Rocket Jump

I thought I'd start off by posting a video by a guy called Freddie Wong about rocket jumping, which Kevin mentioned briefly in the lecture - not educational, just entertaining. He usually makes live-action videos inspired by videogames, if you're interested you should check out Future Rock Band and Portal Gun on his channel.

ANYWAY. Prepare yourself for an incoherently put-together argument.

I was interested with the reading by Mia Consalvo and Nathan Dutton in their attempt to create a template for the study of videogames by trying to categorize what I personally think can’t really be categorized. While their method would work pretty well for the static elements of a game, such as characters and objects, I think overall it wouldn’t work as a basis for studying all videogames. This is because a game can’t fully be understood by a single person playing it due to the immense number of possibilities that lie within the game in the player’s actions, interpretation and experience of it.

I was pretty intrigued by the notion of the ‘infinite canvas’ that was brought up in the lecture on Thursday. When Scott McCloud coined the term in reference to the never-ending potential for size and creativity that web-comics possess, journalist Steven Poole argued that videogames could be viewed in the same sense. Attempts by scholars in the past to try and study videogames in light of other visual art forms such as film and theatre fail to acknowledge the ‘infinite’ potential of videogames, in that the agency that the viewer, or in this sense the player, possesses in a videogame makes it an entirely different experience.

While the plot in many games remains invariably the same no matter how many times you play it through (although there are games now that change the story depending on how you play, such as Heavy Rain), the actions that you decide to make within the game won’t be exactly the same each time you play it, and neither will someone else play it the same way that you did.

Take for example a game in which the goal is to make it through a heavily-guarded building, save a hostage and make it back out. One person may play through the game by getting the hostage out of the building without once being spotted by a guard; another person may play through the game killing every guard they come across before reaching the hostage, and killing every other guard on their way back out of the building; another person may continually try and fail to make it to the hostage without being subdued by the guards; and so on. The agency you have as a player of the game allows you to create your own narrative within it (whether your playing style makes it an espionage thriller, gory action flick or a story about someone who gets infuriated by not being able to make it past the third boss), and the narrative is ultimately created by your individual experience in playing the game, and any emergent behaviour that stems from that.

This brings back McCloud’s idea of the infinite canvas, and it’s application to videogames. Whereas McCloud’s definition was based on the author’s potential to create a web-comic outside the bounds and physical limitations of print comics, when applied to videogames it goes outside the potential of the game’s creator – the infinite canvas is expanded by the possibilities both presented to and created by the player of the game.

Herein lies my issue with Consalvo and Dutton’s methodology. Their fourth section of study, the ‘Gameplay Log’, describes a process so incredibly broad in its scope that there is no feasible way a game could be studied in its entirety simply by a single researcher playing the game, no matter how exhaustively they believe they have explored it. While it does acknowledge the need to log somehow the playing experience rather than simply observing the design aspects of the game (i.e. the author’s work), it merely states to do this in order for the researcher to gain an idea of the scope of possibilities of a game.

What I’m trying to get at here is that I don’t think you can set down a certain method to study videogames by, because the issues they present transcend various fields of study, and require sociological, legal, artistic, political etc. thought on them.

/rant over.