GTA IV: A Journey of Design Research through Liberty City

I’ll quote the intro here:

The Grand Theft Auto video game series, by Rockstar Games, has become the landmark of the video game industry. Since the third installment of the series in 2001, ‘GTA’ has become the most anticipated and talked about video game franchise in the entertainment industry. The series has explored both conceptual and technological boundaries of video games. It has redefined how crime, characters, and popular culture can be incorporated into the design of a video game in a particularly savvy manner.

At the same time, academic study of video games has emerged as its own discipline. After debates about the development of broad theoretical strokes, it has become time to produce, and popularize, detailed analyses of individual game masterpieces. Such readings can make findings of video game studies available to both game developers and gamers, but also – and more importantly – to educators, parents, and journalists interested in developments in popular culture.

In these pages, game scholar and designer Aki Järvinen, Ph.D., will produce such a reading from the perspectives of design, psychology, and culture.

’All Rules Lead to Players’
by Aki Järvinen

Lectio Praecursoriae, University of Tampere, Finland

March 8th, 2008

Dear custodian, dear opponent, ladies and gentlemen.
It is my task to open this event by speaking to you about my work, to be defended here today. I will start with some thoughts on the title of the thesis: Games without Frontiers.

It refers to several things: First, how this thesis does not focus solely on one form of games, such as computer or mobile games, or games typically played in a certain location (outdoors), or games played by certain kinds of players (e.g., children). Rather, in Games without Frontiers, ’gameness’ is seen as a phenomenon that extends across historical player tastes, technologies and media, taking forms in each technology or medium that suits it best, catering for a variety of play experiences.

Second, the title is, as many of you know, intellectual property of Peter Gabriel, as it is the title of one of his songs. In the song, there is the line ‘games without frontiers, wars without tears’. This line in the lyrics actually suggests what was to become one of the cornerstone observations of my thesis: How games are designs for struggle, microscopic worlds, without the heartfelt anxieties that our struggle in the everyday can produce. Nevertheless, it is towards those heartfelt anxieties, the experience of a wide range of emotions that I would like to see my work contribute to in the field of game studies and game design. I will return to this at the end of this speech.

I have written the thesis as a consumer, researcher, and producer of games. I start the thesis with a passage that tries to explain why and how I’ve ended up producing a study like this. Through this attempt at self-reflection I also try to shed light on possible studies that ’could have been’, if my life in relation to research and games would have taken different turns than those that actually took place during the last, approximately nine years.

There indeed were many studies that could have been, and, also a certain possibility: no study at all. The end result is something in between, as a number of my previous writings were abandoned in order to make room for new thoughts. The work is multi-disciplinary, yet the theories and topics left out during the process have been numerous: theories on visual culture and technologies of vision, cultural theory of new media, audience studies, study of ideology, environmental aesthetics, narratology, critical theory, have not made their way to this toolbox of theory. I want to highlight this aspect of writing a doctoral thesis, or any study, because it brings up the aspect of research as a creative process, as a process of design in itself.

My passion for games and research has persisted, of which today is concrete evidence. Part of the solution has been the broadening of my research focus outside computer and video games. My point is that there is a world of games and players outside computers and video game consoles, it is alive and well, and I have found it a fascinating object of study. It has clearly also opened my eyes to what kinds of experiences digital technologies can, and perhaps more importantly, can not achieve. Had I kept the focus on computer games only, I doubt whether my interest and persistence would have lasted.

Then again, I have to admit that personally this has lead to what I have chosen to call

Moments of academic and professional insecurity

This confession does not refer to a feeling that I did not know what I was doing. Rather, the reasons are elsewhere. The subject of my study, in academic contexts, is still unusual, even if ‘game studies’ as a discipline might be emerging out there – and in here, today. I have heard numerous speeches, read numerous proposals about the supposed importance of studying games, yet there has been numerous occasions where my own belief has faltered; do we really need to invest so much time and money into developing and studying games? During writing the study, I have wrestled with questions of self-doubt, such as, ‘What good is it that I am doing?’, ‘Are games important, really?’, and consequently: ‘Should I focus my energy on something else?’

