~ ] I mD

hele Knobel clael Peters ~lrc~ L _

worlds in play

International Perspectives on Digital Games Research

EDITED BY

Suzanne de Castell + Jennifer Jenson

~ PETER LANG

New Yorkmiddot Washington DCBaltimore bull Bern Frankfurt am Mainmiddot Berlinmiddot Brusselsmiddot Vienna bull Oxford

g-in-Publication Data

es on digital garnes research ~

dl Jennifer Jenson -- al episternologies v 21) II references =11 Suzanne II Jenson Jennifer --dc22 2007001943 -8643-7 543

Contents Die Deutsche Bibliothek

JuoIICa]On in the Deutsche data is available

=n~Jddbde

Introduction Suzanne de Castell and Jen Jenson 1

Part I Foundations~ Perspectives and Points ofView

1 Games as Joint Attentional Scenes Janet H Murray 11

2 Towards an Ontological Language for Game Analysis Jose P Zagal Michael Mateas Clara Fernandez-Vara Brian Hochhalter and Nolan Lichti 21

3 Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience Analyzing Immersion

c - ~~-~~ce and durability Laura Ermi and Frans Mayra 37 0 2 ===- Lo~gevity 4 The Design of Narrative as an Immersive Simulation

Renata Gomes 55

5 Interactive Digital Storytelling Towards a Hybrid Conceptual Approach Ulrike Spierling 63

6 Frame and Metaphor in Political Games Ian Bogosr 77

7 Playing Through The Future ofAlternative and Critical n_ crofi Irn Game Projects

-- -Jlted Patrick Crogan 87

g-in-Publication Data

es on digital garnes research ~

dl Jennifer Jenson -- al episternologies v 21) II references =11 Suzanne II Jenson Jennifer --dc22 2007001943 -8643-7 543

Contents Die Deutsche Bibliothek

JuoIICa]On in the Deutsche data is available

=n~Jddbde

Introduction Suzanne de Castell and Jen Jenson 1

Part I Foundations~ Perspectives and Points ofView

1 Games as Joint Attentional Scenes Janet H Murray 11

2 Towards an Ontological Language for Game Analysis Jose P Zagal Michael Mateas Clara Fernandez-Vara Brian Hochhalter and Nolan Lichti 21

3 Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience Analyzing Immersion

c - ~~-~~ce and durability Laura Ermi and Frans Mayra 37 0 2 ===- Lo~gevity 4 The Design of Narrative as an Immersive Simulation

Renata Gomes 55

5 Interactive Digital Storytelling Towards a Hybrid Conceptual Approach Ulrike Spierling 63

6 Frame and Metaphor in Political Games Ian Bogosr 77

7 Playing Through The Future ofAlternative and Critical n_ crofi Irn Game Projects

-- -Jlted Patrick Crogan 87

CO--TENTS

Part II Playerls

8 Vhite-Eyed and Griefer Player Culture Deviance Construction in MMORPGs Holin Lin and Chuen-Tsai Sun 103

9 Playing with Non-Humans Digital Games as Technocultural Form Seth Giddings 115

10 Possibilities of Non-Commercial Games The Case ofAmateur Role-Playing Games Designers in Japan Kenji Ito 129

II Opening the Production Pipeline Unruly Creators John A L Banks 143

Part III Spaees and Plaees ofPlay

12 Push Play An Examination of the Gameplay Button Stephen N (3riffin 153

13 Evolution of Spatial Configurations in Videogames Clara Fernandez-Vara Jose Pablo Zagal and Michael Mateas 159

14 Fictive Affinities in Final Fantasy XI Complicit and Critical Play in Fantastic Nations William Huber 169

15 Lesser-Known Worlds Bridging the Telematic Flows with Located Human Experience through Game Design Debra Polson and Marcos Caceres 179

16 Framing Vtrtual Law Peter Edelmann 191

Part IV Making It Work Design andArchitecture

17 Socio-Ec(h)o Ambient Intelligence and Gameplay Ron Wakkary J1arek Hatala Robb Lovell Milena Droumeya Alissa Antle Dale Eernden and Jim Bizzocchi 207

18 Shadowplay Simulated Illumination in Game Worlds Simon Nicdcnthal 221

19 Achieving Realistic Reactions in Modern Video Games Lcif Gruel1oldt Michael Katchabaw and Stephen Danton 229

20 New Design Methods for Activist Gaming J1ary Flanagan Daniel C Howe and Helen Nissenbaum 241

Contents

21 Adaptive Game Techm Approach to Game De Darryl Charles iIichaei Michaela Black Adrian Julian Klicklich and -pl

22 Build It to Understan in Game Design Space Michael Mateas and Am

Part V Learnin 23 Interactive Story Writ

Using Computer Gam Mike Carbonaro bria Curtis OnLlczko ThoIlll Duane Szati-on and Stq

24 Games as a Platform pound Rikke Magnllssen

25 Contexts Pleasures a1

Computer Games Diane Carr

26 Are Video Games Goo James Paul Gee

Contributors

Contents 11CONTDns

verls 21 Adaptive Game Technology as a Player-Centered Approach to Game Design

layer Culture Deviance Darryl Charks Michael McNeill Moira McAlister Michaela Black Adrian Moore Karl Stringer

103 Julian Kiicklich and Aphra Kerr 249 ital Games as 22 Build It to Understand It Ludology Meets Narratology

in Game Design Space llS Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern 267 al Games The Case s Designers in Japan Part V Learning to Play Playing to Learn

129

[le Unruly Creators 23 Interactive Story Writing in the Classroom 143 Using Computer Games

Mike Carbonaro 1aria Cutumisu Matthew jld~aughton

Curtis Onuczko Thomas Roy Jonathan SchadlerPlnccs ofPlay

Duane Szafron and Stephanie Gillis 285

the Gameplay Button 24 Games as a Platform for Situated Science Practice

tions in Videogames 25 Contexts Pleasures and Preferences Girls Playing 153 Rikke Magnussen 30 I

Z1l1 lIlLi lichael 1ateas 159 Computer Games Diane Carr 313~ XI Complicit

ations 26 Are Video Games Good for Learning 169 James Paul Gee 323

g the Telematic Flows e through Game Design Contributors 337

179

191

rtl71 f1d AImiddotcbitectttre

ene md Gameplay

lation in Game Vorlds

gtt (Iming

] ciLl Droumeva 207

221

1 loJenl Ideo Games _middot~cl1 DlI1ton 229

ll1baul11 241

~

--

1 Games as Joint Attentional Scenes

JANEl H illRRAY

The invention and striking global popularity of the new genre of computer games within the nev digital medium is provoking a reconsideration of older cultural categories such as narrative games and plaY [12345J Our renewed interest in the distinguishing qualities of the ancient representational format we call games coincides ith a moment of scientific focus and theshyoretical speculation on the prehistoric origins of mind and culture One of the central puzzles of eolutionary theory is the problem of the short time span in which primates deeloped into humanoids and humanoids developed into human beings There do not seem to have been enough iterations uf birth and adaptation and death fiJr natural selection to have created the drashymatic advantages that we hold Oer other related species

llichael Tomasello [6] explains this compressed time scheme as the result of a single change in human cognition the ability to understand conspecifics (other members of our species) as intentional agents like oneself This fOllnshydational change underpins symbolic communication and allows us to engage in cultural learning Culture is thc key clement here because the human advantage over other species lies in our ability to share and transmit knowlshyedge and patterns of behavior across historical time and in the raising of children

To make clear the distinction between the cognition of humans and other primates ho share much of our sensory experience and our social orishyentation Tomasello lists five actions that non-human primates do not do in their natural habitats

bull Point or gesture to olltsidc objects for others bull Hold objects up to sh(m thcm to others bull Bring othus to locations so the un obscnc things then bull Actich uffcr objccts to other indiiduals by holding them out bull Intel1lionalh teach other indiiduIs ne behaiors i p 21 )

12 13 JAlFl H MUKRAY

Human ontogeny the deyelopment of the individual in childhood seems to reproduce Tomasellos hypothesized phylogenic achievement At about nine months of age a baby begins to recognize when it has the parents attenshytion and then to be able to follow the parents attention to external objects by following their gaze and by fifteen months babies have usually begun pointing at things to direct the parcnts attention to objects of interest H uman inf~ll1ts below the age of nine months like non-human primates have a limited concept oftheir conspecifics (members of their species) as having menul awareness and intentionality But somewhere around their first birthshyday human infants have begun to understand other persons as intentional agents animate beings who have goals and who make active choices among behavioral means for attaining these goals including active choices about what to pay attention to in pursuing those goals (p 68) Tomasello further argues that the ability to t()llow on the attention of the adult leads to the child recognizing when she is herself the focus of the adults attention and gaze and begins to lay the framework for an understanding of the self as an actor in the SOCill world This cognitive leap whieh happened t()r the species in relatively recent evolutionary time (the last 250000 years or so) and for the individual at 9-15 months old forms the basis f()r the communicative cultural tasks that make up the bulk of human achievement It is the basis of sharing negotiating learning and symbolic communication

The framework in which the cognitive achievement of understanding intentionality leads to the acquisition of culturally transmitted knowledge is called a joint L1ttentionallune A joint attentional scene involves two particishypants such as a parent and child who both understand what the other is attending to In babyhood it occurs in play or in caretaking situations when the adult and the child have a common interest (such as food tickling stroking diapering) and exchange gestures sounds or looks that each recshyognizes as intentional and connected to whatever holds their common focus Once a baby and its parent achieve this ability the babys learning increases exponentially Tomasello similarly believes that once early humanoids achieved this ability the possibility t()r cultural breakthroughs increased

exponentially Tomasellos insight into the development of human cognition may shed

light on one of the more puzzling aspects of games why are they fun What is the primarY motivation to engage in them We knc) that play is intrinsishycally pleasurable for animals and humans alike and there are many theories about its evolutionary value including rehearsal of adult skills and mastery of a flexible repertoire of responses [78] We seem hardwired to play to explore fiJr the simple pleasure of exercising our faculties and exploring the world in non-survival ways This exploratory play seems to serve the purpose of expanding our repertoire of responses of offering a wider range of cognitive

Games as Joint Attentional Scenes

patterns to apply to new situations But games explicitly limit and channel the intrinsically pleasurable exploration characteristic ofplay What is it about a game activity that is intrinsically enjoyable to those who choose to engage in it What do games offer in return for limiting the exploratory delights of play

Perhaps the enjoyment of games is hardwired into us selected by thoushysands of years of cultural behavior to encourage us to seek out situations like Tomasellos joint attentional scenes Indeed the three defining characteristics of a joint attentional scene are similar to the social situation necessary tix gaming

bull Shared limited f()Cus on external objects andor behaviors bull Mutually witnessed intentionality among participants within the

shared context bull Symbolic communication between participants

The ability to form this joint attentional scene makes it possible to

engage in the activities characteristic of games to treat abstract representashytions consistently to behave according to negotiated rules to limit ones actions and attention to the game pieces and game actions to what counts in the game screening out other stimuli and actions Joint attention organshyizes two of the core activities of games turn-taking and synchronizing behaviors

Tomasellos theory also suggests some of the core adaptive benefits of games since thev reinforce key benefits of joint attentional scenes

bull An understanding of the self both as an agent and an object within a community of other intentional agentobjects

bull The ability to shift perspective from ones own point of view to the point of view of others to imagine what someone else is thinking and to see oneself from the point of view of the other

bull The ability to intentionally teach and learn which is the foundation of all human cultural development

It is easy to think of a contemporary board game or one of its early preshycursors such as mancala or knucklebones as a joint attentional activity comshyposed of limited focus mutually witnessed intentional acts and symbolic manipulation Taking turns dropping seeds into a special set of holes in the ground or throwing pieces of animal bone or clay dice the players are aware of each ones turn of each ones separate actions and history in the game and of the relative position of each to one another in the scoring of the gll11e Watching one another pia is an opportunity for passive and active learning f()r metacomments on the play of one another Boardgames intensify the

14 15 JANET H MlIR1ZiY

opportunity for witnessing the actions of the other player and for keeping track of multiple positions within the same game Sports games intensity the opportunity fix intentional teaching and learning by focusing performance on goal-centered behaviors that are optimized for comparison between playshyers and between turns Games prmide a framework for watching and crishytiquing iterative activities and tor working collectiely for improved performance These patterns of behavior are then available tex survival activities

If Tomasello is right and our ability to form joint intentional scenes was a prerequisite to the acquisition of language thell games may be understood as a foundational element in human culture as the gestural starting point in the history of representational media Although he docs not mention games I think that his work considered in juxtaposition to other research on games and childrens play clearly points in this direction for example researchers at Duke University have studied toddler imitation games such as taking turns jumping off a box which arc good examples of how joint attention is estabshylished and elaborated beteen cognitilly matched pre-linguistic children r9 J for Carol Eckerman II 0 J the important cognitive feature of these games is that they serve as a tltxm of pre-verbal communication She interprets their mirroring interaction as a kind of dialog without language

I expect that the children are using illliution or nonverbal actions as a way of reaching agreement on a topic tilr their interaction So when one child imitates another it may say sOl1lething like lets do this together and when the first child imitates b1ck its kind of like a contirmatioll yes J like this too

Interestingly enough Sutton-Smith [8] citing Kenneth Burke and Greshygory Bateson makes a similar suggestion about the function of play biting in anilll~l1s He suggests that

play might blt the earliest tlJlln of a negative prior to the existence of the negashytive in language PLly as a Wl of not doing whatever it represents prelnts error It is a positive behavioral neg~ltiye It says no by saying es It is a bite but

it is a nip (p 22)

In both cases the urge to play is a means of communicating in a situation in which intelligent creatures have not yet acquired language A play action is a signal like a predator call except that its referent is to the social world

Jlost interestingly Eckerman observed how imitation games can lead to

the development of language in clearly differentiated steps To paraphrase and summarize her observations

bull first they direct elch other Go Wait Jump Vatch me bull Then they answer one another My turn You jump

Games as Joint Attentional Scenes

bull finally they describe their actions as they do them I jump or Big jump while jumping off the box

The game is organizing their behavior providing practice in language exchange and in synchronized expectations and pertemnance The pleasure of the game lies as mLlch in the communication as in the actions and it lies parshyticularly in the matching oflanguage to action and in the choreographing of both into a patterned social interaction The pleasure of games reinfe)rces the adaptive behavior of symbolic communication around patterned social behaviors

Eckerman is particularly struck by the joyousness of the imitation game Her work provides a dramatic parallel to Tomasellos hypothesized moments of (olutionary progress

You can infer from the laughing and smiling going on th~1t they really enjoy interacting with each other Perhaps in these imitative interactions they arc expeshyricncing both their similaritmiddot to others and their separltcness Perhaps they arc learning that e cach arc intentional agcl1ts of action and that playing together is a very pleasant thing rIO I

These early games are based on mutually elaborated patterns that serve the same purpose as written rules Thev arc intrinsically social and can in bct be understood as a celebration of the social of the very presence of other intentional beings The pleasure derived from sharing attention and witnessshying and enacting intentional acts fltJfl1ls the framework tor mastering complex physical and social skills Spectatorship is as much a part of the experience as active performance and in early games it is an alternating spectatorship YOLl

do I do you do I do The elaboration of joint attentional scenes into ever more elaborate games sets up opportunities for performance te)r presenting the self as a pertegtrlner in a socially constructed arena and for incorporating multiple individuals into t1cxible but predictable group structures

The Co-Evolution ofGames Narrative andMedia

Thinking of games in terms of their possible evolutionary history their adapshytive value helps us to think about the persistent contlict in game studies between those who emphasize the similarities between games and stories and those ho emphasize their difterences r 11] It is significant tlut Tomasello links the uniquely human understanding of conspecifics consciousness with the uniquely human understanding of other unseen underlying causes Tomasello believes that human causal understanding evohed tlrst in the social domain to comprehend others as social agents Although there is no Yay of knowing if this is true he points to the cultural evidence that many

17 1( JAlET H MURRAY

ltI III I1 III Ill odd when the are in doubt as to the physical cause of III II I ICil i Il()ke various types of animistic or deistic forces to explain it

I Illq IIi i he debult approach (p 24) In other words the sensing of Ille 11I1llIl intentions of other humans is linked to an animistic view of the II lIld I hat creates explanatory narratives ofintention fix other events as well (()tllitive theorist Mark Turner would agree that an abstract sense of cause 1Ild efkct is an early human cognitive achievement and precedes the acquisishytion oflanguage Turner explicitly identifies this cognitive leap as narrative or parable making the abstraction of causal sequences from the observed world If we accept these theories of early cognition then we can think of games and stories as driving and co-evolving with the development of lanshyguage leading to the development of more complex social patterns more complex causal thinking and more elaborate svmbolic culture

