Introduction to Game ResearchIntroduction to Game Research

2010Lecture in the course International Game Production Studies I

Mirjam Palosaari EladhariGotland University, Sweden

2010Lecture in the course International Game Production Studies I

Mirjam Palosaari EladhariGotland University, Sweden

Overview

- Research

- A new field?

- The growth of the game research field

- Approaches

- Examples

A little about meDr. Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari is associate professor at the GAMEdepartment of Gotland University.  Mirjam's main area of research isAI-driven game design. The research approach she has adopted includesexploration of the social multi-player game-design space throughexperimental implementations of prototypes where both novel andestablished AI-techniques are used. Her dissertation work (2009)explored characterization and story construction in MMO’s focusingsemi-autonomous avatars. Before Mirjam went into research (2003) shewas lead game programmer at Liquid Media in Stockholm. Her first brushwith game research was in the applied research studio Zero-Game of theInteractive Institute in Sweden where she was technical lead (2004)

• Academic bg: computing science, literary studies, behavioural studies

Basic research

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

Applied research

the search for knowledge or as any systematic investigation to establish facts.

The primary purpose for applied research (as opposed to basic research) is discovering, interpreting, and the development of methods and systems for the advancement of human knowledge on a wide variety of scientific matters of our world and the universe.

• The quest for new knowledge

• Sharing to advance field

• Validity - repeatability

New?Common to argue that games are a new field. Both as art form and as industry.

This is FALSE. Not true. !=

•

•

•

New?Common to argue that games are a new field. Both as art form and as industry.

This is FALSE. Not true. !=

• The oldest aretefacts of games are older than the first written stories.

•

•

Earliest game and literary work

Senet

3500 BC

Senet game, the Brooklyn Museum, New York City. Crypt of

Amenhotep III in Egypt

Epic of Gilgamesh

2100 BC

Clay tablet with the Epic of Gilgamesh (dated to ca 700

BC)

New?Common to argue that games are a new field. Both as art form and as industry.

This is FALSE. Not true. !=

• The oldest aretefacts of games are older than the first written stories.

• The industry isn’t that young anymore.

•

• Supressed slide (PH’08)

New?Common to argue that games are a new field. Both as art form and as industry.

This is FALSE. Not true. !=

• The oldest artefacts of games are older than the first written stories.

• The industry isn’t that young anymore.

• Game research as a field however, is not very old. (old method though in military tradition)

Kriegsspiel (1812)

Kriegsspiel, from the German word for wargame, was a system used for training officers in the Prussian army. The first set of rules was created in 1812[1] and named Instructions for the Representation of Tactical Maneuvers under the Guise of a Wargame. It was originally produced and developed further by Lieutenant Georg Leopold von Reiswitz and his son Georg Heinrich Rudolf von Reiswitz of the Prussian Army.[1]

http://www.boardgamestudies.info/pdf/issue3/BGS3Hilgers.pdf

Taktischer Kriegsspielapparat, von Domänen- und Kriegsrat Georg Leopold Baron von

Reiswitz für Friedrich Wihelm III entworfen und 1812 angefertigt. Siftung Preußischer

Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg (Foto Roman März, Berlin). 

Early ’serious game’

SituatingGame research

Game Industry Game Hobbyists

Game Research

Success criteria

Make good games. Sell them.

Pursue own passionate interest.

New knowledge. Understand games and

understand how to make better games.

Resources Large Small Medium

Testing Yes – rigorous Seldom Yes – rigorous

Freedom to share knowledge No – constrained YES YES

• Pre-history: Anthropology and sociology (early study on native americans’ games, Callios, Huizinga)

• Study of digital games, in the beginning: Stigma

• Fields: CS (Hci and AI), Ethnology, Drama = fields that already had tools possible to tweak towards games.

• Then: oh, money! (important trigger: study that showed that game industry exceeded Hollywood box-office income)

• Then: “serious” games

• For some: a necessary rhetoric to keep going

• For others: a sudden new opportunity

• And for some: genuine interest

The growth of the GR field (1)

The growth of the GR field (2)

Early fields:

• Narrative (Film, literary studies, dramaturgy) – Study of the dramaturgy in existing games.

