Weekly assignment 4: Games, online archives and the value of approaching research from unexpected angles

Dragon Age: Origins

This week we take a look at online archives as research tools, and also go a bit meta as we examine an example of how unexpected research ideas can yield interesting results – or at least how they can make for refreshingly unique articles and arguments.

Dragon Age: Origins is a digital role-playing game by BioWare, published in 2009. In many ways it is a good example of a digital RPG, characterized by rules inspired by old tabletop RPGs and a plot owing very much to the traditions and tropes of fantasy literature. Despite leaning on such traditions, Dragon Age: Origins also introduced fresher takes on its genre. For example, the deep relationship system in the game allowed players to become attached to their characters in ways many felt unprecedented. Being a complex game with inspiring game design, Dragon Age: Origins has been frequently touched upon in digital culture research.

One shared aspect of the studies made of the game is that there really seems to be no fixed methodological, thematic or theoretical angle from which the game is approached. Dragon Age: Origins has been studied by a wide variety academics with various backgrounds and research interests. As such, it is an interesting game to use in examining, how games – and digital culture in general – can be studied from unexpected viewpoints. The key to doing research isn’t always what you study but how you study it.

You do know Monty Python, don't you? Otherwise this photo will make absolutely no sense to you at all.

One of the more surprising, but also interesting, approaches to Dragon Age: Origins is Alice Henton's article Game and Narrative in Dragon Age: Origins: Playing the Archive in Digital RPGs, in which Henton approaches Dragon Age: Origins as a playable archive, a game with a digital database at its heart, and constructs an argument about how the game leans heavily on archives, both in its game mechanics and in its narrative elements. Henton also mentions "external archives", stores of data created outside the game, such as online help files, strategy guides and lore collections, that lend further credibility for her argument that digital games are inherently archival.

The article might be a bit arduous to read for all its abstractness but it's certainly worth it, if only for the way Henton uses an unexpected research angle to offer a unique way of looking at Dragon Age: Origins.

ASSIGNMENT
1) Read Henton’s article Game and Narrative in Dragon Age: Origins: Playing the Archive in Digital RPGs. You'll find it from the email I sent you.

According to Henton, an archive is a good concept for examining games both metaphorically and concretely. But just as games have archives in them (as underlying databases and diegetic journals and diaries written by the player character), there are also vast fan-made archives made of games. These collections of information are often important for players but scholars can utilize them as well. To study how game mechanics work, and from what sort of single objects the game is made of, fan-made archives offer a good source of information to access even if you don’t have the game at hand.

2) Find a fan-made archive of a game (or choose one from the links below), pick a single page from it and write a short description of what you picked and what its relation to the game is.

The page you pick can be anything; a snippet of in-game fiction, a description of a single game mechanic, or an item or other such single element of the game. After choosing, navigate the archive long enough to learn as much as you can about your chosen topic and how it relates to the larger context of the game.

For example, if you chose a monster from a game, I expect you to know how difficult it is to best, whether there are any preferred strategies for beating it and so forth. I want to see you have some level of understanding of how the element you picked relates to the game. Also, I’m interested to hear if you managed to find enough information by using only the single archive site, or if you needed to look up information elsewhere.

3) As a purely optional bonus assignment in case you find the first part trivially easy or merely want to reflect on the topic while trawling through the archives: While doing the assignment, keep in mind what Henton wrote. After you’ve finished your archive run, use your hands-on experience to briefly examine Henton’s argument about games and archives.

As per the usual instructions, try to stay somewhere around 500 words but feel free to write more if you like, and email your answers to me by 3.12.

LINKS
You can choose the archive freely but here’s a list of some well-known places if you don't want to spend time looking for one.

A good example of a fan-made archive is WoWWiki – The almost 100,000-page wiki of the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, and one of the largest wiki projects aside from Wikipedia itself. The Dragon Age wiki is also a good place to start, especially after having learned a bit about the game fron Henton's article. Other good places to look are the Demon’s Souls wiki, the Ace Attorney wiki and the Elder Scrolls wiki. Usually the wikis have a “random article” link you can peruse if you want the fates to decide what element of a game to investigate.

