Terra Nova

The Tyranny of Emergence: Modernity's Romance of the Game

It's been some time since I haunted the distinguished halls of TN, but after some tumultuous times that got me out of the habit of putting my working papers up on ssrn and pointing to them here (and at my own blog), I do have a piece that I wanted to share (and I'll be cross-posting this to Doubt is an Art, as I do with all game-related stuff). I'm sure my skin has grown thin from all this time away from the rough-and-tumble world of collaborative blogging. Be gentle. ;)

Last year I had the opportunity to give the keynote address in February at the Ray Browne Conference on Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University, as well as to participate in a symposium in April convened by the Potomac Center for the Study of Modernity on Modernity and Chance. Both venues seemed apt arenas for developing some ideas about game as a cultural form, one that we could place alongside ritual and bureaucracy in our understanding of institutions and the techniques for control at their disposal. The core question I'm asking is: What might we learn by examining the increasing use of games by modern institutions in the digital age as analogous to their longstanding and effective use of rituals and bureaucracy? 

"Not OK: 'GET THE FUCKING CAVERN SCUTTER ENERGIES YOU FUCKASSES.'"

Following up on my recent cri d'coeur about the misanthropy of multiplayer gamer culture, I have to say I'm heartened by the diligence of the Guild Wars 2 developers in trying to create a more friendly, less offensive chat culture from the first day onward.

There's a thread at Reddit where the developers have offered to tell anyone who has been suspended why they were suspended or banned. Basically it breaks down into two major causes: first, that the account has been hacked by gold sellers and second, because the player was saying racist, homophobic, or grossly offensive things in public chat. It's an interesting thread just in purely documentary terms, since developers normally maintain a steely silence about bannings and allow players to represent themselves as the innocent victims of a mistake or a vendetta. But there's also a real pleasure to be had in seeing a player put up their character name, ask in all apparent innocence why they were banned, and to read the community representative quoting back to the player what they said in chat.

I get that this is too labor-intensive to keep up indefinitely. But it's a sign of some smart social thinking to at least do it now and hope to "seed" the emergent culture of the game with a lighter, more inclusive feeling.

Ethics of ARGs

In the latest Social Change Technology podcast Dr Burcu Bakioglu talks to Andrea Phillips about Alternate Reality games, their design and some of the interesting legal and ethical issues that come up. 

Those in the TN community that have been watching / making / playing ARGs for the last few years will be familiar with some of the issues - such as what if someone gets hurt, how far can a 'fiction' go before it is deception? 

While some of the issues raised in the podcast are specific to games that have a very physical element and a fictional layer that sits over the everyday - still raise interesting questions about the ethics of game design and what responsibility the designer has for the players' actions.

You can listen to the podcast and see the full show notes on the Virtual Policy Network site. 

Or by subscribing to Social Change Technology on iTunes or via our RSS feed.

The aesthetics of video games

Are video games art?

Of course they are – the interesting question is, what type(s) of art?

 

The Meaning of Play

I humbly propose a new theory of what play is....

[edit 28 Feb 11: or do I...?]

People play online

…they play with each other. Peer-to-peer. Person-to-Person.

To some, this is a revelation. But we will return to that.

First, back to me…

Giving Up the Fantasy

A major newspaper just reported on the sad moment when Bill Holcomb finally had to leave his fantasy world behind. Bill, in his 70s, had spent better than 20 years in a virtual world and finally got too old to keep it up. He had to retire. He had to step back out into reality and make the transition from Hero to Everyman. He had to experience The Return from the Hero's Journey. It's what the enemies of games wish we would all do, once and for all. Give up on the dream, stop living in a pretend world where we are somehow special and significant and capable of great things. Return to the real world, trudge through the day like everyone else; limit encounters with the heroic to the TV. Watch it, we are told, but don't live it. Look, don't breathe.

