This essay is on the competing roles of desire and destiny within literature, and the ways in which they could operate in electonic literature. Desire is a phenomenon experienced by the reader of a text, who wishes something to happen within the context of the story, or simply wishes to find out what happens next. The act of reading may be seen from both the light of desire and destiny, where the reader desires to know what happens next, but the destiny of the narrative is fixed and unchangeable. The question of desire and destiny is about consequence and control. Destiny controls outcomes and thwarts the consequence of desire.

It should be noted that this discussion makes the most sense when applied to classical texts. Works of modern literature and media are often interested in convoluting the desire and destiny, even when they operate by conventional narrative forms. Modern texts can be interwoven and impenetrable as destined narratives, but require instead the reader to take an active role in experience and interpretation.

The act of reading is unidirectional. If the reader wishes the narrative to take a different direction than the one it has taken, she is powerless to effect such a change. The reader can stop reading, or watching, or listening, but cannot undo the course that the narrative has taken. The reader has control over what is consumed, but not the text or its chronology. Because the text is already written, it is destined.

Davenport poses the question of how to reincorporate desire into narrative. Were such a thing possible, it would raise complex questions and cause implications in how to think of such narratives. Davenport argues that responsive narrative is a social need, and requires thinking creatively of narrative time.

The creation of narrative, the act of telling is motivated by desire, which effects a communication of the writer’s values and beliefs. The author expresses desire by creation of a world, a redescription of the world of the author. “The act of telling incorporates the desire to be heard. In shaping the world, the situation, the characters, and the action, an author inevitably incorporates her own set of bounded “life” values which are structurally embedded in the social contract that conjoins the artist, her community, and the economis of the act of making.”

The process of writing is conveyed as a simulation. The author imagines and describes a world, and the author creates the story by asking “what happens next.” The reader too is motivated by this desire in the experience of reading. Through the process of writing, the author reveals more of the world and conforms to the rules of the story world. These rules are closely tied to the cultural world of the author. Davenport compares how Greek tragedy, Shakespearean plays, and the 19th century novel each reflect the value systems of those eras.

Stories are understood as existing in two kinds of time. One is the time of the story world, which is composed of meaningful events and moments, and the second is the time experienced by the reader. The time of the story world may shift in one direction or another, it may fold in on itself, and it may expand and compress. Control over the story world, whether by the author or through some interaction of the reader’s, must take place and operate within the time of the story world.

In terms of the kinds of ways that users might be able to effect story worlds, Davenport offers two potential means for doing so. The first is the collection-based model, where users collect story elements and assemble them into meaningful sequences. In order to effect agency over the story worlds, readers can inject new potential narrative items. The software itself may take an active role in assembling these and returning information to the user. The second model is aimed toward multiplayer online games, which are highly authored and do not possess generative power. Davenport suggests a means for using commonsense reasoning to dynamically create new narrative segments for the players.

I believe that Davenport’s posed solutions to responsive narrative in story worlds is feasible, but there would necessarily be many forms for their potential implementation. She does not suggest a simulation based approach to effecting game worlds, but does describe narrative authorship as operating in a distinctly simulation oriented manner. This approach is dramatically different from, say, Scott Turner’s approach to story generation.

Hofer’s book is about the golden age of board games, which was from the 1840s to the 1920s. The games reflect the values, beliefs, and aspirations in the American cultural landscape at that time.

This is relevant for considering in the case of 1) gender (many game players were girls), and 2) the correlation of games to ideologies/cultural meaning systems. In contrast to how video games are percieved now, board games were seen as positive, educational, important instilling moral values, and occupied a center within family life. Games were tied into moral value systems, and operationalized the cultural values of the time.

The golden age of board games emerged partly due to the urban shift in the mid 1800s, and indicates a redefining of the space of the home. Board games were not generally popular until urbanization, as agrarian life did not lend itself to leisure time. The emergence of games reinforced the focus of the home as the center of life. The games also conincide with the loosening moral restrictions around the idea of dice and randomness.

The majority of games are not skill based, but generally pure chance, eg, racetrack games, a la game of the goose (and also Orlando Furioso, though this is much earlier). Gradually skill became more significant. Chance based racetrack games are indicative of victorian era, but more modern ones came to have more complex rules and require skills, both in terms of dexterity or strategy. Racetrack games indicated races along several senses of progress, which could be virtuous lives, economic progress, or travel and exploration.

The role of games gradually changed from moral instruction to success, particularly in terms of rising in both wealth and status. Earlier games held Christian themes, of leading a virtuous life and then being rewarded in heaven, to gradually secularizing the games by rewarding material accomplishments, and then focusing on the material entirely.

Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins: Chess For Girls? Feminism and Computer Games

The subject of this book is the girl games movement. The authors open by comparing the topic to a Saturday Night Live skit from December 6, 1997, “Chess for Girls”. The skit parodies girls’ disinterest  in chess, and poses a way to liven it up by making the pieces doll like, and having them prance around with the knights, which are ponies. The parody is important because it parallels the subjects of the girl games movement. Posing serious suggestions to the parody, the authors pose three ways of looking at the disparity. One option is to look at the cognitive activity, and ask if girls are not enjoying chess, or the cognitive effects of chess. Is the game sealed and need to be opened up to girls, and what form would such a thing have? Another way to look at the problem, as “endorsed” by the skit, is to think of chess in relation to other girl activities, so that chess for girls would associate with or resemble activities traditionally associated with girls. A final approach is market based, to think that only 50 percent of a potential market is spending money on chess games and products, and try to develop campaigns to cultivate players.

These approaches parallel many of those seen in the girl games movement. There exists an uneasy alliance between feminism and market approaches to girl games. The approaches both have the same goals, but are frequently at odds in terms of what is the right way to go about implementing them. Debates already existing within feminism come to surface in the matter of developing software and products, and this is made more difficult by the classically masculine audience for games. The goal of this book is not to push one approach or agenda, but to document the moment indicated by the girl games movement.

Gender in games is significant from three perspectives: women in game development, representations of women and the available gender choices within games, and the gender of the players themselves. The last perspective demands a study of the differences between girls and boys, especially as pertains to what they want out of games. This study is problematic, as it can be seen to naturalize gender dichotomies with generalizations (girls want, boys want). Within a culture, differences can be demonstrably found in gender based preferences. To deny that these differences exist is to overlook clear evidence. However, gender roles are culturally based, so the fact that girls and boys tend to want certain things in America at one point in time does not mean that these are universal desires or are biologically rooted.

Games have a huge problem with gender. They predominantly exclude women in favor of men in box covers, and the games themselves. Women are generally simply absent. When they do appear, they are normally in helpless roles or are otherwise misognyistically portrayed. Representations tend to fall under traditional stereotypes. The subjects of games are very predominantly oriented along violent action and exploration of space. Girls are very rarely incorporated into the demographics for these activities. It is frequently argued that there is nothing wrong with that, that girls have other activities they can enjoy, so why is it so important that they play games? Part of the reason for this motivation is along the technological lines, that games are an important step toward comfort with computers. Another motivation is purely economical. It is, after all, no coincidence that The Sims has been the greatest selling PC game of all time and it has a roughly even gender audience. Along the dimension of persuasive games, it can be argued that games are important cognitive tools and are important for thinking about the world systemically.

The concern in this book is to combine theoretical feminism with the practical issues of bringing girl games to market, which is rife with entrepreneurial issues. The most severe problem in girl games, is not to make games for girls who are already comfortable with video games, but rather to introduce games to those who are normally excluded, who are not already interested. This spurs several scholars and game makers to defensiveness over the feminist horror over games that continue the various pink Mattell franchises. They aim to support girls against the loss of self confidence experienced by girls as they enter into a culture that devalues their interests. Barbie is notable because the doll is present on a professional landscape it is a way for girls to think of themselves in professional roles. Other scholars are more critical. Theresa Duncan attacks the “earnest blandness” or girl games. Others argue that the approaches found by market research reinforce gender stereotypes and assumptions, that because of its cultural indoctrination, market research will narrow the understanding of what girls want, rather than broadening it. They argue that games must instead be opened to explore new formats and models of software.

An open question is whether to focus on games for girls explicitly, or simply focus on expanding the sense of games, period. This becomes notable when compared to the use of modern games, where the idea of a “gamer” has become itself a peculiar and narrow demographic, with hardcore players of games only a small subset of 18-35 year old males. A challenge in thinking about inclusive games is to get away from the gender divide in the first place. It is necessary to make generalizations and think about what girls want, to get any inclusivity at all. But it is also necessary to avoid the process of totalizing and demeaning quality of emphasizing only select few interests or lifestyle choices.

Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield: Computer Games for Girls: What Makes Them Play?

This chapter is an analysis and discussion of Barbie Fashion Designer, written by the game designers. In earlier studies, the authors were struck by the partiality of games to male audiences, and how girls were generally uninterested in them, even if the games themselves were nonviolent. The authors analyze the success of Barbie Fashion Designer according to the study by Yasmin Kafai, who studied children who created their own games. The authors find that the success did not come from branding, but came primarily from watching and playing preferences.

