Project Log 3 — Some Technical Difficulties

This Friday, which is normally when I sit down and record the progress of the PhD, our power went out for a large chunk of the night. Without power to work on this, or to even have the light to collect my notes, I got a bit wound up. In my anxiety to try and make sure I had something done, when the power came back, I recorded a short (1-2 minute explanation).

That said, the friday was not the whole of it: There was a lot of other work done last week. Particularly, starting my way through Harmon on Heidegger, as part of the readings pertaining to materiality. Some of my notes follow:

A philosophy is not a set of definite opinions about specific objects.’ – Page 15

Philosophy is, in a way, a game – it is a system, rules, values, with room for things to move between those factors.

‘All things that exist have the character of events.’ – Page 22

Do we see things as their entire history, from star to soil to steel to scissors to scrap to soil again? Things are snapshots of a period of arranged elements, observed in part by an observer who fantasises that the scissor is all it has ever been.

‘factical Dasein is the only subject matter of philosophy,’ – Page 25

Human interpretations of things are the only things humans can consider. Humans are our only current tool for interpreting ‘existence.”

‘Formal Indication’ – P27, follow up on

‘Life always has a threefold structure of past, present and future’ – P28

Surely the present is just another event?

‘Things have significance’ – P29

Kairological Time – P30, look further into this

‘We will have radical and serious phenomenology only when people see that direct presence of the world is never possible and that concealment belongs to the very nature of phenomena.” – P33

I craft cities and cultures and roads and spaceships and play and tension through what we choose to conceal.

‘ Spatiality Of Equipment.’ – P35. Look into this.

The lockdown has also imposed some challenges as some hobby and free play time has been curtailed due to the needs of new shopping and quarantine regimen, Not great, but it’s how it is.

Project Log 2 – DIY Runes

You don’t want to rely on someone else to provide the runes, after all. That’s just wasted rune money.

Strange Days is an asymmetrical multiplayer game with one player playing an existential threat like a horror monster, ala a Lovecraftian monster or killer AI, that is seeking ways to escape its containment. This week I’m going to focus on examining new ideas for the game systems that diversify game components from its original, limited pure-cards design, and that examine the game from the Threat’s perspective.

The wy the Threat used to work in the original design was that each turn, the threat would be digging through a deck of cards that could be laid together to form a dungeon. These dungeon rooms took up a large portion of the math of the game, and under the old limit (120 cards), the design staggered to give the threat an interesting game design. Also, this system involved the threat spending a lot of time making snap decisions every turn that would then impact a longer, later system when they were laying out their dungeon. I don’t want players to have to spend a lot of time working through that kind of thing, that seems annoying, and the spatial element is very difficult to make out of purely procedural pieces. Basically, designing a space uses up a lot of ‘idea space’ on a card that requires you to start making the whole game about movement.

The new idea for the Threat first involves creating a spatial element the whole game can orient around. That is, I’m using a gridded system design for the city. The city is going to be made out of tiles, so that every game, the city is laid out a bit differently, and prevent single dominant patterns or creating a mastery gap. Over at The Game Crafter there are three sets of square tiles I can use to build this city — large, medium and small. Depending on the overall scope of the table, I’m thinking either a 5×5 grid, or a 6×4 grid.

I didn’t explain these numbers at first. A 5×5 grid means there’s a nice standard set of 5 cards of 5 types – there’s a lot of easy combinations you can do with 5. In a list of 5 elements, you get 5 1-element choices, 10 2-element choices, 10 3-element choices, and 5 4-element combinations, which is just very smooth and makes the math easy. If the dice (coming up later) are 6-sided, that makes that math easy too – 5 faces each representing an element and a 6th element representing wild (if I’m kind) or representing nothing (if I’m mean). If I go for a 6×4 grid, that gives a more ‘lateral’ kind of vision of territory, and make the distances a little more different, and change the shapes of runes the Threat can fit in them. Also, the 6×4 grid is best if I have those 6 elements, but 6 doesn’t fit as beautifully in an even distribution of those sets.

