Lecture "An Introduction to Game Research" by Mirjam P Eladhari. Given in 2010 as part of the course International Game Production Studies I at Gotland University in Sweden.

1. Introduction to Game Research 2010 Lecture in the course International Game Production Studies I Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari Gotland University, Sweden

3. A new field?

4. The growth of the game research field

5. Approaches

7. Basic research Basic research or fundamental research (sometimes pure research) is research carried out to increase understanding of fundamental principles. Many times the end results have no direct or immediate commercial benefits: basic research can be thought of as arising out of curiosity..

8. Applied research the search for knowledge or as any systematic investigation to establish facts. The primary purpose for applied research (as opposed to basic research) is discovering, interpreting, and the development of methods and systems for the advancement of human knowledge on a wide variety of scientific matters of our world and the universe.

9. The quest for new knowledge Sharing to advance field Validity - repeatability

10. New? Common to argue that games are a new field. Both as art form and as industry. This is FALSE. Not true. != The oldest aretefacts of games are older than the first written stories. The industry isn’t that young anymore. Game research as a field however, is not very old. (old method though in military tradition)

11. New? Common to argue that games are a new field. Both as art form and as industry. This is FALSE. Not true. != The oldest aretefacts of games are older than the first written stories. The industryisn’t that younganymore. Game research as a fieldhowever, is not veryold. (oldmethodthough in military tradition)

12. Earliest game and literary work Epic of Gilgamesh 2100 BC Senet 3500 BC Senet game, the Brooklyn Museum, New York City. Crypt of AmenhotepIII in Egypt Clay tablet with the Epic of Gilgamesh (dated to ca 700 BC)

13. Royal game of Ur 3300 BC Royal game of Ur, British Museum. Found in The Royal Tomb of Ur, old Mesopotamia,(Irak)

14. New? Common to argue that games are a new field. Both as art form and as industry. This is FALSE. Not true. != The oldest aretefacts of games are older than the first written stories. The industryisn’t that younganymore. Game research as a fieldhowever, is not veryold. (oldmethodthough in military tradition)

15. Supressed slide (PH’08)

16. From Richard Dansky’s talk at PH’08

17. New? Common to argue that games are a new field. Both as art form and as industry. This is FALSE. Not true. != The oldest artefacts of games are older than the first written stories. The industry isn’t that young anymore. Game research as a field however, is not very old. (old method though in military tradition)

18. Kriegsspiel (1812) Early ’serious game’ Kriegsspiel, from the German word for wargame, was a system used for training officers in the Prussian army. The first set of rules was created in 1812[1] and named Instructions for the Representation of Tactical Maneuvers under the Guise of a Wargame. It was originally produced and developed further by Lieutenant Georg Leopold von Reiswitz and his son Georg Heinrich Rudolf von Reiswitz of the Prussian Army.[1] Taktischer Kriegsspielapparat, von Domänen- und Kriegsrat Georg Leopold Baron von Reiswitz für Friedrich Wihelm III entworfen und 1812 angefertigt. Siftung Preußischer Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg (Foto Roman März, Berlin). http://www.boardgamestudies.info/pdf/issue3/BGS3Hilgers.pdf

19. Taktischer Kriegsspielapparat, von Domänen- und Kriegsrat Georg Leopold Baron von Reiswitzfür Friedrich Wihelm III entworfen und 1812 angefertigt. SiftungPreußischer Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg (Foto Roman März, Berlin) http://www.boardgamestudies.info/pdf/issue3/BGS3Hilgers.pdf

20. SituatingGame research

21. Pre-history: Anthropology and sociology (early study on native americans’ games, Callios, Huizinga) Study of digital games, in the beginning: Stigma Fields: CS (Hci and AI), Ethnology, Drama = fields that already had tools possible to tweak towards games. Then: oh, money! (important trigger: study that showed that game industry exceeded Hollywood box-office income) Then: “serious” games For some: a necessary rhetoric to keep going For others: a sudden new opportunity And for some: genuine interest The growth of the GR field (1)

22. The growth of the GR field (2) Early fields: Narrative (Film, literary studies, dramaturgy) – Study of the dramaturgy in existing games. HCI (Human Computer Interaction). Study of interaction between player(s) and game Anthropology and sociology – Study of players in MUDs and live RP settings These fields already had tools that ‘fitted’ research in games. (Read more: Chapter 6 in Designing Virtual Worlds, Bartle, 2003, New Riders)

23. The growth of the GR field (3) COSIGN 2001, the first international conference on Computational Semiotics for Games and New Media,. Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference 2002: Tampere, Finland (Digra was formed) Level Up | Gamesconference 2003, Utrecht, Netherlands A research community was born

24. Game researcher as the constant ’other’ In academia: ”Games are not serious. They don’t cure cancers. And its popular cultur. Hardly worthy of interest” In industry: ”Game studies... They just waffle. Tell us how to do things when they don’t know the reality of development”. Negative patterns. ...Even in the subfield of AI there are polarities when people talk about ’game AI’ (”bah, just pathfinding and random seeds”) and ’academic AI’ (”bah, too heavy processing, useless if written in lisp, omg, i don’t need Deep Blue for this”.) But that’s only on the surface level! When you meet your peers you recognise them, no matter if they are in the industry, in research or hobbyists. That’s when you get down to buisness.

