Discursive Game Design or: Game Design as Cultural Practice

Slide No. 1Game Design – 21st August 2019
Game Design (INFOB2GO)
Discursive Game Design
Or: Game Design as Cultural Practice
Stefan Werning
(Utrecht University, MCW)

Premise • Importance of alternative stories in serious
games
– E.g. with regard to sustainability or migration
• Contemporary issues due to a “crisis of the
imagination” (Bendor 2018)
– Inability to imagine sustainable futures leads to
apathy and lack of democratic legitimation
– ⇒ Enriching the “social imaginary” of ecological
futures
• Need for New (Eco-)Narratives (Donly 2017)
– “Complication, crisis, and resolution” as the
“dominant Western plot model”, which is
“intelligible only on the basis of conflict” (cf.
Campbell, Hero’s Journey)
– Cf. Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (class warfare and
fight against the environment)
• Also applies to commercial games
– E.g. games like Undertale or Stardew Valley
– Emotionally resonate with people by drawing on a
broader cultural context
Bendor, Roy. Interactive Media for Sustainability.
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Donly, Corinne. “Toward the Eco-Narrative:
Rethinking the Role of Conflict in Storytelling.”
Humanities 6, no. 2 (April 10, 2017).

Goals and Structure
• Situate game design in a larger cultural context
 Not ‘just’ a technical skill.
• Frame game design…
– a) … as cultural practice,
– b) … as play,
– c) … as persuasive communication,
– d) … as a research heuristic (Discursive Game Design).

Game Design as
Cultural Practice

Defining Cultural Practice/Techniques
• Cultural Techniques
(Kramer/McChesney 2003)
– “Strategies for dealing with symbolic
worlds”
– “Inextricably linked to corporeal routines”
• Game design functions as …
– Resistance
• Gezi Jam
– Identity politics and ’care of the self’
(Foucault)
• Caring for oneself/others
 Knowing oneself (Socratic ethics)
• Nicky Case’s Coming Out Simulator 2014
– Communication
• FIFA mod for Civilization V
– Art
• Bogost’s Simony
Kramer, Sybille, and Anita McChesney. “Writing,
Notational Iconicity, Calculus: On Writing as a Cultural
Technique.” MLN 118, no. 3 (2003): 518–37.

Game-Making as
“Social Comment”
• Comes with easier-to-use
and more accessible tools
• New York Defender or
Kaboom!
• Performative quality
– Acting out emotions rather than
mimetic representations
• Gradually refined procedural
rhetoric through imitation
and iteration
Thompson, Clive. “Dot-Columnist. Online Video Games Are
the Newest Form of Social Comment.” Slate, 2002.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2002/
08/dotcolumnist.html.

Socio-Cultural Context Matters
• Game design doesn‘t happen in a vacuum
• Train @ 1’09’’
• Playing History 2 - Slave Trade @ 29’’
Deterding, Sebastian. 2016. “The Mechanic Is Not the (Whole) Message: Procedural Rhetoric Meets Framing in Train & Playing History 2.” DiGRA/FDG
’16 - Abstract Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG 13 (2). http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/the-
mechanic-is-not-the-whole-message-procedural-rhetoric-meets-framing-in-train-playing-history-2/.

Designing From Personal Experience
• Game examples
– Satoshi Tajiri (Pokémon), bug collecting
– Shigeru Miyamoto (Zelda), exploring a
cave in his youth
• Works across cultural practices
– Virgilio Martínez: taking things
from one’s environment to
promote local/regional culture
–  Early game designers started by
‘taking (cultural) things from their
environment to turn into games’
• E.g. Nijmeegs Avontuur (1980s)
or Hollanditis (1985)
– Might come back to enrich the
positive performance of national
cultural identity

Symbolic vs. Naturalistic Gameplay
• Game design as cultural practice means
looking beyond naturalistic mechanics
• The symbolic repertoire of Asteroids
– Asteroids
• Amorphous threat, coming from multiple sides at once
• Create a constantly shifting topography
– Asteroid collisions
• Conflict, ‘clash’, repulsion
– Screen wrap
• Spatial loop, returning to the same place rather than
moving
• Frames the edges of the screen as ‘dangerous territory’
– Asteroids breaking down into smaller asteroids
• Problems ‘multiplying’
– Inadvertent (procedural) rhetoric
• E.g. black and white aesthetics  would make color stand
out disproportionately
• Remixing exercise
– E.g. game about a child in a divorce
– Same symbolic repertoire can afford an advergame or a
game about societal change

