Play Redux

Front matter

THE FORM OF COMPUTER GAMES

` David Myers

DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication.

Contents

INTRODUCTION 1 What computer games are CHAPTER1 Bad Play 15 CHAPTER2 Anti-ness 30 CHAPTER 3. Formalism Redux 40 CHAPTER 4 Interface and Code 50 CHAPTER5 The Computer Game Anti-aesthetic What computer games aren’t CHAPTER 6 Anti-narrative 71 CHAPTER7 ‘The Backstory 86 CHAPTER 8 Civilization 98 The self and the social CHAPTERQ Social Play 117 CHAPTER 10 City of Heroes 132 CHAPTER 11 Play and Punishment 144 The genie in the bottle CHAPTER 12 Final Comments 158

Notes 163 References 173

Index 181

Introduction

Play is a very interesting thing. Somewhat strangely, though, play is not studied as often as are the consequences of play.

The reason for this becomes clear when we try to study play: it is a very hard thing to study. Play resists our scrutiny in characteristically slippery ways. One of these is the degree to which play is dependent on and determined by paradox. In The Nature of Computer Games (2003), I spent a great deal of time focusing on the paradoxical nature of play. In that book, I classified paradoxes according to commonly accepted categories, examined common features of those categories, and concluded that paradoxes—and most particularly play-related paradoxes—are a form of self-reference.

Prototypical examples of self-referential paradoxes are these:

e The Liar’s Paradox: This statement is false. o Russell’s Paradox: The set of all sets that are not members of themselves.

In the Liars Paradox, the “statement” refers to itself directly; in Russell's Paradox, the “set” refers to itself by including itself in its own membership. The result, in both cases, is that we have trouble understanding what these paradoxes mean. When we try to derive a meaning from the Liars Paradox, for instance, we find our meaning-making process oscillating between thinking the statement is true (which it must be in order to be false) and thinking the statement is false (because, after all, that is what the statement says it is).

This oscillation of meaning doesn’t stop. And because we find ourselves (potentially forever) in the midst of this oscillation, befuddled, our awareness and attention turn from the meaning we cannot derive to the meaning-making process that cannot derive it. That is, we turn our awareness and attention from the content of meaning to the form of meaning (and/or the lack thereof).

In this brief analysis, then, are a couple of important realizations concerning the nature and study of play that I wish to pursue further here. First and foremost, play involves a special form of self-reference. And because play exhibits a particular self-referential form—similar to paradox—the study of play offers opportunities for formalist methods of study. Second, a self-referential form is also, obviously and importantly, referential. Therefore, the study of play should involve not only the study of self-referential forms but also the study of references and referencing in general: that is, semiosis.

Currently and curiously, the study of play does not often focus on either its formal properties or its semiotic properties as much as it focuses on other things. The most prominent and frequent of these other things is culture.

In the 19708, which was quite some time ago it seems, I was an undergraduate English major at Yale University. Walking across campus on some dark and snowy eve, a fellow student pointed out to me a bearish figure receding in the distance, coated and capped, who was, I was told, William K. Wimsatt, “the formalist.”

After a long career in academia, Wimsatt died in 1975; his primary teaching duties at Yale had been curtailed—if not completed entirely-sometime before that. Thus, I am uncertain whether this figure in memory was Wimsatt indeed or simply one relatively naive student’s wild speculation to another. In any case, that particular image has stuck in my mind as emblematic of the decline of formalists and formalism, both of which were, by the mid-1970s, being shunted into obscurity.

During the mid-twentieth century and beyond, formalist models of literature were superseded by structuralist models of history and, subsequently buoyed by post-structuralism, cultural studies. In this supersession, cultural studies relegated the study of language and literature—and aesthetics in general—to a subset of its own broader, more inclusive, and often impenetrably complex view of social relationships as instrumental and unavoidable in determining human thoughts, interpretations, and meanings.

Ostensibly, semiotics is the study of semiosis, or the human meaning-making process. However, in common practice, semiotics as an academic discipline has tended to adopt a particular set of assumptions regarding how and under what influences a human-like meaning-making process operates. These assumptions are, by and large, equivalent to those of cultural studies. Thus, conventional semiotic analysis situates the human meaning-making process in a particular cultural context.

