When game studies was asserting itself as a new field in the late 1990s, it did so against a background where the primary discourse surrounding games at the time was not in any significant sense academic. The first discourse on games was pragmatic, and corresponds to what we now call game design, but it began long before this term gained its contemporary sense and content, in the manufacture of board games. This hit its stride in the nineteenth century, as the mass produced boardgame industry took over from the games for the moral instruction of children from the previous centuries. Both these game paradigms are related to the four that Caillois identified (discussed last week), combining elements from all four but belonging to none.

Commercial boardgames were competitive, but except in rare occasions they did not consist in a fair trial between competitors as is the case in Chess and Go/Weiqi. They used chance but in a frivolous manner quite removed from the surrender to fate – indeed, for many centuries they used a spinner known as a teetotum rather than dice in order to create conceptual distance from gambling. They had moments of vertiginous panic (e.g. landing on ‘Go to Jail’ in Monopoly) but only trivially. And they entailed simulation, pretending to represent within the world of the game, but at an extremely crude level.

The discourse of game design (as it would come to be known) did not primarily consist in talking about games, but about a different kind of statement: the rule. Indeed, by encoding their player practices as written rules with the aim of having new players learn those practices from written rules, the discourse of game design created the illusion that the rules were the game itself, rather than simply a formal expression of the practices of their play. Boardgames were the vanguard of this advance, which accelerated in the 1950s and 60s with the Avalon Hill wargames and their imitators, which had far more complex rules than anything previously in wide circulation. This was a significant paradigm shift in both the play (and discourse about) games.

At the same time, fairground entertainments were advancing in complexity and breaking from Caillois’ pattern of vertigo into an entirely new game paradigm. Developing out of bagatelle and other such games of chance (that were not strictly Caillois’ games of fate), pinball and pachinko – like boardgames – combined elements of the classical player practices to create a new game paradigm very different to what came before. These led directly to the electro-mechanical arcade games, for which Sega was a major creator, and thus to the videogame, which initially produced largely inferior electronic versions of what had been done mechanically in the preceding decade. There are numerous examples: the player practices of Midway's Sea Wolf from 1976 are directly inherited from Sega's electro-mechanical cabinet Periscope (pictured above), which was released exactly a decade earlier in 1966. The rise of diverse arcade cabinets in the 1960s represents another game paradigm shift, one that the digital arcade simply picked up, rather than initiated.

The third part of Foucault’s Archaeology explains that distinctions between discursive formations depend upon identifying contradictions, some of which are intrinsic – like the contradiction between rule-play and role-play that characterises the RPG game paradigm and its player practices (discussed at length in The Essence of RPGs). However, some are extrinsic and mark separation between one paradigm and another, like the contradiction between the rule-specification of the boardgame paradigm, and the experiential design of a pinball table. Indeed, in terms of discourse, what characterised the arcade game paradigm (which extends decades earlier than the videogame) was a general inability to talk about the design simply as a set of rules.

From pinball onwards, the rules were only a small part of the experience, which was sensory in ways that spanned tactile, audio, and visual. Designers of such games learned from playing each other’s games more than they learned by exchange of written rules, as the tabletop lineage did, especially with the advent of role-playing games in the 1970s. Thus by the 1980s we have, in addition to the four classical game paradigms that Caillois identified, an increasing number of additional paradigms in the cross-bred space between them (as indeed Caillois discussed and critiqued).

The second discourse on games arrives in the late 1990s, calling itself game studies. I suspect it would have called itself ‘game theory’ if economics had not already claimed that term for the mathematics of competition. It is marked, from the very beginning, by the need to distinguish itself from pre-existing discourses – and in particular to make a break from narratology and media studies, which were just starting to take an interest in videogames as they became more overtly narrative. This is a particularly intriguing situation from the perspective of Foucault’s archaeological techniques since the narratives studied in media studies are precisely the game paradigm that Caillois called mimicry – precisely the medium people struggle to accept as games for aesthetic reasons that I outlined in Implicit Game Aesthetics. So there is a certain irony to game studies not only positioning itself in conflict with the narrative game paradigm, but also in choosing as its object of study the videogame, thus unifying a diverse set of player practices that by Foucault’s methods should be considered distinct game paradigms.

