Come play KOTOR with VGHVI!

Thursday night I'll be hosting a simultaneous playthrough of the beginning of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR). We'll have conversation on Skype, which I'll record for possible publication as a podcast.

Here's the invitation (join up at VGHVI today if you haven't already).

And here's a brief blog post I wrote to prime the discussion pump.

A note on the word "practomime"

I'd like to express my thanks to Charles Pratt, a wonderful sparring partner ιn such matters, for discussing this subject with me in the Google wave that led to this post; if you'd like access to that Wave, let me know in the comments.

If my work should continue in the direction I think it's going, you're going to see me use the word "practomime" with increasing frequency. Essentially, I mean by it exactly what I meant by "performative play practice" (PPP). Practomime is what games and stories have in common—playing pretend in a context where everyone agrees that playing pretend is what you do. I'm seeking to replace my own reflexive use of the word "game" with "practomime" in any context where I consider it important to bring the performative element of the practice to the fore. I made the word from two authentic Greek roots, πράττω (pratto: do, act—the word that of course gives us πράξις praxis, which is what Aristotle says tragedy enacts) and that all-time fave of mine μίμησις (mimesis: performance-as [often misleadingly translated "imitation"]—this is what Plato and Aristotle say tragedy is), so I think it's sturdy enough for my purposes, at least.

As I try to figure out what the things people call games are doing and what they can do, I increasingly feel the need to make the connection to mimesis (see this post for a bit more detail). For my own purposes, I need a term that captures certain connections that I have proven to my own satisfaction at least to be fundamental. That doesn't mean I think those connections are by any means exhaustive, and I still think it makes sense at the very least to talk about "game elements" in what I'm relabelling, for my own purpose, "practomimes."

But the category of human experience that's being touched on in these practomimes is so far beyond the semantic range of "game," as I see it, that for me a new term is necessary. That new term needs to capture the greater depth of "games'" aesthetic relationship to Hamlet than to Monopoly. Note that I'm not saying that they're not fundamentally related to both those things.

Consider New Super Mario Bros Wii, which I'm finding, with my aged reflexes, fiendishly difficult. "Is this really a practomime?" I have said to myself, as whatever exiguous story there is in the game faded into the far background to reveal the stark horror of failing over and over to make a particular jump. "Yes," I thought to myself, "but just as calling DragonAge a game doesn't get me anywhere interesting and can in fact serve to impede my critical progress, calling NSMBW a practomime doesn't capture what's most interesting about the game."

On the other hand, I do think it's fascinating, from a practomimetic perspective, that NSMBW is, like a re-composition of the oral epic tradition, a virtuosic variation on what's near-exactly the same story in so many earlier games. That's the sort of thing that for me simply can't be discussed with any degree of facility if we call it a game. But the critical language I'd use might be something like "As a practomime, NSMBW possesses several interesting features that tend to be obscured by the understandable tendency of most critics to frame it primarily as a game."

Game-rules and story-elements

Here at last is the fifth in the PPP series. The skeleton of this post was written more than a year ago, but in writing it I realized that I was having a hard time expressing the ideas without jargon, a difficulty that I've learned to take as a warning sign that I haven't thought something through, and one which obviously stands in the way of sharing the idea with the broad audience I'm hoping it will build. With a few semesters of explaining this notion to students and friends behind me, I think I can push on down the road of the PPP.

When I left this series hanging, so many months ago, we'd come to the end of the unpacking process as far as the definition of the PPP itself was concerned. In this post I’m going to get into the first corollary, a corollary so important as really to make it an essential part of the definition. Here’s the whole definition, again, as usual:

A PPP is an intersubjective performance that takes place in a cultural zone demarcated for play (that is, as not having a direct effect on material circumstances, although that demarcation does not mean in actual reality that material circumstances are unaffected). Within that zone conventions may be and usually are determined by rules analogous to the rules for the setting up of conventions in the misunderstood-as-unzoned “real world.”

