Interests

Research Statement

My research interests focus on the nature of games (and related computational artifacts) as systems of representation and aesthetic experience. My dissertation applied a modal Peircean semiotics to game analysis as an alternative to those models which, implicitly or explicitly, make sharp distinctions between the referential and mechanical aspects of digital games. Other work has focused on aspects of authored meaning and designed experience, with some focus on games from Japan and their relationship to its historical and cultural contexts.

Projects

I have three active research projects at the current time. They share an interest in questions of the interpretation of games as meaningful play-systems, and in an interdisciplinary approach to methods.

Political ontologies / games as epistemic systems

Games and simulations of society, history and politics involve models which posit certain entities: e.g., the citizen, the nation, wealth, the dynasty, territory, the polis. Often these models also evoke the political by defining other entities at its edges: the migrant, the indigenous, the climate.  These entities, as well as the processes predicated of them, constitute political ontologies. While the Westphalian nation-state is the most widely deployed entity in games (consider the ethno-national unit at the center of the Civilization series), designers such as Volko Ruhnke and Alfred Twu, and the creators of many “Eurogames”, have built upon different ontologies.

This project analyses the ontological assumptions and design decisions in extant games, and maps Adams and Dormans’ catalog of game design patterns[1] onto those historical, social and political processes, as a toolkit for serious game design for policy, pedagogy and activism. While previous attempts to apply game design patterns to serious games exist[2] these are often focused on conventional pedagogical settings, and have focused on the function of the mechanics to deliver didactic content. In contrast, my approach understands the mechanics described by the design patterns as knowledge-claims, not simply vehicles of delivery.

Empirical/historical game aesthetics

In the past five years, there has been some attempt at aligning game studies with aesthetic theory. Most attempts to isolate a native aesthetics for digital games are based on claims about general features posited to be universal to digital games. My approach is both empirical—looking for terms of distinction and labels of experience drawn from player discourse—and historical, with new categories coming into existence with the appearance of new games and genres. This project consists of a series of studies which describe and analyze experience identified within the reception of games “in the wild,” among players. Terms such as “twitch” and “grind” designate forms of player experience which should be understood as aesthetic, forms which emerge historically as genres develop, which produce player discourses distinguishing between better and worse design implementations for these categories.

Augmenting traditional historical and theoretical approaches to the study of these experiences, I use methods developed as a member of the software studies initiative at UC San Diego[3]. Computer-vision tools locate the elements which abet different modes of player experience within transcriptions of gameplay.

Intellectual history of play

The study of games takes place under a range of disciplines: HCI, anthropology, film and media studies, psychology, computer science, literary studies, and more. From these, game studies and games research have cohered into a somewhat stable meta-discipline since the 1990s, hand in hand with the emergence of degree programs meant to educate designers, programmers and artists to create digital games for a growing industry. Notwithstanding, there have been earlier iterations of scholarship and serious thought about games and play, and little work in locating contemporary games research and thinking with them. The project would consist of a series of collaborations with cultural historians and other game scholars with expertise on specific languages and historical epochs to produce an intellectual history for games and play. The texts would be those in which games and other play-forms are described, contextualized and interpreted:

Along with the translation and explication of historical texts on games (the first work on this, a collaboration with Riccardo Fassone, examined the games played in the salons of northern Italy in the 16th century[4] as described and reflected upon by noted Italian essayists of that time), we are reenacting the games, trying to reproduce the social and environmental contexts in which they were originally played. The first of these was a reenactment/play of “the game of Ridiculous Blasphemies” described in a 1581 text by Girolamo Bargagli[5]. The game was played at Svilupparty 2017, a public games festival in Bologna, Italy, and subsequently at the 2017 Games and Transgressive Aesthetics workshop. We mean to use these reenactments to help us understand the social, cultural, rhetorical and aesthetic functions of the games as played in their original contexts.

References

Adams, Ernest, and Joris Dormans. Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design. Berkeley: New Riders, 2012.

Arnab, Sylvester, Theodore Lim, Maira B. Carvalho, Francesco Bellotti, Sara de Freitas, Sandy Louchart, Neil Suttie, Riccardo Berta, and Alessandro De Gloria. “Mapping Learning and Game Mechanics for Serious Games Analysis.” British Journal of Educational Technology 46, no. 2 (March 1, 2015): 391–411. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12113.

Douglass, Jeremy, William Humberto Huber, and Lev Manovich. “Understanding Scanlation: How to Read One Million Fan-Translated Manga Pages.” Image and Narrative 12, no. 1 (2011): 190–227.

Girolamo Bargagli. Dialogo de’ giuochi che nelle vegghie sanesi si usano di fare. Venice: Alessandro Gardane, 1581.

Huber, William, and Riccardo Fassone. “Game Studies in the Cinquecento. Prolegomena to a Historical Analysis of the Rhetorics of Play.” Ludica. Annali Di Storia e Civiltà Del Gioco, no. 21–22 (2016).

Huber, William Humberto. “Catch and Release: Ludological Dynamics in Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly.” Loading... Journal of the Canadian Gaming Studies Organization 4, no. 6 (2010).

Lim, Theodore, Sandy Louchart, Neil Suttie, Jannicke Baalsrud Hauge, Ioana A. Stanescu, Francesco Bellotti, Maira B. Carvalho, et al. “Serious Game Mechanics, Workshop on the Ludo-Pedagogical Mechanism.” In Games for Training, Education, Health and Sports, 186–89. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Cham, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05972-3_19.

Suttie, Neil, Sandy Louchart, Theodore Lim, Andrew Macvean, Wim Westera, Damian Brown, and Damien Djaouti. “Introducing the ‘Serious Games Mechanics’ A Theoretical Framework to Analyse Relationships Between ‘Game’ and‘Pedagogical Aspects’ of Serious Games.” Procedia Computer Science, 4th International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications(VS-GAMES’12), 15, no. Supplement C (January 1, 2012): 314–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2012.10.091.

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