Introduction: Games as a field
The world is changing. The world, of course, is perpetually changing, but ours is a time of impressively sudden, and varied, and deep shifts. And our age is one in which technology is often the bellwether of these cultural transitions. From miniscule microchips spring visions of the world that challenge, enthrall, and delight us, expanding our sense of our ever-expanding world.
At some time in the not so distant past, most people were content with being passively entertained. More than happy to comply, writers of the page and of stage and of screen would spin linear yarns of great, and sometimes not so great, sophistication; makeup would be applied, sets would be scouted, music would be composed, all to grip the heart and captivate our reclining bodies. Today, many are not satisfied with their couch-bound spectator status; today, many insist on a more active role.
The remarkable world of digital entertainment we know today all started, amazingly enough, with a whistling white torpedo sent floating through empty space in an MIT basement in 1961. As the torpedo crashed dramatically into the enemy spacecraft, no horns sounded and no drums shook the ground. This was the first volley of attack in what would be known as Spacewar. But beyond the basement, the human race at large paid no notice to the fact that video games had been born.
This conception and subsequent birth were not entirely immaculate. Spacewar was, in fact, a shameless derivative. Its creators, devoted fans of contemporary science fiction books, had large-scale visions of converting their passion to the big screen, and Spacewar is reminiscent of many space battle movies. But more importantly, Spacewar merely marked the opening line of a new chapter in the larger, millennia-spanning history of games.
Creating and playing games is a basic impulse of Homo sapiens. The ancient Greeks, the Vikings, and most likely even our ancient cave-dwelling ancestors all had rule-based systems of play. These served many purposes, from entertainment to competition to education. But our new, post-Spacewar chapter is remarkable. In the historical blink of an eye, video games have colonized our minds and invaded our screens. From a Boston basement, video games have exploded exponentially - reproducing at an alarming rate, much like the fearful space invaders that inspired so many early games - until they are now everywhere from tiny mobile phone displays to presumptuous wall-mounted plasma TVs. And although games like the anti-terrorist, multiplayer Counter-Strike, or the small-time-crime simulator Grand Theft Auto III, are indebted to ancient predecessors, games are not what they used to be either. As the computer has offered up its sublime powers - capable of the impartial processing of even the most complex of rules and the simultaneous, dynamic presentation of sound and graphics - new game forms seem more akin to living, breathing worlds than to Backgammon or Poker.
It was inevitable that academics would eventually notice. Thus, for the last half decade, scholars have unleashed traditional theories and methods of analysis - some more effortlessly, others more painfully - onto the phenomenon of video games. New theories have even evolved, coinciding with a growing number of books and websites devoted to the medium, and on the ever-growing requirements for game design professionals. Since the twin fields of game studies and (video) game design are still in early phases of construction, and since scholars approach games from widely different paradigms, much of the knowledge is not yet readily scannable - or even findable. Hence the need for this book.
In the following chapters, we aim to provide the reader with a broad understanding of video games and video game studies. We explore what we consider to be the most important developments and influential perspectives, and discuss the relations between them. We have been greatly helped by the superb enthusiasm with which experienced gamers have begun to document and chronicle the history of the game industry and of the games themselves. This deep-felt devotion to the medium has manifested itself in the publication of impressive books such as J.C. Herz's Joystick Nation (1997), Van Burnham's Supercade (2001), Liz Faber's re:play (1998) and Johnny L. Willson & Rusel DeMaria's High Score (2002). Comprehensive and extremely useful game documentation projects - like The Killer List of Videogames (www.klov.com) and MobyGames (www.mobygames.com) - also serve as crucial information depots for the game scholar. Such resources nicely complement the publication of thorough and knowledgeable volumes on game design and game theory, such as Chris Crawford's now-classic The Art of Computer Game Design (1982), Espen Aarseth's Cybertext (1997), Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), Richard Rouse's Game Design: Theory & practice (2001), Richard Bartle's Designing Virtual Worlds (2003), Andrew Rollings & Dave Morris's Game Architecture and Design (2000), Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman's Rules of Play (2004), Jesper Juul's Half-Real:Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (2005) and others.
Understanding Video Games owes its existence to these predecessors. But needless to say, everything there is to know about games cannot fit snugly into one volume. Even many volumes would be incapable of documenting the astounding growth of this field. Instead, we refer liberally to original literature and to more comprehensive treatments of many of the issues that we touch upon.
About the Reader
We have written this book to serve a variety of purposes. Our primary audience is a student of games, perhaps in a program of study anchored within the humanities or the social sciences. He or she is not yet a fully trained games scholar, but has an interest in achieving a broad understanding of games. But the comprehensive overview we are striving for should find other beneficiaries as well. Those who are technically oriented or mainly interested in designing games will hopefully find much here to interest them, even if the book does not directly increase their practical skills. Similarly, one of our core assumptions is that any student of games will benefit from at least a passing knowledge of issues not specifically tied to his or her specialty. Understanding how games work and why they look the way they do requires an interdisciplinary approach. We should, in a perfect world at least, all be equally unafraid of code, aesthetical theory, and social thinking. Finally, we hope that even professional scholars will find useful our attempt to systematically map the pertinent topics in game studies.
