I also agree that fun is not a universal imperative for games, although I don't think fun is equivalent to pleasure (not sure if that's what you're suggesting). But I would agree that pleasure doesn't have to be central to our concerns.

As for 'work', I find the use of this word fairly problematic. It's clear that lots of games require a "non-trivial effort", but do we really want to say that they require work? Don't we want to reserve that term for, er, work?

Finally, I wholeheartedly agree that we shouldn't be furthering the divide between ludology and narratology. I really have to think about it more (not to mention actually do so-called 'research'), but I do think that in a very real way, there IS no divide. The subject still has not received anywhere near adequate treatment.

Another point for me is that I don't consider ludology to be formalist, and that I don't consider my own work to be formalist.
I think formalism is to take a fairly ambiguous phenomenon and to attempt to describe it in unambiguous formal terms. But to point to the fact that games _are_ formal systems is not a formalism, and it doesn't mean that you are ignoring interpretation or player experience.

As for the parroting... nope, nope, that's not what I meant. I mean the problem of having to present cutting-edge research in a field so new that it is not universally recognized. That passage was intended to set up the Mary Ann Buckles example which followed -- she found it stressful to present her dissertation on Adventure to a committee that was pressuring her to choose a traditional literary subject instead. (I've added a clarification.)

While it's true there wasn't much to disagree about in this conference, the presentations on Atari 2600 music, on artistic photorealism, cinematics in Lara Croft, delving into the historical contexts of game creation (machine architecture and code, which if you include Nick's presentation on Combat for the Atari 2600, Robert Bowen's on music for the Atari 2600, Peter Bell's on the GameBoy, and mine on Adventure, was a significant chunk of the conference, and perhaps at least touched on in presentations on Civilization and Lara Croft as well), the presentation on legal issues, a call for formal experimentalism, and a wonderful tribute to the pleasure of jumping -- in fact most of the conference -- weren't in the slightest predicated upon the embracement of narratology or the rejection of ludology.

Packing the last few sessions with anti-ludologists may have left one with a particular final impression, but we're talking about a grand total of 3 talks out of about 15.

Jesper>> I don't consider ludology to be formalist

I agree. However, there is a lot of formalist game studies going around. Right?

Jesper>> I don't consider my own work to be formalist

I agree that pointing out that games are formal systems isn't formalism. However, I think categorization and typology are formalist activities. However, I know that you have been unfairly accused of ignoring player experience, but I think it's also true that some approaches to games have done this. The key to solving this is probably to stop batting generalizing so much in our discussions of approaches to game research.

One of the possible problems here is that calling out a new term for game studies -- the whole idea of a coherent field implies stability, categorization, and other formal tendencies. Games "on their own terms" may not provide enough fungible insight for the long haul. Perhaps this was a theme or motivating factor in the Princeton conference.

Walter, your comment reminds me a little of Oscar Wilde's distinction between pleasure and happiness. (That's something that the asthete Henry Wotton says in "The Picture of Dorian Gray.")

Dennis -- Thanks for clarifying. Recognition and understanding are problems. It must have been much worse in 1985 than today, but it's still a struggle, especially at many US institutions.

As I said, it's always dangerous to comment on an event you didn't attend, but these are important subjects worth taking chances on ;)

Right -- and thankfully I have the chance to clarify my points. I do think there needs to be more dialogue, and I'm happy my blog sparked at least a little bit.

Let me re-clarify a point from above. I don't think ludology has to be a formalist practice, but by and large it has been one.

Ian: I know what you are getting at, but could you come up with a more concrete example of what you consider to be formalist ludology?

> However, I think categorization and typology
> are formalist activities.
-Just to be the devil's advocate here: Do we have absolute a priori certainty that all formalisms are bad and should be avoided? We all learned this in grad school, but is it true?

Dennis: Heh, that's interesting. I mainly had John Stuart Mill in mind when differentiating between fun and pleasure, and HE, of course, would equate pleasure with happiness. Not that I agree with that, either....

Jesper>> I know what you are getting at, but could you come up with a more concrete example of what you consider to be formalist ludology?

