactive, but by the fact that games recreate a certain physicality. Basically he goes one layer up - or down - call it meta-interactivity, if you like.

Problems with this argument: tactility and physicality aren't always what (video) games revolve around. What of a game that marginalises these? Dear Esther, for instance, doesn't have a design that responds to input beyond traversal commands. It's a systemically stripped- and dumbed-down experience, pretty much narrative tied to the physical location of you avatar within the world. Yes, you can read a Dear Esther location and admire its physicality, but that can be reduced to saying that playing it is the same as making your character rub his face on a wall for the entirety of your gaming session

Interactive fiction? A prose tree, of forks and branches, that requires input for narrative traversal. There's no tactility involved, and the physicality of the experience is purely up to the text which, arguably, all linear non-interactive prose delivers.

Unless we mean the act of issuing verbs via a keyboard - pressing buttons - which could work, but strikes me as just an abstraction away from the whole 'interactivity' clause - your verbs can be arbitrary and change at will, be they through pressing keys on a keyboard or a button on a controller, but the fact that you have verbs to input via a control mechanism at all means interactivity.

It also occurs to me that maybe Lockaby hasn't defined this 'physicality' too well. The 'feel' of how a game that responds to you? What's that? Is it similar to that ill-defined crackle of neurons in your brainspace, of how when you feel happy, we're talking about the 'feel' of 'happiness' as a sensation with physical lift when it happens? And 'sadness' -- apart from emotional context, in physical terms, again, are we talking about it feeling like a dull weight in your head? How do you quantify this for a game?

My personal opinion is that communication and the grammar you use defines the interpretation of something as a game: your input verbs are specific, loaded commands that need to be physically made through an interface with the game medium, which of necessity needs to be programmable hardware (otherwise this whole idea becomes broadly applicable to any mechanism in the universe); and that, and the differentiated contextual output you receive from the hardware is all you need to define a contemporary game as a game*. A 'game' programmatically parses your verbs and offers its output as a method of communicating to you within its defined ruleset.

There's probably massive flaws with my view, too. Hell, I know there are. Fuck me, I could be talking about a code compiler for all you know according to what I've just outlined. Even if I put in a predefined restriction like, 'for entertainment', we're going to have to define 'entertainment' in very specific terms. Yeesh. Remind me not to do this again just before I'm about to turn in for the night.

But as something to ponder about, I feel it's a pretty damned interesting topic. And hence the topic on the post. Feel free to discuss if you'd like to.

Whether the word 'game' applies to this is a very different argument, so let me pre-empt the shark jumping here by saying that you might as well accept that the word 'game' is an umbrella term used for convenience to avoid pedantic categorisations of the different varieties of interactive experience possible today.

demagogue on 4/2/2012 at 19:42

I think interactivity is still a core thing, but I think many people talking about it that I read don't think very deeply about what they actually mean by that term. I'd go back to my cogsci & philosophy days and try to integrate a theory of world interactivity with a theory of volition generally. It's not just that some action has a response in the game world. They have to be embedded in some kind of "human purpose space", towards some kind of "meaningful end", what they call semantic frames in cogsci. E.g., if you pushed a button and the screen flickered colors, it'd be "interactive" but the player would be "wtf?" and no one would really consider you "interacting" with the screen. Whereas if you frobbed a door and it opened, it'd be taken for granted as interacting with a door. What we want is a theory that explains that difference IMO.

I think that's an important part that's getting short shrift, probably because people take it *so* for granted they don't even think it's relevant (of course "interacting" with a door means opening it; what else would it do??) when it's one of the most important parts IMO (the very question your theory has to answer is: why is 'opening a door' "interacting" with it and not making it flicker in a glitchy way, where you'd just say it's "broken"?) Of course people do talk about that part. Some of it is captured when people talk about affordance theory (mechanics afford the ability to engage with the world in meaningful ways), but it's a very question-begging theory IMO. It doesn't give a very good explanation by itself why affording purpose X is "meaningful" and not purpose Y. Also there's the issue of what level of grain you want to talk about "purpose"... global meaning (M.O.) vs. local meaning (frob a door, it opens) and all the meaning levels in-between, and how they interact (e.g., how does the player understand "opening a door gets you closer to your MO", and "your MO affects how you want to open this door"? This tangled hierarchy of logical dependence.) Affordance theory can't answer those kinds of questions. The way this guy is talking about "physicality" sounds like another approach, but it's still quite question-begging as to what actually about the physicality makes "interacting" with it meaningfully interactive (... presumably something in the way that humans work, but we need a theory of what that is; that's what's really doing the work.)

