Game State versus Play State: From DVDi Games to a Language of Gaming Experience

Research in the field of digital games is highly interdisciplinary but did not yet arrive at common conceptualizations and at a common language of discourse. The difficulty lies in the heterogeneity of knowledge sources, research methodologies, and practices of discourse relevant to understanding, analyzing, and possibly designing digital games. This paper aims to contribute to fill these gaps. Considering digital games as IT application systems and entertainment media at once it focusses on the distinction of concepts such as game state and play state. Based on comprehensive studies of DVDi games within a cooperation project of a university research center and the digital games industry the paper first introduces that type of games. Then it looks at DVDi games as formal describable IT application systems. Third it interpretes DVDi games as entertainment media. Revealing some weaknesses of current DVDi games it finally discusses how to improve future games. Gaming Experience in DVDi Games Interactive DVD (DVDi) games 2 are a rather recent and very specific type of games that require a common DVD player and a TV only. It is based on the presentation of any video material and can exclusively played by means of the DVD player’s remote control. Within the present paper, DVDi games are seen as fairly simple objects of investigation in the field of digital games. In contrast to more widespread PC games the computing power available to control a DVDi game is very weak, thus the game system state is quite simple to describe as a position within the DVD’s playlist. Due to the finiteness of the playlist the set of game states clearly forms a finite state machine. Moreover DVD players are limited to one remote control with limited interaction functionality only, so multiplayer games require sequential player actions. Thus monitoring of a DVDi game play is quite easy even in the case of a multiplayer game. Copyright c © 2007, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. i.e. The Games Company, Germany’s largest fully Germanybased publisher of digital games i.e. DVD only games, DVD board games, and interactive Movies. The latter two are not relevant for the present paper. Game State & Play State – DVDi Games as IT Systems Examining DVDi games as IT application systems, game playing experience can be described by means of formal concepts drawn from theoretical computer science studies. Elementary expressions of game descriptions then consist of user inputs to the system and system reactions. As the users are game players the inputs to the system are moves. According to (Grünvogel 2005) system reactions can be modeled with a map to the state space with respect to the performed move. (Jantke 2006b) introduces it as moves of computerized agents of any type called game moves. However, any sequence of those elementary expressions describes a certain game state. To really understand game playing experience it is relevant to introduce concepts from the users domain, e.g. in the optimal case of immersion the player does not push a button but performs an action such as shooting. At this level it is fairly hard to find a formal description of game playing experience. The attempt of (Björk & Holopainen 2004) has lack of practicability as long as there is no homomorphism map from the set of elementary expressions to the set of semantically driven higher order expressions. Such a map would assign meaning to certain sequences of elementary moves, and vice versa, introduce implementations of certain actions as sequences of elementary moves. Those homomorphisms allow to formally describe game playing experience on a higher level using sequences of semantically annotated actions and thus to describe play states. Finally that conceptualization leads to layered languages of ludology as introduced in (Jantke 2006b). Figure 1: TOMB RAIDER – Push the buttons in the given order and Lara will open the combination lock.