This is the size of a medium square tile.

The point is to represent the Threat as being able to take over the city if they aren’t contained. I also want them to have an element of hidden movement and roll-and-write to them. The gameplay loop as conceived at the moment involves the investigators rolling a number of dice (which creates public information). The Threat takes one dice, discards another, and the investigators keep the rest. The Threat can only ‘fill in’ tiles in their pad with the face of the rolled dice they took – which means that the investigators can determine some information about what the threat might be doing. The remaining dice can be used by the investigators, too – so it might allow for them to heal, or do extra actions or acquire resources.

Meanwhile, the Threat is filling in sections on a map of the city, on a drawn pad. It’s important that anything the Threat does that has some sort of effect be public, though – so once a threat has filled in the right number of sections in secret, they mark those tiles, maybe with markers or tokens, or flip them over. This means that the investigators get to see the city falling before their eyes, as the Threat develops control over territory, and that territory may also present problems for the investigators.

All of this is while the Threat is using cards to create Cases. A case represents a sort of narrative event when the investigators clash with the forces of the Threat. This builds on ideas from Android: Netrunner; the Threat has a deck, a case (or cases?) they’re building, and a discard pile, and as investigators investigate, they can try and look in any of those three locations for Clue cards that will let them trigger the final confrontation of the game. The Threat can therefore view any cards they put in these spaces as potential resources; it may be best to hide a Clue in a Case, because if the investigators take their time getting to it, that’s time the Threat can use. It might be best to discard Clues, because they don’t add to Cases’ difficulty, but that means any investigator who checks the right discard pile might score three or four Clues. Similarly, the Threat may draw cards that inflict Scars on the investigators and try to ‘bait’ them into investigating them.

This also explores thinking about player elimination. In a game with this overtone of violence and conflict and madness, death seems a natural thing to include. For such an elaborate game, though, player elimination can be an unsatisfying end, and I don’t like the idea that in a game that could go long, one player has to sit around waiting for their friends to finish. I’m borrowing from Imperial Assault, that players who fail or are injured instead are ‘weak’ for the rest of an encounter, and can accrue scars, that give them strange behaviours and possible weaknesses for specific combat. Players scarred to a great degree may not be able to stop the Threat, and trigger the final confrontation.

I’m going to need to consider, as components:

• Cards
  • Clue cards
  • Investigator cards
  • Scar cards
  • Case cards
  • Therapy cards
• Tiles
• Standees or tokens to mark positions
• Cultist tokens
• A pad for the threat to write in
• Custom dice

Okay, hopefully more next week!

Board Game Cost Crisis and Kickstarter Concerns

The continuing ramifications of the COVID-19 Pandemic drag themselves across my face again.

The plan for last year was to have developed at least two games, and kickstarted one of them through to fulfillment and document the process autoethnographically. Obviously playtesting games that require meeting strangers on the regular and handling shared objects had to be put on the backburner for 2020. 2021, the plan was to get back in the swing of things, and that’s happened – but other needs have cinched on the throat of that.

Now, this.

Shipping being expensive for kickstarters isn’t likely to hit me now. But it has already bit me for card production over on DriveThruCards, which have restructured shipping and bulk pricing. It’s also part of pushing me to make more Print-And-Play designs for digital distribution, with only larger and prestige titles getting physical printings for sales.

Hopefully, this will settle down in the coming months; but maybe it won’t. Maybe it will lead to domestic facilities, or finding a new standard for workarounds. We’ll have to see.

Project Log 1 – Initialising Designing

It has been a long time since I was at my most productive with game creation. I’ve found myself unconsciously finding other things to do than start this public stage of this project, because it is both potentially embarrassing, and it runs the risk of being an inadequate exploration of what I’m doing. I am always extremely scared of sharing academic writing – I like to run it past my supervisor, but the whole point of this autoethnographic process is to interrogate my own work fearlessly. Therefore: I am attempting being fearless.