Game studies, unlike game design, is a discursive formation that is not in any positive way influencing game paradigms. It is solely an observer, and exclusively of what it calls ‘videogames’ or ‘digital games’. This narrow focus is testified by its primary association calling itself ‘the Digital Game Research Association’. Even today, other kinds of games are treated as distinct objects of study – at this year’s DiGRA conference, the role-playing games summit does not even appear in the programme, and had its own separate timetable. The game studies journal Games and Culture rejects submissions that are clearly about games and culture if the games in question are not videogames. The official mythology of game studies is that videogames are a distinct and unique medium that must be treated separately from all others – including tabletop games, which at best are treated grudgingly as a distant influence. This is the digital exceptionalism that I have criticised repeatedly, and exposed by showing that player practices in videogames descend and directly relate to other game paradigms.

However, it is not other games that game studies is obsessed with keeping out, but those discourses that are concerned with the narrative game paradigm. Hence the famous ‘ludology vs. narratology’ debacle that is to game studies what Romulus and Remus are to the Roman Empire. The official story – if you talk to those allied with ludology, at least – is that ludology triumphed, by showing the uniqueness of the videogame. Foucault’s archaeology suggests a different understanding: game studies is underpinned by the intrinsic contradiction between ludology and narratology, the latter of which was never banished but simply driven underground by the reigning orthodoxy that insists videogames must be understood by borrowing scientific techniques and never by the methods of the humanities.

Ironically, when the third discourse on games arrives it too buys into digitial exceptionalism and presents the videogame as its object of study, in total disregard to the different game paradigms collected by the term ‘videogame’ and the myriad connections to other non-digital paradigms. As much as Brendan Keogh tries to paint game studies as predicating ‘videogames as games’ in his seminal essay Across Worlds and Bodies (as opposed to his battlecry for game criticism of understanding videogames as videogames) he lines up with game studies perfectly. He even uses references that are exactly the foundational matrix of game studies to emphasise his point. This third discourse is not a new discursive formation at all, but the uprising of the suppressed intrinsic contradiction between the sciences and the humanities within game studies, returning to take its vengeance.

Next week, the final part: The Liberation of Games

Much has been written on Caillois’ groundbreaking book, Les Jeux et Les Hommes (translated as Man, Play, and Games) – very little of it insightful. Indeed, within game studies, the majority of responses to Caillois do not obviously go beyond the introduction to the book, where Caillois explains the definition of play and games he is using to guide his enquiry. A few go as far as to engage in his framework, which considers four distinct patterns in play, but none actually take into account Caillois’ purpose in laying out these patterns, which is sociological, and forms the focus of the latter half of the book.

Caillois, following on from Huizinga who inspired him, is interested in how cultures organise themselves around different elements of play, and his four patterns are his framework for investigating this. He expressly disavowed that his patterns should be used as a taxonomy, a point constantly overlooked in discussions of Caillois within game studies, preferring to see his approach as designed to bring out certain intuitive points of focus in order to criticise (as Huizinga did before him) the decline of the play element in culture. In the context of this enquiry, however, our interest is not the general sociological patterns Caillois pursues but the way these patterns reflect game paradigms (as defined last week) at the time he was writing, namely 1958.

The idea behind a game paradigm is to produce a parallel with Kuhn’s paradigms, and Foucault’s discursive formations (explored in the second part of the Foucault’s Archaeology serial). In both cases, we are dealing with networks of practices and (especially for Foucault) relationships between statements. The statement works perfectly for Foucault’s analysis as a smallest unit of interest, but when it comes to games and play, we do not have an equivalent ‘smallest unit’ to turn to. The concept of a ‘ludeme’, both disparaged and developed by David Parlett, has to unify so many disparate things that it is more likely to be misleading than helpful; morpheme and phoneme in language (which the term is modelled on) have extremely distinct usage cases to define them, and the same is simply not true of the elements of games.