Game Design
As Play

Game Design as a
Metagame in Itself
• Improvisational theater as
metaphor
– #IDARB
• Remixing genres
– Each genre acts as meaningful constraint
(Bernard Suits) for the other
– E.g. Vanquish
• Variations on a theme
– Music as reference point
– E.g. Mario levels (Game Maker’s Toolkit)

Bricolage
• Making-do by recombining
available materials/concepts
– Means to goals (Mythological thinking)
 Goals to means (engineering)
• Tinkering
– E.g. ‘making do’ with a finite set of LEGO bricks
• Example: Twine
– Combine (click:) with (display:) to play layered sounds
– Store reference to YouTube videos with 1px
width/height in external passages to be displayed
– Use autostart and timecodes to start/end the sounds
Louridas, Panagiotis. “Design as Bricolage:
Anthropology Meets Design Thinking.” Design
Studies 20, no. 6 (November 1999): 517–35.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0142-694X(98)00044-1.

Playgiarism
• Example: Half-Life (Birdwell 1999)
– Recombining earlier set pieces
– “we set up a small group of people to take every
silly idea, every cool trick, everything interesting
that existed in any kind of working state somewhere
in the game and put them into a single prototype
level”
– “theory of ‘experiential density’”
• Can be conceptualized as playgiarism
(Raymond Federman)
– Copy and recombine/modify one’s own earlier
cultural production
– Introspective technique
• Rooted in the use of games to
defamiliarize and destabilize artistic
practice
– Surrealist games like Exquisite Corpse (played with
language or images)
Birdwell, Ken. “The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process For
Creating Half-Life.” Gamasutra. The Art & Business of
Making Games, 1999.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3408/the_c
abal_valves_design_process_.php.

Player/Designer Types
Bartle, Richard. “Virtual Worlds: Why People Play.” In Massively
Multiplayer Game Development Vol. 2(1), edited by Thor Alexander,
3–18. Hingham, MA: Charles River Media, 2005.
• Killers
– Mostly commercial
‘metagame’
• Achievers
– Trying to perfect one’s craft,
e.g. making the ‘best’ faux-
retro Sonic game
• Explorers
– E.g. genre blending like ROM
Check Fail!
• Socializers
– Game jams

Game Design as
Persuasive
Communication

Basic Vocabulary
• a) Rhetorical Orientation
– Judicial (Past)
– Epideictic (Present)
• Deixis: display or demonstration
– Deliberative (Future)
• b) Rhetorical modes
– Ethos
• Authoritative argument
– Pathos
• Affective argument
– Logos
• Rational argument
– Kairos
• Situational argument
• c) (De-)Legitimation Strategies
– E.g. (van Leeuwen 2007)
– Framing (after Goffman)
• E.g. (Kitzinger 2007)
Kitzinger, J. (2007). Framing and frame analysis. In
E. Devereux (Ed.), Media Studies: Key Issues and
Debates (pp. 134–161). London: SAGE Publications.
Leeuwen, Theo Van. 2007. “Legitimation in
Discourse and Communication.” Discourse &
Communication 1 (1). Sage Publications: Thousand
Oaks, CA: 91–112.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481307071986.

Proceduralist readings
and procedural rhetoric • Procedural rhetoric
– “Encoding ideas as processes”
– “Communit[ies] of practice“
(Bogost/Lave/Wenger)
• A) Basic elements (“the code”)
– Entities
– Meters (“Western spatial metaphors”)
– Goals
– Rules/Mechanics
– Audiovisual design choices
• B) Interpreted components
– Dynamics (cf. MDA framework)
• “emergent behavior of the system”  i.e. loops
• Afforded user behavior (ideal player)
– Themes
• Thematic considerations
• Aesthetics
• Cultural context
• C) Meaning derivations
– Constructed: top-down, starting with hypothesis
– Discovered: bottom-up, starting with detail
observations
– Differentiate ‘meanings’ by labeling and linking
findings
Treanor, M., Schweizer, B., & Bogost, I. (2011). Proceduralist
Readings: How to find meaning in games with graphical
logics. In FDG ’11: Proceedings of the 6th International
Conference on Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 115–122).
New York, New York, USA, New York, USA: ACM Press.