I begin this week’s considerations ruminating on a model of failure. This was spurred by reading Uncertainty In Games by Greg Costikiyan. In Jesper Juul’s The Art Of Failure he outlines a model where he describes:

• Failures of Function where the game fails to work correctly to give the correct outcome
• Failures of Motivation where the game fails to explain to the player the thing they should try to do
• Failures of Execution where the game fails because the player doesn’t play it well enough

When dealing with board games, failures of function are partly shared by the players – they have to incorporate the game’s engine in their own play behaviour. Some may call this a player incentive/capacity problem, but I honestly see it as a design problem. Games need to be made in a way to make maintaining their game state feasible. This is also related to the term that I brought up later while describing the game Strange Days, where I referred to ‘information pollution.’

This is not an idea I have seen formalised anywhere, and it seemed to me to be the best term to describe what I was experiencing. In many designs, especially prototype designs, if ways of conveying information are similar, they are seen as conveying similar information. Stacking cards to represent fungible resources vs stacking cards to represent complex locations, for example, makes it easy to confuse the scale of either. If small round counters represent coins in one zone and creatures in another, then it’s easy to confuse what you’re looking at. Therefore, while players are being given information (how many counters, the scale of them in a physical sense), that information is being corrupted and distorted by the way that information is presented alongside other information. Much like how light pollution makes it difficult to divine light sources, information pollution is not about things that distract or obscure information, but about proper and appropriate information that is presented in such a way as to diminish the ability of that information to be seen as meaningful.

I discuss an aesthetic I want to pursue for some of my card games. That is, the pixel art aesthetic of my pixel art games, which indlues Domains of Meh, Black Jack’s Dungeons, and Downspout. Of those, Only Downspout is a completed game, and I have come to consider that I want to give that game another layer of polish as well. This is primarily focused on the problems of Domains Of Meh, where after secondary rounds of play experience, Domains of Meh‘s game engine is less compelling than I thought, and the decisions it presents are more like a very weak form of worker placement that doesn’t use the things that make that genre interesting or compelling. It’s also a victim of information pollution: The cards are meant to represent both terrain and creatures that live and move in that terrain.

There is a discussion of some of the impact of COVID. It has altered printing costs minorly, but transport costs immensely. Some recent reports from within the industry of kickstarter games finding their shipping costs increase 600%, especially to locations like Australia. This represents a real problem for eventual plans to move into Kickstarter fulfillment, especially because we can’t be sure if this is a result of recent world events or if it’s one of those inelastic demands that’s going to ratchet higher when the industry adapts to it.

The resources of Gamecrafter are my current focus. While looking at the project in terms of making rather than commercial production, Gamecrafter has some really exciting stuff. It brings boxes (which can be part of the game experience, and also give me storage options for other, non-polluting material elements). It brings transparent cards (for things like overlays, or transforming cards with inherited information). There are mats and boards and pads and pencils and dice, dice, dice. There’s room for a lot of playful making in this space.

The game I’m currently considering for Gamecrafter design is to look at the VHS-aesthetic cyberpunk horror game Strange Days I designed for a game in class. That game relied on the idea of a threat player opposing up to five opponent players who represent conflicted and comprimised agents. In the original idea, in that game, the Threat was constructing dungeons out of cards, populating them with cards, and players were opposing them with their own cards. That there is that information pollution problem; by trying to design the game so that every card is worth its presence, some cards had multiple overlapping purposes and complex combinatoric systems designed to make these cards functional. With tokens and chips, I can just make these things represented by tokens.

With that, I am now thinking that the design of Strange Days wants to focus on an existing city, with some hidden movement/planning element. It’s possible I could even make it like a roll-and-write, where the investigators generate information or resources that are implemented in the things the threat can use. I’m going to investigate this further with the idea of city locations ‘releasing’ values that the Threat can use whenever the investigators attend them.

This may not even be the correct format for this kind of autoethnographic consideration of my process, but hopefully it is. Here goes.

Writing Up Die Rich’s Rules (Reblog)

This article originally appeared on my game development blog, and has been reproduced here for students to see. It has been lightly edited. This is an example of how I approach encoding rules once playtesters have played the game. It’s the difference between telling someone in front of me, and writing for someone I’ll never meet.

