I stumbled across Tobias Wrigstad’s blog, where he discusses freeforming, railroading and the players’ freedom. He makes good points about the nature of railroading, freeforming and the role of limitations. However, I find following claim rather curious: “In a generic, ‘tabula rasa’ freeform adventure there are no limitations”. Even without predefined structures like characters there are limitations: the word ‘freeform’ have it’s meaning that guides player’s expectation and player expectations guide their choices (making some more probable and some unthinkable).

Game structures are much like rhetoric: “[T]he author cannot choose to avoid rhetorics; he can choose only the kind of rhetoric he will employ.” (Booth, 1983) Even in freeform (or Jeepform) someone is distributing power, making choice to call event as Jeepform, etc., and thus structuring a game. There are no tabula rasa, unlimited freeform games.

Booth, Wayne (1983). The rhetoric of fiction. Chicago: The Chicago University Press (2nd edition).

I managed, at last, to take time to read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical investigations.

Wittgenstein argues:

For a large class of cases — though not for all-in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. And meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing its bearer. (PI, 43)

Thus, when this is taken as a premise, following makes sense:

Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? [...] [I]f you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and whole series of them at that. (PI, 66)

What follows is that in a language there are words that cannot be defined through common denominators. Consider:

• a game as wild animal hunted or flesh of wild animal to be eaten
• a board game
• game as manipulative behavior. (See http://www.answers.com/topic/game-1.)

Also, meaning of a word is can be blurry without context — like sentence the word appeared in: e.g., king (of England or a chess piece). (PI)

All categories do not have clear boundaries–based on necessary and sufficient condition (odd numbers vs. game); rather categories are fuzzy. After Wittgenstein critique, the nature of concepts has been in under investigation. Some proposed models, based on empirical evidence, are:

• probabilistic view (prototype, exemplar): people classify the instance based on similarity between instance and category;
• theory based (schemata): causal knowledge is used to guide categorization along with the information about typical attributes of the members of a category (Kunda, 1999, pp. 15-52).

Wittgenstein also examine the concept of rule; what is a rule, how one learns and follows rules (PI, 143, 185-243.) Wittgenstein comments on the nature of rules:

It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. [...] –To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions). (PI, 199.)

Peter Winch (1979/1958), following Wittgenstein, argues that the concept of rule is inseparable from the concepts of breaking and obeying rule.
If the above premise is accepted, computer games do not have rules; mostly they implement systems that acts like the ‘natural laws’ (see also entry Are video games art). In this sense, there is qualitative difference between “rules” of, e.g., board and computer games; not between board games and role-playing games like Juul (2005, 43-44) suggest (the qualitative difference there is in the customs of obeying and breaking rules).

Juul, Jesper (2005). Half-real: Video games between real rules and fictional worlds. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Kunda, Ziva (1999). Social cognition. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958) Philosophical investigations. Basil Blackwell & Mott, Ltd., 2nd edition. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Winch, Peter (1979/1958). Yhteiskuntatieteet ja filosofia. Transleted to Finnish by Ilkka Malinen from The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy.

Jane McGonigal is posting her PhD thesis This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century chapters in her web site.

Nokia Games Day 2006 presentations yesterday got me thinking about pervasive games, the subject of my research in previous job.

Markus Montola (2005) has presented that pervasive games can be distinguished from traditional games by using notions of spatial, temporal, and social expansions. Idea is that “regular game is played in certain place at certain time by certain people.” These kinds of predefined and fixed boundaries are refered by the concept of magic circle. A pervasive game extends one or more boundaries (e.g., the game can be played anywhere, anytime, or players cannot distinguish other players from non-players). We have been usign that notion in Pervasive games design and evaluation guidelines for IPerG phase II.

I started to think that there might be an alternative way to approach the qualities of pervasive games vs. traditional games by using Goffman’s notion of framing and frame anlysis. Fine (1983) discusses in Shared Fantasy how frames are switched (e.g., from primary frame to game frame) and how these switches are made visible in table-top role-playing games.

Pervasive games could be thought to obsfuscate some of the frame switches, e.g., not providing clear cut distinctions to players and non-players where a playing area starts and ends (Botfighters vs. soccer).

Montola, Markus (2005). Exploring the Edge of the Magic Circle. Defining Pervasive Games. DAC 2005 conference, December 1.-3. IT University of Copenhagen. Available at: http://users.tkk.fi/~mmontola/onlineroleplay.pdf.
Fine, Gary Alan (1983). Shared Fantasy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.