Barbie Fashion Designer is interesting partly because of its profound success, but also from its unusual trans-media nature. It creatively connects the computer as a tool to play outside of the computer. The software allows the user to design clothes based on a variety of patterns, and they can then print the outfits out, and follow instructions to assemble these into actual clothes that can be worn by the dolls. The program leverages the software of the computer, but the focus of the play does not actually reside within the computer, but outside.

The authors discuss the elements in games, and how they relate to other media and activities, and how these play out with girls and boys.

• Violence and violent action. This is pervasive in games and media culture for boys. Girls generally have a distaste for it. The differences between girls and boys are not uniform or universal, but they do exist. Removing violent action is important, but not the only thing necessary for success.
• Themes. The narrative content and the manners of conflict resolution are another difference. Boys’ games tend to focus on exploration and finding things. In narratives, boys tend to gravitate towards stories with struggles between good and evil. Girls seem to prefer a variety of themes and social or negotiated means of resolving conflicts. Cooperative play is clearly important for successful themes.
• Microworlds. Boys tend to prefer fantasy environments, while girls tend to prefer realistic ones, dealing with problems that might be encountered on an everyday basis. In this sense, girls tend to prefer software that are tools for other activities.
• Characters. The most ostensible application to games and other media are the presence of girls within them. Girls also tend to prefer games which have characters in realistic roles that they can identify with.
• Modes of interaction. Boys tend to readily adopt experimental methods toward engagement, using trial and error before understanding the rules. Girls might prefer games where the rules are more clear and the effects are more predictable. This relates to the styles of hard and soft mastery as described by Turkle. Hard masters prefer to bring the system under control, wheras soft masters are interested in bricolage and having control over the pacing and interaction.

A final point is that the project is critiqued along the lines of perpetuating gender stereotypes, by encouraging girls to play with fashion design. Along that line of reasoning, though, so do boys’ games. The matters of what boys and girls are interested in is subject to cultural flow. Another issue is whether Barbie Fashion Designer can be considered a game. But it is a tool/accessory around the Barbie world. Most games have tight rules, but this is looser, enabling a free social play.

Cornelia Brunner, Dorothy Bennett, and Margaret Honey: Girrl Games and Technological Desire

This chapter is concerned with what girls want out of technology. Brunner studied gender preferences and desires in technology in general and produced the following table: (Brunner 1994, on p. 76)

• Women/Men fantasize about it as a MEDIUM/PRODUCT
• Women/Men see it as a TOOL/WEAPON
• Women/Men want to use it for COMMUNICATION/CONTROL
• Women/Men are impressed with its potential for CREATION/POWER
• Women/Men see it as EXPRESSIVE/INSTRUMENTAL
• Women/Men ask it for FLEXIBILITY/SPEED
• Women/Men are concerned with its EFFECTIVENESS/EFFICIENCY
• Women/Men like its ability to facilitate/grant SHARING/AUTONOMY
• Women are concerned with INTEGRATING it into their personal lives / Men are intent on CONSUMING it
• Women talk about wanting to EXPLORE worlds / Men talk about using it to EXPLOIT resources and potentialities
• Women are EMPOWERED by it / Men want TRANSCENDENCE

The authors list several elements of design particular to games and these technological desires.

• Technological sophistication. Girls are frequently interested in the ability for devices to interact with each other. Objects should be able to interact with each other in interesting ways within a game world.
• Winning and losing. Girls tend to want to perfect themselves, while boys tend to be interested in power over others. Self improvement is notably not the same thing as leveling (which implies comparativity and power), damage is something that is internal (or possibly social).
• Success and sacrifice. Girls are aware of the sacrifices that must be made in life’s choices. Some games emphasize resource management, but this is not the same thing as sacrifice.
• Contradictions of femininity. Games have the potential to explore many dimensions of femininity.
• Persuasion versus conquest. Women tend to value persuasion, not conquest. Persuasion is much more difficult to simulate than conquest. The ideas of spreading a rumor is a good game analogue.
• Humor. The authors suggest that girls are less tolerant for humorlessness in games, because boys are more likely to have fun with conquest and victory. The ideal humor suggested is based on character and situation.
• Adventure. The elements of adventure that are most interesting to girls should focus on defying conventions, rather than gaining authority.
• Puzzles and obstacles. Girls tend to prefer puzzles that are integrated with the story.
• Writing. Girls are interested in writing and communication, paying attention to how to say something, analyzing the meaning behind responses. “Girls might be interested in games that focus on how things are communicated, not just on what is being said.”
• Being chosen. This generally has no analogue in boys’ games. Being chosen is complicated and it can open new friends and opportunities as well as close off old ones.
• Mysteries. This suggests finding ways within games to look at material from a variety of perspectives, in interest of uncovering something hidden. There is usually a social dimension to this uncovering as well.

Yasmin B. Kafai: Video Game Designs by Girls and Boys

This study is about gender differences in game design. It takes place by actually having elementary school students design games for either science or math classes. Both boys and girls were interested in the activity of playing and designing games. The study analyzed the games created by the students to get a sense of their focus and content. Kafai breaks her results down into several analytic categories and finds that the gender differences are pervasive. She finds that boys are primarily interested in adventure games, while girls had a diversity of genres, that girls preferred realistic worlds, small casts, and self-identified characters. Kafai also found that the results from the boys were more diverse than originally expected. This small detail suggests the origin of the trend for mainstream games to dwell on a particular subset of males.

Interview: Brenda Laurel

Laurel discusses the game “Rockett’s New School”. The game “Rockett’s World” “allows players to rehearse different emotional responses to social situations and their consequences.” (p. 123)

Henry Jenkins: Complete Freedom of Movement

Game culture fills a space defined by traditional boy culture (specifically 19th century American). Games create new spaces offering limitless exploration in the modern, confined, urban world. The play worlds in 19th century boy culture is also inicative of social role preparation for adult life. Jenkins lists 8 bullets connecting boy culture to game spaces:

1. Culture is characterized by independence from the realm of mothers and fathers, and fosters autonomy and self confidence. Games create personal and private spaces, instead of finding spaces outside, the spaces are internal (but are windows, representing external space).
2. Social recognition among boys was gained by daring, stunts, or pranks (usually aimed against authority figures). Daring in games is proven through mastery of levels and systems.
3. The central virtues of boy culture were mastery and self-control, and were implemented via setting and meeting challenges. These are characterized in game culture by examining how boys play games repeatedly in order to master challenging levels.
4. Culture was hierarchical, where social status was gained through conflict and challenges. Game and arcade culture is hierarchical with proficiency and adeptness being measures of dominance.
5. Boy culture was violent and aggressive, and children often hurt each other or were hurt in their play. Video games move violence into the symbolic realm, creating pretend violence rather than real.
6. 19th century boy culture tends to be scatological, referring to growing bodily awareness. This is present in games usually through violent means, with depictions of blood and gore. This bodily focus also is used misogynistically to exclude or control women.
7. Role playing was prevalent in culture especially in games of “Cowboys and Indians”, placing boys in fantastic roles. Video games make strong use of roleplaying as well.
8. Play activities were opportunities for social interaction and bonding. Video games enable bonding through expression of common interests, discussing games and using them as a catalyst for interaction.

Jenkins compares boy and girl spaces to novels. Early novels were generally feminine, aimed toward female audiences, but gradually boy books began to emerge. Jenkins characterizes the differences in the interest in books to play spaces. Boy spaces are adventure islands, environments with potential for exploration and mastery, full of wildness, danger, and risks. Girl spaces are secret gardens, private and secret spaces. These spaces reward exploration, but do so at a slower pace, where the goal is not to overcome, but uncover. These spaces also follow along the lines of the gothic traditions, revealing repressed memories and emotions within the confines of the space. In books that feature this motif, often the female protagonist must sacrifice her personal space for the good of others. An alternative style of female space is the “play town“, which reincorporates urban characteristics into other spaces, and emphasizes character and connectedness. This is less explicitly feminine, but is still against traditional masculine roles.

The goal at the conclusion is to develop gender neutral play spaces, though I think that the play town comes close.

Justine Cassell: Storytelling as a Nexus of Change

This chapter is about the dilemma of games for girls, as it is messy to understand the flexible and complex issues of identity. Games should not shoehorn girls into fixed roles providing only a few possible forms of agency. The focus on narrative in some games enables some empowerment, but in these, usually the player is the listener, not the teller. Cassell’s goal is to establish a feminist game design. This requires two elements: 1) authority distributed to the users, where the game itself is about construction, and 2) focus should be interactive storytelling, giving the players the tools to tell their own stories and find their own voices.

Cassell outlines a few bullets characteristic of feminist approaches to design. (p. 303)

• A rejection of “the desirability or even the possibility of value-free research”. It is impossible to factor out the point of view of the researcher in studying a problem.
• A focus on the subjective, experiential, everyday lived experiences of individuals, moving away from objective truths.
• An emphasis on collaboration.
• An attempt to showcase a multiplicity of viewpoints and perspectives.
• An attempt to promote the distribution of authority among the members of a community.

Storytelling is seen as a core method for changing relationships between gender and technology. The focus is on story telling specifically, not just stories.

Salen and Zimmerman are something of the canonical and quintessential game design text. It is a big book, full of content, but my goal is to use it to think explicitly about game design and analysis principles around my research work. The book itself is about design primarily, but in discussing design it uses both theory and practice. Game design is similar to other forms of design, but the content of design is rules. One goal og the authors is to build a critical discourse for discussing games and game design, and I think they have been successful in this regard.

