Games Britanna: Joystick Generation

The third and final instalment of the Games Britannia dealt, of course, with the leap to video games and the influence they have had on gaming.
Looking at the arrival of "Dungeons & Dragons" and how it changed the way people looked at games as well as video games such a "Populous" and "Black and White", games which held you responsible for saving lives instead of ending them. Of course, you have the freedom to decide whether to be a cruel or kind God in these games, however the game will tell you which way you are going: people will fear you, the landscape will change and the little you can see of yourself (your hand) will become uglier the further you travel down the path of cruelty and wilful neglect of the people looking to you for salvation.This was the first time there had really been such a thing as repercussions in video games, you got to decide whether you were the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy' and the game treated you appropriately.
In stark contrast to this was the controversy caused by games in which you could do terrible things with seemingly no repercussions except, that is, a chance  to cause more wanton destruction when they police came for you. I refer, of course, to the incredibly popular "Grand Theft Auto" series. This game allowed you the freedom to do pretty much anything you wanted in the seedy underbelly of a city and people loved the chaos.

The episode also focused on the arrival of Lara Croft on the gaming scene, a character who had a story and who could be understood. As well as the introduction of games that allowed and encouraged you to create your own content such as "Little Big Planet".
The episode focussed on the untapped potential of gaming and how much we can still discover, it made me excited  to make headway and discover something else that no-one has ever seen in gaming before.

Games Britannia: Monopolies and Mergers

The second episode in the Games Britannia series follows gaming into morals and politics instead of religion and simply making a game from nothing.
Mansion of Bliss was a game all about morals and promoting good behaviour in children, the game itself, however, was a simple game of chance. Following more along the lines of trends and less on the moral compass was Pank a Squith which followed the story of Emily Pankhurst.
Although some trends have been almost completely forgotten the following games are still strong today, although the first not by the name it originated with. Brer Fox an' Brer Rabbit was the spiritual forerunner to Monopoly and Cluedo and Scrabble have remained the same for long years.

Games Britannia: Dicing with Destiny

Over the course of the academic year we watched three episodes of "Games Britannia", a documentary dedicated to looking at the history of games in the British isles. Part 1, "Dicing with Destiny" showed us the earliest games to be found in England: I will cover briefly here what was covered in the episode.

The Stanway Game was discovered at a burial site beneath a body and is believed to be one of the earliest examples of a game in British history hailing from the time of the Roman occupation of Britain historians have dated the game at a staggering 45AD.

Alea Evangelii seemed to be an English version of Tafl, a game I mentioned in my Ancient Games blog post, as with a lot of the games of this time it is heavy in spirituality and religion. The game came from medieval Britain and is also known as "Game of the Gospels".

Backgammon, Dice and Chess all owe their British introduction to the book "Libro de los Juegos" which literally translates as "The Book of Games".

The final game was "9 Men's Morris", the game that seems to pop up all over the world. According to Irving Finkel this is because the game seems to be the obvious way to go when one wants to make a game from nothing.

Remediation

Remediation is the process of taking something from one type of media and applying it to another. For example, taking the constant flow of information in a breaking news update and applying it to a video game to get the HUD (Heads Up Display). The transition is not always smooth, but it does usually result in a trend if the remediation works and the two concepts gel and thus is an important tool to consider when creating games.

Ancient Game Tweaking

Our first assessment this year was to take an ancient game and, using what we had learned in our lectures, iterate them. Our test was to come up with a version of the game that we felt was more suited to modern times and was an improvement on the ancient original.

The game that I chose to improve was the Royal Game of Ur, a game I mentioned in one of my previous blog posts aptly named Ancient Games. I have to admit it was difficult to improve upon Ur and that iteration in general was a lot harder than I had first expected. I proved to me how useful and how necessary the iteration process is when developing a game, if it doesn't get play tested then one can potentially miss loads of problems that only asking people to play your game and seeing what happens can turn up.

