The Video Game Theory Reader

Mark J.P. Wolf, Bernard Perron, Mark J.P. Wolf, Bernard Perron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135205188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Cultura popolare

In the early days of Pong and Pac Man, video games appeared to be little more than an idle pastime. Today, video games make up a multi-billion dollar industry that rivals television and film. The Video Game Theory Reader brings together exciting new work on the many ways video games are reshaping the face of entertainment and our relationship with technology. Drawing upon examples from widely popular games ranging from Space Invaders to Final Fantasy IX and Combat Flight Simulator 2, the contributors discuss the relationship between video games and other media; the shift from third- to first-person games; gamers and the gaming community; and the important sociological, cultural, industrial, and economic issues that surround gaming. The Video Game Theory Reader is the essential introduction to a fascinating and rapidly expanding new field of media studies.

CHAPTER 1

Theory by Design

WALTER HOLLAND
HENRY JENKINS
KURT SQUIRE

Why game theory? What functions does theory serve during a moment when a medium is undergoing rapid transformation, when it is still defining its aesthetics, its functions, and its audiences? What forms will give theory maximum impact? Does theory serve a different function when a medium is new than when a medium is well established?

If one looks at the emergence of film theory, the most important early work did not come from distant academic observers but, rather, from direct participants. It came from trade press reporters like the Moving Picture World’s Epes Winthrop Sargent who documented cinema’s evolving formal vocabulary and pushed the medium to achieve its full potential.¹ Sargent’s readers were filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors, who made a direct impact on the kinds of films produced. Early Soviet film theory came from expert practitioners, such as Eisenstein, Vertov, Kuleshov, or Pudovkin, who wanted to record and share discoveries made through their own production practice and, in the case of Kuleshov, to train future professionals.² It came from public intellectuals like Gilbert Seldes who wanted to spark a discussion about the aesthetic merits of contemporary popular culture and thus wrote for mass market magazines, not specialized academic journals.³ Theoretical abstraction and distanced observation came much later, once cinema was more fully established as a medium and had achieved some cultural respectability. More specialized language emerged as cinema studies struggled for acceptance as a legitimate academic discipline. In the process, many now feel it sacrificed the potential for dialogue with media practitioners and consumers.

Game theory seems to be teetering on a threshold: many academics want to see game theory establish itself as a predominantly academic discipline, while others seek to broaden the conversation between game designers, consumers, journalists, and scholars. The opportunity exists for us to work together to produce new forms of knowledge about this emerging medium that will feed back into its ongoing development.

Writers such as Gill Branston and Thomas McLaughlin have made the case that academic theorizing is simply a subset of a much broader cultural practice, with many different sectors of society searching for meaningful generalizations or abstract maps to guide localized practices. Branston draws parallels between the productive labor of a car mechanic and the intellectual work of academic theorists: “Theory, always historically positioned, is inescapable in any considered practice. Our hypothetical car mechanic may find her work intolerable, and indeed replaceable, if it consists entirely of behaving like a competent machine. She will be using some sense of the whole engine to fix bolts successfully; she has to operate creatively with something close to theories—those buried traces of theories which we call assumptions or even, if more elaborated, definitions—of energy, combustion. Should she ever want to drive the car she will need maps.”⁴

Theory thus governs practice and practice in turn contributes to our theoretical understanding. McLaughlin writes, “Practitioners of a given craft or skill develop a picture of their practice—a sense of how it is or ought to be practiced, of its values and its worldview—and many are quite articulate about this ‘theory,’ aware for example that there are competing theories, that not all practitioners work from the same premises. These practitioners’ theories may contrast sharply with the theories of their practice constructed by academic theorists. … It would be possible to find the nurse’s theory of disease, the musician’s theory of audience, the computer designer’s theory of interpretation, the athlete’s theory of sport, the bookstore designer’s theory of reading, the casting director’s theory of character.”⁵ Or, one might add, a game designer or game player’s theory of games. Theoretical terms are most often articulated by expert practitioners, McLaughlin argues, during moments of transition or disruption, when existing language prove inadequate to changing situations, common wisdom has not yet been established, competing models demand adjudication, contemporary developments demand new vocabularies, or the practice comes under fire from the outside and has to justify its own assumptions. We ascribe theoretical insights to avant-garde artists, for example, when they push their media in new directions or provide aesthetic rationales for their work. Yet, when a medium is sufficiently new, all works produced are in a sense avant garde—they are mapping still unfamiliar terrain, requiring a heightened consciousness about the medium itself.