The authors borrow a quote from Clark C. Abt: “A game is a particular way of looking at something, anything.” This is relevant from the perspective of model and world building. The goal here is not to use universalizing (everything is a game), or overly specific understanding of games, but instead use multiple points of view. These are organized through “game design schemas”, which are particular ways for approaching games. It is possible and productive to look at games through many schemas, much like Sutton-Smith’s rhetorics of play. The schemas are organized into primary schemas of rules, play, and culture.

Meaningful Play

The idea of meaningful play used here comes from Huizinga. The authors expand on this idea. Meaning is descriptive (of outcomes) and may be discernible or recognized. Alternately, meaning may be evaluative, in the sense of understanding the relationship between actions and outcomes, reincorporating and integrating knowledge.

Design

Design is a constructive process. Addressing design in general, the authors pose that “Design is the process by which a designer creates a context to be encountered by a participant, from which meaning emerges.” This is very general, but the idea of a context enables a broad sense of the experience to be encountered by the participants. Meaning is understood semiotically now, as meaning within the system, but it may relate to meaning outside of the system. A relevant example of the interplay of meaning between inside and outside is in a controversial event in 1993 where Hasbro removed offensive words from The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. In game, the words lose meaning as words, but they are still offensive outside the game.

Systems

Games are understood as systemic, and the understanding of systems is borrowed from Stephen W. Littlejohn. Systems are composed of: (p. 51)

• Objects: the parts, elements, and varialbes within the system
• Attributes: qualities of the system and the objects
• Internal relationships: how these objects work in relation to each other
• Environment: what the context of the system is

Games may be understood in terms of several equivalent systems, but they may be understood within different system contexts. A game may be understood in terms of formal, social, and cultural systems. This is important to note, because it presents systems as a general interpretive and analytic tool.

Another key distinction within systems is the degree of openness in properties, what their relation is to their environment. A system is open if its internal mechanisms are visible and transparent, and if the internal properties are receptive to changes in the environment. Social and cultural interactions with games tend to be open, whereas formal systems tend to be closed. We can extend this reasoning and consider that formal systems are open when they relate to emergent effects that are derived from their environment.

Interactivity

One perspective on interactiviy is borrowed from Crawford. The authors define four multivalent modes of interactivity that can exist on several scales. In general, a system is interactive when its users have choices, and those choices are meaningful in some sense. It is possible for interaction to be designed, but it is possible for interaction to take place in a manner that is completely outside of design (talking while playing a board game, players on a forum about an MMOG). Modes of interactivity (p. 59-60):

1. Cognitive interactivity; interpretive participation. This is intellectual between the person and the system.
2. Functional interactivity; utilitarian participation. These are functional and structural interactions, generally pertaining to issues of usability. For instance, if the text on a screen is legible, or if pieces on a board game are easy to move.
3. Explicit interactivity; participation with designed choices and procedures. This is the sense of interaction as normally understood between player and system. Choices, random events, and simulation belong to this category.
4. Beyond-the-object-interactivity; participation within culture of the object. This is the idea of fan culture and cultural participation with the content and meanings of the game.

Choice is the primary means of interaction with game systems directly, and choices have several sub elements to them. These are described as follows: (p. 63-64)

1. What happened before the player was given the choice?
2. How is the possibility of the 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?

Defining Games

The authors perform a fairly comprehensive analysis of definitions of games made by various game scholars, and define a great grid comparing their definitions. The result is clearly that games are general and reach into a diversity of categories. The authors then formulate their own definition of games: “A game is a system in which players engage in artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.” A such, “Game design is the process by which a game designer creates a game, to be encountered by a player, from which meaningful play emerges.” (p. 80) The two border cases given are puzzles, which, by their definition, are games, and roleplaying games, which by their definition, are not, but may be closer to games or farther away. The authors do not mention simulation games such as The Sims, but I suspect that this would be on a borderline category closer to the negative category, because there is not really conflict implicit in the system.

Defining Digital Games

Digital games tend to have the following properties. This is not to say that non-digital games do not have these properties, but that digital games usually must have them: (p. 87-88):

1. Immediate but narrow interactivity. Immediacy is the key element, but the scope and nature of the interactivity is confined along the narrow bands of along which one can interact with a computer.
2. Information Manipulation. Games work by containing information and hiding it from the player, and they can hold large quantities of information encyclopedically.
3. Automated complex systems. Games may be automated, but they tend to hide the system underneath.
4. Networked communication. They can facilitate communication between players, albeit on confined channels.

The Primary Schemas: Rules, Play, Culture

Primary schemas are ways of looking at and analyzing games. The primary schemas are oriented along formal, experiential, and contextual dimensions. The authors borrow the idea of schemas from Ortony and Rumelhart (!). The issues in developing schemas are:

• Schemas have variables: They provide a frameworkd into which new information may be integrated.
• Schemas can embed: If a schema includes a concept, then it may contain schemas for thinking of the subcomponents of the concept.
• Schemas represent knowledge at many levels of abstraction.
• Schemas represent knowledge rather than definitions: Schemas are encyclopedic rather than definitional.

Rules on Three Levels

There are 3 kinds of rules: (p. 130)

1. Operational: the explicit instructions, such as the instructions on the box of a board game, or the range of options available to players in a digital game.
2. Constituative: the underlying formal structures beneath the game. These may be understood at a procedural or mathematical level.
3. Implicit: these are the rules of play, which affect the social conduct around the game, but these rules are generally not specified.

Games as Emergent Systems

This chapter discusses rules, complexity and emergence. Complexity is a sweet spot between periodicity and chaos. Complexity and emergence basically become an aesthetic of rules. The subject of complexity ties into the dyanmics part of the mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics trio devised by Mark LeBlanc. The authors describe that game designers should learn to think about game design on a second-order, developing an intuition for how mechanics will affect the emergent complexity that results from a game system. This is intrinsically tied to the understanding of rules and is at the heart of rules-based approaches to game design.

Breaking the Rules

Rule breaking is important in thinking of how players engage with games, simulation and social games especially. We can think about rule breaking as pertains to formal games, but also as how it pertains to the looser kinds of social games (and rituals) where interaction has an essentially game-like format. The authors develop a taxonomy of rule breaking according to player attitudes, and this leads to a classification of player types. Thinking of the policies of rule breaking relates games to ethical and moral systems. The kinds of attitudes that are important are: the player’s adherence to the rules, the player’s interest in winning, and the player’s degree of lusory attitude. This leads to the following five player types:

1. The standard player: is the measure by which others are judged. The standard player respects the rules, has an interest in winning, and a lusory attitude.
2. The dedicated player: is interested and driven by the mastery of the game. Has an intense interest in winning and a zealous lusory attitude.
3. The unsportsmanlike player: is intensely interested in winning, is not interested in breaking the operational rules, but will violate the implicit rules. Both the unsportsmanlike player and the dedicated player are interested in a mastery over the rules.
4. The cheat: violates the formal rules, usually covertly, but does so with the interest of winning the game. So the cheat has some degree of lusory attitude, in that he is invested in the outcome, but not the process of reaching it.
5. The spoil-sport: wholly violates the rules of the game, has no interest in winning, no lusory attitude, and actively breaks the magic circle. An example is the Twister player who pushes over the other players.

There is another kind of player in single player digital games who resembles the unsportsmanlike player or the cheat, who plays a game in attempt to break it or uncover what is underneath. This is a process that is both interested in the workings of the game, but also is aimed to defeat the spirit of play in the game. This kind of player is especially dangerous in games that are about fictional adaptation, because the player is interested in exposing the border cases, and disrupting the game flow.

Defining Play

The authors general definition of play: “Play is free movement within a more rigid structure.” (p. 304) There are three kinds of play activities as pertains to games: Game play, ludic activity, and being playful. The latter is the most general, but all three relate to ideas of performance as described by Schechner. Game play is play within the magic circle, within the space and time and the formal rules of the game itself. Ludic activity is engagement with material means of interaction with objects of play or games, but not necessarily within the context of a formal structure. Playfulness is freedom, though it may be tight freedom, within social or cultural systems. This is a good type of division of activity to examine within simulation games, for instance. The authors pose that games are both a subset of play, but play is also an element of games.

Games as the Play of Experience

Play is about the experience of playing games. This is tied to the cycle of interaction, and the authros introduce the idea of a core mechanic to form the experiential blocks of interactivity. The core mechanic an the activity that players perform repeatedly or predominantly within the scope of a game. The core mechanic is both the interaction and the activity of play in a game. Designers often neglect or take for granted the core mechanics in creating games. It is a crucial element to keep in mind when thinking about design.

Games as the Play of Pleasure

This chapter discusses teh pleasure of games, which are wrapped up in the captivating powers of play. They pull from Mark LeBlanc, Michael Apter, Callois, Csikszentmihalyi, and Halford and Halford. Some of this relates to behavior theory, reinforcement, and conditioning, but it is largely wrapped in the ideas of goals and desire. The idea of flow is introduced, but cautioned, that flow is not a golden solution to every game, and it is not necessarily always desirable. The key element is how to provide and negotiate rewards and pleasure between the game and the player.

