Terra Nova

Project Massive: Reloaded

Slashdot has covered it, but we want to get the word out: Project Massive is one of the few sources we have for information about MMORPG users. They've got the results from one survey wave up and are looking for more. Take their wave 2 survey here.

Ye Olde Disciplinary Punch-and-Judy Show

So the "ludology" vs. "narratology" debate has flared up again, along with accompanying feuding over whether "game studies" really is or should be a discipline. Markku Eskelinen 's reply to Julian Kucklick (via Ludology) is only one of the stones that Kucklick's review of the anthology First Person has set in motion. Jasper Juul also has replied to Kucklick at his weblog.

So I thought I'd take a crack at this old chestnut myself. On one hand, I think the ludologists are if anything being too generous to some of what has been said about games by scholars who come more from the narratology end of things--the problem with some narratological accounts isn't that narrative is somehow intrinsically different in games, it's that some people coming out of literary or cultural studies have a tendency to write about genres and texts that they know little or nothing about. On the other hand, I don't have much sympathy for the desire to make "game studies" a discipline, partly because that's not where my bread is buttered, but also because I think academic writing about games provides a good opportunity to practice a new middlebrow form of academic cultural criticism that consciously avoids the insular norms of scholarly writing.

Read on for more detail if any of that makes you sharpen your knives...

Other Players conference

Due to some technical difficulties the submission deadline for the Other Players conference has been extended to August 16. Papers should be submitted online (contact Miguel Sicart for any questions about the process). The conference is December 6-8 at the IT University of Copenhagen and is sure to be a good one so hope folks can make it!

Games Masters

Frans Mäyrä of DiGRA and the University of Tampere Hypermedia Lab has just launched an interesting Master's Course in Digital Games Research and Design.

The course is distance learning based (no you have to go to Finland) and materials are provided by the likes of: Richard Bartle, Jessica Mulligan, Jesper Jull, Gonzalo Frasca, Espen Aarseth and Katie Salen – which is pretty much a top team of practitioner / theorists.

So if you fancy taking this stuff _really_ seriously check out the admissions details.

A Piece of Place

As I mentioned previously, I'm going to be presenting at the DCC04 workshop on Virtual Worlds. This audience provided an opportunity to move away from the legal and economic discussions and to focus on the role of place in Second Life. The paper is here.

In earlier papers I've talked about the use of economic motivations to provide context within a general, user-created world. This paper explores a different set of ideas, namely that factors that lead to a sense of place -- such as modeling on the real world, travel, land ownership and a constant influx of new land -- also provide a crucial context and motivator to creation and community formation.

ComWork Reminder

Just a quick reminder that the registration deadline for the May 21 Community Work: Managing Multiplayer Culture symposium is this Friday. Speakers for the event will be Richard Bartle, Edward Castronova, Julian Dibbell, and Jessica Mulligan.

*** Spaces are filling up quickly so please register asap if you would like to attend. ***

Registration is free. Send a message with your name, email address, and affiliation to [email protected]
Full details, including the program, can be found at the website.

Look forward to seeing some of you here next week! :)

Announcement: May 21 event at the ITU

Hi everyone. Just wanted to post an announcement for a symposium - Community Work: Managing Multiplayer Culture - we are hosting here at the Center on May 21. We'll be having a day-long event on the subject of community management in games and are incredibly lucky to have a terrific panel of speakers - Richard Bartle, Edward Castronova, Julian Dibbell, and Jessica Mulligan. The full details and program can be found at the website. Registration is free but required by May 14.

I'll also just note quickly the symposium dovetails as the third day of a PhD course here, Game Culture (details also online) which runs May 19-21. Jessica Mulligan will be a guest speaker on day two of that as well. Applications for the course are due by April 19. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions!

Dmitri takes games 'very seriously'

Shame on you if you have not read at least some of Dmitri Williams’s phd dissertation Trouble in River City: The Social Life of Video Games (note 11MB!) or the rather shorter The Video Game Lightning Rod: Constructions of a New Media Technology, 1970-2000.

But you’re in luck. This week Dmitri was interviewed on Michigan Radio’s State Side program. It’s a great interview where Dmitri talks about the social role and effects of video games and will be of interest to anyone that wants to take the subject ‘very seriously’ i.e. his comments are balanced and research based. The interview is here (requires Real).