Pervasive Games and La Decima Vittima

When people think of games they usually think of either computer games or board games, things that are completely removed from the real world.
Pervasive gaming, however, takes place in the real world and thus opens up all sorts of new possibilities. An example of pervasive gaming would be a treasure hunt or a paper chase, but more recently people have become more and more creative when creating pervasive games. This has led to things like LARPing, or Live Action Role Playing, people take on a character wholly for as long as the LARPing event lasts and get to take part on what has been described as a live action version of Dungeons and Dragons role-playing.

A new form of pervasive game that has become popular with the release of such things as the Japanese book/film "Battle Royale", but was sparked by odd, Italian film named La decima vittima (the tenth victim), is a game called 'Killer' or 'Assassin'. It started on certain University campuses in America, a student would join an 'assassin's' or 'hunter's' guild and as such would sign up for the game, they would be given the name of someone they had to 'kill' (another person in the guild, so as to avoid scaring people who weren't aware of the game) and would have to find a way to take out their target. It was all completely non-lethal, of course, 'killing' would have to be done in a harmless way, for example with an alarm clock in their bag representing a bomb or 'stabbing' your target with a wooden spoon. 
However, once you sign up to be an assassin you also sign up to be a victim, people got to enjoy the thrill of being the hunter and hunted without any actual danger. As previously mentioned, this movement started after the release of La decima vittima, a peculiar film set in the future where crime and war have been abolished by the set up of the Big Hunt Club, a place where people can indulge their most primal and violent urges within the bounds of the law. Once you sign up you pass through five phases of being the hunter and the victim, as a hunter you hunt another member of the Big Hunt, someone who's turn it is to be the victim and as the victim you must survive and kill your hunter. Once you make it to ten kills you are rewarded with fame, glory and vast amounts of money.
The people who started killer wanted to experience the same thrill, but without the risk of actual harm, and so 'Killer' was born.  

Technology has also allowed pervasive gaming to make huge leaps forward, with smart phones equipped with scanners and cameras there are becoming an increasing number of AR or Augmented Reality games. As well as treasure hunts where people follow odd symbols that can only be scanned by the QR scanners on their phones or pads. 
It would seem that gaming is making a leap from tabletop and screen to the real world.

Bibliography practice

During the past year we have been learning how to use the Harvard reference system, here I have a bibliography that I have created from books and articles I have read over the year as practice to perfecting this form of referencing.

Finkel, I. Ancient Board Games. 1931, Steward, Tabori & Chang.
Braithwaite, B & Schreiber, I. Challenges For Games Designers. 2008, Cengage Learning.
Leblanc, M. Commisioned essay 'Tools For Creating Game Dynamics' in The Game Design Reader: A Rules Of Play Anthology. 2006, MIT, pp. 438-459
Knizia, R. Commissioned Essay in: Rules of Play:Game Fundamentals. 2004, MIT, pp. 22-27.

Delving into the Past

During our lectures across the year we have had the chance to play four of the ancient games we have been studying: The ancient Egyptian game Senet, the Royal game of Ur, Duodecim Scripta and Hnefatafl, sometimes referred to as the The Viking Game.

A racing game from Ancient Egypt, Senet pits two players against each other in a race to the afterlife by getting all of their counters across and off of a board made of three rows of ten squares. The game, as you would guess from a game based around racing to the afterlife, is heavy in religious imagery and gameplay mechanics based around religion with certain squares helping you on your way or hindering you. Progression along the board was decided by throwing sticks or rolling sheep knuckles.

The game features some interesting rules allowing players to use certain tactics, such as the ability to swap counters around. Should one player throw a roll that allows them to move their counter onto a square occupied by their opponent's they can swap the counters, moving their counter forward and their opponent's back. However, if a person places two of their counters next to each other on the board this prevents either one being 'taken' and if they manage to get three in a row this forms a block, completely stopping any counters behind the block from progressing. 

I thoroughly enjoyed playing Senet, it was a fascinating look at what may be the world's oldest game.