The Tomasello hypothesis can be interpreted as linking both games and stories to the single moment in which human consciousness first awakened The moment has two key aspects

bull The understanding of ones fellow creatures as intentional beings leading to the exploration of joint attention which can be understood as the birth ofmimetic games

bull The understanding of overt events as the result of invisible causes which leads to abstract thinking about causal patterns which can be understood as the birth ofnarrative thinking

These two cognitive and cultural advances have one key eHect

bull The elaboration of symbolic communication starting with gesture and vocalization and developing into spoken language which can be understood as the birth of meditl

The italicized phrases represent my interprcration of Tomasellos theory Just as culture and cognition co-evolve I would argue that the elements of culture are also subject to an ongoing process of co-evolution Mimetic games lead to greater social organization and closer attention to the world which forwards causal thinking which leads to more complicated garnes both of which produce a demand for more expressive language This pattern-the co-evolution of games narrative and language-is visible in toddlers and children and imaginable as a narrative of prehistoric human life It is also visshyible in the cultural patterns of historical time if we think of human (spoken) language as a medium and of bter symbolic media as co-evolving in a simishylar way with ever more elaborate mimetic and causal (game and story) genres In order to knit these different time scales together and motivate these rather broad generalizations it is useful to turn to the work of Merlin Donald who

I 1111S IU Joint Attentional Scenes

1 Il()t hesizes that modern human cognition arose in fc)Ur steps starting with IIIlt plit from our primate cOLlsins episodic culture) which we share ith other 1IIIIll111als and primates in which social relationships and cyen simple tool use Ill clop on the basis of brain function that allows only discrete episodic strucshy1IIIl and recall mimetic culture in which the early hOl11inids Cln understand ltIll mother as intentional conscious agents and can communicate symbolshyI dl allowing them to form bands migrate hunt domesticate fire and 1IIIke simple tools mythic culture in which sapient humans communicate IIII( )ugh symbolic f()rms of representation such as oral language mimetic ritshyIIds and cave paintings understanding the world in narrative terms and III( )dern theoretical culture which understands the world in terms of abstract I IlIltaiisms and is based on massive externally stored memory systems such as I rillt and computers 11213 j

The transition between the first and second stages is the one Tomasello kscribes as bringing an understanding of shared attention and 1bstract luses The mimetic stage can be thought of as driven lw games and rituals 1 he elaboration of the synchronized actions and communications of the Illlmanoids with a capacity for joint attention Gameplaying in this stage may IllVe been mostlv tied to survival with the pleasure of synchronization lddillg energy to the acquisition of skills necessary f()r evading predatory anishymals or collectively hunting them A sustained culture of rule-based coordishyIllted behaviors would reinf(Jrce the development of language which in turn (lUld support more detailed and memorable stories Mimetic behaviors surshylive in contemporary society in pleasurable rituals like dancing and athletics The earliest videogames were mimetic in that the gameplay was f(xused on t he mastery of simple repetitive behaviors moving a character through a maze eating pellets Vith the elaboration of the medium of video games to include more detailed graphics alld more responsive and complex programshyming videogames ofkr us more complex patterns to absorb and perform The toddler pleasure in joint attention and imitation is reproduced in a way by gamcs that challenge us to synchronize our actions with machine such as the arcade game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) ill which players must keep up with a pattern of dance steps Like an oral culture game like Simon Says which challenges children to cont()rm their behavior to symbolic codes (sposhyken commands) DDR presents the dance steps not by example but in a spashytial notation that must be quickly interpreted and acted on Games like these may be helping us to elaborate a common symbolic language with our new electronic joint attentional partners

The third stage mythic culture can be seen as driven by complex narrashytives the result of more elaborated oral language and longer traditions of shared experience Mythic thinking characterized by heroic legends and ritshyually transmitted narrativcs is apparent in the writings of antiquity which

19 I JI11 H JhRl-Y

11111 Iiimiddot (11d IIIllS and in pre-literate cultures But tlt)[ms of mythic 111111klll) lIldurc into our post-literate age often reinflt)rcing 1Hiliarions based II l01ll1ll0n identities as in families ethnic groups and political parties When athletic events become mass spectator sports in which players embody the aspirations of spectator fans they pass from mimetic into mythic culture with larger than life performances of superhuman beings Videogames otten invoke this mythic state of mind by casting the player in the role of superhero or placing the action within a fantasy domain characterized bv animism and supernatural mythical tigures

The fourth and current stage of human culture according to Merlin Donald is characterized by theoretical thinking The transition ti-om the mythic to the theoretical stage is the result of the invention ofTiting hich is tirst used as a commercial tool and for talismanic inscriptions of the names of gods and rules and later as a way of recording oral culture such as stories and magical spells and is then perfected by the Greeks as a means of recordshying the process of thinking and reasoning therdw allowing tltlr 1 sustained collective discourse that moves from mythic Lplanations to re1soned argushymentation In Donalds elegant analysis we m()c trom Ape to Einstein in only three steps which we can think of in terms ofsvmbolic Lchange cognishytive strategies or cultural building blocks from joint attention to langu~lge to

writing from mimesis to narrative to argumentation ti-om ritu11 to myth to theory

Though neither Tomasello nor Donald points to games as instruments of cognitive evolution it is striking how otten games are part of their 1rgushyments Tomasellos experimental examples with apes and children arc usualhshyin the form of games Both Tomasello and Donald point to childrens supeshyriority at games as evidence of fundamental cognitive differences that preshydate language acquisition

Human childrcn play rulc-govcrncd games by imitation ottcn without J1 t()rshymalizcd instruction Thcy invcnt and learn new glmcs ottcn without using 11Il guagc Apcs likc othcr animals cannot learn similu gamcs thl are restrictcd to games that by our standards arc vcry simple The problem of bridging liom ape to human would thus appcar to involve a great dCli morc thm pinpointing the arrival time ofvocal languagc [ 12]

But though Donald instances mimetic games as one of the key composhynents of hominid development both cognitil~ scienti~ts ~top short of seeing games as a driving force of cognitive and cultural eolution Yet the more one thinks about the clements of cultural cognition the more game-like they seem

( [11111 flS joi71t Attcntimml Sccncs

Digital Games andJoint Attention

111e argued elsewhere rlut the aliYent of the computer as a medium ith ib 1ll1lLJue combination of procedural participato1 cncclopedic and spatial 111()rdances is 111 advancc in human culture comparable to the imention of Ilint or l11ming imagc photograplw [5J Thc ne digital medium expands )llr cogniriC pOcrs lw offering us ncv as of representing thc odd (eg Ilm)ugh parameterized simulations) 1nd greater pOcrs of organizing inf(xshy11111 ion (eg mul ti melk1 archivcs accessible through metadata) It is also a Illedium that is particularly well suited to games because the rules of the ~~l111C can be programmed into the computer and beGluse the user can rake JIl the role of the pLwcr Plaing glmes on the computer is similar to llld liltlTcnt tl-0111 pre-digital game pL1ing It contlates glme and puzzle into 1 single t(lrm in that a gamc played against a mcchanized opponcnt is reall a proccdural puzzle It can eliminatc turn uking by providing worlds that arc t1ways opcn to interruption and interycntion at hatCer pace the interactor 1 illing or able to sustain The computer is not 1are of our C0111mon [ltxus hecause it is not conscious in the same 1 a human player is conscious But it prmides us ith 1 partner hose thought processcs we arc aware ot~ and middotho rcprescnts the mcdiated consciousness of an implied human programshyIller e cngage with the computer as if it eIT an embodied opponcnt but 1lso as if it ere similar to a painting or a book the result of a prior act of conscious reprcsentation Cames can be thought of as socializing us into a l1e cyborg order establishing rituals of commonality ith proceduralized 1rtibcts

The computer is the most capacious pattern-making medium e hae ever had Ve have only begun to glimpse the nC symbolic structures that we can build with it cognitive scafflt)lds that will help us to organize and adY1I1ce the traditions of thinking that hae nO brought us beyond the ability to repshyresent our ideas in purelY linear fltmn lt3iCn that games playa kcy role in giyshying birth to language in the individual and the species we should not be surprised that the are playing a key role in elaborating the Ile symbolic 1111shyguage of intcr~lction in explI1ding the zone of proximal development tltJI digshyital mcdia

AcknowletlJ11tents

[his essay is excerpted Ii-om longcr u-gument T()ard a CUll mll Theorv oj Caming Digital Games and thc Co-Eolution of Media l1ind and Culture Popular Communishymtioll Volumc 4 NlIllber 3 p 18gt-2022006

20 JFI H MURRAY

References

1 Aarseth E J (~vbertext Penpectilcs on El~qodic Literature Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins Uniersit Press 1997

2 Bolter J and R Crusin Remediation UnderstandiJl3 Nell fedia Cambridge lA MIT Press 1999

3 Laurd B ComputCls as DmltC1 Reading MA Addison-Wesley Publishing Co 1993

4 Manmich L 11)( LallTlIillC ofNCJl Jfcdia Cambridge MA MIT Press 2001 5 lurra J H Halllet OIl the Holodeck Th( Flttllr( o(NllrratiJlc in Cyberspace New

York Simon amp Schusterfree Press 1997 6 Tonusello 11 llJC Cltltural Ortqills of HW1li11l CiJllitirJll Clmbridge lA Harshy

ard Cnietsin Press 2001 7 Bck()ft~ M and Bers J A (Eds) Animal PIal lOFOlItiollaIV Comparatilc and

tcolrLq iwI Pcnpccti1CJ elmbri dgc No York C1mbridge U nilCrsi t Press 1998 8 Sutton-Smith g Jhc A1JlIJtrj1ti~l of Plav Cambridge HHard lniCrsit Press

1997 9 Didow S M and C O Eckerman Toddler Peers from Nonerbal Coordinated

Action to Verbal Discourse Social Delclopmmt I O( 2) (2001) 170-188 19p 10 Malcolm K Studies Shed Light on Toddler Deeopment 2000 Aailablc at

ImpIwdukcnewsdukecdu20()()06toddler630_printhtm (I ast accessed Jul 142006l

11 udrip- fruin - and P Harrigan First Pels(II Nell ~lcdia a1 Story Performallcc I1l1ti Galll( Cll11hridge MA MIT Press 2004

12 DOluld 1 Orit7ills of the Hodenz Jfilld 17ra Staqts ill the 11011lti01l of Culture alld CrJtT71itir1l Cambridge Llt Hlrud LTninrsity Press 1991

13 DOIl1Id 1 A Milld So Rare The Elolutioll of Hiliwit COlscioumesr New York WW ~orton 2001

14 Schillarndt-Iksscrat D HaJJ WritillH Came About Amtill TX Uniersitl ofTncls Press 1996

~

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2 Towards an 0 for Game Ana

Josf P ZAGAL MICHAEL

BRIAN HOCHHAlTER AltI

This chapter introduces the Gam t()r describing analyzing and stu COP in the context of other pro present the theoretical and methlt our conceptualllnderstanding of t ith an overvie describing its s outline a number OfWdVS in hic rltion of interesting research que our ork will take

He

Game designers have called t()r designers currently lack a unifled wd thinking through the desi~

approaches tC)(US on offering aid t patterns [356] which name and related notion of design rules 1 design situations f7 81 Other am arious humanistic disciplines-t~ terms of their usc of space [9] as [1112] in terms of the tempora [ I 3] or in terms of sets of teature~

Contents 11CONTDns

verls 21 Adaptive Game Technology as a Player-Centered Approach to Game Design

layer Culture Deviance Darryl Charks Michael McNeill Moira McAlister Michaela Black Adrian Moore Karl Stringer

103 Julian Kiicklich and Aphra Kerr 249 ital Games as 22 Build It to Understand It Ludology Meets Narratology

in Game Design Space llS Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern 267 al Games The Case s Designers in Japan Part V Learning to Play Playing to Learn

129

[le Unruly Creators 23 Interactive Story Writing in the Classroom 143 Using Computer Games

Mike Carbonaro 1aria Cutumisu Matthew jld~aughton

Curtis Onuczko Thomas Roy Jonathan SchadlerPlnccs ofPlay

Duane Szafron and Stephanie Gillis 285

the Gameplay Button 24 Games as a Platform for Situated Science Practice

tions in Videogames 25 Contexts Pleasures and Preferences Girls Playing 153 Rikke Magnussen 30 I

Z1l1 lIlLi lichael 1ateas 159 Computer Games Diane Carr 313~ XI Complicit

ations 26 Are Video Games Good for Learning 169 James Paul Gee 323

g the Telematic Flows e through Game Design Contributors 337

179

191

rtl71 f1d AImiddotcbitectttre

ene md Gameplay

lation in Game Vorlds

gtt (Iming

] ciLl Droumeva 207

221

1 loJenl Ideo Games _middot~cl1 DlI1ton 229

ll1baul11 241

~

--

1 Games as Joint Attentional Scenes

JANEl H illRRAY

The invention and striking global popularity of the new genre of computer games within the nev digital medium is provoking a reconsideration of older cultural categories such as narrative games and plaY [12345J Our renewed interest in the distinguishing qualities of the ancient representational format we call games coincides ith a moment of scientific focus and theshyoretical speculation on the prehistoric origins of mind and culture One of the central puzzles of eolutionary theory is the problem of the short time span in which primates deeloped into humanoids and humanoids developed into human beings There do not seem to have been enough iterations uf birth and adaptation and death fiJr natural selection to have created the drashymatic advantages that we hold Oer other related species

llichael Tomasello [6] explains this compressed time scheme as the result of a single change in human cognition the ability to understand conspecifics (other members of our species) as intentional agents like oneself This fOllnshydational change underpins symbolic communication and allows us to engage in cultural learning Culture is thc key clement here because the human advantage over other species lies in our ability to share and transmit knowlshyedge and patterns of behavior across historical time and in the raising of children

To make clear the distinction between the cognition of humans and other primates ho share much of our sensory experience and our social orishyentation Tomasello lists five actions that non-human primates do not do in their natural habitats

bull Point or gesture to olltsidc objects for others bull Hold objects up to sh(m thcm to others bull Bring othus to locations so the un obscnc things then bull Actich uffcr objccts to other indiiduals by holding them out bull Intel1lionalh teach other indiiduIs ne behaiors i p 21 )

12 13 JAlFl H MUKRAY

Human ontogeny the deyelopment of the individual in childhood seems to reproduce Tomasellos hypothesized phylogenic achievement At about nine months of age a baby begins to recognize when it has the parents attenshytion and then to be able to follow the parents attention to external objects by following their gaze and by fifteen months babies have usually begun pointing at things to direct the parcnts attention to objects of interest H uman inf~ll1ts below the age of nine months like non-human primates have a limited concept oftheir conspecifics (members of their species) as having menul awareness and intentionality But somewhere around their first birthshyday human infants have begun to understand other persons as intentional agents animate beings who have goals and who make active choices among behavioral means for attaining these goals including active choices about what to pay attention to in pursuing those goals (p 68) Tomasello further argues that the ability to t()llow on the attention of the adult leads to the child recognizing when she is herself the focus of the adults attention and gaze and begins to lay the framework for an understanding of the self as an actor in the SOCill world This cognitive leap whieh happened t()r the species in relatively recent evolutionary time (the last 250000 years or so) and for the individual at 9-15 months old forms the basis f()r the communicative cultural tasks that make up the bulk of human achievement It is the basis of sharing negotiating learning and symbolic communication

The framework in which the cognitive achievement of understanding intentionality leads to the acquisition of culturally transmitted knowledge is called a joint L1ttentionallune A joint attentional scene involves two particishypants such as a parent and child who both understand what the other is attending to In babyhood it occurs in play or in caretaking situations when the adult and the child have a common interest (such as food tickling stroking diapering) and exchange gestures sounds or looks that each recshyognizes as intentional and connected to whatever holds their common focus Once a baby and its parent achieve this ability the babys learning increases exponentially Tomasello similarly believes that once early humanoids achieved this ability the possibility t()r cultural breakthroughs increased

exponentially Tomasellos insight into the development of human cognition may shed

light on one of the more puzzling aspects of games why are they fun What is the primarY motivation to engage in them We knc) that play is intrinsishycally pleasurable for animals and humans alike and there are many theories about its evolutionary value including rehearsal of adult skills and mastery of a flexible repertoire of responses [78] We seem hardwired to play to explore fiJr the simple pleasure of exercising our faculties and exploring the world in non-survival ways This exploratory play seems to serve the purpose of expanding our repertoire of responses of offering a wider range of cognitive

