Markus Montola, who might well be described as the Godfather of European Pervasive Appropriative Games, had a few kind words for my thesis Pervasive Games Are Not A Genre! (They are a sub-genre.).
Other than the fact that the curse of Dakota Fanning has struck again (he refers to me as a she), Markus raised a few points of contention that I would like to address. Unfortunately, Markus’ website doesn’t allow for comments so I’ll address his concerns here.
Of course I disagree with many things presented in here. One of them is the classification of appropriative games to big, ubiquitous and pervasive games. I agree with the argument that we need to classify these things into more elaborate sub-groups, but I don’t agree with the division made here; Brown’s categories basically boil down to “no tech”, “user-owned tech” and “game operator provided tech”. The distinction is useful, but not sufficient as a genre classification.
The speed at which one can be bogged down while discussing genre is amazing, so I will keep this a brief and as to the point as possible. A genre is simply a category of composition belonging to a greater taxonomy. In constructing my genre system, I tried to answer two questions:
- What do these games do?
- How do they go about doing that?
These games erect a representational layer of play over existing space without significantly altering the physicality of that space. Everything one might layer on top of this (real vs. virtual space, 1 player vs. many players, etc), are really well-passed the core of the experience. These games appropriate space and then relinquish it physically unaffected by the gameplay.
This “representational layer of play” is either constructed through computation or non-computational means. I choose the term big games to represent the non-computational ones. I’ll admit that this term isn’t optimal, but this application reflects the rhetoric of its popular usage. The non-computational games big games received the least amount of attention in my treatment, and really do warrant a greater investigation.
I devoted most of my efforts to the games that constructed their “representational layers of play” computationally. For a starting point, I relied greatly on Jane McGonigal’s This Might Be A Game. I became fairly invested in looking at how game theorists on the humanities side of things viewed the terms “pervasive” & “ubiquitous” versus how game theorists / computer scientists viewed the terms. I’m not going summarize that section here, but it did allow to me arrive at what I think is a valuable distinction.
Pervasive games are games that rely upon computational technology that has already been dispersed through the appropriated environment. On the other hand, ubiquitous game rely upon computational technology that must first be introduced to said environment.
Not to be short, but reducing this distinction to “user-owned” and “operator-provided” completely disavows the historical computational context through which the terms “pervasive” & “ubiquitous” were derived. I find that a lot of work done in this field relies too heavily on convenient adjectives and verbs. Definitions constructed in this manner often make great sound bites & blog posts, but fall apart under the slightest of theoretical scrutiny.
Which leads me to:
P.S. On page 49 Brown sees some unintended implications in my model of pervasive game: In fact I tried to express pretty much the same stuff she writes here. I suppose this is an unfortunate side effects of metaphorical models: They inspire creative readings.
I can’t blame Montola for calling me out here. The first part of my agenda was to call out and debug a few of the popular metaphoric models. It isn’t so much that I disagree with Markus as much as I disagree with several conclusions I have seen that drew upon his work in question.
Unfortunately, the second part of my agenda had to be cut from the thesis. It just wasn’t going to be ready. I’m hoping to be able to address it soon (I really need to finish Ian’s Persuasive Games first). Ian argues:
…that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. [He calls] this new form “procedural rhetoric,” a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation.
I believe that appropriative games operate similarly, but distinctively differently due to the confusion in regards to the magic circle we are referring to. I refer to this new form as “procedural dialectic,” and will be expounding about it further in the future.
So…comments?
In about a week and a half, Come Out & Play 2007 will kick-off as part of PICNIC ‘07 in Amsterdam. Unfortunately I am not able to make the festival due to scheduling issues, but past collaborators David Jimison and Jeff Crouse have a game so Georgia Tech will be proudly represented. Hopefully my accepted entry Disavow! will find its way into to CO&P ‘08 this coming spring in NYC.
Wow. Brilliant. Does anyone know whose work this is? The concept is just beautiful. I’ve placed an email to