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I have repeatedly heard it pointed out recently that talking about “video games,” even games in general (see Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Aphorism 66), is an oversimplification. Solitaire, football, and charades are all games. Likewise, the old Windows standard Minesweeper, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game EverQuest, and my own favorite game, the foot-controlled Dance Dance Revolution, are all known as “video games.”

To make sweeping statements like “video games encourage violence” or to ask questions like “are video games really motivational?” in light of this starts to seem clumsy. There have been plenty of voices calling for a more nuanced understanding of video games, and yet somehow the frame in which many discussions of video games begin is simplistic (even Roger felt compelled to begin the Princeton conference by acknowledging these oversimplifications, saying “we are not here to condemn games or to defend them, but to interpret them.”) I’ve been guilty of contributing to overgeneralization myself; I’ve been hyping a discussion of “video games” as such within the department without being more specific.

In the future I think we all need to acknowledge the diversity of computer-mediated games from the start, framing our discussions in terms of individual genres or even specific games. Do we mean shooters, card games, side-scrollers, simulations; handhelds, arcade consoles, or computer platforms? I’d hope this would open the door to discussing their more interesting elements rather than rehashing “violence” or “mindlessness” again and again.

So one possible task in my department would be to start talking about games by genre, and then more specifically categorizing them by design features to study how they interact with various cognitive and social abilities.

Nick Montfort, a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, referred to a multi-layered model for understanding video games which was developed by Lawrence Konzack. Konzack specified seven layers, but Montfort only dealt with five in his paper.

The five layers he discussed were:

• platform,
• game code,
• game form,
• interface,
• and reception and operation.

In elaborating, Montfort made it clear that earlier levels of video games in this model enable and constrain later levels.

My immediate reaction as someone who is interested in the social and cognitive dynamics of learning was “hey, that last level needs to be unpacked!” Montfort’s last level may be a condensation of Konzac’s last three, for all I know. One way or another, the last level, reception and operation, ought to be expanded by various fields of human behavior study. But the other levels hold up well. Specifically, I think they are good distinctions to make in order to understand what people may need to know in order to play a video game, and what they do as they play it.

Let me give a few examples (making crude use of the minimal cognition and literacy vocabularies I have so far): In order to function in a community of gamers, a new player will need to understand certain things about the social meanings of a given platform (arcade games, Playstation, cel phone games, etc) and of various game forms (first-person shooters, puzzle games, side-scrollers). Montfort made the excellent point that the form of a platform itself tells the player about the social meaning of playing a game; for example, in the early days of home video games a console sold with two controllers, suggesting to potential buyers that play was a social event. Today, most home consoles sell with only one controller.

Moving on to the other levels, a certain amount of literacy in computer languages (code-level) might in some cases enhance gameplay, especially in games where you can modify characters, abilities, or scenarios by manipulating code. Certainly one needs to be literate in reading interfaces (symbols on controller buttons, cursors and menus onscreen) to play at all. One also needs to transfer appropriate parts of one’s real-world knowledge, and of other games, to reading the specific iconography of the game world (FIRE BURN! HAMMER SMASH! MUSHROOM MAKE BIG! RED CARD ONLY ON BLACK CARD!) At the level of reception, if I understand it correctly, a player must develop gestalts for understanding onscreen movement (though as games become more realistic, maybe this is not as hard as it was back in the days when graphics only kinda looked like what they were supposed to look like ;))

Dennis Jerz, professor at Seton Hill University presented a paper on the history of Adventure, which I believe is acknowledged as the first text-based computer adventure game.

I found many concrete suggestions in Jerz’s presentation for those of us looking to develop software to teach expert bodies of knowledge. Adventure was developed by a hobbyist spelunker as a way to introduce his daughters to the practice of caving. As such, the game scaffolds and models an expert’s ways of seeing and exploring a cave.

Jerz pointed out that because they are limited to text written by the caver who developed the game, players only “see” the environment the way an expert caver would, noting salient features like exits, dangerous situations, etc. He interpreted other elements of the game, such as the disappearance of corpses of snakes and other “enemies,” as representing elements of caving culture (take little and leave little behind), though these were more incidental to the demands of programming a simple and functional game at the time.

Modelling a domain of social knowlege in this way would be harder to do in a graphic game. Most of the RPGs I play have ways of denoting what’s important, such as pointer icons, flashing objects, etc; you might also do something like highlighting salient objects or regions of the screen in yellow, gradually dimming them. However, my guess is it’s more difficult to try to teach someone to develop an expert’s way of looking at the world when you present them with a more detailed and confusing visual image than it is with carefully written text. One way or another I find it an interesting question to consider whether either a graphic or a text-based game can ensure that players are aware that they are receiving real-world expert information without having a human being there to explain it to them.

Jerz also described simulated caving rescues — a practice which is a part of learning safety in the hobby — as being sort of games in themselves, and described a puzzle within the game that revolved around assembling a brass lamp designed like one used in caving. I thought this was sort of an interesting thing to consider: which parts of an expert domain are already significantly gamelike enough to be turned into a game or puzzle onscreen?

Jerz made text-based games sound like an excellent way to model expert knowledge. Sadly, I just don’t think text-based games are of interest to anyone but us old fogeys who played them as kids because there wasn’t much else to play back then. Maybe if they were presented as something other than a game — something more like a book — maybe then bookish kids might go for it… I don’t know. Maybe I’m also underestimating the potential of graphic games to accomplish the same things.