Games as the Play of Meaning

Games can represent, and games are representations. They create complex internal systems of meaning, which relate to the outside through presentation and performance. The act of play involves both presentation and interpretation. As wholes, games are representations in that they represent something whole in the world: a roleplaying game might represent a fantastic narrative, a fighting game might represent hand to hand combat, and so on. Within the games, the games can represent, by representing characters, stories, ideas, and objects.

Games as Narrative Play

The authors discuss the problematic relationship between games and narratives. The conclusion they come to is that to create a game narrative is to create a narrative system, essentially a fictive world. The narrative system is a system of parts, with elements, relationships, and so on. In roleplaying games, narrative elements are integrated into the game mechanics.

Games as the play of Simulation

Simulations are the means by which whole games are representative of some larger system. “A simulation arises from the operation of a system in which every element contributes in an integrated way to the larger representation.” (p. 439) Borrowing from Warren Robinett, the authors examine simulation as composed of four elements:

1. Simulations are abstractions. The simulation cuts away large swaths of detail, and reduces the subject being simulated to some stylized or statistical qualities. The key design skill associated with abstraction is deciding what to include and what not to.
2. Simulations are systems. A simulation is made of smaller interrelated parts. The attributes defined by abstraction must have some relevant meaning within the system, affecting how objects react or are related to other things, otherwise the attributes are superfluous.
3. Simulations are numerical. Or, alternately, they are logical. In order for the system to formalize its rules, the objects and attributes of the simulation must be formulated numerically or logically. In order for a simulation to work, its abstraction must tie back to its logical formulation.
4. Simulations are limited. Models are necessarily incomplete. A common belief in games is that simulations are better if they are more complex, but this is  false.

Games as Open Culture

Open culture is the idea that players have control over their experiences and allows freedom of use. Will Wright has described a model of open game design that is shaped like a pyramid. In this model, the players are the producers. At the top of the pyramid, there are the fewest participants, and they design tools for use with the game. The next level are the players who make use of these tools to design new content and objects. The next layer are those who distribute content, and create web sites and share material. At the bottom of the pyramid are the players who make use of the objects created by the above layers. All of these layers can be filled with players, not designers.

Open culture is about open systems, where players are given or are able to devise tools to create their own play.

Seymour Chatman is primarily a film scholar, but his research aims to encompass the broad concept of narrative in all its forms. Chatman belongs to the structuralist school of criticism, and finds that structuralism is an effective and useful approach toward understanding narrative. His position finds that narrative is a combination of “a what and a way”, where the what is the story of a narrative, and the way is its discourse.

Introduction

Chatman opens by comparing theory and poetics. Poetics accounts for the structure of storytelling, which accounts for how to analyze form, but asks more questions than it answers. Poetics is not concerned with “What makes Macbeth great?” but rather “What makes Macbeth a tragedy?” Russian formalism is an instance of poetics, but it lacks the power to address more complex and modern narratives. Literary theory is about the nature of literature. It is not criticism. It is about explaining what the possibilities are. Instead of asking what the author should or should not do, it asks “What can we say about the way structures like narratives organize themselves? That question raises subsidiary ones: What are the ways we recognize the presence or absence of a narrator? What is plot? Character? Setting? Point of view?” (p. 19) These questions are Chatman’s goals to explore. To do this, he breaks down narrative into components: Narrative is composed of story and discourse, and the story is made of events and existents. This extends loosely from Aristotle.

The idea of structure that Chatman uses comes from Piaget, who claims that structure contains wholeness, transformation, and self-regulation. Narrative is a structure by these terms, and furthermore it is a semiotic structure. As a semiotic structure, it is divided into quadrants by expression and content, and substance and form. Discourse is the expression of narrative, while content is the story. Both of these have elements of substance and form. A worthwhile endeavor is to imagine what of this constitutes the world and the model. It seems like both of these are content, but what identifies the world versus the model in terms of the cultural codes, characters, and such is lest clear. The experience of reading is a part of the discourse, and it is arguable that in an adaptation project, the form of expression should be mimicked or made analogous to the source material.

Experiencing a narrative requires interpretation, filling in the gaps. This is a crucial element in story, that it is possible for the reader to inject their own interpretations, and supply extra details and imagery to what is being read. This is interesting in the context of film and visual video games, which supply more and more visual information. Chatman explains that narratives evoke a world of potential details. The text supplies some of these details, but it is up to the reader to fill in the rest. There is a range of artistic expression in narrative, as is present in painting. Painting may be more or less detailed (impressionistic works forgo detail to create expression and mood), likewise narrative may choose to go in or out of details at whim. Narrative is never complete.

Statements in discourse may be interpreted, and have different interpretations. Discourse can show and tell, but showing and telling have different meanings. All statements are mediated to some degree, but telling increases the degree of mediation. The range of mediation and forms of narration create a spectrum of modes between the author and the reader.

Story: Events

Events make up the things that happen, and this is the content, but the arrangement of these events as presented to the reader is a matter of discourse. The presentation of sequence implicitly conveys causality. Readers interpret consecutive events as causally related. The verisimilitude of events, the manner in which they are interpreted as real, is according to how the reader thinks they should be, not necessarily as they are. Thus, explicit narration is only required for events which are notable or unusual. Without narration, the reader is left to believe that things continue as they “ought to”. Narration thus becomes an issue of inclusion and omission. This is an interesting point because it ties back to the way in which we read or use models. Although the application to formal models is difficult because common expectations are notoriously difficult to express.

Chatman describes extensively the filmic devices for developing cuts and scenes, and explains these in relation to the terms of narrative sequence. These have to do with the role of time in events, which have flow of rhythms and cycles. Using Pride and Prejudice as an example, he explains how the narration is broken into phases of scene (action) and description. Rhythm and flow are good to think about from the perspective of adaptation, because these carry the dramatic mood and experience of the narrative.

The latter part of this chapter discusses macroscopic plot structures. Chatman argues that to form characterization of narrative forms, it is necessary to understand cultural codes, among other things. Without understanding these, typologies of narratives (for instance, Propp) must be narrow and confined to particular domains.

Story: Existents

Where an event is something that occurs in time, an existent is something that occurs in space. In cinematic narratives, this is more literal: existents are things that show up on screen and take up space on the screen. Chatman gives five qualities for these: (p. 97-98) These are ostensibly matters of presentation, but it is still a matter of the material content of the film itself.

1. Scale or size
2. Contour, texture, and density
3. Position
4. Degree, kind, and area of reflected illumination
5. Clarity or degree of optical resolution

Verbal and cinematic story space are different in several respects. Text has much more ambiguity and freedom, and is open in terms of visual imagery, but this imagery may be suggested given the style of the narrative. Conversely, cinema cannot describe things and events, it must show them. Games, interestingly, are in an in-between space. They can both show and tell by making use of various interactive techniques.

Regarding character, the original model belongs to Aristotle, but Aristotle’s approach leaves much to be desired. Aristotle frames characters as having traits, but this raises contention about the primacy of the action or the character’s traits: which is the cause of which? What is the relation of the plot to the character? Formalist depictions of character treats characters as variable and interchangeable, where the only importance is their function within the story. Characters are secondary or worse with respect to the plot. On the other side, Henry James argues for an interdependence of character and plot.

Much study in narratology places character subordinate to plot, only existing to serve the plot’s needs. However, the reader is free to interpret and extend the idea of the character and ask questions about them. Models of characters that are merely functional are closed, where the characters cannot be extended outside the narrative space. In theories that close characters, readers are forbidden from attempting to think about characters outside of the plot. An example that characterizes this stand is O. B. Hardison, who argues that characters (specifically in the case of Shakespeare) are simply dramatic figures and their lives and personalities are restricted to the words on the page. Chatman is horrified by this position and argues that it is absurd, and the reader must be free to imagine and extend the personalities, and ask questions about the characters beyond the text. An interesting element of this conflict is that the closed model of characters is intrinsically hostile to not only adaptations, but the idea that the text may belong to anyone other than the author. If the characters cannot live outside of the text, then they are simply puppets of the author, controllable by the author alone.  Chatman explains that to understand a character, it must be interpreted and reconstructed. There is always more to interpret of characters.

The narrative evokes a world, and the reader is free to enrich that world. Chatman’s goal is to construct an open theory of character (open in the Umberto Eco sense). The terms to be understood in characters are totality, traits, and uniqueness. Traits are used to compose character and character has a range of them. A trait is a “relatively stable or abiding personal quality” (p. 126). Characters may shift between traits over the course of a narrative, and traits may extend beyond the events of a story. The idea of traits is to develop a structural format for character identity, that is meaningful within the scope of the story world, but can also be extended beyond the story world. The notion of trait is sufficient for literary analysis, but for the purposes of procedural adaptation, it requires more formalization and detail. A character model is something that I am interested in developing, but it is not clear exactly how the process will work.

The process of going through a narrative and extrapolating a world from it is something Chatman calls “reading out”. This is discussed in relation to A. C. Bradley (who focused on Shakespeare) and open trait-analysis. This is the sort of thing I am doing with Pride and Prejudice now. This sort of analysis though has been broadly criticized for neglecting the surface features, the texture of language.

