The Montola Letters 1
Recently Markus Montola wrote a mini-review on my thesis as part of his on-going dissertation work in Pervasive Games. Markus is one of the driving forces behind IPerG and is one of the proverbial heavyweights in the area of appropriative gaming. Markus and I have struck up a dialog on the subject, and as long as he consents (which he has) I will be posting the exchanges here in unedited forms.
Hi Dakota,
We’ve been discussing genres a lot lately within IPerG, and found out two sensible approaches to “pervasive game” genre classification. Either you study existing games and gaming cultures and discuss the existing historical and popular ways of classifying the games, OR you build your own categories from scratch in order to inform design. The question is: What is the purpose of the classification?
Due to distribution issues, the former one is really hard to do with “pervasive games”: They’ve been reinvented SO many times over and over. You have locally born game groups like big games, alternate reality games and pervasive larps, which are partially overlapping, partially similar and have bunch of strange features other groups consider irrelevant. You end up with a game like Momentum, which perfectly belongs to all three groups, and game like Majestic, which looks like an alternate reality game but is not due to not being part of the ARG movement. Computer games have had easy and fairly global distribution, so genres such as platformers and rally games have crystallized very early. The ways of playing larps and “pervasive games” are too many to count or distinguish.
So you can take the design approach, asking what are the prototypical feature compositions that best serve as a basis for a designer trying to think about this new stuff. If you go this way, you may scrap most of the historical influences from your classification, and build an entirely new one. (Of course old practices, games and groupings should help you along). But if you go this way, I don’t think your three groups are informative enough.
So… where do you stand, in either of these approaches or elsewhere?
Best,
- Markus