Pseudo-Live Blog From U Minnesota

Two points from Greg Lastowka's presentation this morning at the University of Minnesota's GRAVEL program, that made me re-think (yet again) what is happening in these spaces:

1. Ignatius of Loyola conceived of immersion as an important spiritual tool. If you have spent time at Georgetown University, this will ring some bells.

2. The U.S. Supreme Court has already affirmed the existence of a magic circle, albeit negatively. In PGA Tour vs. Martin, the court said that a certain rule is not 'essential' to the game of golf. That implies that some rules are, in fact, essential to golf, and that these rules would receive some kind of respect from the court. The EULA lives, in other words.

Should researchers cheat?

Mia Consalvo has recently started a new blog, Memory Card, dedicated to game studies. Mia has been doing some interesting work looking at the issue of cheating in games, something particularly interesting in MMOGs. What constitutes cheating, how various communities define it/act upon it, how players often frame their own cheats in relation to gameplay etc are all things I've encountered in my own work on EQ. But there is another fascinating angle here that she raises in her blog which is how should researchers approach the issue of cheats. As she asks, "Is there a proper way to play when you are a researcher (or a critic)?" Certainly within my own methodological subfield (qualitative sociology, ethnography, participant observation, etc.) all kinds of tricky questions like this have come up in traditional research. Of course, if you simply deal with the "easy" kind of definitions the cheat issue may seem like no big deal -- But what about twinking your character? Checking out rogue servers? Tagging along with a group that takes advantage of handy pathing glitches? Using a walk-through or guide to get a quest item that ups your stats? Of course, all these questions go back to that definition of what a cheat in fact is but we researchers are in no way immune from wrangling with that one ourselves. I suppose some of it may rely too on what your approach is and what kinds of questions you look at in your work. For example, given the kind of ethnographic work I do the idea of buying a high-level char for EQ so that I could check it out didn't make sense. I wouldn't get that full range of experience/life of the community. But if you are interested in one particular slice of a game, would it be ethical? Methodologically sound? (I'm intentionally stepping around the legal-per-EULA/TOS question here.) Or what if you do close readings of a game, do you need to play it all the way through? Should you confine yourself to not using any outside assistance? At the recent Digra conference there was a session in which this issue came up and it certainly seemed that many people felt that quite a few games weren't playable without cheats and walkthroughs, which I suppose adds a whole other angle to the question. Anyway, I don't want to hijack Mia's thread here too much ; ) Keep an eye out for her work on this subject!

US Government Powned!

Wired news has coverage of an event many Terra Novans attended at State of Play, the roundtable on eRulemaking. It covers some of the discussion, has a couple of quotes from Raph, credits Professor Noveck appropriately, but in some ways mischaracterizes the discussion. The government wasn't there to get opinions from game developers about how to improve their process. Instead, they were there to solicit ideas on how to use games to educate citizens about the process.

What's unfortunate is that they ignored the obvious flaws in their design. After all, they were just talking to a bunch of game designers and developers.

The flaws are probably obvious to any TN reader. By moving away from publicizing rules and proposed rules in the Federal Register and allowing responses by snail mail towards electronic publishing and commenting, the government is hoping to broaden democracy and to allow more participation. As anyone who has participated in anonymous and unmoderated forums will immediately recognize, this has some flaws. First, the number of submissions is going to skyrocket, compounding something that the representatives of EPA and DOT folks there mentioned, reading all of the submissions is already a problem. Second, and more dangerous, organizations will be able to more efficiently scour proposed rules for issues that they don't like and then bombard the agency with millions of like-minded comments, greatly exaggerating the actual representation of that organization. Obviously, lobbiests already have an advantage in the rulemaking system. Sadly, the proposed changes will increase their advantage, not decrease it.

However, I don't want to focus too much on this specific case. Raph, who also saw the flaws in the proposed system and commented on them at the conference, either didn't give those quotes to Wired or they chose not to use them. Should Raph, as one of the most visible game designers in the US right now, be writing white papers on "MMO Lessons for Real Democracy"? If Al Franken can be a visiting professor at the Kennedy School of Government, shouldn't Raph (or other MMO creators/designers/educators)? Wouldn't it be in Sony's long term best interest to be able to announce that? A friend went to KSG after being Mayor of a small Northern California town. Shouldn't the folks keeping 300,000 users happy be able to leverage their experiences in the same way?

