- Reviewing Bogost Questions / Feedback
- Procedural Rhetoric: Identifying Mechanics
- To The Google Doc
- Let’s Play: Papers Please
- Homework: First Project, a Procedural Analysis
Thursday Update
I’ve gone through the ideas we developed on Tuesday for a procedural analysis and attempted to transform it into a more organized heuristic. Let’s take a look.
I quickly skimmed through the first set of gaming journal entries and was impressed by the range of games folks are playing–let’s walk through that quickly.
Homework for Tuesday:
I want to budget a “double session” over the weekend (and I’m giving you some time today to get a head start). Play your game for 2 hours, writing for about 20 minutes after each session. So, by next Tuesday, you should have played your game for at least 3 hours, and written for at least an hour.
After this, you should have a pretty clear what the 2-4 most significant procedural dimensions of your game are. In other words, the thesis of your paper should be starting to take shape. You should have more guided questions/focus for your remaining 2 hours of gameplay.
We’ve got a tentative due date on this first paper of January 31st. So that means next week would involve playing your game for 2 hours and then turning your gaming journal notes into a paper. I’m guessing at paper length here: this feels like 4-5 double-spaced? Honestly, I’m less concerned about length and more curious about the depth of ideas and analysis. Also: tone/voice/style. I hate academic papers. I teach another class on video games in which people write academic papers. This is not technically a CO writing class, so you don’t have to write academic papers. Write in any voice that suits you. Pretend you are an IGN reviewer. Hate something? Channel your inner Zero Punctuation. Or, perhaps more better, your inner Extra Credits. Or, just go ahead and write a 5 paragraph-ish essay. Or don’t.
Tuesday’s class will be my stock “How to organize an academic paper” lecture thingy. If you *need* to learn how to write/organize an academic paper, then I will certainly read one and help you. Consider this an opportunity to practice the style of writing you want.
- Narrative Mechanics: Missile Command
- Mechanics and Tone – How Does Gameplay Relate to Story?
- No Gendered Mechanics – How Genre Stereotypes Limit Games and Players
- Hidden Game Mechanics: Design for the Human Psyche
Reviewing Bogost Questions
Looking through the Bogost reading responses, I noticed a number of people who had questions regarding procedural rhetoric. I think this response captures a lot of the uncertainty I was reading:
I was confused about what exactly procedurality is. Is procedurality/process the software itself or the rules the computer software makes? I think after reading the article that I’ve
come to understand that process is what determines what the players can and can’t do in the game.
And I could see some additional confusion manifest in responses to Q4, since many people gave examples of “choose your own adventure” decisions or character choice. In many cases, choosing a playable character or navigating a decision tree isn’t necessarily procedural. (Sicart veterans: things get dicey if a supposedly ethical decision is tied too closely to an in-game reward or power level; that’s when decision-making might be procedural because of a game’s reward structure).
Let’s recall Custer’s questions for players:
- What does this game “represent” (different potential meanings: Literal? Symbolic/Theme? Is this game modeling something from the real world? Beyond this real world model, is there a deeper meaning / attempt to persuade?
- What mechanics does the game use to support that representation?
- What are some potential arguments made by the mechanics?
- In what ways do the mechanics match the argument?
- In what ways do the mechanics clash with/ignore the argument?
- So what is procedural? Let’s begin by thinking about the mechanical systems that players navigate.
What I would like to do today is to further develop Custer’s heuristic. In Rhetoric and Composition, a heuristic is a set of open answered (not yes/no) questions intended to help spur thought and generate ideas. I would like to extend Custer’s heuristic by flushing out what kinds of mechanics, and what kinds of questions, we can ask about the games we play. What are the kinds of “mechanical processes” we encounter in games?
I’ve already started this a bit above, trying to tease out sophisticated multiple meanings for the term “represent” in question #1. As an old literature major, I tend to think about representation in terms of “theme” or “moral”: the element of the human condition that a game attempts to illustrate (for you non-English majors, this will make more sense when we discuss Aristotle in the *next* project). But we can also take representation more literally–for instance, Out of the Park baseball attempts to represent the machinations of a baseball season from the perspective of a general manager. Sim City affords you the opportunity to design, manage, and grow a city. Not all games necessarily represent something that we can/do in the real world, but many do, or, at the very least, incorporate real world systems into their design. Other games incorporate real world “ideas” about the ways the world works into their designs (ideologies).
Okay, to the Google Doc. Activity #1: What do we mean by mechanics?
What happens when we run “Every Day the Same Dream” through our developing heuristic idea machine?
One thing that might help us here is Love’s (n.d.) “Problematizing Videogames: Students to be Critical Players. Let’s start by looking at his summary of Bogost and “unit operations” (p. 7). Love offers a handful of preliminary discussion questions on page 11–let’s take a look at those, too, and identify which of them feel procedural.
The meat of Love’s article focuses Consalvo and Dutton’s (2006) 4 categories for analyzing a video game:
- Object Inventory (12-13)
- Interface Study (14)
- Interaction Map (15)
- Gameplay Log (16-17)
Break and attack.
First Project: Procedural Analysis of a Video Game
My hope is the discussion above and collaborative work in our Google Doc helps clarify a range of procedural analytic approaches. (If time/interest allows, Hayden (2017) on how Mass Effect proceduralizes particular theories of international relations. Particularly the thesis work on 177 and sample analysis on 182.
Your assignment is to identify a game (or games) for procedural analysis. This can be a game with which you are already familiar or one that you have never played–either option should produce results. I expect you to play the game(s) for 6 hours, writing a gaming log for every hour of play. Our heuristic activity should provide you with plenty of avenues for thought regarding your game log entries and eventual paper focus. Your ultimate paper focus should be on the most interesting (whether positive or terrible) rhetorical purposes/mechanics in your game. This might vary widely depending on what game you choose to play.
I rarely assign students to write something that I have not done myself–but this is one of those cases. While I have written extensively about video games, I have not written a procedural analysis (the closest I got was on the psychological implications of Resident Evil’s typewriter save system). In Thursday’s class, I’m going to try and model how I might approach this paper by playing “Papers Please” with you and applying the heuristic questions to our collective play.
Logistically, it is quite tricky for me to anticipate how long these papers will be. We will figure that out down the road. I would like to set the due date for these papers as Monday, January 31st.
Homework
I would like you to create a Google Doc and submit it to the Canvas Assignment Week 2: Procedural Gaming Journal. Let me walk you through that now.
Between now and Thursday, you should identify a game you want to play and write about, and play it for 45 minutes. Then write in your gaming journal for 15-20 minutes. Use the heuristics we examined and developed in class today to guide your writing. Your paper will be on the procedural dimensions of your game–what is procedural interesting? Sophisticated? Frustrating? Do the mechanics feel “realistic” to you? Do they pull you out of an immersive experience? Is this game making an explicit social argument (even explicit requires nuance, there’s a difference between, say, the PETA games we examined last week and FFXIV’s Shadowbringer’s critique of Trump).
Additionally, you might experiment with a game highlighted on the Games For Change website. As the title suggests, many of these are “serious games.” You might conduct a procedural analysis to see if they are a “good” game, if they are taking advantage of mechanical/procedural affordances in a way that intensifies their intended message.
You are also free to compare contrast how a particular mechanic works/differs in a number of different games (say, my question about how movement differs in World of Warcraft and FFXIV–why does this matter, how does it impact my experience as a player?)