Games as Joint Attentional Scenes

patterns to apply to new situations But games explicitly limit and channel the intrinsically pleasurable exploration characteristic ofplay What is it about a game activity that is intrinsically enjoyable to those who choose to engage in it What do games offer in return for limiting the exploratory delights of play

Perhaps the enjoyment of games is hardwired into us selected by thoushysands of years of cultural behavior to encourage us to seek out situations like Tomasellos joint attentional scenes Indeed the three defining characteristics of a joint attentional scene are similar to the social situation necessary tix gaming

bull Shared limited f()Cus on external objects andor behaviors bull Mutually witnessed intentionality among participants within the

shared context bull Symbolic communication between participants

The ability to form this joint attentional scene makes it possible to

engage in the activities characteristic of games to treat abstract representashytions consistently to behave according to negotiated rules to limit ones actions and attention to the game pieces and game actions to what counts in the game screening out other stimuli and actions Joint attention organshyizes two of the core activities of games turn-taking and synchronizing behaviors

Tomasellos theory also suggests some of the core adaptive benefits of games since thev reinforce key benefits of joint attentional scenes

bull An understanding of the self both as an agent and an object within a community of other intentional agentobjects

bull The ability to shift perspective from ones own point of view to the point of view of others to imagine what someone else is thinking and to see oneself from the point of view of the other

bull The ability to intentionally teach and learn which is the foundation of all human cultural development

It is easy to think of a contemporary board game or one of its early preshycursors such as mancala or knucklebones as a joint attentional activity comshyposed of limited focus mutually witnessed intentional acts and symbolic manipulation Taking turns dropping seeds into a special set of holes in the ground or throwing pieces of animal bone or clay dice the players are aware of each ones turn of each ones separate actions and history in the game and of the relative position of each to one another in the scoring of the gll11e Watching one another pia is an opportunity for passive and active learning f()r metacomments on the play of one another Boardgames intensify the

14 15 JANET H MlIR1ZiY

opportunity for witnessing the actions of the other player and for keeping track of multiple positions within the same game Sports games intensity the opportunity fix intentional teaching and learning by focusing performance on goal-centered behaviors that are optimized for comparison between playshyers and between turns Games prmide a framework for watching and crishytiquing iterative activities and tor working collectiely for improved performance These patterns of behavior are then available tex survival activities

If Tomasello is right and our ability to form joint intentional scenes was a prerequisite to the acquisition of language thell games may be understood as a foundational element in human culture as the gestural starting point in the history of representational media Although he docs not mention games I think that his work considered in juxtaposition to other research on games and childrens play clearly points in this direction for example researchers at Duke University have studied toddler imitation games such as taking turns jumping off a box which arc good examples of how joint attention is estabshylished and elaborated beteen cognitilly matched pre-linguistic children r9 J for Carol Eckerman II 0 J the important cognitive feature of these games is that they serve as a tltxm of pre-verbal communication She interprets their mirroring interaction as a kind of dialog without language

I expect that the children are using illliution or nonverbal actions as a way of reaching agreement on a topic tilr their interaction So when one child imitates another it may say sOl1lething like lets do this together and when the first child imitates b1ck its kind of like a contirmatioll yes J like this too

Interestingly enough Sutton-Smith [8] citing Kenneth Burke and Greshygory Bateson makes a similar suggestion about the function of play biting in anilll~l1s He suggests that

play might blt the earliest tlJlln of a negative prior to the existence of the negashytive in language PLly as a Wl of not doing whatever it represents prelnts error It is a positive behavioral neg~ltiye It says no by saying es It is a bite but

it is a nip (p 22)

In both cases the urge to play is a means of communicating in a situation in which intelligent creatures have not yet acquired language A play action is a signal like a predator call except that its referent is to the social world

Jlost interestingly Eckerman observed how imitation games can lead to

the development of language in clearly differentiated steps To paraphrase and summarize her observations

bull first they direct elch other Go Wait Jump Vatch me bull Then they answer one another My turn You jump

Games as Joint Attentional Scenes

bull finally they describe their actions as they do them I jump or Big jump while jumping off the box

The game is organizing their behavior providing practice in language exchange and in synchronized expectations and pertemnance The pleasure of the game lies as mLlch in the communication as in the actions and it lies parshyticularly in the matching oflanguage to action and in the choreographing of both into a patterned social interaction The pleasure of games reinfe)rces the adaptive behavior of symbolic communication around patterned social behaviors

Eckerman is particularly struck by the joyousness of the imitation game Her work provides a dramatic parallel to Tomasellos hypothesized moments of (olutionary progress

You can infer from the laughing and smiling going on th~1t they really enjoy interacting with each other Perhaps in these imitative interactions they arc expeshyricncing both their similaritmiddot to others and their separltcness Perhaps they arc learning that e cach arc intentional agcl1ts of action and that playing together is a very pleasant thing rIO I

These early games are based on mutually elaborated patterns that serve the same purpose as written rules Thev arc intrinsically social and can in bct be understood as a celebration of the social of the very presence of other intentional beings The pleasure derived from sharing attention and witnessshying and enacting intentional acts fltJfl1ls the framework tor mastering complex physical and social skills Spectatorship is as much a part of the experience as active performance and in early games it is an alternating spectatorship YOLl

do I do you do I do The elaboration of joint attentional scenes into ever more elaborate games sets up opportunities for performance te)r presenting the self as a pertegtrlner in a socially constructed arena and for incorporating multiple individuals into t1cxible but predictable group structures

The Co-Evolution ofGames Narrative andMedia

Thinking of games in terms of their possible evolutionary history their adapshytive value helps us to think about the persistent contlict in game studies between those who emphasize the similarities between games and stories and those ho emphasize their difterences r 11] It is significant tlut Tomasello links the uniquely human understanding of conspecifics consciousness with the uniquely human understanding of other unseen underlying causes Tomasello believes that human causal understanding evohed tlrst in the social domain to comprehend others as social agents Although there is no Yay of knowing if this is true he points to the cultural evidence that many

17 1( JAlET H MURRAY

ltI III I1 III Ill odd when the are in doubt as to the physical cause of III II I ICil i Il()ke various types of animistic or deistic forces to explain it

I Illq IIi i he debult approach (p 24) In other words the sensing of Ille 11I1llIl intentions of other humans is linked to an animistic view of the II lIld I hat creates explanatory narratives ofintention fix other events as well (()tllitive theorist Mark Turner would agree that an abstract sense of cause 1Ild efkct is an early human cognitive achievement and precedes the acquisishytion oflanguage Turner explicitly identifies this cognitive leap as narrative or parable making the abstraction of causal sequences from the observed world If we accept these theories of early cognition then we can think of games and stories as driving and co-evolving with the development of lanshyguage leading to the development of more complex social patterns more complex causal thinking and more elaborate svmbolic culture

The Tomasello hypothesis can be interpreted as linking both games and stories to the single moment in which human consciousness first awakened The moment has two key aspects

bull The understanding of ones fellow creatures as intentional beings leading to the exploration of joint attention which can be understood as the birth ofmimetic games

bull The understanding of overt events as the result of invisible causes which leads to abstract thinking about causal patterns which can be understood as the birth ofnarrative thinking

These two cognitive and cultural advances have one key eHect

bull The elaboration of symbolic communication starting with gesture and vocalization and developing into spoken language which can be understood as the birth of meditl

The italicized phrases represent my interprcration of Tomasellos theory Just as culture and cognition co-evolve I would argue that the elements of culture are also subject to an ongoing process of co-evolution Mimetic games lead to greater social organization and closer attention to the world which forwards causal thinking which leads to more complicated garnes both of which produce a demand for more expressive language This pattern-the co-evolution of games narrative and language-is visible in toddlers and children and imaginable as a narrative of prehistoric human life It is also visshyible in the cultural patterns of historical time if we think of human (spoken) language as a medium and of bter symbolic media as co-evolving in a simishylar way with ever more elaborate mimetic and causal (game and story) genres In order to knit these different time scales together and motivate these rather broad generalizations it is useful to turn to the work of Merlin Donald who

I 1111S IU Joint Attentional Scenes

1 Il()t hesizes that modern human cognition arose in fc)Ur steps starting with IIIlt plit from our primate cOLlsins episodic culture) which we share ith other 1IIIIll111als and primates in which social relationships and cyen simple tool use Ill clop on the basis of brain function that allows only discrete episodic strucshy1IIIl and recall mimetic culture in which the early hOl11inids Cln understand ltIll mother as intentional conscious agents and can communicate symbolshyI dl allowing them to form bands migrate hunt domesticate fire and 1IIIke simple tools mythic culture in which sapient humans communicate IIII( )ugh symbolic f()rms of representation such as oral language mimetic ritshyIIds and cave paintings understanding the world in narrative terms and III( )dern theoretical culture which understands the world in terms of abstract I IlIltaiisms and is based on massive externally stored memory systems such as I rillt and computers 11213 j

The transition between the first and second stages is the one Tomasello kscribes as bringing an understanding of shared attention and 1bstract luses The mimetic stage can be thought of as driven lw games and rituals 1 he elaboration of the synchronized actions and communications of the Illlmanoids with a capacity for joint attention Gameplaying in this stage may IllVe been mostlv tied to survival with the pleasure of synchronization lddillg energy to the acquisition of skills necessary f()r evading predatory anishymals or collectively hunting them A sustained culture of rule-based coordishyIllted behaviors would reinf(Jrce the development of language which in turn (lUld support more detailed and memorable stories Mimetic behaviors surshylive in contemporary society in pleasurable rituals like dancing and athletics The earliest videogames were mimetic in that the gameplay was f(xused on t he mastery of simple repetitive behaviors moving a character through a maze eating pellets Vith the elaboration of the medium of video games to include more detailed graphics alld more responsive and complex programshyming videogames ofkr us more complex patterns to absorb and perform The toddler pleasure in joint attention and imitation is reproduced in a way by gamcs that challenge us to synchronize our actions with machine such as the arcade game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) ill which players must keep up with a pattern of dance steps Like an oral culture game like Simon Says which challenges children to cont()rm their behavior to symbolic codes (sposhyken commands) DDR presents the dance steps not by example but in a spashytial notation that must be quickly interpreted and acted on Games like these may be helping us to elaborate a common symbolic language with our new electronic joint attentional partners

The third stage mythic culture can be seen as driven by complex narrashytives the result of more elaborated oral language and longer traditions of shared experience Mythic thinking characterized by heroic legends and ritshyually transmitted narrativcs is apparent in the writings of antiquity which

19 I JI11 H JhRl-Y

11111 Iiimiddot (11d IIIllS and in pre-literate cultures But tlt)[ms of mythic 111111klll) lIldurc into our post-literate age often reinflt)rcing 1Hiliarions based II l01ll1ll0n identities as in families ethnic groups and political parties When athletic events become mass spectator sports in which players embody the aspirations of spectator fans they pass from mimetic into mythic culture with larger than life performances of superhuman beings Videogames otten invoke this mythic state of mind by casting the player in the role of superhero or placing the action within a fantasy domain characterized bv animism and supernatural mythical tigures

The fourth and current stage of human culture according to Merlin Donald is characterized by theoretical thinking The transition ti-om the mythic to the theoretical stage is the result of the invention ofTiting hich is tirst used as a commercial tool and for talismanic inscriptions of the names of gods and rules and later as a way of recording oral culture such as stories and magical spells and is then perfected by the Greeks as a means of recordshying the process of thinking and reasoning therdw allowing tltlr 1 sustained collective discourse that moves from mythic Lplanations to re1soned argushymentation In Donalds elegant analysis we m()c trom Ape to Einstein in only three steps which we can think of in terms ofsvmbolic Lchange cognishytive strategies or cultural building blocks from joint attention to langu~lge to

writing from mimesis to narrative to argumentation ti-om ritu11 to myth to theory

Though neither Tomasello nor Donald points to games as instruments of cognitive evolution it is striking how otten games are part of their 1rgushyments Tomasellos experimental examples with apes and children arc usualhshyin the form of games Both Tomasello and Donald point to childrens supeshyriority at games as evidence of fundamental cognitive differences that preshydate language acquisition

Human childrcn play rulc-govcrncd games by imitation ottcn without J1 t()rshymalizcd instruction Thcy invcnt and learn new glmcs ottcn without using 11Il guagc Apcs likc othcr animals cannot learn similu gamcs thl are restrictcd to games that by our standards arc vcry simple The problem of bridging liom ape to human would thus appcar to involve a great dCli morc thm pinpointing the arrival time ofvocal languagc [ 12]

But though Donald instances mimetic games as one of the key composhynents of hominid development both cognitil~ scienti~ts ~top short of seeing games as a driving force of cognitive and cultural eolution Yet the more one thinks about the clements of cultural cognition the more game-like they seem

( [11111 flS joi71t Attcntimml Sccncs

Digital Games andJoint Attention

111e argued elsewhere rlut the aliYent of the computer as a medium ith ib 1ll1lLJue combination of procedural participato1 cncclopedic and spatial 111()rdances is 111 advancc in human culture comparable to the imention of Ilint or l11ming imagc photograplw [5J Thc ne digital medium expands )llr cogniriC pOcrs lw offering us ncv as of representing thc odd (eg Ilm)ugh parameterized simulations) 1nd greater pOcrs of organizing inf(xshy11111 ion (eg mul ti melk1 archivcs accessible through metadata) It is also a Illedium that is particularly well suited to games because the rules of the ~~l111C can be programmed into the computer and beGluse the user can rake JIl the role of the pLwcr Plaing glmes on the computer is similar to llld liltlTcnt tl-0111 pre-digital game pL1ing It contlates glme and puzzle into 1 single t(lrm in that a gamc played against a mcchanized opponcnt is reall a proccdural puzzle It can eliminatc turn uking by providing worlds that arc t1ways opcn to interruption and interycntion at hatCer pace the interactor 1 illing or able to sustain The computer is not 1are of our C0111mon [ltxus hecause it is not conscious in the same 1 a human player is conscious But it prmides us ith 1 partner hose thought processcs we arc aware ot~ and middotho rcprescnts the mcdiated consciousness of an implied human programshyIller e cngage with the computer as if it eIT an embodied opponcnt but 1lso as if it ere similar to a painting or a book the result of a prior act of conscious reprcsentation Cames can be thought of as socializing us into a l1e cyborg order establishing rituals of commonality ith proceduralized 1rtibcts

The computer is the most capacious pattern-making medium e hae ever had Ve have only begun to glimpse the nC symbolic structures that we can build with it cognitive scafflt)lds that will help us to organize and adY1I1ce the traditions of thinking that hae nO brought us beyond the ability to repshyresent our ideas in purelY linear fltmn lt3iCn that games playa kcy role in giyshying birth to language in the individual and the species we should not be surprised that the are playing a key role in elaborating the Ile symbolic 1111shyguage of intcr~lction in explI1ding the zone of proximal development tltJI digshyital mcdia

AcknowletlJ11tents

[his essay is excerpted Ii-om longcr u-gument T()ard a CUll mll Theorv oj Caming Digital Games and thc Co-Eolution of Media l1ind and Culture Popular Communishymtioll Volumc 4 NlIllber 3 p 18gt-2022006

20 JFI H MURRAY

References

1 Aarseth E J (~vbertext Penpectilcs on El~qodic Literature Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins Uniersit Press 1997

2 Bolter J and R Crusin Remediation UnderstandiJl3 Nell fedia Cambridge lA MIT Press 1999

3 Laurd B ComputCls as DmltC1 Reading MA Addison-Wesley Publishing Co 1993

4 Manmich L 11)( LallTlIillC ofNCJl Jfcdia Cambridge MA MIT Press 2001 5 lurra J H Halllet OIl the Holodeck Th( Flttllr( o(NllrratiJlc in Cyberspace New

York Simon amp Schusterfree Press 1997 6 Tonusello 11 llJC Cltltural Ortqills of HW1li11l CiJllitirJll Clmbridge lA Harshy

ard Cnietsin Press 2001 7 Bck()ft~ M and Bers J A (Eds) Animal PIal lOFOlItiollaIV Comparatilc and

tcolrLq iwI Pcnpccti1CJ elmbri dgc No York C1mbridge U nilCrsi t Press 1998 8 Sutton-Smith g Jhc A1JlIJtrj1ti~l of Plav Cambridge HHard lniCrsit Press

