Playtest

We’ve just had a long weekend down in this part of the world due to public holiday celebrating the birthday of our erstwhile monarch who curiously isn’t even a citizen of our country and lives on the other side of the world, and also has her birthday on a completely different day to the one celebrated. The curious outcome of a constitutional monarchy not yet quite over its colonial roots no doubt.

In any case I had a bit of extra time off, and given that the weather outside was strongly encouraging indoor pursuits, I decided that some extended computer game play sessions were in order. Particularly I finally got around to playing Bethesda’s Oblivion, which I picked up a few months ago but haven’t got around to yet.

I should point out that I played its predecessor Morrowind a lot, both for my own enjoyment, and as I analysed it for my Honours thesis. Needless to say, I am very accustomed to the way Morrowind plays, and the feeling and experience of playing it. I think it is this familiarity that caused Oblivion to feel kind of strange at first – it’s similar enough to Morrowind that I expected the experience of play to be like Morrowind, yet different enough that things kept happening in ways that were unexpected and jarring. This was particularly true of the combat mechanics, gone were the fairly simple tactics at play in Morrowind (do more damage more quickly than your opponent), in were all sorts of being knocked back and around, movement, and timed blocking. And lets not mention the changes to the GUI menus, which have me constantly clicking around looking for things where they ’should’ be.

Though I’ve gotten used to it now, I think these misplaced expectations are a good example of some of the things I’ve been writing about with regards to the importance of familiarity in videogame play. Importantly the expectations I had about Oblivion weren’t some sort of consciously held belief about how the game would play, I just sort of implicitly expected to be able to stand there and belt my opponent with my sword, ala Morrowind.

Speaking of the thesis, I believe my work plan to have it finished some time in August has been approved. Of course this will mean that I’ll remain too busy to post much here, which of course is largely the previous situation for the last 12 months extended anyway.

I’ve used the phrase ‘intentional stance’ a few times in the chapter I’ve been writing, and I wasn’t really sure of where I had gotten it from, or if it was something I had come up with. So i decided to google it, and it seems like it was a lucky thing I did, seeing how its the name of a “theory of mental content proposed by Daniel C. Dennett” according to wikipedia.

Anyway a clarifying footnote later, the actual theory itself piqued my interest, as it seems to have some fleeting resonance with the layered model of the interface I developed in my DiGRA 07 conference paper . The crux of the theory is that things can be explained firstly by anthropomorphising them, in the sense of treating them as a rational agent, and then considering it at different levels of abstraction, from the most concrete physical stance, through the function and purpose orientated design stance, to the titular intentional stance that is concerned with thinking and intent.

Whilst the theory seems, at least from what I can glean from its wikipedia entry, to be concerned with things work, i.e. make predictions, rather than the with the different levels at which we actually interact with things, in the case of my paper, the interface, there is something to the most abstract layer, the intentional stance, which I think may help we elucidate the most abstract level of my model, which I termed the conceptual level for lack of anything more effectively descriptive. Perhaps what I was trying to get at with that layer is that our use of the interface, both in its physical and software manifestations, is not just arbitrary but directed and meaningful at a higher level, that it is intentional. Might be some lucky timing as I will probably need to revisit the paper in my thesis writing sometime soon.