Tom;
>
> Im just starting a Phd, looking at the performative grammar of gameplay
> (rules, objectives, linguistic flow, etc). In my mind much about the act of
> livecoding relates very closely to gameplay activity. With this in mind I
> was hoping that some of you might be able to provide me with some links to
> reading material that might be relevent to my research.
>
>
It won't come as a surprise to those who have seen me perform (
http://vimeo.com/5559531 ) that one of my main inspirations in linking
gameplay to "performative grammar" is StreetFighter. StreetFighter is
interesting in general because it was the first arcade game to use that many
buttons as well as more complicated joystick movements to access more
advanced game actions. It can be debated whether SF is the best game in that
genre but nobody would question that it set the standard for both the
interface and the game rules that other games followed (Mortal Kombat, Art
of Fighting, Guilty Gear, etc).
Especially the more modern incarnations of these games feature a extremely
large vocabulary of moves that may only be used in certain contexts (for
example right after another move or while getting hit) or where the
effectiveness of the move will depend on what came before it (for example to
accomplish a series of blows that can't be stopped if the first one wasn't).
Furthermore the most powerful moves often demand a complicated series of
button presses and joystick movements that the player will need to memorise
and practice.
Looking at it from this perspective there are analogies to be made between
StreetFighter (when played at a certain skill level) and natural or formal
languages. I would say that there is also a definitive performance aspect to
this, seeing as how this game is preferably played in a arcade against a
human opponent where the large screen will allow spectators to follow the
progress of the match.
So far for the good news. The bad news is that while there is a lively
online scene around these games (
http://www.shoryuken.com/forum.php ) that
has written a great deal on them, most of that is focussed on winning them
(as opposed to analysing the game itself from a more general point of view)
and a specialised vocabulary is used that would be hard to penetrate for
casual readers. On top of that most of the books analysing these games in
depth are in Japanese as well as out of print. The designers themselves
typically keep silent about the inner workings and in more than a few cases
dedicated players found that effects never intended by the designers could
be accomplished, in those cases the way that the games are played at high
levels would dramatically change, sometimes months or more after their
release.
What I'd suggest you look at would be the blog of David Sirlin, a game
designer who re-balanced one of the versions of this game for a HD
re-release. A good start would be this page;
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/street-fighter-hd-remix-design-overview.htmlIt
covers the difficulty of inputting commands as related to the need for
intuitive expression, amongst other things.
I hope this helps you a bit. Personally I find the idea that a
two-directional joystick combined with just 6 buttons can be used to express
well over a 100 distinct statements that can all interact akin to Sun Stzu's
observation that "the musical notes are only 5 in number yet their
combinations are infinite" (he was Chinese, hence the number "5").
Good luck, once you get to that stage I'd very much appreciate a pdf of your
work.
Kas.
PS, if anyone has a time-machine, could I borrow it to go back in time for a
decade or two to show my dad that all those hours in fact weren't wasted and
that playing SF yields relevant perspectives on formal grammar? Please?
Received on Wed Jan 20 2010 - 16:34:02 GMT