So to cut to the chase, I think that the way semantic frames are cognitively constructed & used in human behavior (and the cognitive systems that do that work) gives us a decent theory to work with that isn't question begging. The punchline for me is, I've been reading up on semantic frames & why certain laws (I mean literally in the law books, legal theory is part of what I do) have to be written the way they are to be "meaningful" for human purposes. And I see a lot of parallels with game world mechanics and "rules". Essentially game designers are embedding a "natural law" into their game world (with all the theological, ethical, & legal baggage), and it's in understanding that natural law that makes action meaningful in it, why "completing an objective" is a higher law you feel you have a *duty* to fulfill, and why a lower-level rule like "frob a door to open it" is given meaning in realtion to that higher duty (as the meaning of the higher duty can also in part be constructed to respect the door mechanic.) The theory is: constructing "natural laws", & finding meaning in the world in terms of them, is something brains are designed to do and very embedded in the volitional cognitive systems & their processing on world models (e.g., "chair" design is embedded in the kinematic & volitional cognitive systems involved in "wanting to sit" projects. By projects I mean courses of action that get primed & triggered, e.g., when your legs are tired or in certain social situations giving you, among other things, volitional impulses to go down project courses of kinematic action to the end they're after: sitting down; by "triggered" I mean the relevant semantic frames involved are constructed & operate to trigger project-action in the situations where they're strongly called, like in a meeting or sit-down restaurant situation, and in just those ways that get the agent to the ends of the project they're about. Now just substitute chair-design with game-world design). The brain isn't a tabular rasa; it organizes its world-model into "project" orientations (the semantic frames) and that's what grounds meaning in the world, why rain means get inside and a crying baby needs help -- those nebulous feelings of the "right way things ought to be done or mean" that you mention -- with two main contributions, the architecture we inherit from our pleistoscene ancestors in our DNA (instinctual meaning; fear means freeze or run) & a cultural overlay that "coattails" on that architecture & uses it for its own purposes (linguistic meaning; in a historical religious culture God means for us to go to church; society means for us to get jobs & pay taxes; or more locally, this situation means for me to extend my hand to shake hands at this time because that's the norm that's been burnt into me by that frame and it's jumping up & down for me to do it in this situation). And the tangled-hierarchy effect of frame networks I mentioned (tangled dependence relations) is built into how the architecture works, e.g., the interconnection of the shake-hands frame & doing-my-job-well frame. So many games can package their mechanics to tap into how the semantic frames & project orientation cognitive architecture works, but they also have the unique ability to construct worlds with some of their own natural laws, what we think of as core mechanics, like RPG stats, as if these stats are encoded in game-heaven and have real efficacy (like Papal Bulls had in previous centuries). Explaining game interactivity & meaingfulness would then be a matter of explaining what the "intentionality" cognitive architecture (to use the old technical term for it; anyway, whatever cognitive systems are doing this job) is doing to give gameworld meaning to the player.

Well that's a thumbnail scratch of the direction I might go with a theory on this stuff anyway. I'd have to do a lot of support work just to lay out the basic models to even get to the actual theory. How's that for intellectual dumping?

Edit: I think you edited some parts in after I read your initial post that are connecting with things I'm saying too. Anyway, IMO cognitive linguistics is totally where all the action is right now theory-wise. I recommend the book Evans & Green Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction if you want background reading. It's still missing a lot IMO though. They very rarely if ever tap into any of the neuroeconomics literature (Marr, Glimcher, et al), which I think is the proper core of their theory, since I think the architecture of "volition" is doing a lot of the work giving meaning to meaning (rather than this metaphor business they emphasize so much, still important but not the core thing IMO), so I might recommend Glimcher's book Neuroeconomics too. Start getting into those two fields, CogLing & NeuroEcon, & I think you can talk about game-theory like a pro.

Koki on 6/2/2012 at 07:12

Quote Posted by Sulphur

So... much... Sulphur... must... protect... frontal... lobe

Quote:

Whether the word 'game' applies to this is a very different argument, so let me pre-empt the shark jumping here by saying that you might as well accept that the word 'game' is an umbrella term used for convenience to avoid pedantic categorisations of the different varieties of interactive experience possible today.

Yeah, let's ignore the fact that games are defined by their interactivity... in thread in which we talk about interactivity in games.

What could possibly go wrong?

Renzatic on 6/2/2012 at 07:19

In this thread, Koki uses sarcasm, and secretly wishes all games were turn based.

Mr.Duck on 6/2/2012 at 22:00

Oh, honey, I'll TURN your base anytime, anyplace!

:cool:

And now, back to you, Sulphy.

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demagogue on 7/2/2012 at 01:20
Good lord, just what we need ... Duck-bots! :tsktsk:

Sulphur on 7/2/2012 at 07:14
Koki: was that a brainfart, or did you just not actually read the post?

Yeah, I know -- it's probably both.

dema: I'm going to have to parse that post at work before I can respond. :laff: Seriously, though, that's a loaded set of paragraphs. Lots to think about.

gunsmoke on 9/2/2012 at 15:20
Can we have these stupid bot posts deleted in these threads? They completely disrupt the flow.

Aerothorn on 10/2/2012 at 01:17
Going to give this a full read-through when my brain isn't fried from work, but I'll head straight for the ego-zone.

I was a staff writer at Nightmare Mode when Eric got picked up (during my brief month-and-a-half stint there; sadly I got hired shortly after I joined the team and didn't have the resources to do a weekly feature). And it was AWESOME. They are a great crew, though I'm not sure I ever really fit in; as a lot they were all console oriented and have different gaming tastes than me, and there was a clear difference of perspective and values. Lockaby really shook things up, and brought a lot to the table; and taking a quick gander makes it seem like the site has definitely improved since my tenure (hopefully not BECAUSE of my absence).

Oh: and I know Eric would love it if you'd send this to him!

P.S. Realized that I was thinking of Eric Swain (other NM Eric) when writing this. Though it all applies to Lockaby too, except he joined a little earlier. Hmm.