Mr. Holcomb's virtual world was a baseball fantasy camp. He was pretending to be a shortstop, not a sorceror. Interestingly, the paper's treatment was poignant and sympathetic rather than dismissive and critical. They didn't say he wasted his time or his money. They didn't insist that he was crazy for paying real money for a virtual experience.

It's not a little contrast. Fantasy Football has 18 million players. Playing with virtual football players is not subject to social criticism, while playing with virtual warriors is.

Intended and Unintended Consequences (or the Nightmares of Dr. Bombay)

I am with A360 on the current child safety debacle, and it raises a conversation that needs to be had (and re-had) before we get a whole lot further. In 1998's My Tiny Life (free pdf) , Julian Dibell  chronicles, among other things,  the experiences of a virtual rape victim and (her) MOO community.  Seminal on multiple levels, the work explores many aspects of identity, ethics and permission in a post-modern, techno-centric age.  

So here's the question.  In an exodus recession, were do we draw the lines with economies made up of adult, child, and child-like beings in virtual worlds? With their child-like or grown-up avatars?  With AI(s), inhabited or not?  What's appropriate, what's not?  What's criminal, what's not?  What is slavery?  Labor?  How do we simultaneously allow freedom(s) and conversations and experiments and deviations and enterprise, and protect from harm?  Does hacking or enslaving one's or another(s) virtual being(s) to elicit behavior other than intended by the owner consitute criminal activity? At what point(s) are we complicit?  Which pathways of influence do we fear?  Applaud? What precedents exist? What forms can teaching a lesson take?  Is it/can it be therapy? Is it 'promoting hatred'to discuss such things openly, or is opening the can of worms a good thing overall?  Let's summarize and rule.

 

The Gnostic Revolution

From TN's Armchair Philosophy Department: Gnosis means Knowledge. Not knowledge but KNOWLEDGE, you know? Understanding of Things Eternal, of the Forms, of the Ephemeral, of the Infinite, of the Capitalized.

Gnostics are people who Know. Gnosticism is a school, or a philosophy, or a frame, or what have you, grounded on the notion that there are things to be Known out there that are only poorly reflected in the "real" world. Indeed, you might identify a gnostic by whether she puts scare quotes around "real." In some extreme forms, gnosticism holds that the "real" world is not only only "real," but also bad, corrupt, yucky. All the good stuff is ephemeral and infinite; the stuff we can handle every day stinks in comparison, therefore a person should spend her life trying to stay connected to the Infinite and reject the ick that lies close to hand. 

Tolkien expresses a gnostic sensibility when he writes that a man who wakes up and finds himself in prison cannot be blamed for trying to get out and go home. For Tolkien, the prison is the real world, and home, for Tolkien, is Heaven. Some religious teaching aligns quite nicely with gnosticism, urging followers to seek Truths only within. Other religions emphasize that the world is a good place and absolutely deserves our attention. Moreover, when some people run around claiming that they have a Special Insight to The Beyond, all too often the Movement results in other people losing their money, their time, or their lives.

Gnosticism invites rejection of the real world and its status quo. A new conflict along these lines is going to play out quite directly through the emergence of virtual worlds.

Game Design: The Art of the Human?

I can't get it out of my head or understand it when it is in there. Please discuss, share.

Artists :: Art as Game Designers :: People.

Terra Novans Interviewed for Paper on MMO Research Ethics

Thomas, Constance and I (among others) were lucky enough to be interviewed for a fabulous paper by Miami University's Heidi McKee and James Porter on the ethical challenges associated with conducting research in MMO spaces. It has just been published in the International Journal of Research Ethics.  Woot!

Game as Cultural Form, Play as Disposition

I've just posted a piece to SSRN about play. In the past I have focused on games as a culturally-shaped activity (what we anthropologists would call a "cultural form"), and in the course of that I have made explicit efforts to decouple games from the concept of play (see here, for example). I argued that it is not very useful to see play as an activity, with games as a subset of it, and suggested that play more usefully denotes a disposition, a way of approaching the world.

