Game Studies: Rules, Emergence, and Information

On By BrettIn game studiesLeave a comment

Of all the games we played last week, I was most interested by Mastermind, as it felt the most systematic and logic-based. From the six base colors and the four possible slots for these codes, you had 6x6x6x6, or 1,296, outcomes initially. I found myself thinking through my succession of moves each round logically whittling down these potential outcomes, in a somewhat mathematical way.

In other words, with the code already made, I was free to work within my own head and not respond to the moves of the other player in an ongoing, emergent way, unlike Blockus and Connect Four. I could stick to my own system or strategy and not have to worry about the way other players shifted their strategy. Over a succession of rounds in Mastermind, this may change, but in the context of the night, it did not. It was almost like the game was completely inside my own head as a series of logical possibilities scaffolded over a series of decisions.

This in-my-head quality made the game feel more like what Salen and Zimmerman say about “decision trees,” where one could trace out a consistent set of approaches, including a winning strategy, through a flow chart. With the numbered layout of six colors and four slots, the game has a series of discrete decisions mapped along two possible axis of variability, unlike Chess with its range of varied moves. But this only describes the possible moves, which is where the role of information came in.

Again, in Blockus and Connect Four, my move changed based on the information of the ongoing moves done by the other player(s). As Chris encroached on my territory, for example, I started making a stronger effort to block him. But in Mastermind, my moves changed based on the information provided by my own past decision. In this way, strategy was still emergent in Mastermind as I got new information, but the components of the game–like the input of other players–affected that emergence less. I could create an arc of moves that, theoretically, could be almost algorithmic and unchanged as each guess progressed.

In the information theory approach, as Salen and Zimmerman define, “information is a measure of how certain you can be about the nature of a signal” (193). As they breakdown Mastermind, as the guesser gets more feedback about the nature of the code through the black and white begs, “the guesser narrows down the possible answers (decreasing uncertainty), carving out a single guess fro ma range of all possible guesses” (194-95). Initially, the uncertainty is total–1,296 possible outcomes–but each round reduces the possible answers, so that by my final guess, I was no longer guessing. I logically knew exactly what my answer was.

In the other games, I never experienced this level of certainty. There was no set “strategy,” just an emergent web of possible strategies based on the changing game board, particularly in Blockus. I could get a sense for where people may go, but I never “knew.” I got a sense, as Even points out in his post, that a more expansion-oriented strategy seemed effective, or that certain pieces could fit into key choke-points for other players. But chance, or uncertainty, remained high. Noah, for example, could deliberately not play the “right” move, as we often did in connect four to delay the victory. Or one of us would miss the right move. Or a new move would come up based on the third or fourth person. All of these variables would, in turn, affect my move, feeding back into the system and affecting theirs.

In this way, Blockus, and to a lesser extent Connect Four, felt more “complex” and more uncertain than Mastermind. Or perhaps, it felt more emergent. But importantly, as Salen and Zimmerman point out, these feelings may simply be feelings, and the formal backdrop, the “constituative rules,” of all the games had a similar logic that operationalized in different experiences.

CCR 633: Thinking through Things, Dwelling, and Fourfold

On By BrettIn affect, embodied rhetoric, rhetoricLeave a comment

This past weekend, my parents and I attended a concert at a Anyela’s a winery just outside of Skaneateles. From our seats, we saw lanes of grapes, stretched out like topography along the hills. Behind the stage, the lake reflected back the setting sun in bleeding reds and oranges staining the the once-blue water.  The stage rose up like a wooden ark, seeming to sit becalmed amid the people, trees, lake, and grapevines. And the musicians–a motley collection of strings, brass, harpsichord, and players–played as the sky dimmed through stirred-up rainbows into muted black.

In time, crickets chirped amid bow-strokes and the temperature fell. Under-dressed for the cold, I buttoned up my cardigan and sipped at my Cabernet Franc–its living brethren growing on the hills nearby.  When the sky was a steady darkness, fireworks perched over the shoulder of a distant hill, occasionally sneaking a muted rumble into the music.

At one level, these noises and sites–combined with our distant seats–got “in the way” and impeded the “piece” of Vivaldi or Sufjan Stevens from reaching us, “the audience.” Vivaldi may have pulled out his (wig) hair imagining how fireworks, crickets, and someone tripping over a stair in the dark would fit is double cello concerto.

This is what my parent’s thought. But the whole time I kept thinking about Heidegger and Rickert’s ambient rhetoric, thinking how this particular concert was incredibly ambient, even down to the fourfold of Heidegger’s dwelling. How the crickets and the cold, the sloped earth and changing sky, fit together, indeed “spoke together.”