Die Rich is a card game I developed… I want to say early 2020, late 2019. The idea comes from a long time ago, and it’s built around a design I used for referencing a thing in a RP space, of the Carthaginian General Hannibal.

The thing is, something happeend in 2020 (like, all of 2020), and that meant I never developed the rulebook for it. I’d played the game, before I ever made any of the cards, and I’d tested it, I knew the game worked… but I never wrote down the rules.

Now I don’t know if I remember them, exactly.

But I do have a deck of the cards, so I can play the game, and see the problems, and reconstruct what I generally know. Then I’m going to construct what I need the rules to cover, and you can read that. This is how these rulebooks kinda got made.

First, you set the game up. This game uses slugs: Stacks of cards that have a trait. I need the Scoring cards to show up roughly equally spaced between one another, so we make a set of slugs to make the deck. Now, there’s a mathematical way to do this, where subtract starting hands, divide the remaining cards into four stacks, shuffle the scoring cards into each of them, then stack them up, with the Hannibal at the bottom. That’s the math of it, but phrasing it needs to be done in an approachable way:

• Remove the four scoring cards from the deck, and shuffle the remaining cards.
• Deal each player a face-down hand of four cards.
• Then deal the remaining cards into four piles.
• Shuffle the four scoring cards
• Put one of each scoring cards face-down on top of the piles.
• Shuffle the pile with the blood-stained Final scoring card
• Then shuffle each of the other stacks, and put them on top of the pile with the Final Scoring card in it.
• The deck is now ready to go!

Okay, that gives our direction for the setup. That’s good, I like that.

Next up, we need to describe the play pattern of each turn. Each player is going to pick a card from their hand to play into a tableau in front of them, and when the scoring cards come up, those cards are then ‘scored.’ That’s what the laurels are for on each card – that’s how many points that card is worth.

Every time a scoring card comes up, you score all your cards. Each type of card in your tableau is ‘won’ in different ways. It’s possible for a category to have nothing but losers, mind you!

• Property cards are rewarded to the player with the single largest property.
• Politics cards are rewarded to the player with the most supporters
• Market cards are rewarded to the player who has the cheapest markets
• Bacchanal cards are rewarded to the player who has one.

How then do these cards differentiate themselves in play? Property, Politics and Markets all have a I-VI bar on them. For each type of card, this bar means something different.

• Property cards: the number indicates where the property is. You want to get property in different, adjacent areas, to make more control over areas. This means you want contiguous numbers, if you can. The cards at either extreme – I and VI – have the highest value, because there are fewer cards for them to connect to.
• Market cards: the number indicates the prices your market charges. Lower numbers are safer, more sustainable. Market cards can score multiples at once – but it’s much easier to have markets broken by another player’s choices. So if you have say, two five-value market cards stacked together, you may be looking at a lot of points, but then any player who can play any market that’s cheaper is going to not just get their points, but destroy your points.
• Politics cards: the number indicates your position on a left-right spectrum. You earn all the political support that’s nearest to your position, with draws being dropped. So if you take 3, and another player takes 5, you get 1, 2, and 3, and they get 5 and 6.
• Bacchanal cards: Only one person can have a Bacchanal card. When a player plays a Bacchanal card, all the other ones in play get discarded. This means that if two players play a Bacchanal at the same time, they cancel each other out.

The cards have text on them to remind you of some of this – but there are details, like the Politics cards don’t explicate what ‘most supporters‘ mean. That means that needs a clear example, probably with a diagram.

Markets can have ties, and Bacchanals can’t, though. If you and I both put down a market value III and you do too… that’s fine. We can coexist. We’ll even score them, at the end of the round, unless some other player undercuts both of us.

As for politics? It’s possible for nobody to win. If one player takes the I and the other takes the VI, those two players have equal area control (I gets II and III, VI gets IV and V), and then when the time comes to grade politics? Neither of them succeeds.

Okay, that’s the rules for scoring, but we haven’t cleared up how you add cards to your tableau. That means we need to talk about the actual steps of play. You set the cards up, you understand how to value them, and now.. What.

