Five pieces of writing, one new site recommendation, three games and two videos. Contributions from Courtney Stanton, Matt W, Jimmy Maher, Jenn Frank, George Buckenham, Alex Pieschel, Eric Lockaby and David Kanaga.

Continue reading: This Link Drag Is High Scoring

7. insurgency

"Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches, let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end they'll beg us to save them."

Bob Page on the Second Ludology/Narratology War (Deus Ex)

Today, anyone and his granny can make a game and a new breed of street developer has emerged. Some of these new designers see the prevailing game paradigms as too constricting. Why the need to win or lose? What is the point of points?

Tale of Tales' Michaël Samyn views the conventional single-player experience as nothing more than a "test" and, a couple of years ago, he proposed the notgames "design challenge" – something he refuses to call an agenda or a movement. He wanted to encourage developers to put aside goal-directed play and aspire to make art with games.

Despite opposing notions of ludology, Samyn's restatement of the single-player formula as a test is a classic ludological, reductionist argument - tear away the shallow exterior, and you are left with nothing but naked hoops to jump through. And just like ludologists, Samyn is interested in crafting significant, unique work in the medium of games. Take a look at these "opposing viewpoints" on Myst:

Espen Aarseth in 2004: “Most critics agree that the Miller brothers succeeded eminently in making a fascinating visual landscape, a haunting and beautiful gameworld, but to experienced gamers, the gameplay was boring and derivative, with the same linear structure that was introduced by the first Adventure game sixteen years earlier. Nice video graphics, shame about the game.”

Michaël Samyn, the Notgames Fest 2011 keynote: “Why had people not realized that most of us were playing Myst for its world and its stories, and not the arcane puzzles?”

Aarseth and Samyn both make the same point, differing only in emphasis. Aarseth sees failure, but Samyn sees inspiration. Ludology says games are based on mechanics and goals; the notgames perspective calls goals and challenge out as clichés that hobble the greatest of video game art.

Continue reading: A Theoretical War, Part 3

4. defection

In 1998, Jesper Juul presented a paper titled "A Clash between Game and Narrative" at the Digital Arts and Culture conference, based on his ongoing postgraduate research. He asserted that narrative was not just unimportant in games but actually burdensome. Games and narrative were "two phenomena that fight each other" and attempts to merge them would inevitably "zigzag" between the two.

Juul also demonstrated that narrative ended up as digital paint which is a similar to an argument put forward by Brian Moriarty in last year's GDC and also here on Electron Dance:

"I illustrated this [using] a silly platformer with background art by Michelangelo, dialog from Shakespeare, characters from Ingmar Bergman movies and music by Bach... but it was still just a platformer... [Such games] may have an arty veneer, and explore important topics and themes, but it's all bolted on to familiar game mechanisms that are not essentially synergistic."

Clearly both men take issue with propositions like One and One Story (referenced last week) but I found some of Juul's arguments oddly anachronistic. It was published when game story was becoming more and more important to players and 1998 was notable for being the year that Half-Life blew everyone away. Players were no longer shooting blocks and dodging pixel balls; they were sweating and surviving in Black Mesa, fighting their way out of a catastrophe, trying to piece together what had gone so wrong. Was Juul swimming against the tide?

Continue reading: A Theoretical War, Part 2

1. prologue

Perhaps one of my saddest university memories is when I shrugged my shoulders and accepted the end of mathematics.

Before my undergrad years, I devoured every mathematical fact I came across as if starved of adequate mental nutrition. School did a bang-up job of cauterizing the subject, giving the impression that mathematics was done, there was nothing else to know. Congratulations. Game over.

Yet at university, I was faced with an enormous banquet of knowledge that, at first, made me physically excited. I just couldn't get enough. However as I consumed and digested my way through lecture after lecture, I came to the unpleasant realisation that I wouldn’t be able to know everything. In a personal way, it was the end of mathematics and the beginning of unavoidable specialisation.