In doing that I wasn't trying to argue that games and play are not related to each other, but rather that we need to move beyond seeing them as intrinsically linked (where the question of, for example, whether something is a game boils down to whether it brings about a playful experience). The primary motivation was to make room for an approach to games on their own terms, but the issue of play has been simmering with me for a long time. The posted essay is the result – a long-planned attempt to articulate play as a disposition.

Structures of Governance

From a governance perspective – what the key structural differences between Virtual Worlds and the Internet and what does this mean for national governments?

Maxwell's Hammer

From time to time here on TN I've delved into methodological territory, and in my last effort, quite some time ago, I focused on the charges of "anecdotalism" that qualitative research in the social sciences sometimes faces, and argued that generalizable claims can be generated out of such methods. But, in retrospect, that piece did not confront the root of the problem directly, given the degree to which I do not there question generalizability itself as the core aim of scientific inquiry.[fn 1] As research on virtual worlds continues to increase, and as the different parts of the academy ramp up their efforts to fight for their funding (and perhaps thereby seek to discredit other approaches), it seems worthwhile (and consistent with the ecumenical spirit that largely characterizes TN) to consider how scientific the pursuit of other kinds of claims apart from the general are.[fn 2] And that's where James Clerk Maxwell comes in...

Legitimate Questions

One of my longstanding interests in studying virtual worlds is governance and legitimacy. How are virtual worlds governed, and to what extent is this governance legitimate? When we think about political legitimacy, we can start to see a key difference between how political institutions have established their legitimate rule in the past, and how the multiple new institutions of governance in virtual worlds go about it. In particular, I am curious about how games may be making larger and larger contributions to political legitimacy in virtual worlds. To what extent are the outcomes that games generate not only legitimate in reference to the game (a valid, just, or fair win, if you will) but also contributing in some way to the legitimacy of associated institutions, such as guilds, gamemakers, and others?

The Lifetime to Master

It's taken me five years of on-again, off-again but often substantial playing of poker (don't worry, mostly not cash games) to really understand some of the game's concepts that I read about when I was playing but didn't properly understand.

Ludological scholars are right to insist, in this respect and others, that games require attention as games, that they have a character or nature that is intrinsic to games and not to texts or performances or sociality. Poker has a "deep game" that is not spelled out in the rules, but which powerfully sorts out the losers and the winners, given a sufficient number of rounds of play.

What's the "deep game" of virtual worlds, those that have at least some game-like character?

What do we mean by ‘computer game’?

When we talk about computer games we are picking out a set of things in the world. Typically we will think of PC games, console games, flash games – that sort of thing. However I think that there is vagueness when we think about boundary conditions and, more interestingly, that these boundary cases tell us something about how we conceptualize games.

As this is a long post  it's worth putting the answer I get to, then running through how I get there, so this is my proposed definition:

A computer game is a game where at least some of the bounds of game-acts are essentially controlled by information technology.

This is my thought process - at a brief glance it looks to me that there are two areas in which we might find necessary conditions for something to be a computer game. These are: display of action and decision-making.

[Three posts in a row, I’m sure I just heard a gong from the side of the stage]

Plato’s game

Rules are one of the things that define something as being a game. But I wonder what it is we refer to when we talk about the rules of a game.

Warning this is only of interest, and then only marginally so, to the particularly beardy.

This is Your Brain on WoW

A recent article in The Age entitled Ethical Dilemmas canvassed the question of the ethical obligations of game designers to players. According to the piece, Jonathan Blow, the designer of Braid, claims that the grind of MMORPGs is unethical:

Mr Blow believes developers need to think about what their games are teaching players when they reward them for performing certain actions.

"That kind of reward system is very easily turned into a Pavlovian or Skinnerian scheme," he says. "It's considered best practice: schedule rewards for your player so that they don't get bored and give up on your game. That's actually exploitation."

...