Passage in 10 seconds

I have a terrible nagging feeling that this week's assignment is nowhere near as interesting as last week's. As consolation I offer you Passage in 10 seconds, a rather good satire of the game we played last week.

Hang on, you've done well so far!

Weekly assignment 3: Supernatural ambassadors of agency

If last week was about players and their interpretations of games, this week is all about interacting with game characters. Just as last week, the focus is still on players engaging with games, but this time we'll concentrate on a specific part of that engagement: In the very centre of studying games and human interaction is the dilemma of the player character as something that is part of the game and part of the player.

Bob Rehak has eloquently summarized the weird binary role game characters have between the game and the player:

"[The avatar's] behaviour is tied to the player's through an interface: its literal motion, as well as its figurative triumphs and defeats, result from the player's actions. At the same time, avatars are unequivocally other. Both limited and freed by difference from the place, they can accomplish more than the player alone; they are supernatural ambassadors of agency." (Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar, 2003)

And indeed, it's difficult to say how much of our actions in games are dictated by the rules and limitations imposed on us by our characters. But it's just as difficult to say to what extent our characters are independent from us, instead of being merely our representations and tools in a digital world.

For example, the original Super Mario never spoke, thus emphasising action instead of dialogue, so you might argue that Mario encouraged the player towards an action-oriented approach to the game. Yet I remember several occasions when players abandoned the action in favour of a more relaxed and action-free exploration to see what the creatures of Mushroom Kingdom were doing, making Mario more of a laid-back pacifist than anything else. Which is the real Mario, and does it even matter?

ASSIGNMENT:
In his article Telepresence, cinema, role-playing. The structure of player identity in 3D action-adventure games [PDF] Rune Klevjer sketches a theory of three kinds of identities at play in action-adventure games. Likewise, In his book My Avatar, My Self: Identity in Video Role-Playing Games Zach Waggoner posits a three-point identity model for digital role-playing games, based on the work of James Gee. [PDF] (Read the little chapter titled Gee's Virtual, Real-World and Projective Identities)

Read both texts and compare the models and, naturally, feel free to comment on the other points raised especially by Klevjer. Which of the models do you think explains the interaction between the player and the character better, or do you think they complement each other? The models are for specific genres of games, but do you think they are applicable to other games as well?

If you wish to ponder about your relationship to game characters in practical terms, you can try One Chance, a game about what choices you would make if the world was ending, and see how you relate to the protagonist. Or you can draw from your experience with Passage. They're not ideal platforms for this topic (these short games rarely allow much characterization), but they might give you some ideas anyway.

And though I hope it's obvious, I'll nevertheless state it here: I expect no knowledge of games or of game-related theories from you. I'm interested in what you get from the two aforementioend texts, and how that relates to what you already know of games, regardless of the depth of that knowledge. So, read the texts and tell me what thoughts they raised.

As you already know, stay somewhere around 500 words and email your answers to me by 26.11.

Exam date

Hark, a vagrant is a web comic everyone interested in contemporary digital art should check out. It has nothing to do with the exam except that it happens to conveniently portray my delight in having the date finally settled.

As none of you voiced a complaint at the announced exam date, I assume it works for you. Brilliant!

The exam is on Thursday 13th of December, from 12.00 to 14.00 at seminar room Virkkunen (E104). No need to register. Just be there on time, and there will be someone there to hand you your question sheets.

Email me if you have any questions regarding the exam.

Weekly assignment 2: A hands-down with playing and studying games

Passage by Jason Rohrer

What is the essence of games? Is it the rules or the act of playing? The rules make the game what it is but the act of playing ultimately blows the spark of life into an otherwise inert rule system.

The answer, I am sure, is somewhere in between (or maybe nowhere near at all), and it is exactly this conundrum that you get to examine during this week's assignment.

Jason Rohrer is a California-based game designer known for his thoughtful approach to game design. His third game Passage, released in 2007, garnered a fair amount of attention for causing strong emotions in many players.

The game was made for the Gamma 256 design challenge and as such it follows the strict guidelines of the challenge: The graphics are minimalistic and the whole game takes no more than 5 minutes to play through. Yet it has been widely regarded as a good example of clear and beautiful game design. In a very compact package it showcases many of the strengths and possibilities of game narrative.