This is contrary to the assumptions I am going to bring to bear here, and it is contrary to the original assumptions of formalism as held and promoted by William K. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, Viktor Shklovsky, and other similar formalists.

Wimsatt and Beardsley (1954) coined the terms intentional fallacy and affective fallacy to emphasize exactly this issue. The tenets of their “New Criticism” claimed that it is the literary work itself—its interior mechanics— that determine its value as literature, or its “literariness.” If you were, rather, to determine that literariness on the basis of author intent—including author history, culture, or psychology—then you would be guilty of an “intentional fallacy.” Likewise, if you were, rather, to determine that literariness on the basis of audience (reader) response—emotive or otherwise—you would suffer from an “affective fallacy.”

Above all other things, it is this claim that sets formalism apart from its opposition: the formal properties of an artwork are its defining properties.

When we apply an unadulterated formalism to the study of play, we produce a similar claim: the formal properties of play are the defining properties of that play. This is the primary claim I will make here, and this claim (if true) allows us to position semiotics, in contrast to its position within cultural studies, as a science. At its core, semiotics as a science investigates representationalism, intentionality, and human meaning-making as fundamental components of human activity and expression and, equally importantly, as more general features of the natural world. For, although human meaning-making processes often behave and feel as though they were subjective, semiotics as a science would attempt to uncover their objective properties, regardless of cultural context. These objective properties may appear most evident in the mechanics of a common, singular, and universal meaning-making form.

The most oft-cited studies of play and the historical basis for most contemporary play and game studies are not formalist studies. The two most prominent of these are Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) and Caillois’ Man, Play, and Games (1961). Each of these early works has something important to say regarding the crucial issue of whether human culture is determinant of or determinable by human play.

Huizinga’s thesis, for instance, is clear:

The aim . . . is to integrate the concept of play into that of culture. Consequently, play is . . . understood . . . not as a biological phenomenon but as a cultural phenomenon.!

Yet Huizinga’s analysis subsequently reveals play as dependent on something other than cultural contingency.

If this innate tendency of the mind . . . is in fact rooted in play, then we are confronted with a very serious issue. We can only touch on it here. The play attitude must have been present before human culture or human speech existed.”

Caillois’ book, more focused and restrictive in theme than that of Huizinga, prefers to examine and categorize toys and games (“the residues of culture,” p. 58) rather than either play or culture in broader contexts. To this end, Caillois’ analysis is largely directed toward attempting to uncover—the same attempt I will make here—universal properties of play as form: “These diverse qualities [of play activities] are purely formal. They do not prejudge the content of games” (p. 10).

Thus, both Huizinga and Caillois (much more readily, in fact, than most contemporary analyses of computer games) acknowledge a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary play element: an element that is formal, biological, and, ultimately, universal.

The consensual successor to the early Huizinga and Caillois landmark studies is Sutton-Smith’s well-received The Ambiguity of Play (2001). This book is the crowning achievement of one of the most prolific, influential, and insightful scholars of play in the latter half of the twentieth century; yet The Ambiguity of Play is also quite characteristic of the current “cultural turn.”?

In The Ambiguity of Play, as the title implies, Sutton-Smith describes seven distinct play “rhetorics,” each indicative of a particular set of cultural values and beliefs. It is only in the final chapters of his book that Sutton- Smith, almost reluctantly, offers his own definition of a culturally independent play that he describes as “adaptive variability.”

Evolution is characterized by quirky shifts and latent potential. What could be more fundamental in talking about all forms of play than to describe them in terms of the centrality of this notion of quirky shifts? . . . The notion that play itself is some kind of adaptive variability, and therefore presumably some kind of reinforcement of realistic adaptive variability, is very attractive.*

I define play as a facsimilization of the struggle for survival.”

Despite claims such as these (which I find very attractive as well), Sutton- Smith, in the current fashion, qualifies his biologically derived definition with reference to some larger cultural context in which it must reside: “Despite my extensive criticism of the rhetoric of progression, I have now invented yet another form of it” (p. 231).