25. Now, annual and bi-annual conferences are organised International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE) International Conference on Entertainment Computing (ICEC) Future Play SIGGRAPH Games Focus, SIGGRAPH Sandbox Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Foundations for Digital Games (FDG)

26. Approaches Social science approach Studying the effects of games on peopleWhat do games do to people?E.g.: Learning, effects of violence in gamesHow do people create and negotiate a game? Humanities approach Studying the meaning and context of gamesWhat meanings are made through game use?Studying games as artifacts in and of themselvesE.g.: Affordances of the medium, critical analysis, rhetoric Technological approach (Industry and engineering approach) Understanding the design and development of games E.g.: How to make better games Games as drivers of technological innovations E.g.: Graphics, AI, networking, etc.

27. Example, Social Sciences tradition Study people (players) Members of different types of guilds interviewed.Interviews with real-life leaders in different types of organisations. Big difference is that in a game the guild leader doesn’t have to report to anyone else, such as stockholders. Interviewed 6 leaders, but the useful ones in terms of similarity was the air-force and a student radio. Leadership Style in World of Warcraft Raid Guilds, Prax, NordicDigra 2010

28. Approaches Social science approach Studying the effects of games on peopleWhat do games do to people?E.g.: Learning, effects of violence in gamesHow do people create and negotiate a game? Humanities approach Studying the meaning and context of gamesWhat meanings are made through game use?Studying games as artifacts in and of themselvesE.g.: Affordances of the medium, critical analysis, rhetoric Technological approach (Industry and engineering approach) Understanding the design and development of games E.g.: How to make better games Games as drivers of technological innovations E.g.: Graphics, AI, networking, etc.

29. Example, Humanistic tradition Study existing games to get better understanding Conclusion This paper explored three ways in which games relate to the human condition and suggested three devices for the purposeful design of games that teach us something about ourselves. Device I “Fictional Alignment” focused on expanding the emotional palette of games by aligning game structure and fictional theme. That way the affective strength of game emotions would carry the fiction, while the context provided by the fiction would alter the meaning of game emotions. Device II “Procedurality” referred to games’ potential to make statements about how things work by representing processes with processes. Procedural expression is a terrific tool to enhance our understanding of the social, mental and psychological processes that underlie our believes, behaviors and relationships towards the world around us. However, [...] Mechanisms of the Soul – Tackling the Human Condition in Videogames, Doris Rusch, DIGRA 2009

30. Approaches Social science approach Studying the effects of games on peopleWhat do games do to people?E.g.: Learning, effects of violence in gamesHow do people create and negotiate a game? Humanities approach Studying the meaning and context of gamesWhat meanings are made through game use?Studying games as artifacts in and of themselvesE.g.: Affordances of the medium, critical analysis, rhetoric Technological approach (Industry and engineering approach) Understanding the design and development of games E.g.: How to make better games Games as drivers of technological innovations E.g.: Graphics, AI, networking, etc.

31. Example, Technological tradition Building something new 'Multiparty Multimodal Dialogue Architecture withRealtimeTurntaking‘ Kristinn R. Thórisson, Ólafur Gíslason, Gudny Jonsdottir, Hrafn Th. Thórisson IVA 2010

32. A bit on method cross pollination Social Sciences (sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc) In social sciences games are treated like any other field – an anthropologist may go to Second Life just as well as to a suburban area of New York to study aspects of human behaviour. In AI, especially modelling if virtual agents and virtual environments theories from social sciences is used when modelling and building. In testing, HCI and other fields use methods for experiments developed in psychology (often social psychology) Cultural studies (Literary studies, film studies, dramaturgy, performance studies etc. Each field has their theorists, and share many theories. All about studying an already existing artefact or a type of artefact by studying different instantiations. Goal: to achieve greater understanding by using theories and other patterns of understanding as tools. Also, to see if current theories are enough to understand. If not: make new theories, frameworks, models. Technology (computing science with subfields) Bordering fields: Cognitive science, HCI, interaction studies.

33. Recap Social Science tradition: Study the human subject (the player) Cultural studies: Study the cultural artefact (the game) Technological tradition: Build something new; (a better way of doing something existing(faster, more accurate), or an innovation – partial or completely new) Missing: Art. Hardly represented at all. Direct Theory could be a promising approach to the field.