1997 9 Didow S M and C O Eckerman Toddler Peers from Nonerbal Coordinated

Action to Verbal Discourse Social Delclopmmt I O( 2) (2001) 170-188 19p 10 Malcolm K Studies Shed Light on Toddler Deeopment 2000 Aailablc at

ImpIwdukcnewsdukecdu20()()06toddler630_printhtm (I ast accessed Jul 142006l

11 udrip- fruin - and P Harrigan First Pels(II Nell ~lcdia a1 Story Performallcc I1l1ti Galll( Cll11hridge MA MIT Press 2004

12 DOluld 1 Orit7ills of the Hodenz Jfilld 17ra Staqts ill the 11011lti01l of Culture alld CrJtT71itir1l Cambridge Llt Hlrud LTninrsity Press 1991

13 DOIl1Id 1 A Milld So Rare The Elolutioll of Hiliwit COlscioumesr New York WW ~orton 2001

14 Schillarndt-Iksscrat D HaJJ WritillH Came About Amtill TX Uniersitl ofTncls Press 1996

~

-

2 Towards an 0 for Game Ana

Josf P ZAGAL MICHAEL

BRIAN HOCHHAlTER AltI

This chapter introduces the Gam t()r describing analyzing and stu COP in the context of other pro present the theoretical and methlt our conceptualllnderstanding of t ith an overvie describing its s outline a number OfWdVS in hic rltion of interesting research que our ork will take

He

Game designers have called t()r designers currently lack a unifled wd thinking through the desi~

approaches tC)(US on offering aid t patterns [356] which name and related notion of design rules 1 design situations f7 81 Other am arious humanistic disciplines-t~ terms of their usc of space [9] as [1112] in terms of the tempora [ I 3] or in terms of sets of teature~

~

--

1 Games as Joint Attentional Scenes

JANEl H illRRAY

The invention and striking global popularity of the new genre of computer games within the nev digital medium is provoking a reconsideration of older cultural categories such as narrative games and plaY [12345J Our renewed interest in the distinguishing qualities of the ancient representational format we call games coincides ith a moment of scientific focus and theshyoretical speculation on the prehistoric origins of mind and culture One of the central puzzles of eolutionary theory is the problem of the short time span in which primates deeloped into humanoids and humanoids developed into human beings There do not seem to have been enough iterations uf birth and adaptation and death fiJr natural selection to have created the drashymatic advantages that we hold Oer other related species

llichael Tomasello [6] explains this compressed time scheme as the result of a single change in human cognition the ability to understand conspecifics (other members of our species) as intentional agents like oneself This fOllnshydational change underpins symbolic communication and allows us to engage in cultural learning Culture is thc key clement here because the human advantage over other species lies in our ability to share and transmit knowlshyedge and patterns of behavior across historical time and in the raising of children

To make clear the distinction between the cognition of humans and other primates ho share much of our sensory experience and our social orishyentation Tomasello lists five actions that non-human primates do not do in their natural habitats

bull Point or gesture to olltsidc objects for others bull Hold objects up to sh(m thcm to others bull Bring othus to locations so the un obscnc things then bull Actich uffcr objccts to other indiiduals by holding them out bull Intel1lionalh teach other indiiduIs ne behaiors i p 21 )

12 13 JAlFl H MUKRAY

Human ontogeny the deyelopment of the individual in childhood seems to reproduce Tomasellos hypothesized phylogenic achievement At about nine months of age a baby begins to recognize when it has the parents attenshytion and then to be able to follow the parents attention to external objects by following their gaze and by fifteen months babies have usually begun pointing at things to direct the parcnts attention to objects of interest H uman inf~ll1ts below the age of nine months like non-human primates have a limited concept oftheir conspecifics (members of their species) as having menul awareness and intentionality But somewhere around their first birthshyday human infants have begun to understand other persons as intentional agents animate beings who have goals and who make active choices among behavioral means for attaining these goals including active choices about what to pay attention to in pursuing those goals (p 68) Tomasello further argues that the ability to t()llow on the attention of the adult leads to the child recognizing when she is herself the focus of the adults attention and gaze and begins to lay the framework for an understanding of the self as an actor in the SOCill world This cognitive leap whieh happened t()r the species in relatively recent evolutionary time (the last 250000 years or so) and for the individual at 9-15 months old forms the basis f()r the communicative cultural tasks that make up the bulk of human achievement It is the basis of sharing negotiating learning and symbolic communication

The framework in which the cognitive achievement of understanding intentionality leads to the acquisition of culturally transmitted knowledge is called a joint L1ttentionallune A joint attentional scene involves two particishypants such as a parent and child who both understand what the other is attending to In babyhood it occurs in play or in caretaking situations when the adult and the child have a common interest (such as food tickling stroking diapering) and exchange gestures sounds or looks that each recshyognizes as intentional and connected to whatever holds their common focus Once a baby and its parent achieve this ability the babys learning increases exponentially Tomasello similarly believes that once early humanoids achieved this ability the possibility t()r cultural breakthroughs increased

exponentially Tomasellos insight into the development of human cognition may shed

light on one of the more puzzling aspects of games why are they fun What is the primarY motivation to engage in them We knc) that play is intrinsishycally pleasurable for animals and humans alike and there are many theories about its evolutionary value including rehearsal of adult skills and mastery of a flexible repertoire of responses [78] We seem hardwired to play to explore fiJr the simple pleasure of exercising our faculties and exploring the world in non-survival ways This exploratory play seems to serve the purpose of expanding our repertoire of responses of offering a wider range of cognitive

Games as Joint Attentional Scenes

patterns to apply to new situations But games explicitly limit and channel the intrinsically pleasurable exploration characteristic ofplay What is it about a game activity that is intrinsically enjoyable to those who choose to engage in it What do games offer in return for limiting the exploratory delights of play

Perhaps the enjoyment of games is hardwired into us selected by thoushysands of years of cultural behavior to encourage us to seek out situations like Tomasellos joint attentional scenes Indeed the three defining characteristics of a joint attentional scene are similar to the social situation necessary tix gaming

bull Shared limited f()Cus on external objects andor behaviors bull Mutually witnessed intentionality among participants within the

shared context bull Symbolic communication between participants

The ability to form this joint attentional scene makes it possible to

engage in the activities characteristic of games to treat abstract representashytions consistently to behave according to negotiated rules to limit ones actions and attention to the game pieces and game actions to what counts in the game screening out other stimuli and actions Joint attention organshyizes two of the core activities of games turn-taking and synchronizing behaviors

Tomasellos theory also suggests some of the core adaptive benefits of games since thev reinforce key benefits of joint attentional scenes

bull An understanding of the self both as an agent and an object within a community of other intentional agentobjects

bull The ability to shift perspective from ones own point of view to the point of view of others to imagine what someone else is thinking and to see oneself from the point of view of the other

bull The ability to intentionally teach and learn which is the foundation of all human cultural development

It is easy to think of a contemporary board game or one of its early preshycursors such as mancala or knucklebones as a joint attentional activity comshyposed of limited focus mutually witnessed intentional acts and symbolic manipulation Taking turns dropping seeds into a special set of holes in the ground or throwing pieces of animal bone or clay dice the players are aware of each ones turn of each ones separate actions and history in the game and of the relative position of each to one another in the scoring of the gll11e Watching one another pia is an opportunity for passive and active learning f()r metacomments on the play of one another Boardgames intensify the

14 15 JANET H MlIR1ZiY

opportunity for witnessing the actions of the other player and for keeping track of multiple positions within the same game Sports games intensity the opportunity fix intentional teaching and learning by focusing performance on goal-centered behaviors that are optimized for comparison between playshyers and between turns Games prmide a framework for watching and crishytiquing iterative activities and tor working collectiely for improved performance These patterns of behavior are then available tex survival activities

If Tomasello is right and our ability to form joint intentional scenes was a prerequisite to the acquisition of language thell games may be understood as a foundational element in human culture as the gestural starting point in the history of representational media Although he docs not mention games I think that his work considered in juxtaposition to other research on games and childrens play clearly points in this direction for example researchers at Duke University have studied toddler imitation games such as taking turns jumping off a box which arc good examples of how joint attention is estabshylished and elaborated beteen cognitilly matched pre-linguistic children r9 J for Carol Eckerman II 0 J the important cognitive feature of these games is that they serve as a tltxm of pre-verbal communication She interprets their mirroring interaction as a kind of dialog without language

I expect that the children are using illliution or nonverbal actions as a way of reaching agreement on a topic tilr their interaction So when one child imitates another it may say sOl1lething like lets do this together and when the first child imitates b1ck its kind of like a contirmatioll yes J like this too

Interestingly enough Sutton-Smith [8] citing Kenneth Burke and Greshygory Bateson makes a similar suggestion about the function of play biting in anilll~l1s He suggests that

play might blt the earliest tlJlln of a negative prior to the existence of the negashytive in language PLly as a Wl of not doing whatever it represents prelnts error It is a positive behavioral neg~ltiye It says no by saying es It is a bite but

it is a nip (p 22)

In both cases the urge to play is a means of communicating in a situation in which intelligent creatures have not yet acquired language A play action is a signal like a predator call except that its referent is to the social world

Jlost interestingly Eckerman observed how imitation games can lead to

the development of language in clearly differentiated steps To paraphrase and summarize her observations

bull first they direct elch other Go Wait Jump Vatch me bull Then they answer one another My turn You jump

Games as Joint Attentional Scenes

bull finally they describe their actions as they do them I jump or Big jump while jumping off the box

The game is organizing their behavior providing practice in language exchange and in synchronized expectations and pertemnance The pleasure of the game lies as mLlch in the communication as in the actions and it lies parshyticularly in the matching oflanguage to action and in the choreographing of both into a patterned social interaction The pleasure of games reinfe)rces the adaptive behavior of symbolic communication around patterned social behaviors

Eckerman is particularly struck by the joyousness of the imitation game Her work provides a dramatic parallel to Tomasellos hypothesized moments of (olutionary progress

You can infer from the laughing and smiling going on th~1t they really enjoy interacting with each other Perhaps in these imitative interactions they arc expeshyricncing both their similaritmiddot to others and their separltcness Perhaps they arc learning that e cach arc intentional agcl1ts of action and that playing together is a very pleasant thing rIO I

These early games are based on mutually elaborated patterns that serve the same purpose as written rules Thev arc intrinsically social and can in bct be understood as a celebration of the social of the very presence of other intentional beings The pleasure derived from sharing attention and witnessshying and enacting intentional acts fltJfl1ls the framework tor mastering complex physical and social skills Spectatorship is as much a part of the experience as active performance and in early games it is an alternating spectatorship YOLl

do I do you do I do The elaboration of joint attentional scenes into ever more elaborate games sets up opportunities for performance te)r presenting the self as a pertegtrlner in a socially constructed arena and for incorporating multiple individuals into t1cxible but predictable group structures

The Co-Evolution ofGames Narrative andMedia

Thinking of games in terms of their possible evolutionary history their adapshytive value helps us to think about the persistent contlict in game studies between those who emphasize the similarities between games and stories and those ho emphasize their difterences r 11] It is significant tlut Tomasello links the uniquely human understanding of conspecifics consciousness with the uniquely human understanding of other unseen underlying causes Tomasello believes that human causal understanding evohed tlrst in the social domain to comprehend others as social agents Although there is no Yay of knowing if this is true he points to the cultural evidence that many

17 1( JAlET H MURRAY

ltI III I1 III Ill odd when the are in doubt as to the physical cause of III II I ICil i Il()ke various types of animistic or deistic forces to explain it

I Illq IIi i he debult approach (p 24) In other words the sensing of Ille 11I1llIl intentions of other humans is linked to an animistic view of the II lIld I hat creates explanatory narratives ofintention fix other events as well (()tllitive theorist Mark Turner would agree that an abstract sense of cause 1Ild efkct is an early human cognitive achievement and precedes the acquisishytion oflanguage Turner explicitly identifies this cognitive leap as narrative or parable making the abstraction of causal sequences from the observed world If we accept these theories of early cognition then we can think of games and stories as driving and co-evolving with the development of lanshyguage leading to the development of more complex social patterns more complex causal thinking and more elaborate svmbolic culture

The Tomasello hypothesis can be interpreted as linking both games and stories to the single moment in which human consciousness first awakened The moment has two key aspects

bull The understanding of ones fellow creatures as intentional beings leading to the exploration of joint attention which can be understood as the birth ofmimetic games

bull The understanding of overt events as the result of invisible causes which leads to abstract thinking about causal patterns which can be understood as the birth ofnarrative thinking

These two cognitive and cultural advances have one key eHect

bull The elaboration of symbolic communication starting with gesture and vocalization and developing into spoken language which can be understood as the birth of meditl

The italicized phrases represent my interprcration of Tomasellos theory Just as culture and cognition co-evolve I would argue that the elements of culture are also subject to an ongoing process of co-evolution Mimetic games lead to greater social organization and closer attention to the world which forwards causal thinking which leads to more complicated garnes both of which produce a demand for more expressive language This pattern-the co-evolution of games narrative and language-is visible in toddlers and children and imaginable as a narrative of prehistoric human life It is also visshyible in the cultural patterns of historical time if we think of human (spoken) language as a medium and of bter symbolic media as co-evolving in a simishylar way with ever more elaborate mimetic and causal (game and story) genres In order to knit these different time scales together and motivate these rather broad generalizations it is useful to turn to the work of Merlin Donald who

I 1111S IU Joint Attentional Scenes

1 Il()t hesizes that modern human cognition arose in fc)Ur steps starting with IIIlt plit from our primate cOLlsins episodic culture) which we share ith other 1IIIIll111als and primates in which social relationships and cyen simple tool use Ill clop on the basis of brain function that allows only discrete episodic strucshy1IIIl and recall mimetic culture in which the early hOl11inids Cln understand ltIll mother as intentional conscious agents and can communicate symbolshyI dl allowing them to form bands migrate hunt domesticate fire and 1IIIke simple tools mythic culture in which sapient humans communicate IIII( )ugh symbolic f()rms of representation such as oral language mimetic ritshyIIds and cave paintings understanding the world in narrative terms and III( )dern theoretical culture which understands the world in terms of abstract I IlIltaiisms and is based on massive externally stored memory systems such as I rillt and computers 11213 j

The transition between the first and second stages is the one Tomasello kscribes as bringing an understanding of shared attention and 1bstract luses The mimetic stage can be thought of as driven lw games and rituals 1 he elaboration of the synchronized actions and communications of the Illlmanoids with a capacity for joint attention Gameplaying in this stage may IllVe been mostlv tied to survival with the pleasure of synchronization lddillg energy to the acquisition of skills necessary f()r evading predatory anishymals or collectively hunting them A sustained culture of rule-based coordishyIllted behaviors would reinf(Jrce the development of language which in turn (lUld support more detailed and memorable stories Mimetic behaviors surshylive in contemporary society in pleasurable rituals like dancing and athletics The earliest videogames were mimetic in that the gameplay was f(xused on t he mastery of simple repetitive behaviors moving a character through a maze eating pellets Vith the elaboration of the medium of video games to include more detailed graphics alld more responsive and complex programshyming videogames ofkr us more complex patterns to absorb and perform The toddler pleasure in joint attention and imitation is reproduced in a way by gamcs that challenge us to synchronize our actions with machine such as the arcade game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) ill which players must keep up with a pattern of dance steps Like an oral culture game like Simon Says which challenges children to cont()rm their behavior to symbolic codes (sposhyken commands) DDR presents the dance steps not by example but in a spashytial notation that must be quickly interpreted and acted on Games like these may be helping us to elaborate a common symbolic language with our new electronic joint attentional partners

The third stage mythic culture can be seen as driven by complex narrashytives the result of more elaborated oral language and longer traditions of shared experience Mythic thinking characterized by heroic legends and ritshyually transmitted narrativcs is apparent in the writings of antiquity which

19 I JI11 H JhRl-Y

11111 Iiimiddot (11d IIIllS and in pre-literate cultures But tlt)[ms of mythic 111111klll) lIldurc into our post-literate age often reinflt)rcing 1Hiliarions based II l01ll1ll0n identities as in families ethnic groups and political parties When athletic events become mass spectator sports in which players embody the aspirations of spectator fans they pass from mimetic into mythic culture with larger than life performances of superhuman beings Videogames otten invoke this mythic state of mind by casting the player in the role of superhero or placing the action within a fantasy domain characterized bv animism and supernatural mythical tigures