I will not attempt hereafter, as Sutton-Smith has, to allay the concerns of cultural studies; I will attempt to more directly assert the assumptions and consequences of a biologically derived human play that is most recognizable in its common formal properties. Huizinga, Caillois, Sutton-Smith, and others have referenced these properties, but always without embracing—or confronting—them fully. These unrealized assumptions within the cultural studies of play might be least controversially labeled biological naturalism, which supposes material and objective properties of human cognition as essential to an understanding and analysis of that cognition and, by extension, cognitive play.

Using the assumptions of biological naturalism, I hope to revisit and, hopefully, revitalize formalist aesthetics theories that have been pushed aside in the intervening decades of scholarship since their origin.

The realm of computer games seems an especially good place to attempt this pro-formalist task. For computer games, of all types of games and play, are most securely situated in the formal properties of a digital game code, which is much more measurable and more determinable than that code’s pre-digital analog: game rules.

From the perspective of semiotics as a science, computer games are most essentially semiotic machines that generate and transform meanings through the coded manipulation of signs and symbols. The more accurately we are able to replicate these evocative qualities of computer games, the more likely we are to gain insight into some of the more problematic areas of human representationalism. To this end, the procedural structures of computer game design and play may be considered homologous to the human cognitive structures that enable them. Therein, the study of computer game forms and rules—and particularly the study of the interactive and transformative properties of paradoxical play with those rules—has the potential to emulate the representational qualities of the human mind in form and, perhaps, in function.

Admittedly, however, neither computer games nor computer game rules entirely encompass the phenomenon of play; and, in fact, the study of play is well justified in and of itself, with or without special reference to computer games. I have had some occasion to reflect on this larger matter: why the study of play is, in itself, important.

In one instance, David Crookall, the energetic editor of the long-running scholarly journal Simulation & Gaming, compiled a reflective issue, to which I contributed. Similarly articulate and energetic editors have called upon me to contribute my thoughts on the value of studying play and games during the initial publication of the relatively new Sage journal Games and Culture. The same question was asked in each instance: why do we now have an increasing number of game studies, scholars, journals, and interests?

There is no doubt that much of the current (twenty-first-century) academic interest in computer games and game studies is driven by the recent commercial success of the video game industry. There was, in fact, a brief, but otherwise similar, surge in academic interest in computer games and gaming during the early 1980s; when Atari was in its heyday, Chris Crawford’s Balance of Power received coverage in the New York Times Magazine (Aaron 1985), and I published my first analyses of computer games (Myers 1984).

That early video game market went bust, however, and game scholars went back to what they had been previously doing: designing, playing, and writing about games in a relatively more obscure and less convivial environment. Now, more than twenty years later, as the game industry re-asserts prices and profit margins, we once again find games and the scholarly study of games popular and, increasingly, popularized. Once again, games are interesting and appealing things—as is game play.

So, the more important question is not really “Why game studies now?” but, rather, “Why game studies at all?” Out of several reasons I have given in the past, let me re-emphasize two.

First, the study of games involves the study of play.

In 1999, after reviewing thirty years of articles in Simulation & Gaming, I said this:

What I’ve found in my review of [Simulation & Gaming] is encouraging: the continued and resolute focus on the game-playing process. Perhaps this is more by luck than design. Many contributors seem to be either dedicated game designers or game players—or both. It’s natural and expected, then, that much of their analysis is based on either game design or play. But, if this is luck, then it’s also serendipidity, for (once again) it is exactly the process of play—aside from its effects—that is at the center of the whirlpool of theory in other fields.®

After all, what other aspects of human behavior (other than play) are so common, so universal, so pervasive, so profound, and so critical to an understanding of human nature, well-being, and self-consciousness—yet studied so seldom?

Often, play studies are deemed synonymous with child development studies; and too often, theories of play remain narrowly focused within developmental models that, for all their insights, fail to consider seriously the implications of widespread and common adult play. Yet play is surely not so characteristic of the human child as it is of the human species.

