CONVENTIONS
It is an obvious statement to declare that games are rule-based. From the famous definitions of Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois to the recent ontological accounts of video game scholars, one is expected to follow strict principles of conduct in order to play a game. These principles are permitting as well as prohibiting means and actions to achieve specific goals and to obtain a particular and/or a final result. Insofar as the act of regulating is enforced by a computer program, video games are even more bound by their set of rules. However, these fundamental and explicit regulations hide other ones, less clear but as cardinal to the game activity: conventions.
Rules and Conventions
Rules and conventions go hand in hand. The terms are often used interchangeably, to start with Roger Caillois for instance. In the introduction of the French edition of Man, Play, and Games (not translated in the English version), Caillois defines games as follows:
Any game is a system of rules. These define what is or not a game, that is, what is allowed and what is forbidden. These conventions are at the same time arbitrary, imperative, and without appeal. They cannot be violated on any account, or else the game ends right away and is destroyed by the same fact.
([1958] 1961, pp. 11–12, my translation)
The fifth essential quality of play is, for him, “[g]overned by rules: under conventions that suspend ordinary laws, and for the moment establish new legislation, which alone counts” ([1958] 1961, p. 10). When Caillois places his four categories of games on a continuum between two poles, the uncontrolled fantasy he calls paidia is opposed to the ludus, which is “a growing tendency to bind it [this paidia] with arbitrary, imperative, and purposely tedious conventions” ([1958] 1961, p. 13). Yet, the section of his chapter where he deals in more detail about the combination of two poles is entitled “From Turbulence to Rules” ([1958] 1961, p. 27). Mimicry (or simulation), the third category he distinguishes,
exhibits all the characteristics of play: liberty, convention, suspension of reality, and delimitation of space and time. However, the continuous submission to imperative and precise rules cannot be observed—rules for the dissimulation of reality and the substitution of a second reality. Mimicry is incessant invention. The rule of the game is unique: it consists in the actor’s fascinating the spectator, while avoiding an error that might lead the spectator to break the spell.
([1958] 1961, pp. 22–23)
Then, in order to show that ludus is compatible with mimicry, Caillois states:
However, it is the theater which provides the basic connection between the two, by disciplining mimicry until it becomes an art rich in a thousand diverse conventions [this is the word employed in the original French version, translated in English as “routines”], refined techniques and subtly complex resources. By means of this fortunate development, the cultural fecundity of play is amply demonstrated.
([1958] 1961, pp. 30–31)
The notion of conventions might be more clearly thought in terms of rules insofar as games are seen as part of culture. Conventions are then not seen as constitutive or operational rules. They are unwritten and/or implicit rules. This is how Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman define them when they address games as cultural environments. And the authors of Rules of Play (2003, p. 574) state that conventions are essential to games:
But taking on the lusory attitude doesn’t just mean accepting the limitations of the operational rules. It also entails following implicit rules. Playing a game means submitting to the authority of the magic circle, which includes the cultural conventions expressed through implicit rules.
It is the “unstatable customs” that make players engage with the appropriate seriousness and perform acts of fair play. Those behaviorial guidelines are socially constructed. It is on account of such constraints guaranteeing and regulating our way of thinking that Peter J. Rabinowitz has studied narrative conventions and theorized the understanding, analysis, and interpretation of fiction reading in relation to rules. According to Rabinowitz: “The term convention may appear, at first, somewhat restricted—for many people, when they think of literary conventions, think of formulas of plot and character. Conventions, however, inform our reading in far more complex ways” (1987, p. 42). They are not “waiting to be uncovered in a text, but in fact precede the text and make discovery possible in the first place” (1987, p. 27). To comprehend the operations required to create meaning out of a text, Rabinowitz offers a system comprised of four types of rules: the rule of notice, the rule of signification, the rule of configuration, and the rule of coherence.
Although rules and conventions can be interchanged (and other synonyms employed for the sake of style) while discussing the conditions that govern procedures and behaviors, the concepts still need to be distinguished to remain significant. This is the point made by Robert Rawdon Wilson who examines the game/text analogy in In Palamedes’ Shadow. Explorations in Play, Game & Narrative Theory:
The argument will be here that conventions are looser, less abstract, more resistant to formulation, and altogether more flexible than rules. They are learned differently from the way rules are normally learned: not deductively, as tightly construed prescriptions to be applied, but inductively, as a matter of experience and through practice.