• Each turn, players pick up to one of the cards in their hand, and put it into their tableau face-down.
• When every player has chosen their card, or chosen not to place one, they flip it over.
• If a player play a Bacchanal discard all the other Bacchanals any tableaus.
• If two players play a Bacchanal on the same turn, both are discarded.
• If a player plays a Politics card and they already have a Politics card in their tableau, they pick one to keep and discard the other
• If a player has not played any card, they can discard any number of cards from their hand.
• Then, each player draws cards until they have four cards in hand.

Okay that’s our player loop. But we’ve looked at the drawing of cards, and that’s a problem, because that deck has those Scoring cards in it. Those scoring cards have on the back of them a symbol so when they show up, people get to know that scoring is about to happen. Then…

• If a Scoring card is revealed, players flip it over and set it next to the deck while they draw cards up to their four cards

Alright, hang on, in a four player game, there’s very much possible a chance that if all the players throw out their hands, you could see sixteen draws and that’ll get multiple scoring cards revealed, so we need to make a note for that.

• If one or more Scoring cards are revealed, flip them over and set it next to the deck while players draw their cards.

Then there needs to be a rule about how to handle scoring.

• Once one or more scoring cards have been revealed, it’s the end of the round. Players can play one more turn, and at the end of that turn, players score their cards.
• All the market cards that have the shared lowest value are scored.
• The player who has the largest property scores one of those cards of their choice
• The player who has the most political support scores the politics card
• For each type of card in your tableau that you can score, turn it around so the wreaths are pointing up. They’re not part of your tableau any more.
• Check the scoring cards – they give special bonuses to players who perform best in one of the three categories of Property, Politics and Bacchanal this round.

And… that’s it?

I think?

The final scoring card, the Hannibal card ends the game. That doesn’t get anyone any bonus points.

Upon playtesting with some students, I got a new detail to work with: It’s possible riiight at the end of the deck that a player doesn’t have the means to restock their hand. This creates a slightly fiddly rule. I don’t want to make it so players have to monitor who drew what, because what cards go into your hand is technically hidden information, and I don’t want to make the draw into a slow, monitored specific.actions. So this creates a little bit of wiggly feelings – do we just deal with it when some players’ final actions are made with fewer cards? I’m not sure it’s a bad thing.

The problem it presents, though, is that it means that the order of drawing suddenly becomes something to track. Right now you don’t need to.

I think that as a result, when the deck runs out, you just shuffle the discard pile, stick it down and the players draw their remaining cards from it. This is as best I can see the simplest method?

Alright, so that’s… our basic outline? That’s all the rules required for the game. Now the next struggle is to get these into a rulebook.

Abstraction, Confrontation, and Materiality

When you work with ideas for PhDs, which are original research (god, that’s scary), at first you must construct a model. This is a draft of mine, from way earlier in the year, which has already been dragged around the block. It’s already under revision. But, if I want to show the process, that means showing the bits I’ve already moved past, even if I’m embarassed of them. Consider this a stepping stone.

My PhD is about making games.

I’m working on constructing a model for looking at games (in general) that focuses on board games (in specific). Existing models of classifying games out in the wild are kind of grassroots, disorganised, and unfortunately, structured primarily by nerds, some of the worst kind of humans for providing comprehensive, forgiving models of classification. There are people who will shout in your face that 4th Ed D&D is a tactical miniatures Wargame, you Chad, because it’s not about communicating relationships between types of games as much as it is about defending territory they’ve staked out, and somehow being able to transform their preferences into rules. Ameritrash and Eurogame are terms of art, not (such as it is) science.

This model of game analysis is meant not to give hard defined boundaries for the games – don’t think this is about saying this game scores a 7.4 on miniatures. This is about instead presenting games as expressions of multiple axes, and lets you think about games in terms of how their designs are similar.

