Whatever the case, I liked it. It was aesthetically good.

In games (and sometimes real life) the use of innovative technique is met with you got lucky or that’s stupid because competitors are unwilling to change their framework to include the new reality, they simply dismiss it.

During one such game, it sort of struck me that all of these players, all 64 of them, had sort of become accustomed to the present battle lines, and had forgotten that there was even a possibility of progressing to the enemy’s next capture point.

With this in mind, and with probably an enormous amount of luck, I just got up and ran past the enemy’s battle lines. None of them noticed me. And once I was back there, they didn’t even realize I was next to them until I had taken out two entire squads with a machine gun.

That little adventure in Bf3 made me think a lot about how innovation works in the real world. How we have a tendency to rule out possible paths because we think they are impossible, or because we think it’s not achievable within the current framework of a given industry or social structure.

However lame and generic this story might sound, it was probably one of the first times I’d ever learned something metaphorical about real life through a game I’d played, and I’m trying desperately to catch whatever that was and put it in a bottle.

The only real conclusion I can make is that the whole “modern war” theme had nothing to do with my epiphany. It was the structure of the game. A faint glimpse of true procedural rhetoric, perhaps.

For the real time strategy games, I’d argue the act of ordering a unit to move is the primary action, regardless of the movement.
.Each is pretty equally weighted in any moment. But I think baseball is a rather easy example, because of the clear division I think it is simple to say that each inning is made up of two sub-games and within each sub-game a primary action is to throw for the defense, and to bat, for the offense.

But this gets complicated when we start talking about things like Magic. So is the primary action playing a card or choosing a card to go in your deck? Or is it made up of two sub-games? Now that we’ve introduced the idea of sub-games we can push this even further. Couldn’t it be said that each game is a sub-game? How about a turn, a phase, a stack? The fact that most games are simple games layered on top of complex games makes this issue very difficult.

Although one thought does come to mind before I just dismiss my idea. Maybe magic is two sub-games: building and playing, with their respective primary actions. However, I would argue as your relationship to a game evolves, the number of sub-games within that game actively increases. Secondary actions become primary actions within sub-games. (I’ll explain secondary actions in my next post, but basically they are actions that are not as important as the primary action but help to tie the primary action to the goal)

But this would, of course, have a whole other set of ramifications which ends up implying that no game is ever really a fixed unit even for the player playing it, and that it changes over time as the player’s conception of the game changes. Hope I didn’t prattle on for too long.

It’s also interesting to apply this to sprinting on a track. Is the primary action in a foot race to “run” or is it to “lift leg up” or “push off from ground”?

And for real time strategy games, is merely the act of ordering a unit to move considered the primary action? These games require the execution of a variety of actions executed at the right times in order to achieve a desired outcome.

I think one of the problems with most of American commercial media is that the trope is “Character goes through conflict”, “Character grows positively from conflict”. I suppose a better argument to make is that connecting with characters is not important. We have this belief that in order to be interested in a story we have to directly relate to that character in some way. I think characters can be created that grow and teach interesting stories without being immediately connectable. That being said, creating characters that aren’t easy to sympathize with is also not a good method.

I would instead reform the argument to focus on the emotional resource aspect of narrative and storytelling. I feel I probably took a rather extreme view (hahah) which corrupted what I was trying to say. Good storytelling seems to be about connecting our emotional resources with the emotional resources of the character in question. This can be through positive character development or not, but it should not be using character development as the only part of a story at the expense of other narrative types.

I would also say that both of your examples i.e. Gilgamesh and the Odyssey had other very powerful elements going for them in addition to the character developments. But the point about character development being tied to American exceptionalism is the fact that character development in American media is always judged on a forwards or backwards scale. Either they are developing for the better or the worse, not in the “interesting ways” you say. So again, I’ll admit to an extremely poorly crafted argument, but I maintain that the media’s current focus on interpersonal relationships and character development above all else is only to the detriment of what is currently getting produced.

I do agree that character development isn’t the only possible focus of a story and that it is easier to tell a story in games which isn’t focused on character development, but condemning character development outright (and associating it with modern American exceptionalism?? Character development has been the focus of good stories since Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, etc) is ridiculous!

When I was analyzing UNO I was trying to find the simplest possible game to analyze and deconstruct. And, to be honest, I just didn’t give it enough of a run through. Part of the difficulty with doing this blog is that all of my arguments seem so weak because they just don’t encompass enough territory. I’m thinking I should focus on writing an essay a week and making it a well-crafted argument/debate.

Anyway, onto a response!

The cool things about interrupts is that it shows such a great area that modern game designers really don’t take enough into account. (I’m not saying past game designers did either, but they made simple enough games that it wasn’t really relevant.) The house rules. Games are such cultural elements that house “rules” is not really a strange way of playing, but in many ways the norm. We apply our morals and basic logics to all games that we play that we often have opinions on games whose rules cannot change i.e. video games. For example, people who employ tactics in different ways we consider to be either quaint or ruthless depending on our viewpoint. It means that games are always personal even the most mass produced (like Uno).

Heading back towards Uno. It is definitely all about the illusion of control, which seems to be a large theme in most of Hasbro’s line-up of games. There are some great reads on randomness in games. One is that randomness actually leads to the better player winning more often and creating a fun game state, but this is not that type of randomness. This type of randomness is actually very different. The reality is that any individual card you play has very little value. In other words, playing a green 5 over a blue 6 (no matter which is the “correct” play) will gain very few percentage points of advantage (even if one is just strictly better). What actually occurs is mostly just for looks. When you play a blue six, you get to hear the grumbling of your opponents if they cannot match the card, and you get to see the way the tide of the game shifted because of your “decision”. Which sends a positive response to your brain because you think “oh yay, I have power to ‘manipulate’” which you actually don’t.

This actually leads to a further point which is a debate about the purpose of games. In some ways Uno is pure entertainment as its players don’t really have any power to control the game state. Is this okay? Is this not okay? What are we trying to accomplish with this? I’m not really sure.

I hope that made sense and was helpful. Also, I’m sorry about Chinese checkers. I’m trying to work on it.