Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Theatre, not drama in particular, is what is valuable when looking at videogames. It's not really about the poetics, since that just leads down the road to useful, but incomplete narrative programs--we already know that narrative strategies are going to be a big part of any human medium. The real question is what we can add to that.

Theatre, being essentially live-action modelling of a possible world is a great touchstone to digital games/worlds, because at their core ALL digital games are models. This is an insight that Frasca touched on in '99 but his theory is neither logically nor metaphysically tenable: it's not about representation/simulation. simulations are simply dynamic models that purport to be accurate with respect to some actual-world system. Nevertheless, they are still models, and models are quite definitely representations. This misunderstanding has lead to a false division between 'narratology' and 'ludology' that is neither productive nor accurate. It sounds like Ms. Laurel's theatre-based approach avoids that. To that extent, it sounds quite interesting.

Still, ditch the Poetics. Aristotle wasn't on about models in theatre per se. He was much more interested in dramatic structure. And dramatic structure is a less enlightening avenue of research w/r/t digital games than theatre.

cheers