What we have is a model on three axes. It started out as a spectrum – a line in a row – then two lines in a row – then lines in opposition, but where we are now, the model considers each game has having a range of Abstraction, Confrontation and Materiality. Each of these values goes from ‘not very much at all’ to ‘lots and lots’ – we’re not talking hard numeric values. It’s possible a game to have very little abstraction, almost none, and it’s very possible for a game to have very little materiality, just as it’s possible for a game to have lots and lots of materiality or abstraction. At the same time it seems very hard for a game to have literally nothing of any of these things.

Abstraction, in layperson’s terms, is how much a game presents of a theme. All games are abstractions – they’re human-mind representations of importance, assigned to indicators. Soccer is an abstraction, even if the thing it’s abstracting is soccer mattering (soccer is fake, actually). Some board games are very, very heavily abstracted for what they represent – look at games like Chess or Checkers – even those that are trying to represent something like a battle are still pretending battles work on extremely arbitary, careful rules with oddly specific dynamics. Some games are instead very low on abstraction and do whatever they can to present to you, the player, as much of their theme and game world every time you play them. Games like Magic: The Gathering are, again, still abstract representations of a war between wizards, but they’re still absolutely soaking with things that want to give you the feeling of existing in their world.

Low-abstraction games can look really different, though. Dungeons and Dragons runs low on abstraction because you’re trying to make absolutely sure that the world feels real, and players engaging with that world can interact with it in as many ways as they can conceive and explain to the player coordinating the game. Games like Gipf are really abstracted because they want to make the math puzzle of how you engage with them more present than caring about the fiction or the motivations of actions.

Confrontation is the degree to which the game presents players with opposition. The easiest models of confrontation are players in competition with one another, trying to ‘beat’ one another in some way. Race games like Snakes and Ladders have a lot of very obvious confrontation. You want to get to the goal before your opponents do. When they win, you do not win, and the very simple binary of ‘win or lose’ is the only thing the game is about. Confrontation and how the game presents it is a fascinating axis with so many different options. Games can be opaque about it, like Tigris and Euphrates, or they can be direct, like Formula D. They can make engaging with your confrontation indirect, like Monopoly, or they can make it direct, like Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Sometimes the game itself confronts all players, and then those players compare how they handle that opposition, and that becomes another level of confrontation, like Imperial Settlers.

Then, our third axis is materiality. Board games get to do a lot with materiality, moreso than videogames – because board games are built around what you might conventionally see as ‘actual objects.’ Some tabletop games can have almost no materiality, like word games and gambling puzzles. Some games play with huge materiality, like crowd-friendly games like Two Rooms And A Boom where just having a big space is part of the game. To bring up Dungeons and Dragons again, that’s a game that turns dungeons and palaces and dragons into (potentially) entirely conceptual entities, both as non-material entities, but also imbues those entities with the idea they should have mass and weight and force, and therefore, they have a virtual materiality.

This is a first draft of this concept space. It’s going to get prettied up for my thesis – and we’re already on the way to changing parts of it. Still, as with all things that wind up working, there are points along the way where they do not work. That’s where this is.

Symmetrical Juuls

[rules and fiction] are complementary, but not symmetrical.

When you deal with academic writing you’re sometimes left stymied by word choices. It’s one of the reasons the whole affair can feel super arcane, because people spend a month writing a sentence and then another month justifying that sentence to the people overseeing the writing.

This is something I’m finding. Most days I look at a statement and rewrite it, figuring it might look good tomorrow. So far it hasn’t.

This eight word conception comes from Jesper Juul’s Half-real: Video games between real rules and fictional worlds, 2011, and I feel like I could spend a lot of time – like, say, a whole blog post – picking at those word choices. Why not symmetrical? Why not asymmetrical? Why not ‘they are not symmetrical.‘ It’s easy to conceive that the structure of this one little sentence is that simple.

This is from Chapter 4, which is about Fictions. This chapter is – to summarise roughly – about what we sometimes in games refer to as theme or abstraction, not its narrative. Narrative is a story, and it’s how our brains do things – I’ve long since said that a game is a machine for making stories, and we make stories because it’s a really useful way for our brains to store a linear sequence of cause and effect. Fictions is a good way to establish the idea of the world that the game wants that story to occupy – whether an abstracted world where nothing matters but the order and sequence of a play, or a heavily flavoured world of flavours and sounds and spaces and moistures.

