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?
These are not new ideas in my work (and especially not in some posts I've done here), but I had long planned to set down my ideas about these cultural forms and their relationships to each other in one place, mostly for my own satisfaction (for that reason, too, I am sure that many of the examples will strike readers of my work as familiar ones for my thinking).The paper is still in a working state, without citations and still set up for oral presentation (and includes many of the images from these occasions – I do not plan on including them for final publication). You should be able to download the paper here. Here is the abstract:
The projects of governance at the heart of state and other institutional control under the context of modernity have been marked by a heavy reliance on two cultural forms, ritual and bureaucracy, each of which organizes action and meaning through distinctive invocations of order. The steady rise of liberal thought and practice, particularly in the economic realm (following, if partially, Adam Smith) has gradually challenged the efficacy of these cultural forms, with open-ended systems (more or less contrived – from elections to the “free” market) exerting more and more influence both on policy and in other areas of cultural production. It is in this context that games are becoming the potent site for new kinds of institutional projects today, whether in Google’s use for some time of its Image Labeler Game to bring text searchability to its image collection, or in the University of Washington’s successful deployment of the game Fold-It to find promising “folds” of proteins for research on anti-retroviral vaccines.
But even as they are so used, we can see how these contrived, open-ended mechanisms create new challenges to the structure of the very modern institutions which would seek to domesticate and deploy them. While a longstanding example would be Hitler’s unsuccessful use of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games’ results as part of his project of political legitimization, digital networking technology is making new and more complex gambits of this sort possible today. Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world Second Life, found itself in a state of organizational contradiction as it sought to architect, from the top-down, a game-like space premised (and sold) on a playful ideal of user freedom and control. Google’s recent and reluctant turn to curators for certain search terms also reflects the limits of their previous attempts to continually refine their algorithms so as to let search results reflect perfectly the aggregate actions of web users. In all of these cases we see that a turn toward open-ended, game-derived mechanisms (which often mirror the market) generate paradoxes for those who sought to leverage the potency of games for generating meaningful outcomes.
In this process digital technology has played an important role as well, making the use of games possible at a scale vast in both scope and complexity, while subtly changing even what a useful conception of games would be that could account for the game-like elements now proliferating in much of our increasingly digital lives. From this twenty-first century vantage point, what may we learn by setting the cultural form of game against these other cultural forms, with attention to their shared and distinctive features? By considering what has changed to make the domestication (as it were) of games possible, and also reflecting on how these other forms have been put to work by institutions, we can begin to chart the landscape ahead for games and institutions under the context of modernity and ask key questions about what issues of policy and ethics it raises.
Any comments welcome, of course. It feels good to be back.
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.
Holy hellions, Batman, 2012 is off with a bang.
Too bad about SWTOR and the LEGO Universe, but Guild Wars 2 might actually ship this year, and there are some other exciting things brewing. Tera Online might emerge unscathed from its legal machinations and make its promised launch date of May 2012. Blizzard is making a 'casual' MMO (with product placements)...
But here's what I'm waiting for...
The Secret World (April 2012) - This one is exciting even among the 'I'm not an MMO person' crowd. To me, it's like the game I've been waiting for. Here's why:
Want more? Check out the initial announcements at PAX 2009, or more recent trailers and interviews. Register for the beta, if you haven't already. Watch out for the government.
Also, don't forget that DiGRA (the Digital Games Research Association) is holding its semi annual conference in Tampere, Finland (where all the very cool kids are). They need papers and reviewers, so get in touch!
Ha, got your attention, eh? But this is actually an important topic, of the 'reality is broken' variety. Like the fact that we're obsessed over sexting and other digital phenomena related to sex, yet we have done little to improve sex education in this country. In fact, we have vilified and cut funding to Planned Parenthood and other organizations that save people's lives by providing them critical information that affects them physically, emotionally, spiritually. I ranted about this on Quora recently:
Sexting isn't the issue. The lack of good, ongoing and honest sex education and support (from elementary school) is. I personally don't care what kids do in this regard, as long as they are well-informed and not succumbing to pressure from peers or romantic partners. And obviously this behavior is probably not appropriate in classrooms.
As an anthropologist, I will tell you that sex play in early pubescence and later is very, very normal, and in some cultures, very well tolerated with positive effect. We are extremely backwards in our proclivity to bury our heads in the sands.
I do, however, think all kids need to be educated on the potential ramifications of having a digital trail of activity like this, and what it can mean in terms of reputation (immediately) and career later. It's outrageous that kids learn most of what they know about sex from each other, tv/movies and the Internet. This leaves gaping holes in their knowledge and their judgment about something that can affect their lives in such profound ways, and can even lead to illness and death.
I've been thinking for some time that games could play an important role in helping to eliminate a lot of the misinformation that is spread among kids and teens. Typically this sort of thing is handled a la the serious game: take some existing curriculum - the sort of thing you'd see in a high school sex ed class (if a school is lucky enough to have it). 'Chocolate-covered broccoli'. Seldom about the realities of sex and the social and emotional contexts that surround it. And boring.
One of my favorite sites is Ask Alice, a community effort from Columbia University that provides a forum for kids and teens to ask any question about sex, drugs, what have you, and get a truthful and reasonable answer. I think it's an incredible resource, but most people don't seem to know about it. So where are people getting their sexual educations?