The part I’m going to talk about in this post is the first part of the last sentence, which is about conventions within the zone of play, and their relation to what we usually think of as rules. I want to suggest that what we think of as “rules” and what we think of as the key elements of story-telling—genre, setting, plot, characters—are actually two varieties (flavors, even) of the same thing. Then, I want to suggest that that thing, whether it appears in a homeric epic or in a first-person shooter, gets its meaning from the way the PPP's participants (author, audience, designer, player) shape its relationship to the “real world” in their imaginations.

I think “rules” is as good a term as any, since rules and play are closely associated in a variety of areas, and play is the heart of the PPP. So I’ll keep using that word. Retaining “rules” also means that one end of the comparison is relatively neatly anchored—everybody has played games, and has an insinctual feel for what a rule is, even if "rule" remains hard to define exactly.

Interactive storyteller Corvus Elrod defines a game-rule as "a precisely-defined relationship within the gamespace." ("Gamespace" is Corvus' term for what I would call a game's particular instance of the zone of play.) This definition will seem abstruse at first, I think, but its usefulness appears quickly when we apply it, because it covers game-phenomena as diverse as "At the start of the player's turn, he or she roles the dice" and "When the player pushes the A-button in this situation, the player-character jumps" and "When the player has killed Andrew Ryan, he or she must disarm the self-destruct sequence for the story to proceed" and "If the player chooses those dialogue options, he or she will be given the opportunity to kill Carth Onasi." Each of those relationships is precisely-defined within the gamespaces of Yahtzee (among many, many others), Super Mario Brothers (among many, many others), Bioshock, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

We have rules pretty much nailed down, then. The other end of the comparison, though, is still floating free—why am I saying that rules and the elements of a story are the same thing? The answer is simple, though it will take a while to make it fully persuasive: story-elements themselves are precisely-defined relationships within the zone of play. Let's take the most obvious of story-elements first—plot. Plot is what happens in the zone of play constituted by the story—that is, from one important perspective, plot is the precisely-defined relationship between each event and every other event in the story. In the Iliad, for example, the plot of the beginning of Book 1 runs "Chryses comes to ransom his daughter; Agamemnon sends him away; Chryses prays to Apollo; Apollo sends a plague; Achilles calls a council." These events make the story not by themselves, but in relation to one another.

Similarly, character is a set of precisely-defined relationships between parts of a story. This point is self-evident on an obvious level, because Achilles is for example the leader of the Myrmidons and the friend of Patroclus. More importantly, in my view at least, character is a precisely-defined relationship on a deeper level as well: Achilles is the Achilles of the Iliad in that he is the greatest of warriors—that is, he stands precisely-defined in a relationship of superiority both to the other Achaeans of the Iliad and to all the warriors the bard's audience knows. Setting goes the same way: the Achaeans' being encamped on the shore near Troy is expressible as the relationship of where the Achaeans are to where the Trojans are and to where the Achaeans came from. Invididual features like ships and tents are then placed by the PPP's participants (the bard in this case) in relation to that relationship.

Here we run into a question of enormous importance—one that in my opinion demonstrates how crucial the contribution of homeric epic can be to an understanding of how games work. If a seemingly static set of story-elements like the plot and characters of the Iliad as we have it can be expressed in terms of rules, is there then no difference between interactive art and static art? (And, of course, if so, isn't that definition of "rule" clearly wrong?)

The answer is Yes, and No. (And No to the parenthetical question.) The nature of homeric epic is a wonderful guide here, because it demonstrates so clearly the transformation of interactive to static and back. Remember that what we have is a fossil of a once-living tradition of bardic recomposition. The bard begins with a set of rules in the form of a skeleton of plot, characters, setting: because of the bardic tradition's development, he sings within a set of precisely-defined relationships. Achilles for example isn't allowed actually to leave Troy. Achilles is the leader of the Myrmidons. The Achaeans are encamped on the shore near Troy. The bard may order events differently, change details of characters and details of setting, but he may not change the basic course of the story, just as the player of a game like Halo may sometimes do things in a different order, may play the Master Chief as reckless or cowardly, may experience different elements of the landscape the designers have made, but must always do the same things—and in the end, were someone to make a video, or write an account, that player will have produced a static version of the game/story.