"I think a lot of modern game design is actually unethical, especially massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, because they are predicated on player exploitation," Mr Blow says

All Bets Are Off

Linden Lab has recently changed their policy about gambling in Second Life, effectively banning it (find a clutch of news reports here). The specific demands, in terms of policy and regulation, that gambling and other significant-stakes gaming make on virtual worlds have drawn my attention on TN before. Here I'd like to ask TN-at-large the following: What do you think the effects of this policy are likely to be on SL? On virtual worlds in general (if any)?

The State of Second Life

Second Life is at a turning point.

Ganking the Meaning out of Games

Steven "Play No Evil" Davis, in a great comment on Mark Wallace's thread, asked the following question:

Is griefing simply emergent play that some folks don't like?

I think this is an interesting question to pursue, and I'm going to take a somewhat provocative stance and answer "no," partly to explore some territory and partly because I think there's a case to be made against griefing that doesn't founder on a libertarian objection (i.e., that if some people do something in a low-consequence environment, then it must be fun to them/their choice, and therefore must be okay).

Discipline & Pwnage

So I've been having my usual beginning-of-the-semester chats with my graduate students about their projects and progress. I enjoy these, and I think they do to (they almost never complain about the thumbscrews, or -- more of a shock -- having to read Habermas). One of them, Krista-Lee Malone, is a master's student and long-time gamer who is completing an excellent thesis about hardcore raiding guilds. During our chat she said something about how these raiding guilds went about preparing her to participate in their activities, and it prompted me to follow up on some ideas from here. It's about Foucault, bodies, institutions, and whether the relationship between developers and guilds is changing in important ways.

Meaning, Games, and Bureaucracy

A while back in a comment posted in this thread, Ren posed an excellent question that I've been pondering for some time. Wondering about the implications of my model of games as process for the question of meaning, he asked:

Do we then just have that the meaning-generative property of games is just a fact of process [i.e., no different from other social processes] and the types of meanings [in games] are consequences of the contrived contingency?

Curse you, Ren! I haven't slept since August!

Against Exceptionalism: A New Approach to Games

Selling games short -- it's happening all the time in games research scholarship and in books on game design. In the rush to carve out a special place for games scholarship, to demonstrate its importance, and to attempt to convey what we feel as gamers is powerful about games, games thinkers have relied on an exceptionalist approach to games, seeing them as a form of play necessarily set apart from the everyday, and therefore requiring a distinct treatment. In short, this inherited and largely unexamined theory of games assumes there is a rupture (in experience, in form) between games and other aspects of social life.  But while understandable, this is precisely the wrong approach.

Where am I?

As keen eyed readers will have spotted you can now see a map of where TerraNovans are currently located. It’s neat. But it’s not the map I wanted. I wanted a way to show you all where we are virtually. The problem is that I don’t think that map exists. I’m not sure we even have a metaphor for it. That is - the true metaverse; the universe of virtual universes.

The Epistemology of Anshe

Religion in MMOGs

Many MMOGs have within them some nod toward religion, some degree of religious trappings at least.  Priestly characters are common, as are holy warriors (paladins).  To say nothing of demons and angels based loosely on Christian archetypes, the former of which make regular appearances in online games. 

And yet, actual religion and theology are pretty much absent or at best non-operative in most MMOs.  In fantasy games the priest is typically a "healer" but otherwise the character is a façade.  In modern or science fiction games, religion is conspicuously almost entirely absent. 

I've been wondering for some time about enabling the presence of both real-world and made-up religions in MMOs as thematically appropriate.  Is this a good way to flesh out a world, to create gameplay surrounding a moral code and shared identity, and to bring a significantly missing piece of human community to the game, or would it just be a way to invite controversy -- in effect, to draw aggro from both religious and non-religious players and cause a heap o' customer service trouble?   

The companion to this question is a bit more introspective: to what degree does the answer to the question of operative religions in MMOs vary with our own degree of spirituality/religiosity?  Is the perceived  agnosticism of the game development community keeping religion out of MMOs?