Discourse: Nonnarrated Stories

The first topic on the subject of discourse is the narrative spectrum, which is largely pulled from Wayne Booth. The essence of this spectrum revolves around the conflict between showing and telling, or presentation versus mediated narration, or mimesis and diagesis. All of these essentially represent the same conflict between how the story is narrated and read. The importance of discourse is heightened by perspective or point of view. This is made the most prominent in film, but has always been an issue in narration. Most clearly, point of view has to do with how the world is logically digested and understood. There are many forms of discourse, which rely on how the point of view is communicated. Discourse may be narrated, nonnarrated, direct, soliloquy, and so on. Each of these forms implies something meaningful.

One of these forms of narration is free direct speech, which is an interior monologue. This form of narration is frequently used in Pride and Prejudice, and Chatman explains the critical features of interior monologues in five bullet points: (p. 182-183)

1. The character’s self-reference, if any, is first person.
2. The current discourse-moment is the same as the story-moment; hence any predicate referring to the current moment will be in the present tense. This is not an “epic present” depicting past time, but rather a real present referring to contemporary time of the action. Memories and other references to the past will occur in the simple preterite, not the past perfect.
3. The language–idiom, diction, word- and syntactic-choice– are identifiably those of the character, whether or not a narrator intervenes.
4. Allusions to anything in the character’s experience are made with no more explanation than would be needed in his own thinking, that is,
5. There is no presumptive audience other than the thinker himself, no deference to the ignorance or expository needs of a narratee.

Chatman more elements of the interior monologue (as stream of consciousness, or free indirect speech), and again relates it to Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth’s thoughts after Lady Catherine leaves are revealed to us, to indicate her emotional state. Chatman explains that the key reason why we are privy to this thought is as a clear narrative action. Elizabeth’s internal mind is a reflection of her character, and the flow of thoughts and moods are very controlled and logical. Narratively, this moment is highly significant, and the moment reveals her emotions and state: perplexed, angry, and strangely hopeful. “The passage tells us, firstly that she is discomposed; secondly, that she cannot take her mind off a visit extraordinary not only in its substance but in the urgency attached to it by Lady Catherine, who clearly feels that Darcy may indeed act; thirdly, that she wonders how such a rumor could have begun; fourthly, that the fact that Darcy is Bingley’s friend and she Jane’s sister must have prompted speculation about her prospects too; and finally that the Lucases have already consummated a match which she has begun to contemplate only in the privacy of her own mind.” (p. 191) This extrapolation, or reading out, as it were, gives a clear set of narrative events that are taking place in Elizabeth’s mind, but are important nonetheless.

This point suggests an interesting game mechanic, though. The player might be prompted at certain points with a bubble of “I think…”, or “I feel…” and must fill in some thoughts, which will indicate the player character’s disposition and composure.

Scott Turner is most notable for his work on the Minstrel storytelling system. Minstrel is notable in terms of storytelling systems because it is one of the first, long with Liebowitz’s Universe, to employ a model of authorship and an author’s plans. Minstrel is also notable for its elaborate system for implementing creativity. The work is very tightly bound up in the rhetoric of traditional AI. The model of creativity works in terms of problem solving, and uses analogical reasoning to cast problem solving strategies from one domain into another.

While my work is not aimed at story generation, and my approach is very different, Turner is a useful perspective to keep in mind in terms of drama management, authorial goals, and creativity within story worlds.

Storytelling and Creativity

The problem as initially framed is an issue of story telling. Turner is interested in developing a computer program that can tell stories. Originally, this research began with finding a copy of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, and then experimenting with the recombination of stories using Propp’s formal structure. Turner quickly found that Propp’s morphology, while it may be useful for understanding stories, is insufficient to instruct a computer to tell them. To tell or understand a story, it is necessary to have more than form, but a large network of information: author goals, reader expectations, and cultural knowledge. Turner turns his attention not to the makeup and content of stories themselves, but the process by which an author creates a story.

Developing stories involves thinking about the purpose and the message of the story, in addition to its form and content. This is one of the more innocuous claims that Turner makes, but it is arguably somewhat controversial. His goal is to rule out the idea of nonsense stories which do not employ causality or simply do not reach any kind of satisfying conclusion. However, many stories have messages, but those messages may not be clear or straightforward at all. They may be messages that require a great deal of interpretation, leading to diverse ranges of valid interpretations. Turner’s examples are simple, tending to employ very simple moral messages. In his defense, we have to start somewhere. It’s not possible to leap straight into a storytelling system that can write something along the lines of À la recherche du temps perdu without being able to write something simple first.

Storytelling requires a strong knowledge of not only the story, but the world in which the story takes place, the meanings of the terms and elements that occur within it. Minstrel uses an Arthurian world, where it is necessary for the storytelling system to understand what dragons and knights and princesses are, what it means for a knight to charge or be wounded, and what characters might be liable to do after some event. This does not mean understand in the sense of exact definition, but rather have a functional understanding of how these work within the story world.

Storytelling also requires creativity. This is the constraint that Turner issues which is the most remarkable. Creativity requires both the judgement of creativity, as well as an ability to be creative in the first place.

Minstrel’s architecture employs a problem solver, and treats the process of developing a story as a problem to be solved. Turner does not see this as a specialized process, used for scientific endeavors, but rather an everyday one. He claims that problem solving is invariant across problem domains, so the same problem solving method may be used in any domain, from astrophysics, to navigation, to grocery shopping. This argument is contestible, but through using it, he is able to make an interesting observation about how to use creativity. Creativity is the process of using knowledge or a method from one domain and applying it to another. In planning terminology, this involves an integrated process of search and adaptation. Experiencing a problem in one domain, the planner searches through other domains to find structurally similar problems, and then adapt them into the original domain. The interesting thing about this, for all the critiques of AI planning, is it is a method of thought that exists outside of conventional situational thinking, and is a reasonably effective means of producing creative solutions to problems.

The architecture that Turner uses involves extensively making use of author goals. There are four kinds of goals: thematic goals, consistency goals, drama goals, and presentation goals. In addition to employing creativity, the story must be able to satisfy these goals according to the author’s needs. Consistency goals are about producing consistent and causally sound stories, drama goals involve satisfying constraints to make the story dramatically interesting, such as having foreshadowing, suspense, and so on. Presentation goals aim to make the story clear and legible to the reader. Thematic goals are interesting to me, and I will address those in the next section.

A Model of Storytelling

Turner argues that storytelling is a matter of satisfying author goals. People write stories intentionally, for deliberate reasons. As such, the stories themselves have goals within them. To illustrate the importance of author goals, Turner looks at Meehan’s Talespin. Talespin does not make use of authorial intentions, and instead has only character plans and intentions. The Talespin stories are generally not too good, meandering and lacking purpose, and occasionally getting into infinite loops. Turner argues that storytelling requires more than mere simulation, and that authors are not merely simulators.

My goal in the adaptation project is not to tell stories, but make games. The challenge to simulation puts me on the defensive, but it is necessary to acknowledge that in order for there to be stories, there must be more than simulation alone. I would argue that what is missing from Talespin is some sense of values or meaning within the world. The example of the bear going to get berries is boring not because there is no authorial meaning, but because the actions and events are not meaningful to the reader.

One way of dealing with the matter of author goals I suppose is to challenge them in favor of reader goals. Authors may write bad stories that meander or go nowhere. The author may have goals which are uninteresting or nonsensical. The author may value these goals, but the readers may find them bewildering. This is not unusual, people write bad stories all the time. Merely having author goals is not enough to make a story interesting. The life of a story is not dependent on the author who writes it, but the community of readers who value it. This is a very important observation that should be made with literature of author goals in story planning.

The actual method of story generation in Minstrel is developed by planning and problem solving. The planner manages the author-level goals, and the problem solver works to find means of solving those goals. At the top level, Minstrel’s goal is to “tell a story”. As this proceeds, Minstrel will choose a moral, a theme, and then begins applying drama goals, performing consistency checks, and making the story presentable. It does this cycle for each scene in the story. This approach to story development is extremely top-down. The work is pioneering, but it is distant from the actual method by which a writer may actually compose a story. Writing involves iteration and revision of the entire work in cycles. I would argue that when the goals are established and some of the basic elements are introduced, the writer does perform simulation, to see what happens next. Minstrel achieves causality by looking backwards from an event and seeing what could have caused it. A real author will employ some of this approach, but will aslo use simulation to simply get causality by advancing time and playing it out.

The model presented is that stories have themes, where a theme is some sort of moral “lesson”. This is a contestible account of the reason behind storytelling, both within stories and of the reasons for writers to create stories. By employing diverse lessons to other storytelling domains, this suggests that the theme of a story and the world of a story can be separated unproblematically, which is false. Stories are culturally anchored, and themes may be conventionally bound to one set of story worlds. An example in the realm of Aesop’s Fables, which contain the kinds of lessons Turner is interested in, is the story of the And and the Grasshopper, which has a remarkably different ending as told in the West versus in Japan. Western culture is much more individually oriented, and focused on independence, whereas Japanese culture relies on interdependence and mutual support. Lifting themes from one domain to another may be creative, but it may also run the risk of cultural imperialism when done unawares.