The book itself, I learned about, sadly not from my readings – I mean, I’m working through them at my own rate – but from the Game Studies Study Buddies podcast, which is available here. I’m honestly annoyed because it seems that the people involved are both smart and on similar pages to me, processing text and not necessarily agreeing with or disagreeing with it, playing in the spaces of consideration and being able to vocalise good and useful ideas about how academics can consider games, and they don’t fall down into treating all videogames as alien creatures to tabletop games. Heck, they mention that as something Juuls notices, the way tabletop games break a lot of the rules of what ‘is’ a game and therefore ‘game’ has to keep moving as a definition.

But that word choice, that thing up top, it sits on my head, as a friend mentions she’s dealing with internet that is Very Not Good, which I distinctly and clearly understand as different to Not Very Good. That order of emphasis is a coherent conception, and yet if I tried to feather it out for you I might miss the meaning she’s getting at.

Anyway, these ideas, that fiction and rules are complementary is something I have stumped at hard: If your rules fly in the face of your fiction, you weaken them both. The fiction can encode actions in your mind and make game mechanics coherent where they might otherwise not be. I’ll not go into examples here, but maybe I will another time. This is just a given.

But that last point: They are not symmetrical.

To call them asymmetrical would be to say that they are never symmetrical. To call them non-symmetrical would make their symmetry a function of what they are. Much of game studies want to talk about rules without fiction, to break down Plants vs Zombies into specific, tight details that ignore that this is a game about zombies, and how they vs plants, and how that fiction encodes game rules into player’s minds. Juul forwards the idea in Half-Real that you can discuss rules without fiction, but not the fiction without rules.

And that’s what I’m worrying at right now. Because they aren’t symmetrical. Rules can interleave with one another in places that leave the fiction untouched. Shuffling and stacking a deck in a particular way may have an outcome to the fiction, but the rules of the method are there for the outcome, not for the cause. There are ways the fiction can leave the rules untouched, like decals over a chassis. But I’m not sure I agree with Juuls that fiction depends on rules while rules do not depend on fiction.

But we’ll see. This is the problem with readings.

You’re never sure until you’re done and you’re never done.

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This blog post represents notes on my PhD reading of Half-real: Video games between real rules and fictional worlds, by Jesper Juul (2011), chapter 4.

Presentation Feedback 1

Mamamia.com.au

The first presentation was a discussion of the media outlet MamaMia.Com.Au. It looked at the outlet over time and considered it both in terms of changing perspectives from a personal blog to a business entity, and also in so doing, the shift in landscape about representation of and presentation as a feminist outlet.

The main thing that stood out to me about this talk was the way the presentation used feminism, the word. Specifically, the presentation simply used feminism as a binary state, as in the question is Mamamia A Feminist Media Source. This needed some definition: Feminism has a simple definition, but its execution is very broad and wide. Is Mamamia an outlet unwittingly part of “White Feminism?” Is it striving to be Intersectional? Is it historically feminist, and full of a userbase primarily oriented around the feminist struggles of their younger days?

This definition wasn’t supplied. I assume the Thesis does present a single, central vision on the definitions and boundaries of feminism it intends to use, with its focal values and how it seeks to engage them, but it was still confusing to me. The question of is this feminist or not becomes much harder to answer without a clear idea of what that is, or even how that means. Theory and praxis are very different things, and it’s also possible that the outlet comes from a place of feminist theory, but its practical expression is flawed or is rendered without an awareness of the many complex intersections of not just genders, but gender binaries and cissexist assumptions.

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Games From The Outside

My notes are sadly a bit thin from this presentation. Thanks to a prolonged internet outage, I’ve been unable to recover much of what I had to say about it. I will note that the slides were very information dense. Much of what the talk covered projected to me the idea of a sort of Ethnography – of reaching into a community space not owned by the writer and creating a text to decode what was evident to the people within the setting.

