Useful Words Thread

[John Brindle]

This is a thread for words which are useful or interesting to use in game criticism. They can be from any source and any discipline, but ideally they should not be commonly-used ones, and your post should explain why you think they are useful or interesting.

because there is no edit function here, all submitted words will be added to a google document which anyone can edit:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ApCu39lbZwWedGtoeUNhN191N3dtdm5mbjdqUkFzSXc&usp=sharing

Have fun!

[John Brindle]

I would like to begin with some useful offshoots from the diegetic branch!

• Diegesis: a term from ancient Greek storytelling which originally means 'narration'. Narratology - the broader humanities field, not the game-crit-debate sub-school - has uses the term to mean, 'the fictional world'. Something which is diegetic exists in the fictional world being suggested or presented. In film, for example, sound and music which exists fictionally is diegetic music (e.g. 'Ride of the Valkyries' in Apocalypse Now), whereas a film score would not be.

Dan Pinchbeck, of Dear Esther fame, developed this in his PhD thesis into a quite versatile framework for thinking about the way in which 'narrative' interacts with gameworlds.Robert Yang did a great summary/write-up of this thesis for easy reading. Broadly, Pinchbeck defines:

• Ludodiegetic. Things which are game/system elements and which are part of the fictional world depicted. Healthpacks are an example of this, as are guns, shooting, enemies shooting at you, etc.
• Heterodiegetic. Things included in the system world but which are not 'supposed' to be fictionally 'real'. They've got one foot in both worlds. Loot glint, objective arrows, hints at the bottom of the screen.
• Non-ludodiegetic. Things wot are in the game but in no way implied to be part of the world. Quicksaving, menu screens.

I think I've got this right. Yang outlines a lot of provisos and complications. 

When I thought about this I realised that I was talking around the subject all the time in my games writing. eg in a post I did about the weird ways people play immersive sims, a lot of it was concerned with the relationship between the world the player is imagining and how the game maps to that imagination with its feedback/affordances. e.g. talking about players who 'ghost' in Thief, I found that some ghosts valued the diegetic over the ludo and others the ludo over the diegetic. This was most visible in connection to spiders: some said "I don't count spiders as 'spotting me' for the purposes of my ghost run, because, come on, they're just spiders." Others said "I count spiders, spiders cannot see me" and went so far towards that goal that they discovered spiders in Thief actually see backwards, from their buttholes. I call this fact "blatantly heterodiegetic", because it is part of the system (presumably a glitch/bug) but definitely not part of any narrative.

While we're at it:

• Affordance. The extent to which the design and properties of an object make different actions easier or harder. An object's affordances are its possibility space, what the object allows and disallows, what it incentivises (through ease) or disincentivises (through difficulty), and what properties of the object lead to this distribution. This has obvious applications to game systems, which are objects which afford us different options to different extents!

Affordance is a great way to get around the problem of how an object (like a game) can be said to have a 'purpose' or 'meaning' without falling back on the idea that its maker defines its meaning (problematic, considering how things escape our intentions) or the idea that it has some intrinsic purpose (defined by God?? What is this substance, 'purpose'?) . i.e. how do you decouple the idea of purpose/meaning from intention (at the one end) or teleology (at the other?). One way is to say that, given a certain context, in this case the human universe of physical and mental capabilities etc etc, meaning and purpose emerges from the extent to which objects afford certain uses. This also allows exegesis of what effects things actually have, subversive readings, and unintended consequences.

My reading of this term as an 'escape' from a theoretical trap, a baby/bathwater separator, is influenced by my approach to literature in texts. In literary theory, it's clear that author intention doesn't necessarily mean shit, and on the other hand that words don't actually have some magical intrinsic meaning which lies within them like a soul. Nevertheless, what allows us to continue making statements about what texts mean (albeit with more complications and qualifications) is the fact that, given a cultural context, different arrangements of signs clearly have properties which make them 'readable' in specific ways. Certain arrangements are more or less readable as having certain meanings, and more or less readable than other arrangements to that end. To me, 'affordance' resembles exactly this theoretical manoeuvre - but applied to objects instead of to writing. And then, when you consider that writing is also an object, the distinction dissolves. Woohoo! 

[John Brindle]

P.P.P.P.P.S. This thread is also for telling me that I am wrong about the usage/origin/implications of any given term, and potentially telling others the same thing! But if an in-depth debate is likely, that should probably be split off into a different thread.
 

[Brian Taylor]

have you been reading Umberto Eco

On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 10:36 AM, John Brindle <bull...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I would like to begin with some useful offshoots from the diegetic branch!
>

> Diagesis: a term from ancient Greek storytelling which originally means

> 'narration'. Narratology - the broader humanities field, not the

> game-crit-debaqte sub-school - has uses the term to mean, 'the fictional

> world'. Something which is diegetic exists in the fictional world being
> suggested or presented. In film, for example, sound and music which exists
> fictionally is diegetic music (e.g. 'Ride of the Valkyries' in Apocalypse
> Now), whereas a film score would not be.
>
> Dan Pinchbeck, of Dear Esther fame, developed this in his PhD thesis into a
> quite versatile framework for thinking about the way in which 'narrative'

> interacts with gameworlds. Robert Yang did a great summary/write-up of this

[Tommy Rousse]

Eyeball butthole spiders.  Nice.