(1990, p. 85)
Rules are explicit and rigid. Unless someone wants to cheat, they need to be followed. On the contrary, conventions “cannot be broken; they can only be ignored or neglected” (1990, p. 87). There is no sanction when a convention is disregarded or misread; the activity is not even destructive. That being said, a knowledge of conventions has an impact on the ongoing action.
The Rules of Conventions
In its juridical sense, a convention is an agreement between parties for the regulation of matters affecting them. It belongs to the domain of voluntary exchanges. This meaning is shedding light on how conventions are generally grasped. In Peter J. Rabinowitz’s aforementioned theory of narrative, reading fiction is a conventional activity as it presupposes an assumed contract between author and reader where reality is to be understood according to certain paradigms. As David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson state in Film Art: An Introduction, such a conception applies to much more than literature:
Very often conventions demarcate art from life, saying implicitly, “In artworks of this sort the laws of everyday reality don’t operate. By the rules of this game, something ‘unreal’ can happen.” All stylized art, from opera, ballet, and pantomime to slapstick comedy, depends on the audience’s willingness to suspend the laws of ordinary experience and to accept particular conventions. It is simply beside the point to insist that such conventions are unreal or to ask why Tristan sings to Isolde or why Buster Keaton doesn’t smile. Very often the most relevant prior experience for perceiving form is not everyday experience but previous encounters with works having similar conventions.
([1979] 2004, p. 53)
In the video game, it is, for instance, illogical to find ammunition (and medkits with the well-known red cross painted on them) scattered all around in the space of first- and third-person shooters. According to common sense, the enemies wouldn’t leave such valuable and lethal items that might be exploited against them lying everywhere. To make the gathering more dynamic, ammunition and other items have been hidden in wooden crates that need to be smashed as the theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman is so often doing with his crowbar in Half-Life 1 and 2 (Valve, 1998 and 2004). For a better integration into the idea of combat, ammo can be picked up from killed enemies; nonetheless, there is no need to crouch to pick them up. All you have to do is to pass over dead bodies and dropped ammo as in Wolfenstein 3D (id Software, 1992) where a quick flash and synthesized sound signal that clips have been added to the inventory—in later first-person shooters, pickups such as these will be indicated by various weapon cocking sounds. Ammunition may also be gathered from dropped weapons, but only once the gamer carries the same armament in his arsenal, as in the Call of Duty series (Activision, 2003–present).
Conventions lead to the same effect as rules and fiction. Following Jesper Juul’s discussion in Half-Real: Videogames between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds: “Rules separate the game from the rest of the world by carving out an area where the rules apply; fiction projects a world different from the real world” (2005, p. 164). Conventions furthermore help, referring to Huizinga’s terms, to get into the “magic circle” and see “temporary worlds within the ordinary world” ([1938] 1955, p. 10). Nevertheless, they differ from rules. To turn to Juul again, he observes that a player
cannot possibly predict the gameplay of a game simply by reading the rules. In video games, the rules are initially hidden from the player—this means the player is more likely to use the game world to make inferences about the rules. In fact, the player may need a fictional game world to understand the rules.
(2005, p. 176)
Undeniably, it is more unlikely that a player will read about the conventions of a game. Referring to the previously mentioned example of the wooden crates to be smashed in first-person shooters, Juul explains that “[f]or an inexperienced player, this is nonsensical and not cued by the representation: Only the trained player knowing the conventions of the game genre would understand it” (2005, p. 179). While it is by trying and failing to pick up ammo from a gun s/he doesn’t own yet that a gamer learns the rule of ammunition gathering, nothing definitely tells her at first to destroy some crates to refill her weapons, unless an icon appears every time the player-character is near such a crate, as in Resident Evil 6 (Capcom, 2012); crates are frequently utilized for other purposes in video games, such as cover protection, climbing support, labyrinth construction, etc. This conventional action becomes meaningful in that it has been seen and performed in previous games. If conventions can be seen as implicit rules in video games, it is because they are hidden in more than one game. Game rules, mechanics, and controls become conventional when they are used in many video games.