Past and current game studies clearly demonstrate that game play is a cross-generational phenomenon. Indeed, definitions of games, based on very curious and sometimes paradoxical distinctions between rules-bound and rules-free systems (see Klabbers 1996), portend revision and transformation of conventional understanding of rules-based systems of all sorts: governments, economies, cultures. Sutton-Smith, in particular, has been influential in extending the study of play beyond the boundaries of child education and development by emphasizing aspects of games and play—rough and “dark” play, for instance—that have been discounted by developmental theorists.

Second, the study of games involves the study of representations.

The study of representations and the study of play are closely connected. The study of representations within games emphasizes formal properties of games; the study of play emphasizes the functional properties of those same aesthetic forms. One of the more intriguing potentials of game studies is to illuminate this connection and, in the process, perhaps resolve some of the more vexing problems in representationalism and philosophy of mind. Prominent among these is what Harnard (1990) terms the “symbol grounding” problem: an information processing dilemma based on the paradoxical implications of an endlessly recursive semiotic process operating without a clear and common reference—or “ground’—to some objective correlative or “other.”

In fact, it has long been my contention that problems and anomalies associated with human semiosis—such as the symbol grounding problem— do not result from flaws of thought or logic but, rather, are necessary and inevitable characteristics of representationalism. Game studies may well help specify such problems more clearly—as well as come to some deeper and more complete understanding of the incorrigible nature of their, at best, partial solutions.

Games, like literature, use conventional signs and symbols in unconventional ways. Early formalists focused the study of literature on the nature of “literariness,” or on those fundamental properties of literary form both derivative of and in reference to the habits and conventions of a natural language. In this same sense, what are the fundamental properties of games? What properties of game designs and forms distinguish games from other, more conventional acts and objects of human creation and culture?

Surely, these characteristics involve the form and function of representations within games. All games—all play—are, after all, virtual. And in our current age of the virtual, games and play occupy central positions.

Yet, while most concede some fundamental role to representationalism in understanding and analyzing games, there has been, to date, little overlap between the study of representational form and the study of game form— much less overlap than in other academic fields involving other aesthetic domains.

Linguists, semioticians, and some in philosophy of mind have most often carried this particular interdisciplinary torch forward. But the intellectual net is, in fact, widespread. Early exemplars of a game-related cognitive aesthetics include Jakobson’s analysis of metaphor and metonymy (Jakobson & Halle 1956), Levi-Strauss’s (1979) study of binary structures in myth and culture, Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999, 2003) insight into analogies and the origins of language, Marr’s (1982) examination of visual perceptions and cues, and Johnson-Laird’s (1983) treatise on mental models. Other studies, thematically similar but slightly closer to the study of games and related entertainment forms, include Bordwell’s (1989) essays on film, Csikszentmihalyi’s (1991) psychological analysis of flow experiences, Grodal’s (2003) investigation of the relationship between games and sensations, and Aarseth’s (1997) identification of aporia and epiphany as common and fundamental characteristics of game forms.

Each of these reveals how representational forms function as aesthetic objects during the creation, manipulation, and interpretation of signs and symbols. And each of these studies can be usefully applied within a cognitive aesthetics (coordinated with a biological naturalism) that would correlate phenomenological experiences—‘“fun,” for instance—with more objective, representational, and, ultimately, cognitive forms. Game studies are posed to emphasize, articulate, and explain such a correlation, much to the benefit of cognitive sciences and cognitive aesthetics.

Some further things are perhaps best said here in the beginning.

While I will pursue a formalist analysis, I will not attempt to be either overly technical or, for that matter, strictly precise in describing forms of play and games. This is not entirely an admission of defeat; it is an admission of inaccuracy. The precise nature of a technical explanation of play consistently eludes us all, and so I have come to believe that this elusive characteristic of play is its characteristic form.

In analogy, for instance, there is a paradox known as Berry’s Paradox: “The least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables.” In previous analysis, I have, as Berry’s Paradox attempts to describe its integer, attempted to describe play as, essentially, indescribable. Since I am able to do that only indirectly and only with analogous references to other, similarly indescribable forms, I will attempt to make those references as palatable and accessible here as possible.