34. Recap Social Science tradition: Study the human subject (the player) Cultural studies: Study the cultural artefact (the game) Technological tradition: Build something new; (a better way of doing something existing(faster, more accurate), or an innovation – partial or completely new) Missing: Art. Hardly represented at all. Direct Theory could be a promising approach to the field.

35. Game Design as a research area Historic debate. Common opinion that it is best to integrate game research as a subfield in already existing fields. Our stance: Games and Game design is a field of its own, that can use methods from other fields, as well as develop specific methods for games when necessary.

36. What this means for you. Will you solve a problem? Which one? Will you ask/explore a question? Which one? Now, how to best find the answers: Will you study or build? If you study; what to study the actual game or, players who play the game? If you build – what type of innovation? A better way of doing something? A new way of doing something? If you build, how will you know if it is new? (:thorough review of field) If you build, how will you know if it is better? Better how? (test it.)

37. Example: Study players Social Sciences tradition You are intrigued by how people cooperate in groups in MMOs. You study the field: Look at other writings on groupings in MMO’sWhen you play, you pay close attention to how people behaveYou read up on group dynamics in psychology, and other relavant literature You sharpen your research question or thesis. You pick your field (what MMO, what types of players, W1st or general etc) You design your own study. This can be done in many different ways. Perhaps you consider: Creating a specific scenario that you enact (ie you try to control the experiment. For example, to run the same dungeon over and over again with different or same patterns. You work out a way to deal with the ethics – your participants need to know they are part of an experiment. Making deep iterviews with a small number of players. You wonder if a small sample of players will say something about *general* behaviors, so when you have some theories you make a survey and get a massive amount of players to answer your questions. Asking the developers for logs of RT data that you then can build filters for, in order to pull out potential behavioral patterns. You find it difficult to find the right persons who can grant you access to the data, but finally you succeed and get cracking on your data. You analyse your data. Perhaps the results wasn’t what you expected, and that makes it even more interesting. Your write up your results.

38. Example. Study artefacts. Humanities tradition You want to know how different type of narrative elements are used in game worlds that has the same mythos, but are of different genres. Build or study? (How much time do I have?) Find object of study. WoW – as MMO, as board game, as novels and as pen&paper RPG. How study it? What parts to study? What theories can be useful as tools when I study it? (Be prepared to ditch theories if they don’t work – the question and the object of study must take precedence) Study it. Be prepared to reformulate your thesis. When you have studied it and analysed it, do you see better ways of doing it? (given that you are the only one who has studied this particular thing in your particular way, what you think will be interesting to others.) And: any news on Life, Universe and Everything?

39. Example: Build New You want to explore ways of using EEG feedback as part of a game design. You check out different EEG devices, and decide upon using one of them. (or several if you have person-hours for it) You check what others have done with game design and EEG. (You don’t want to repeat mistakes. You don’t want to spend time researching what is already known) You make an experimental game design using EEG input. (*This* is your theory/question/thesis – you propose a new way) You implement the game. You design a test for your game that can answer your questions using your game. You test. (Quantitative and/or Qualitative methods) You analyse and reflect. (How did it work? What can others use, what should others avoid?) You share your results, helping others with similar interests. Engineering/ industry tradition

40. Links Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_studies) DiGRA' digital library of game studies conference papers (http://www.digra.org/dl) More starting points at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_studies#External_links

41. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_simulation (Simulation and Gaming listed as one of the journals)

42. Game Studies Journal The International Journal of Computer Game Research Our Mission - To explore the rich cultural genre of games; to give scholars a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories; to provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussions on games and gaming. Game Studies is a crossdisciplinary journal dedicated to games research, web-published several times a year at www.gamestudies.org. Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games, but any previously unpublished article focused on games and gaming is welcome. Proposed articles should be jargon-free, and should attempt to shed new light on games, rather than simply use games as metaphor or illustration of some other theory or phenomenon. http://gamestudies.org

43. Game Research and Industry GDC Top Ten – yearly picks. Project Horseshoe – aim: solving the toughest game design problems

44. Examples of researchTechnology tradition

45. Façade (2005) Façade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative – an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama. […] interactive character behavior and drama-managed plot. You play the character of a longtime friend of Grace and Trip, an attractive and materially successful couple in their early thirties. During an evening get-together at their apartment that quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict dissolution of Grace and Trip’s marriage. http://www.interactivestory.net/

46. A Behavior Language (ABL) A behavior language is a reactive planning language, based on the Oz Project language Hap, designed specifically for authoring believable agents-characters that express rich personality, and that, in this case, play roles in an interactive story called Facade. A Behavior Language for Story-based Believable Agents, Intelligent Systems, IEEE, by Mateas, Stern (July/Aug 2002)

49. Alice and Kev, http://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/alice-and-kev/

50. Alice and Kev, http://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/alice-and-kev/

51. Thank you for listening