Judith Pintar lecture extra credit
At last Friday’s lecture at the Beckman Institute, Judith Pinar gave a presentation where she talked about interactive fiction--particularly gaming--with a focus on hodology and meta-hodology. The talk was surprisingly entertaining, refreshingly unpretentious, and, in my opinion, one of the best academic lectures I’ve ever attended. The lecture itself was accompanied by a hilariously self-aware PowerPoint presentation full of randomly placed pictures of dragons, and phrases like “bullet points are the ramen noodles of ontology.”
In terms of content, Pintar set out her discussion points right off the bat, taking apart the mouthful of a title on her intro slide: “The Appeal of an Endless Horizon: Collaborative Game Design as Meta-Hodological Play.” She kicked things off explaining to her audience exactly what “meta-hodological” meant, describing it as an “awareness of the contexts that shape the paths through which methods are created.” She mentioned structural inequalities, such as Robert Moses’s design of the Long Island bridges, and how that had the effect of giving objects (the bridges) agency.
In the next section of her talk, she discussed game design--collaborative game design, in particular. He described hodology from the player’s perspective as the path they take through the game (this can be referred to as a “desire path”). Meta-hodology--from the game designer’s perspective--would be the awareness of every potential path the player could take. Pintar also mentioned Richard Bartle’s four player types: killers (acting upon players), achievers (acting upon the world), explorers (interacting with the world), and socializers (interacting with other players). One real-world example she referenced was the “Quad Game” she has her students work on.
In the section of her talk about “endless horizons,” Pintar explained that “social context of narratives, relations, practices are often invisible except to designers, dedicated players, and game critics.” An important part of how a game is perceived is the manner in which it’s presented--or, if you’re creative enough, the manner in which you think about it. She used the example of dodgeball; it’s supposed to be this great childhood game, but a lot of kids actually hate it because it’s an easy opportunity for bullying, and some kids just want to hide. But if you change the narrative from “hiding is weak, get out there and throw balls at kids!” to one where different people have different jobs--some kids throw balls, others shield people, etc, then the narrative becomes very different.
Toward the end of her lecture, Pintar brought up a question that I really liked: is changing the rules cheating? Or is it designing? What pushes it over from one into the other? I don’t think there’s a clear answer, and that’s part of why I thought it was such a great question. Either way, it’s definitely something I’d like to explore further in the future.