I was really inspired by a TED Talk a lovely woman by the name of Cindy Gallop gave not long ago. You should watch it yourself, otherwise I might ruin it, but I will tell you that she makes some rather stunning points about how porn culture has distorted the way people think about sex. Clearly we need to figure out some better ways to communicate all of this, aside from ignoring the groundswell of sexual activity that is incredibly normal for our species.
There's rather a dearth of recreational, digital sex games, a fact that surprises me given the proclivity of clever porn mongers who hawk every kind of sex ware imaginable. Have throughout history, using any available technology. It's well established, for instance, that early photography and film thrived on sexual innovations. And we certainly spent a lot of time discussing the ins and outs of cybersex back in the day, when everything digital was a novelty. Are we jaded? Or recession economics?
Well, it seems like a business opportunity to me. They appear to sell plenty of books and board games in those novelty sex shops. People could certainly use some variety in their sex lives. Yet the ecosystem somehow manages to eschew innovation, just like the video game industry. Microsoft, for instance, is blocking sexual uses of their Kinect device, citing 'unintended puposes' (imagine a mash-up of a Kinect device and teledildonics - long distance love, FTW!). I did find A-Chat , but it seems like a graphics enhanced chat room app, and that's boring, too... I suppose there's the seedy underbelly that is Second Life's sex subculture, but it seems, well, seedy. And not terribly educational. But if people are into it, great. Let's just have some other options.
Most sex and videogames conjecture has been about either glorifying or bastardizing sexual content. There are few balanced perspectives: Brenda Braithwaite's work is very insightful, and Bonnie Ruberg has made quite a few contibutions, too. That's sort of not the point I'm trying to make, though. Sure, we could be more mature about sex and sexual imagery in games. But I sort of don't care about that stuff. I want us to ask, yet again, how can this incredible platform for persuasion be used for the greater good? How can we inform people, encourage safe play and experimentation... delight with escapism, encourage fantasy and role-playing... do all the things that we know video games are so good for?
So, brilliant Terra Novans... what games would you design to solve this problem?
I'm thinking about a paper for a conference on ethics and games being set up by Harry Brown this October, and I'd like to kick out a concept (about which I know nothing, so it fits here) to see what your reaction is (if any): Maturity. I'm getting older and older, you see, and online shenanigans seem to be losing significance. Once thrilling, then annoying, now boring. What's happening?
Maybe it has nothing to do with age; maybe it's a stance with respect to goofing off that changes often according to circumstance, even if there is a general trend such that older people lose interest. What's your Sophomoric Stance? When Mia gave us all those neat examples about cheating, did you feel outrage, or titillation? Or maybe you just rolled your eyes and muttered, "Kids."
I feel this urge to challenge what seems to be a standard analysis of online transgression, in which transgression is either celebrated as significant revolution or vilified as significant crime. I'm not concerned about the revolution or crime part, but the significance.
When you play board games, you have to follow the rules. Otherwise people won't play with you. Playing by the rules requires a certain amount of maturity, especially since many rules are unwritten social rules, like, don't lick the dice. Hard when you're 3, easy when you're 48. (Pretty easy, anyway. For me. It's usually not a problem. Very few complaints.) Now if someone is not old enough to play the game, and breaks the rules accidentally or intentionally, well, that pretty much wrecks the game for everybody. But is it anything more than that? A moment of global trangressive significance? No - it's just someone is being a baby. It's annoying because, well, we could have had fun. But apparently not doing this particular thing, so, let's just go do something else. And that's it!What happens if we start treating rule-breaking in online environments as the acts of kids (of whatever age)? There's a big difference between handling kids and handling criminals. When kids are up to something, you just wave them off, put them in their place, and move on. The situation is definitely not loaded with ramifications. If you need to undertake common-sense moves to keep kids away from stuff they are likely to wreck, you don't agonize about it - it's better for you and for them to keep them out. I wonder if the "RP" moniker in MMOGs has less to do with RPing than with its role as a kid-filter. Do kids (again - kids of any age, "kids" = "people with a sophomoric stance that judges mooning as awesome") like to give their character stupid names that the RP filter catches? If so, that makes "RP server" into "adult server."
Do other authors use the term"maturity" when describing various pranks and persecutions and trollings in pseudonymous environments? Does maturity rise as one gets deeper and deeper into the social systems of persistent worlds? What happens when lots of online gamers are senior citizens? "When I was a kid, we only corpse-camped true idiots, but kids today, they just go off on anybody. It's a shame. Makes me wanna ragequit WoW, just like I did in 2006, 2009, 2013, 2021, and 2029...Oh, do ya remember the 2017 Night Elf model, wasn't she sweet..." [/face-plant into apple sauce]
Some game forum threads are destined to become classics, enshrined in the annals of epic winningness. That's the case, I think, for the recent BioWare thread on the topic of the "straight male gamer."
The OP in the thread (who had apparently posted on this topic several times, in hopes that he would receive support for his views), was voicing his outrage over the fact that Dragon Age 2 allows romance to occur between any two players, rather than enforcing heterosexual norms. The centerpiece of his argument is that "straight male gamers" make up the vast majority of players, and their needs should therefore dictate the game's design.