The counter-intuitive truth is that that interaction between the participants of a PPP and the rules and story-elements of that PPP produces what looks like a static narrative, but that that static narrative is not actually a different sort of thing, but is rather yet another set of rules for the production of yet another version of the PPP. What looks like a static narrative, when turned into an intersubjective performance by, say, a reader, becomes a new—crucially, constrained in different ways—story or game.

Where does it get us to express the analogy between game-rules and story-elements? It allows us to approach, yes, the relationship between things like interactivity, immersion, and narrative in what I think is a more meaningful way. Among other things, it gets us completely beyond the notion that there's any fundamental split between gameplay and story. To think about rules and things like plot and character this way also helps us talk about the way that events in the zone of play relate to events in the "real world," and what that relation can mean to participants in PPP's.

In the next post, which will hopefully come without such a long hiatus, I'll start exploring the relationship between game-rules/story-elements and stuff in the "real-world." An understanding of games and stories as both being examples of PPP's can get us to some interesting places, I believe, in the intersection of ludonarrative art with the lives we live outside the zone of play.

Play and the "real world"

Here’s the fourth in the PPP series.

The provisional definition of “performative play practice,” again:

A PPP is an intersubjective performance that takes place in a cultural zone demarcated for play (that is, as not having a direct effect on material circumstances, although that demarcation does not mean in actual reality that material circumstances are unaffected). Within that zone conventions may be and usually are determined by rules analogous to the rules for the setting up of conventions in the misunderstood-as-unzoned "real world."

Now we’re getting to the hard, and interesting, part. It’s also the part that has a great deal to do with the discussion of games and performativity that Ian Bogost opened up recently (see here and here). And it’s the part that I believe really makes games and stories two kinds of the same thing.

The name for it doesn’t really matter very much, since it’s an idea I’m actually talking about rather than a word, but the English word that I think comes closest is “play.” It’s pretty much incidental, but the Latin word that Johan Huizinga chose for his seminal (though I think fundamentally flawed) study Homo Ludens, and which has been adopted by a substantial number of those who study games, ludo, means “play.”

The problem with using “play,” a problem I have to face up to here at the start, is that it’s such a common word that its shades of meaning are nearly infinite. I’m going to have to define it narrowly for my purposes, and use it narrowly, if I’m to make any headway. When I define it, though, I’m going to have to avoid assuming the thing we’re trying to prove—that is, I have to avoid taking for granted that “play” means “games and stories”—although that will be difficult, because I think the best, most useful definition of “play” pretty much is “games and stories.”

Here’s my definition of “play”: any practice understood not to have a direct effect on material circumstances. That is, if people are said to be “at play,” what is meant is that what they are doing, whatever they are doing, isn't going to change what’s going on in the “real world.” (I’m being annoying and putting “real world” in quotation marks because it’s going to be really important when I move further and talk about what we can do with the idea of the PPP that we remember that the “real world” is actually a construct in our heads and the heads of everybody else on earth—the biggest, the infinite Second Life. Or you can call it the Matrix, like the Wachowskis. More on that later, obviously.)

Now if you don’t like that definition of “play,” but you still think this idea that stories and games are two forms of the same thing has merit, there’s an easy work-around: every time I use the word “play,” substitute “understood-not-to-affect-material-circumstances.” It’s not absolutely necessary that we call it “play,” even though using that word links up all sorts of things very nicely—games and theater, for example (remember, “All the world’s a play,” after all).

At any rate, what is essential to what I’m trying propose in the PPP is that for any example of something that we might call a “story” or a “game,” we can either say that it’s understood not to have an effect on material circumstances or that it’s not actually a story or a game.

Before we move to the thorny problems of things that almost certainly are stories or games and yet that do affect material circumstances (such as gambling and world-changing literature like the Iliad), let’s look at the usual suspects:

• Stopping at a red light: not a game or story; affects your societal status with respect to the law.


• Reading a newspaper article (let’s say it’s an article about a lander touching down on Mars): not a game or story of the kind we’re interested in; affects your understanding of the material circumstances of the “real world”—that is, what actually happened on Mars.


• Playing Boom Blox (a puzzle game): game; lacks a direct relationship with the “real world”; note, however, that the player’s hand-eye coordination will, almost certainly, increase in the process of playing the game.


