It’s generally accepted that one of the things holding back videogames as a serious art form is a lack of formal critical discourse. Right now video game critiques tend to boil down to nothing more than “I liked this game” or “I hated this game” because reviewers and game designers don’t have the critical tools to analyze a gameplay experience on a deeper level.
The narratology camp has been trying to analyze videogames using critical language borrowed from modern literary theory. That means looking at the game in terms of symbolism and themes and character and narrative. For example, a narratologist might write a scholarly paper on Lara Croft dissecting the various contradictions in her constructed persona. She’s clearly designed to be a sex object, but the mostly male audience that played Tomb Raider also identifies closely with her. Are they experiencing the equivalent of putting on drag? Or are they enjoying having completely control over a powerful female? Or some conflicted combination of the two?
The ludologist says this is interesting, but tangential. The physical appearance of an in-game character is a minor factor in the gameplay experience. What’s really going on at a deep level is a complex interplay of abstract rules. The “fun” comes from how these rules intermesh with each other as the player moves through the gameworld. And traditional literary theory isn’t very useful for talking about this sort of thing.
Unfortunately there isn’t yet ANY good critical theory for talking about the stuff that the ludologists want to talk about. For example, it’s clear that “cadence” is an important factor in determining if a level is fun or not. (Cadence is the pacing of a level, the ups and downs, and moments of panic and calm.) But we don’t have a standard language for analyzing cadence. We need to be able so say things like: “The cadence of this stretch is too KIFFY. We need a more POLGY approach. Let’s throw in a few BINGLES.”
Unfortunately we don’t know what POLGY, KIFFY and BINGLES are yet … .
Basically the narratologists have good tools for answering minor questions and the ludologists have crappy tools for answering big questions.
re: fourth edition: this is a Dungeons and Dragons question.
First edition was published in the very early eighties, I think, and very well received as a mad genius’s lunatic hodgepodge of creative, not always logical rules. Second edition was published in the late eighties, and most gamers consider it an abomination that added complexity to the rules without adding any fun. Third edition came out in 2000 (I think), and is generally well-received for rationalizing a lot of the stuff from previous editions, in some ways turning D&D into an almost object-oriented programming language. (for example, it used to be that the Charm Person spell worked on a list of about two dozen different creatures. Now, each creature has a Creature Type, and Charm Person works on all creatures with the Humanoid type). It’s also criticized for taking power away from the dungeon master for a game.
Fourth edition is rumored to be coming out sometime soon, and the rumors are that miniatures will become very important to gameplay (i.e., little toy soldier figurines that are more or less optional currently). Rumors abound also that the person running the game will have progressively less power: they’ll move from being roughly analogous to Head Scriptwriter to being analogous to a referee. Some folks are excited about that, others think the sky is falling, and others still say, “Whatever, dude; my old books aren’t going to go up in flames.”
See?? THAT’s what I’m talkin’ about. This is just getting cool.
Pochacco, very well written - if you are the least bit interested, I would appreciate your starting your own thread on this here - probably in Cafe Society - teeing up the description you just shared. Fascinating and I bet a ton of folks would be interested who won’t come to this general geekery thread…
**LHoD, Ryso, Kythereia, MostlyClueless ** and a bunch of others - this is fascinating stuff - you should start threads on yours, too!! Talk about Fighting Ignorance!
Thanks - and keep them coming on this thread if you aren’t sure whether your Raging Debate™ can stand on its own yet! Heck, I never even got to whole “long tenon vs. short tenon for set-neck construction” for electric guitars yet - big controversy there, let me tell you…
There are many, but one that leaps to mind - M16 or AK47? M16 is a precise, well made, expensive and accurate rifle firing a small but fast round, while the AK is able to be fired after being buried in the sand for a while.
I don’t fully understand why AK supporters are so keen on burying their rifles in the sand, but this seems to come up in every discussion about the things.
“M16 can fire almost MOA groups off the shelf and makes an acceptable long range rifle with the addition of optics, but also functions remarkably well for close combat in the M4 configuration”
“Yeah? You can bury the AK in the Sahara sand for a year and it’ll still shoot when you dig it up!”
Over at Texas A&M, there are various discussions centering around Vision 2020 (a big university plan to “modernize” the university and make it more welcoming to different kinds of students).
Basically, the pro-Vision 2020 people say that Texas A&M needs to modernize itself and get rid of things that tie us to the past, feeling that the University needs to become more welcoming to students of various cultural backgrounds (the feeling being that it’s bad that Texas A&M seems to attract mostly conservative white folks).
The anti-Vision 2020 people say that we LIKE being different from all the other colleges, and that Vision 2020 will strip A&M of everything that makes it unique and different. Some folks argue that it’s not so much a case of us doing anything wrong because all the various minorities don’t want to go to school here, as just the fact that the sort of people who would want to go to school at a college an hour and a half from the nearest major city in a decidedly conservative part of Texas just tend to be conservative white folks. There is also a big concern that the Vision 2020 people are gradually trying to get rid of all the various kooky traditions that we like in order to make the university more “generic”.
I suppose being able to bury the gun or whatever is handy if you aren’t in a position to keep the gun in a clean environment like an armory, or where you don’t have access to the oppertunities to perform regular maintenance. A gun that can be buried and then dug up and fired can be handy for discrete stockpiling of weapons, such as if you’re hoping to be the underdog victor in a fight.
Of course, if you are the member of a large, well supplied, well-equiped fighting force with reliable access to spare parts and reasonably good facilities for maintinance, the ability to bury your gun and fire it is relatively unimportant, so you might as well go for improved range, accuracy, etc.
Was talking to someone about how it seems like American weapons and military equipment is designed so that it requires so much specialized maintinance that it would almost never be able to be used against us. I understand finding spare parts to keep their F-14s in the air has been a longstanding problem for Iran (and being able to keep their F-14s flying without our help is probably of a fair amount of political importance for the Iranians).
