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Category: Genres

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09/03/09

08:04:44 Programme & "After Dark"  

Categories: Genres, News, Game Studies, 139 words

Une courte mise à jour bilingue pour vous mentionner la mise en ligne du programme pour le colloque Penser après la tombée de la nuit: Bienvenue dans le monde des jeux vidéo d'horreur. Vous trouverez par ailleurs sur le site la chanson thème officielle du colloque, appelée "After Dark", avec voix et paroles gracieuseté de l'auteur. Quelqu'un sait combien de colloques académiques ont eu leur propre chanson thème?

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A quick bilingual update to let you all know that the conference programme for the Thinking After Dark: Welcome to the World of Horror Games conference has been put online. Also, there's a nifty official conference theme song available, titled "After Dark", with vocals and lyrics by yours truly. Now a quick question: how many academic conferences have had their own theme song before?

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01/09/07

12:33:23 Vampire Rain. Or, A Gaming Theory Account. A Fragment.  

Categories: Gaming Theory, Genres, Gaming Log, 1233 words

There's a game called Vampire Rain. It's on the Xbox 360, and it's real bad according to Gamerankings ("bad" as in "41% bad"). I'd like to confirm, infirm or nuance these judgments, but I can't. My story with the game in a nutshell: I rented it, started it, played roughly twenty minutes of tutorials, decided to write a little on my experience with it, went back to the game after about 15 minutes of pause, found out that voice acting wasn't played back properly, turned off the game and launched Oblivion because I was bored with it, and tried feeding it back in my X360 the next day only to find out the game wouldn't work. In fact my Xbox wouldn't read the disc. I have utterly no idea what could have happened. Every other game works flawlessly except Vampire Rain, which worked fine, and now doesn't.

Anyway, I saw the basic movement mechanics of the first tutorial level, but didn't even see a Vampire, nor Rain, I believe. So I really can't tell you whether it's any good. What I will tell you here, however, is how the concept of generic markers from Alastair Fowler's Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (1982) have shaped my experience.

What is a generic marker? Two quotes should suffice here:

The generic markers that cluster at the beginning of a work have a strategic role in guiding the reader. They help to establish, as soon as possible, an appropriate mental “set” that allows the work’s generic codes to be read. (p.88)

The writer in effect is saying, “If you feel uncertain how to take this book, try taking it with those others." (p.90)

These quotes can be summed up in two points:
1) A generic marker is a reference (whether explicit or oblique) to a known work largely held representative of a genre, or to a multitude of works all belonging to a same genre, used to "mark" the text and situate it among this generic tradition.
2) It is used to regulate the reader/viewer/gamer's horizon of expectancy (I am guess-translating Jauss' concept, from the French "horizon d'attente") by referring to a past known work. Naturally, for the marker to have an effect, the reader must have some knowledge of the work being referred to.

Before the Storm
I had first heard of Vampire Rain while discussing Horror games with my peers at the Université de Montréal. One of them said that Vampire Rain, a game that had come out recently for the Xbox 360, was a horror game. This summed up the whole of my knowledge of the title. When I went to my usual video club - originally to rent BioShock, which had naturally flown off the shelves - I decided to give it a try. Armed with only the hear-say that it was a horror game, I had thought it to be some sort of action/horror title. Quickly reading across the back cover, I saw "tactical horror", or something akin to that. At this point my comprehension shifted a bit, from a straight Devil May Cry expectation to something more like Ghost Recon or Rainbow Six. Getting home with the game, I opened its case and flipped through all the instructions manual's 6 pages, to find out it said absolutely nothing of the game's setting, the characters, the backstory, etc. Neither was there a small text detailing what the game was like or what it was about. Now that I look back on it, I think it was just the second "Xbox live" and technical manual. The "true" manual must have been stolen by someone else who rented the game before me. I watch the opening cinematic. A lone woman in a dark alley (I can infer she will be the victim of a classic frightening scenario) that is attacked by a man, crawling from atop a wall, looking like an undead with the fangs of a vampire. Then a confusing but interesting montage of newspaper covers and scenes conveys a general idea of abductions, a high number of people gone missing, deaths, etc. Special agents that look like SWAT teams enter the picture, confirming the "tactical squad" aspect promised by the game's box.

The game's main menu gives me two options in the "Single Player" section: either starting what I assume to be a chapter, "Rain", or a "Tutorial" that will teach me "How to avoid being seen". This leads me to believe that sneaking around as in other Stealth games will probably be an important dimension to the gameplay.