From Persuasive Games to Game
Design as Persuasive Communication
• Diachronic procedural rhetoric
– E.g. across a game series or mods altering
procedural of the original game
– Rhetoric through design changes rather
than any given set of procedures
– E.g. challenging or reaffirming existing
procedures over time
• (Re-)Framing the role of religion in
cultural history from Civ IV to Civ VI
– Inherently part of a competition between
civilizations
• Cf. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations (1996)
– Information network
– Faith as ‘currency’ to purchase
units/upgrades
– Civ VI
• First religion-based winning condition
• Religious combat, extended in Fall 2017
update (incl. healing, flanking etc.)
• Inadvertent rhetoric: “missionary spam”
Werning, S. (2018) ‘Modding as a strategy to (de-)legitimize
representations of religion in the Civilization franchise’, in
Ross, A. S. and Rivers, D. J. (eds) Participatory Digital Cultures
and Contemporary Discourses of (De)Legitimization. New York
& London: Routledge, pp. 307–325.

Problem: Genres/Mechanics
as Cognitive Constraints
• Game genres and mechanics as
cognitive schemas
– Institutionalized over time, e.g. by
reusing/refining existing code
• Problem:
Schemas can constrain our capacity
for critical expression and social
imaginaries
– Also applies to textual/visual communication!
• Some fit better than others
– ‘Healing gun’ in Endless Ocean
• “The Pulsar is a device that shoots
electromagnetic pulses that can heal sick or
injured animals”
– Save the Rhino by Auroch Digital

Problem: Genres/Mechanics
as Cognitive Constraints
• Important to choose suitable
genre frameworks or iconic
games
– ‘Protection’: tower defense, capture the
flag, chess
– ‘Sustainability’: worker/engine placement
• Subverting genre markers can
also foster critical thinking
– Defamiliarization
– New York Defender ( Missile Command)

Game Design as
Research Heuristic

Caveats of Existing
Applied Games
Sicart, Miguel. “Loops and Metagames: Understanding Game
Design Structures.” In Proceedings of the 10th International
Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2015).
Pacific Grove, CA, USA, 2015.
http://www.fdg2015.org/papers/fdg2015_paper_22.pdf.
• Require long-term engagement
– Formation of “metagames” over time (Sicart
2015)
– Required for ‘thinking through’ games rather
than about games
• Example: Monopoly ⇔ Eco-Monopoly
– Competition to create “custom-designed
versions of Monopoly centering around the
architecturally-related forces that can shape
contemporary urbanity”
• Procedural rhetoric is inevitably
incomplete
– Only partially compatible with players’
expectations as a model
– In-game solutions like adaptive gameplay and
personalization cannot fully accommodate this

Practice-Based
Game Research • Video games as “executable
thought experiments” (Schulzke)
– “Challenge a theory by identifying a difficult
case that it cannot answer”
• E.g. Descartes’ ‘Evil Genius/Demon’
– Example: Rust randomly assigning gender
and ethnicity to its players
• “Virtual worlds” as
“philosophical artifacts”
(Gualeni)
– Defamiliarization
– Introspective (cf. Federman 1977 on
playgiarism)
– Performative?
“Grant[s] the recipient of a philosophical
notion or argument direct experiential
engagement with the notions and points of
view that it mediates” (9)
Schulzke, Marcus. 2014. “Simulating Philosophy:
Interpreting Video Games as Executable Thought
Experiments.” Philosophy and Technology 27 (2): 251–65.
Gualeni, Stefano. 2016. “Self-Reflexive Videogames:
Observations and Corollaries on Virtual Worlds as
Philosophical Artifacts.” GAME. The Italian Journal of Game
Studies 5 (1). https://www.gamejournal.it/gualeni-self-
reflexive-videogames/.

