Response Blog #5: Discussion Reflection

In class today we talked about how games, like Tamagotchi, were really popular in Japan but experienced little or short-lived popularity in the United States.  I think it’s interesting that the same game can have such a different reception by different demographics.  Essentially, the game play is the same, but the different values of the cultures cause the games to be received differently.  This also applies to how different groups of people within a society accept a game with different results.  One example of this is the mobile phone games that are geared toward the “casual” gamer, as opposed to the more serious games for consoles and PC.  This made me think about how people will obsess or dismiss games just because they have a certain stigma attached to them.

As someone said in class, the Wii U is a good example of this as it is actually a “pretty good system,” but many people just ignore it because they associate the Wii brand with family-friendly, kid games.  In fact, when games are being marketed, they are often marketed to a specific demographic, which causes them to be alienated from other demographics, which can severely hurt profit, as seen with Tamagotchi, or drastically help it, as with the Wii.

I dislike how society instantly judges and categorizes games, but I hate the fact that it influences many games meant to be “hits” to be the same formula over and over again, like the Call of Duty series, following this logic of marketing to specific markets.  For a game to be financially successful, many companies think they have to repeat every year with essentially the same game with minor improvements and it will be successful because of the immediate reputation attached to it as part of the series.  A new Call of Duty game will instantly be received well by the Call of Duty fanbase.  This is the reason why I feel independent games have been doing so well lately: they allow the gaming community to not experience what they think they want, but what they unknowingly crave.  I feel a game like Minecraft could never have been made at a large firm like Activision because it was too risky.  Minecraft has poor graphics, the opposite of the trend, no story, again the opposite, and no set ending, again opposite.  It was focused on creation, playing, testing, and learning.  Not a lot of people could have conceived of this type of game before it was created, but following its success, there are many copies, which almost signifies its success.

That’s not to say that established video game companies are not innovating.  Ubisoft took a slight risk with Watchdogs to try to create a new game with unique gameplay.  I just feel independent games, which have little marketing and cause the gamer to have little knowledge beforehand, are what’s pushing the market ahead and breaking down barriers between the “established” gaming demographics.  Minecraft might be loved or hated by certain people, but the important part is that the game has to be played to be understood.  There was nothing that was like it when it came out, which caused all gamer types to try it.  It had the potential to have a gamer base much larger than any particular demographic because it was not designed for any particular demographic.

The creator, Notch, had a dream and he realized it, with no coercion from a sales or marketing department. I feel that this is how game development used to be when games were still new and not mainstream yet, and I feel that the more successful independent firms become, the more the whole gaming industry will change to follow suit.  Games will become more expressions of passion than methods of profits again, and the gaming industry might be able to revert back to the days of originality and innovation.

Response Blog #4: Reading Response

I liked the different perspective that James Paul Gee’s Good Video Games and Good Learning had on player production in video games.  Previous definitions, such as Caillois’, suggested that play could not be productive, or else it would be work instead of play.  Callois definition concerning production was concerned almost entirely with physical property, which is only reasonable seeing that Caillois wrote about games before video games were feasible, while Gee’s refers more to non-physical intellectual creation and growth.  I think that both definitions are correct actually.

Play should not be totally concerned with the creation of physical goods, like someone’s job in a factory might be.  I think Caillois made sure to include his stipulation about play being unproductive because he wanted to define play as being separate from work.  I think play is generally considered as being an entity separate from work.  Even though there have been recent attempts to merge aspects of play into work to make people happier and more productive, society must still consider them separate activities if it is necessary to try to merge them.  In this way, Caillois is correct.

But at the same time, society is recognizing that play is not worthless and unproductive with its attempts to increase the “playfulness” of adults.  I feel that this productive quality of play lies more in what Gee is talking about with players being partially responsible for “producing” the game they play.  This feeling that the player has the power to shape his or her experience yields happiness and produces results – in this case, progress in the game.  Also, along the lines of what Bogost says, play has the ability to shape the views and opinions of the players, which is an intellectual change that can lead to physical, psychological, and social results.

In summary, playing does not usually produce any physical results or products, which is in accordance with what Caillois said, but it can, and most often does, produce positive changes in intellectual thought that can eventually lead to physical or real results.  Additionally, as play is hybridized more and more with work, it’s possible to see play as a means of making production more entertaining and fun, thereby increasing productivity with its positive psychological effects.

Response Blog #3: Discussion Response

In class, we talked about Bogost’s ideas that video games can actively shape the player’s experience of his or her world, much like any other medium, such as books, movies, or television shows.  This is a serious change from the prior definitions of play and game involving a split from the world, and an inherent quality of non-productiveness.  This suggests that games and play are not un-productive, but have a purpose and allow the player to grow mentally.  This also suggests that although the play of the game might take place in a world outside of the conventional (with the magic circle), the game still has meaning in the real world.  The actions and decisions made in the game have at some impact on the real world, even if it just helping to develop the player’s position on certain real world issues.  