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ENG 730: “Werewolf” and Fundamentals of Play

On By BrettIn game studiesLeave a comment

I had played “Werewolf” a handful of times in the past, mostly at parties with larger groups of people. These past times also had different variations, like the inclusion of a witch who could silence a villager in the night and no dead goat/cow/chicken/corn to start the game.

This initial dead goat/chicken/cow/corn felt like one of the more significant parts of the game, as (unless you are the Seer and get lucky) you lack information, making the choice of the vote more random. Salen and Zimmerman’s concept of the “anatomy of choice ” highlights the character of this initial vote I think. As they break it down, the anatomy of choice includes the following five steps:

  1. What happened before the player was given the choice?

  2. How is the possibility of choice conveyed to the player? 

  3. How did the player make the choice?

  4. What is the result of the choice? How will it affect future choices?

  5. How is the result of the choice conveyed to the player?

If we take the “voting of a villager to exile” as our choice, then some of the answers to these questions would be the same in latter votes. For example, the possibility of choice is conveyed through the narrator announcing the daylight and the need to vote, and the immediate result would be the showing of the player’s card and their exile.

But other elements differ. For one, the dead goat offers no information, so in the initial vote, we are all suspect. Initially, we had no way to really back up a decision–no answer to the “how” in an experiential sense for making our choice. Later on, we could use evidence from the course of play, but the first vote feels more awkward, dangerous, and random.

I feel like that created our role-playing. With the addition of roles, it eased the difficulty of this initial vote because we could essentially make up narrative reasons, easing the sense of randomness. As time went on, however, we seemed to embrace more of the arbitrary nature of this vote with a “go for it” approach. The randomness also heightened our appeal to the gambler’s fallacy and other more probabilistic thinking. Later votes invited more meta-gaming, analysis, and psychology.

The result of the choice, in a larger sense, was also important. If the villages got the wolf in the first turn, winning was much easier, raising the stakes.

I think what makes Werewolf an interesting game is that the choice–while the same procedure through each round–changes so much as the in-game context changes. As Salen and Zimmerman note about design, “Design is the process by which a designer creates a context to be encountered by a participant, from which meaning emerges.” Almost like stages in a game-show, as contestants get eliminated, each new vote provides a new “level,” “round,” or context to be encountered by the players as participants. And as the context changes, the experience changes. Patterns and skills emerge, but each vote presents a new problem to solve, a new experience of “meaningful play.”

This creates an elegant scaffolding between the “macro” and the “micro” levels of choice and outcome, to use Salen and Zimmerman’s terms. Each round, the available information changes and the stakes change in terms of our immediate “quantifiable” goal, and while the larger strategy for either wolf or villager may be the same, the tactics for each round are flexible and rhetorically situated.

Early on, for example, the wolf may want to appear completely innocuous and invisible. As time goes on, the wolf may want to eliminate more villagers, especially in the penultimate round. Or, initially, the wolf may kill the other wolf, making them appear innocent for the rest of the game. The round helps determine the more productive choice, to which the player must respond and be sensitive to, while maintaining the larger goal in mind.

Works Cited:

Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT P,  2004.

ENG 730: Werewolf and Meaningful Choice

On By BrettIn game studies, rhetoricLeave a comment

I’m going to start posting my school blog posts here, just so all my writing is in one place. They’ll come up fairly regularly and will be signified by a course title. Today is Game Studies.

I had played “Werewolf” a handful of times in the past, mostly at parties with larger groups of people. These past times also had different variations, like the inclusion of a witch who could silence a villager in the night and no dead goat/cow/chicken/corn to start the game.

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Ruins, Trauma, and Time

On By BrettIn Politics, society, ThoughtsLeave a comment

The magazine showed a scarred, abandoned street. The sort of ruin porn that surfaces from Pripyat, Centralia, or some other orphaned collection of concrete and steel that once constituted “a city,” or at least something human. Shifting earth had torn ditches into the blacktop, like broken bread. Softwoods studded cracks with prickly, anemic limbs. Rubble and rocks piled outside stripped, sagging walls. Cloud-dimmed gray permeated the cityscape.

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Empty Building by Joseph Novak, via creative commons.

“18 WAYS TO SURVIVE THE APOCALYPSE” the headline said, in bold, sans-serif font.