Miguel Sicart is a game studies scholar who has specialized especially on the ethics of digital games. In his article Against Procedurality he raises a point about how important it is to not only understand the rules and systems of a game but the players and the players' playfulness as well.


ASSIGNMENT
1) Download Passage for free from the game's website, or get it for your iOS device from the App Store (0,79€). Play the game through, then read Rohrer's statement about the game and play Passage again, or at least reflect what you read against your playing experience.
2) Read Against Procedurality by Miguel Sicart.
3) Write about your experience playing Passage, and about how reading the author statement affected (or did not affect) your interpretation and emotions. Based on your experience with the game, what do you make of Sicart's question: "If rules contain the meaning, what is the need for an author statement?"

Once again, keep your word count somewhere around 500 words (don't worry about going over the limit if you have more to say on the topic, I don't mind), and email your answer to me by 19.11.

Some Notes

A note on Passage. I've yet to hear of any computer unable to play the game. If you, however, have trouble getting it to work, contact me and we can work something out. Also, when playing Passage, keep in mind Rohrer's hint regarding the game:

"General Hint: The game only lasts 5 minutes. If you don't get the point at first, please keep playing."

A note on Against Procedurality. The article focuses a lot on theories of game studies that I am not in any way expecting you to be familiar with. Read Sicart's article for his arguments and the big picture he paints. You don't need to pay attention to the specific theories and details unless you explicitly wish to.

A note on deadlines. Has everyone turned in their assignment from the first week? If you still haven't, please do so as soon as possible. Don't make me start posting deadline-related internet memes, because I totally will.

Weekly assignment 1: Introduction to games and game studies

Jesper Juul: Half-Real

Jesper Juul is one of the heavy-hitters in the field of Game Studies. In his seminal book Half-Real Juul jotted down a proposal for a basic theory of video games. The book deals with what digital games are, what their relation to games in general is, and how the whole process of playing a game works. The book is an excellent introduction to the study of games, both analog and digital alike, as well as an interesting window into the particularities of researching digital culture.

If you're at all interested in games, I heartily recommend reading the whole book. But for our purposes the introduction will suffice.

ASSIGNMENT: Read the introduction [PDF] to Juul's book Half-Real to get acquainted with the topic of games and their study. After reading the introduction, write a small piece of personal reflection on your own gaming history. You can concentrate on just one recollection, or create a larger set of reflections.

Here are some (entirely optional) questions you can use to get started:

• Do you have fond memories of a particular game?
• How have your gaming habits changed over the years? What did you play as a child vs. what are you playing now, if anything?
• Are you currently engaged with a game you feel passionately about and if you are, how does it compare to games you've played before?
• Have you played board games?
• Did you ever figure out the rules to Minesweeper or Hearts – the two classic games that have come bundled with the Windows operating system since forever? Or better yet, have you ever played them in any capacity?

Also, do keep in mind that gaming and playing are very much in the same semantic domain, so feel free to discuss any forms of games-related or game-like play you can think of, be it with digital games or at, for example, a playground.

Keep your word count somewhere around 500 words (roughly one page), and email your answer to me by 12.11. I accept any common file formats but .doc and .rtf are preferred.

Happy reminiscing!

Hello, everyone!

Pay no mind to the disarray. I'll fix things up before Monday :)

Welcome to the other side! I hope you enjoyed the lecture (or at least didn't find it utterly traumatizing) and are ready to start working on the course assignments starting on Monday, 5.11.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me via email: johannes.koski@utu.fi, or leave a comment on this blog. It ought to be possible without any kind of registrations or other hurdles

In case you want to try out Asteroids, one of the old games I discussed on the lecture, you can find a rather good version of it here. I think the playing area is a bit smaller than in the original but otherwise it's about as close as it gets.

Oh, and for all of you who are unfamiliar with Uuno Turhapuro (and wish to torment themselves with a dreadful morsel of Finnish pop culture history), here's Uuno's Wikipedia page. And this is how he looks in action:

I felt it my duty to enlighten you about Uuno since I mentioned him during the lecture and so few of you were familiar with him. I'm afraid our souls might never recover from seeing that video. Sorry.

Anyway! Check back on Monday, and I hope you'll enjoy the course!