• Playing Halo: game whose story portrays a completely fictional science-fiction universe; note that in addition to greater hand-eye coordination that results from playing shooters like Halo, one could make (indeed, I have made) an argument that figures in that story are symbolic representations of figures in the real world, like real soldiers and real terrorists.


• Reading a science fiction novel: story whose fictional world bears no direct relationship to the “real world”; again, though, as in Halo, the story may portray material circumstances of the “real world” in fictional representation.

You can tell that even before we get to the gambling and the world-changing literature, there are problems for saying that PPP’s don’t have “real world” effects. The key, then, is in the words “understood” and “direct” in the definition of the PPP (and of “play”).

Here’s the thing: while you’re stopping at a red light, you understand yourself, and you understand that the people near you are understanding you, as directly affecting the “real world.” If you run that red light, you may well directly collide with another car. When you’re reading a newspaper story, you understand yourself to be reading about actual events, portrayed directly in the words of the article.

While you’re playing Boom Blox, though, you aren’t, at that moment when you are playing that game, doing it because you’re trying to increase your hand-eye coordination. Think of it this way: what’s the difference between an exercise to increase your hand-eye coordination, and a game that does it? Or, why do we have games to teach typing?

I think the answer is that when you’re playing the game, you’re precisely not purposely changing material circumstances in the “real world.” That’s the whole appeal (such as it is) of “edutainment,” right? And it’s the appeal, I believe, at bottom, both of science-fiction and of serious, world-changing literature: because the effect on material circumstances is not direct, is not immediate, we can have that which is only (I think) very inadequately decribed as “fun.”

Above all, I think “fun” is inadequate because what we have is also appropriately called catharsis--but that’s yet another discussion I have to push down the road. Next up in the PPP series: rules and conventions.

Noted: Ian Bogost on performativity in games

It’s taken me a while to get to this one, because I was away and because the subject is so important to me and so germane to what I’m doing with the concept of the PPP (performative play practice [see here]) that I had to spend some time on this note.

My own use of the word “performative” comes, like Ian’s, from the work of JL Austin on what Austin was the first to call “speech acts.” A speech act is an utterance that does something, rather than saying something. The classic example is saying “I do” at your wedding (as long as that’s what you’re supposed to say to get married in the ceremony you’re using, and you’re doing it at the right moment in the ceremony). Speech acts aren’t true or false; instead, they’re felicitous or infelicitous—they work or they don’t work; you get married or you don’t get married.

Seems pretty simple, but Austin himself recognized, and later critics began to demosntrate in ever more complex ways, that the line between speech acts and utterances that aren’t speech acts (to use Austin’s terms, “performative utterances” and “constative utterances”) is pretty much non-existent. Even with the classic “I do,” there’s a component of true/false constativity—is it true, for example, that you are going to support your spouse in sickness and in health?

Ian’s piece in Gamasutra (here) is as I understand it an argument that one thing games can do is affect the real world. He gives several examples of different ways that happens, including the Pain Station and Cruel 2 B Kind. Ian would seem to call it peformative play whenever a game has an effect on something outside the game, whether a player’s nervous system or random passersby who are serenaded on the misimpression that they are playing the same game as the serenader.

Here’s where I part company from Ian pretty dramatically. Although I think it’s absolutely fascinating to think about how symbolic actions taken inside the zone of play can affect material circumstances in the “real” world outside the zone of play (which is how I would characterize what Ian is doing), I have to say that I don’t think that it’s in the spirit of Austin and those who followed him in the study of performative utterances to call those phenomena “performative.” If I’m reading Ian’s piece correctly, he’s saying that any time something inside the game causes an effect outside the game, it’s performative. My own reading of Austin and the other speech-act theorists suggests that performativity in any sign-system (for instance, spoken language or the visual, auditory, and interactive language of video games) depends entirely on the cultural context to supply the necessary distinction between felicity and infelicity. That is, for an act of signification to be performative, it must be recognized as a performative practice within the relevant culture. If you say “I do” outside a wedding ceremony, you’re not going to get married.

