Architecture of games
From GamesCultures.org
Article on Architecture of Games
Authored by Jan H.G. Klabbers, KMPC-NL
Contents |
[edit] Introduction
Framing a collaborative effort regarding mapping digital play around the world is not a simple and straightforward task. As Frans Mäyrä and the InGa Team (University of Tampere - Games Research Lab - Finland) rightly observe: currently we have available only scattered information on the popularity and forms of engagement with digital games in a global context. Gamers are aware that playing games presumes engaging themselves in multiple gaming formats. Claims about particular games and typical qualities of groups playing those games do not necessarily match. Therefore, in the spirit of the 2007 conference of DiGRA with the theme “Situated Play”, Frans Mäyrä and the InGa Team proposed in December 2007 a collaborative effort aimed at collecting findings from research, gathering personal observations and reporting on group and institutional activities about forms of play around the world. With this goal in mind they have set up the following web site: http://www.gamescultures.org. It is an open WIKI resource about global games cultures.
Frans Mäyrä and colleagues pointed out that the basic philosophy behind GamesCultures.org is to share information between researchers, and to situate that information in various geographical, social and cultural contexts. They invited gamers to use the site to convey and share findings from research, link information to publications, and to compare results and lessons learned with similar work performed by colleagues in other countries. Comparison makes only sense if those involved in the effort share a frame-of-reference that enhances a common understanding of the architecture and use of games. Providing such preconditions, information and data - scattered over many geographical locations - could over time grow into a valuable knowledge resource for comparative studies into various social and cultural aspects of gaming, and become supported by useful links to other, established sources of games research information. Frans Mäyrä and colleagues, for good reasons, expressed a word of warning about the limited reliability of self-published media, referring to errors and misconceptions in “wikis” and “blogs”. To ensure that this effort will bear fruit in terms of a reliable and valid WIKI resource, all those who engage themselves in “Games Culture” should form a critical, knowledgeable, and constructive community of gamers, open to debate, and mutual learning. As a rule, adjustments in the WIKI resource should be made only after the gamers involved have had a chance to discuss them in advance, to share a common understanding of the issue at hand. Unilateral adjustments in the text should be avoided. Participants should refrain from building a WIKI Tower of Babel.
[edit] The play element of culture
Play is a basic quality of humans. According to Huizinga (1955), play precedes and brings forward culture. If play is a common human drive, then we should not be surprised to find its traces in ancient cultures, as well as in current cultures spread over this globe. Games are forms of play. A whole variety of forms exist. Forms may gradually grow over centuries, see for example the game of CHESS, or they are specifically designed to suit certain purposes during a particular period of time. Deliberate design happens with for example business and management games, urban management games, international relations games, and more recently with digital games.
The idea of play is subjectively embedded in the player, while the idea of a game - a form of play - is objectively grounded in the rules, and resources. The term “playful gaming” links both qualities. A game is only a game if being played. Game resources can be very simple: small holes in the sand and a handful of beans to play AWARI; a bunch of plastic to play FOOTBALL in the back yard, a wooden board and small colored wooden discs to play CHECKERS, or GO. They can be sophisticated such as in digital games. The key is the human drive to play. The instrumentality of games influences the experience of play, and their playfulness.
Comparing various cultures, we can observe a diversity of games that are linked to national folklores. North Americans enjoy baseball, football, ice hockey, and basketball. People from the UK and the Commonwealth love cricket and rugby, while the Dutch enjoy long distance skating in severe winter (100 km and more) and football (soccer). In general, people from Europe, South America, and especially Brazil love football (soccer), while the Japanese by tradition love JUDO and SUMO. The geopolitical strategy of the USA seems to be related to the mindset of CHESS, while by comparison the Chinese political philosophy seems to be linked to playing GO. What makes that these various sorts of games are so closely linked to national folklore? Is it the architecture of those games, the way they are embedded in the prevailing life style, the type of socio-economic order, norms and values, or religion that trigger or prevent such preferences to emerge? An interesting question is whether one can speak already of such national folklores with regard to preferences for certain types of digital games.
A group of professionals, involved in digital gaming, have introduced for marketing reasons the term “serious games”. That term is in relation to the idea of play odd. If there is a class called “serious games”, then there is also a class “not-serious games”. I am not sure what the meaning of “not-serious games” is. Huizinga (1955) checked the conceptual value of the word “play” by the word, which expresses the opposite, its negation. For this he chose the word “earnest”, used in the sense of “work”. The opposite of work can either be play, jesting, or joking. He chose the complementary pair play-earnest as the most interesting one. Leaving aside here linguistic questions, Huizinga argued that the two terms are not of equal value. The significance of the term “earnest” is defined by and exhausted in the negation of “play”, earnest in the sense of “not-playing”, and nothing more. The significance of “play”, on the other hand, is not defined or exhausted by calling it “non-earnest”. Players can be both playful and serious. Therefore, the play concept is much broader and of higher order than is seriousness. Seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness. Following this line of reasoning, I argue that the term “serious game” excludes play and is equivalent to work. Serious games are either not playful, referring to working conditions, or they are playful, excluding working conditions. Applying the first option implies that playing serious games is a contradiction in terms. Following the second option - the idea of serious games including playfulness - makes that the connotation “serious” becomes redundant, and the term “serious games” a pleonasm.