I don't think many would argue with the fact that the overwhelming majority of RPG gamers are indeed straight and male. Sure, there are a substantial amount of women who play video games, but they're usually gamers who play games like The Sims, rather than games like Dragon Age. That's not to say there isn't a significant number of women who play Dragon Age and that BioWare should forego the option of playing as a women altogether, but there should have been much more focus in on making sure us male gamers were happy. [...] Its ridiculous that I even have to use a term like Straight Male Gamer, when in the past I would only have to say fans.
BioWare's David Gaider responded to the post magnificently:
The romances in the game are not for "the straight male gamer". They're for everyone. We have a lot of fans, many of whom are neither straight nor male, and they deserve no less attention. We have good numbers, after all, on the number of people who actually used similar sorts of content in DAO and thus don't need to resort to anecdotal evidence to support our idea that their numbers are not insignificant... and that's ignoring the idea that they don't have just as much right to play the kind of game they wish as anyone else. The "rights" of anyone with regards to a game are murky at best, but anyone who takes that stance must apply it equally to both the minority as well as the majority. The majority has no inherent "right" to get more options than anyone else. More than that, I would question anyone deciding they speak for "the straight male gamer" just as much as someone claiming they speak for "all RPG fans", "all female fans" or even "all gay fans". You don't.
While I do wish Gaider hadn't followed that with a bit of backpedaling in the "would I do it again?" paragraph, overall this response is made of win. Bravo, BioWare.
I humbly propose a new theory of what play is....
[edit 28 Feb 11: or do I...?]
I’ve never been fully satisfied with the definitions of ‘play’ and ‘game’ that have currency in Game Studies. Where I really have trouble is when I try to apply them to the fields of ethics and the philosophy of law in which I now tend to write.
In my recent analysis of sports law and the historical relationships between violence, criminal law and governance (focusing on duelling, boxing, rugby etc) I’ve been searching for an explanation of what is going on when sport is left to get on with it - free from ‘magisterial interference’, as the London Prize Ring Rules of 1838 put it.
I’ve touched on some of this in a recent post (People play online http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2011/02/people-play-online-.html) – but what I did not focus on there was a more formal characterisation of the thing at the centre of sport and games i.e. play.
Since Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) there has been a modern academic debate about the meaning of ‘game’ and ‘play’. Readers not familiar with the history can quickly get up to speed by reading Juul’s excellent paper The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness (http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameplayerworld/), and Malaby’s Beyond Play: A new Approach to Games (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=922456).
The cannon of theories all do useful jobs of work, however I feel that none of them successfully identified the correct underlying principles at the heart of play, or at the very least those that are operational when we look at play in respect of law and other forms of institutional power.
It seems to me that one core concept that explains what play is and how it operates should be founded on what’s happening at the semiotic layer. So let’s jump into my proposed definition (that will need a lot of un-packing):
Play is the recognised, negotiated, process of a purposeful shift in the dominant meaning; and contextual attribution of value, of acts.
Games are normative forms of play.
[28 Feb 11 ludic] play-meaning - the meaning that has been shifted or attributed
[28 Feb 11 ludic] play-semiotics - the system of the signs product through play
ludic-capital - the degree to which these ludic-meaning and semiotics are operational in a given context e.g. when set against institutional-capital.
[edit 26 Feb 2011:
ludic-intent - the intentional attitude we hold towards acts where the internal meaning and value we attribute to them has primacy over external ones.
ostensible-play or hollow-play - where the intentional attitude that we hold towards acts holds the external value of those acts over the internal values and meanings]
Magic circle - the term we use to denote the bounds of the context wherein the ludic-meaning of an act prevails over the co-existing non-ludic meaning (or lack thereof).
OK, let’s un-box that…
Act
I’m being broad in my use of the word act. I don’t just mean physical things but also, speech, thoughts etc. So I’m including word games and purely cognitive forms of play.
Meaning shifts and recognition
Where I’ve always started puzzling about play is by wondering what it is I recognize when I see play occurring, and how it is that this thing seems to have so much power. Back to my favourite example – in the normal course of events we don’t arrest boxers or rugby players for Battery. So what is it that they are doing that is not the same as people hitting or pushing each other?
Of course, as I covered recently on TN, they are ‘doing’ anything different at all. Rather they, the officials, the sporting bodies, the law, spectators and many that might just happen to see the event attribute a different meaning to the acts.
Moreover, in sport a lot of socio-cultural signalling work goes into pointing out that the acts in question signify something other than we might expect. Language is an important sign - we tend not to talk about rugby players pushing each other, we talk about blocks and tackles. In boxing we talk about jabs and under-cuts. Visual signs are also important - people are wearing unusual clothes, usual ones that are different from ‘ordinary’ ones, they in a marked space during a marked period of time.
What all this is doing is facilitating all relevant parties’ recognition of the meaning shift. Indeed, a more systematic analyses might reveal that there is a correlation between the strength of signalling and gap difference between the juxtaposed meanings i.e. physical contact sports require a lot of signals so we are very sure that they are not ‘just at fight’, whereas playing-field cricket with a tennis ball needs very few signs to protect it form external influence as the what’s at stake when ludic-capital fails to have force are very low.