The fourth and current stage of human culture according to Merlin Donald is characterized by theoretical thinking The transition ti-om the mythic to the theoretical stage is the result of the invention ofTiting hich is tirst used as a commercial tool and for talismanic inscriptions of the names of gods and rules and later as a way of recording oral culture such as stories and magical spells and is then perfected by the Greeks as a means of recordshying the process of thinking and reasoning therdw allowing tltlr 1 sustained collective discourse that moves from mythic Lplanations to re1soned argushymentation In Donalds elegant analysis we m()c trom Ape to Einstein in only three steps which we can think of in terms ofsvmbolic Lchange cognishytive strategies or cultural building blocks from joint attention to langu~lge to

writing from mimesis to narrative to argumentation ti-om ritu11 to myth to theory

Though neither Tomasello nor Donald points to games as instruments of cognitive evolution it is striking how otten games are part of their 1rgushyments Tomasellos experimental examples with apes and children arc usualhshyin the form of games Both Tomasello and Donald point to childrens supeshyriority at games as evidence of fundamental cognitive differences that preshydate language acquisition

Human childrcn play rulc-govcrncd games by imitation ottcn without J1 t()rshymalizcd instruction Thcy invcnt and learn new glmcs ottcn without using 11Il guagc Apcs likc othcr animals cannot learn similu gamcs thl are restrictcd to games that by our standards arc vcry simple The problem of bridging liom ape to human would thus appcar to involve a great dCli morc thm pinpointing the arrival time ofvocal languagc [ 12]

But though Donald instances mimetic games as one of the key composhynents of hominid development both cognitil~ scienti~ts ~top short of seeing games as a driving force of cognitive and cultural eolution Yet the more one thinks about the clements of cultural cognition the more game-like they seem

( [11111 flS joi71t Attcntimml Sccncs

Digital Games andJoint Attention

111e argued elsewhere rlut the aliYent of the computer as a medium ith ib 1ll1lLJue combination of procedural participato1 cncclopedic and spatial 111()rdances is 111 advancc in human culture comparable to the imention of Ilint or l11ming imagc photograplw [5J Thc ne digital medium expands )llr cogniriC pOcrs lw offering us ncv as of representing thc odd (eg Ilm)ugh parameterized simulations) 1nd greater pOcrs of organizing inf(xshy11111 ion (eg mul ti melk1 archivcs accessible through metadata) It is also a Illedium that is particularly well suited to games because the rules of the ~~l111C can be programmed into the computer and beGluse the user can rake JIl the role of the pLwcr Plaing glmes on the computer is similar to llld liltlTcnt tl-0111 pre-digital game pL1ing It contlates glme and puzzle into 1 single t(lrm in that a gamc played against a mcchanized opponcnt is reall a proccdural puzzle It can eliminatc turn uking by providing worlds that arc t1ways opcn to interruption and interycntion at hatCer pace the interactor 1 illing or able to sustain The computer is not 1are of our C0111mon [ltxus hecause it is not conscious in the same 1 a human player is conscious But it prmides us ith 1 partner hose thought processcs we arc aware ot~ and middotho rcprescnts the mcdiated consciousness of an implied human programshyIller e cngage with the computer as if it eIT an embodied opponcnt but 1lso as if it ere similar to a painting or a book the result of a prior act of conscious reprcsentation Cames can be thought of as socializing us into a l1e cyborg order establishing rituals of commonality ith proceduralized 1rtibcts

The computer is the most capacious pattern-making medium e hae ever had Ve have only begun to glimpse the nC symbolic structures that we can build with it cognitive scafflt)lds that will help us to organize and adY1I1ce the traditions of thinking that hae nO brought us beyond the ability to repshyresent our ideas in purelY linear fltmn lt3iCn that games playa kcy role in giyshying birth to language in the individual and the species we should not be surprised that the are playing a key role in elaborating the Ile symbolic 1111shyguage of intcr~lction in explI1ding the zone of proximal development tltJI digshyital mcdia

AcknowletlJ11tents

[his essay is excerpted Ii-om longcr u-gument T()ard a CUll mll Theorv oj Caming Digital Games and thc Co-Eolution of Media l1ind and Culture Popular Communishymtioll Volumc 4 NlIllber 3 p 18gt-2022006

20 JFI H MURRAY

References

1 Aarseth E J (~vbertext Penpectilcs on El~qodic Literature Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins Uniersit Press 1997

2 Bolter J and R Crusin Remediation UnderstandiJl3 Nell fedia Cambridge lA MIT Press 1999

3 Laurd B ComputCls as DmltC1 Reading MA Addison-Wesley Publishing Co 1993

4 Manmich L 11)( LallTlIillC ofNCJl Jfcdia Cambridge MA MIT Press 2001 5 lurra J H Halllet OIl the Holodeck Th( Flttllr( o(NllrratiJlc in Cyberspace New

York Simon amp Schusterfree Press 1997 6 Tonusello 11 llJC Cltltural Ortqills of HW1li11l CiJllitirJll Clmbridge lA Harshy

ard Cnietsin Press 2001 7 Bck()ft~ M and Bers J A (Eds) Animal PIal lOFOlItiollaIV Comparatilc and

tcolrLq iwI Pcnpccti1CJ elmbri dgc No York C1mbridge U nilCrsi t Press 1998 8 Sutton-Smith g Jhc A1JlIJtrj1ti~l of Plav Cambridge HHard lniCrsit Press

1997 9 Didow S M and C O Eckerman Toddler Peers from Nonerbal Coordinated

Action to Verbal Discourse Social Delclopmmt I O( 2) (2001) 170-188 19p 10 Malcolm K Studies Shed Light on Toddler Deeopment 2000 Aailablc at

ImpIwdukcnewsdukecdu20()()06toddler630_printhtm (I ast accessed Jul 142006l

11 udrip- fruin - and P Harrigan First Pels(II Nell ~lcdia a1 Story Performallcc I1l1ti Galll( Cll11hridge MA MIT Press 2004

12 DOluld 1 Orit7ills of the Hodenz Jfilld 17ra Staqts ill the 11011lti01l of Culture alld CrJtT71itir1l Cambridge Llt Hlrud LTninrsity Press 1991

13 DOIl1Id 1 A Milld So Rare The Elolutioll of Hiliwit COlscioumesr New York WW ~orton 2001

14 Schillarndt-Iksscrat D HaJJ WritillH Came About Amtill TX Uniersitl ofTncls Press 1996

~

-

2 Towards an 0 for Game Ana

Josf P ZAGAL MICHAEL

BRIAN HOCHHAlTER AltI

This chapter introduces the Gam t()r describing analyzing and stu COP in the context of other pro present the theoretical and methlt our conceptualllnderstanding of t ith an overvie describing its s outline a number OfWdVS in hic rltion of interesting research que our ork will take

He

Game designers have called t()r designers currently lack a unifled wd thinking through the desi~

approaches tC)(US on offering aid t patterns [356] which name and related notion of design rules 1 design situations f7 81 Other am arious humanistic disciplines-t~ terms of their usc of space [9] as [1112] in terms of the tempora [ I 3] or in terms of sets of teature~

12 13 JAlFl H MUKRAY

Human ontogeny the deyelopment of the individual in childhood seems to reproduce Tomasellos hypothesized phylogenic achievement At about nine months of age a baby begins to recognize when it has the parents attenshytion and then to be able to follow the parents attention to external objects by following their gaze and by fifteen months babies have usually begun pointing at things to direct the parcnts attention to objects of interest H uman inf~ll1ts below the age of nine months like non-human primates have a limited concept oftheir conspecifics (members of their species) as having menul awareness and intentionality But somewhere around their first birthshyday human infants have begun to understand other persons as intentional agents animate beings who have goals and who make active choices among behavioral means for attaining these goals including active choices about what to pay attention to in pursuing those goals (p 68) Tomasello further argues that the ability to t()llow on the attention of the adult leads to the child recognizing when she is herself the focus of the adults attention and gaze and begins to lay the framework for an understanding of the self as an actor in the SOCill world This cognitive leap whieh happened t()r the species in relatively recent evolutionary time (the last 250000 years or so) and for the individual at 9-15 months old forms the basis f()r the communicative cultural tasks that make up the bulk of human achievement It is the basis of sharing negotiating learning and symbolic communication

The framework in which the cognitive achievement of understanding intentionality leads to the acquisition of culturally transmitted knowledge is called a joint L1ttentionallune A joint attentional scene involves two particishypants such as a parent and child who both understand what the other is attending to In babyhood it occurs in play or in caretaking situations when the adult and the child have a common interest (such as food tickling stroking diapering) and exchange gestures sounds or looks that each recshyognizes as intentional and connected to whatever holds their common focus Once a baby and its parent achieve this ability the babys learning increases exponentially Tomasello similarly believes that once early humanoids achieved this ability the possibility t()r cultural breakthroughs increased

exponentially Tomasellos insight into the development of human cognition may shed

light on one of the more puzzling aspects of games why are they fun What is the primarY motivation to engage in them We knc) that play is intrinsishycally pleasurable for animals and humans alike and there are many theories about its evolutionary value including rehearsal of adult skills and mastery of a flexible repertoire of responses [78] We seem hardwired to play to explore fiJr the simple pleasure of exercising our faculties and exploring the world in non-survival ways This exploratory play seems to serve the purpose of expanding our repertoire of responses of offering a wider range of cognitive

Games as Joint Attentional Scenes

patterns to apply to new situations But games explicitly limit and channel the intrinsically pleasurable exploration characteristic ofplay What is it about a game activity that is intrinsically enjoyable to those who choose to engage in it What do games offer in return for limiting the exploratory delights of play

Perhaps the enjoyment of games is hardwired into us selected by thoushysands of years of cultural behavior to encourage us to seek out situations like Tomasellos joint attentional scenes Indeed the three defining characteristics of a joint attentional scene are similar to the social situation necessary tix gaming

bull Shared limited f()Cus on external objects andor behaviors bull Mutually witnessed intentionality among participants within the

shared context bull Symbolic communication between participants

The ability to form this joint attentional scene makes it possible to

engage in the activities characteristic of games to treat abstract representashytions consistently to behave according to negotiated rules to limit ones actions and attention to the game pieces and game actions to what counts in the game screening out other stimuli and actions Joint attention organshyizes two of the core activities of games turn-taking and synchronizing behaviors

Tomasellos theory also suggests some of the core adaptive benefits of games since thev reinforce key benefits of joint attentional scenes

bull An understanding of the self both as an agent and an object within a community of other intentional agentobjects

bull The ability to shift perspective from ones own point of view to the point of view of others to imagine what someone else is thinking and to see oneself from the point of view of the other

bull The ability to intentionally teach and learn which is the foundation of all human cultural development

It is easy to think of a contemporary board game or one of its early preshycursors such as mancala or knucklebones as a joint attentional activity comshyposed of limited focus mutually witnessed intentional acts and symbolic manipulation Taking turns dropping seeds into a special set of holes in the ground or throwing pieces of animal bone or clay dice the players are aware of each ones turn of each ones separate actions and history in the game and of the relative position of each to one another in the scoring of the gll11e Watching one another pia is an opportunity for passive and active learning f()r metacomments on the play of one another Boardgames intensify the

14 15 JANET H MlIR1ZiY

opportunity for witnessing the actions of the other player and for keeping track of multiple positions within the same game Sports games intensity the opportunity fix intentional teaching and learning by focusing performance on goal-centered behaviors that are optimized for comparison between playshyers and between turns Games prmide a framework for watching and crishytiquing iterative activities and tor working collectiely for improved performance These patterns of behavior are then available tex survival activities

If Tomasello is right and our ability to form joint intentional scenes was a prerequisite to the acquisition of language thell games may be understood as a foundational element in human culture as the gestural starting point in the history of representational media Although he docs not mention games I think that his work considered in juxtaposition to other research on games and childrens play clearly points in this direction for example researchers at Duke University have studied toddler imitation games such as taking turns jumping off a box which arc good examples of how joint attention is estabshylished and elaborated beteen cognitilly matched pre-linguistic children r9 J for Carol Eckerman II 0 J the important cognitive feature of these games is that they serve as a tltxm of pre-verbal communication She interprets their mirroring interaction as a kind of dialog without language

I expect that the children are using illliution or nonverbal actions as a way of reaching agreement on a topic tilr their interaction So when one child imitates another it may say sOl1lething like lets do this together and when the first child imitates b1ck its kind of like a contirmatioll yes J like this too

Interestingly enough Sutton-Smith [8] citing Kenneth Burke and Greshygory Bateson makes a similar suggestion about the function of play biting in anilll~l1s He suggests that

play might blt the earliest tlJlln of a negative prior to the existence of the negashytive in language PLly as a Wl of not doing whatever it represents prelnts error It is a positive behavioral neg~ltiye It says no by saying es It is a bite but

it is a nip (p 22)

In both cases the urge to play is a means of communicating in a situation in which intelligent creatures have not yet acquired language A play action is a signal like a predator call except that its referent is to the social world

Jlost interestingly Eckerman observed how imitation games can lead to

the development of language in clearly differentiated steps To paraphrase and summarize her observations

bull first they direct elch other Go Wait Jump Vatch me bull Then they answer one another My turn You jump

Games as Joint Attentional Scenes

bull finally they describe their actions as they do them I jump or Big jump while jumping off the box

The game is organizing their behavior providing practice in language exchange and in synchronized expectations and pertemnance The pleasure of the game lies as mLlch in the communication as in the actions and it lies parshyticularly in the matching oflanguage to action and in the choreographing of both into a patterned social interaction The pleasure of games reinfe)rces the adaptive behavior of symbolic communication around patterned social behaviors

Eckerman is particularly struck by the joyousness of the imitation game Her work provides a dramatic parallel to Tomasellos hypothesized moments of (olutionary progress

You can infer from the laughing and smiling going on th~1t they really enjoy interacting with each other Perhaps in these imitative interactions they arc expeshyricncing both their similaritmiddot to others and their separltcness Perhaps they arc learning that e cach arc intentional agcl1ts of action and that playing together is a very pleasant thing rIO I

These early games are based on mutually elaborated patterns that serve the same purpose as written rules Thev arc intrinsically social and can in bct be understood as a celebration of the social of the very presence of other intentional beings The pleasure derived from sharing attention and witnessshying and enacting intentional acts fltJfl1ls the framework tor mastering complex physical and social skills Spectatorship is as much a part of the experience as active performance and in early games it is an alternating spectatorship YOLl

do I do you do I do The elaboration of joint attentional scenes into ever more elaborate games sets up opportunities for performance te)r presenting the self as a pertegtrlner in a socially constructed arena and for incorporating multiple individuals into t1cxible but predictable group structures

The Co-Evolution ofGames Narrative andMedia

Thinking of games in terms of their possible evolutionary history their adapshytive value helps us to think about the persistent contlict in game studies between those who emphasize the similarities between games and stories and those ho emphasize their difterences r 11] It is significant tlut Tomasello links the uniquely human understanding of conspecifics consciousness with the uniquely human understanding of other unseen underlying causes Tomasello believes that human causal understanding evohed tlrst in the social domain to comprehend others as social agents Although there is no Yay of knowing if this is true he points to the cultural evidence that many

17 1( JAlET H MURRAY

ltI III I1 III Ill odd when the are in doubt as to the physical cause of III II I ICil i Il()ke various types of animistic or deistic forces to explain it

I Illq IIi i he debult approach (p 24) In other words the sensing of Ille 11I1llIl intentions of other humans is linked to an animistic view of the II lIld I hat creates explanatory narratives ofintention fix other events as well (()tllitive theorist Mark Turner would agree that an abstract sense of cause 1Ild efkct is an early human cognitive achievement and precedes the acquisishytion oflanguage Turner explicitly identifies this cognitive leap as narrative or parable making the abstraction of causal sequences from the observed world If we accept these theories of early cognition then we can think of games and stories as driving and co-evolving with the development of lanshyguage leading to the development of more complex social patterns more complex causal thinking and more elaborate svmbolic culture

The Tomasello hypothesis can be interpreted as linking both games and stories to the single moment in which human consciousness first awakened The moment has two key aspects

bull The understanding of ones fellow creatures as intentional beings leading to the exploration of joint attention which can be understood as the birth ofmimetic games

bull The understanding of overt events as the result of invisible causes which leads to abstract thinking about causal patterns which can be understood as the birth ofnarrative thinking

These two cognitive and cultural advances have one key eHect

bull The elaboration of symbolic communication starting with gesture and vocalization and developing into spoken language which can be understood as the birth of meditl