McLaughlin’s formulation would suggest, then, that as game designers develop their genre and formal vocabulary, expand their audience, introduce new production processes, or contend with governmental and policy challenges, this “vernacular theory” production will play a central role in their lives. Expert practitioners, such as Eric Zimmerman, Brenda Laurel, Doug Church, Will Wright, Peter Molyneux, and Warren Spector, among many others, have made significant contributions to our early understanding of this emerging medium. Professional conferences, such as the Game Developers Conference, have been at least as important academic conferences in formulating and debating game theory, if not more so. And the gamer community also has been actively and publicly involved in making sense of the medium, its audience, and its impact.

The MIT Comparative Media Studies Program has been actively involved in those public debates about games and game theory over the past several years. We hosted one of the first conferences to bring together academic theorists with game design professionals to talk about the current state and future development of the medium. We have conducted workshops at E3, GDC, and other major industry gatherings, demonstrating how a broader humanistic knowledge of media might enhance game design. Many of our faculty members have participated in a series of workshops with some of the top “creatives” at Electronic Arts, examining such core questions as genre, narrative, character, emotion, and community.⁶ We also have been involved in public policy debates, testifying before governmental bodies, speaking to citizens, educators, parents, and reporters. We are motivated by a commitment to applied humanism—that is, the effort to mobilize theories, concepts, and frameworks from the humanities to respond pragmatically to real world developments during a period of media in transition.

The Games-to-Teach Project represents a new phase in our efforts to provoke discussion between game designers, players, policy makers, and scholars. A collaboration between the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and Microsoft Research, the project seeks to encourage greater public awareness of the pedagogical potentials of games by developing a range of conceptual frameworks that show in practical terms how games might be deployed to teach math, science, and engineering at an advanced secondary or early undergraduate level. Much of the existing work in “edutainment” has focused on the primary grades. We feel games can also be used to communicate more complex content aimed at older players, who now constitute the core gamer market.⁷ Our research has showed that incoming students at MIT are more apt to turn to games for their entertainment than film, television, or recreational reading; many respondents expressed enthusiasm for the idea of mastering classroom content through gaming.⁸ Our group starts from the assumption that educational games need to be inserted into larger learning contexts, not operate in a vacuum. Games can no more turn kids into scientists and engineers than they can make kids psycho killers; our task is to identify what things games do well, and how educators can leverage existing game genres and technologies.

Science and engineering faculty have long utilized digital models, simulations, and visualizations as teaching aids. There is an all-or-nothing quality to visualizations and lecture-style materials, however. Rather than presenting an explanation for a phenomenon (or a canonical illustration of “how things work”), games present players microworlds; games offer players (students) a contexts for thinking through problems, making their own actions part of the solution, building on their intuitive sense of their role in the game world. A gamer, confronting a challenging level, finds personal satisfaction in success—and personal motivation as well, rehearsing alternative approaches, working through complex challenges (often well into the night!). Many parents wish that they could get their children to devote this determination to solving their problem sets—it is an open question, however, whether simply working toward a better grade is an effective educational challenge. Games confront players with limits of space, time, and resources, forcing them to stretch in order to respond to problems just on the outer limits of their current mastery. The best games can adjust to the skills of their players, allowing the same product to meet the needs of a novice and a more advanced student. Indeed, the concept of advancing in “levels” structures the learning process such that players can’t advance without mastery—something that curriculum- and test-designers have struggled to build into their work.

