Author: MichelleWong

Looking at this week’s reading, I find myself having much to say while not having much to say at all. Part of it, I think, was that I was thrown by how casual the text was. The description of the text being “interviews” lends itself to the form of Interviewer: This is the interviewer’s question or statement and Interviewee: This is the response to the question or statement. Instead, this was more of a flow of thought, with descriptions of the interview settings (such as a “woozy backstreet diner”) and the state of the interviewer. Curious, I looked up the book and author and found that it was funded through the internet and posted on a blog, which certainly explains a lot about the writing style, as I recall seeing similar styles in my forays into the depths of the internet. That being said, the formatting and circumstances of the text are a side note to the actual interviews which I found, unfortunately, a tad bit intense. The writer’s howling of AGENDA in the first interview seems like exactly the sort of thing one would write in a blog to attain views and comments. I did find the interview itself to be quite a decent look into how Gone Home was designed, and considering the game got mixed to positive reviews I’d consider it mildly successful. The second interview was also quite good, with perspective on design. Unfortunately, the last interview completely threw me for a loop. The complete fixation on sex reeks of way too much information and the poorly interlaced poetry reads like something found after digging too deep into a fandom. It doesn’t help that Cibele has extremely poor reviews, which makes me wonder if it managed to get the “game” part of video game right. There are many types of issues that smaller games and studios can tackle that larger ones would avoid, but failing to execute the concept properly kind of makes the ideas and concepts fall flat.

The final chapter of Isbister’s How Games Move Us covers the social aspect of games. In it, she discusses how even a game like Words With Friends can bring social connections, as the game led to a reunion with an old friend. Meanwhile, larger communities in MMORPGs such as Uru stick together, even jumping games when Uru shut its doors. Unfortunately, I have relatively little experience in most major social games, instead preferring to stick to single player experiences. As much as I want to, I doubt I’ll play Journey, as I am uncertain if the Playstation 3 servers have a high enough population for matchmaking and am unwilling to pay for online access on the Playstation 4 when I could buy most games on Steam and play online for free. The massive backlog of games to play doesn’t help either. What I have played, however, is Pokemon, which was sadly not touched upon in the text. While the main story and gameplay are all singleplayer, trading and battling against other trainers are available after certain points. In the older iterations of the games I rarely used these features, as they required link cables and physical meetups, but newer generations take advantage of wireless connections and internet access. Normally, when I finished the singleplayer mode I would stop playing, but the ability to breed and arrange trades with other people online added a few more hundred hours to my play time. Additionally, there exists an exploit in which trading an egg to a player with a certain stored value results in a shiny pokemon, a rare occurrence. For a few months, I was a part of a group online that would hatch eggs matching our number, and then returning them to their original owners. Despite the risk the one of us could run off with the pokemon, I encountered no incidents in the few months I was part of the group.

Chapter 3 of Katherine Isbister’s How Games Move Us discusses body movement in games, both virtually and in meatspace. To support the topic of this chapter, Isbister then goes on to describe studies where body postures affect a person’s feeling toward various tasks, and then uses this to segue into motion controls. What isn’t elaborated on, however, is how the motion control trends of the Wiimote, Playstation Move, and Microsoft Kinect have all died down. While Nintendo was the first of the three to push its version of motion controllers known today, the company’s newer consoles neglect to use the Wiimote. The Wii U controller more resembles a tablet with joysticks, and the upcoming Switch doesn’t look like it uses it either. From my own experiences with the Wiimote, I can see why it isn’t so popular today. The experience was novel, but having to swipe the remote every time I wanted to attack in Twilight Princess and draw out every Celestial Brush technique in Okami rapidly grew annoying. The other two controllers haven’t fared as well either. I forgot the Playstation Move was a thing until it was mentioned in the text, which sums up its existence quite well. Meanwhile, I remember the Kinect much more strongly. In 2012, Microsoft attempted to promote the Kinect in the robotics tournament I was a part of in high school. In place of an autonomous period in the game where teams had to preprogram their robots to move without player control, they could instead send a human player over to a Kinect station and control the robot with body movements. Few teams used this feature, preferring to use their tried-and-tested autonomous routines. One team ran their program, and had their human player dance and mime out various characters in the Kinect station instead. While I agree with Isbister’s point that body movement and motion controls are important aspects to consider in games, I can’t find the current state of motion controls as anything but gimmicks.

For a book from the same Playful Thinking series as Sicart’s Play Matters, Katherine Isbister’s How Games Move Us is much more straightforward. Rather than dance around definitions and the like, How Games Move Us states its topics and supports it with evidence from studies and quotes from well-known game designers.
In the first chapter of the book, Isbister discusses how choices in games and in game design can invoke emotion is players. Within the opening paragraphs, I found myself strongly connecting to the ideas proposed in the text. I have always found it hard to get into watching a new movie or television show, as sitting and watching characters do things was boring compared. Instead I favor books and video games, where I could at least stop and imagine what later plot twists and outcomes might occur. The rest of the chapter, as it covered the various aspects of flow, emotions, avatars, NPCs, and customization, also touched on things I found myself enjoying in games. Making a character and inventing a personality before going out to explore a world as that character always made playing special compared to just being an already established character, although the choice of what to do depended on the story.
Of course, some of these aspects are not exclusive to video games. Gamebooks such as Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy share these traits of character customization and choices influencing outcomes. One of them, Sorcery! was later made into a video game by Inkle, who also did 80 Days. Further still are a few particular forums I browse, where “quests” are run by a forum member and other users vote or write in on actions to take. These are not video games, but my enjoyment of both these and video games, and the use of similar concepts, certainly explains why I was attracted to both.