The italicized phrases represent my interprcration of Tomasellos theory Just as culture and cognition co-evolve I would argue that the elements of culture are also subject to an ongoing process of co-evolution Mimetic games lead to greater social organization and closer attention to the world which forwards causal thinking which leads to more complicated garnes both of which produce a demand for more expressive language This pattern-the co-evolution of games narrative and language-is visible in toddlers and children and imaginable as a narrative of prehistoric human life It is also visshyible in the cultural patterns of historical time if we think of human (spoken) language as a medium and of bter symbolic media as co-evolving in a simishylar way with ever more elaborate mimetic and causal (game and story) genres In order to knit these different time scales together and motivate these rather broad generalizations it is useful to turn to the work of Merlin Donald who

I 1111S IU Joint Attentional Scenes

1 Il()t hesizes that modern human cognition arose in fc)Ur steps starting with IIIlt plit from our primate cOLlsins episodic culture) which we share ith other 1IIIIll111als and primates in which social relationships and cyen simple tool use Ill clop on the basis of brain function that allows only discrete episodic strucshy1IIIl and recall mimetic culture in which the early hOl11inids Cln understand ltIll mother as intentional conscious agents and can communicate symbolshyI dl allowing them to form bands migrate hunt domesticate fire and 1IIIke simple tools mythic culture in which sapient humans communicate IIII( )ugh symbolic f()rms of representation such as oral language mimetic ritshyIIds and cave paintings understanding the world in narrative terms and III( )dern theoretical culture which understands the world in terms of abstract I IlIltaiisms and is based on massive externally stored memory systems such as I rillt and computers 11213 j

The transition between the first and second stages is the one Tomasello kscribes as bringing an understanding of shared attention and 1bstract luses The mimetic stage can be thought of as driven lw games and rituals 1 he elaboration of the synchronized actions and communications of the Illlmanoids with a capacity for joint attention Gameplaying in this stage may IllVe been mostlv tied to survival with the pleasure of synchronization lddillg energy to the acquisition of skills necessary f()r evading predatory anishymals or collectively hunting them A sustained culture of rule-based coordishyIllted behaviors would reinf(Jrce the development of language which in turn (lUld support more detailed and memorable stories Mimetic behaviors surshylive in contemporary society in pleasurable rituals like dancing and athletics The earliest videogames were mimetic in that the gameplay was f(xused on t he mastery of simple repetitive behaviors moving a character through a maze eating pellets Vith the elaboration of the medium of video games to include more detailed graphics alld more responsive and complex programshyming videogames ofkr us more complex patterns to absorb and perform The toddler pleasure in joint attention and imitation is reproduced in a way by gamcs that challenge us to synchronize our actions with machine such as the arcade game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) ill which players must keep up with a pattern of dance steps Like an oral culture game like Simon Says which challenges children to cont()rm their behavior to symbolic codes (sposhyken commands) DDR presents the dance steps not by example but in a spashytial notation that must be quickly interpreted and acted on Games like these may be helping us to elaborate a common symbolic language with our new electronic joint attentional partners

The third stage mythic culture can be seen as driven by complex narrashytives the result of more elaborated oral language and longer traditions of shared experience Mythic thinking characterized by heroic legends and ritshyually transmitted narrativcs is apparent in the writings of antiquity which

19 I JI11 H JhRl-Y

11111 Iiimiddot (11d IIIllS and in pre-literate cultures But tlt)[ms of mythic 111111klll) lIldurc into our post-literate age often reinflt)rcing 1Hiliarions based II l01ll1ll0n identities as in families ethnic groups and political parties When athletic events become mass spectator sports in which players embody the aspirations of spectator fans they pass from mimetic into mythic culture with larger than life performances of superhuman beings Videogames otten invoke this mythic state of mind by casting the player in the role of superhero or placing the action within a fantasy domain characterized bv animism and supernatural mythical tigures

The fourth and current stage of human culture according to Merlin Donald is characterized by theoretical thinking The transition ti-om the mythic to the theoretical stage is the result of the invention ofTiting hich is tirst used as a commercial tool and for talismanic inscriptions of the names of gods and rules and later as a way of recording oral culture such as stories and magical spells and is then perfected by the Greeks as a means of recordshying the process of thinking and reasoning therdw allowing tltlr 1 sustained collective discourse that moves from mythic Lplanations to re1soned argushymentation In Donalds elegant analysis we m()c trom Ape to Einstein in only three steps which we can think of in terms ofsvmbolic Lchange cognishytive strategies or cultural building blocks from joint attention to langu~lge to

writing from mimesis to narrative to argumentation ti-om ritu11 to myth to theory

Though neither Tomasello nor Donald points to games as instruments of cognitive evolution it is striking how otten games are part of their 1rgushyments Tomasellos experimental examples with apes and children arc usualhshyin the form of games Both Tomasello and Donald point to childrens supeshyriority at games as evidence of fundamental cognitive differences that preshydate language acquisition

Human childrcn play rulc-govcrncd games by imitation ottcn without J1 t()rshymalizcd instruction Thcy invcnt and learn new glmcs ottcn without using 11Il guagc Apcs likc othcr animals cannot learn similu gamcs thl are restrictcd to games that by our standards arc vcry simple The problem of bridging liom ape to human would thus appcar to involve a great dCli morc thm pinpointing the arrival time ofvocal languagc [ 12]

But though Donald instances mimetic games as one of the key composhynents of hominid development both cognitil~ scienti~ts ~top short of seeing games as a driving force of cognitive and cultural eolution Yet the more one thinks about the clements of cultural cognition the more game-like they seem

( [11111 flS joi71t Attcntimml Sccncs

Digital Games andJoint Attention

111e argued elsewhere rlut the aliYent of the computer as a medium ith ib 1ll1lLJue combination of procedural participato1 cncclopedic and spatial 111()rdances is 111 advancc in human culture comparable to the imention of Ilint or l11ming imagc photograplw [5J Thc ne digital medium expands )llr cogniriC pOcrs lw offering us ncv as of representing thc odd (eg Ilm)ugh parameterized simulations) 1nd greater pOcrs of organizing inf(xshy11111 ion (eg mul ti melk1 archivcs accessible through metadata) It is also a Illedium that is particularly well suited to games because the rules of the ~~l111C can be programmed into the computer and beGluse the user can rake JIl the role of the pLwcr Plaing glmes on the computer is similar to llld liltlTcnt tl-0111 pre-digital game pL1ing It contlates glme and puzzle into 1 single t(lrm in that a gamc played against a mcchanized opponcnt is reall a proccdural puzzle It can eliminatc turn uking by providing worlds that arc t1ways opcn to interruption and interycntion at hatCer pace the interactor 1 illing or able to sustain The computer is not 1are of our C0111mon [ltxus hecause it is not conscious in the same 1 a human player is conscious But it prmides us ith 1 partner hose thought processcs we arc aware ot~ and middotho rcprescnts the mcdiated consciousness of an implied human programshyIller e cngage with the computer as if it eIT an embodied opponcnt but 1lso as if it ere similar to a painting or a book the result of a prior act of conscious reprcsentation Cames can be thought of as socializing us into a l1e cyborg order establishing rituals of commonality ith proceduralized 1rtibcts

The computer is the most capacious pattern-making medium e hae ever had Ve have only begun to glimpse the nC symbolic structures that we can build with it cognitive scafflt)lds that will help us to organize and adY1I1ce the traditions of thinking that hae nO brought us beyond the ability to repshyresent our ideas in purelY linear fltmn lt3iCn that games playa kcy role in giyshying birth to language in the individual and the species we should not be surprised that the are playing a key role in elaborating the Ile symbolic 1111shyguage of intcr~lction in explI1ding the zone of proximal development tltJI digshyital mcdia

AcknowletlJ11tents

[his essay is excerpted Ii-om longcr u-gument T()ard a CUll mll Theorv oj Caming Digital Games and thc Co-Eolution of Media l1ind and Culture Popular Communishymtioll Volumc 4 NlIllber 3 p 18gt-2022006

20 JFI H MURRAY

References

1 Aarseth E J (~vbertext Penpectilcs on El~qodic Literature Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins Uniersit Press 1997

2 Bolter J and R Crusin Remediation UnderstandiJl3 Nell fedia Cambridge lA MIT Press 1999

3 Laurd B ComputCls as DmltC1 Reading MA Addison-Wesley Publishing Co 1993

4 Manmich L 11)( LallTlIillC ofNCJl Jfcdia Cambridge MA MIT Press 2001 5 lurra J H Halllet OIl the Holodeck Th( Flttllr( o(NllrratiJlc in Cyberspace New

York Simon amp Schusterfree Press 1997 6 Tonusello 11 llJC Cltltural Ortqills of HW1li11l CiJllitirJll Clmbridge lA Harshy

ard Cnietsin Press 2001 7 Bck()ft~ M and Bers J A (Eds) Animal PIal lOFOlItiollaIV Comparatilc and

tcolrLq iwI Pcnpccti1CJ elmbri dgc No York C1mbridge U nilCrsi t Press 1998 8 Sutton-Smith g Jhc A1JlIJtrj1ti~l of Plav Cambridge HHard lniCrsit Press

1997 9 Didow S M and C O Eckerman Toddler Peers from Nonerbal Coordinated

Action to Verbal Discourse Social Delclopmmt I O( 2) (2001) 170-188 19p 10 Malcolm K Studies Shed Light on Toddler Deeopment 2000 Aailablc at

ImpIwdukcnewsdukecdu20()()06toddler630_printhtm (I ast accessed Jul 142006l

11 udrip- fruin - and P Harrigan First Pels(II Nell ~lcdia a1 Story Performallcc I1l1ti Galll( Cll11hridge MA MIT Press 2004

12 DOluld 1 Orit7ills of the Hodenz Jfilld 17ra Staqts ill the 11011lti01l of Culture alld CrJtT71itir1l Cambridge Llt Hlrud LTninrsity Press 1991

13 DOIl1Id 1 A Milld So Rare The Elolutioll of Hiliwit COlscioumesr New York WW ~orton 2001

14 Schillarndt-Iksscrat D HaJJ WritillH Came About Amtill TX Uniersitl ofTncls Press 1996

~

-

2 Towards an 0 for Game Ana

Josf P ZAGAL MICHAEL

BRIAN HOCHHAlTER AltI

This chapter introduces the Gam t()r describing analyzing and stu COP in the context of other pro present the theoretical and methlt our conceptualllnderstanding of t ith an overvie describing its s outline a number OfWdVS in hic rltion of interesting research que our ork will take

He

Game designers have called t()r designers currently lack a unifled wd thinking through the desi~

approaches tC)(US on offering aid t patterns [356] which name and related notion of design rules 1 design situations f7 81 Other am arious humanistic disciplines-t~ terms of their usc of space [9] as [1112] in terms of the tempora [ I 3] or in terms of sets of teature~

14 15 JANET H MlIR1ZiY

opportunity for witnessing the actions of the other player and for keeping track of multiple positions within the same game Sports games intensity the opportunity fix intentional teaching and learning by focusing performance on goal-centered behaviors that are optimized for comparison between playshyers and between turns Games prmide a framework for watching and crishytiquing iterative activities and tor working collectiely for improved performance These patterns of behavior are then available tex survival activities

If Tomasello is right and our ability to form joint intentional scenes was a prerequisite to the acquisition of language thell games may be understood as a foundational element in human culture as the gestural starting point in the history of representational media Although he docs not mention games I think that his work considered in juxtaposition to other research on games and childrens play clearly points in this direction for example researchers at Duke University have studied toddler imitation games such as taking turns jumping off a box which arc good examples of how joint attention is estabshylished and elaborated beteen cognitilly matched pre-linguistic children r9 J for Carol Eckerman II 0 J the important cognitive feature of these games is that they serve as a tltxm of pre-verbal communication She interprets their mirroring interaction as a kind of dialog without language

I expect that the children are using illliution or nonverbal actions as a way of reaching agreement on a topic tilr their interaction So when one child imitates another it may say sOl1lething like lets do this together and when the first child imitates b1ck its kind of like a contirmatioll yes J like this too

Interestingly enough Sutton-Smith [8] citing Kenneth Burke and Greshygory Bateson makes a similar suggestion about the function of play biting in anilll~l1s He suggests that

play might blt the earliest tlJlln of a negative prior to the existence of the negashytive in language PLly as a Wl of not doing whatever it represents prelnts error It is a positive behavioral neg~ltiye It says no by saying es It is a bite but

it is a nip (p 22)

In both cases the urge to play is a means of communicating in a situation in which intelligent creatures have not yet acquired language A play action is a signal like a predator call except that its referent is to the social world

Jlost interestingly Eckerman observed how imitation games can lead to

the development of language in clearly differentiated steps To paraphrase and summarize her observations

bull first they direct elch other Go Wait Jump Vatch me bull Then they answer one another My turn You jump

Games as Joint Attentional Scenes

bull finally they describe their actions as they do them I jump or Big jump while jumping off the box

The game is organizing their behavior providing practice in language exchange and in synchronized expectations and pertemnance The pleasure of the game lies as mLlch in the communication as in the actions and it lies parshyticularly in the matching oflanguage to action and in the choreographing of both into a patterned social interaction The pleasure of games reinfe)rces the adaptive behavior of symbolic communication around patterned social behaviors

Eckerman is particularly struck by the joyousness of the imitation game Her work provides a dramatic parallel to Tomasellos hypothesized moments of (olutionary progress

You can infer from the laughing and smiling going on th~1t they really enjoy interacting with each other Perhaps in these imitative interactions they arc expeshyricncing both their similaritmiddot to others and their separltcness Perhaps they arc learning that e cach arc intentional agcl1ts of action and that playing together is a very pleasant thing rIO I

These early games are based on mutually elaborated patterns that serve the same purpose as written rules Thev arc intrinsically social and can in bct be understood as a celebration of the social of the very presence of other intentional beings The pleasure derived from sharing attention and witnessshying and enacting intentional acts fltJfl1ls the framework tor mastering complex physical and social skills Spectatorship is as much a part of the experience as active performance and in early games it is an alternating spectatorship YOLl

do I do you do I do The elaboration of joint attentional scenes into ever more elaborate games sets up opportunities for performance te)r presenting the self as a pertegtrlner in a socially constructed arena and for incorporating multiple individuals into t1cxible but predictable group structures

The Co-Evolution ofGames Narrative andMedia

Thinking of games in terms of their possible evolutionary history their adapshytive value helps us to think about the persistent contlict in game studies between those who emphasize the similarities between games and stories and those ho emphasize their difterences r 11] It is significant tlut Tomasello links the uniquely human understanding of conspecifics consciousness with the uniquely human understanding of other unseen underlying causes Tomasello believes that human causal understanding evohed tlrst in the social domain to comprehend others as social agents Although there is no Yay of knowing if this is true he points to the cultural evidence that many

17 1( JAlET H MURRAY

ltI III I1 III Ill odd when the are in doubt as to the physical cause of III II I ICil i Il()ke various types of animistic or deistic forces to explain it

I Illq IIi i he debult approach (p 24) In other words the sensing of Ille 11I1llIl intentions of other humans is linked to an animistic view of the II lIld I hat creates explanatory narratives ofintention fix other events as well (()tllitive theorist Mark Turner would agree that an abstract sense of cause 1Ild efkct is an early human cognitive achievement and precedes the acquisishytion oflanguage Turner explicitly identifies this cognitive leap as narrative or parable making the abstraction of causal sequences from the observed world If we accept these theories of early cognition then we can think of games and stories as driving and co-evolving with the development of lanshyguage leading to the development of more complex social patterns more complex causal thinking and more elaborate svmbolic culture

The Tomasello hypothesis can be interpreted as linking both games and stories to the single moment in which human consciousness first awakened The moment has two key aspects

bull The understanding of ones fellow creatures as intentional beings leading to the exploration of joint attention which can be understood as the birth ofmimetic games

bull The understanding of overt events as the result of invisible causes which leads to abstract thinking about causal patterns which can be understood as the birth ofnarrative thinking

These two cognitive and cultural advances have one key eHect

bull The elaboration of symbolic communication starting with gesture and vocalization and developing into spoken language which can be understood as the birth of meditl