Game ontologies and typologies are formalist ludologies. Usually, they describe attempts to categorize and define an analytic space before performing analysis. This includes the ti esti question, what is a game, and all the various genre categorization projects.

At the risk of being hoist on my own petard, we might contrast formalist ludologies with something like "critical ludologies," which ask the question, what does a game do? or more properly, what does this game do?

Jesper>> Just to be the devil's advocate here: Do we have absolute a priori certainty that all formalisms are bad and should be avoided? We all learned this in grad school, but is it true?

Lol. Well, I don't believe all formalisms are bad. Actually, formalism is probably a reductionist term. However, I do think that such formalist activities need a deeper grounding in criticism, content analysis, cultural analysis, "close playing," or whatever other interpretive manifold you wish to leverage.

Put differently, formalist ludology is the hope that a formal categorization or definition of games can precede their analysis as cultural artifacts. I fear this represents a kind of hope for a "Tractatus Ludico-Philosophicus" (pace Wittgenstein), a guidbook that always already would admit its own failure, a hope for a perfect and frictionless world. To be fair, this is an extreme depiction, which is precisely why it is the one I fear.

Now, on the flipside, my hope is that the formal understanding of both rules and software will influence critical analysis of games, and to this end I welcome ontological and set-theoretical approaces to games. I'd just like to see them tethered more frequently to analysis of actual games.

Hmm. It is interesting to see the few lines posted by Nick generate such responses, and he was accurate if a little briefer than my actual paper. If anyone wants to see what I actually said, or at least meant to say, then email me and I'll send a copy of the paper. Not a mention of ludology in sight, I'm afraid.

Try: b-dot-atkins-at-mmu-dot-ac-dot-uk

This is part of something that will be appearing via that old fashioned process of ink and wood pulp so I don't want to post it in full online, but all individual requests will be answered eventually.

Thanks, Barry! Could I cajole you into posting just a few sentences or an abstract here to set the record straight?

This is going to be huge for a blog post, but it seems that it was the opening remarks that have caused most comments, so here is the first couple of pages of what I spoke from. Anyone who has a copy of the Utrecht proceedings might want to access the CD and turn to Matt Garite’s paper (not a Scandinavian) to see the kind of criticism I was thinking about. Please note the first person singular in the title. And really, the attempt was to address the way I think the institutional response to digital game studies is having an influence on some of the work that is produced (see Dennis’ earlier comments about the Buckles PhD).

“Can I please reload from last save-game?”: Getting it wrong (and right) in a nascent field.

Computer game and videogame criticism is a serious business. At the inaugural conference of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) in Utrecht in 2003 there was much public talk of taxonomies and typologies, and of grand theories of definition and categorisation. There was not much talk, however, about why people play games in the first place, and where we find our pleasures in digital games. In one keynote lecture an overarching definition of games was articulated by Jesper Juul that excluded any mention at all of pleasure or fun in its complex diagrammatic representation. […] There were no cries of dissent, no revolution on the floor of the auditorium. The audience nodded, satisfied. This is, after all, a serious business, and careers are now at stake. There is a difference between those working in the field, and those who merely enjoy the games. […] Digital game studies has enough problems getting itself taken seriously without its practitioners giving the game away by talking about just how much fun they might be having. Outside the lecture theatres groups of enthusiasts who also happen to be academics could be heard exchanging anecdotal accounts of pleasures experienced while playing games, but the public rhetoric was all of seriousness and labour.