The statement works as Foucault’s foundation because it is an event, a claim that is enunciated in given circumstances, and the event can work as the smallest unit of anything we care to investigate (as Alfred North Whitehead realized), since it is transparent to whether our focus is a thought, an action, or a material object. What is more, any event in any game or play situation is a potential statement, something that can be stated as an observation about that play (“I won”) or about the conditions in any given play (“you can’t touch the ball with your hands”).

Caillois’ first pattern covers competitive games (what he calls agon after the Greek word for contest) and concerns the pursuit of victory under conditions of fair trial. This describes the game paradigm that has formed and been maintained for several millennia around sporting contests, with prevailing practices such as ‘sportsmanship’ and the pursuit of victory in competition. Sports, it is worth remembering, are a kind of game, one that has set itself apart from the others through a persistent glorification of physical prowess. Directly competitive mental competitions – Chess and Go/Weiqi, for instance – qualify as a closely related aspect of the same game paradigm, even though they could never be considered sport. In this regard, it is worth recognising that Foucault’s discursive formations are united by intrinsic contradictions (as we will see next week) and distinguished by those contradictions that cannot be resolved; in terms of competitive play, the difference between a sport and a game is purely internal to the paradigm in question.

As Bernard Suits shrewdly observed, competitive games are characterised to a great extent by constraints on what is allowed – golf would not work if you could use your hands to move the balls, for instance. What further characterises the game paradigm of competition are the regulatory events at the start and end: victory, that which allows us to state “I won!”, is the inescapable characteristic of competition, so much so that many whose play aesthetics prioritise this paradigm presume it is characteristic of all games. (This is the most basic mistake people make about games: to project their own aesthetic values as if they had objective weight – a point Kant links to all aesthetic experience).

The start is even more important to competition: players must begin with the same initial conditions in order for it to be judged fair, in the specific way this term is used in competitive games. Even when these conditions are inequal, as in the case of handicapping, the goal of the inequality is to adhere to ideals of equality, e.g. in horse racing when different racers are expected to carry different amounts of weight in order to give each competitor a purportedly equal chance of winning.

Caillois’ second pattern (named alea after the Latin for dice) concerns games of chance and fate, and constitutes a different game paradigm precisely because its conception of fairness is incompatible with that of competition: in games of chance, everyone has the same chance of winning not because of attempts to balance talent but because skill has no bearing on victory. This, for much of the history of mankind, has been precisely the appeal of gambling, it entails a surrender to fate, an acceptance of a powerlessness that might grant victory to anyone.

However, even by the time Caillois is writing, there were forces mutating this game paradigm, both in terms of the statements made about it (e.g. statistical analyses bringing skill into the previously sacred mystery of games of fate) and in terms of the composition of games (e.g. poker, which allows chance to be mediated through skillful reading of the other players). The ‘favour of the gods’, so long the mythology of gambling, is fading in what Max Weber termed ‘the disenchantment of the world’.

In Caillois’ third pattern (ilinx), the game paradigm is completely different as there is no role for victory at all, neither is there Suits’ voluntary acceptance of limitation to define challenges. This is the play of vertigo, which is exemplified in the fairground ride that uses dizzying speeds and centripetal accelerations to tap into excitement and fear. The event of consciousness-destroying panic constitutes this game paradigm, which many would dismiss as ‘not a game’ and thus miss how central the successors to this paradigm have become to videogames.

So too his fourth and final pattern, mimicry, whose exemplar of ‘play’ is the theatrical play that Caillois – unlike so many game scholars since – recognizes as a game paradigm radically distinct from the play of winning. It is precisely this contradiction, the fictional story against the functional state of winning, that half a century later will give rise to entirely new discursive formations about play.

Next week: The Three Discourses on Games

Its very name conjures up ideas of freedom and reckless abandon, yet how we play is never without limitations or methods – it is always conditioned by the circumstances within which it occurs. Even the other mammals recognise boundaries to their play, violations that will change the play of (say) two dogs from excited, friendly roughhousing into hostile snarling and bared teeth. But how can it be, if play is at root unshackled by the specifics of rules and systems, that play is never entirely free?