Other Players Conference CFP

Just wanted to make sure everyone saw the CFP for the Other Players conference being organized by Jonas Heide Smith and Miguel Sicart here at the ITU. Here is the announcement that went out yesterday:

---------
The Center for Computer Game Research at the IT University of Copenhagen invites you to submit a paper for the "Other Players" conference. The conference takes place between the 6th and 8th of December 2004.

Please find full CALL FOR PAPERS here: http://www.itu.dk/op/callforpapers.php

We hope to see you in Denmark in December.

Best regards,
THE CENTER FOR COMPUTER GAMES RESEARCH: http://game.itu.dk/
CONFERENCE WEBSITE: http://www.itu.dk/op/
-----------

I also want to mention that we have a page detailing all the events sponsored by the Center for Computer Games Research as well as an email newsletter you can sign up for.

But is it play?

Brian Sutton-Smith and Marie-Laure Ryan were just here for Jesper's defense (which went quite well, he is now Dr. Juul!) and they both gave interesting talks. Sutton-Smith (who is much more lively and fun than came across with the DiGRA videoconference event) lectured on the nature of play. While he gives a fascinating historical account of the different ways play has been thought of he also, roughly speaking, proposes that play is what we do to deal with the fact that life can be miserable - it's a tough world, full of anxiety and disappointment, so we cope via play. It's a fascinating proposal and when he presents all kinds of engaging stories about children's play I find it hard to not buy it at least a little bit. But I've been thinking about this issue lately. We often hear how when we play we step inside a "magic circle" for the duration of the game, agreeing to a kind of fiction that is fairly distinct from our normal lives. Theorists like Huizinga and Caillois seem to go even further, suggesting that play is actually a space quite separate from, and even contaminated by, the real world. I wrote a paper on power gamers recently (comments/feedback very welcome btw) and part of what it drew me to thinking through was what we make of play that doesn't look like what we traditionally think of it as. I've been doing some research on professional gaming as well and have hit the same point - can we call this stuff that often looks like work play? Caillois is particularly harsh on this point, suggesting that when play is colonized by reality, "What used to be a pleasure becomes an obsession. What was an escape becomes an obligation, and what was a pastime is now a passion, compulsion, and source of anxiety. The principle of play has become corrupted. It is now necessary to take precautions against cheats and professional players, a unique product of the contagion of reality." So I wonder, what might he (and other theorists who take this harder line) make of all the stuff that goes on in MMOGs? All those instances where the fiction of the game collides with "real" lives. The buying and selling of virtual goods for offline money. The obligations, passions, even anxieties. Are all those players really players in any strict sense? Or are they doing something else? Hidden in this question of course is why it matters at all what we call this activity. I can't say I've worked this through completely yet but I can't help but think that the more the "magic circle"-like definitions of play get pushed at (and in turn "labor"), the closer we will get to understanding what it means when our play is not fun, when it is repetitive, when it seems to look like work, when it doesn't run smoothly but is filled with contentions over rules, strategies, and cheating... and yet we keep going back, finding pleasure in it somehow. What does it mean to the definition of play when the boundaries between gamespace and "regular life" are less clear, when investments in each blur into each other. Maybe MMOGs are a special case of play and have led me to see games as much more messy than if I'd come at it from other genres (though to be honest, I doubt it). But I still wonder about all the weird boundary-activities we find in MMOGs and how much they will influence our understanding about what play is. Maybe they aren’t so boundary after all.