I missed the last few posts on bad_penny, so I’m catching up on all the latest. It’s… holy Mother Mary. Fandom done blowed up.
To make this fit the thread, I think the current raging debate in my area of geekery is “Is it plagiarism if you quote PARAGRAPHS from published works in your fanfic and somehow ‘neglect’ to tell your readers?” (answer: YES, dammit!) with a side debate of “If it is plagiarism, is it okay if we send the plagiariser death threats?” (answer: NO, dammit!)
Wank to the left of me, wank to the right of me, and I still haven’t bothered to read the Draco Trilogy.
Looks like you missed your chance. (I never read it either, but I suspect it’s an experience I can live without.)
The current raging debate in my other are of geekery is whether Thomas of Woodstock is an Elizabethan or Jacobean play, but as it involves no threats of death against anybody except the aforesaid Woodstock, it isn’t nearly as exciting.
Over on the Alice Cooper boards, the debate is wether or not the original band should get back together and if so, should it be for a single concert, a tour or permanantly. Related to that is who should fill in for Glen Buxton (RIP).
Alice Cooper Group vs Alice Cooper solo has led to some real wars.
I understand the feeling, but allow me to assuage my guilty conscience over doing exactly that.
Whether you use serial or non-serial commas, the important thing is to be consistent in style. Problems sometimes arise when we’re editing several articles by authors with different punctuation styles that will be printed together in the same magazine. While we can justify a mix of writing styles, punctuation and spelling have to be made consistent throughout, so some writers are going to get their commas changed.
Further, my boss and I are both non-serialists (though we both recognize that it’s a matter of personal taste), so when we’re proofreading text for publication, serial commas jump out at us, while non-serial commas blend into the background. We’re therefore more likely to catch mistakes and make everything consistent if we declare non-serial to be the standard and change everything to conform to that. It’s no judgement on the writer.
Very much against it, but that’s because of the type of writing I do: almost nothing I write stays in the format or application that it was originally written in. After the plain text is checked, it goes on to one of the designers (who know little or no English), who place it into a layout and then worry about things like tabs, breaks, spacing and so on.
With text going from Word to Illustrator to Eudora to Photoshop to Flash to Quark to PDF to etc., and with the designers not being able to judge what should go where based on the context, and with the occasional character errors that inevitably occur when going between English and Japanese applications, adding extra spaces, tabs or line breaks is just asking for trouble. Obviously, if your writing isn’t going to be passing through such a convoluted process, then there’s no problem.
I’m a hardcore Magic: The Gathering player, and magic has a history of raging debates. Usually, whenever WOTC (Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes magic) makes any change of any sort, particularly if it involves banning one or more cards, there is a raging debate between people saying “OMG OMG OMG OMG THAT IS THE STUPIDEST DECISION OMG OMG I AM GOING TO QUIT MAGIC IS GOING TO DIE OMG OMG OMG”, and people who disagree. So far, approximately every single one of those decisions has turned out just fine… and many of them now seem so blindingly correct that you have to wonder what happened to the people who disagreed with them. (Actually, the stupidest thing WOTC has done in years was get the color of artifacts wrong in Mirrodin, and they fixed that one set later.)
I don’t think there are any raging debates right now… there could have been a debate about whether Coldsnap draft sucked, except that everyone seems to agree that it does, in fact, suck, so there’s no debate.
Hmm. Problem is I’m solidly in the ludology camp and I’m pretty much argued-out on the topic after discussing it thoroughly on game industry message boards … .
I’m not smart enough to understand computer programming so those posts just give me a headache.
I’m basically at alpha nerd levels of knowledge in two areas:
1. Baseball. Baseball is regrettably a field in which everyone argues about everything all the time so there’s rarely an overarching debate. Certainly, however, the most recent subject of near-religious division is the concept of “Moneyball,” though to be quite honest 97% of all people on both sides of the debate don’t really even know what “Moneyball” is and in many cases did not read the book.
Having said that, one debate connected to this that seems to be heating up is the relative value of drating players out of high school or out of college.
For those of you who don’t follow sports, in baseball (and in many other sports) North American players are drafted before entering the professional ranks; the teams basically go through a list of all amateur players and take turns “picking” them, which gives them the exclusive right to sign that player to a contract for a year. The debate is whether it’s more useful to draft players out of high school - who are younger and so in theory you can get them right away and maybe they develop more, but are higher risk - or out of college, when the player’s abilities are more clearly formed.
Past analysis has suggested college players are better bets, but in recent years the relative success of high school picks seems to be increasing, and some teams that have adopted a college-player-heavy drafting strategy have been remarkably unsuccessful. Plus, players from Asia or Latin America are not subject to the draft, and it’s hard to quantify just how that affects your drafting strategy.
2. ISO 9001. I’m an ISO 9001 lead auditor, one of the best in the business, I think. For what reason I cannot quite discern the origin of, in recent years a huge debate has flowered over whether or not a company with an ISO 9001 complaint quality system needs to hold internal audits. This is curious because the standard really clearly says they must (clause 8.2.2) and yet this debate is really fired up right now, with a lot of sub-positions and different avenues of trying to resolve the matter.
See? Somehow the M16 is such a persnickety princess that’s as difficult to maintain as an F-14.
Remember, the people arguing FOR the AK are probably living in suburbia and keep their toys in pristine condition. The AK is fine for a dirt poor guerrilla that can’t afford anything better, but I promise you that if the AR was as twitchy as legend indicates, the Army would have dumped it 20 years ago. Instead, they looked at what was wrong and fixed it.
Dang, sorry. The OP didn’t ask for a demonstration of our raging debate…