Further, if I wish my analysis to be clear, and if I were to look for guidance in the clarity of my academic colleagues, I would find those colleagues in philosophy to be, pretty much by far, the clearest and most able writers. An important element of this clarity, I've noticed, is that articles and publications in philosophy tend to have fewer references than articles and publications in the social sciences, where game studies largely reside. Principia Mathematica is a well-known and prototypical example of this ability of the philosopher to find validity in an extended examination of his own argument rather than in the piecemeal—and often rhetorical—introduction of the abridged arguments of others.

While I am not so brave as to disregard entirely the value of the citationfilled treatise, I confess that I have thought about it. As a result, I hope to present my argument here aided as appropriate but unburdened, if possible, by the sometimes overzealous ritual of citation.

In the game studies community, controversies arise, from time to time, concerning the nature and relevance of the examples used to discuss the fundamentals of computer game play. Because the computer game industry, like other digital media industries, undergoes rapid evolution and change, examples of computer games used as a basis for theory development may sometimes be considered too “old” and therein not fully descriptive of more current behavior in computer game play. I rather think, in general, that the opposite is true.

As I argued in The Nature of Computer Games, computer game play and design very quickly converged in the 1970s and 1980s into a relatively limited number of still easily recognizable genres and patterns of play. These formal patterns are determined by the relatively intractable nature of human cognition and, thus, are actually often more evident in the simpler and less embellished forms of early computer games than in their later, slicker, and more commercially institutionalized forms.

A related issue here involves the concern that to understand computer game play, it is necessary to fully experience that play. I sympathize strongly with this concern—which poses a serious obstacle for the analysis of a phenomenon that requires, quite literally, hundreds and hundreds of hours of computer game play in order to most intimately learn and understand the systemic nature and individual consequences of computer game play.

Nevertheless, the nature and necessity of computer game play can only be gauged when that play takes place over an extended period of time, in a repetitive and recursive process. That is, the process of play only becomes most evident when and where there are multiple applications of that process.

These multiple applications might take place within a large group of players, or, equally validly, these multiple applications might take place within some single and extended period of play. Therefore, in most cases, here and elsewhere, I have tended to use expert computer game play as an indication of what is most likely to occur when computer games are played regularly and extensively. Expert play is better used for this purpose than beginner play in that expert play is more complete in its exploration and realization of computer game form.

Finally, a last word on biological naturalism and media determinism: if I wish to position play as originating in the natural history of the human species, then, obviously, the environment in which that species has evolved is important to acknowledge. This synergy between human environment and human behavior is readily apparent in natural affordances—of which computer games make much and significant use.

Computer games—as well as the digital medium they represent—can be considered an environmental influence on human behavior and, one might suspect, therein capable of radically transforming those (like us) who increasingly live, breathe, think, and evolve within a digital landscape. This was indeed the assumption of the once-popular media determinist Marshall McLuhan, who quite literally believed that digital media extended the human senses and, in that process, transformed human cognition. That will not be my position, however.

The most basic argument asserting the primacy of biological code over digital code in determining human behavior is simply this: Given two systems of code, one in human cognition and one in digital media, which could be expected to interact with and, over time, adapt to the other? Which would most likely display the greatest amount of variation and adaptive change over time?

Obviously, it seems to me, the system that is more flexible and capable of change will adapt more quickly and more radically to its environment than will the system that is less flexible and less capable of change. Thus, the code associated with digital media forms is more likely to adapt to the code associated with human interpretive processes—rather than vice versa."

Giving at least face validity to these assumptions, the same simple argument can also be applied to social and cultural “codes.” These, too, seem more obviously amenable to sudden change and variation than do biological codes governing human cognitive behavior. Thus, according to the same logic as above, social and cultural rules and systems are more likely to reflect adaptations to human cognitive properties than vice versa.

So, in sum, despite their potential to wreak havoc elsewhere, it is highly unlikely that digital media have had any impact whatsoever on the fundamental properties of human cognition.

Consciousness is a biological process like digestion, photosynthesis, or the secretion of bile. Of course, our conscious lives are shaped by our culture, but culture is itself an expression of our underlying biological capacities.’