The Royal Game of Ur, so named because it was found during the excavation of the royal cemetery of Ur. This game was discovered by Leonard Woolley in the 1920's in what is now Southern Iraq, jut like Senet the game is played by two people racing to get all of their counters off of the board first. However, the Royal game of Ur is does not rely as heavily on religion for the game mechanics although it does feature a mechanic that allows one player to 'take' another player's counter and another that keeps counters safe thus allowing strategies to develop. A full set of rules can be found in Irving Finkel's Ancient Board Games, a book showing Finkel's deep fascination with board games both ancient and modern. 

Though similar in many ways, Ur and Senet bring out very different strategies and I must say that I enjoyed playing the Royal game of Ur jut as much as I did Senet.

Duodecim Scripta is an ancient Roman forerunner to blackjack and, like the previously mentioned two, is a racing game.  Two players race to get all of their counters to the final square and can 'take' each others pieces along the way in a very similar way to Senet, in fact there are so many similarities between this game and it's Egyptian predecessor that many people believe it may have evolved from Senet.

Duodecim Scripta is also known as "twelve lines" and was played using a three sided dice rolled in a cup.

Hnefatafl comes from medieval Scandinavia and is the only one of these games that is not based around a race to the last square. It is played by two players, just like the other games, but instead is based around one player trying to get their King piece off of the board while the other player tries to thwart this attempt. When playing it we did find it a little unbalanced in that it was nearly impossible to win as one side. The game has been renamed "The Viking Game" in recent times and re-marketed to modern audiences.

Caillois’ Terminology - Categorising Games

Play is a word that holds many different meanings, Caillois attempts to put these into categories in his book "Man, Play and Games" and here I will post both a description of each category with examples and my thoughts on them.
It should be known that Caillois also sorted game into two larger categories, Ludus and Paidia, which refer to how and why the game is played. Most games played by adults fall into the Ludus category, these are games with set rules and regulations. Paidia, however, describes what children do when they play; children playing is spontaneous and changeable, there are no rules or restrictions governing what they do they simply 'have fun'. Within both of these categories are the four sub-categories previously mentioned, although the type of game is changed by whether they fall into the category of Ludus or Paidia.

First comes Agon - which is essentially competition. Ludus examples of Agon that include sports (football, tennis, rugby, etc), most board games (monopoly, ludo, risk, etc) and a large quantity of online gaming (Call of Duty, Battlefield, Starcraft, etc). Paidia examples of Agon are harder to find as the meaning of Agon is competition and when you compete against someone there are almost always rules. However, an example of Agon that would fit into the category of Paidia is something along the lines of when two children play with sticks pretending they are swords, there are no rules governing the play they are simply play-fighting. Pay-fighting is, probably, the best example of Paidia Agon.
Agon appeals to the competitive side of humanity, the primal need to prove yourself better than others of your species; the primal urge that exists within us to assure only the strongest genes survive.

Second is Alea or games of chance. Ludus examples include card games such as poker and role-playing games where the player must role dice to pass various 'checks' and progress with the game. Paidia examples would be slot machines or Russian roulette, no real rules or complexity, simply chance.

Third in the list is Mimicry, simulation. A Ludus example would be, as may seem obvious, simulation games where the player simulates various situations. Mimicry is one category that fits into Paidia better than Ludus, children's games of imagination, such as 'playing house' or 'cops and robbers', where children take on certain roles and act out scenarios. These don't have any rules, it's simply having fun using one's imagination.

Finally we come to Ilinx, pertaining to vertigo in games. Ilinx is, perhaps, the catagory that is hardest to explain simply, it is not limited to the nauseating sensation one may feel when looking down from a height but also encompasses experiences that cause a physical sensation. For example, the vertigo felt when spinning, watching a high speed car chase or the reckless abandon of mindless destruction in some games.
Unlike the first two categories a Ludus example of Ilinx playing is hard to find, however we can find examples in racing games and games such as the 'Grand Theft Auto' series where players can cause as much destruction as they like without having to worry about real world repercussions.
Paidia examples of Ilinx, however, are much easier to find. If we look at children playing we will often see Ilinx: spinning in a circle then stopping abruptly, building the highest tower of blocks possible before knocking it over... These simple joys sum up Ilinx and are inherent in simple play.