Bother. I seem to have missed the really controversial talks.

The main thought I left Princeton with, in regards to formal systems, was that the player's realization of the actual formality of the game is lessened the more realistic the game becomes. In other words, not that fun was in conflict with rules, but that realism was. The more realistic the game, the harder it is for the player to suspend disbelief... so the limited number of gamepieces or allowable manipulations becomes a hurdle, or even an affront, rather than an integral part of the game system. We don't complain of being forced to "perform as a top hat" in Monopoly, or of women getting greater range of movement than men in chess... but Hayot and Wesp did a whole paper on choice of race in Civ, and someone in the audience complained to Greg Lastowka about how you can't use alternative energy sources in Sim City. I don't know that this is necessarily a bad thing. In our presentation, Beth and I tried to deal with the question of whether a digital text can present "real choice" to the user, and we were defining "real" as "offering as many viable options as does the physical world" (or, in the case of a fantasy world, as WOULD the physical version). But games have, by definition, always been severely limited, stripped-down versions of the physical world -- compare chess to a battle, Risk to a world war, or the Game of Life to life, and those are only the ones that even *purport* to be semi-simulations. The more realistic the game, however, the less second-nature this limitation becomes, and we want a wider range of allowable behaviors. It may be that one can't create a satisfactorily "realistic" game without essentially dropping the "game" part, erasing the formality of the system (and Lastowka touched on this in questioning whether MMORPGs are games).

It makes me wonder about the hypothetical success of Christy Wampole's hypothetical Workshop for Potential Video Games (hmm... Oujepo?), which Dennis didn't talk about in detail... she was basically proposing that game designers impose various new constraints on games and question existing constraints in the manner of the Oulipians. But would a user consent to new and unexpected constraints in a realistic game? Would the constraints have to be known to the designers and programmers but invisible to the user to make the game playable? Or, alternately, might we actually cull the constraints from real life -- i.e., "make a game where the main character is schizophrenic" or "a game where the main character is blind" or even "a game where the main character is a dog."

Ok, you all probably lost interest a few paragraphs ago. :>

Nope. I stayed with you, Jess.

There is actually a game coming out form Capcom called "Killer 7" in which the main character has, you guessed it, 7 distinct personalities with which the player must navigate to progress. How random and uncontrollable all of this is remaions to be seen (I suspect it is quite controllable, less "real" in shifts).

But your whole discussion definitely makes me think about Freud's assertions regarding civilization as a tightly constructed unit brought together to avoid the "death" that lurks in the "outside" world (the old civitas/ paganus dialectic). All else produced in this civilization is a by-product (I know, I know-- this is quite abstracted here) of this survival instinct.

What I'm trying to suggest is that it seems to me that the formal systems of most games rely on the same sort of dilemma that Freud claims we all face in our adhrerence to society's laws-- either play by them (jump over the hole) or die (fall into the hole). Obviously, the intrinsic rules of any system have layers of nuances that separate them from others-- Eternal Darkness for the Gamecube actually requires that you "die" to become reborn as a more powerful entity. In other words, the rules of gaming's formal systems and their relationship to "realism" are hindered by the same adherence to the system that we voluntarily engage in daily: Don't test the system or you will be deleted. Enter the hacker....

Ooh, excellent point! This is another one of those moments in the class when I have to go lie down...

"But games have, by definition, always been severely limited, stripped-down versions of the physical world -- compare chess to a battle, Risk to a world war, or the Game of Life to life, and those are only the ones that even *purport* to be semi-simulations. The more realistic the game, however, the less second-nature this limitation becomes, and we want a wider range of allowable behaviors. It may be that one can't create a satisfactorily "realistic" game without essentially dropping the "game" part, erasing the formality of the system (and Lastowka touched on this in questioning whether MMORPGs are games)."

This is interesting to me given my interests in historical wargaming, where the tension between "game" and "simulation" is always present (and often explicit--some systems are overtly designed as games first and foremost, others as simulations, though the really interesting ones somehow manage to be both). One famous example of simulation triumphing over "game" was a package called Campaign for North Africa that required the Italian troops to carry extra water in their supplies so as to be able to boil their pasta! (That sounds like a caricature, but it's historically accurate and was an issue during the actual fighting.) Anyway, for most wargamers the appeal of the hobby lies in the extent to which the chaotic events of warfare can be abstracted and modelled in formal terms. A good example are command and control rules, part of the so-called "fog of war." The first generation of wargames, from the 1960s and 1970s, more or less allowed a player to do whatever he (almost always a "he") wanted--the player had an omniscient god-like view of the battlefield, and could do anything at any time. More recent games, however, introduce command and control restrictions: your units may not always do what you want them to, or do it when you want (need) them to do it. Orders may be lost, mis-interpreted, or intercepted. As the _player_, you may spot a weak-point in your opponent's lines from your omniscient view hovering over the map, but your battlefield commanders may not be able to organize and maneuver their forces to take advantage of it. The point is that all of these messy, human issues are formally modelled by the game system in the form of charts or tables, with subordinate commanders' historical personalities quantified to allow for a probabilitistic determination of their response to a given situation.

You're thinking this doesn't sound like much fun? Maybe not (to each their own) but what's brought me back into the hobby is the fact that these are some of the most intricate formal systems we have ever devised--the maps, cardboard units, and rules are essentially analog computers.