Hey board game dev friends. As I work on this book using my historical problem space framework, a framework initially developed with video games, I'd truly live to know if YOU think is is applicable. So if you're bored, how about skimming this ?? thersites-journal.de/index.php/th... - ThreadSky

gamingthepast.bsky.social • 223 days ago

Hey board game dev friends. As I work on this book using my historical problem space framework, a framework initially developed with video games, I'd truly live to know if YOU think is is applicable. So if you're bored, how about skimming this ??
https://thersites-journal.de/index.php/thr/article/view/238

Comments

vpjarponen.bsky.social•223 days ago

Your notion of witnessing is interesting. Our game dev culture seems very aesthetically orientated - sometimes at the expense of failing to include captivating incentive structures/problem spaces, I feel. A symptom of a broader aesthetical, epistemological, phenomenological cultural orientation?

gamingthepast.bsky.social•223 days ago

Thanks so much for your thoughts! Here's a response 🧵So there are some critical differences between the Historical Problem Space framework and Bogost's procedural rhetoric. HPS actually includes procedural rhetoric as part of it's analysis of a game. 1/

gamingthepast.bsky.social•223 days ago

A main difference between the two is the focus. Procedural Rhetroic speaks of how any game CAN present their point to players. HPS speaks of how historical games all DO present their points, portray the pasts they represent. Historical games present the past as historical problem spaces. 2/

gamingthepast.bsky.social•223 days ago

Your ideas about incentive structures make perfect sense. One of the more important insights from HPS (it seems to me) is that historical games are about goal-oriented action by player agents (so player agents pursuing incentives, right). 3/

gamingthepast.bsky.social•223 days ago

In history, which I tend to define as the selective representation of the past goal-oriented behavior is sometimes part of the historian's focus, sometimes not. For me this is because sometimes we are goal-oriented, many times we are not (or do not know what our goals are). 4/

vpjarponen.bsky.social•223 days ago

An excellent point about goal-orientation. In design I‘ve had my struggles with trying to incentivise outcomes that historical may not have been intended at all. Often this boils down to in history agency being distributed (multiple agents) but in games focused and pinpointed on the single player.

gamingthepast.bsky.social•223 days ago

But a historical game, really a game history, player agents pursue goals as the central assumption. So that is a way a game with its historical problem space approach is selectively interpreting the past. And procedural rhetoric fits in there as one of the ways an HPS can be implemented 5/

vpjarponen.bsky.social•223 days ago

In my own analog designs I have tended to think of games as representing *incentive structures* for players to excercise their agency with. Laying down these structures is a way of „simulating“ history. I feel this is analogous to your problem space concept - and we both nod to C Thi Nguyen here.

vpjarponen.bsky.social•223 days ago

In my work I like to think about what particular incentive structures popular in games (say min-maxing; area control) might tell us about our design culture(s), where might these ideas come from historically, and what alternatives might there be.

vpjarponen.bsky.social•223 days ago

I do find this useful in that it encourages us to think about the „procedural rhetorics“ through which different games shape our experience as they represent history as problem spaces. How does your framework relate to Bogost‘s notion? Are there critical contrasts?

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply