Week 2 - Are AIs Videogames?

The second chapter of Newman’s book Videogames introduces several of the fundamental concepts developed by some of the most important academic figures that investigated the notion of play in the past. In particular, he focuses on the writings of Roger Caillois’s basic notions of paida, ludus, aigon, alea, illinx and mimicry so as to bring a basic framework that would allow the academic critic to delve deeper into the nature of videogames. Of those concepts, it seems that the ones that could be used to enlight our understanding of the early history of videogames such as described in this week’s other readings are the notions of paida (free play) and ludus (challenge or goal oriented play activity). While most games developed in the 1970s and 1960s unbounded play experiences (Pong, Spacewar, ...), Space Invaders allowed the player to engage the game with a very clear objective: beating the machine’s highscore. While this goal was not inscribed in the game’s diegesis per se, it was one of the first game to offer feature that allowed space for a ludus-oriented play session. This probably adds up to the list of reasons explaining the epoch-making success of Space Invaders in Japan.

Another striking finding in the second chapter of Newman’s book is—after carefully examining different definitions of the nature of videogames and exposing how open-ended the range of available frameworks really is—how easily he rejects AI-based toys such as AIBO or Furby from his definition of what constitutes the corpus of videogames. While I understand his point—videogames need at least a form screen to display the video part of the object—, I am not sure this would completely apply to the conception of what videogames are in Japan. Notably, author Masuyama Hiroshi’s perspective on the media derives from the idea that videogames are mainly AIs providing some kind of playful communication. Therefore, he sees game playing as a form of dialogue between the software—providing settings and inital conditions—, and the player—responding with input. This provides the basic framework for Masuyama to state that videogames are not necesssarily confined to the screen, but could also acquire an artifical body mimiking those of human beings, allowing for more forms of playful communication. This interpretation was also recently echoed by Masayuki Uemura in his keynote talk in the 2013 edition of the International Japanese Video Game Studies Conference when he explained that the appearance of the Famicon marked the movement from asobu dôgu to asobu aite—from play tool to play partner. Could this gap between Newman and Masuyama’s perspectives direct us to an answer in our investigation of the specificity of Japanese game design?

Caillois, Roger. Les Jeux et les hommes; le masque et le vertige. Édition revue et augmentée. ed. Paris: Gallimard, 1967. Print.

Masuyama, Hiroshi. Terebi gêmu bunkaron : intarakutibu media no yukue (Treatise on Video Game Culture: Towards an Interactive Media). Kôdansha Gendai Shinsho. Tokyo: Kôdansha, 2001. Print.