This four part serial runs in parallel to Foucault’s Archaeology, over on my original blog, Only a Game, to celebrate its ten year anniversary this July. Each of the four parts of Player Practices is linked to the corresponding part of the other serial, although it should be possible to follow this one on its own provided you’re not too concerned about the roots of the methods I am building upon. The purpose of this particular set of posts is to demonstrate how we can understand all play – whether with videogames, movies, boardgames, novels, RPGs, dogs, dice, or just our imagination – as player practices that form lineages of connectivity that thread together very different genres and media. Further, that these practices are linked to the discourses about play, such that even when the forms of discussion seem very different, they are still interconnected.

In the first part of Foucault’s Archaeology, I look at how the French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault overlaps the work of the US historian-philosopher Thomas Kuhn, who suggested that the sciences undergo periodic transformations he termed paradigm shifts. Kuhn’s paradigm (and Foucault’s historical a priori) specifies the conditions of knowledge within any given scientific discipline – and the equivalent concept in Foucault’s work specifies conditions of knowledge in any human field that can be understood as a network of related statements. He further argues that all knowledge can be understood in this way, and even leaves open the possibility that his methods could be applied to more disparate fields, such as artworks. Foucault clearly recognises the peculiarity of taking a technique originating in the analysis of discourse and applying it to the skills of, say, an artist:

In analysing a painting, one can reconstitute the latent discourse of the painter; one can try to recapture the murmur of his intentions, which are not transcribed into words, but into lines, surfaces, and colours; one can try to uncover the implicit philosophy that is supposed to form his view of the world... Archaeological analysis... would not set out to show that the painting is a certain way of ‘meaning’ or ‘saying’ that is peculiar in that it dispenses with words. It would try to show that, at least in one of its dimensions, it is discursive practice that is embodied in techniques and effects. In this sense, the painting is not a pure vision that must then be transcribed into the materiality of space; nor is it a naked gesture whose silent and eternally empty meanings must be freed from subsequent interpretations. It is shot through – and independently of scientific knowledge and philosophical themes – with the positivity of a knowledge.

What I am attempting in this serial is to pick up the possibilities that Foucault suggests could describe artworks and apply the same argument to games and play. Partly, this is because I have been able to defend the claim (in Imaginary Games and elsewhere) that games can never be excluded from the category of art, but partly it’s because play and games entail knowledge of various different kinds, and anywhere there is knowledge it is possible to apply Foucault’s method. This is a key point: it is the reason that game design is a viable discipline, but it is also important to recognise that the potential knowledge about play is in no way exhausted by game design – as game studies revealed, and as game criticism reveals again.

We have indeed witnessed, in the last fifty years or so, paradigm shifts (to use Kuhn's term, since it is more elegant than Foucault's) in the discourses surrounding games, a point that I will pick up and explore more closely in two weeks time. The possible knowledge we can have about games and play is nearly inexhaustible, and certainly capable of sustaining multiple discourses. But if this were all I wished to discuss, this serial would not significantly go beyond Foucault, who already explained how his ‘discursive formations’ describe any domain of knowledge. But just as he also suggests that painting et al can also be understand as a kind of discourse (or, better, a kind of knowledge) so it is with games and play themselves – quite apart from any discussions about it! But what, it is reasonable to ask at this point, what would a game paradigm be?

The answer, I suggest, has already been brilliantly traced by the work of another French intellectual, Roger Caillois, who is considered one of the founding voices clearing the path for game studies. I’ve already shown (in Beyond Game Design) how Caillios’ patterns of play can be seen as prescient observation of neurobiological patterns at a sociological level. But Caillois’ four patterns, which he stresses are not to be taken as either a taxonomy nor as exhaustive, also indicate four dominant game paradigms at the time he was writing – four networks of player practices, constraining both particular kinds of play, and the discourses that surround those forms of play. Examining these will suggest the validity of the idea of a game paradigm, and thus a shift between one way of playing and another.