Singing in the Rain
I now get to play. My character moves forward in a crouching stance strangely reminiscent of Splinter Cell. My squad leader and teammate shows me the way to go forward. I try pressing two or three buttons; X makes me take out my pistol and aim with an over-the-shoulder camera, which allows me to move around at the same time. With the Y button I move from crouching stance to straight-up stance, which makes me run a little faster than if I cautiously crouch. All the controls are identical, or at least very similar, to Splinter Cell.

This constitutes a "family-resemblance", as coined by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. This is also potentially a generic marker. This game will resemble Splinter Cell, but it is too early yet to know whether the link will be limited to the particular or if it will broaden itself to the "stealth" game genre beyond this particular Tom Clancy franchise.

A little while later I come face-to-face with a wall, and my teammate starts climbing a vertical rain gutter pipe that looks like it came straight from Splinter Cell. This is a second marker I can recognize, and strengthens my impressions. A few minutes later, a crucial moment pops up: I get a call from some sort of radio emitter. A little box labeled "CALL" blinks on the screen while a "bip-bip! bip-bip!" sound is heard. The box is shaped as a rectangle, it is placed at the horizontal center of the screen, a little higher than the vertical center, and is of a single shade of color. This is exactly as in Metal Gear Solid 2 (and maybe also the other games of the series, I would have to verify).


This second reference universalizes the link that Vampire Rain had been establishing with Splinter Cell. It is to be taken as belonging, or as an heir to, the Stealth game genre in general. From here onwards, I can use a third model to understand and organize the content that will be presented to me. If I don't understand something, or if it seems out of place, I can try to rationalize not only from a viewpoint of Horror or Tactical Shooter, but also from that of Stealth games.

Unfortunately, the game itself isn't very fun nor compelling, so I put it to rest for the night, and the next morning, it won't work. I will never get to see the rest of Vampire Rain, or put my hypotheses to test. But hopefully this short piece will have illustrated the working of generic markers and the potential of gaming theory in video game studies, as well as the importance of situating observations and the analysis of works in the context of one's own experience and familiarity with the object of study.

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02/06/07

15:16:30 Genres and prototypes  

Categories: Genres, 475 words

I've been reading on literary genre theory this week. I have to skip a good bit of in-depth discussion, as I'm not really interested in the literary genres themselves, but more on the theoretical framework genre studies use. I've noted something which I think is the most interesting model I've seen so far: the prototype. There are multiple ways to look at games and genres, and initially I thought of using the analytical components approach. (my own term, not an official name for the methodology). This consists in identifying the base components which combine to make a genre, for instance, "First-Person point of view", "twitch gameplay", "real-time action", "multiple weapons", "modular geography", and so on, for the First-Person Shooter. Naturally, this sort of rigid system does not allow for a good understanding of individual titles situated on the peripheria of a said genre. Half-Life? Deus Ex? My thought was to develop a ratio-thing, such as "a FPS usually has 7 out of these 11 elements: (list)".

This model could still potentially work, I said to myself. I planned on using Staffan Björk and Jussi Holopainen's Patterns for Game Designs (from their eponymous book) as a base intertext for analysing genres and enumerating their components. And so I heard of this prototype theory. I haven't actually researched it yet, just read a little descriptive paragraph of the thing.

In this model, a genre is defined by an archetypal title, a "prototype". This prototype's base components are analysed, and placed in a hierarchy (the first-person point of view being the main component of the first-person shooter). Other titles resembling this prototype then are ranked as more or less generic depending on the number of components (and their individual primacy) they share with the prototype. At first sight, this seeems like a better way to study genres as far as video games go. The industry is very much based on the model of the copycat, where a single game achieving a huge success often spawns legions of doubtful imitations (Crackdown, Just Cause and Saint's Row for GTA?). Here is a little piece of gold which my brother dug up, randomly, and for which I will be eternally grateful to him. This chart very much suggests this mimicry pulsion (wouldn't Caillois be happy?) which the industry follows.

For these reasons thinking in terms of prototypes makes sense. However it brings another hurdle: which games to pick as prototypes? My personal experience of course elicits a few select titles, but I would ideally need more thorough, proven - in a word, less subjective - picks. "Top 10" titles from various gaming websites? Gamasutra's Quantum Leap awards seem nice, but they're awarded to titles that revolutionized their genre, which posits the problem that their genre existed in the first place. I'll think some more about this in the weeks/months/years to come.

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