• HCI (Human Computer Interaction). Study of interaction between player(s) and game

• Anthropology and sociology – Study of players in MUDs and live RP settings

These fields already had tools that ‘fitted’ research in games. (Read more: Chapter 6 in Designing Virtual Worlds, Bartle, 2003, New Riders)

The growth of the GR field (3)

• COSIGN 2001, the first international conference on Computational Semiotics for Games and New Media,.

• Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference 2002: Tampere, Finland (Digra was formed)

• Level Up | Gamesconference 2003, Utrecht, NetherlandsA research community was

born

Game researcher as the constant ’other’

• In academia: ”Games are not serious. They don’t cure cancers. And its popular cultur. Hardly worthy of interest”

• In industry: ”Game studies... They just waffle. Tell us how to do things when they don’t know the reality of development”.

• Negative patterns. ...Even in the subfield of AI there are polarities when people talk about ’game AI’ (”bah, just pathfinding and random seeds”) and ’academic AI’ (”bah, too heavy processing, useless if written in lisp, omg, i don’t need Deep Blue for this”.)

• But that’s only on the surface level! When you meet your peers you recognise them, no matter if they are in the industry, in research or hobbyists. That’s when you get down to buisness.

Now, annual and bi-annual conferences are

organised• International Conference on Advances in

Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE)

• International Conference on Entertainment Computing (ICEC)

• Future Play

• SIGGRAPH Games Focus, SIGGRAPH Sandbox

• Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA)

• Foundations for Digital Games (FDG)

Approaches

Social science approach

Studying the effects of games on peopleWhat do games do to people?E.g.: Learning, effects of violence in gamesHow do people create and negotiate a game?

Leadership Style in World of Warcraft Raid Guilds, Prax,

NordicDigra 2010

Study people

(players)

Example, Social Sciences tradition

Members of different types of guilds interviewed.Interviews with real-life leaders in different types of organisations. Big difference is that in a game the guild leader doesn’t have to report to anyone else, such as stockholders. Interviewed 6 leaders, but the useful ones in terms of similarity was the air-force and a student radio.

Approaches

Social science approach

Studying the effects of games on peopleWhat do games do to people?E.g.: Learning, effects of violence in gamesHow do people create and negotiate a game?

Humanities approach

Studying the meaning and context of gamesWhat meanings are made through game use?Studying games as artifacts in and of themselvesE.g.: Affordances of the medium, critical analysis, rhetoric

Mechanisms of the Soul – Tackling the Human Condition in Videogames, Doris Rusch, DIGRA 2009

ConclusionThis paper explored three ways in which games relate to thehuman condition and suggested three devices for thepurposeful design of games that teach us something aboutourselves. Device I “Fictional Alignment” focused onexpanding the emotional palette of games by aligning gamestructure and fictional theme. That way the affectivestrength of game emotions would carry the fiction, whilethe context provided by the fiction would alter the meaningof game emotions. Device II “Procedurality” referred togames’ potential to make statements about how things workby representing processes with processes. Proceduralexpression is a terrific tool to enhance our understanding ofthe social, mental and psychological processes that underlieour believes, behaviors and relationships towards the worldaround us. However, [...]

Example, Humanistic tradition

Study existing

games to get better

understanding

Approaches

Social science approach

Studying the effects of games on peopleWhat do games do to people?E.g.: Learning, effects of violence in gamesHow do people create and negotiate a game?

Humanities approach

Studying the meaning and context of gamesWhat meanings are made through game use?Studying games as artifacts in and of themselvesE.g.: Affordances of the medium, critical analysis, rhetoric

Technological approach (Industry and engineering approach)

Understanding the design and development of gamesE.g.: How to make better gamesGames as drivers of technological innovationsE.g.: Graphics, AI, networking, etc.

 'Multiparty Multimodal Dialogue Architecture with Realtime Turntaking‘

Kristinn R. Thórisson, Ólafur Gíslason, Gudny Jonsdottir, Hrafn Th. ThórissonIVA 2010

Example, Technological tradition

Building somethin

g new

A bit on method cross pollination

• Social Sciences (sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc)

• In social sciences games are treated like any other field – an anthropologist may go to Second Life just as well as to a suburban area of New York to study aspects of human behaviour.

• In AI, especially modelling if virtual agents and virtual environments theories from social sciences is used when modelling and building.

• In testing, HCI and other fields use methods for experiments developed in psychology (often social psychology)

• Cultural studies (Literary studies, film studies, dramaturgy, performance studies etc.