Huizinga is one of the original voices in the study of play and games. Homo Ludens is his study of play in culture. The work is taken primarily as an anthropology of play, and Huizing is strikingly broad in his examination of play in different cultures. Much study of culture and philosophy in the West has limited itself to looking at history in Greece, Rome, and then Western Europe. Huizinga does explore these, but also reaches out to India, China, Japan, and the Blackfoot Tribe. For someone writing in 1938, this indicates some appreciable cultural diversity. Huizinga is perhaps notable for his coinage of the term “magic circle”, but his work is deeper than normally credited. His understanding of play is also wrapped up in conflict, which is a point of contention between him and other scholars. The ultimate manifestation and function of play to Huizinga is the resolution of conflict, which in turn creates social order.

Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon

This chapter opens looking to understand the role of play within culture. Huizinga notes that play is older than culture, it is spread beyond merely the human species, as animals play. Play is clearly important, but it is unclear as to why we do it. Play must serve a function so that we can play at all. Play is elusive when attempting to ascribe some form of biological function to it, as it rejects and expands beyond any attribution posed onto it. The idea or concept of fun is equally elusive. Both the ideas of play and fun are linguistically problematic, because they mean very different things across languages and cultures. However, play itself exists independent of any name assigned to it, and independent of our understanding. Play is supra-logical and irrational.

The goal is to approach play as the player might percieve it. Huizinga’s goal is to look at play as a special activity within a culture, to see it within its context, not try to understand how it is conditioned from the outside. Our culture is permeated with play, from language, to myth to ritual. Each of these involves negotiating between that which is imaginary to that which is real. Language is a system of reference, and linguistic signs are different from their referents. The signs are, in a sense, not real (not concrete, anyway), and they relate to concrete things in the world. Myth interprets the physical world by explaining it in terms of the divine. Ritual connects meaning and concrete practices with symbolic practices. All of these are systems of play.

Play is difficult to classify in relation to other concepts. Huizinga makes the claim that play is the opposite of seriousness, but this proves problematic. Play can be serious, but his explicit assertion is that “Play is non-seriousness.” (p.5). This is different from claiming that play is not serious. Other things that are non serious are also not play, such as laughter, the comic, jest, and folly. Play cannot be classified morally (as good or bad), not can it be classified aesthetically. Play eludes classification and determination by other terms.

Play is voluntary. It may be deferred or suspended at any time. It involves stepping out of the “real,”  and as such it is in a position of inferiority to the “serious”. Play and seriousness exist in a cycle, where the ordinary world is suspended when the play begins, and resumes when it terminates. Play exists inside everyday life, but apart from it, existing in a special time and space. In time, it begins, goes on for some duration, and then finishes. Afterward, it is over, but exists as a memory, and may be re-enacted. In space, play occurs in special consecrated grounds that are set aside for the play to take place. This enclosure is what defines the magic circle. Examples of these sacred spaces are the playground, the arena, the card-table, the temple, the stage, the court of justice, and so on.

Within the circle, play imposes new rules, and creates order. This is counter-intuitive, as play is usually what breaks rules, but within its space, the rules of play are sacred. Deviation or breaking these rules spoils the game. Within the space, the course of play is enchanting and captivating. It is enthralling that it creates another world and, for lack of a better phrase, opens up a new form of consciousness. However, within this, there is an element of tension. Within the scope of the play, something is at risk, or the players want something to “go” or “go off” or simply happen. The player has some sort of motivation and objective. Due to this motivation and the possible outcome, an ethical dimension arises in the play. Even though play itself transcends morality, within the scope of play, there is a moral structure, determined by the rules of play.

The moral structure connects the performance of the player to the player’s adherence to the rules. It is morally important to abide by these rules and still meet the goals. A player who is a cheat still operates within the space of the rules. Even though the cheat breaks the rules, it is in order to win. The person who ignores the rules brazenly and does not act to win is something worse (like the parent who dismantles the pillow-fort, or the dog who runs onto the soccer field), because they have violated the sacred order of the magic circle. Breaking the rules reveals the fragility of the play itself. Huizinga explains that play is robbed of its illusion, which literally means “in-play”. This is notable for several reasons. The first is that illusion is an interesting word for capturing the believability of the world of play, as compared to, say immersion. A player who experiences immersion may still be aware of the fact that the world is imaginary, whereas the player experiencing illusion is seeing the world of play as of foremost importance.

The Play-Concept as Expressed in Language

In this chapter, Huizinga looks at the terms for play as expressed in different languages and cultures. The uses of the terms for play are quite diverse. One of the earlier distinctions is between the Greek terms paidia and agon. The term paidia represents the childish sense of play, as in things that are non serious and lighthearted. The other term, agon, is about contest and conflict. This is the term Huizinga is primarily interested in, as it denotes contests and competitions which were of great importance in Greek life. Agon is, incidentally, the root that gives us “agony,” so its connection to games is of a much more serious nature.

Huizinga investigates several other languages, and finds that there is a large diversity in terms, but different terms separate the agon/paidia difference with some frequency. These terms are discussed on the Wikipedia page for Homo Ludens. At the end of the chapter, he examines the words for seriousness or earnestness in these languages as well, although this proves to be problematic as finding the opposite of play is difficult linguistically. Huizinga concludes with a point that helps clarify the relationship between seriousness and play.

Leaving aside the linguistic question and observing the play-earnest antithesis somewhat more closely, we find that the two terms are not of equal value: play is positive, earnest negative. The significance of “earnest” is defined by and exhausted in the negation of “play”–earnest is simply “not playing” and nothing more. The significance of “play”, on the other hand, is by no means defined or exhausted by calling it “not-earnest”, or “not serious”. Play is a thing by itself. The play-concept as such is of a higher order than is seriousness. For seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness. (p. 45)

Play and Contest as Civilizing Functions

Culture arises from play, but in doing so, it takes on the form of conflicted play. “The view we take in the following pages is that culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning. Even those activities which aim at the immediate satisfaction of vital needs–hunting, for instance–tend, in archaic society, to take on the play-form.” (p. 46) The use of play is used in negotiating conduct within a group, or between two opposing groups. The agon form of play is epitomized in the contest, and it is frequently through these sorts of contests, that order is established within the culture. Winning and losing within a play contest is usually merely symbolic, but the meaning of the win or loss is interpreted concretely within the culture.

Play contests establish a social order. The stability of the society comes from a defined order, which is determined by contests demonstrating some kind of strength. The leader of a group would be the one who is superior in some form or another. Social heirarchy may be demonstrated through playful displays. I find this claim very odd, though. Within interactions, I would agree that these take on playful forms and the interactions may be seen as contests of some kind, but to argue that entire cultures are ordered according to this play seems far fetched. The rules for defining victory and the resulting order must be consented upon or at least accepted, especially for the victory to be connected to any kind of ethical or moral superiority in the culture itself. This would indicate the need for protocols to determine social order by these playful forms, but it is ambiguous as to what forms these might take.

Play and Law, Play and War

These are two chapters which explore both the practice of law and the practice of war as playful social constructions. They exist outside of the scope of everyday life, they operate in special environments where there are special rules, yet both are still serious with real consequences. Regarding war, Huizinga qualifies his claim by indicating that it is a cultural function only when the members regard each other as antagonists with equal rights.

Schechner’s perspective on performance is broad and inclusive. He sees it as including much more than theatre, but along an entire spectrum, which ranges from everyday life to rituals and art. Two perspectives on performance are the models of the web and the fan. Schechner is heavily influenced by Victor Turner, who treats performance and play as the “as if”. Within the context of performance, the imaginary becomes real, and the “as if” is equivalent to the “is”. Schechner’s goal is to unite all applications of performance under one theory which is inclusive of its many applications. Much of this text is influenced by his travels to Australia and Southeast Asia, and one aim is to reincorporate the rituals of the New Guinea tribesmen, Australian Aborigines, the Balinese, and many others, with the practices of both classical and modern theatre. Schechner was influenced by Goffman as well, acknowledging the performances of everyday life.

To discuss performance, Schechner uses two models, the web and the fan. The fan presents performance as an organized spectrum of categories, and the web reveals the dynamic influences and interconnections. In the fan model, the further one moves up the fan, the more orderly the function of performance, and the lower, the more free and disorderly. The opposing ends of the fan meet, however, as the establishment of a new ritual, which requires a great deal of play and freedom, then becomes a new structure of order. The web model is structured around item (5), which is Schechner’s own background. This is not an indication of bias, but rather perspective, as it his vantage point.

Approaches

Schechner opens this chapter by critiquing an approach to classical Greek theatre, called the Cambridge thesis. This thesis aims to discern the origin of theatre, and the emergence of comedy and tragedy. The Cambridge thesis asserts that both tragedy and comedy evolved from specific rituals. Tragedy comes from the dithyramb, and comedy comes from phallic dances, both of which emerged from some “primal ritual”. This assertion is dubious for a variety of reasons, not least being the absence of any evidence for a primal ritual. Furthermore, rituals do not seem to have much in common with theatre that would indicate the emergence of one from the other. Schechner is not interested in supplying a new origin theory, and is critical of the use of origin theories toward the understanding of theatre. Instead, he is interested in what theatre might have in common with ritual characteristically.

