The Great Undiscovered of Minecraft

Minecraft within Minecraft

I have to admit, I am not much of an indie gamer. I spend most of my time with the big-budget mainstream titles in my research. There is a reason for that, but it isn’t the point of this article. What is important is that Minecraft managed to get my attention, partially due to its intensely addictive fun, and to the buzz its created within the gaming/blogging community. I’d like to address the game and its context a little here.

Firstly, why is this thing so fun that around 500,000 people have parted with their 10€ to play an alpha release that would have been known as a demo five or ten years ago? The reasons aren’t that hard to grasp, and have been documented in a few places already. There is the intense feeling of agency: the player is able to affect this world in deep, meaningful ways relative to the complexity of the world itself. This world doesn’t have a narrative or social structure, it only has a physical presence. So, the physical interactions the player can have with every block of space, whether filled with material or not, is akin to being a small God in a simple universe. Every square block is offering its existence to the player to be tampered with, shaped and molded into something greater, offering no resistance and bending to the will of the creator.

This is a powerful feeling, and demonstrates the rule of agency quite nicely. Many AAA games are far richer in content, but that content is out of the player’s reach. Whether it is the physical landscape or architecture, whether a vehicle, a door, or an NPC, these rich pieces of the gameworld are impervious to interaction. The player can’t do anything to them. These parts of the gameworld simply do not care about the player. Every part of the Minecraft world does care. Read more »

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Grand Theft Auto: First Steps

As part of my PhD research I am undertaking case studies of various AAA videogame titles.  These end up taking the form of long critical reviews with essay-like analysis in the latter half of the piece.  Many of these will be appearing in the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds as reviews, with supplementary information that just doesn’t fit in a stand-alone article on my Videogames Reference Wiki.  So far they all contain a longish discussion of the narrative and game mechanics, with some critical judgment of each in turn.  I will analyse the narrative in terms of story-telling, and make some recommendations, or refer to those of others.  Similarly with the mechanics, I have done some work to understand their ‘gameness’ and their relationship to the narrative framework.  The Assassin’s Creed article below is an example of the results of one such study.  (Or two since AC1 and AC2 consisted of two separate sections in my thesis and in the journal.)

One game I have yet to tackle is Grand Theft Auto IV.  Though it is quite old now (wow, 2 years is old?) I will be revisiting Liberty City and writing out my adventures there for the first time in the coming weeks.  I left this one late intentionally because I felt I needed some practice at this craft of criticism before tackling such a monumental example as GTA4.  And yes, I do begin this task with the bias that GTA4 is a monument.  There is simply so much in it.  I wanted to have some kind of framework that would help me hang onto the wildly differing array of topics that is sure to come up when I play through this thing again, and I think the time is just about right.

So what I have here are a list of topics, themes, points and questions that I hope to address in some way as I play through this game.  They are not in any particular order, but the groupings are how I am at this point understanding certain clusters and relationships.  Please feel free to comment with additions or omissions.  Please feel free to reference your own work as I am happy to synthesize and cite any other analysis that will make this work deeper and better rounded.  So here we go: Read more »

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Contemplating Rules

A tool useful when contemplating rules.

The following is sort of a post-article writing meditation on what I think I’m saying in a forthcoming piece on Fable 2.  Keep an eye on the SCAN Media Journal for a long review/critique of Fable 2 that opens up the idea of different rule sets in an example game.

In the field of game studies, we find ourselves talking about ‘rules’ a lot.  The rules of a game are the most obvious, and often the most valued.  Think of Marrku Eskelinen and early Jesper Juul–they both describe game rules in very clear terms as being a recognisable structure that we can point at, discuss, critique etc.  We learn the rules of the game in order to play, if we break them we are cheaters, etc.  They can be negotiated on the fly in certain types of (children’s) games, that sort of thing.

When looking to narratology, we can discern a different set of rules, the rules of ‘narrative.’  I would argue that these are rules of a different order, more meta-rules for building a good narrative, not content-rules of a particular narrative.  Like the meta-rule of what a game is (should be fair, have quantifiable outcome), the structuralist rules of what a narrative is (beginning, middle, end, having a narrator) are upheld by the narrative, not described within it.  So, the rules of an individual game are not identical to rules of games in general.  Similarly, the rules of narrative (structure) are not the same as rules that apply within a particular narrative.  And quite obviously, the rules that define general narrative and general game are not the same thing either–this is essentially the basis of the narratology vs ludology debate.

However, videogames are not ‘games’ nor are they ‘narratives’ they are, above all, videogames.  A new form of media/expression/art/software that hasn’t been properly defined or criticised yet.  I believe we are getting close, however, as the frame of the general debate has shifted in the last couple years.  A lot of it has to come down to language, and the precision with which we apply certain words.  So a word like ‘game’ needs to not be confused with ‘videogame’ in certain contexts.  Because if we are talking about the rules of a particular game, we may or may not be talking about its particular instantiation within a videogame.  We seem to have a fairly decent grip on the fact that the ‘narrative’ doesn’t account for the entire videogame, but perhaps because of the funny word play involved, it seems that earlier theory tried to substitute the game (rules) for the whole videogame. Read more »

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Drama ex Machina: The Desperation Meter

This post is a speculative solution to a problem I noticed in Assassin’s Creed, both I and II, but could equally be used in other vaguely similar games.  Firstly, let me outline the problem as I see it, and then describe my mechanical solution.

I loved both Assassin’s Creed games, the first was a revelation, and the second made the first look like a tech demonstration.  However, there was a basic problem for me: it was too easy.  Both Ezio and Altair were far too strong, essentially able to ignore the sneaking and barrel headlong into any number of guards with a reasonable expectation of survival.  In AC2 it was even worse because arguably the most efficient method of dealing with an enemy would be to go in unarmed and use the disarm/kill combo to insta-gib the baddies.  In either case, armed with the longsword, both assassins could simply back up to a wall and deal with the enemies one by one.

This broke the fiction for me, as my concept of an assassin is a killer who doesn’t ever fight, let alone face off with heavily armed and armoured troops.  Assassins come in the night, and their victims die without ever seeing them.  Perhaps like in the Hitman series, the assassin isn’t even there when the victim is killed; instead a series of traps are laid and the killing might seem accidental.  The cost for this is that assassins must travel light, to go unnoticed they must blend in and disappear.  They cannot carry heavy weapons, wear armour etc.  Their economy of power, if you like, is squarely situated in the surprise attack, not in battle prowess.  If Altair/Ezio were a unit in an RTS, they would be clearly over-powered.  They should be like a rogue or thief in RPGs: deadly from behind but unable to take much of a direct attack. Read more »

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