• Each field has their theorists, and share many theories. All about studying an already existing artefact or a type of artefact by studying different instantiations. Goal: to achieve greater understanding by using theories and other patterns of understanding as tools. Also, to see if current theories are enough to understand. If not: make new theories, frameworks, models.

• Technology (computing science with subfields)

• Bordering fields: Cognitive science, HCI, interaction studies.

Recap

• Social Science tradition: Study the human subject (the player)

• Cultural studies: Study the cultural artefact (the game)

• Technological tradition: Build something new; (a better way of doing something existing(faster, more accurate), or an innovation – partial or completely new)

•

Recap

• Social Science tradition: Study the human subject (the player)

• Cultural studies: Study the cultural artefact (the game)

• Technological tradition: Build something new; (a better way of doing something existing(faster, more accurate), or an innovation – partial or completely new)

• Missing: Art. Hardly represented at all. Direct Theory could be a promising approach to the field.

Game Design as a research area

• Historic debate. Common opinion that it is best to integrate game research as a subfield in already existing fields.

• Our stance: Games and Game design is a field of its own, that can use methods from other fields, as well as develop specific methods for games when necessary.

What this means for you.• Will you solve a problem? Which one? Will you ask/explore a

question? Which one? Now, how to best find the answers:

• Will you study or build?

• If you study; what to study

• the actual game or,

• players who play the game?

• If you build – what type of innovation?

• A better way of doing something?

• A new way of doing something?

If you build, how will you know if it is new? (:thorough review of field)

If you build, how will you know if it is better? Better how? (test it.)

Example: Study players• You are intrigued by how people cooperate in groups in MMOs.

• You study the field:

• Look at other writings on groupings in MMO’sWhen you play, you pay close attention to how people behaveYou read up on group dynamics in psychology, and other relavant literature

• You sharpen your research question or thesis. You pick your field (what MMO, what types of players, W1st or general etc)

• You design your own study. This can be done in many different ways. Perhaps you consider:

• Creating a specific scenario that you enact (ie you try to control the experiment. For example, to run the same dungeon over and over again with different or same patterns. You work out a way to deal with the ethics – your participants need to know they are part of an experiment.

• Making deep iterviews with a small number of players. You wonder if a small sample of players will say something about *general* behaviors, so when you have some theories you make a survey and get a massive amount of players to answer your questions.

• Asking the developers for logs of RT data that you then can build filters for, in order to pull out potential behavioral patterns. You find it difficult to find the right persons who can grant you access to the data, but finally you succeed and get cracking on your data.

• You analyse your data. Perhaps the results wasn’t what you expected, and that makes it even more interesting.

• Your write up your results.

Social Sciences tradition

Example. Study artefacts.

• You want to know how different type of narrative elements are used in game worlds that has the same mythos, but are of different genres.

• Build or study? (How much time do I have?)

• Find object of study.

• WoW – as MMO, as board game, as novels and as pen&paper RPG.

• How study it? What parts to study? What theories can be useful as tools when I study it? (Be prepared to ditch theories if they don’t work – the question and the object of study must take precedence)

• Study it. Be prepared to reformulate your thesis.

• When you have studied it and analysed it, do you see better ways of doing it? (given that you are the only one who has studied this particular thing in your particular way, what you think will be interesting to others.) And: any news on Life, Universe and Everything?

Humanities tradition

Example: Build New• You want to explore ways of using EEG feedback as part of a game

design.

• You check out different EEG devices, and decide upon using one of them. (or several if you have person-hours for it)

• You check what others have done with game design and EEG. (You don’t want to repeat mistakes. You don’t want to spend time researching what is already known)

• You make an experimental game design using EEG input. (*This* is your theory/question/thesis – you propose a new way)

• You implement the game.

• You design a test for your game that can answer your questions using your game.

• You test. (Quantitative and/or Qualitative methods)

• You analyse and reflect. (How did it work? What can others use, what should others avoid?)

• You share your results, helping others with similar interests.

Engineering/ industry tradition

Links• Game Studies: The International

Journal of Computer Game Research (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_studies)

• DiGRA' digital library of game studies conference papers (http://www.digra.org/dl)

• More starting points at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_studies#External_links

Thank you for listening

Thank you for listening