[Brendan Keogh]

I'm a huge fan of talking about affordances. Wherever possible, I avoid saying videogames have 'rules' because I'm really not happy with using that word when it comes to videogames for a number of reasons. Simply, rules tend to be things a game's player can ignore if they really want (and really want to be a jerk), and they are also things a game's player has to learn before playing the game. But 'rules' in videogames are embedded properties in a world that function the way they function whether the player wants them to or not. This is why I think affordances (along with its partner 'constraints') is a much better term. It implies a possibility space that the player remains within, without implying the player can only do exactly what they are told. This is super simplistic, but I love this Chris DeLeon blog post that states the point very succinctly: http://www.hobbygamedev.com/spx/games-are-artificial-videogames-are-not-games-have-rules-videogames-do-not/ Though he doesn't use the word 'affordances' (but that's totally what he is getting at).

I don't have other words to add for now. I just wanted to get on #TeamAffordances

[John Brindle]

Huh that is a super interesting article. Been thinking along the same lines re the difference between videogames and other games (as it's a longstanding critical orthodoxy to equate them), but have been phrasing it in terms of 'automation' of rules, ie the computer is an Other which performs and enforces the rules for you.

Here's a couple of useful things, which are probably known to many but rarely used in game studies:

• Deformance. 'Performing' a deformation of a text in order to reveal something about it or highlight something in a new way. Term was coined by Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, and summarised/problematised by Mark Sample here. 

In the context of videogames this could mean all sorts of things - from 'counter-play' like that of the guy who revealingly deformed Sim City - to accidents of hardware, like the way my shitty computer slows Hotline Miami right down and in doing so reveals what close, intense control it gives to the player. I don't think this word is actually necessarily that useful - I find it slightly silly - but the critical method is potentially really interesting.

[Nick Capozzoli]

It does strike me as a little redundant (deconstruction? parsing? reverse-engineering?). And though the 2nd link seems to try to "reclaim" it, I find that it's a bit inseparable from its crooked, misshapen, disfigured connotations.

Perhaps it helps the word's utility when it comes to happy video game accidents? It'd seem an apt descriptor for your Hotline Miami example, I think. Less-so the SimCity one.

[Dan Golding]

Speaking as someone who is writing a PhD thesis on game spatiality and as someone who uses Dan Pinchbeck's work a fair bit, I have to note here that I actually don't think that terms like 'ludodiegesis' are actually very useful — except perhaps when talking about Pinchbeck's own work. Especially in non-academic critical work, I can't imagine a situation where I'd want to say something was ludodiegetic instead of simply saying something like, "it's part of the fictional world of the game".

They may be cute neologisms, but I'm just not sure that the level of precision they grant (not much, in my opinion, unless you're in a scholarly context that requires highly frequent delineation between types of diegesis) is worth the trade-offs on accessibility and readability.

My criticisms here do not apply across the board, though. 'Diegesis' and 'affordance' are very useful, in part due to the fact that the barrier they present to accessibility isn't unreasonably high.

On Monday, February 25, 2013 2:04:02 AM UTC+11, John Brindle wrote:

[psepho]

This is an excellent thread and I have already used a new word. Despite being a classicist originally, I didn't know (or had forgotten?) the term 'diegetic' -- very useful indeed and just the right tool for the job.

[Brian Taylor]

One time I used diegetic in a review of asuras wrath because that game is totally fascinating in how it fucks with nondiegetic representations of diegetic effects (health bars specifically)

[John Brindle]

Some more words:

• exoludic - coined by Porpentine to refer to when a game asks you to do stuff outside the computer program. e.g. Oh My Gorgons tells you you have to close your eyes when within line of sight of the enemies.
• optimality/incidentiality - I used these in my article about Pippin Barr's Art Game, although I also said they have complications and problems. See also this storify. Optimality is the extent to which/ways in which a system allows winning and losing, allows players to optimise towards given outcomes. Incidentiality is the extent to which/ways in which interactions in a system are 'incidental' to broader outcomes. Obvious objections and qualifications do not, I think, make these any less potentially useful.
  
• QWOP (as a verb) - to make something complicated which was formerly taken for granted. eg Receiver qwops firearms, Cart Life qwops in-game shop transactions. Kinda silly but I feel like I wanna spread it around lol
  

[Alan Williamson]

Sorry, don't think I can handle 'qwop' as a verb.

[Cameron Kunzelman]

I really like qwop as a verb SO TAKE THAT ALAN

[Daniel Nye Griffiths]

Verbing qwops qwop?