default header

Theory

Books on games

Moderator: JC Denton

Unread postby Gaius » 22 Aug 2014 04:21

I was looking up some of the "game academic" people yesterday and I came across some books that have been released relatively recently relating to videogames.

First up is Jesper Juul! From the Playful Thinking series from MIT Press:

http://www.playfulthinking.net/

the art of failure
by Jesper Juul

We may think of video games as being "fun," but in The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul claims that this is almost entirely mistaken. When we play video games, our facial expressions are rarely those of happiness or bliss. Instead, we frown, grimace, and shout in frustration as we lose, or die, or fail to advance to the next level. Humans may have a fundamental desire to succeed and feel competent, but game players choose to engage in an activity in which they are nearly certain to fail and feel incompetent. So why do we play video games even though they make us unhappy? Juul examines this paradox.

In video games, as in tragic works of art, literature, theater, and cinema, it seems that we want to experience unpleasantness even if we also dislike it. Reader or audience reaction to tragedy is often explained as catharsis, as a purging of negative emotions. But, Juul points out, this doesn't seem to be the case for video game players. Games do not purge us of unpleasant emotions; they produce them in the first place. What, then, does failure in video game playing do?

Juul argues that failure in a game is unique in that when you fail in a game, you (not a character) are in some way inadequate. Yet games also motivate us to play more, in order to escape that inadequacy, and the feeling of escaping failure (often by improving skills) is a central enjoyment of games. Games, writes Juul, are the art of failure: the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience it and experiment with it.

The Art of Failure is essential reading for anyone interested in video games, whether as entertainment, art, or education.

About the Author
Jesper Juul is Assistant Professor at the New York University Game Center. He is the author of Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds and A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players, both published by the MIT Press.


Seems laughably bad.

Next is another book from the Playful Thinking series called "Uncertainty in Games" by a guy called Greg Costikyan:

uncertainty in games
by Greg Costikyan

In life, uncertainty surrounds us. Things that we thought were good for us turn out to be bad for us (and vice versa); people we thought we knew well behave in mysterious ways; the stock market takes a nosedive. Thanks to an inexplicable optimism, most of the time we are fairly cheerful about it all. But we do devote much effort to managing and ameliorating uncertainty. Is it any wonder, then, asks Greg Costikyan, that we have taken this aspect of our lives and transformed it culturally, making a series of elaborate constructs that subject us to uncertainty but in a fictive and nonthreatening way? That is: we create games.

In this concise and entertaining book, Costikyan, an award-winning game designer, argues that games require uncertainty to hold our interest, and that the struggle to master uncertainty is central to their appeal. Game designers, he suggests, can harness the idea of uncertainty to guide their work.

Costikyan explores the many sources of uncertainty in many sorts of games – from Super Mario Bros. to Rock/Paper/Scissors, from Monopoly to CityVille, from FPS Deathmatch play to Chess. He describes types of uncertainty, including performative uncertainty, analytic complexity, and narrative anticipation. And he suggests ways that game designers who want to craft novel game experiences can use an understanding of game uncertainty in its many forms to improve their designs.

About the Author
Greg Costikyan, an award-winning designer of board, tabletop, roleplaying, computer, online, mobile, and social games, is Senior Designer at Disney Playdom's Dream Castle Studio. He is the author of four science fiction/fantasy novels.


This one actually seems interesting to me. Uncertainty in games is a topic that has not occurred to me and one that I thought would be useful for understanding and designing videogames.

Through the Amazon page for Juul's book I came across another book called "Characteristics of Games" by George Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield (creator of Magic: The Gathering) and K. Robert Gutschera:

http://www.amazon.com/Characteristics-G ... 26201713X/

Characteristics of Games offers a new way to understand games: by focusing on certain traits--including number of players, rules, degrees of luck and skill needed, and reward/effort ratio--and using these characteristics as basic points of comparison and analysis. These issues are often discussed by game players and designers but seldom written about in any formal way. This book fills that gap. By emphasizing these player-centric basic concepts, the book provides a framework for game analysis from the viewpoint of a game designer. The book shows what all genres of games--board games, card games, computer games, and sports--have to teach each other. Today's game designers may find solutions to design problems when they look at classic games that have evolved over years of playing. Characteristics of Games--written by three of the most prominent game designers working today--will serve as an essential reference for game designers and game players curious about the inner workings of games. It includes exercises (which can also serve as the basis for discussions) and examples chosen from a wide variety of games. There are occasional mathematical digressions, but these can be skipped with no loss of continuity. Appendixes offer supplementary material, including a brief survey of the two main branches of mathematical game theory and a descriptive listing of each game referred to in the text.


This one also seemed interesting to me as it contained issues that have occurred to me and seem important, namely "degrees of luck and skill needed" and "reward/effort ratio". The comparison between the different genres of games also seems interesting.
User avatar
Gaius
 
Joined: 08 Apr 2011 06:17

Unread postby icycalm » 22 Aug 2014 10:16

Your saying that Juul's book "seems laughably bad" shows that you have not understood my Genealogy, and are merely piling up on the guy because everyone else seems to. The arguments presented in that summary of the book are awesome, and you seem incapable of both evaluating them on their own merits, and relating them to what I have written about the subject. If someone had told you that I had written that summary, you'd be praising it instead.

It is a sobering reminder to me that even most of my loyal readers do not really understand what the fuck I am saying to them, and that their praise of me therefore means next to nothing.

