Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9241823" data-attributes="member: 71699">Let's start with what it means to play to find out. The ontologist Espen Aarseth once defined games as ergodic literature, implying inter alia narrative that was effortful to traverse. Trad would fit the bill, as would say The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. I don't agree with that definition (and I'm not sure Espen now would, either.)An obvious objection is - what counts as effort of the right kind? Suppose that for each page I turned of Wuthering Heights, you forced me to perform a hundred push ups. It seems obvious that there must be some relation between the effort and what is found out. That implies that we mean something more than just investing effort, when we say play to find out.But suppose we are playing, what about what we find out? Is it enough that is generated as a product of play. Suppose I spectate play of Apocalypse World. As a spectator I find out the story as play generates it. That doesn't seem like enough. Implying we mean something more than simply finding out what play generates, when we say play to find out.Consider next the MDA/DDE/PDE framework discussed up thread. The framework asserts that the game design does not directly author the player experience. And I have just pointed it out that it doesn't exist solely in their knowing what happens, either. Rather, player experience ("aesthetics") subsists in playing. Playing to find out a story means experiencing that story as play.Picture a standard, old-fashioned adventure videogame. You can diagram it like this - story > game > story > game > story > game. I get a snippet of story - perhaps a cutscene - and then I get to play. If I overcome the challenges, I unlock the next snippet of story. Am I in that case playing to find out the story? Not according to what I just said above. This is somewhat descriptive of a traditional adventure path.We can use playing rather loosely to mean everything that happens from session start to session end. Applying a tighter definition of play, I claim that game-play and non-play are intermingled along that timeline. Playing to find out only refers to such aspects and times as we are in fact playing, and to those experiences found in the play itself. We play storynow for the sake of experiencing ludonarrative, otherwise we could read a book. Similarly, reading a history book doesn't mean we've experienced playing to find out about the Sengoku period, even if at the end we know some of the same things.The reason play to find out is a useful lense, and not just a synonym of playing, is that it reminds that play is experienced in the process, not the product. So in sim, my emotional and noetic satisfaction (MDA aesthetics!) in achieving an elevated appreciation is found not in the end product, but in the play itself. In gamism, my emotional and social satisfactions in beating my foes is found not in the end product (of those foes being beaten) but in the play itself. (This is easily seen by offering a gamist nothing but gimmes. Offering nothing but gimmes normally discourages repeat play.)This is what unlocks for every mode the opportunities of neotrad. Why it's worth bothering with. Storynow is fortunate enough to have been forced to declare it as an overt intent. Probably because sim and gamism had always been more about the process - they were a good way there - while stories before contemporary games had ordinarily been received as product.</blockquote>

Verification