What Happens Before Game Design?

As the bio on the side tells you, I am a Graduate Student working on a degree that should end up in Applied Sociology. I have many interests, Games, Culture, Technology's effect on Education, and the effect of play on the way things are. In this blog, I want to talk about the things that go into the design of a video game. I'm not interested in level design, system design, narrative design, i'm interested in the entirity of the design process that occurs before a game is begun. Designers pull from culture, that thing that we create through our billions of interactions and localizations each and every day. We create it through newspapers, television shows, government systems, churches, bathrooms, toasters, and everything else that interacts with us in some way shape or form. What is it that is at work when we turn on a game? Are the designers pulling from a common pool of culture? Are they pulling from more than just mythology and morality? These sorts of questions are what i'd like to explore. 

Moreso than this, I want to explore exactly what it means to design a video game. When a video game is made, we often take an earlier game, monopoly, chutes and ladders, candyland, or things like Doom, Dungeons and Dragons, or Cops and Robbers. Through this, we will get into the fundamentals of play in culture. With things like The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia by Bernard Suits, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element of Culture by Johan Huizinga, and Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois i'm hoping to add another layer to discussion of play. Further, my discussions will be using what is referred to as the Sociology of Associations. Bruno Latour and his discussions on the fundamentals of Sociology have produced a theory that everyone but him called Actor-Network Theory. While he has begrudgingly agreed to call this theory as it has been labeled, he takes great pains to try and create an instrument through which we can trace the associations between actor-networks. 

An Actor-Network, to be brief, is, "...what is made to act by a large star-shaped web of mediators flowing in and out of it. It is made to exist by its many ties: attachments are first, actors are second..."

Attatchments imply possession; these possessions also possess us, "to have is to be held." Latour was fond of the puppet / puppeteer metaphor. Current social theory gives no autonomy, no agency to those whom exist inside society. Through Latour's work, actors are still puppets, but like a pupeteer, the puppet is as much an actor as the pupeteer has sway over the puppet. Through this, we will see how games control us, move us toward innovation in gameplay as much as the game creators try and translate what it is the gamers want. We will be trying to explore what this association is doing to the state of play within video gaming. 

Further, we will try to broaden the field of discussion of the video game to include the games that failed. Why is it that some games fail while others do not? Why is it that some games are released to be a commercial property with horrible bugs and destructive save states? There are studies that look into this sort of thing, but I think that discussion about it is still constructive. The more we know about what has failed in the past, the more we'll understand about the things that have succeeded. In this way, we will talk about the constantly changing concept of design. While I am not going to stick with just one social theorist, I believe what Latour says of the concept of design:

The sheer range of things now subject to it — objects, cities, and everything in between — shows just how momentous, and total, this shift in production promises to be. And yet, he observes, the connotations of design imply a certain ‘modesty’: it’s less about construction and creation than informed modification and collaboration. To design, Latour points out, suggests redesigning, and improving, something that came before, opposed to working from scratch in solitary, ingenious confinement. It is, thus, recursive and remedial, favoring skill and attention to detail over bold, inaugural ideas that lack accountability.

Thusly tooled, I am going to try and write at least three times a week. The impetus for the blog is to force myself to write about these subjects. I am hoping that, in doing this, the background of my practicum will find itself made more real.