I also want to note here that ‘recognized’ entails at lest some degree of being ‘conscious of’ – I will pick this point up more in the discussion of ‘purposeful’.
Negotiated process
Factors that are characteristic of the spectrum from free solo play to international sport are the parameters and processes of meaning negotiation.
In solo free play we create meaning: ‘this box is a castle, the cushions are my army, apart from that one I can’t reach, that’s just a cushion’ – here play involves the process of self negotiation of the signs we are attributing to artefacts, thoughts or acts. Knocking something all the way over with a ball might signify that it has been defeated, unless it falls against the sofa and does not fall over – then maybe it is defeated, or maybe it’s just injured and needs another strike to be defeated, maybe that will change in a few minutes etc etc etc.
When two or more people are involved in play they jointly consent to shift meaning and mutually give respect to the shifted meanings through the process described here. This may be a highly formal process involving actual contracts or unspoken and just understood through action. This mutuality is not perfect as the meanings somewhat internal to each individual. This is not a weakness in play or this proposed theory of play - it is an intrinsic characteristic and why negotiation is also intrinsic. Learning this is part of learning how to play.
Hence – when I mention shifted meaning or mutually understood meaning in a play involving more than one person, strictly speaking I’m allowing for non-perfect symmetry of meaning and negotiation processes (but that’s a bit long winded to keep repeating).
So, in some forms of play a sphere is play artefact that should be held or kicked in specific ways, and that getting it through hoop scores a point, and a point is valued more than not-a-point, and that if the ball goes into the road play stops for a while and there’s no advantage to either side because the road is dangerous, so the fact that getting the sphere might be dangerous often prevails over it being a ball (though of course not all the time – an area that’s particularly interesting when we think of injury and liability in ARGs and games that utilise the built environment).
This goes all the way to tacking someone in a game of rugby which can only be done in a certain way, too near to the head and it’s not a tackle, it’s ludic-meaning gives way to it’s non-ludic one: it’s an attack, or at least there will be some form of negation over the dominant meaning – ranging from unspoken thoughts and looks thought to court cases. For American readers - the NFL have recently re-interpreted what are “egregious and elevated hits”, issuing fines to those that fell foul of the new rules (http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d81b732df/article/anderson-on-flagrant-hits-no-new-rules-just-more-enforcement).
Dominant meaning
So, the process of negotiation is one of establishing which meaning; among many possibilities, is the dominant meeting to be attributed to a given type and token of act. In games and sport where this is well established, the emphasis of negotiation is in on whether individual acts fall within the parameters mutually agreed for the given type of act.
It is critical to note that the dominant meaning of an act for any given person or institution co-exists with other meanings, both those that are produced through play e.g. ‘I thought the ball was out if it was on the line’; and those that pre-existed e.g. ‘the man hit the other man’. The meanings given primacy and dominance through play exist in a complex, sometimes co-constructive, relationship to these other meanings. A relationship that can shift over time for any given act – see below for a little more on this.
Attribution where non existed
By ‘shift in meaning’ I include both: a shift from a previously understood meaning to a new one; and, a shift form there being no previous meaning, or an extremely diverse set, to a new mutually recognized. For example a sphere going through a hoop or between piece of wood tends to have no generally understood meaning – but in many games a very central and important mean is attributed to it.
Purposeful
As noted above the recognition of meaning shift implies that there is some consciousness of the process that is occurring. More than this, the process of meaning shift does not just happen to be occurring, people are actively doing it. So, to be playing you have to know you are playing – you can involve other people, such as in many Alternative Reality Games, but they them selves are not players unless they gain awareness of the game.
One of boundaries of my proposed definition is probably animal play and play in early childhood, as here I’m not sure what should be said about the nature of recognition or purpose as this gets into theories of self consciousness. I’ll probably defer to Winnicott here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnicott).
Dominant .. contextual attribution of valuation
Meaning and value are inter-twined, but in defining play it is worth recognizing what is happening to each. I’ve covered meaning so now let’s look at value.
Contextual attribution is where we are giving primacy to the internal value of an act rather than the externalities. Like with meaning, both exist and may be recognized, but are not on equal footing. So, running with a ball and kicking it though a net have the contextual values of being a goal, changing the score and determining which team may win. They may also keep one fit, make on happy, earning a living etc. Indeed these may be a motivation to play, but they are contingent to what play is.
This is important because there are things that look very much like play but are not play. For instance getting on a bus and taking a bit of paper from a bus conductor has many characteristics of play: the conductor wears a uniform, they give you a bit of paper you both call a ‘ticket’, the ticket has meaning within the context of the bus journey etc. However, in this case the value of the meaning shift (e.g. from bit of paper to ticket) is primarily instrumental, whereas one might play a game of collecting the very same tickets and seeing how many of what colour ink one could get.
What’s not in the definition?
The definition of play and game I’m proposing is one that characterises a process. This is because, like some others, I think there are attributes that are very often products of play or generally associated with it that are not themselves intrinsic to it.
One issue with many definitions of play is that they sought to draw a bright line between play and not play. This definition tries not to do that. The shift and primacy of meaning and value is to a dominant role. One thing that is important about this distinction is that the other meanings and values do not go away. A push in rugby is still a push - it’s just that in many contexts it makes very little sense (but still some sense) to try to give primacy to that interpretation (see Peter Ludlow’s From Sherlock and Buffy to Klingon and Norrathian Platinum Pieces: Pretense, Contextalism, and the Myth of Fiction for more on this kind of thing in a philosophy of language style http://alphavilleherald.com/images/various/Fiction.rtf).
From another perspective it is worth nothing that under this definition, play is a process that co-exists with many other things. We may be playing world of Warcraft at the same time that we are talking on the phone or doing our day-to-day job, but the meaning shift that is going on in respect of pixels and xp is still occurring.
That is play is something that when doing we are also not doing.
We can be playing and thinking about our tax return, which is not play. So the dominance of meaning, or the ludic-capital of play, is not absolute. In the case of a sport, especially highly organized sport, ludic-capital tends to be fairly well signalled and bounded in space and time. Though there are still areas ripe for negotiation e.g. the player that hits another player just after the final whistle – the type of case where the lack of an absolute notion is clear as the socially constructed understanding of the act and the relative power of institutional v. ludic capital will determine which meaning prevails, till the case goes to appeal…
Dear Thomas
And this all ways brings my back to a conversation I’ve been having for years with the esteemed Dr Malaby, see:
Thomas and I agree on a lot of things. In particularly Malaby explicitly resists the notion of play as a exception and thinks of it as process. Initially I thought that adding ludic intentionality to Malaby’s definition would make it fit for purpose, but that felt wrong as the notion of ludic is part of what one is trying to define. What’s more I feel that the focus on ‘contingency’ is useful, but meaning is where the action is at.
Putting the definition to work
I’m now going to apply the definition I’ve proposed to a set of related concepts and debates about play. Given the space I’ve already taken up this is going to be really superficial but will indicate the direction in which I’m thinking and the way I apply the theory – of course, you might buy it but apply it completely differently. I kinda hope you do.
Game
The definition of play that I’ve proposed includes the idea of value. I believe that games and sport are forms of play. Hence in the discussion above I have tended to move between them in the examples given.
As asserted above: Games are normative forms of play. What I mean by this is that in what one might dangerously term pure-play the values that are given to meaning have significance in respect to the in-play and not-play contexts but much less significance, in terms of ranking, in respect of each other. In games the relative value of meanings within the context of play are very important. So the difference between the ball going through the hoop and not going through it is characteristic of a form of game. That is, the norms in question that are the defining characteristic between play and game are internal to the game. It may be, and very often is the case, that these norms gain external recognition (indeed I’ve argued that they can become moral norms: MMO’s as Practices: http://www.mendeley.com/research/mmos-as-practices/) but that’s not an intrinsic quality.
This tends to lead to codification in the form of rules and governance. But it is not, as some might argue, the rules that are important but the play norms that they codify. Similarly it’s not the outcome of a game, as such, that is an essential characteristic but the possibility of an outcome distinct from another. I realize I’m splitting hairs here.
Like most other things here this difference between play and game has its clear-cut cases but as a general matter is somewhat fluid as the relative normative value of something within play might ebb and flow, so we might just play within the context of a game and play might turn into a game, it’s all about emphasis and primacy at any given time.
Law
The definition of play I’m proposing stems from my long discussions about the notion of play and latterly my reading of sports law. Hence where it fits very well is in the area of law and ethics as both of these are, and can be seen to be when one examines the rhetoric, rooted in meaning – often played out in terms of metaphor.
Hence I think that the idea of social-cultural shifts that mean that certain meanings just don’t get traction in an institutional context does explain the mechanics of what is going on in sport and, what should go on in law and computer games (part of the subject of a book I’m currently working on with de Zwart and Humphries).
Play and Playful
There is a continuum from being playful to play. In playfulness the shifted meaning is only partially or fleetingly dominant or is merely a peer of other meanings, hence playfulness can be easy to shift in and out of.
Fun
The definition does not require play to be fun [edit 26 Feb 2011: see my comment here for clafrication that forced play is hollow-play or ostensible-play].
or even voluntary. Someone might be forced to play at gun-point a game that causes them physical pain. Take football as an example - in respect of the process, the thing they are doing would still meet all the criteria above, sphere as ball, points etc etc thought I can see an argument about dominance of externality in this special case.
Why do we play?
I don’t know. The definition I propose seeks only to provide what I think are the intrinsic characteristics of what play is. There are deep psychological and social reasons for why we play and how we play, I suggest readers look at Sutton Smith and others for these. I’m not sure my definition even helps understand these motivations, but I hope that my emphasis of meaning helps.
Why does play ‘work’ ?
Again, I don’t really know, but I do have some thoughts about why play and so-called gamification have an impact on efficiency out outcomes. Basically its about a change of focus and a the relationship between meaning shifting (making) and learning. But more of that in another post…
Why is play and learning so closely aligned?
Because operational knowledge of meanings is intrinsic to play and the process of negotiation of meaning is very intense knowledge work. There's a lot more to be said here.
Can play be work?
