Response to Tim’s Ludology/Narratology Analysis

Just responded to Tim Burke’s good analysis of ludology, narratology and cultural studies at Terra Nova, and am also posting here for posterity.

Tim, this is a great piece, and not only because you’ve given props to historical readings of Captain America . I’m going to do a hit and run on a number of points, and am looking forward to expanding on them through discussion here.

It feels strange and kind of thrilling to think about ludology as affinate to cultural studies, after being convinced for a while now that my decision to work within cultural studies puts me outside ludology in a big way. Unfortunately, I don’t know if these connections between the two are always acknowledged in the preexisting debate. I think that the origin of the ludological position — Aarseth’s Cybertext — interprets the extratextual as something very different from what we as cultural scholars understand as production and consumption, culture, or use. His distinction is not between texts and reception but between texts and textual machines, and the ludological focus of study is the textual machine. The player is necessary to actuate a semiotic sequence, but her or his historical or sociocultural position doesn’t really seem to enter into the equation.

In First Person, both Jenkins and Moulthrop note this elision of cultural considerations in much ludological literature, and the ludologists’ responses to them don’t disagree. I think Juul’s response to Kuklich, which you cite, signals a gradual reconciliation between games as ludic systems and games as artifacts within larger systems of media production and consumption, which makes me very happy. But I would argue that is a fairly recent development. Again, I like very much your assertion of the importance of a historical, even Bakhtinian perspective on game genres, but I think this perspective is a departure from most canonical ludological writing, even more so than the narratological view as you’ve presented it:

In the context of games criticism, this tendency might lead to a narratologist placing enormous interpretative weight on the fact that most first-person shooters are structured by conflicts between the player’s avatar and small groups of three to six enemies, seeing this as a narrative choice that has authorial intent behind it.

Is this a narratological position? It seems to map pretty directly to the ludological method Frasca calls “simulation rhetoric” in The Video Game Theory Reader. Sometimes I worry that “narratologist” becomes a straw man, a signifier more for “dilletante humanist who knows shit about video games” rather than “practitioner of narratological methods of inquiry.” Certainly this isn’t always the case, but the tendency toward agonism and ad hominem attack in the responses of Eskelinen and others makes me worry that what begins as a distinction between different opinions can easily slip into counter-productive othering. At this point, I have no idea whether I’m a ludologist or narratologist, and I suspect I’m not alone.

Then there’s the institutional question. I agree 100% that there are plenty of opportunities in new fields of inquiry (including game studies) to upend traditional academic publishing and use the blogosphere and other contexts that are much less ossified. But there’s still that darn institution, and envisioning game studies as non-institutional seems to ensure that those who study games academically must do so through the backdoor, after getting a tenured position in something else, as many of the scholars here have done. You have the professional luxury to decry the journals and celebrate the blogosphere, but I’m a kid scholar looking at a US academic market where formal publication is still a prerequisite to success, and the most popular games studies programs are looking for a shipped title, not a Ph.D., under one’s belt. These contextual realities bear on my perspective quite a bit. I have lots of material in my diss that speaks to the points you raise here, and I’d much rather blog about it than go through arduous journal submission, but every time I put something out on the Web, I’m consumed with anxiety about what it does to my chances of getting a book contract. This is a young field, practiced by young scholars, and I’d love to see some more discussion about ways to reconcile old (journal) and new (blog) modes of publication and distribution.

Finally, I’d like to open up the question: how well does ludology address the question of virtual worlds? Juul and Rules of Play have both noted that MMOGs deviate pretty considerably from the classic (Caillois-ian) definition of games. Virtual worlds impact the ludology/narratology debate in a big way, and this is the ideal place to begin teasing out exactly how.

Thanks,
Jason