Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, "Build It to Understand It: Ludology Meets Narratology in Game Design Space"

(In Worlds in Play)

- If game scholars are contribute to game design/the advancement of the form (why would they want to?), they must understand design, rather than only analyzing existing games -> explore the new territory they imagine in their theory (but why should they be imagining new territory?)
- Player agency as the heart of the tension between ludology and narratology
- Mateas and Stern created Façade to explore this tension
- Complexity of game design problems requires the construction of experimental games to map/discover new areas of game design space
- Existing games only represent a small fraction of the possibility of games, so game scholars need to speculate on and explore those spaces to truly understand games
- So, according to Mateas and Stern game studies should be guided by a hypothetical, imaginary gamespace that will somehow reveal to us what games truly are/will be as we explore it? That's dumb. Games are whatever they are at any given moment, and are changing constantly... why would we assume that the true nature of games are in it's hypothetical future development, and not in their actual cultural-historical contexts? And for that matter, why would we assume that games have a true nature that can be revealed by making new games? Absurd.