And games can enable multiple learning styles: for example, arts students might better grasp basic physics and engineering principles in the context of an architectural design program. Many of us whose eyes glaze over when confronted with equations on a blackboard find we can learn science more thoroughly when it builds on our intuitive understandings and direct observations, yet many important aspects of the physical world cannot be directly experienced in the classroom. Students often complain that they see few real-world applications for what they learn in advanced math and science classes, yet they might draw more fully on such knowledge if it was the key to solving puzzles or overcoming obstacles in a game environment—if the knowledge were a tool rather than an end. It is both a motivational distinction and a matter of mindset (and what is the object of teaching if not literally to change one’s mind?).

Games model not only principles but processes, particularly the dynamics of complex systems; students develop their own languages for illustrating those systems and grow incredibly adept at explaining them in their own terms. Researchers have found that peer-to-peer teaching reinforces mastery⁹; why, then, do we dismiss such information exchange in the context of gameplay (a website devoted to strategies for a particular game, or picking apart the rules of a simulation to ensure maximum efficiency) as somehow intellectually illegitimate? Such interactions are a critical part of the gaming context, and in the case of educational games, perhaps the most pedagogically important interactions.

Games also may enable teachers to observe their students’ problemsolving strategies in action and to assess their performance in the context of authentic and emotionally compelling problems. Teachers may stage a particularly difficult level during a lecture, comparing notes on possible solutions. And the gaming world represents a rich model for sharable content, putting authoring tools into the hands of consumers and establishing infrastructures for them to exchange the new content they have developed. The question for educators, then, is not whether games could someday work to teach students; they already do so. The question is how to help these two worlds, that of gaming and that of education, to work together.

By design, our conceptual frameworks constitute thought experiments that seek to address core questions in game theory, pointing toward directions still largely unexplored by the mainstream industry. One could draw an analogy between these thought experiments and the early work of the Kuleshov group. For more than a year, Kuleshov taught his students at the VGIK school how to make movies without having any access to film stock; they conceptualized movies, blocked movies, imagined ways of dividing the action into shots, and even reedited existing movies, trying to develop a better understanding of how cinema operates. Kuleshov’s experiments and insights have, however, guided decades of filmmakers as they sought to master the building blocks of film language. Similarly, our students are working through games on paper, examining existing games, brainstorming about future directions, and through this process, trying to address central issues surrounding games and education. As we developed these prototypes, we consulted with game designers, educational technologists, and the scientists and engineers most invested in the content areas, using them as a catalyst to get feedback and insight from practitioners.

We see these design documents as a form of game theory, one that starts with broad conceptual questions but addresses them through concrete examples. In the process of developing these frameworks, we have developed a much firmer grasp of the core challenges and opportunities that will shape the emergence of an educational games market. Operating within an academic space, removed from the immediate need to ship product, we were able to ask more fundamental questions about the medium and to imagine new directions games might take. This essay will discuss four of those frameworks—Hephaestus, Supercharged!, Biohazard, and Environmental Detectives—describing the conceptual and practical challenges we confronted and what we think these examples reveal about the potentials of educational gaming.

The “games” we are describing have not been built—so far—though the next phase of the Games-to-Teach Project involves the development of playable modules that can be tested in educational contexts and the development of a government, foundation, industry consortium that can fund the actual production and distribution of the games. This essay describes games that are in a very real sense theoretical—games that might exist, someday, but whose current value lies in the questions they pose and the directions they point for future development.¹⁰

Remediating Real World Play: Hephaestus

Hephaestus presented the challenge of translating the successful FIRST robotics competition to a digital space. FIRST¹¹ is a “non-profit, educational organization that was founded to inspire and excite young people about science and technology by bringing together professional mentors with high school students from around the country.”¹² Started in 1989, FIRST was founded by Dean Kamen in the hopes that “the act of invention—that is, the work of scientists, engineers and technologists—[will be] as revered in the popular culture as music, athletics and entertainment are today.” FIRST consists of two main competitions—the FIRST Robotics design competition and the Lego League, two competitions in which players design, construct, and operate robots in competitions. While Hephaestus incorporates elements of these other competitions, it is primarily based on the FIRST Robotics Competition.¹³

Every January, the FIRST Robotics Competition pits over 650 teams from nearly every state in the United States as well as representatives from Canada and Brazil. Each team is typically comprised of thirty-five students and an adult men...