Structure of the book
Beyond this introduction the book is divided into the following chapters:
The game industry: Explores the business side of video games, to provide a basis for understanding large-scale trends in contemporary game design.
What is a game Introduces the reader to classic and current approaches to the study of games and play and discusses how to meaningfully group games into specific types, or genres.
History: Tells the history of video games, focusing on the development of game form and groundbreaking titles. This history emphasizes the games themselves, rather than the game industry or individual designers.
Video game aesthetics: Offers a formal description of games in terms of sound, graphics and use of space and time.
Video game culture: Describes all the aspects of games that are external to the actual works themselves, such as the position of video games in our modern (media) culture and the discourses that both surround and embroil the gaming world.
Player culture: Explores some of the cultural practices of video game players. Whereas the previous chapter explored how games fit modern cultures in a broad sense, this one examines how players organize themselves and produce culture inside and outside their games.
Narrative: Recounts the relationship between video games and the art of storytelling, focusing on the role of literary theory in the study of games.
Edutainment and the "Serious Games" movement: Introduces the reader to an increasingly important field often referred to as "serious games", and discusses topics like "games and learning", "persuasive games", and "political games".
Video games and risks: Discusses the oft-mentioned and culturally divisive question of whether (or how) playing certain types of games can harm the player.
The larger questions
Many people believe that textbooks should be all-inclusive collections of knowledge on a given topic. This is not an unreasonable ambition, but can give a false impression of orderliness, and can ignore the messy, on-the-ground chaos vital to creative and intellectual advances. Such a vision implies that most issues within a field are settled and that the scholars all agree; ignored are the magnitudes of disagreement within a discipline. Game studies is a young field. It is a field that has yet to settle, systematically and convincingly, some rather important questions.
One of these is the most basic question of all: what is a game? Game scholars do not agree on this most fundamental issue. If this worries you, take heart - it is a condition common to many fields. Sociologists, for instance, do not all hold identical ideas about what society means; media scholars differ in their definition of medium. In one important sense, of course, the question of what comprises a game is really just a question of definition. We cannot determine empirically or logically what a game is. What we can do, however, is seek a definition appropriate for our questions, and be quite explicit about the meaning of "game" when we employ it in important situations.
Another question central to game studies is this: why are there games? Why do we, biological entities capable of creating poetry, climbing mountains, and splitting the atom, spend so much time playing games - especially when playing these games often conflict with our basic human needs: to sleep, to feed ourselves, to communicate with our spouses? We don't know. Or rather, the question has sparked surprisingly little interest and no consensus exists. However, some answers have been proposed, and, not unreasonably, they tend to be rooted in biology. They usually go something like this: The ability to play allows organisms to simulate real-life situations. Through these simulations, the organism can practice important skills in relative safety. The individual with a disposition towards play then has an adaptive advantage over those lacking this disposition; natural selection takes care of the rest. The individual who practices throwing his spear in his spare time stands a better chance of survival when a sabre-tooth tiger attacks. Such an answer, though sensible, is not comprehensive. While evolutionary biology, for instance, may explain why there are games, it does not explain very clearly why our games look the way they do. Nor does it explain why people like different games and display such an enormous range of attitudes about the very act of playing games.
Which leads us to the next question: why do some people prefer certain games? Again, we must admit that we cannot answer this with any sort of conviction. In fact, trustworthy statistics documenting such preferences (or documenting whether there is, in fact, variation) are less than abundant. We could speculate that age, gender, social status, religion or hair color correlates with game preferences, but we would then have to explain why this should be the case. We have lots of ideas, but no fully formed theory here. The expanded version of this question is also interesting: do certain types of games appeal to people in certain times or cultures, and if so, why? Again, we could speculate that there is a correlation between the rise of capitalism and the popularity of certain types of highly competitive games, but what we really need is a coherent theory of why such a relationship should be expected and rigorous testing of specific hypotheses derived from such a theory.
Lastly, there is the question uttered by everyone from pundits to parents: How do games affect the player? In this case there is research but little agreement. The question should not be confused with do games affect the player? They do. The former question is completely legitimate, but it is also quite difficult to answer (as we shall see in Chapter X: Videogames and Risks). Some popular variations on this question include: Do violent games make players violent? Do zero-sum games make people less cooperative in real life? Can games teach children useful skills?
These larger themes are woven throughout Understanding Video Games, and we attempt to answer some of the questions by synthesizing the work that has been done so far in game studies. But the reader should keep in mind the relative youth of the field. At present, video game studies may have more questions than answers, more doubts than certainties. The rules are still being formed; the orthodoxies have not yet been established. And for the curious researcher, there are many worlds in need of exploration. Of course, this is part of why the field is so thrilling. In other words, the discipline welcomes you; there is much to be done.
i. Film scholar Joseph Anderson in The Reality of Illusion Anderson, 1996 has argued interestingly that play-behaviour is a biological adaptation. This also explains why we like movies.
ii. One source is Kafai, 1998