Practice-Based
Game Research • Zavala & Odendaal (2018)
advocate “codifying theory into
game mechanics”
• “Emergence of critical play [as
defined by Mary Flanagan] did
not seem to occur naturally”
– Players struggled with the randomness of in-
game events
– Not unexpected, as the effect of ‘applied’
games can differ considerably per player
– Committing to one final game prevent both
the authors and players (as potential co-
designers) from exploring what constrains
the potential for critical play and how it
could be unlocked differently.
Zavala, Karla, and Adriaan Odendaal. “Black Boxes out
of Cardboard: Algorithmic Literacy through Critical
Board Game Design.” Analogue Game Studies 5, no. 4
(2018). http://analoggamestudies.org/2018/12/black-
boxes-out-of-cardboard-algorithmic-literacy-through-
critical-board-game-design/.

Practice-Based
Game Research
• Game-making as scholarly practice
– “Immersive affect” of technologies like VR can be “at
the expense of the kinds of careful, reflective
engagement associated with critical scholarship”
– “Convenient size to share via email for collaborative
projects”
– “Challenge often-exclusive scholarly methods and
communication strategies”
• Twine
– “Twine creations occupy a liminal space between
multiple media forms and the expectations of gaming,
literary, and filmic cultures of production and
consumption”
– “Constellating ideas, and anticipating narrative
networks and multiple pathways through such ideas”
– “Spatialize[s] a text, recreating a textual source into
an inhabitable and navigable location”
 Offers a different episteme for (academic) texts!
– “Presentation tool that augments other forms of
scholarly communication”
Wilson, Rebecca, and Jon Saklofske. “Playful Lenses:
Using Twine to Facilitate Open Social Scholarship
through Game-Based Inquiry, Research, and Scholarly
Communication.” Knowledge Creation, Dissemination,
and Preservation Studies 3, no. 1 (February 27, 2019).
https://doi.org/10.5334/kula.11.

Considering Methodologies
Beyond Games
• Practice-based game research
usually focuses on one game
 Adapt methods from other
disciplines
• The ‘Kuleshov Experiments’
(1910s/20s)
• Contemporary re-creations
– Knowledge creation occurs between
the designs, not in one of them
– Predicated on iteration and remixing
as design heuristics

Defining Discursive
Game Design • Premise:
Game-making as an ongoing critical
conversation
– Every prototype is but one ‘utterance’
⇔ Can be quoted, reframed and challenged
through redesign
– “Discursive games” (Voorhees 2012)
– “Discursive design” (Tharp & Tharp 2018)
• Evoking emotions rather than affording
convenience/immersion
• Three characteristics
– 1) Embrace multiplicity and unfinishedness as
‘productive irritations’
– 2) Game co-creation as playful practice
(Bricolage, experimenting with perspectives)
– 3) Autoethnographic perspective
(Retrace the contours of the design-as-discourse)
Voorhees, Gerald. “Discursive Games and Gamic
Discourses.” Communication +1 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–21.
Tharp, Bruce M., and Stephanie M. Tharp. Discursive
Design. Critical, Speculative, and Alternative Things.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018.
Glas, René, Jasper van Vught, and Stefan Werning.
“‘Thinking Through’ Games in the Classroom - Using
Discursive Game Design to Play and Engage with
Historical Datasets.” ToDiGRA, 2020, in production.
https://medium.com/@kaywerlyn/discursive-
design-why-provoking-emotions-are-
important-in-design-8754ca13d889

Game-Making as Discourse: Ecomodding
• Eco-Modding as a form of public
discourse
– Can constitute a “cultural public sphere”
(Burgess et al. 2006)
– Might allow for performing “cultural
citizenship”
• Addressing the „crisis of imagination“
(Bendor 2018)
• Characteristics
– Unusually productive as a platform for
online discussion (Owens 2011, 489-90)
• “self-reflection, courtesy and a constructive
disposition”
– Agenda setting
• Cf. list of existing eco-mods and their themes
– ‘Quoting’ and ‘re-framing’
Vita, J. (2014). Users as Co-creators: Player-centric Game Design.
User Experience Magazine, 14(1).
Retrieved from http://uxpamagazine.org/users-as-co-creators/

