Literature Survey - My Work

This week our group wrote the first draft of our literature survey. The following are the sections which I wrote for it.

The work of Roger Caillois

Roger Caillois (1913-1978) was a French sociologist most noted for his 1958 book les Jeux et Hommes, translated as “Man, Play and Games.” He applied the term game to all play activities.

The principle value of Caillois' work for modern game design is that his framework for considering games provides us a unique perspective for examining play. (Bateman, 2006)[1] In order to examine theories of play, Caillois came up with four different classifications of play. They are:

Agon: This means competition, or a collection of games whose primary motivation is to test the player’s abilities against others. Caillois uses for example children competing to see how long they can hold their breath under water.
Alea: This means chance. It is seen as the counterpart to Agon. Each competitor has an equal chance of winning and the player is more passive.
Mimicry: This means simulation. It is based on forgetting, or shedding your personality to assume another. The essence of mimicry is in pretending to be someone or something else.
Ilinx: This means vertigo. It consists of momentary attempts to destroy the stability of perception and inflict temporary pain upon yourself. An example of this from Caillois is children spinning around to deliberately make themselves dizzy.

[1]Roger Caillois’ patterns of playChris Batemanhttp://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2006/05/roger_caillois_.html

Agon

“So central to the modern videogames industry is agon (competition) that many people considered ‘game’ to be almost synonymous with the notion of competitive play.”(Bateman, 2006)[1]

This opening sentence to Bateman’s article highlights how important agon is believed to be within the industry as people believing games to have an inherently competitive aspect to them. There are always high scores to beat or other players to kill. This is also backed up by Markku Eskelinen when he writes “in ilynx and alea the player is a passive intrigant whereas in agon and mimicry she has to be more active.”[2]

It is important to look at is how the theories of ludology and narratology fit into the concept of Agon. It is easy to envisage how well ludology fits into the concept, as many games which base themselves on being pure competition often do not feature much in the way of a story other then the bare minimum, for example first person shooters or sports games.. With these games, there is always one fixed objective which doesn’t change, be it to score more goals then the other team, capture the enemies’ flag or kill all the other team.

Espen Aarseth argues however, that “gameplay is part and parcel of what makes the story; in some senses, it is the story.” (Wallace, 2006)[3] Therefore when people try to exclusively try to label narratology as the storyline, they are missing something. It is possible that what is missing is experience. The player’s experience of a game must surely be taken into account when discussing narratology. Because it is hard to quantify an experience which no two players will share exactly, it is possible that experience has been neglected from the argument. Although in a football game for example, the end goal of the game is defined purely by the rules, how the player achieves those goals is the story. No two games of football would ever be the same therefore they cannot simply adhere to a basic set of rules.

[1]The challenge of Agon
Chris Batemanhttp://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2006/03/the_challenge_o.html

[2]The Gaming situation
Markku Eskelinenhttp://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/

[3]The play’s the thing
Mark Wallacehttp://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_36/220-The-Play-s-the-Thing

Alea

Roger Caillois described Alea as the following: “Alea is the Latin name for the game of dice. I have borrowed it to designate, in contrast to agon (games of competition), all games that are based on a decision independent of the player, an outcome over which he has no control, and in which winning is the result of fate rather than triumphing over an adversary.” (Caillois, 1958)[1]

The discussion here is where do ludology and narratology fit into the concept of alea? With a game being probability based there obviously must be a heavy ludemic element to it.

Chris Bateman himself looked into ways to introduce aleatory elements through narrative in his tabletop role playing games. “I made the chances of success tend to be quite high (80-100%) but provided an alternative aleatory element in the Criticals system, allowing players to succeed to wildly differing degrees. In this way, the alea was not will I succeed or fail, but can I succeed to a degree significant enough to impact the flow of the narrative.” (Bateman, 2006)[2]

Giving the player varying degrees of success is a good way to introduce alea through narrative by opening up the rules. In computer games, a good example of an aleatory element is loot dropping from bosses in online role playing games. The player doesn’t know beforehand exactly what will drop from the boss, but still participate on the off chance that loot which they will want will drop.

Bateman also gives an example of where aleaic elements fail, where the player is tempted to use the save function to simply reload the area if the chance does not fall in their favour. Therefore I believe that whilst there is the potential for narratology to be applicable to alea, whilst the player has the ability to undo anything that goes wrong then the suspension of disbelief is there to be broken.

[1]Man, Play and Games
Roger Caillouis
University of Illinois Press
ISBN 025207033X

[2]The rituals of Alea
Chris Bateman
http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2005/11/the_rituals_of_.html