My own view is that the performative involved in gaming is for instance “I engage in this practice which is called Pong.” If a group of people were standing around me, they would recognize my playing of Pong as felicitous if I were in fact playing Pong, and infelicitous if for instance my TV weren’t working. If the game were configured so that a lightning bolt shot out of the TV and killed a bystander when I scored a point, it wouldn’t be performative, it would be manslaughter. The only performativity involved would be that I was playing a game of Pong that produced the death of a bystander—a kind of game that would be recognized within culture as entirely infelicitous as a play practice.

The reason I call my theoretical construct “performative play practice” is precisely that the play involved, which I would argue produces both games and stories, is recognized within culture as having the necessary cultural authority to create a zone of play (what Huizinga, as Ian points out, called an “act apart”). The felicity of that practice—that is, whether it is recognized as performative or not so recognized—depends only on whether society recognizes the occasion I have chosen as one that’s appropriate for performative play. In my view, that has nothing to do with any “real world” effect my play might have.

So my objection to Ian’s piece is I suppose that I want to keep the concept of performativity for the relationship of games to the other practices of culture, rather than to what I would seek to characterize as tangential effects of games upon phenomena outside the game. In the case of the Pain Station, my own view is that players’ bodies are conscripted as abstract signifiers inside the zone of play; in the cases of Cruel 2 B Kind and World Without Oil my own view is that the “real world” effects of the games are actually part of the reception of the games, and have nothing to do with their performativity as games.

On the other hand, I would see Gwap, incidentally, as the most interesting case, because I agree with Ian that it’s actually infelicitous as a game—that is, given a full understanding of its mechanics, culture I believe would not recognize it as being a game at all.

I finally want to thank Ian deeply for bringing the matter up, and I hope the community will take up the matter of performativity in games as a topic of discussion.

PPP (2): Intersubjective performance

Here’s the second in the PPP series (the link goes to the first post in the series).

The provisional definition of “performative play practice,” again:

A PPP is an intersubjective performance that takes place in a cultural zone demarcated for play (that is, as not having an effect on material circumstances, although that demarcation does not mean in actual reality that material circumstances are unaffected). Within that zone conventions may be and usually are determined by rules analogous to the rules for the setting up of conventions in the misunderstood-as-unzoned Symbolic Order (you can call that reality; I’ll unpack it much further in subsequent posts).

So what do I mean by “intersubjective performance”? Let’s start with a less compressed version: an intersubjective performance is a meaningful act that crosses the boundary between a person’s self and what lies outside the self. As we define the PPP, we’re going to be limiting it to a certain type of such intersubjective performance, but all by itself, you can see that “intersubjective performance” covers everything from playing Halo to playing Boom Blox to reading the newspaper to stopping at a red light: in each of these cases, a person does something meaningful in relation to what we might call a system of meaning that exists outside that person. In the cases of Halo and Boom Blox, those systems of meaning are the games themselves, as written in algorithms, and encoded on the digital media; in the case of the newspaper, the system is contained in the individual stories and their symbolic relationships to the events they record; in the case of the red light, the system is contained in the laws that govern driving, as mediated by the individual traffic controls that monitor the patterns according to which lights change.

The most obvious meaning of “intersubjective,” though, is something like “between two or more people,” and it’s worth spending a little time unpacking why it makes more sense to talk about crossing the boundary of the self instead. Obviously, crossing the boundary of the self is a description that encompasses the kind of intersubjectivity we’re more used to (the thing about being between multiple people), because in order to communicate or even identify with another person, the first person has to make a connection from inside him or herself to outside him or herself, from the self to the other.

It makes all the sense in the world, a great deal of the time, to think of a peformance like a game or a newspaper in terms of communication and identification between two or more people. But it’s truer, I believe, to think of the intermediate step of crossing the self’s boundary as more fundamental. The examples of a (mostly) single-player game like Boom Blox, and of solitaire, and of the red light, are all better understandable this way. We certainly can imagine the “other people” who designed the games, and who set the traffic patterns, but in the moment of the practice, of playing the game or stopping at the light, what really matters for the person enacting the performance is that the game and the red light lie outside the self, as parts of a system of meaning within which the performance (the playing or the stopping) has valid meaning.

As we move deeper into the definition, we’ll be dealing next with the idea of the “cultural zone demarcated for play.” Of the four examples in the last paragraph, only the games fit this criterion.

The series continues in The zone of play.