Game-Making as Discourse:
Modding Eco-Mods
● Playful Mapping as eco-critical
communication
○ Contributes to the role of fiction and
worldbuilding in “climate change imaginaries”
(Whiteley et al. 2016)
○ “Video games can make players participants in
the flawed worlds and allow them to become
part of the underlying logic of how these
worlds are created and sustained” (Schulzke
2014)
● Placing environment tiles and natural
resources
○ E.g. based on contemporary projections like
https://wad.jrc.ec.europa.eu/aridityprojections
○ Blends rhetoric and gameplay requirements
(e.g. severely limiting specific resources)
LaPensée, Elizabeth. “Indigenous Board Game Design in The
Gift of Food.” Analogue Game Studies 3, no. 2 (2016).
http://analoggamestudies.org/2016/03/indigenous-board-
game-design-in-the-gift-of-food/.

Game-Making as Discourse:
Indigenous Board Games
LaPensée, Elizabeth. “Indigenous Board Game Design in The
Gift of Food.” Analogue Game Studies 3, no. 2 (2016).
http://analoggamestudies.org/2016/03/indigenous-board-
game-design-in-the-gift-of-food/.
• Performativity of climate change
research
– Offers “pathways for passing on Indigenous
ways of knowing, as learning and reinforcing
community teachings is built into the game’s
mechanics”
• Addresses the need for
alternative stories (Donly/Bendor)
– “If you look on a board game shelf, how many
games will you see with actions based on
collaboration, stewardship, generosity, and
gratitude? Most likely, you’ll find mechanics
like attacking, stealing, and backstabbing.”

Three Angles of Discursive Game Design
• Epistemological Angle
– How does game-making change the way we think about a given topic?
• Societal Impact Angle
– How does game-making allow for involving and empowering external audiences?
• Sociotechnical Angle
– How does game-making affect the way we collaborate with others on a given topic?)

Epistemic Implications:
Terminology
● What is Epistemology (and why does it
matter?)
○ “Theory of knowledge, especially with regard to
its methods, validity, and scope, and the
distinction between justified belief and opinion”
○ “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a
hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail”
(‘Maslow’s hammer’, after Abraham Kaplan’s
“law of the instrument”)
■ E.g. epistemologies of visual evidence in data
visualization
● Example: Environments in Eco-Games
○ a) Background/Frame (The Last of Us)
○ b) Obstacle/Source of danger (Limbo)
○ c) Resource (Minecraft)
○ d) ‘Character’ (Flower)
⇒ Governs what we ‘want to know’ about the environment
Shaffer, David W. “Epistemic Frames for
Epistemic Games.” Computers and Education
46, no. 3 (April 1, 2006): 223–34.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2005.11.00
3.

Persistent Games as Social Laboratories
● Games as “laboratory” settings for
economic and social processes
(Edward Castronova)
○ Everquest as “the world’s first truly egalitarian polity”
○ Sale of female avatars 10% smaller than for male
○ Gaming Open Market as an exchange bureau for trading
virtual currencies “like travellers at an airport”
● Experimenting with alternative
economic ‘epistemes’
○ Players creating their own economy in Asheron’s Call
(Ludgate 2010)
○ Makeshift currencies
○ Using external forums but also designating in-game
places as marketplaces; repurposes the /shout macro
Ludgate, Simon. “Virtual Economic Theory: How
MMOs Really Work.” Gamasutra. The Art &
Business of Making Games, 2010.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1345
76/virtual_economic_theory_how_mmos_.php
?print=1.
Lawson, Larry L, and Catherine L Lawson. “Video
Game-Based Methodology for Business
Research.” Simulation & Gaming 41, no. 3
(2010): 360–73.

