Games * Design * Art * Culture

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

"Understanding Games"

Via Kim Pallister via Raph comes a link to "Understanding Games," which attempts to do for games what Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics does for comics--that book explains comics in the form of a comic, while Understanding Games attempts to explain games in the form of a game (or series of connected games).

Excellent idea. The treatment is by my lights quite shallow, however; e.g., the first lesson is in terms of representation, and games are at their core systems... Representation is not irrelevant, but it doesn't get under the skin. Still, quite interesting.

Part 1
Part 2

posted by Greg at 6:09 PM 49 comments

49 Comments:

I'd like to see something called "Understanding Punk Games" that talks about when representation does get under the skin. Maybe I'll make it if I have time, maybe I'll make it using Santiago's framework.

By Patrick, at 9:59 PM

Shallow but fun. I might even suggest that rethinking about these issues this way is fun precisely because it's shallow. Forum based discussions and such tend to get bogged down in semantics, and creating semantics was never the point of trying to understand video games.

Personally, I've always tended to think more in terms of games as systems. When playing these games however I've let my mind wander into considering games rather abstractly: One might abandon rules all together and just think about what the player sees. Sort of a 'Turing test' for video games, if you like. After all, that's basically what rules and observations are when you get down to it.

Part 3 is up btw.

By Anonymous, at 1:00 AM

Understanding Comics is a masterpiece, precisely because it never steps out of the comics medium which it describes. While a noble attempt, Understanding Games is nothing more than a Powerpoint presentation with some interactivity tacked on. It is illustrative, but it doesn't work completely within the medium of games to do what it does.

One could argue that if I consider these nothing more than glorified powerpoint presentations, what of experiences like Halo/Gears of War, or Grim Fandango? Yeah, they're not games. All those multimedia/communications majors that invaded the industry along with the CDROM have pulled the wool over our eyes. Few modern examples of interactive software actually qualify as games by a strict definition, like Crawford's in Chris Crawford on Game Design (as opposed to his somewhat muddier definitions in his earlier work).

If the definition is looser, sure, these can be made to fit. I believe that they are shortchanging the medium by not getting across their ideas in the form of an interactive experience.

Then again, games simply might not be capable of doing so. Until we know one way or another, I think our future Scott McClouds should hold off. After all, Understanding Comics was created a century after craftpersons began seriously working in the medium, and a few decades after Eisner described the medium exhaustively in print.

Part 3 is out, and it tries teaching a concept through the interactive experience only.

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A cute primer. Would be great included in the curriculum of an elective 8th grade transdisciplinary class called Intro to Game Design.

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