Thank the gods for the meta level. If you can’t say anything clever, just talk about not knowing what to say.

Anyway. So a new phase in my life started yesterday, with me taking up my studies in Game Design at the ZHdK. It promises to be quite an interesting time, with interesting people all around. Some of them I already found quite likeable, others I haven’t figured out yet, but I’m quite confident that 3 years of working together will do its job.

Since I intend to revive this blog to write about insights and thoughts, I find it appropriate to note the observation about our first course: Spiel:Kritik by Ulrich Götz.

The basic idea behind the course is obvious: tackle the preformed ideas of what games are and how they are supposed to work. I know the concept: at theatre studies, we took half a year to talk about the very definition of theatre, what consists of it and what not. This time around, we had half a week; the main part taking an existing mainstream game, examining it and then turning each of its building blocks into its opposite – and visualise that idea, none the less.

That being the first week, I was both shocked and intrigued. It was like someone actually demanded something, and challenged me! Okay, so let’s tackle that …

My idea, based on the fact that most games with a combat element requires the player to retain the wholeness of his avatar’s featured a figure that was slowly wiped off the screen, until it was totally gone and invisible.

The idea completely fell through – but then again, in the end only 3 out of 11 ideas were found worthy of praise by Ulrich Götz. He complained that we didn’t dig deep enough, that we didn’t took the games apart, that there were still too much assumptions about how a game is done.

He might be right in some aspects. Turning black into white is not taking a game apart. But really getting into it means actually tackling the foundations of the definition of games itself. And if you reverse those, you don’t necessarily have another game. Rather an anti-game. And this was one step most of us fresh(wo)men didn’t dare to make.

This has been shown most prominently by the last presentation, which was applauded by Götz. By defining the opposite of 1 player as 0 player, [the student of which I should learn the name] basically presented a screen saver. Apart from making it start and stop, the player had no way of interacting. Is this still a game? I don’t think so – but at least it shows that any game needs a player to interact with it, or it wouldn’t be one. It would fall apart.

This was partly what I wanted to show with my concept as well, but I obviously failed, at least rhetorically. Is a game still a game when the player loses the ability to react with the virtual environment? How does it change the player’s perception of a game if a seemingly competitive game lacks the conclusion of whether he has “won” or not?

Unanswered questions, but I guess I will find answers to them, sooner or later.