The italicized phrases represent my interprcration of Tomasellos theory Just as culture and cognition co-evolve I would argue that the elements of culture are also subject to an ongoing process of co-evolution Mimetic games lead to greater social organization and closer attention to the world which forwards causal thinking which leads to more complicated garnes both of which produce a demand for more expressive language This pattern-the co-evolution of games narrative and language-is visible in toddlers and children and imaginable as a narrative of prehistoric human life It is also visshyible in the cultural patterns of historical time if we think of human (spoken) language as a medium and of bter symbolic media as co-evolving in a simishylar way with ever more elaborate mimetic and causal (game and story) genres In order to knit these different time scales together and motivate these rather broad generalizations it is useful to turn to the work of Merlin Donald who

I 1111S IU Joint Attentional Scenes

1 Il()t hesizes that modern human cognition arose in fc)Ur steps starting with IIIlt plit from our primate cOLlsins episodic culture) which we share ith other 1IIIIll111als and primates in which social relationships and cyen simple tool use Ill clop on the basis of brain function that allows only discrete episodic strucshy1IIIl and recall mimetic culture in which the early hOl11inids Cln understand ltIll mother as intentional conscious agents and can communicate symbolshyI dl allowing them to form bands migrate hunt domesticate fire and 1IIIke simple tools mythic culture in which sapient humans communicate IIII( )ugh symbolic f()rms of representation such as oral language mimetic ritshyIIds and cave paintings understanding the world in narrative terms and III( )dern theoretical culture which understands the world in terms of abstract I IlIltaiisms and is based on massive externally stored memory systems such as I rillt and computers 11213 j

The transition between the first and second stages is the one Tomasello kscribes as bringing an understanding of shared attention and 1bstract luses The mimetic stage can be thought of as driven lw games and rituals 1 he elaboration of the synchronized actions and communications of the Illlmanoids with a capacity for joint attention Gameplaying in this stage may IllVe been mostlv tied to survival with the pleasure of synchronization lddillg energy to the acquisition of skills necessary f()r evading predatory anishymals or collectively hunting them A sustained culture of rule-based coordishyIllted behaviors would reinf(Jrce the development of language which in turn (lUld support more detailed and memorable stories Mimetic behaviors surshylive in contemporary society in pleasurable rituals like dancing and athletics The earliest videogames were mimetic in that the gameplay was f(xused on t he mastery of simple repetitive behaviors moving a character through a maze eating pellets Vith the elaboration of the medium of video games to include more detailed graphics alld more responsive and complex programshyming videogames ofkr us more complex patterns to absorb and perform The toddler pleasure in joint attention and imitation is reproduced in a way by gamcs that challenge us to synchronize our actions with machine such as the arcade game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) ill which players must keep up with a pattern of dance steps Like an oral culture game like Simon Says which challenges children to cont()rm their behavior to symbolic codes (sposhyken commands) DDR presents the dance steps not by example but in a spashytial notation that must be quickly interpreted and acted on Games like these may be helping us to elaborate a common symbolic language with our new electronic joint attentional partners

The third stage mythic culture can be seen as driven by complex narrashytives the result of more elaborated oral language and longer traditions of shared experience Mythic thinking characterized by heroic legends and ritshyually transmitted narrativcs is apparent in the writings of antiquity which

19 I JI11 H JhRl-Y

11111 Iiimiddot (11d IIIllS and in pre-literate cultures But tlt)[ms of mythic 111111klll) lIldurc into our post-literate age often reinflt)rcing 1Hiliarions based II l01ll1ll0n identities as in families ethnic groups and political parties When athletic events become mass spectator sports in which players embody the aspirations of spectator fans they pass from mimetic into mythic culture with larger than life performances of superhuman beings Videogames otten invoke this mythic state of mind by casting the player in the role of superhero or placing the action within a fantasy domain characterized bv animism and supernatural mythical tigures

The fourth and current stage of human culture according to Merlin Donald is characterized by theoretical thinking The transition ti-om the mythic to the theoretical stage is the result of the invention ofTiting hich is tirst used as a commercial tool and for talismanic inscriptions of the names of gods and rules and later as a way of recording oral culture such as stories and magical spells and is then perfected by the Greeks as a means of recordshying the process of thinking and reasoning therdw allowing tltlr 1 sustained collective discourse that moves from mythic Lplanations to re1soned argushymentation In Donalds elegant analysis we m()c trom Ape to Einstein in only three steps which we can think of in terms ofsvmbolic Lchange cognishytive strategies or cultural building blocks from joint attention to langu~lge to

writing from mimesis to narrative to argumentation ti-om ritu11 to myth to theory

Though neither Tomasello nor Donald points to games as instruments of cognitive evolution it is striking how otten games are part of their 1rgushyments Tomasellos experimental examples with apes and children arc usualhshyin the form of games Both Tomasello and Donald point to childrens supeshyriority at games as evidence of fundamental cognitive differences that preshydate language acquisition

Human childrcn play rulc-govcrncd games by imitation ottcn without J1 t()rshymalizcd instruction Thcy invcnt and learn new glmcs ottcn without using 11Il guagc Apcs likc othcr animals cannot learn similu gamcs thl are restrictcd to games that by our standards arc vcry simple The problem of bridging liom ape to human would thus appcar to involve a great dCli morc thm pinpointing the arrival time ofvocal languagc [ 12]

But though Donald instances mimetic games as one of the key composhynents of hominid development both cognitil~ scienti~ts ~top short of seeing games as a driving force of cognitive and cultural eolution Yet the more one thinks about the clements of cultural cognition the more game-like they seem

( [11111 flS joi71t Attcntimml Sccncs

Digital Games andJoint Attention

111e argued elsewhere rlut the aliYent of the computer as a medium ith ib 1ll1lLJue combination of procedural participato1 cncclopedic and spatial 111()rdances is 111 advancc in human culture comparable to the imention of Ilint or l11ming imagc photograplw [5J Thc ne digital medium expands )llr cogniriC pOcrs lw offering us ncv as of representing thc odd (eg Ilm)ugh parameterized simulations) 1nd greater pOcrs of organizing inf(xshy11111 ion (eg mul ti melk1 archivcs accessible through metadata) It is also a Illedium that is particularly well suited to games because the rules of the ~~l111C can be programmed into the computer and beGluse the user can rake JIl the role of the pLwcr Plaing glmes on the computer is similar to llld liltlTcnt tl-0111 pre-digital game pL1ing It contlates glme and puzzle into 1 single t(lrm in that a gamc played against a mcchanized opponcnt is reall a proccdural puzzle It can eliminatc turn uking by providing worlds that arc t1ways opcn to interruption and interycntion at hatCer pace the interactor 1 illing or able to sustain The computer is not 1are of our C0111mon [ltxus hecause it is not conscious in the same 1 a human player is conscious But it prmides us ith 1 partner hose thought processcs we arc aware ot~ and middotho rcprescnts the mcdiated consciousness of an implied human programshyIller e cngage with the computer as if it eIT an embodied opponcnt but 1lso as if it ere similar to a painting or a book the result of a prior act of conscious reprcsentation Cames can be thought of as socializing us into a l1e cyborg order establishing rituals of commonality ith proceduralized 1rtibcts

The computer is the most capacious pattern-making medium e hae ever had Ve have only begun to glimpse the nC symbolic structures that we can build with it cognitive scafflt)lds that will help us to organize and adY1I1ce the traditions of thinking that hae nO brought us beyond the ability to repshyresent our ideas in purelY linear fltmn lt3iCn that games playa kcy role in giyshying birth to language in the individual and the species we should not be surprised that the are playing a key role in elaborating the Ile symbolic 1111shyguage of intcr~lction in explI1ding the zone of proximal development tltJI digshyital mcdia

AcknowletlJ11tents

[his essay is excerpted Ii-om longcr u-gument T()ard a CUll mll Theorv oj Caming Digital Games and thc Co-Eolution of Media l1ind and Culture Popular Communishymtioll Volumc 4 NlIllber 3 p 18gt-2022006

20 JFI H MURRAY

References

1 Aarseth E J (~vbertext Penpectilcs on El~qodic Literature Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins Uniersit Press 1997

2 Bolter J and R Crusin Remediation UnderstandiJl3 Nell fedia Cambridge lA MIT Press 1999

3 Laurd B ComputCls as DmltC1 Reading MA Addison-Wesley Publishing Co 1993

4 Manmich L 11)( LallTlIillC ofNCJl Jfcdia Cambridge MA MIT Press 2001 5 lurra J H Halllet OIl the Holodeck Th( Flttllr( o(NllrratiJlc in Cyberspace New

York Simon amp Schusterfree Press 1997 6 Tonusello 11 llJC Cltltural Ortqills of HW1li11l CiJllitirJll Clmbridge lA Harshy

ard Cnietsin Press 2001 7 Bck()ft~ M and Bers J A (Eds) Animal PIal lOFOlItiollaIV Comparatilc and

tcolrLq iwI Pcnpccti1CJ elmbri dgc No York C1mbridge U nilCrsi t Press 1998 8 Sutton-Smith g Jhc A1JlIJtrj1ti~l of Plav Cambridge HHard lniCrsit Press

1997 9 Didow S M and C O Eckerman Toddler Peers from Nonerbal Coordinated

Action to Verbal Discourse Social Delclopmmt I O( 2) (2001) 170-188 19p 10 Malcolm K Studies Shed Light on Toddler Deeopment 2000 Aailablc at

ImpIwdukcnewsdukecdu20()()06toddler630_printhtm (I ast accessed Jul 142006l

11 udrip- fruin - and P Harrigan First Pels(II Nell ~lcdia a1 Story Performallcc I1l1ti Galll( Cll11hridge MA MIT Press 2004

12 DOluld 1 Orit7ills of the Hodenz Jfilld 17ra Staqts ill the 11011lti01l of Culture alld CrJtT71itir1l Cambridge Llt Hlrud LTninrsity Press 1991

13 DOIl1Id 1 A Milld So Rare The Elolutioll of Hiliwit COlscioumesr New York WW ~orton 2001

14 Schillarndt-Iksscrat D HaJJ WritillH Came About Amtill TX Uniersitl ofTncls Press 1996

~

-

2 Towards an 0 for Game Ana

Josf P ZAGAL MICHAEL

BRIAN HOCHHAlTER AltI

This chapter introduces the Gam t()r describing analyzing and stu COP in the context of other pro present the theoretical and methlt our conceptualllnderstanding of t ith an overvie describing its s outline a number OfWdVS in hic rltion of interesting research que our ork will take

He

Game designers have called t()r designers currently lack a unifled wd thinking through the desi~

approaches tC)(US on offering aid t patterns [356] which name and related notion of design rules 1 design situations f7 81 Other am arious humanistic disciplines-t~ terms of their usc of space [9] as [1112] in terms of the tempora [ I 3] or in terms of sets of teature~

17 1( JAlET H MURRAY

ltI III I1 III Ill odd when the are in doubt as to the physical cause of III II I ICil i Il()ke various types of animistic or deistic forces to explain it

I Illq IIi i he debult approach (p 24) In other words the sensing of Ille 11I1llIl intentions of other humans is linked to an animistic view of the II lIld I hat creates explanatory narratives ofintention fix other events as well (()tllitive theorist Mark Turner would agree that an abstract sense of cause 1Ild efkct is an early human cognitive achievement and precedes the acquisishytion oflanguage Turner explicitly identifies this cognitive leap as narrative or parable making the abstraction of causal sequences from the observed world If we accept these theories of early cognition then we can think of games and stories as driving and co-evolving with the development of lanshyguage leading to the development of more complex social patterns more complex causal thinking and more elaborate svmbolic culture

The Tomasello hypothesis can be interpreted as linking both games and stories to the single moment in which human consciousness first awakened The moment has two key aspects

bull The understanding of ones fellow creatures as intentional beings leading to the exploration of joint attention which can be understood as the birth ofmimetic games

bull The understanding of overt events as the result of invisible causes which leads to abstract thinking about causal patterns which can be understood as the birth ofnarrative thinking

These two cognitive and cultural advances have one key eHect

bull The elaboration of symbolic communication starting with gesture and vocalization and developing into spoken language which can be understood as the birth of meditl

The italicized phrases represent my interprcration of Tomasellos theory Just as culture and cognition co-evolve I would argue that the elements of culture are also subject to an ongoing process of co-evolution Mimetic games lead to greater social organization and closer attention to the world which forwards causal thinking which leads to more complicated garnes both of which produce a demand for more expressive language This pattern-the co-evolution of games narrative and language-is visible in toddlers and children and imaginable as a narrative of prehistoric human life It is also visshyible in the cultural patterns of historical time if we think of human (spoken) language as a medium and of bter symbolic media as co-evolving in a simishylar way with ever more elaborate mimetic and causal (game and story) genres In order to knit these different time scales together and motivate these rather broad generalizations it is useful to turn to the work of Merlin Donald who

I 1111S IU Joint Attentional Scenes

1 Il()t hesizes that modern human cognition arose in fc)Ur steps starting with IIIlt plit from our primate cOLlsins episodic culture) which we share ith other 1IIIIll111als and primates in which social relationships and cyen simple tool use Ill clop on the basis of brain function that allows only discrete episodic strucshy1IIIl and recall mimetic culture in which the early hOl11inids Cln understand ltIll mother as intentional conscious agents and can communicate symbolshyI dl allowing them to form bands migrate hunt domesticate fire and 1IIIke simple tools mythic culture in which sapient humans communicate IIII( )ugh symbolic f()rms of representation such as oral language mimetic ritshyIIds and cave paintings understanding the world in narrative terms and III( )dern theoretical culture which understands the world in terms of abstract I IlIltaiisms and is based on massive externally stored memory systems such as I rillt and computers 11213 j

The transition between the first and second stages is the one Tomasello kscribes as bringing an understanding of shared attention and 1bstract luses The mimetic stage can be thought of as driven lw games and rituals 1 he elaboration of the synchronized actions and communications of the Illlmanoids with a capacity for joint attention Gameplaying in this stage may IllVe been mostlv tied to survival with the pleasure of synchronization lddillg energy to the acquisition of skills necessary f()r evading predatory anishymals or collectively hunting them A sustained culture of rule-based coordishyIllted behaviors would reinf(Jrce the development of language which in turn (lUld support more detailed and memorable stories Mimetic behaviors surshylive in contemporary society in pleasurable rituals like dancing and athletics The earliest videogames were mimetic in that the gameplay was f(xused on t he mastery of simple repetitive behaviors moving a character through a maze eating pellets Vith the elaboration of the medium of video games to include more detailed graphics alld more responsive and complex programshyming videogames ofkr us more complex patterns to absorb and perform The toddler pleasure in joint attention and imitation is reproduced in a way by gamcs that challenge us to synchronize our actions with machine such as the arcade game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) ill which players must keep up with a pattern of dance steps Like an oral culture game like Simon Says which challenges children to cont()rm their behavior to symbolic codes (sposhyken commands) DDR presents the dance steps not by example but in a spashytial notation that must be quickly interpreted and acted on Games like these may be helping us to elaborate a common symbolic language with our new electronic joint attentional partners

The third stage mythic culture can be seen as driven by complex narrashytives the result of more elaborated oral language and longer traditions of shared experience Mythic thinking characterized by heroic legends and ritshyually transmitted narrativcs is apparent in the writings of antiquity which

19 I JI11 H JhRl-Y

11111 Iiimiddot (11d IIIllS and in pre-literate cultures But tlt)[ms of mythic 111111klll) lIldurc into our post-literate age often reinflt)rcing 1Hiliarions based II l01ll1ll0n identities as in families ethnic groups and political parties When athletic events become mass spectator sports in which players embody the aspirations of spectator fans they pass from mimetic into mythic culture with larger than life performances of superhuman beings Videogames otten invoke this mythic state of mind by casting the player in the role of superhero or placing the action within a fantasy domain characterized bv animism and supernatural mythical tigures

The fourth and current stage of human culture according to Merlin Donald is characterized by theoretical thinking The transition ti-om the mythic to the theoretical stage is the result of the invention ofTiting hich is tirst used as a commercial tool and for talismanic inscriptions of the names of gods and rules and later as a way of recording oral culture such as stories and magical spells and is then perfected by the Greeks as a means of recordshying the process of thinking and reasoning therdw allowing tltlr 1 sustained collective discourse that moves from mythic Lplanations to re1soned argushymentation In Donalds elegant analysis we m()c trom Ape to Einstein in only three steps which we can think of in terms ofsvmbolic Lchange cognishytive strategies or cultural building blocks from joint attention to langu~lge to

writing from mimesis to narrative to argumentation ti-om ritu11 to myth to theory

Though neither Tomasello nor Donald points to games as instruments of cognitive evolution it is striking how otten games are part of their 1rgushyments Tomasellos experimental examples with apes and children arc usualhshyin the form of games Both Tomasello and Donald point to childrens supeshyriority at games as evidence of fundamental cognitive differences that preshydate language acquisition

