How people interact with games is often conceptualized in terms of "nouns" and "verbs". Chris Crawford is the often attributed source of this meme: "games are about verbs." Indeed, in these days when game and virtual world discourse bleeds so freely into so many mainstreams, the real world, as well as our virtual ones, are beginning to look like hotbeds of verbs. Yet I wonder, if this view is too simplistic, take the case of MMOGs as illustrative...
As with games in general, "noun" and "verb" descriptions pervade discussions of MMOGs and their legacy, MUDs. Damion Schubert described the MMOG noun / verb relationship in this way:
...giving the players content is giving them nouns, whereas giving them systems is giving them verbs - new actions they can perform on the game world. Giving players more verbs gives them different tools to attack problems, and also alternate activities. When you’re talking about games that players play for thousands of hours, that variety of gameplay is crucial. Players crave different experiences - they want to be pushed in new directions, and given new tactics...
Describing MMOGs by "nouns" and "verbs" is useful for their set of handy and ancient metaphors that extend from our palpable sense of language as well as from the text heritage of MUDs and command-line user interfaces. However, does this choice in metaphor, as useful as it is, obfuscate a central detail about MMOGs by way of ignoring a dirty little secret? Namely, that while our lingustic nouns and verbs are cross-dressers, their use in describing MMOGs seem to conveniently ignore this...
...In our native tongue, we are easily promiscuous with our nouns and verbs - morphing them one way or the other to suit language needs. This is especially true when we converse about new things, things not well rooted in our collective minds. Technology, for example, always seems to catch us by surprise. When surprised, we conjure up words quickly like "bookmark" (noun->verb) and "download" (verb->noun) to fill the gaps.
Raph Koster in Theory of Fun suggests that we, as players, seek to streamline play in MMOGs by downstepping all our high energy interactive juices into lumpy things to shunt to a corner of our mind. Cognitive macros of sorts. Thus, in our attempt to regularize and optimize our treadmills - creating new articles from processes - it sounds like, in a way, we are turning verbs into nouns. Do virtual worlds contain subtle dynamics that can grind away at the very syntax of our relationship to them?
What of the other direction? Are there activities in virtual worlds which we devise to frankenstein weary nouns with new life? How many of you have doodled your virtual treasures into patterns on texturized soil to spell names, poetry, draw pictures, create illusions, express your wicked selves: "DOODZ!!!!!!" Does this count? What about all the posing and emoting spent in group idleness? Are all these actions bonfires burning nouns into verbs, I wonder.
Perhaps meta activities are better examples of how verbs can reinvigorate nouns... Joe is tired of questing (a noun), so he *ebays* (a new shiny verb) his "phat loot"! Or, Helen has a slow day and does grief!
...Relatedly, recently, I encountered a new word. It is an interesting word, but also perplexing. Jamie Fristrom writes about "Toyetic" in this way:
The thing I noticed most about Half-Life 2 is that it's incredibly toyetic. "Toyetic" was a word given to me by a friend who used to work at Mattel who doesn't like being mentioned in my blog. It means, "like a toy." An amusing sidenote is that the guys at Mattel are trying to make their toys more like computer games, while we're trying to make our computer games more like toys. Or toy chests, anyway. The collection of guns in your typical FPS are already toyetic; a set of toy guns, each with their own kind of play. Half-Life 2 gives us a bunch of new toys above and beyond the usual collection of weapons: the air raft, the gravity gun, the dune buggy, the ant lions, portable gun turrets, squads of soldiers. Each toy comes complete with a context to make it interesting, and makes Half-life 2 feel like a brand new game, not a rehash.
What I find fascinating about the "Toyetic" concept, at least as I imagine it, is that it embodies succinctly the confusion between nouns and verbs in MMOGs:
Toyeticized items bind context (nouns) with some highly contextualize activity (verbs), creating a Toyetic thing - which I guess would have to be a sort of virtual world *verbal phrase* - another noun... and so it goes.
Jamie's irony is also interesting, which I spin as while RL toys are seeking to become more verb-y, computer games are sneaking a march and becoming more noun-y. Cross-dressing by convergence.
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