Gameplay Conventions
In accordance with Caillois’ previous comment about theater, each art comes to elaborate its conventions according to its own features: real actors on stage for the theater, audiovisual recordings shown on a screen for cinema, or digital data that can be acted upon via an interface for the video game. For example, while an entrance and an exit of characters divide the various scenes in the classical theater, it is a fade-in and a fade-out (or a dissolve) that are used as transitional devices in a classical film, and the clearance of aliens’ rows that separates the levels in arcade games in the vein of Space Invaders (Taito, 1978). Likewise, video games have remediated conventions from theater and film. The interior locations of early 2-D graphical adventure games such as Maniac Mansion (Lucasfilm Games, 1987) were designed like theater stages, with the absent fourth wall giving access to the action and the entrances and exits of the player-character stage left or right leading to another room. When 3-D computer graphics could be overlaid on pre-rendered static backgrounds, as in Alone in the Dark (Infogrames, 1992), the game space was fragmented into various fixed camera angles. And since the window into the world of video games is mainly considered to be a virtual camera, there are still many codes borrowed from the movies. Yet, it is the gameplay, or the actions of the gamer within the virtual playground (being a whole inhabited world or an abstract space) and the reactions of this playground, that distinguishes the video game from theater or film.
To reiterate both the question and the answer of Juul (2005, p. 123) about Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981): Why does Mario have three lives? Because the game would be too hard to play with only one. This sort of reply can be invoked for many different facets of video games: the regenerating health; the sparkling effect of important items; the quantity of weapons, ammunition or things the player-character can carry along; the extra-diegetic music being heard upon a dangerous situation; the barking of soldiers looking around for the infiltrated player-character; the stealth meter indicating the player-character is hidden in a dark area at the feet of an opponent although the image is quite well-lit; the different shady edges or stones that can be used to climb up a wall or a rock; the overhead radar and compass of a HUD (heads-up display) displaying the position of allies or enemies and indicating the right direction to the next goal; the checkpoints and quick saves, etc. Since the video game is also an art rich in a thousand diverse conventions, these can hardly be all taken into consideration at once. We nonetheless can broadly distinguish two types of gameplay conventions.
The first type of gameplay convention—briefly discussed above—consists of the ones giving the gamer support or information so that s/he can play the game more easily. In keeping with the projection of a game world different from the real world, one key helpful convention of video games that needs to be underlined might be best described by Dorothy Heathcote’s well-known “mantle of the expert” approach to education (Heathcote and Bolton, 1996) in which the participants are endowed with relevant expert knowledge in order to take part in a task-oriented activity. It is true, to refer to what Caillois has argued about his ludus pole, that the video game
provides an occasion for training and normally leads to the acquisition of a special skill, a particular mastery of the operation of one or another contraption or the discovery of a satisfactory solution to problems of a more conventional type.
([1958] 1961, p. 29)
But no matter how many moves and super combos the gamer will be able to learn and execute via the main protagonist Ryu in a game of the Street Fighter series (Capcom, 1991–present), s/he’ll be incarnating someone that possesses from the outset black belt martial arts skills. In Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell (Ubisoft, 2003), s/he’ll be playing a well-trained and very agile Sam Fisher (rolling, wall jumping, sliding down on zip lines, making dropping attacks, etc.). In addition, s/he’ll become very quickly a “master of unlocking,” seeing inside a lock and using a pick to open secured doors. In Sleeping Dogs (United Front Games/Square Enix London, 2012), s/he’ll be hacking computers and surveillance cameras by having to guess within six attempts a four-digit numerical password in a similar fashion to the classic board game Mastermind (Mordecai Meirowitz, 1970). In these instances, and in many others with less simulational complexity, the gamer puts his/her mantle of the expert.
The second general type of conventions is composed of the ones that hinder the gamer’s progression and success. In constructing his definition of games, Bernard Suits draws attention to the fact that “[i]t is not that obedience to game rules must fall short of ultimate commitments, but that the means which rules permit must fall short of ultimate utilities” (1978, p. 29). For Suits, “rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means” (1978, p. 34), and the gamewright’s craft revolves around drawing lines not too tight and not too loose with respect to the permissible means. Following Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal flow theory (1975), one will say that the optimal ludic experience of a video game is known to be reached when the gamer’s skills are dynamically balanced with the challenges s/he faces. Inasmuch as one wants to win, one does not want to walk away with an easy triumph. The difficulty levels one can choose from at the beginning of many games meet this aspiration. The antagonization curve follows the improvement of the gamer; either by introducing stronger, faster, or wiser adversaries (whether soldiers or drivers) or by progressively staging confrontation with more numerous enemies. The save points to be found scattered in different locations of the survival horror games played on consoles intensify both the fear of dying and of the need to replay a section from the last save point. Similarly, the save systems allowing only few saved games ask for a better management of progress; a game such as Dead Rising (Capcom, 2006), permitting only one save per storage device, makes the photojournalist Frank West’s run into the Willamette Parkview Mall much tougher. The maze-like construction of the video game space in general (and the backtracking asked by some games), as well as the labyrinth-like configuration of many puzzles in adventure games, take more time and thought than straight routes or simple reckonings. In order to progress, the various levels the gamer must go through customarily end with a more challenging battle against a “boss,” a bigger, smarter, and harder monster to kill; Shadow of the Colossus (Team Ico, 2005) twists this convention by concentrating its action on the sole boss battles against 16 Colossi.