On the subject of Juul, it seems he's not as much of an imbecile as I had assumed he was, and it is obvious he has read my Genealogy and probably put some time into reading up on Nietzsche and perhaps also some of the other authors I cite in that book. Otherwise it's impossible to explain how someone who wrote a book about "The Casual Revolution" approvingly could turn around a few years later and compare videogame-playing to tragedy. That summary is, line by line, a perfect application of Nietzsche's theory of tragedy to videogames, and even goes as far as to reject Aristotle's understanding of tragedy as catharsis, which Nietzsche harps on at several points in his books and in his notes. Even the book's title is amazing! The Art of Failure lol! I tip my baseball cap to you Juul! Well played! About the only thing that summary needs to be true next-level shit is a reference to me and to Nietzsche!

Having said all that, I don't plan to be reading the book anytime soon. If I know anything of academics, he has simply taken up that summary and bloated it up to fill a whole book, because you can't sell a page as well as you can sell three hundred of them. If anyone is willing to read it and report back on it, however, I would certainly appreciate it. It's definitely one of the few videogame books (if not the only one) not written by me which seems to me worth following up on.

On another note, stop writing parentheses like this:

Richard Garfield(creator of Magic: The Gathering)


And start writing them like this:

Richard Garfield (creator of Magic: The Gathering)


I already edited this mistake out of your posts over a dozen times, and I am sick of it. I can't for the life of me fathom what sort of mental hangup would make you habitually leave a space after a parenthesis but not before it, but if you keep doing it I'll have to ban your account.

And to end on a positive note, thanks for reporting on these three new books for us. Your contributions to the site are very much appreciated.
User avatar
icycalm
Hyperborean
 
Joined: 28 Mar 2006 00:08
Location: Tenerife, Canary Islands

Unread postby Gaius » 25 Aug 2014 08:49

I wrote:This one actually seems interesting to me. Uncertainty in games is a topic that has not occurred to me and one that I thought would be useful for understanding and designing videogames.


The "not" is an error. The passage should read:

This one actually seems interesting to me. Uncertainty in games is a topic that has occurred to me and one that I thought would be useful for understanding and designing videogames.


I apologize for the parentheses mistake, it won't be an issue in the future.
User avatar
Gaius
 
Joined: 08 Apr 2011 06:17

Unread postby earthboundtrev » 31 Oct 2014 07:01

I borrowed Juul's book The Art of Failure from my university library, and have read the first chapter of it so far. The book does seem to be a drawn out retelling of the summary that has already been posted, but he defends his ideas well in just the first chapter.

Juul spends the entire first chapter describing what he calls: "the paradox of failure in games". He claims that there are three different aspects of this paradox:

1. We generally avoid failure.
2. We experience failure when playing games.
3. We seek out games, although we will experience something that we normally avoid.

Juul does directly reference Nietzsche in this book! In the first chapter he quotes a passage from The Birth of Tragedy to support his theory:

Jesper Juul wrote:Games are meaningful not simply by representing the tragedies, but on occasion by creating actual, personal tragedies. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche discusses the notion that tragedy adds a layer of meaning to human suffering, that art "did not simple imitate the reality of nature but rather supplied a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, and was set alongside the latter as a way of overcoming it".

The paradox is not simply that games or tragedies contain something unpleasant in them, but that we appear to want this unpleasantness to be there, even if we also seem to dislike it (unlike queues in theme parks, for example, which would prefer didn't exist). Another explanation could be that while we dislike failing in our regular endeavors, games are an entirely different thing, a safe space in which failure is okay, neither painful nor the least unpleasant. The phrase "It's just a game" suggests that this would be the case. And we do often take what happens in a game to have different meaning from what is outside a game. To prevent other people from achieving their goal is usually hostile behavior that may end friendships, but we regularly prevent other players from achieving their goals when playing friendly games. Games, in this view, are something different from the regular world, a frame in which failure is not the least distressing. Yet this is clearly not the whole truth: we are often upset when we fail, we put in considerable effort to avoid failure while playing a game, and we will even show anger toward those who foiled our clever in-game plans. In other words, we often argue that in-game failure is something harmless and neutral, but we repeatedly fail to act accordingly.


I'm going to read the book in its entirety, and will post more quotes that I think are interesting.

Here's a list of all of The Art of Failure's different chapters:

    1) Introduction: The Paradox of Failure
    2) The Paradox of Failure and the Paradox of Tragedy
    3) The Feeling of Failure
    4) How to Fail in Video Games
    5) Fictional Failure
    6) The Art of Failure
User avatar
earthboundtrev
 
Joined: 11 Nov 2013 02:30
Location: Virginia, USA

Unread postby icycalm » 25 May 2015 00:51

This book from 2009 supposedly references me:

https://archive.moe/vr/thread/2339491/#2425174

Anonymous wrote:>>2425165
nope

here's the prof's book, which is certainly worse than AK's writing:

http://www.amazon.com/My-Avatar-Self-Id ... d+identity


https://archive.moe/vr/thread/2339491/#2425124

Masterchum (80.82.64.117/1cc) pls visit, free games wrote:>>2425110
>Icycalm was actually required college reading somewhere
It's over.


For the record, it's not the first time either. I have linked several college classes elsewhere in the forum over the years where this has happened.

Don't think the book thing makes me happy either. What would make me happy is if all these little scribblers stopped scribbling about things they don't understand. Failing that, referencing me is the next best solution. But referencing me in a useless 207-page book almost defeats the purpose of referencing me in the first place. Just give people the link to me and be done with it if you have nothing new to say! (and trust me, you do not, since I've already said everything).
User avatar
icycalm
Hyperborean
 
Joined: 28 Mar 2006 00:08
Location: Tenerife, Canary Islands

Previous

Return to Theory