[I skipped this bit because of time, but it should be there…] So much is only to be expected as this nascent field attempts to mark out its boundaries and limits. As Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman note in that most academic of interventions, ‘a footnote to a footnote’, in Rules of Play, there ‘is a tremendous amount of existing research on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, cognitive, and cultural qualities of pleasure’ (330), and it might be too much of a task for any critic to try and produce a synthesis of all extant work in the area into which games might be fitted. It is worth noting, however, just how absent examinations of pleasure have been so far in the burgeoning field of digital game studies, and it might be worth asking ourselves why this might be so, and whether the critical concentration on other issues might have consequences for the development of the field. [end skip]

In part, of course, any academic engaged in the enterprise of game criticism is only displaying a certain amount of intelligent self-interest in shying away from discussions of pleasure when filling in grant application forms or defending her or his object of study before a still frequently suspicious general public and wider academic community. It might even be convenient, as well as commonplace, to call back to Johan Huizinga’s definition of homo ludens (man the game-player) to substantiate a claim that the playing of games is a constituitive part of our basic humanity, rather than something superfluous or excessive, essential to our selves rather than something we do in our spare time. Games must be more than mere frivolity if we are to justify the labour we are expending on them. In the case of digital games Espen Aarseth, once again, might be considered to have led the way, and his arguments from Cybertext have established a trend in game criticism that few have since questioned. His coinage of the term ‘ergodic’ (from the Greek for ‘work’ and ‘path’) to describe those texts in which ‘nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text’ (1) certainly set up an initial and hugely influential paradigm where the focus is not so much on ‘play’ but on its antonym ‘work’. Inevitably, this has meant that much of the language in which videogames have been discussed has been the language of labour. […]

And I know I'm not making this easy by refusing to post the paper online, but just ask and you shall receive.

Thanks, Barry. Gonzalo makes some points over at ludology about the dangers of responding to notes instead of articles, and even though I knew this danger (see my original post), and most of my comments were inspired by blog posts rather than paper summaries, nevertheless I continue to put my feet into the fire.

At any rate, thanks for offering the paper to those who are interested.

Read my analysis of the game Deadline in Cybertext (pp.115-27) and then tell me it does not show that I had tremendous fun while playing it. Professionally I have *never* felt the need to hide my pleasure in gaming (I have plenty of newspaper clippings to document this), and the idea that I have been influential in surpressing the admittance of enjoyment in games research feels very alien, not to mention lacking in hard evidence.

I guess one should be flattered and thrilled by all this construction of the Scandinavian Other of game studies (especially when it comes from academically dominant countries), but, as Gonzalo argues, perhaps it is time for more serious fun? And don't forget, my students can beat your students in CS any day of the week! (Ask Jesper if the figures 13-0 means anything to him if you think I am bragging.)

One last comment, and then I am going to drop out of the blog-o-verse for a well earned rest from a very odd version of academia. The paper is not an attack on anyone. The paper is an academic paper on pleasure and digital games. It is an academic paper. Given at a conference. It will be published by and by. Sure, it contextualises what I want to say within the way I see game studies post-Utrecht, but that isn't particularly astounding. It doesn't mention ludology. It doesn't 'accuse' Espen of ignoring or 'suppressing' pleasure. It says nothing about Jesper than what is posted above. It takes two of the influential starting points of game studies, Espen's book and Janet Murray's discussion of Tetris in Hamlet on the Holodeck, and plays with the idea of where work and play are in intersection in games. What is everyone responding to? Not to what I wrote, or spoke, as the only person who has asked for a copy has been Ian himself. I have the utmost respect for any and all academics involved in game studies. For most of us that has involved taking a risk and putting ourselves on the line because we are all committed to an enterprise we think is worth it. I think we should be a plural discipline, and I am less inclined to dispose of the best of the old in forging the new, but so what? Difference is good. Debate is good. It almost smacks of academic practice.

One thing that makes me curious is why a paper given at a conference with 75 or so people should bug anyone. Much better to ignore blatant claptrap. After, that is, you find out what that claptrap might have been.

Nick Montfort offers a welcome lighthearted intermission from this conversation (which I then immediately subvert... sorry Nick!).

You know, I was sitting near Barry in Utrecht while Jesper expounded during the keynote, and I thought I observed a slightly deeper wrinkle creeping into Barry's frown. Of course, at the time, I attributed such consternation to my earlier claim that Janet Murray had a foxy 'do... but now, lookee here.

You can't pwn rules and rules-breaking and play and work and everything else all at the same time, can you? Lines have to be drawn somewhere, sometime.

All in all, sounds like good fun.