Providing the play element of culture, which applies to all cultures, research findings conveying that people in certain countries play games is a trivial outcome. More interesting and informative will be to characterize the sort of game categories that people play, taking into account the typical qualities of those games. For example, Caillois (2001) paid attention to the interdependence of games and culture, to the reciprocal relationship between a society and the games it likes to play. He illustrated this among others with the Argentine card game of TRUCO, related to POKER and MANILLA. It is essential for each player to let the partner know the cards in hand, without the opponents learning about them. The single cards, and combinations are symbolized via various facial expressions, each corresponding to different individual cards and sets of cards. The signals are part of the rules of the game. They must be meaningful to be effective for the partner, and simultaneously incomprehensible for the opponents. Skill is required to communicate with the partner, and to deceive the opponent. Such game qualities, so prevalent as a characteristic of this almost national pastime, “may excite, sustain, or reflect habits of mind that help give ordinary life, and possibly public affairs too, their basic character: the recourse to ingenious allusions, a sharpened sense of solidarity among colleagues, a tendency toward deception, half in jest and half serious, admitted and welcomed as such for purposes of revenge, and finally a fluency in which it is difficult to find the key word, so that a corresponding aptitude must be acquired” (Caillois, 2001, p.84). In terms of cause and effect relations, it may be that TRUCO has impacted on the Argentine culture. It may also be the other way around. Argentine culture, favoring ingenious allusions, has embraced TRUCO, because it reinforces existing habits and values. It also may be the case that Argentine culture and TRUCO form a positive feedback loop, reinforcing one another. The question is whether this connection between TRUCO and Argentine culture, observed and hypothesized by Caillois in the 1950s, still exists in contemporary Argentine, or whether another game has become a national pastime? Moreover, it could as well be the case that TRUCO was a good escape from oppressing, upsetting government (Klabbers, 2006, p. 304-305).
[edit] Games are artifacts
Games are artifacts: human constructions. The study of form and structure of these artifacts should be at the basis of their classifications, generating classes and specimen with distinct qualities. The morphology of games should provide the foundations for developing a coherent taxonomy, which I consider a precondition for making comparisons. Studying the architecture of games covers three aspects (Klabbers, 2006): • Art and science of design of the artifacts; • Style and layout of particular artifacts; • Structure, design, and assessment of the artifacts. Basically, the morphology of games consists of three interrelated building blocks: 1. Actors (players); 2. Rules; 3. Resources. For example, playing CHESS requires two players (actors), a common set of rules, and the following resources: a game board, two sets of different pieces - one, black, and the other one white, and in a tournament, a chess clock. The rules not only prescribe which moves with the pieces are allowed, moreover, they define whether and how both players are allowed to communicate. Different games include different qualities and abilities of distinct numbers of players, different sets of rules, and different kinds of resources. The way the players interact defines the social organization, they (temporarily) shape. These interactions follow from the rules (codes of conducts, habits, etc.). Rules are associated with regularity, the common order of things, instructions, procedures, directions, in general by assertions. Game designers express and communicate knowledge by making assertions about causal relations between the game objects. Resources are represented by a variety of media of representation such as a soccer field, game boards, or digital images mirroring the infrastructure of a city, a building, or a landscape. The medium of representation of CHESS can be a wooden board, an electronic screen, or a playground with play-actors.
[edit] Architecture of games
Based on the notions expressed above, the architecture of games is illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Illustration of the generic architecture of games
It represents fully-fledged digital games, including avatars that are embedded in the set of rules. The actors impinge directly - or via the avatars - on the resources, in this illustration characterized by a city map. The reader will understand that the reference system of resources can be shaped through a whole variety of media of representation, as is common practice in gaming. It is acknowledged that in principle each actor - through distributed access to the resources - can play by different sets of rules. It is up to the designer to allocate a (sub)set of rules to all or to a subset of players.
With this frame of reference in mind we are able to generate the great diversity of appearances of games, whether or not computer supported. Moreover, that diversity is understood from the viewpoint of a generic architecture. Both qualities enable the comparison of distinct sorts of games in terms of their composition of actors (social organization), rules (sorts of prescriptions, procedures, and assertions), and resources (media of representation). Donning this lens to read the multiple appearances of games will enhance sharing information between researchers and practitioners, situating that information in various geographical, social and cultural contexts, and consequently gathering common understanding. In addition to describing games according to this frame of reference, researchers and practitioners should report on the typical contexts-of-use and the intended audiences (types of users) of the games. That information relates to the artifacts and their operational environments, referring to their functionality, usability, and playfulness.
Digital games are artifacts from tool-rich industrial societies. For that reason, mapping digital play around the world will right from its beginning offer a biased sample of digital gaming. Biased, in the sense of lack of an adequate IT-infrastructure, as is the case in various countries, or lack of sufficient financial resources, as is the case with poor people even in rich countries. Therefore, information on the popularity and forms of engagement with digital games in a global context will stay biased. We will need to include that notion in our reports. Digital games form a special branch of games, both with regard to their architecture, and their global reach and accessibility. That awareness should be taken on board as well.
[edit] References
- Caillois, R. (2001) (first ed. 1958). Man, Play and games. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
- Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo Ludens: A study of the play element in culture. Boston: The Beacon Press.
- Klabbers, Jan H. G. (2006). The Magic Circle: Principles of gaming & simulation. Rotterdam: SensePublishers. See: http://www.kmpc.nl