Games as Exploratory Data Practices
● Using game co-creation to promote
creative data literacy (D’Ignazio)
○ Helps define data literacy as an elusive
concept (without prioritizing any one
episteme)
● Changing the game alters the
epistemology of the data at hand
○ Sample dataset scraped from the Google Play
Store
○ Game prototypes explore the given store
categories or the role of metrics (rating,
review count)
● The playing card as “platform” (Altice
2014)
○ Material affordances (planar, uniform,
ordinal, spatial, textural)
Altice, Nathan. “The Playing Card Platform.”
Analogue Game Studies 4, no. 2 (2014).
http://analoggamestudies.org/2014/11/the-playing-
card-platform/.

Implications for Societal Impact :
Fields of View
● Cf. game design as cultural practice
● Feedback loop
○ PolicyLab
(“undertake research at the intersection of art, social
sciences, and technology to design games and
simulations”)
○ School of Policy
(“train policymakers and civil society groups in the
use of these tools”)
○ Policy in Play
(“design artefacts such as graphic novels and games
to make policy more accessible”)
● Rubbish
○ Simulates waste management in a municipal
context
○ Influenced by commercial games like Pandemic
○ Inherently collaborative
⇒ Cf. Donly on eco-narratives and games being
predicated on conflict

Implications for Societal Impact :
Playing with National Game Histories
● Harnessing national game archives
as alternative repositories for
transnational identity formation
● Everyday performance of national
culture in popular media (Edensor
2002)
● Putting “national gaming cultures”
(Wolf/Iwatani 2015) in a
transnational context
○ Numerous individual collections
● Using game co-creation to minimize
historiographical bias
Edensor, Tim. National Identity, Popular Culture
and Everyday Life. London & New York:
Bloomsbury, 2002.
Wolf, Mark J. P., and Toru Iwatani, eds. Video
Games Around the World. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2015.

Sociotechnical Implications:
Terminology
● Game prototypes as “actor-networks”
○ Socio-technical constellations
○ Agency and rhetoric of technical objects
 Affordances
● Game prototypes as “boundary
objects” (Leigh Star)
○ Do not require consensus to facilitate
collaboration
○ “Interpretive flexibility” ⇔ material
constraints
○ E.g. maps
● Example: Super Mario Bros. planning
sheet
○ Actor-network aspects
○ Characteristics as boundary object
Edensor, Tim. National Identity, Popular Culture
and Everyday Life. London & New York:
Bloomsbury, 2002.
Wolf, Mark J. P., and Toru Iwatani, eds. Video
Games Around the World. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2015.

Games as Interdisciplinary Facilitators
● Games allow for ‘identifying and
communicating diverging assumptions
among stakeholders’
● Rationalizing player mentalities and
motivations is essential to play
effectively
○ Cf. Norton Long’s view on “The Local
Community as an Ecology of Games” (1958)
to explain the actions of players in ‘multiple
games’
● Game co-creation allows for expressing
one’s viewpoint through procedural
rhetoric
● Example: Modifying the Checkered
Game of Life (1861)
Long, Norton E. “The Local Community as
an Ecology of Games.” American Journal of
Sociology 64, no. 3 (1958): 251–61.

• Co-creating epistemic games to facilitate
stakeholder understanding on drug-
related threats to health and public
order
• Sample game based on CIA-developed
Collection Deck
• Workflow using Google Sheets,
Nandeck/Squib and Tabletop Simulator
• Hybrid format beyond digital or
analogue
Playing with Stakeholders

• ‘Built-in’ procedural rhetoric
– Conflates physical and social proximity
– Frames anti-vaxxers as tangible ‘obstacle’
– Minimizing ‘losses’ rather than all-out victory
• Co-creation as rhetoric to reflect
more diverse viewpoints
– A) Give individual nodes randomized names and
short biographies
• Critiques the systemic view on epidemics as
‘managerial’ and potentially disaffected
– B) Anti-vaxxers can ‘spread’ to nearby nodes
• Acknowledges the spreadability of conspiracy
theories
• Several increases the urgency of anti-vaxxers
– C) Many small levels with increasing difficulty
• Emphasizes the historical dimension of the issue
• Notion of ‘escalation’ becomes less urgent but more
‘organic’
Games as Interdisciplinary Facilitators: Vax

Discursive Game Design or: Game Design as Cultural Practice

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