Schechner unites several groups of performance under the same heading: play, games, sports, theatre, and ritual. These share four important qualities: a special ordering of time, a special value attached to objects, non productivity in terms of goods, and rules. (p. 8) Time may be understood as structured in terms of events, which must be completed no matter how long they take. Time may be set, which is an imposed fixed clock time, creating antagonism between the activity and the clock. Time may be symbolic, where the activity represents something happening in a different ordering or flow of time, where time is simply considered differently. While these varying perspectives are distributed among the types of activities described, all are present in digital games. Objects within these performances take on new and special meanings, and their value within the context of the performance may be entirely different than outside. In a ball game, the ball is of crucial and extreme importance, but outside it is inexpensive and has little practical value. The non productivity of performance is in common with what Huizinga and Callois say about games, however Schechner notes some challenges. Performance in theatre has some productive capacity, it fills a theatre house and makes money, sports games are extremely lucrative. However, nothing material is actually produced in the performance itself. Rules apply because performances are activities apart from everyday life. Rules are most notable in the context of games, but also operate in theatre as well. Despite the magnitude of performances, rules are generally held to be the same. The players in a major league baseball game may be better than in a sandlot game, but the rules that govern their conduct are the same nonetheless. Rules are not only designed to tell the players how to play, but how to keep the play space safe against encroachment from the outside.

Play and ritual are seen as opposing ends of performance, but they are still similar. Play is intrinsically motivated, while ritual is extrinsically motivated. The role of freedom is described in positive and negative terms. In performance, constraints are layers, but at the center is always some sort of freedom. The example Schechner gives to illustrate this point is of a theatre performance, where an actor is first confined by the physical space, then by the conventions of theatre, then by the drama or script, then by the instructions from the director, but finally, underneath all of that, the actor has freedom. The relationship between these is what Shechner describes as the axiom of frames. When an outer frame is looser, then the inner frame must be tighter, and vice versa. An example is when a theatrical performance has a very rigid script, then the actor’s freedom within that is more important. Or when the actor has a great deal of freedom, as in improvisational theatre, the conventions used become important.

Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance

The rituals and scripts used in Paleolithic times were not modes of thinking, but patterns of doing. With Greek theatre, this came to be reversed: action was understood abstractly. Modern theatre is moving to reverse this once again, it loosens the matter of exact presentation, and comes to focus again on doing. Schechner examines the relationship between drama, script, theatre, and performance as concentric rings, with performance as the widest, most encompassing and loosely defined thing on the outside, with drama as the tightest and most delineated thing and is the smallest circle on the inside.

• Drama is the smallest and most intense circle. A drama is independent of the people who carry it, and it may be carried between places and times. Even if the people who perform the drama do not comprehend it, the drama remains preserved.
• Script is all that can be transmitted between places and times. The script is the code of events, and is transmitted between people. The transmitter must know the script and be able to teach it to others.
• Theatre is the event that is enacted by the performers. This is what the performers do during production. The theatre is concrete, present, and immediate. The theatre is meant to be the manifestation of the drama, but it is an articulation and concretization of it.
• Performance is the whole constellation of events that take place in and among the performers and the audience. This is all encompassing and inclusive, containing all of that which is not determined by the script or drama.

Schechner gives another brief summary of the terms: “To summarize thus far: the drama is what the writer writes; the script is the interior map of a particular production; the theatre is the specific set of gestures performed by the performers in any given performance; the performance is the whole event, including audience and performers (technicians, too, anyone who is there).” (p. 87) It is difficult to define performance because of its flexible and permeable boundaries. In public performances, such as celebrations, festivals, and the like, it is easy to shift between being a performer and a spectator.

Another useful framing: performance is “Ritualized behavior conditioned/permeated by play.” (p. 99) This is used to consider performance as a general animal phenomenon. However, Schechner argues that self awareness and cultural transmission are necessary for performance. Play is arguably derived from real life systems, but real systems would not exist without play and freedom to establish them. Schechner borrows from Huizinga in looking at play. Play behavior is derived from hunting and violent/combative activities, but these are also forms of play. The relationship between these activities and play is seen as a sequence of cycles. Playing/hunting leads to ritual/playing, to drama/ritual, to hunting/drama, back to playing/hunting. Rituals and dramas are generally crisis oriented. Crises are moments where balance and order are threatened and must be restored. Although it is arguable that many social rituals exist to maintain order, as opposed to restoring it.

Selective Inattention

Schechner discusses social drama, and borrows a diagram from Victor Turner. I do not know if it appears in Turner’s book, so I am reproducing it here. Schechner’s goal is to take that concept and integrate it with aesthetic drama. Turner’s cycle works in four stages: 1) breach, 2) crisis, 3) redressive action, 4) reintegration. This structure works to maintain social function and consistency. Theatrical tragedy follows this cycle with some degree of accuracy. However, in tragedy, the redressive actions usually wind up leaving the protagonists dead. The “infinity diagram” demonstrates how social drama turns to affect theatrical drama, and social drama also takes on the form of the theatrical.

This book is about the linguistics of writing. Generally, linguistics is centered around the language of speech, and neglects the characteristics of writing. I was interested in this book from two main perspectives. The first is the consideration of written text for analysis. The second is the purpose of developing some sort of writing system for character communication within a simulated world. An in-world language is arguably necessary, (as discussed in Crawford), but is an enormously risky venture, fraught with problems and difficulties. Sampson does not provide clear answers to these questions, but does provide a vocabulary and method for thinking about them cohesively.

Linguistics has classically ignored written language in favor of speech. This division comes from several philosophical perspectives. speech and langauge play an important part in the development of parts of the brain in evolution, and this evolutionary root underscores the importance of speech to language. Writing is a cultural development, and its influence becomes the strongest after the invention of print. Writing is still very important culturally. Sampson’s thesis question is to develop a linguistics of writing.

Three categories of study must be distinguished around writing: typology, history, and psychology. Typology deals with form: what types of written languages are there. The types of written languages, as played out in alphabets and such, are often determined by cultural differences. An example is the adoption of Roman versus Cyrillic alphabets in Eastern Europe. The spoken languages are similar, but the alphabets are divided along the line of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. The history of writing examines how writing changes. The historical development of writing is different from the historical development of speech, as can be seen to play out in spelling, conventions, and the like. Sampson makes an interesting argument about the value of writing. The linguistics of speech avoids declarations of value to ways of speaking. It is inappropriate to argue that one spoken language is better than another, because value is determined within a culture, and cannot be asserted externally. However, writing does not face this problem. Writing is a tool like any other, and writing systems may have more or less value depending on the circumstances of their use.

Sampson introduces a vocabulary for discussing writing. “I shall use the terms script, writing-system, or orthography, to refer to a given set of written marks together with a a particular set of conventions for their use.” (p. 19) Orthography has much to do with conventions beyond the actual symbols themselves. A language and a script are often conflated, but they are different. Writing is not the same as the transcription of speech, and this is due to the conventions of use. Writing operates according to different grammatical rules and conventions. Multiple scripts may be used to write for one language, and one script may be used for multiple languages as well. The units of writing are graphs. Sampson argues against the use of the terms symbols, characters, letters, and the like, due to their inspecificity. Sampson defines writing itself is a system for communicating using “permanant, visible marks”.

There are to major kinds of writing systems: semasiographic and glottographic. The former uses images with conventions of reading and interpretation. This can be translated into a spoken language, but not read directly. Semasiographic scripts are not normally understood as writing, but are pervasive in communication. Visual illustrations to convey instructions are semasiographic. More poignantly, mathematics is a semasiographic system. These are generally passed over in favor of glottographic systems. There is a lot to be said for semasiographic systems in digital media, and Crawford’s early work using sentence construction belongs in this category. It is interesting to note that semasiographic symbols may have “names”, or translations, which convey how to read the individual icon, but the entire system is still semasiographic because even witht the names, the text cannot be simply read.

Sampson divides glottographic systems into logographic and phonographic subcategories. He notably eschews the term “ideographic” because it is unclear. Logographic systems are similar to semasiographic systems in that they are pictoral, but they are not meant to be interpreted or translated explicitly. Spoken language is “double articulated”, according to Andre Martinet: It articulates thoughts into units, and then provides vocal codes for these units. Thus, a written language that can be read may articulate either the vocal codes, or the units of thought themselves. A pictographic language uses images to designate words is logographic. Phonographic scripts represent the actual phonetic symbols in the words, and generally letters are used to denote vocal sounds.

Systems may be classified according to a couple more principles. Systems may be motivated (iconic) or arbitrary. This difference applies to both phonetic and logographic scripts. A motivated phonetic alphabet will have like-sounding characters resemble each other, while a motivated ideographic script might have graphs which resemble the things they are supposed to represent. Systems may also be complete or incomplete (defective). Completeness relies on the capacity of the written language to carry across the range of expression in the actual language. It is relatively straightforward to see how ideographic scripts may be incomplete, but phonographic languages may be incomplete in other respects as well. English writing is unable to carry through in script the various vocal intonations that might be associated with a sentence. In human speech, intonation can carry across much important data.

Having discussed these fundamental points, Sampson reviews many different written languages. Only a few of these were really noteworthy, so I will examine those here:

The first case study is of Sumerian writing. This was developed for the highly specialized purpose of recording transactions. It is composed of both motivated and arbitrary graphs: Many transactions were written with an image denoting the object being bought or sold, and a number, the components of which are arbitrary in comparison. Because writing was specialized and intended for this very specific purpose, it is difficult to consider it incomplete. Sampson makes a brilliant analogy to computer programming. One usually does not say that a programming language is incomplete because it cannot express Tennyson. The both programming languages and Sumerian cuneiform emerged to fill particular needs. Sampson also compares the transaction writing to a kind of mnemonic, like a note that one might jot down in a calendar, which is adistillation of a sentence into its salient elements.