There must be more pressing matters to study in the world other than games. I know there is. Yet games do affect the lives of thousands and thousands of people, and they are an ancient form of human interaction. Games are also an ancient form of design. This testifies for games’ omnipresent nature, as play of games indeed has been documented in most cultures. Whereas play is a universal form of human behaviour, games are universal designs for structuring play. As such, they contribute to a significant body of evidence about human creativity.

Therefore, my own path out of the dilemma of games’ importance has been to focus on what matters in games as a human experience. This I have sought through focusing on the emotional experience of game play, because from the perspective of the humanities, that is the bottom line, so to speak - that is the ground zero of how games matter, not the sales charts or the technological advancements. Arguably these aspects are all linked to each other, but what I suggest is a perspective where the sales charts become the collective voice of players; where new technologies are socially adapted, not vice versa.

I will next touch upon the work itself by discussing

Two premises and conclusions

In a thesis, there should be a thesis. My starting hypothesis was that any known game in the universe can be deconstructed into parts with a single, unified set of theoretical concepts, and my thesis defines those concepts and methods of how to use them. The second hypothesis I have taken, and tried to prove, is that it is possible to produce - if you excuse the term - a ‘ludo-psycho-logical’ theory of the experiences players go through when playing games, and apply this kind of psychological framework of understanding game play for analysis and design purposes.

The two theses I have sough to validate by addressing two domains:

Understanding games as systems

My research starts from the premise that structurally, games are made out of parts that interact. This structure can be conceptualised as a system, and the parts I have conceptualised as nine different elements. Their relationships have been discussed as rules, more specifically rule procedures, and the concept of embodiment has been introduced as the relation and realization of rules and game elements. The three-fold distinction to self (me as a player), other (you as a player), and system (the game design as agent) has strived to articulate the fundamental parties of interaction in games, in a general level.

Understanding game play as emotional experience
From the perspective of emotional processes, games are made out of events, agents, and objects in a metaphoric world, and it is those events, agents, and objects that trigger our emotions when we play. I have argued for goals as privileged forms of rules, which are fundamental to the motivation and enjoyment of players. Goals in games are rules that elicit players into striving towards them, invite players to act, often in larger than life contexts. This is what often distinguishes game goals from the often mundane or abstract goals of everyday life. Besides the psychology of goals, I have discussed behavioural phenomena through theories of mood management, selective exposure, emotion, pleasure, and pretence, to name the most significant theories and concepts.

In addition, I have taken advantage of categorizations of emotions in order to develop a theory of player experience: a theory that maps the phases and reactions players go through when playing a game. This has also lead me to discussions of aesthetic experiences, and the performative and communicative aspects of games. The first has been explored through the various domains of human abilities, and the latter through the material basis of games as media - in other words, through different materials with which games and their modes of address can be designed. In the process, I have highlighted the possibilities and constraints of different game media – from wood to paper, from speech to images, and onwards to the new media of computer technology – with emphasis on the consequences of such design choices for the emotional experiences of players.

This emphasis I have condensed into the slogan:

All rules lead to players

Under this heading, I will briefly speak about directions for future work in this area.

If I combine the two afore-mentioned paths of thought in my thesis, that is 1) understanding games as systems and 2) understanding game play as emotional experience, the conclusions of my thesis can be found from the following statement: Games are goal structures which facilitate playful human performances and planning, thus giving birth to emotional episodes.

The consequence of such a formulation is that it has become time, at least for me personally, to shift the focus: to move from ‘game design’ to ‘player design’. At least today, that is what I would like myself to be called: an expert in player design; an expert in using games in creating play experiences that reach across the frontiers of what games, as we know them today. Therefore, the end of Games without Frontiers, in fact, signals a new horizon: the beginning of work – communication, debate, application, experimentation, production – in the fields of game analysis, education, and design.

I will end this lectio with some thoughts on;

How to make games matter, in even more substantial ways

In the end, the thesis under scrutiny today presents an interpretation, a lengthy one, of what game design research should be. With ‘game design research’ I refer to the study of games as design objects; games as results of design practices. This brings forth the nature of game design as an aesthetic and creative practice.