Genre Conventions
From a formal perspective, advantageous or disadvantageous conventions remain frequently used techniques and common traits between artworks. First and foremost, the establishment of conventions happens within particular genres, and even within popular franchises. As Julian Kücklich underlines,
After all, a genre is nothing but a general term for a number of texts with similar characteristics. While these characteristics are not always explicitly formulated, we know what to expect from a first-person shooter or a real-time strategy game, just as we know what to expect from a detective story or a romantic comedy. Aberrations from these conventions are tolerated to some degree, but if they go too far the game will not be accepted as a representative of its genre.
(2006, p. 101)
The latest-released game that is related to a video game genre appears indeed on what H.R. Jauss has called a “horizon of expectations”: “The new text evokes for the reader (listener) the horizon of expectations and rules familiar from earlier texts, which are then varied, corrected, altered, or even just reproduced” (1982, p. 23—in line with our previous observation, one will note that it is the term “rule” that is used). The gamer playing the single-player campaign of any recent first-person shooter on the PC will “know what to expect” inasmuch as s/he has started at one point to “look at” a horizon extending at best from Maze War (Steve Colley et al., 1974), or at least from Wolfenstein 3D (id Software, 1992), DOOM (id Software, 1993), Quake (id Software, 1996), Half-Life, Halo: Combat Evolved (Bungie, 2001), Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (215 inc, 2002), Call of Duty (Infinity Ward, 2003), and F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon (Monolith, 2005), to name a few popular classics that have led to successful series. S/he will not be taken aback to use the W, A, S and D keys on the computer keyboard for movement and the mouse to rotate the view, fire, and perform actions. S/he will anticipate seeing a gun at the bottom right of the screen and to face a first-person weapon HUD with a crosshair. S/he will be able to read the various visible indicators (current weapon equipped, in-clip and available amount of ammo, health, armor shield, or flashlight) and understand that s/he is hit when the screen flashes red. S/he’ll be prepared to go on a linear route and fight his/her way through maps of one-way corridors, rooms, and restricted outside areas. S/he’ll know that s/he’ll get bigger guns on the way, take the life of many enemies, and that s/he might destroy some supply crates to get ammo and shoot a few explosive barrels for more fire power. Falling in the world of Medal of Honor, Halo, or F.E.A.R., s/he will turn to the war, science-fiction, or horror genre to better recognize the theme, the iconography, and plot elements. Actually, the sole rule of this enumeration is the shooting of enemies. No matter how many they are and how smart the artificial intelligence is, the gamer has to annihilate the foes before they kill him/her (player-character). The rest are conventions: the controls’ configurations (they can be adjusted to personal preferences), the position of the gun and the indicators, the type of weapon used, the way it is handled, and where the gun battles happen, etc. None of these are fixed, but were set by custom.
The conventions of a genre might become more noticeable when they are not present in a game or, in Kücklich’s words, when an aberration is encountered. For instance, The Orange Box that the video game developer Valve released in 2007 includes Half-Life 2: Episode Two (2007) (along with Half-Life 2 (2004) and Half-Life 2: Episode One (2006)), Team Fortress 2 (2007), and Portal (2007). If the first two games are typical single-player and multiplayer first-person shooters, Portal stands out of the bundle package. The gamer still uses a gun visible at the bottom right of the screen and has to confront enemies represented by turrets. But the gun shoots portals (an entrance and an exit) necessary to make the way out of various test chambers. The action is not based on adrenaline sequences of shooting and sensori-motor skills, but rather on problem solving and cognitive skills. So, while the IGN website classifies the game under the first-person shooter genre, Portal is more a puzzle game than a first-person shooter. In this respect, conventions do move from one genre to another so as to widen or renew the experience of a genre. To introduce a famous example, although System Shock 2 (Irrational Games/Looking Glass Studios, 1999) has everything similar to a first-person shooter taking place in a science-fiction setting filled with horror imagery, the choice of one of the three careers (Marine, Navy, or OSA) and of its first features at the beginning of the game, and the necessary upgrades of characters’ statistics, technical and weapon skills, associate it as much with the role-playing genre. And the role-playing games conventions of the video games have themselves been drawn from pen-and-paper role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons (E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, 1974) and Traveller (Marc Miller, 1977).