Next week: Caillois' Patterns of Play

Several years back, we had a chance to work with Supersonic, a British developer that everyone at International Hobo respected because they were responsible for one of our favourite multiplayer games of all time: Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament on the Sega Megadrive. Even better than this was the realization that the game we were being brought into was another game in the same style: it didn’t have the Micro Machines license, it was in full 3D rather than top down 2D, but it was clearly another link in the same chain. Supersonic, we discovered, had never lost their love for this kind of game, and had found a way to keep making them even when the publishers had forced them off the intellectual property. It could be complained that the new game, then called Toast but eventually released as Mashed, was not original. But to do so would be to miss precisely what was valuable in Supersonic’s custodianship of player practices – and the same argument that applies to Supersonic equally applies to Nintendo EAD Group 1 and Mario Kart.

Why would anyone question the value of Nintendo’s hugely popular Mario Kart franchise? The most likely reason for doing so is because of the assumption, common to critics in a great many media, that originality is the highest value of artworks and thus that works that lack it are in some way deficient. Let me call this the cult of originality. If I may abuse Robert Hughes phrase for the impact of modern art, critics are infatuated with the shock of the new. Now it is important to recognize that originality is indeed a genuine value in respect of artworks, yet it is in no way its sole value. Equally it is worth recognizing that while games have a conceptual claim to art (as I argue in Imaginary Games), they are also at an intersection of a great many human activities, including narrative and sports. The way we assess a game, therefore, might not be through a common set of critical practices. Indeed, if we want to fully appreciate games in all their diversity, it is necessary to understand that by collecting so many disparate things under the single banner of ‘game’, we distort a chaotic multiplicity into artificial unity.

Before seeing how this approach of deifying originality falls apart when considering Mario Kart, it is worth reiterating this claim. At the point that ‘games’ as a term become a unity, they have ceased to possess their individual character: it is the attempt to then impose unitary character back upon individual games that causes people to valorise some games and denigrate others by excluding them from the mantle of ‘game’. This is the argument I put forward in Implicit Game Aesthetics. When we accept instead the diversity of play, we find that inside the blanket category of games are things that resemble narrative artworks, things that resemble fairground sideshows, things that resemble representative art, things that resemble or represent sports – and we have an ever-growing need for a ‘liberation of games’ to break us out of the habit of seeing all these diverse activities and entities as subject to judgements of only one kind.

In the case of Mario Kart, we land somewhere between sports (that is, motor sports) and fairground rides (that is, bumper cars). Immediately, we are outside of the space where someone whose critical practices were learned in connection with books, films, or theatre – the narrative artworks – has firm footing. Since most critical practice has come down this path, and since alternative approaches like Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations are out of the conceptual grasp of the majority of game critics, Mario Kart comes into the space of art criticism like a cuttlefish at a flower show. Immediately, the critic who wishes to defend it must appeal to its inherent entertainment value – and for many with a penchant for criticism, this feels like selling out.

However, it should not. The aesthetic value of fairground rides lies precisely in their capacity to amuse, and if we were able to get past the barrier that the totalizing term ‘game’ inflicts upon us perhaps we would be unafraid to make this connection. My interest here, however, is not in the aesthetics of amusement but the conservation of player practices in sports and sport-like activities. For one of the aspects of sports that characterises them as such is that their player practices are strongly conserved. While the rules of sports do change, and occasionally the institutions governing sports split and create variant practices, the rate of change of player practices within sports is the lowest of all games. It is this continuity – this maintenance of tradition – that affords sports their cultural esteem, for if they were not stable in this way they would not persist long enough to establish themselves as national institutions.

Mario Kart, like a sport, has strongly conserved player practices. Across all eight iterations of the main franchise (ignoring the arcade cabinets Nintendo co-developed with Namco), the core of the game has persisted, and the player practices have thus obtained a constancy. The concept of a multi-race grand prix with power-ups to aid a racer – or inflict upon others! – and of power slides and hopping to assist with cornering remains the core of the titles in this series throughout. Over and above this is the idea of abstracting difficulty out by characterising three different speeds of race as 50cc, 100cc or 150cc i.e. of having engine size substitute for difficulty by recognising that faster races require greater skill to master. These establish a core suite of player practices that remain, sports-like, constant throughout the franchise.