On reading the seventh chapter of Sicart’s Play Matters, I have to wonder how the author would interpret video game mods. It might be getting ahead of things, but if play is appropriation, and the architecture of play trumps game design, then what exactly would a game mod, which appropriates this architecture of play, be? Furthermore, while some “architects” make the tools and abilities to easily modify their creations (aka mod support such as Bethesda Softworks’ various creation kits), others do not include this support. This, however, does not appear to stop dedicated modders from creating and distributing their own tools. So how would either of these categories of modding fit into the text? Mod support given to the players seems like something that would belong in this chapter, as these architects of play understand that their creations will be appropriated. Support added by fans would be more suited for one of the earlier chapters. But then what about architects that realize support is wanted and then add support to suit player needs? I would classify them as architects that understand the need for appropriation, but I am curious as to what Sicart’s take on it would be.

That aside, Sicart’s mention of twitter bots in the eighth and final chapter leads me to wonder how the text would be different if it were written and published now. As the copyright reads 2014, the book and its contents are limited to events and examples from that year and previous. Earlier this year, there was a particular twitter bot that went rampant. Despite Microsoft’s intentions for Tay to learn and mimic a teenager, the internet went and managed to turn it into a neo-nazi in under a day, among other things. Of course, it was then taken down and overhauled, but the tale of Tay going Terminator lives on. This seems like the sort of situation that would make it into Play Matters. Tay’s tweets certainly were expressive, and its eventual viewpoint on things provided quite a bit of insight into the bot’s experiences. The play, in this instance, was the lessons the internet taught to this one chatbot. And, if anything, the entire situation showed that Microsoft did not read this book, as the company apparently had no awareness of the way their systems could be played with.

Reading the next few chapters of Play Matters brought to mind the Contemporary Art class I took last semester. In the fifth chapter, Beauty, the author begins to discuss the aesthetics of play. The act of playful actions, the performance of expert players on the field, the restrictions of the rules forcing a dance, this all becomes beauty. Much like the many art movements throughout history, the way the author waxes poetic about play reminds me of how artists are always attempting to remain on the cutting edge of ideas, to make something so different from the norm. Despite the author’s claims of not caring for the arts, it seems clear to me that his definition and perception of play are similar in mindset to Pollock, who moved the canvas from the easel to the floor, or Warhol, who readily embraced commercialism and mass production.

Unfortunately, at this chapter, the text began to lose me. Yes, the discussion on playgrounds the previous chapter was entertaining, and continued on about appropriating spaces and discussing these designated play spaces that were subject to interference, but at this point I feel all this talk of play is stretching itself thin. Rather than actually being about play, it seems the author is using all this talk of play and playgrounds as some kind of metaphor for the points he wants to get across. If the author wishes to be an artist, I’d be glad to be a critic. Replace play with, say, food. We could engage with food, and draw out theories about how the need to eat has led to something or another, how the act of eating means this or that, how the choice of utensils being safer and restrictive or, perhaps, the presentation of a tea ceremony or whatnot is beauty. Given enough time and effort, the book could easily be rebranded as The Importance of Eating or Foodstuffs. Granted, the ideas that the author covers is, at the very least, worth discussion, but all this talk of play only results in semantic satiation, as the word play rapidly loses its meaning.

The first impression I had on reading Sicart’s Play Matters was that the writing was whimsical. As the first three chapters were assigned reading in a textbook, I expected to either silently suffer a slog through a boring, mechanical text overflowing with equations, or wince at the text jamming the author’s pet theory into my retinas. Well, given that the book is the author’s musings on play, there was soapboxing, but it was tolerable.

As expected, the first chapter of a book called Play Matters discussed what, exactly, play is. Rather than simply games or fun things, play, as defined in this chapter, is much more. According to the author, play can be harmful or helpful, pleasurable or not. To Sicart, play is about human expression. The second and third chapters continued to build off of this, discussing what playfulness and toys are.

What really struck me, however, was how accurate the “playfulness” in chapter two really was. Specifically, how the attitude of playfulness seems to apply to several of the things I am interested in. Many electronic devices today have locked settings and features on them, preventing users from installing and modifying anything they want to. Yet, communities have sprung up around not only getting past this security, but also making free applications and functions for all to use.

Unfortunately, the third chapter failed to leave any sort of strong impression on me. Throughout “Toys,” constant references to various toys that I am unfamiliar with made it harder to understand the points the author was trying to make. Regardless, the first three chapters of Play Matters were an interesting read with a new perspective on what play is, and I will be curious to see where the rest of the book goes with its musings.