Narrative and Other Conventions at Play
Given its hybrid nature, and the fact that the video game is as much as cinema a synthesis of previous spatial and temporal art forms, there are many conventions at play that are not specific to the gaming activity. Following the nominal narratology versus ludology debate, the narrative ones remain the most noticeable.
Indeed, not all video games tell stories. But when they do, mostly in the course of the campaign or journey of single-player games, they rely on a prevalent method, that is, on a “typical oscillation between [cut-scenes] and play.” Rune Klevjer has well argued that this “[o]scillation is a standard convention in story-based computer games, and my guess is that this form will not go away. On the contrary, it is becoming a new kind of artistic language, developing its own rules” (2002, p. 197). Undeniably, by convention (and not by a rule that would need to be respected), many video games start with a non-interactive sequence introducing the gamer to the world and its characters, and finish with one or many sequences when there are multiple endings. To make reference to Klevjer’s defense, cut-scenes during a game can be used as surveillance or planning tools, “gameplay catapults,” moments of release from intense action, and rewards. They exploit cinematic codes to elicit emotions and to unravel the plot. The narrative and back-story information are also conveyed through written documents and audio logs the player-character finds along his/her way. Following Henry Jenkins’s vision of game design as narrative architecture and Don Carson’s notion of environmental storytelling, the stories take place. “The organization of the plot becomes a matter of designing the geography of imaginary worlds, so that the obstacles thwart and affordances facilitate the protagonist’s forward movement towards resolution” (Jenkins, 2004, pp. 124–125). For instance, while the gamer has come to expect to be able to venture in side-quests besides the main one and to cross different landscapes in the role-playing genre, s/he knows that s/he’ll be falling into a dark and claustrophobic world in the survival horror genre.
In the spirit of a projected world different from the real world, the embedded narrative of story-driven games builds on the common spectacular intensification of popular fiction; not many games are structured around everyday routines, as emergent as they can be. The player-character (alone, in co-op with another player, or with various nonplayer characters) embarks on a war against space invaders, on a modern warfare against foreign invasions or insurgencies, on a series of ordered assassinations, on an investigation to solve murders, on a descent into the depths of the criminal world, on a battle to defeat a hellish force or an evil corporation, on a confrontation against monstrous creatures, on an infiltration of secure military bases, on a quest to recover lost artifacts or stolen treasures, on a voyage to find the last heir of a noble family, etc. In the end, the scope of the events goes from the saving of a princess from the grip of a mean opponent to saving the whole universe from destruction. The conflict revolves around the good vs. evil paradigm. No matter the various/numerous forces involved or the sinuous road taken and, above all, regardless of the number of failures (or “game overs”) the gamer experiences or how long it takes him/her to progress, the player-character always succeeds (or always ends in defeat in arcade games, where it is a question of how long the gamer can last). An assassination that is meant to fail such as the one at the beginning of the “One Shot, One Kill” mission of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward, 2007) is pretty unconventional. In most cases, further complicating matters occur after an achievement to send the player-character on another track.
Such a study of conventions that are not based on gameplay could be extended to other types. We can, for instance, think about all the audiovisual conventions, the question of stereotypes, the conventional social behaviors in MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games), the language conventions used to communicate online, the conformist practices in the industry, the commonplaces of game conventions or trade fairs, etc. In the end, as for any artwork, conventions are important to the video game. They help the gamer to get into what Arsenault and Perron (2008) have called the “magic cycle” of games, conceptualizing the figure of the circle not in terms of enclosed space, but as a cognitive frame of gameplay and as an ongoing cyclic process of actions and reactions (or inputs and outputs) between the gamer and his/her understanding and interpretation of a video game in the course of time. Since, to reiterate Rawdon Wilson’s previous argument, a gamer learns conventions through experience and practice, an exposure to even a small number of games makes him/her familiar with the way certain video games are played and gives him/her a head start. S/he looks forward to these envisaged aspects and conducts because they facilitate his/her gaming insofar as s/he does not have to learn the basics once more, as well as meeting his/her desired experience. On their side, game developers capitalize on this generic and conventional appeal of their games. But the unconventional is obviously as noteworthy. Because conventions change over time, some disappear and others come to be known. This is how new videoludic genres or sub-genres emerge.
References
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