ludology

Disclaimer: I apologize if this seems fragmented. I'm writing this on a supply of allergy meds.

So, Markku Eskelinen and the ideas surrounding Ludology seem like a dead horse by now. We've already established that most--if not all--of us either don't like his work or aren't convinced Towards Computer Game Studies is a valuable work of scholarship. While I don't exactly disagree, I'm more interested in trying to understand why his opinions are met with such open hostility, and what (if any) scholarship can be extracted from his essay.

So, if we consider Towards Computer Game Studies something of a flagship for Ludology's self-proclaimed maiden voyage into the glorious uncharted territory of the Computer Game (and while that may seem like an unfair judgement, ludology itself is a very contemporary school of thought created upon the platform of direct resistance to narratology), we run into basic problems with premises. Eskelinen's premises.  read more »

As I played Photopia, our discussion about ludology kept coming to mind. Photopia seems to wreck the theory of a dichotomy between games and other narratives. It contains both a game and a narrative aspect that can not be seperated from one another without losing the entire meaning. Here the idea of a game and narrative work harmoniously together.

It can not be argued that Photopia is not a game, and at the same time it could not be seen as not being a narrative. There are plots, kernels, satellites and characters. There is always a setting, although navigating it may not always be easy.

Photopia was one of my favorite games to play. I really found the narrative interesting and funny. I really thought it was hilarious that he would explain the definition of words like depression, adorned, etc. yet during the section in space when he is using fancy terminology about radioactive materials and such he doesn't bother to slow down or break from the narrative to explain.

Due to the nature of the game, I easily played it, as it seemed like a book that I had the ability to interact with, much like the R.L. Stine books I have previously mentioned in other blogs.

“If I throw a ball at you, I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.” Eskelinen may be right but such a useless comment but he deserves that I pick up the ball and throw it at his retarded self. What was he implying anyways? I suppose he was trying to separate narratology from ludology. After making that comment his credibility points dropped pretty fast.

So his way of defeating the study of narratology is to separate the “colonized” narratology from ludology by “resisting and beating them.” Who are them anyways? It’s quite interesting of the vocabulary he uses because later into his argument he describes duration in gaming as “set time in which the winner is the one who’s in the better position when the set time is up.” It is the exact proposition he used to begin his rant about ludology.  read more »

After reading Markku Eskelinen's excerpt about the infiltration of narratology in ludology, I found some of his arguments intriguing, but most of them were sounded like pretentious crap. And this was my reaction before reading his rude response to Richard Schechner.. I think his main point that caused me to feel so indignant was how he differentiates between ludology's user time and event time and narratology's story time and discourse time. He expresses these ideas as being totally separate, black and white arguments when really these concepts are so ambiguous.  read more »