Mathematics divides into branches and branches within branches. It's like Inception minus the snow soldier shoot-out. It’s ridiculous to vote down one branch as being more “important” than another (fuzzy logic versus probability theory, for example) because each theoretical direction has its place, a purpose.

Take, for example, the humble quadratic equation. You’re taught in school that the solutions of

can be calculated from:

A decent teacher might let slip that there’s also a special formula for cubic equations (involving powers of 3) and another for quartic equations (powers of 4). And what you certainly don’t get told, for fear of shaking your belief in all things holy, is that no one was ever able to find a nice formula for quintics (powers of 5).

It's not that mathematicians weren't trying hard enough. The quartic solution was discovered in the 16th century and all attempts to derive a quintic solution were fruitless. It took another three hundred years and a detour into a highly abstract branch of mathematics called algebra to prove that a general quintic solution doesn’t exist.

Algebra is a strange land with terms like cyclic groups, isomorphisms, Noetherian rings and algebraic closures. The takeaway from this is that all of these different mathematical lines of inquiry relate to each other in obscene, almost underhand ways.

And then you have games studies.

Continue reading: A Theoretical War, Part 1

So it's time for a new series, The Academics Are Coming. Based around several interviews, it's about games studies academics who make games - who they are, why they do it and the relevance of their work to the gaming industry.

It kicks off for real next Tuesday with the first part of A Theoretical War. Oh and here's a video.

For more information, have a look at the project page which contains the week-by-week schedule. The series should finish mid-August. Please enjoy the ride.

Contains swearing, violence and nudity. Actually there's only swearing. What you will discover in the video:

• Why write about video games?
• Why does AJ have a love/hate relationship with GameFAQs?
• Cutscenes: to play or to skip?
• How gamers on the fringe need the mainstream
• The shocking truth that Shaun has a thing for Lyle Fernandez of Mindjack
• Schafer vs Hofmeier deathmatch

Referenced links:

• Arcadian Rhythms: Top Ten Serious Games
• Arcadian Rhythms: 2011 Retrospective - The Favourites
• Arcadian Rhythms: An Interview with Littleloud's Darren Garrett
• Neptune's Pride game "Spearbeams and Tears"

The second episode will be posted on 22 May. Sorry about some of crackling on the audio; the rest of the series is crackle-less.

On the train, tired. Don't want to get a book out, so I fumble for the Blackberry. I've already checked today's news and Google Reader. There's nowhere else to go and it's not much fun seeking out new destinations with a wireless syrupband connection.

I look at the games included in the company Blackberry build. I am as underwhelmed as I was the last time I gazed into this small puddle of choices. I break out Klondike. It'll pass the time. I was fascinated with Patience when I was younger even though it is virtually a game of following instructions that emerge from the cards; more tarot than tarot. Jonathan Blow could probably dedicate a whole seminar to the evils of the game.

I just want to get to the end of this journey.

But another begins.

Continue reading: Submergence

In a personal essay, Jenn Frank used 90s simulation Creatures to talk about her disconnection from motherhood – both physical and mental. It's worth your time if you haven't read it already and I'm not here to rip into her article – but I do want to pick up on one point.

There's an implication nestled in the final lines that her experience with Creatures tells her what she would be like as a mother. And zing! went my abstraction alarm.

Continue reading: Parenting Is Not an Escort Mission

Brian Moriarty, in an interview with Electron Dance last year, talked about how he was disenchanted with videogames as a medium. In the comments, I came clean about where I agreed with Moriarty:

Where I would find common ground is this: In 30 years, I can’t remember a single video game that has ever changed the way I think about something. Certainly I have had profound experiences, but these are games in the “emotional simulator” format, not of “and the next day, I saw things differently”.

Ever since I wrote that comment, I've been looking for examples where games have changed my world view or taught me something. Let's be clear: today, I don't give a shit about games that move me to tears. This is about having impacts beyond the confines of the videogame, a game that leaks.

Today, I'm going to share three personal examples that have done just that.

Continue reading: Less Cause, More Effect