Some Level Up thoughts

I've finally caught up a bit from my trip to Utrecht and figure now is a good time to sneak in a conference report while most of the group is in New York for the State of Play conference (which I really look forward to hearing about). As has been mentioned a few places the conference was great and it was terrific to meet up with so many interesting researchers. The keynotes and papers were good, though I admit wanting to see a bit more diversity in what is framed as the major questions of the field. I've been thinking about the imagined user who haunts the central approaches. I confess this is more an impression than a fully researched argument but I often feel that some of the meta-debates leave the terrain of the actual user, and actual practice, a bit undetailed and without context. There is structure, there are rules, there are stories, there are texts... and real players, culture, industry, etc. seem to inhabit a kind of unarticulated hidden space. Might it be that there is a third set of meta-concerns, approaches, methodologies so far a bit absent - not in practice but in terms of foregrounding - that can inform the field more actively? The common points of departure, "game" and "story", which have structured much of the concerns thus far could be broadened out to include the player (and culture), meaningfully described/analyzed/theorized. Just to be clear, this is in no way meant as a slight of what we have so far, but maybe it's time for things like sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology, law, history, etc to emerge more strongly. I suppose, of course, I'm preaching to the choir a bit by writing this here. It's been great to see work in those fields turns up at recent conferences and journals and I look forward to when we begin to see these approaches shape some of the meta-debates in game studies. I briefly ran my thoughts by Espen (sharing an office is handy that way) and he didn't disagree, even suggesting (with a kind of playful seriousness) that what is needed is a "second paradigm conflict." Heh, I'm not sure that I'd go that far but it's an interesting issue. Is game studies at a place (or should it be) where central theoretical/methodological frameworks can be fruitfully added to by the social/human sciences? How can, and does, the work of those of us in these fields effect some of the theoretical debates we have been encountering thus far? How are concepts, approaches, frameworks that often dominate the field challenged/supported/extended by the inclusion of this type of work? And just as importantly, what is lost or goes missing when we don't foreground work in the social/human sciences? He of course pointed out that the burden for such a thing rests with those of us doing work in the area and I certainly agree. I wonder too though how such an endeavor can be supported structurally. I think we are seeing good inclusions in the Game Studies journal for example, and tracks at various conferences where such work is presented. It will be interesting to see if there is some way the dichotomization of the theoretical terrain can be unsettled a little.

To this end I will just mention some work at the conference I found particularly interesting. A group of researchers from Taiwan - Holin Lin, Chuen-Tsai Sun, Honghong Tinn, Chheng-Hong Ho - presented several papers on the social context of games including Lineage and Ragnarok Online. Sun/Lin/Ho's paper "Game Tips as a Gift" was particularly interesting in that it explored console gamers widespread use of strategy guides/walk-thrus and located their production and circulation in various social networks. We have examples of the way playing MMOGs is a fundamentally social activity but I think it's quite interesting to situate console gaming in a similar context. I wonder, does anyone actually game alone? And are the boundaries of cheating quite messy when we start seeing the widespread use (across genres and platforms) of things like hints, tips, walk-thrus, guides, etc.? I've begun to think that defining "game space" too narrowly misses the ways gaming is only possible because of these larger contexts. It certainly seems the case that a good number of games and genres are only playable, or are the most enjoyable, when all kinds of "extra-game" practices and knowledge get used. In this regard, the panel on participatory culture with Andrew Mactavish, Sue Morris, and Cindy Poremba, was very good. The presenters focused not on MMOGs but on FPS's, The Sims, and modding culture. Each detailed out fascinating ways players are involved in what Sue calls "co-creative" media - where playing the game fundamentally rests on a mix of player/company technologies and practices. Mactavish presented some great points not only about the ways the modding community is supported through tools, but simultaneously kept in check through them (and EULAs) as well. Without watering down important differences, I came away from Level Up thinking that a lot of what we've been talking about in relation to MMOGs is happening in variations amongst the FPS and console community as well and that they all stand as important examples for making sure we include actual players/cultures as part of the theoretical foundations the field gets built on.

Doing Research in Games

In a previous post I mentioned there were a few themes that really stood out to me at the recent AoIR conference. In the middle of hearing about all the interesting data people were turning up during their work I became struck by how many people were talking about, almost confessing, their love of games. It's a familar joke and it usually gets played out as a riff on the AA intro, "Hi, I'm T.L. and I am a games researcher..." "Hi T.L.!" (spoken in unison). Of course, one question that sometimes comes up is how objective you can be if you love the game you are playing, etcetc. I can't say I'm a big fan of the whole objective/subjective dichotomizing framework. If only the world, and research, were so neatly summed up. I think the critical variants of fields like anthropology and sociology have pushed at that debate enough so I won't rehash it here. What I do want to ask though is what does it mean to actually play while you research? This question really hit me when I was at an EQ Fan Faire a few years back. At one point a group of us were doing a Live Quest which involved running all around the hotel, hailing "NPCs", etc. Given my methods fall to ethnography, participant observation, interviews, etc I joined in and hustled up staircases, dashed around the lobby, even taught someone a simple box-step dance all in the service of both research and well, play. I was thinking about how the activity of play puts us in positions of affectivity and even unguardedness. I've done fieldwork before (both online and off) but there is something for me about games research and the play it produces that feels quite different. I'm curious what others think - how does the activity of play affect our work? Is the kind of investment we see in traditional studies the same as what happens when we research in MMOGs or does the activity of play itself produce something more?