PowerPoint Sucks

Back in BCM311 I wound up offhandedly suggesting this was a reason that we shouldn’t use Powerpoint to make our points. After that point was made, the Professor eschewed it for our presentations in that class, but I did still start this little piece and considered it worth polishing up and finishing. As I start another semester of work, the specter of Powerpoint looms and I felt it best to elaborate.

Why Does It Suck?

• Presentations should not simply be reading aloud the text on a slide
• Slides should be useful for illuminating the spoken text
• But that means the bulk of the presentation is in the spoken text…
• … and that means there’s not as much text to put in the slides!
• So if your marking rubric requires a word count or slide count, it encourages text dumps!
• Slides are good for images and graphs and video – which are not graded as words!
• Good Powerpoint presentations are best handled with some theatre –
• and those skills aren’t part of any of the courses!
• So giving a good presentation isn’t something we teach –
• it’s something we expect you to already be able to do!
• And that means the skills Powerpoint give you are just skills for making more Powerpoint!
• Skills for making Powerpoint aren’t good skills because Powerpoint sucks!
  

Why Do Teachers Want It?

I think the big reason teachers want us to use powerpoint is because it’s a deliverable. It’s a thing that we can put our references onto, that shows we put some work in and did something other than read enough to give an impression we’re faking our way through the course. One of the ways we can represent that we’re doing the work is to show our ability to recontextualise it – one thing to put text on a page, but if we talk about it, even for a few minutes at a time, we can show that we’ve been able to recontextualise that information.

We then waste all that time just reiterating a written report!

So.

What Can We Do To Fix It?

Well here’s the bad news. Students need to get engaged.

We need to have the leeway to treat our deliverable in terms of references. Word counts on Powerpoint presentations need to just go – they’re awful, they’re useless. Powerpoint isn’t a bad skill to have but it’s not a skill fundamental to everything we do. Unless the uni is going to offer a course on Using Powerpoint Well, then we need to make sure our involvement, our skill with the program itself is a minimal factor.

We need to be able to do things like record the presentation, and then, after the fact annotate our own recorded audio, such as on Soundcloud. We need to be able to do things like record a presentation ahead of time and playback the video or the audio with images.

If the challenge is the recontextualisation, then let us recontextualise in a way that doesn’t benefit people who are good at fooling people, and instead tries to give as many people a platform to show that they have recontextualised the information.

#LHA300-4 – Synthesis

There’s this term you see a lot in gaming media, a term that’s faded in popularity in recent years but sadly serves a decent purpose: Ludonarrative Dissonance. This dissonance, derived from the cinematographical term Filmic Dissonance, is the problem that comes when a game’s systems, juxtaposed with the game’s content, seems mis-matched.

There’s a number of examples of this in games. One fairly renowned example is in the videogame Bioshock Infinite, where a narrative about racism in an opulent floating country is interrupted by the player character being induced by health-based rewards to eat cake out of trash bins. Ask any game reviewer and they’ll have an example for you, of something that stood out to them and stuck in the memory about a game because they weren’t… quite sure it fit.

This synthesis of content and systems is, for lack of any better term, the game itself. When they work together, the game feels whole; when they work against one another, it creates a strange feeling. Sometimes it doesn’t even slow things down meaningfully – players are very good at skipping over systemic bumps as they get into the fun of a game.

Dissonance is worth considering, especially when you have a dossier or a statement of intention in a game. If a game is about deprivation and debt, does it mean anything if the players are constantly rolling in the game’s currency? Does a game frame itself as being about combat, but all combats are resolved by a single, blind die roll?

In The Suits there’s no current glaring point of dissonance. In play, there are moments when the lack of information becomes a problem. Players are trying to manage hidden information, but are completely bereft of reasons why. It’s possible a player may use their nicknames, and give a player who knows all the possible nicknames an edge on knowing what gang they belong to. What’s more, memorising that table (when ambiguity about who is what allegiance) becomes a very powerful option, which seems maybe against what is a very lightweight, very small game.