In this kind of practice, game designers create, no more or no less, worlds as designs for play. This leads us to the experiential, or even artistic, aspect of games.

In my view, art is about offering experiences that enable us to see the world in a different light, or constitution. Thus, art changes our perceptions of what it is to live in a world, as we gather experiences of alternate worlds and behaviours.

As microscopic worlds with their own rules, games can be - and have been - part of this process. Therefore I believe that the most important games are those that manage to construct a world of their own, not unlike works of art. For me, this is not a question of scale or detail - from the perspective of the theories in the thesis, both a board game like Checkers, and a contemporary, hugely successful online game like World of Warcraft create a world of their own, a world that becomes the focus of attention for their players.

But there are many ways to design a world; there are many ways to design the ethics of that world. There are, in the terms of my theories, many ways to design goals and the means for players to strive for them, and communicate these matters to players.

Here we arrive at the question concerning games’ nature as, supposedly, ‘mere’ entertainment versus something that has persuasive powers; powers to change and influence our beliefs, and possibly persuade us to take action once the game is over. If we accept a hypothesis according to which games, like any other form of communication, are able to persuade their players, in other words either shape their beliefs, responses, or even behaviour, then we have to accept the postulation that play may lead to many varieties of behaviour, even harmful behaviour.

Without resorting to populist rhetoric, this nevertheless is a thought that, in my experience, too few game developers, in their urgency to create business growth through ‘mere’ entertainment, contemplate upon. In the thesis under examination, I promote the idea of game design through metaphors that create emotional attachment - however, it is metaphors and simulations of death that get proliferated in games - and, deservedly in part, games with vividly designed metaphors of death thus gain public dissent.

By having studied the emotional nature of play behaviour with games, I want to argue the case for different metaphors - metaphors of empathy, nurturing, and hope, to mention a few candidates that should be defended against the onslaught of visionless formulas and cynical or nihilistic metaphors. There is no doubt that metaphors of competition and conflict have created great games, yet I believe that the forces for positive change outside games lie elsewhere. This might be true for new business opportunities as well.

Design premises such as these have to do with how events, agents, and objects, are represented, or simulated, in a game; in terms of my thesis, how rules are embodied into various game elements and their interaction. As my honourable opponent Mr. Juul has noted in his studies, there seem to be games with different weather - ‘hardcore’ ones with storm clouds and murky proceedings, and ‘casual’ ones with shinier, brighter look on things. As the empirical sample of Games without Frontiers shows, I have had my share of rain and sleet in the scholar’s cave. Therefore, instead of the often heard mantra for ‘better games’, I want to contribute to the development and study of games which aim for a better weather - not out there, not necessarily literally, but in the mental spaces of players, and the immediate contexts of game play, contributing to positive qualities of lives. I firmly believe that both games which aim to entertain, and games with a serious agenda, are able to do that with equally powerful, yet different approaches.

My esteemed colleague Gonzalo Frasca’s game studio Powerful Robot has adopted the slogan ‘play can change the world’. This, I propose, should increasingly be the focus of game studies as well: To produce understanding of how games, as designs for interaction between humans, or humans and computers, change the worldly perceptions of their players, or the surrounding culture at large.

It is not only that we need to believe that play can change the world, play is, in fact, changing the world as we speak – why else would anyone, child or adult, play? Therefore, mine is a belief at possibilities to leverage desires for play in order to produce awareness of cultural and ideological issues in the world.

This I propose can be achieved with games, for players - for us, that is - but also for those who struggle, with goals lesser than ours, yet no less important than ours, - and who truly would need to experience the joy of play. Games can help in doing that.

Thank you.

I have levelled up!! I will post my opening speech, ‘lectio’, from the defense in the coming days. Then this site is just about done.

Games without Frontiers: Theories and Methods for Game Studies and Design

This means that I will remove the old table of contents.

[edit]

The presentation slides from ITU can be found from my slidespace.

Games without Frontiers: Theories and Methods for Game Studies and Design

My presentation slides from the DiGRA 2007 Tokyo conference provide an overview to the project. You can find them at Slideshare.

I’m looking forward to comments - I’m also available for teaching & lecturing!