It is improbable that our species evolved complex adaptations to even agriculture, let alone to postindustrial society . . . The available evidence strongly supports this view of a single, universal, panhuman design, stemming from our long-enduring existence as hunter-gatherers.*

In fact, almost without exception, new media technologies have already evolved in accordance with the requirements and characteristics of human sensibilities—rather than vice versa. The evolution of computer games demonstrates this as well as any other new media form: from black and white to color, from flat to three-dimensional visual displays, from mono to surround sound, and from isolated and single-player games to more socially oriented and complex massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs—cr, for short, MMOs).

And yet, because computer game forms adapt to and model human sensibilities, it does not necessarily follow that computer game play either extends or transforms those sensibilities. Indeed, it is important to recognize that behavior generated by mechanisms that are adaptations to an ancient way of life are not necessarily adaptive in the modern world.!°

In other words, self-reflective computer game code does not entail selfenlightening computer game play. One of the enduring themes I wish to promote here is that computer games evolve toward the subjective and the psychophysical and, in that evolution, remain steadfastly apart from the objective, the physical, and the real. The consequences of this include selfpleasure and self-understanding, in many cases of computer game play, but also self-delusion, in many others.

Here is what you will find in the rest of the book:

Chapters 1-5 (What computer games are) develop a computer game aesthetic, which I position as an anti-aesthetic. The first chapter is a description of the fundamentals of play as a semiotic process. Here I establish a model of play as a rules-breaking mechanism and outline critical distinctions, based on this model, among play, games, and simulations.

In Chapter 2, I dwell on the concept of anti-ness in form, in philosophy, and, most relevantly, in play.

Chapter 3 establishes some revealing connections between a formal analysis of computer games and play and previous formal analyses of literature and “literariness.”

Chapter 4 examines the form of computer games in more detail, highlighting differences between computer game code and computer game interface, both of which have significant influence during computer game play. This chapter also defines and gives examples of two most important formal properties of computer game play, which together constitute interactivity: recursion and contextualization.

In Chapter 5, I summarize the meaning and implications of a computer game anti-aesthetic as regards computer game play and existing theories of computer game play, particularly theories based on the assumptions of cultural studies.

Chapters 6-8 (What computer games aren't) introduce a more focused analysis of specific computer games in terms of their narrative potentials and the inconsequential nature of those potentials. Chapter 6 debunks the notion of narrative as an important influence on computer game play in general. Chapter 7 looks at the misguided use of narrative-based analysis to understand genres in computer game play, and chapter 8 looks at the presence (infrequent) and absence (often) of narrative influences in Sid Meier's famed Civilization computer game series.

Chapters 9-11 (The self and the social) deal with one of the more currently engaging topics in game studies: social play. This analysis is most generic in chapter g and then increasingly specific and detailed in chapters

10 and 11, regarding the mechanics and consequences of play in the MMO City of Heroes/City of Villains (CoH/V) (Cryptic Studios, 2004). Chapter 11 describes a case study of CoH/V play in which social play and game code are in significant conflict.

Chapter 12 (The genie in the bottle), in finale, is quite short. This chapter repeats and re-emphasizes the basic characteristics of computer game play that I have found enlightening elsewhere, as well as making some speculative comments concerning the future of social media and the consequences of social policies directed at regulating and controlling individual and idiosyncratic (e.g., “bad”) play in social media contexts.

These chapters are a compilation—not in any particularly ordered sequence, but nevertheless in significant bulk—of a series of similarly themed articles I have presented and published in various game-related conventions and contexts since The Nature of Computer Games appeared in 2003. I am grateful to those in charge of such things for allowing the words and ideas of the following original articles to reappear as necessary and appropriate here:

“Forms of rules of games of forms.” In J. Sorge & J. Venus, eds., Erzdhlformen im computerspiel: Zur medienmorphologie digitaler spiele. Bielefield: Transcript. 2009.

Play and punishment: The sad and curious case of Twixt. In The [Player] Conference proceedings. Copenhagen: IT University of Copenhagen, 2008.

The videogame aesthetic: Play as form. In Mark Wolf & Bernard Perron, eds., Videogame reader II, 45-63. New York: Routledge, 2008. Copyright © 2008 from “VIDEO GAME THEORY READER/2/2 by David Myers. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa ple.