Finally, as was previously mentioned, Ted and I had talked about gathering together EQ researchers into a meet online and I want to propose a date for that. How does Saturday, Nov 22 at 3pm EST work for folks? I know mid-afternoon may not be ideal but that would probably accomodate all our timezones. I'd like to suggest the Bristlebane server... and not because I will bring my regular char around ;) I'd suggest we all just start a lvl 1. But with BB it'll be easier for me to load up ale for everyone... in a fine EQ tradition I'm thinking drunken dwarf racing! Feel free to pass this announcement along and post here or email me if you are interested. Who knows, if it is a hit maybe we can do periodic meetings in various worlds.

Talkin' 'bout the EQ Generation.

I hired a research assistant yesterday who (charmingly) couldn't believe that I was actually going to pay him to hang out in MMORPGs and collect data. Like a number of the students I speak with, his dream is to work in the games industry, and many of them see MMORPGs and VWs as the wave of the future.

Which got me thinking about 2 related issues. If you were advising students about ways into the MMORPG (as opposed to other type of game) industry, what would you say? The typical response--as I understand it--is to be a beta-tester, QA person, become a GM, and move up the ranks. Or do an animation/specialist CGI degree and move in from there. But my students are from the business side, and couldn't build a better shader if their lives depended on it. So, given all the interest here in economics/society/law of VWs, is there a need for people who have broader educations than being able to write a Fourier transform from scratch?

Related to this, I wondered what sort of university program would be an ideal training ground for the next generation of Raph Kosters, Dave Rickeys, Richard Bartles, Brian Greens, Richard Garrriotts, etc etc. If, say, Teddy C and I were to create a program, what should it include? (And I'm assuming that it would be necessarily interdisciplinary, and might involve engineering, art, law, economics, rhetoric, etc etc)

Gaming @ AoIR

Just back from Toronto where I was attending the annual AoIR conference (Association of Internet Researchers). In the past there has been a paper or two on gaming but this year there were three formal panels and a scattering of other papers bringing the total number of presentations to around 13 (and those are only ones with obvious gameish titles). The birds of a feather meeting organized by Mia Consalvo (who actually managed to get us together at 8am - now that is quite an accomplishment!) had somewhere around twenty people. It was great to hear lots of interesting work on the social/cultural/communicative aspects of a variety of games and over the next couple of days I'll post on a few of the themes that particularly caught my ear this time around.

One that wove through several talks was the extent of player participation in creating meaningful, and usable, game worlds. Sal Humphreys, Jason Rhody, and Donald Snyder each presented fascinating data on the ways players are not simply "users" of the tech but active content producers. Sal, drawing on her work with EQ, suggests that players "social, emotional, and material investments" are crucial to the success of the game. It was also nice to get some non-EQ data in the mix and both Jason, with his work on AC, and Donald, with his piece on TSO, pointed to the ways players are constantly involved in the creation of the game space. Jason spoke about the widespread development and use of plug-ins and showed how they get tied to altering the interface and shaping gameplay. Donald's paper on in-game radio was a great example of players not only melding two techs but using them for some fascinating political purposes.

I've often thought the amount of actual labor players put into games and game communities is one of the most hidden aspects of these multiplayer worlds. Sal challenged us to not over-dichotomize between players & developers and it certainly seems the case (at least in these types of games) that players are developers in some respect. Beyond the work they do in the game there are all those fansites, walk-throughs/strategy guides, maps, databases - not to mention the free testing/feedback/community management gamers do along the way. I think players get this point but, as I've written in the past, I'm concerned when companies that run the games don't. I was heartened by Jason's account of how the folks at Turbine treat involvement by the community and I wonder, to what degree should we be calling players designers...? ...developers? And are they getting "enough" in return for all their labor?