Human childrcn play rulc-govcrncd games by imitation ottcn without J1 t()rshymalizcd instruction Thcy invcnt and learn new glmcs ottcn without using 11Il guagc Apcs likc othcr animals cannot learn similu gamcs thl are restrictcd to games that by our standards arc vcry simple The problem of bridging liom ape to human would thus appcar to involve a great dCli morc thm pinpointing the arrival time ofvocal languagc [ 12]

But though Donald instances mimetic games as one of the key composhynents of hominid development both cognitil~ scienti~ts ~top short of seeing games as a driving force of cognitive and cultural eolution Yet the more one thinks about the clements of cultural cognition the more game-like they seem

( [11111 flS joi71t Attcntimml Sccncs

Digital Games andJoint Attention

111e argued elsewhere rlut the aliYent of the computer as a medium ith ib 1ll1lLJue combination of procedural participato1 cncclopedic and spatial 111()rdances is 111 advancc in human culture comparable to the imention of Ilint or l11ming imagc photograplw [5J Thc ne digital medium expands )llr cogniriC pOcrs lw offering us ncv as of representing thc odd (eg Ilm)ugh parameterized simulations) 1nd greater pOcrs of organizing inf(xshy11111 ion (eg mul ti melk1 archivcs accessible through metadata) It is also a Illedium that is particularly well suited to games because the rules of the ~~l111C can be programmed into the computer and beGluse the user can rake JIl the role of the pLwcr Plaing glmes on the computer is similar to llld liltlTcnt tl-0111 pre-digital game pL1ing It contlates glme and puzzle into 1 single t(lrm in that a gamc played against a mcchanized opponcnt is reall a proccdural puzzle It can eliminatc turn uking by providing worlds that arc t1ways opcn to interruption and interycntion at hatCer pace the interactor 1 illing or able to sustain The computer is not 1are of our C0111mon [ltxus hecause it is not conscious in the same 1 a human player is conscious But it prmides us ith 1 partner hose thought processcs we arc aware ot~ and middotho rcprescnts the mcdiated consciousness of an implied human programshyIller e cngage with the computer as if it eIT an embodied opponcnt but 1lso as if it ere similar to a painting or a book the result of a prior act of conscious reprcsentation Cames can be thought of as socializing us into a l1e cyborg order establishing rituals of commonality ith proceduralized 1rtibcts

The computer is the most capacious pattern-making medium e hae ever had Ve have only begun to glimpse the nC symbolic structures that we can build with it cognitive scafflt)lds that will help us to organize and adY1I1ce the traditions of thinking that hae nO brought us beyond the ability to repshyresent our ideas in purelY linear fltmn lt3iCn that games playa kcy role in giyshying birth to language in the individual and the species we should not be surprised that the are playing a key role in elaborating the Ile symbolic 1111shyguage of intcr~lction in explI1ding the zone of proximal development tltJI digshyital mcdia

AcknowletlJ11tents

[his essay is excerpted Ii-om longcr u-gument T()ard a CUll mll Theorv oj Caming Digital Games and thc Co-Eolution of Media l1ind and Culture Popular Communishymtioll Volumc 4 NlIllber 3 p 18gt-2022006

20 JFI H MURRAY

References

1 Aarseth E J (~vbertext Penpectilcs on El~qodic Literature Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins Uniersit Press 1997

2 Bolter J and R Crusin Remediation UnderstandiJl3 Nell fedia Cambridge lA MIT Press 1999

3 Laurd B ComputCls as DmltC1 Reading MA Addison-Wesley Publishing Co 1993

4 Manmich L 11)( LallTlIillC ofNCJl Jfcdia Cambridge MA MIT Press 2001 5 lurra J H Halllet OIl the Holodeck Th( Flttllr( o(NllrratiJlc in Cyberspace New

York Simon amp Schusterfree Press 1997 6 Tonusello 11 llJC Cltltural Ortqills of HW1li11l CiJllitirJll Clmbridge lA Harshy

ard Cnietsin Press 2001 7 Bck()ft~ M and Bers J A (Eds) Animal PIal lOFOlItiollaIV Comparatilc and

tcolrLq iwI Pcnpccti1CJ elmbri dgc No York C1mbridge U nilCrsi t Press 1998 8 Sutton-Smith g Jhc A1JlIJtrj1ti~l of Plav Cambridge HHard lniCrsit Press

1997 9 Didow S M and C O Eckerman Toddler Peers from Nonerbal Coordinated

Action to Verbal Discourse Social Delclopmmt I O( 2) (2001) 170-188 19p 10 Malcolm K Studies Shed Light on Toddler Deeopment 2000 Aailablc at

ImpIwdukcnewsdukecdu20()()06toddler630_printhtm (I ast accessed Jul 142006l

11 udrip- fruin - and P Harrigan First Pels(II Nell ~lcdia a1 Story Performallcc I1l1ti Galll( Cll11hridge MA MIT Press 2004

12 DOluld 1 Orit7ills of the Hodenz Jfilld 17ra Staqts ill the 11011lti01l of Culture alld CrJtT71itir1l Cambridge Llt Hlrud LTninrsity Press 1991

13 DOIl1Id 1 A Milld So Rare The Elolutioll of Hiliwit COlscioumesr New York WW ~orton 2001

14 Schillarndt-Iksscrat D HaJJ WritillH Came About Amtill TX Uniersitl ofTncls Press 1996

~

-

2 Towards an 0 for Game Ana

Josf P ZAGAL MICHAEL

BRIAN HOCHHAlTER AltI

This chapter introduces the Gam t()r describing analyzing and stu COP in the context of other pro present the theoretical and methlt our conceptualllnderstanding of t ith an overvie describing its s outline a number OfWdVS in hic rltion of interesting research que our ork will take

He

Game designers have called t()r designers currently lack a unifled wd thinking through the desi~

approaches tC)(US on offering aid t patterns [356] which name and related notion of design rules 1 design situations f7 81 Other am arious humanistic disciplines-t~ terms of their usc of space [9] as [1112] in terms of the tempora [ I 3] or in terms of sets of teature~

19 I JI11 H JhRl-Y

11111 Iiimiddot (11d IIIllS and in pre-literate cultures But tlt)[ms of mythic 111111klll) lIldurc into our post-literate age often reinflt)rcing 1Hiliarions based II l01ll1ll0n identities as in families ethnic groups and political parties When athletic events become mass spectator sports in which players embody the aspirations of spectator fans they pass from mimetic into mythic culture with larger than life performances of superhuman beings Videogames otten invoke this mythic state of mind by casting the player in the role of superhero or placing the action within a fantasy domain characterized bv animism and supernatural mythical tigures

The fourth and current stage of human culture according to Merlin Donald is characterized by theoretical thinking The transition ti-om the mythic to the theoretical stage is the result of the invention ofTiting hich is tirst used as a commercial tool and for talismanic inscriptions of the names of gods and rules and later as a way of recording oral culture such as stories and magical spells and is then perfected by the Greeks as a means of recordshying the process of thinking and reasoning therdw allowing tltlr 1 sustained collective discourse that moves from mythic Lplanations to re1soned argushymentation In Donalds elegant analysis we m()c trom Ape to Einstein in only three steps which we can think of in terms ofsvmbolic Lchange cognishytive strategies or cultural building blocks from joint attention to langu~lge to

writing from mimesis to narrative to argumentation ti-om ritu11 to myth to theory

Though neither Tomasello nor Donald points to games as instruments of cognitive evolution it is striking how otten games are part of their 1rgushyments Tomasellos experimental examples with apes and children arc usualhshyin the form of games Both Tomasello and Donald point to childrens supeshyriority at games as evidence of fundamental cognitive differences that preshydate language acquisition

Human childrcn play rulc-govcrncd games by imitation ottcn without J1 t()rshymalizcd instruction Thcy invcnt and learn new glmcs ottcn without using 11Il guagc Apcs likc othcr animals cannot learn similu gamcs thl are restrictcd to games that by our standards arc vcry simple The problem of bridging liom ape to human would thus appcar to involve a great dCli morc thm pinpointing the arrival time ofvocal languagc [ 12]

But though Donald instances mimetic games as one of the key composhynents of hominid development both cognitil~ scienti~ts ~top short of seeing games as a driving force of cognitive and cultural eolution Yet the more one thinks about the clements of cultural cognition the more game-like they seem

( [11111 flS joi71t Attcntimml Sccncs

Digital Games andJoint Attention

111e argued elsewhere rlut the aliYent of the computer as a medium ith ib 1ll1lLJue combination of procedural participato1 cncclopedic and spatial 111()rdances is 111 advancc in human culture comparable to the imention of Ilint or l11ming imagc photograplw [5J Thc ne digital medium expands )llr cogniriC pOcrs lw offering us ncv as of representing thc odd (eg Ilm)ugh parameterized simulations) 1nd greater pOcrs of organizing inf(xshy11111 ion (eg mul ti melk1 archivcs accessible through metadata) It is also a Illedium that is particularly well suited to games because the rules of the ~~l111C can be programmed into the computer and beGluse the user can rake JIl the role of the pLwcr Plaing glmes on the computer is similar to llld liltlTcnt tl-0111 pre-digital game pL1ing It contlates glme and puzzle into 1 single t(lrm in that a gamc played against a mcchanized opponcnt is reall a proccdural puzzle It can eliminatc turn uking by providing worlds that arc t1ways opcn to interruption and interycntion at hatCer pace the interactor 1 illing or able to sustain The computer is not 1are of our C0111mon [ltxus hecause it is not conscious in the same 1 a human player is conscious But it prmides us ith 1 partner hose thought processcs we arc aware ot~ and middotho rcprescnts the mcdiated consciousness of an implied human programshyIller e cngage with the computer as if it eIT an embodied opponcnt but 1lso as if it ere similar to a painting or a book the result of a prior act of conscious reprcsentation Cames can be thought of as socializing us into a l1e cyborg order establishing rituals of commonality ith proceduralized 1rtibcts

The computer is the most capacious pattern-making medium e hae ever had Ve have only begun to glimpse the nC symbolic structures that we can build with it cognitive scafflt)lds that will help us to organize and adY1I1ce the traditions of thinking that hae nO brought us beyond the ability to repshyresent our ideas in purelY linear fltmn lt3iCn that games playa kcy role in giyshying birth to language in the individual and the species we should not be surprised that the are playing a key role in elaborating the Ile symbolic 1111shyguage of intcr~lction in explI1ding the zone of proximal development tltJI digshyital mcdia

AcknowletlJ11tents

[his essay is excerpted Ii-om longcr u-gument T()ard a CUll mll Theorv oj Caming Digital Games and thc Co-Eolution of Media l1ind and Culture Popular Communishymtioll Volumc 4 NlIllber 3 p 18gt-2022006

20 JFI H MURRAY

References

1 Aarseth E J (~vbertext Penpectilcs on El~qodic Literature Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins Uniersit Press 1997

2 Bolter J and R Crusin Remediation UnderstandiJl3 Nell fedia Cambridge lA MIT Press 1999

3 Laurd B ComputCls as DmltC1 Reading MA Addison-Wesley Publishing Co 1993

4 Manmich L 11)( LallTlIillC ofNCJl Jfcdia Cambridge MA MIT Press 2001 5 lurra J H Halllet OIl the Holodeck Th( Flttllr( o(NllrratiJlc in Cyberspace New

York Simon amp Schusterfree Press 1997 6 Tonusello 11 llJC Cltltural Ortqills of HW1li11l CiJllitirJll Clmbridge lA Harshy

ard Cnietsin Press 2001 7 Bck()ft~ M and Bers J A (Eds) Animal PIal lOFOlItiollaIV Comparatilc and

tcolrLq iwI Pcnpccti1CJ elmbri dgc No York C1mbridge U nilCrsi t Press 1998 8 Sutton-Smith g Jhc A1JlIJtrj1ti~l of Plav Cambridge HHard lniCrsit Press

1997 9 Didow S M and C O Eckerman Toddler Peers from Nonerbal Coordinated

Action to Verbal Discourse Social Delclopmmt I O( 2) (2001) 170-188 19p 10 Malcolm K Studies Shed Light on Toddler Deeopment 2000 Aailablc at

ImpIwdukcnewsdukecdu20()()06toddler630_printhtm (I ast accessed Jul 142006l

11 udrip- fruin - and P Harrigan First Pels(II Nell ~lcdia a1 Story Performallcc I1l1ti Galll( Cll11hridge MA MIT Press 2004

12 DOluld 1 Orit7ills of the Hodenz Jfilld 17ra Staqts ill the 11011lti01l of Culture alld CrJtT71itir1l Cambridge Llt Hlrud LTninrsity Press 1991

13 DOIl1Id 1 A Milld So Rare The Elolutioll of Hiliwit COlscioumesr New York WW ~orton 2001

14 Schillarndt-Iksscrat D HaJJ WritillH Came About Amtill TX Uniersitl ofTncls Press 1996

~

-

2 Towards an 0 for Game Ana

Josf P ZAGAL MICHAEL

BRIAN HOCHHAlTER AltI

This chapter introduces the Gam t()r describing analyzing and stu COP in the context of other pro present the theoretical and methlt our conceptualllnderstanding of t ith an overvie describing its s outline a number OfWdVS in hic rltion of interesting research que our ork will take

He

Game designers have called t()r designers currently lack a unifled wd thinking through the desi~

approaches tC)(US on offering aid t patterns [356] which name and related notion of design rules 1 design situations f7 81 Other am arious humanistic disciplines-t~ terms of their usc of space [9] as [1112] in terms of the tempora [ I 3] or in terms of sets of teature~

20 JFI H MURRAY

References

1 Aarseth E J (~vbertext Penpectilcs on El~qodic Literature Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins Uniersit Press 1997

2 Bolter J and R Crusin Remediation UnderstandiJl3 Nell fedia Cambridge lA MIT Press 1999

3 Laurd B ComputCls as DmltC1 Reading MA Addison-Wesley Publishing Co 1993

4 Manmich L 11)( LallTlIillC ofNCJl Jfcdia Cambridge MA MIT Press 2001 5 lurra J H Halllet OIl the Holodeck Th( Flttllr( o(NllrratiJlc in Cyberspace New

York Simon amp Schusterfree Press 1997 6 Tonusello 11 llJC Cltltural Ortqills of HW1li11l CiJllitirJll Clmbridge lA Harshy

ard Cnietsin Press 2001 7 Bck()ft~ M and Bers J A (Eds) Animal PIal lOFOlItiollaIV Comparatilc and

tcolrLq iwI Pcnpccti1CJ elmbri dgc No York C1mbridge U nilCrsi t Press 1998 8 Sutton-Smith g Jhc A1JlIJtrj1ti~l of Plav Cambridge HHard lniCrsit Press

1997 9 Didow S M and C O Eckerman Toddler Peers from Nonerbal Coordinated

Action to Verbal Discourse Social Delclopmmt I O( 2) (2001) 170-188 19p 10 Malcolm K Studies Shed Light on Toddler Deeopment 2000 Aailablc at

ImpIwdukcnewsdukecdu20()()06toddler630_printhtm (I ast accessed Jul 142006l

11 udrip- fruin - and P Harrigan First Pels(II Nell ~lcdia a1 Story Performallcc I1l1ti Galll( Cll11hridge MA MIT Press 2004

12 DOluld 1 Orit7ills of the Hodenz Jfilld 17ra Staqts ill the 11011lti01l of Culture alld CrJtT71itir1l Cambridge Llt Hlrud LTninrsity Press 1991

13 DOIl1Id 1 A Milld So Rare The Elolutioll of Hiliwit COlscioumesr New York WW ~orton 2001

14 Schillarndt-Iksscrat D HaJJ WritillH Came About Amtill TX Uniersitl ofTncls Press 1996

~

-

2 Towards an 0 for Game Ana

Josf P ZAGAL MICHAEL

BRIAN HOCHHAlTER AltI

This chapter introduces the Gam t()r describing analyzing and stu COP in the context of other pro present the theoretical and methlt our conceptualllnderstanding of t ith an overvie describing its s outline a number OfWdVS in hic rltion of interesting research que our ork will take

He

Game designers have called t()r designers currently lack a unifled wd thinking through the desi~

approaches tC)(US on offering aid t patterns [356] which name and related notion of design rules 1 design situations f7 81 Other am arious humanistic disciplines-t~ terms of their usc of space [9] as [1112] in terms of the tempora [ I 3] or in terms of sets of teature~