The magazine was on a K-Mart rack, like a bruised piece of skin in an otherwise Willy-Wonka-bright palette of check-out line candies, play dough containers, and glossed up celebrities. The rest of the store was pretty quiet beyond the usual ambience of carts, footsteps, distant telephones, and distant arguments.

I think my dad an I were there to buy a couch cover.

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Clogged Up

On By BrettIn Personal, Thoughts, WritingLeave a comment

I have other more “pressing” things to do this morning. Perhaps some housework. Definitely some teaching prep and student feedback. Maybe research. But I feel like I needed to write this morning to get rid of a certain clogged feeling. So I’m setting a timer for 30 minutes and writing. Let’s see what happens.

I guess I’ll start looking at the feeling more directly. I’m not quite sure what it is, but it feels a bit like cabin fever for the mind, like I’m stuck doing similar intellectual activities. Or just sort of stuck in a general life way. I was doing a freewrite the other day, and this came out describing the feeling:

I don’t know how I got here. Well, I know in a literal sense, the sense that if a cop were to ask me how I got there, I could tell him. Tell him in pretty solid detail. And I’m not trying to be all abstract, thinking about genetics and geology and all that—how I got here in space time or geologic time. No, it was really more of a feeling, really. Like I was drifting in an aimless current and suddenly beached like a piece of drift wood, with the current flowing further down stream.

I think this sort of mood is pointing to some of the intellectual ambiguity that comes from overthinking existence. To thinking, learning, being, but not necessarily acting because despite all this thinking and learning, sometimes it’s hard to figure out what to do. Or how to do what you want to do. Or what there is to do.

Right now, in terms of my life, I’m on summer break before entering my second year of coursework in a 4-year PhD program in composition and cultural rhetoric. I’m teaching a summer class. I’m vaguely trying to work through an idea about video games, trying to improve my programming literacy, and read for exams next summer. But I am, largely speaking, in coursework.

This brings me back to writing and that clogged feeling. One of my friends and colleagues described that coursework feels like being a sponge loaded up with water, and since you are not doing much non-reflective writing, you don’t have an outlet to squeeze out all this intellectual saturation.

I also think this feeling has a connection to another conversation I had–a few times, actually–about the “selfish” nature of grad school, especially when it is intensive and absorbing. Doing all of this learning feels a bit cut off. A professional writer has an audience, but in coursework, I’m not sure why I’m learning quite yet, what all this knowledge is supposed to lead to, what I’m supposed to do with it.

This seems to be one of the difficult things about knowledge production to me. In the past, I’ve generally looked at intelligence and what I would term intellectual productivity in an emergent, almost playful sense. That ideas come from playing with other ideas, thinking through them, talking through them, etc. I’m having a hard time transitioning to the “production” of knowledge, from learning as work in stead of play. Learning, even when it was difficult, has always been play to me, not “work.”

I suppose I’ve been dwelling on this “work” and “play” distinction lately, which I imagine is inevitable when researching play and games. I’m not sure what keeps sticking me to it, though.

I suppose it’s the question of why work matters. Why we work. Why we work hard, in particular. Many don’t have a choice–it’s work or die–but I think a lot of people do have some choice about work, or at least the illusion of choice, and the existential anguish involved with that (maybe false) choice. This is one issue. That sense of “am I doing what I love?”Or even, “Can I do what I love?”

But that’s not the only question. One has issues like “fullfilling work,” a fairly recent idea, or the odd tyranny of play that may happen when one is expected to know certain media and play becomes work. The difference between productive hobbies and wasting time. Production v. play. What it means to earn a “living” and not just “an earning.” When a passion becomes something else.

My timer is winding down, so I guess I’ll end in this messy set of contradictions. But I think this this particular fixation does point to larger things, or could. I’m just not quite sure yet.

Productivity?

On By BrettIn Personal, Philosophy, ThoughtsLeave a comment

As the years go on, I see the false idol of long hours. Long hours, when meaningfully deployed are great, but so often quantity takes the place of quality. I worked x hours, instead of getting x done. Or in its more haunting form, I still have time and work to do today, so I can’t rest.

I think of a distinction raised in Sogyal Rinpoche’s Tibetan Book of Living and Dying between what I call lazy laziness v. busy laziness. Lazy laziness refers to what we normally consider lazy: the archetypal the couch potato, the binging of Castle reruns, the downing of Atomic-Fire-Lazer-Charged chips. Busy laziness refers to the layering on of hours that ultimately distract us from more meaningful activities, simply exhausting us until we pick back up the next day to do the same thing, ad infinitum. Though I think we rarely fall in either extreme, that spectrum has followed me through the years.