Sure. [edit 26 Feb 2011: maybe]
Cheating
Under the definition I have proposed cheating becomes an act related to games which is a wilful corruption of meaning for an end that that simultaneously embraces and undermines the norms in operation. Cheating can be seen as one of the boundary conditions of game.
Narratology vs ludology
I don’t think there is any conflict between my proposed definition and these two ends of the spectrum of approaching play. Stories are engines for creating meaning as is play, they are deeply linked. There’s yet another paper in this I think.
Magic Circle
I believe this definition is compatible with a slightly re-defined notion of the magic circle. Critics of the magic circle seem to want to get rid of it in totality because, I think they see it as too absolute and rigid. I think we need to be less literal about Huizinga. As I’ve noted above play is co-existent with other activities this does not in any way reduce the fact of play nor the ludic-capital in respect of, say, institutional power. So the magic circle still seems a very good way of picking out a conceptual space in which play occurs and some of the characteristic of that space.
Conclusion
I submit that many other definitions of play have great value. I propose that the definition I have provided here has utility partially in the fields of law and ethics. To be less modest I hope I have picked out the intrinsic features of play that underlie previous definitions and thus have provided…. One definition to rule them all :)
This is starting to feel like most of a paper and the start of a book so I’ll be very interested in feedback.
[edit 28 Feb 2011
Much thanks to all those that referenced Goffman in their comments. While I was aware of Goffman and a vague notion of frames, well ‘contextual frames’ was what I had in mind, I had not gone back to source. Doing so was a frankly uneasy experience as I found from reading Goffman that my view of play is not only a bit like his, it’s uncannily like it – he uses pretty much the same logic, the same distinctions, the same examples. It was kinda freaky reading it. I came to the initial conclusion that while I still think my analysis is pretty darn clever given I’d not read anything like it, it might be that Goffman has said everything already, so it was pure re-invention on my part. This moved me from uneasy to positively queasy.
I’ve now read a good chunk of Goffman and a bit of secondary writing, and I’m hoping there are some Goffman (Goffmonians?) scholars around that can help me out.
First, let’s revise some Goff..
In text below I’m quoting from the following edition of Goffman’s 1974 work: Goffman, E., Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience, Northeastern University Press 1986.
Early on Goffman defines ‘frame’ as: “I assume that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principals of organization which govern events – at least social one – and our subjective involvement in them; frame is the word I use to ref to such of these basic elements as I am able to identify” (ibid pp. 10 -11)
Later he talks about a concept called ‘keying’ which he says come in 5 types (ibid pp. 46 – 77):
Furthermore keying is defined as (ibid p.45)
“a. Systematic transformation of materials already meaningful…”
“b. Participants in the activity are meant to know and openly acknowledge that a systematic alteration is involved…”
“c. Cues will be available for establishing when the transformation is to begin and when it is to end”
“d. Keying is not restricted to events perceived within any particular class of perspectives”
“e. ...fighting and playing around at checkers feels to be much the same sort of thing…”
Goffman also notes that the activities have a “an inward-looking experiential finality”, and participants might enter into a “meaningful universe sustained by the activity” which we might call a “realm’ or possibly ‘world” (ibid p. 46).
Lastly I want to note where Goffman talks about a given instances of keying when: “during any one occasion participants felt that a particular frame prevailed and could be sustained” (ibid p.54)
Bringing frames and keys (or keying) together Goffman starts to add a few more terms: “Given the possibility of a frame that incorporates keyings, it becomes convenient to think of each transformation as adding a layer… the innermost layering, wherein dramatic activity can be at play to engross the participant. The other is the outer most lamentation, the rim, of the frame, as it were, which tells us just what sort of stat in the real world the activity has, whatever the complexity of the inner lamentations” (ibid p. 82).
Some things to note later in the work are, that dealing with out of frame activities Goffman talks about participants ability to “dissattend” (ibid p.202) i.e. withdrawing attention and awareness (ibid).
Lastly I want to note the notion of Frame Breaking where an individual breaks out of what would be expected within a frame through activities including “Flooding” (ibid p. 350) such as ‘dissolving into laughter or tears” (ibid), this might break the fame not only for them but for others. Goffman also talks about a shifted key where a response creates a sort of feedback loop which and produce an “up keyed” and “down keyed” response. Downkeying being where a play or organized fight gets out of control, Upkeying where things take on a greater sense of unreality e.g. players might start to make larger and larger bets out of all sense of portion (ibid pp 359 – 366).
So, I defined play as “the recognised, negotiated, process of a purposeful shift in the dominant meaning; and contextual attribution of value, of acts.”
I think it would be fair for someone to conclude that I’ve done nothing more than provide an alterative definition of keying and cash things like ‘up keying’ out in very slightly different ways in the context of a limited range of frames i.e. those relating to play, sports etc.
However I don’t read my work as saying exactly the same as Goffman - this is where more knowledgeable scholars need to help me out. Where I see the difference is that in my notion of play I want to put the fluidity of meaning and value, and the continual negotiation of this as central to the theory. I certainly see that there is an overall frame or context in which the play is occurring and that this can be broken by spoil-sports (who break the frame). But the notion of frame, like the notion of magic-circle in the original seems to me to be too rigid to account for the nuance of individual actions and interactions. In a sense I don’t see negotiation as something that is happening just in edge cases and having a binary outcome of play or not-play, rather it seems to me that the process of negotiation is one of the things that is sustaining and re-configuring play at each instant.