Consonantal writing is phonographic orthography without vowels, as is the case in Hebrew script. Generally, context is sufficient for determining the meaning of ambiguous terms. However, the language has low redundancy. The term of redundancy is borrowed from Shannon and Weaver, and is a property of information theory. “A system possessing relatively high redundancy is one where, in an average signal, the identity fo any given part of the signal is relatively easy to predict given the rest of the signal. Suppose that a policeman telephones to give you details of a suspect who needs to be looked out for, but because the line is bad you hear only some of the letters and numbers as they are spelled out: you hear the suspect’s name is F*ANK DAW*ON and his car registration is OWY 9*8P.” The suspect’s name in this example is easy to determine because English names have high redundancy. Car registrations have low redundancy, so the missing digit is impossible to reconstruct. Redundancy is an important consideration in written text, as well as in the laanguage used to communicate itself.

In terms of alphabet and construction, Han’gul composes graphs according to phonetic differences and is clearly differentiated. Graphemes map to phonemes, and similar phonemes have similar graphemes and vice versa. Syllables are organized into larger structures through construction. The tying of these graphs together is powerful for phonetics, but for language construction, I need a semantic system for developing a composed language.

Jan Fergus: The Professional Woman Writer

Jane Austen is important because she is not only a woman writer, but a professional writer. The context of being a woman writer was especially different in Austen’s lifetime, but was better than it had been before. There were still numerous setbacks: the legal challenges regarding women and money were numerous, and the culture suggested that if a woman did write, it was as a leisure activity. The image of Austen being a leisure writer is false, but was persistent, and this led to many criticisms. The “leisure writer”, as a stereotype, was someone who wrote without education or learning, passionless, writing to stave off idleness. Austen was passionate about her work and motivated from childhood to see her writing in print.

One reason why the leisure writer image might be so persistent is that the idea of someone who is able to write during leisure time and achieve wild success is an identifiable image. The image is one which readers, especially over the course of time, might appreciate and idealize. This identifiability might be one of the reasons for the fan culture that surrounds her.

Due to the costs and mechanisms of publishing, generally writers needed to write in addition to some other income. However, Austen shrewdly managed to support herself through writing alone, which was very unusual, and is indicative of a significant professionalism.

Rachel M. Brownstein: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice

Mr. Bennett’s line that we live to make fun of our neighbors is complex and reveals Austen’s irony. Mr. Bennett’s viewpoint is one to be condemned, and it seems insufficient in context of the complex social life played out in the novel. However, this perspective is one supported by the world itself, where characters gossip and are very interested in each others’ fortunes. Following along the lines of class and status, others misfortunes are pleasing to hear, because they elevate the listener in a somewhat “moral” sense.

From the perspective of model building and world design, this leads to an interesting challenge. The content of the world is supported by these mechanics, of traditional social roles and narratives. Within the world, there is a model of correct or proper behavior. This behavior is consistent with Mr. Bennett’s view, that individuals act in self interest, and take what opportunities are presented to them. Unhappy marriages are normal, but they are proper, where the marriage serves a social function in the interest of some concerned parties. Thus, to live a happy life, against all odds, the mechanics of proper behavior must be broken. This is equivalent to placing mechanics in a game world that make the game easier, but make the resolution less satisfying. This is much like Mirror’s Edge with guns, and Geneforge with canisters. Using these mechanics both rewards and punishes the player, but in a way to elicit some authorial commentary on their role in life.

The breaking of rules exhibited in Pride and Prejudice is a form of ironic commentary by Austen on the codes of social expectations and values in her world. The form of these texts (Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice) is that of a “romantic novel with ironic commentary”. This sounds like a great design idea. There is a delicate relationship between common tropes, conventions, and cliches within romance and common life. The texts operate against these, by breaking rules, but ultimately will come back and support them.

There is an interesting perspective on the intimacy of the characters of Elizabeth and Darcy. While much of the world is public, their interaction is personal and intimate, and the efforts made in the novel to drive the characters apart serve to reinforce their intimacy. The course of the book is essentially anti-gothic. The gothic tradition frequently involves the female protagonist visiting a historical and secret space, and finding depth in herself by responding to some terrifying thing found in there. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s visit to Pemberly reveals the depth in Darcy’s character hitherto unseen, Elizabeth being a deep character already.

The first two proposals in Pride and Prejudice that Elizabeth rejects are similar because they reinforce the thesis described by the first line of the book. They assume that Elizabeth operates according to the social expectations of the world, expecting only to marry well, not concerned with her own identity and happiness.

Brownstein concludes that even for all fo Elizabeth’s iconoclasty, she enjoys in gossip and delighting in the news of her neighbors as well. Elizabeth claims that the moment of persuasion of her own love for Darcy occurred at seeing Pemberly. We are not so different from our neighbors, but where we are different is of crucial importance.

Juliet McMaster: Class

This chapter discusses class differences in Austen’s books. Austen was well poised to observe the interplay of different classes. Her friends and family gave her access to witness different class interactions, and as an unmarried woman, she was “out of the game”, where married women would adopt the class of their husbands. Social class is predominantly a masculine trait, and used to rank men in terms of their social influence. Class was also universally acknowledged and played a visible role in interactions. While the American class system is important, it attempts to be covert.

The first layer of class (that is present in Austen’s writing anyway) has to do with titles, which should ideally be inherited. Ancestry is the foundation upon which the entire class system is built. It arguably the case that the emphasis on ancestry has to do with proximity to royalty. Personal titles (Sir, from a knighthood) are valuable, but less significant because they are not inherited. Women may also be titled, but this again comes from lineage.

Land and money are important, but not nearly as much as a title. Land is the next most significant class indicator after titles. The value of land depends on primarily how long it has been owned, the size and income of the estate come in at a distant second. This is what separates both Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bennett, though the difference between them is still significant (more so due to the entailment). This fact is noted in Elizabeth’s rebuttal to Lady Catherine, that Darcy is a gentleman and Elizabeth is a gentleman’s daughter. This is a flattening of the class landscape that Austen seems to approve of.

There is an implied moral status tied to land ownership. Money from investments and business is good, but not nearly so much as land. The professional class comes next, and there is an implied order from the clergy, navy, army, law, and then medicine. Afterward comes trade, and finally the servants and working class. Most of Austen’s characters come from the gentry class and its many strata, though there are a few notable characters of various reputations in the professional class, and a few others in trade. There is an absence of servants and other workers which seems conspicuous by modern standards. Austen is arguably intrigued by the trading classes, and not inherently prejudiced against it.

Austen is suspicious of those interested in social mobility and looking to move up ranks (the Bingley sisters, for example). This is a trait of character which is considered morally reprehensible. These characters are concerned with elevation, and not with manners or conduct. There is an association between morals and class, which is “universally acknowledged” but revealed to be flawed. Characters look to class first as an indication of character, but only thereafter observe actual moral behavior.

Edward Copeland: Money

There is a review of levels of money here. Money is a crucial element to Austen’s world, and this essay gives a review of the various levels of income and what they mean. I won’t review these here, but note that they are on pages 135-137. There is an interesting relation between women and money. Unmarried women had restricted rights in terms of their ability to own land and manage their income, but the situation was worse for married women, who could not legally own property or have legal title to money at all. Furthermore, married women were considered responsible for management of the household, but (because they had no rights) were unable to exercise control over their income and expenditures. When husbands squander money (Wickham, for example) the wife is held responsible for the mess. The fear of financial loss is an important motive for Austen because of her own particular financial situation.

John F. Burrows: Style

The use of free indirect speech sets up an interaction, a dialogue, between the narrative voice and the storyworld. The authorial voice is ironic and encourages readers to keep up their wits and approach the social world in the texts with a critical perspective. Burrows references Bakhtin in his portrayal of the dialogue between these voices.

Claudia L. Johnson: Austen cults and cultures

There is an interesting criticism by Henry James, that Austen was admired by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Austen is extended and adapted in many forms. Interestingly, she is now incorporated into the self definitions of many diverse groups and individuals, often using opposing perspectives. Austen is incorporated by both escapists and realists, iconoclasts and conventionalists, connoisseurs and common readers. This wide adoption makes it difficult to extract the “real” Austen from those who have adopted her.

The author refers to a short story by Kipling, “The Janeites”, which is about a group of WWI soldiers who are Austen fanatics and treat Jane Austen as a way of life. The interesting thing about the story is that the characters are preoccupied with the world, but not the plots. They use the Austen model of the world, casting other characters in terms of the characters known from the books. They use the atemporal narration, and resist the sense of plot which demands forward movement and temporal causality. Austen is considered intrinsic to the classic English cultural identity before the first World War. And was thus an anchor to hold onto by soldiers whose cultural identity was under threat.

The Janeite manner of reading is presented as a practice, a practice of interpretations. This extends the text beyond the textual boundary, into a world defined by events, characters, and shared meanings. Johnson connects to Henry Jenkins, reinforcing that the culture of Jane Austen is a fan culture, but one whose material is popular as well as high.