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The Human Condition

On By BrettIn Media, People, Politics, rhetoric, society2 Comments

I’ve been carrying these ideas around for a while now and am still thinking through them. With Trump, Brexit, Orlando, anti-trans bathroom laws, and other issues cycling through the media–or at least my media–lately, I keep coming back to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, written in 1958 as a defense of philosophy’s role in “the active life” and a critique of its preference for “the contemplative life.”

Arendt opens the book discussing Sputnik. Being the first human-made object to leave the Earth, Sputnik represented, in the words of one reporter, the first “step from men’s imprisonment on Earth.” Arendt goes on to argue that science and technology have increasingly tried to make human life “artificial.” Extending lifespans, splitting the atom, in vitro fertilization, etc., for Arendt, “offer a rebellion against human existence as it has been given.”

I’m not as concerned with this “rebellion” and would side with others in the post-human view that technology and artifice have always been part of the human condition. Instead, what interests me more is Arendt’s next critique: “The trouble concerns the fact that the ‘truths’ of the modern scientific worldview, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought.” In other words, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We can do things, like a split an atom or raise an embryo in vitro, but can’t talk about it as a public.

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Bethena, Cracking open a nut

On By BrettIn Art, History, Thoughts4 Comments

I’ve been getting into Joplin lately, playing and listening. He’s know for “The Entertainer,” which my mom always calls “The Sting” after the movie of that name, and “The Maple Leaf Rag.” These are fun pieces, but he wrote a lot more. Many are similar, like “Binks Waltz,” as these were his primary money makers, but then one has “Bethena.”

Joplin published “Bethena” in 1905, shortly after his wife Freddie, of two months, died from pneumonia. Between the death and early 1905, we don’t know much about Joplin’s location and actions, but finances were tight. The piece also fell into obscurity for some time, and we don’t know how successful it was when Joplin was around. We also don’t know who Bethena was. Some speculate it was a nickname for Freddie. And the figure on the cover of the original cover is also a mystery, though she is often considered Freddie as well.

The song showed up again in Benjamin Button, with NPR doing a little write up, and it has garnered critical attention on its own. For one, it’s a beautiful piece. Wistful, simple, and ultimately affirming. Joplin uses that initial coda and shifting key changes to weave a powerful emotional journey.  His use of the coda, in particular, reminds me of Beethoven’s “Pathetique” Sonata’s first movement, grounding a roving piece in sad reflection. But it doesn’t have the drama of Beethoven, replacing it with lyricism. “Cantible,” say the directions, “like singing.”

It’s also rhythmically complex, mixing a baseline from classical waltz with the subtle syncopation found in cakewalk and rags, itself slightly altered. But the contrast is elegant, gently carrying the piece along, almost invisible.

I say all this for two reasons. One, I love finding these little gems–moving pieces that are not well known. And in this particular case, I find it sad that one of America’s best composers remains a bit obscure. I can easily YouTube Beethoven and Messiaen, finding loads of videos, but Joplin generally yields player pianos, ragtime enthusiasts with poor microphones, or still images with songs in the background. Not professional performances.

Second, I find the (inter)textuality of this music fascinating. For one, there’s the obscurity of the piece’s origins and its possible connection to Freddie’s death. Then, why did it disappear? How did it get rediscovered? Who is Bethena, if anyone? Why did Joplin write this? Was it to make money like most of his work, or was it like his failed opera, something more serious?

And the layering of classical waltz with cakewalk and rag also has a lot to it. The privileged, ritzy connotations of classical waltz rubbing elbows with the folk rhythms of plantation slaves doing cakewalk and player pianos grinding out rags.

And then the piece’s use in Benjamin Button, interlacing and helping to build a film in a completely different context.

Music is much like poetry, presenting a nut that may be beautiful on the surface but gets more beautiful and complex as one cracks it open. One listens to the melody and rhythms, the weaving tonalities and structures, the counterpoint and traditions, the forms and genres, themselves dancing, interlaced with stories and affect, and the piece transforms.

One of my poetry teachers once wrote that good prose is like good beer and good poetry is like good gin, more distilled and compact. Exceptions exist–Joyce and Wolfe have pretty ginny prose, I think–but the distinction has stuck with me. Only now, I’m not sure where music falls. Maybe wine. Taking the time to let the flavors waft over you, with little recognitions gathered in new ways. Each playing a slightly different experience, a slightly different piece of ephemeral craft.

Whatever the case, I’m glad I found this piece a few years ago and that it comes along still, at least now and then.