But, does anyone read Goffman as saying pretty much the same thing and I’m merely trying to save face (see what I did there) or thinking of the rigidity of frames in the physical world and carrying this over conceptually?]
Our friend Bonnie Ruberg has sent a paper composed during her expedition to the Comp Lit program at Berkeley. The topic: Sex in Second Life as a game. The report arrived by packet boat yesterday and may be collected at this wharf. Enjoy!
Does a book (new out in the US) point to a happy, healthy, virtual future – just like a certain TN’er told us?
Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone is getting a bunch of publicity in the US right now. Tom Ashbrook did a great interview with the authors on WBUR’s On Point last week (top tip: an updated edition of the work is available in the UK which includes a response to the books critics).
The thesis of the book is pretty simple: social inequality leads to negative outcomes for the whole of society – primarily this relates to health but includes other things like violence, teen pregnancy etc etc. An note, this is about inequality, not absolute wealth, so the poor in society A can have more money than the poor in society B, but if the gap between rich and poor in A is greater than B, then health outcomes will tend to be lower in A.
Wilkinson and Pickett go further than merely observing this correlation – they argue that the outcomes are a result of psychological impact of inequality increasing things such as ‘evaluation anxiety’; relying on less people for more and more people for nothing, and other elements of a sense of self.
Well, you can see where this is going. After On Point I skimmed back through the last chapters of Exodus to the Virtual World by Dr Castronova (of this parish). The ability of VW’s to provide accomplishment, hierarchy, and social groups is exactly what Catronova was arguing. The Spirit Level seems to add meat to the argument.
Wherein we spin into old arguments – if VW’s can have positive impacts on health outcomes, why are they not actively promoted a part of public policy. Indeed for VW’s to have anything more than a marginal impact on a few that happen to be invested heavily in them they might have to be promoted by the state. What’s more, if we follow the argument, they are preventative and prevention is cheaper than cure.
The rebuttal might be the usual ‘not real’ argument – things there are not real, achievements are not real. But of course we in many ways talking about symbolic achievement on both sides of the argument, it’s not what you have it’s what you feel about what you have in respect of others, it’s all relative semiotics.
So, state sanctioned VW’s and XP for all !?
Inspired by Mark Chen's project summary and ensuing discussion, I have been thinking that we should collect on our collective experience and document some of the ways we achieve insight in an area as rapidly evolving as virtuality. In the associated comment thread, Richard and I discuss method, and I explain a lot more about participant observation and why it is sometimes ok to be subjective. We have also had more than a few discussions about method over the years.
That said, it's still a highly emergent and tricky area, with researchers and practioners inventing and reinventing methods on a constant basis. This, arguably, is a good thing.
In my MMO research I made a lot of methodological decisions based on technological parameters/ limitations (WoW, for instance, didn't have an easy way of collecting chats, yet City of Heroes did - critical to my method that I can collect qual data such as this, therefore it had to be CoH). What are the rules? Is it a spectrum inclusive of scholarly and commercial efforts accompanied by a range of expectations about what constitutes evidence, truth, and calls to action?
A lateral thought: I have also been pleasantly surprised to see more and more speculative ideas about virtual worlds, virtual life, the virtual sel(ves), etc. etc. etc. (even entire tv series). I appreciate the big picture perspective: what got us here, and where we might be going. I'm also involved in some projects that remind me how far we've come, and how much further we have to go.
Of course, history tells us that we tend to overestimate some of technology's impacts while simultaneously overlooking others (Alan Kay?). My role as an anthropologist encourages me to look around me and try to ascertain what aspects of our culture are likely to survive, to morph, what technologies are emerging, what sub-cultures will thrive, what people will care about, how they will play/work, how kinship and learning and philosophy change, or don't. Etc. Really not a lot of crystal ball gazing, just observation coupled with intuition and a deep embedding in the culture(s) in question. We even accept anecdotes in this 'verse.
My role as a futurist attempts to project what our world might look like within that context, or better yet, within some variations not even imagined, or imaginable. In a usability lab, I might take advantage of specfic data collection methods that prove a point in graphs and charts of what happened in that one session on that day. Extrapolation is, of course, possible, but not 100% accurate, once observer effects, natural vs artifical environments and longer term behaviors are evaluated. However, there are seeds of some possible future(s) in these observations. The question, ultimately, is what will stick, and what will fade. Or as an old friend called William Shakespeare said:
If you can look into the seeds of time and say, which grain will grow, and which will not, speak then to me.
Tricky business. 'If Union Pacific had realized they were in the transportation business, instead of the railroad business, we'd be flying on Union Pacific planes'. (someone said it). Decoupling technologies from cultural shifts is the first step in understanding. Or at least that's my opinion and my preferred approach, which is really only a variation in perspective, not better or worse than other approaches, but pieces of the puzzle.