I think this helps ameliorate the issue I had with the various definitions that sometimes asserted that play must have real-world consequences and some do not.  I always felt that play did not have to have real world consequences, in fact, I believed that play could not have any real world consequences.  I believed this because I felt that saying that a game needed to have real world consequences restricted certain games from being labeled as a game, such as soccer, because I could see no real world consequence of playing a game meant totally for enjoyment.  

From the class discussion on the different types of play throughout the last few weeks, especially with reference to Bogost’s theories, I now believe that a game could have a requirement to have real life consequences because I can now see that the real life consequence might be a change in behavior of the player.  What I should have realized earlier is that if playing is central to human development, as some has suggested, then a game does have real world consequences – just not in the way I had previously thought.  The way that playing can shape the ideas, opinions, and even feelings of the player shows that it has real world consequences, even if the consequences are drastic or huge.

In summary, I would like to amend what I said in my last Class Discussion blog about games needing a decisive split from reality (the magic circle) to that games intrinsically feature this split from reality, but still carry over parts of the real world that can be changed, such as the player’s mental and emotional state, which was emphasized with Bogost’s pieces.

Response Blog #2: Reading Reflection

My reflection will be concerned with the four definitions for RPG that were required reading and can be found: here, here, here, and here.  I will synthesize these definitions to create a more encompassing, and I feel more correct, definition.

The definitions can be split into two categories: general and very, very, very specific.  The last three fall into the general category and just say that an RPG is a game that allows a player to completely assume the role of a character, complete with freedom to play the game how the character would.  Essentially, this is saying that a RPG is a game that has no fixed progression path, but gives the player the ability to decide how he or she wants to play.  The first one, however, is oddly specific and says that for a (computer/video) game to be an RPG, there must be a statistical setup for character skills, some method of increasing character statistics, and a menu-driven content and combat system.  To be fair, the author of this did seem to be trying to distinguish genres for video games in the 90s.  The second one also agrees with this first somewhat, as it holds that skills are necessary for a RPG.

The general category seems to be to capture the essence of the RPG, the role playing itself.  The ability to lose oneself completely in a role is the purpose of the RPG, and it is not specifically hindered or helped by the presence of all the needs of the second category.  Traditional RPGs exist the way they do because of the technological limits at the time of their creation.

Games are a reflection of the technical abilities of the designers at the time of creation.  Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) was not computer-based because computers in 1974 did not have the capabilities to easily keep track of the players, rules, and settle discrepancies in adventures unforeseen by the architects of the game, but that’s not to say that games could not be created nowadays that capture the magic and essence of D&D, nor that they have not already been created.  I would like to propose a new definition that the only requirement for an RPG is that the game allows the player to become anything that he or she wants, within the reasonable limitations of the game world, and allows him or her to be completely engrossed in the act of becoming another person.  There is no need anymore for a RPG to only have a “menu-driven” content and combat system.

As technology improves, as it will, RPGs will allow people to create whole fantastical lives that allow for anything and everything that both normal life and fantastical life include.  Games have been becoming less genre-specific, and more and more games blur the lines between genres.  I feel genres exist because limitations of the designers caused them to focus on only one or few types to completely flesh out and create a game.  But I see the future of RPGs, and game sin general, being alternate lives for people, merging elements of traditional RPGs, simulation, adventure, and action games.

Everything will be a crossover and it will be perfect.

Response Blog #1: Discussion Reflection

In class, the topic came up that life can be treated as a game because it fulfills the characteristics defined in class: it has rules, variable and quantifiable outcomes, valorization of outcomes, player effort, attachment to outcomes, and negotiable consequences to how it is “played.”  Despite all of this I find a huge problem with saying that life is a game.  Saying that life is just a game suddenly devalues almost everything about it.  It is no longer a place to prove oneself, but a place to play as whomever one wants to be.  Life becomes nothing more than just completing objectives and putting on a persona, and I do not think this is what most people view it as.  Treating life as a game strips it of the beauty, responsibility, and sense of urgency in my mind.

First, my interpretation of “life” for this blog is that “life” is the reality that a person experiences at all times.  With reference to the magic circle, a game should create a separate place from reality.  If life is a game, then it would have to mean that a person can separate all of his or her experiences from what is really happening to him or her, which does not seem possible.  To fix this definition, I would like to put forth another requirement: I believe that for a game to be a game, there has to be a decisive and present split from reality.  In other words, the magic circle is not just a concept utilized in some games; it is a necessity of all games.

With this extra characteristic, it is hard to interpret life as a game, as this would make it seemingly impossible to split the game from reality.  There would be no magic circle because the “real world” would effectively cease to exist.

That’s not to say that everyone couldn’t and doesn’t treat life as a game, just that the vast, sane majority do not.  To “play” life as a game, there must be a conscious split from reality.  This means that a person would have to present two versions of himself or herself, one for the “life” he or she wants to present and his or her real life.  And even this is simply a weird case where a person spends way more time in the game world than the real world, but does not affect the fact that both worlds exist.

In summary, I believe that there is an extra characteristic of a game that is not included in the class definition: that there must be a decisive and present split in the game world from reality.  This helps me reconcile some of the exceptions I had with applying the previous class definition to situations.