This is not to say that the games do not change or develop. The original Super Mario Kart (1992) had grand prix races (then called Mario Kart GP) consisting of five consecutive races for each cup; this changed to four with Mario Kart 64 (1996) and has remained thus ever since, although the number of cups offered raised to eight with Mario Kart DS (2005). The selection of power ups has been adjusted, most notably by the inclusion of the dreaded Blue Shell with Mario Kart 64, and the Super Horn in Mario Kart 8 (2014) that at last offers a chance of defence against it. The role of the Coin has also been in constant flux throughout: core to the design of the first game, it did not return until Mario Kart Super Circuit (2001) on the GBA, then disappeared until Mario Kart 7 (2011) on the Wii, which seems to have reintegrated it with some permanency.

Super Circuit was the only title not developed by Nintendo’s EAD Group 1 studio, although Intelligent Systems (who made that particular game) have always been closely tied to EAD. Super Circuit is particular significant for its introduction of the concept of cups consisting of classic races, solidifying the continuity of player practices by making every previous game a potential participant in each new game. Players who engage in a contemporary Mario Kart are thus offered not only nostalgia but a chance to exercise their already learned player practices, allowing quicker mastery that is no less satisfying because of it. A gainful comparison could be made to the motor racer revisiting the same tracks each year, or the golfer who plays on classic golf courses.

With Mario Kart 8, the conservation of player practices takes an unusual twist, for thus far we have been talking about Nintendo EAD Group 1 acting as custodians solely for the player practices of the Mario Kart series. But with the DLC provided for the latest installment, we find the concept of classic tracks being extended to another, less successful Nintendo racing franchise: F-Zero, a series also created by EAD. The recent addition of the 200cc speed further takes the game closer into intersection with F-Zero, which always had speed as a core element in its concept. The result is that Nintendo EAD Group 1 are now the custodians not only of the player practices of Mario Kart, which they have faithfully maintained for more than twenty years, but also for F-Zero, which (uniquely) is being curated within Mario Kart itself.

The cult of originality, dutifully served by reviewers, critics, and gamers alike, misleads us into thinking that all that matters in videogames is breaking new ground. While inventiveness and creativity are undoubtedly values we should celebrate, we must not be fooled into thinking that this is all that could ever matter about games, or indeed any artwork. Whereas a painting can be viewed largely unchanged centuries after it was created, games cannot be played in the conditions they were first created ever again. Emulation is more reincarnation than preservation. As such, the capacity to maintain player practices, to act as custodians for an established form, is something also worth celebrating. There is even precedence for this in adaptations of books and plays that, while adding some new element or twist to their staging, remain faithful to the source materials. The theatre has long since thrived on this continuity of practice, and the same aesthetic principles can be applied to games. Mario Kart remains faithful to itself, and EAD – and Supersonic, for that matter – deserve praise for this achievement.

Dedicated to Supersonic, and also a friendly glove slap for Jed.

Over on Only a Game today, details of the special double serial I will be running both here and there throughout June. Entitled Foucault’s Archaeology (Only a Game) and Player Practices (ihobo), it ties in with the ten year anniversary of Only a Game on July 1st.

Back to social media this June… it is not a transition I am looking forward to, but I’m sure it won’t be so bad once I get over the initial terror at reconnecting to the hive mind.

• If you commented on either of my blogs, replying to you is my highest priority. Blogs before slogs.
• If you messaged me on Twitter, I will get back to you, but please allow a few days as I haven’t even installed the app on my pocket robot yet.
• If you commented on Google+, Chrome would have harassed me about it while I was using Gmail, which is another reminder that I should try and leave Gmail this Summer.
• Shout out to everyone I met at DiGRA, which I really enjoyed in the end. My ten minute presentation ended up having half an hour, which was just long enough to have fun with it.
• Apologies, but I doubt I will put my DiGRA presentation online, as it is incomplete without me talking over it. I continue to mull, though, and could be swayed…

What’s in store this June? Find out tomorrow…

Cross-posted from Only a Game.