Above I have commented on some of the methods I use in achieving a deeper understanding of virtuality. I know psychology, law, economics, education, cybernetics, cultural theory and communications have yet other perspectives, while commercial research's distance between, say, market research and observational player research, is often a cultural chasm that doesn't take advantage of those perspectives in symbiosis. Yet it achieves other things, so in combination with other approaches, it becomes a way of observing in details some facets of the overall possibility/problem space to be explored. Different types of data persuade different categories of stakeholders, eliciting the change(s) desired. A constellation of methods can better assure success (inspiring relevant change/innovation) in the distributed, interdisciplinary groups we work within.
Soon I will post a more thorough introduction to my preferred approaches, one of which is cyborg anthropology (if you just can't wait, you can buy the book or hear Amber Case explain it...). In the meantime, Marshall McLuhan:
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
Of course, we kind of knew that already, but Yahtzee at Zero Punctuation touches on WoW's number-centric play brilliantly.
I've been playing Cataclysm almost every day since it's release last month (minus some traveling days). At first, the abundance of "new" kept me going for a long while. Now that I've hit a little slump, waiting for the guild to get enough toons to start raiding, I'm in that part of the cyle where I reflect on the play a little and wonder why I was so sucked in. I think for me it was seeing everything there is to see, flying around in (new) Azeroth, leveling-up in the new zones, seeing the new dungeons, etc. I suppose I like exploring (though, I'm not an explorer, as I don't like typifying players; rather prefer typifying behavior).
But now that I've done that, what do I have to fall back on? Just numbers and the maximizing thereof? I sometimes think that every design decision in the last 5 years was purposefully done to narrow legitimate play, not just encouraging number play but normalizing it. I started on an RP server way back when, yet these days all I seem to be doing is theorycrafting (or, more precisely, consuming theorycraft). It makes me uncomfortable.
Even more uncomfortable is the thought that maybe the reason why no one seems to be able to compete with WoW is because they don't focus on number crunching as much... Is that true?
I've been playing the hell out of a gem of an online game called "League of Legends" for the past few months (description of the game and my connection to it below).
On Friday, the developers posted an announcement on their forums about a new community policing process. In short, reports of griefing will be automatically forwarded to review to other players, ostensibly randomly. Players will be given briefing materials on the case and then asked to vote for punishing or pardoning the player. Those who vote with the majority will be awarded game points.
My mind boggles at this on several levels.
First, did they just solve customer service? Is this is a brilliant outsourcing hack that combines gemeinschaft and gesellschaft in a way never possible before? Second, did they just create a tool that incentivizes people to game the system? Is it a litmus test for decency in which some people will play nice while others will act in pure self-interest?Has anyone ever seen automated policing like this? Will it work?
Full disclosure: I've been working with the developer on a research project in which my students deployed a large-scale (n=20k) survey of LoL players, matched with anonymized play data. NDA in place. Papers coming out later this year. Major kudos from me to the studio for supporting the work and enbracing user research.
For those who haven't played it, LoL is a hybrid title described by some as a 30-minute MMO. It combines elements of leveling in the RPG sense, tower defense, PvP, and team arenas, and is a direct descendent of the crazy-popular Warcraft III map "DOTA."
It's that time again... the persistent rush at the beginning of each new cycle of time to reflect and predict. Well, we like that sort of thing around here. Sometimes we're right, sometimes wrong. But we're always trying to draw out our inner oracles...
My 2011 (and onward) predictions:
- our small people will continue to overrun our Facebook accounts as they fiend for more and more digital bling, especially since Facebook apparently doesn't let kids under 13 have their own accounts. I will continue to shell out the credit card for $10 of 'presents' for my kid's best gamer friends. Perhaps this economic boom will fuel the 'maybe we will survive this media change!' mentality.
- the fantasy MMO reaches saturation levels except for the truly committed. This is not a lore problem, but a pattern matching one. Expect regeneration in 5-10 years or when the new LOTR movie comes out. Oh wait. Guild Wars 2. Does war count as fantasy?
- more 'brand-affirming' virtual worlds. Some might be good.
- more alternative/augmented reality and transmedia MMOs (mobile plus tv plus Kinect plus books plus movies plus 3D-everything). More and more exodus.
- more sci fi, speculative fiction, near term possibility exploration (simulation, as predicted by Ted eons ago)
- Is the MMO inside out yet? More and more I find myself gaming with people like my ex mother-in-law (lovely woman, not a gamer of any description tho!)
- More worlds, fewer games? (does Facebook count as a world?)
- The phrase 'casual gaming' will die as everyone begins to game, casually and otherwise. Already so in South Korea (I find it useful to consider parts of Asia as possible reflections of our future(s)).
- The gaming industry will more fully begin to fund and rely on research.
- Singularity?
There are far too many of my interests resurrected in this post. Please add your favorite memes and join me in documenting our predictions! (how will we otherwise remember?)
The Wall Street Journal reports that the rampage killer Jared Loughner was a gamer. As usual? Recall Mr. Cho, whose killing of Hokies was followed immediately by angry denunciations of the game industry for programming him thusly. It turns out that the only game in his troubled mind was Sonic the Hedgehog. I guess Sonic only seems to be a cuddly rodent; he's actually the vehicle for a secret code that turns ordinary people into frenzied savages.
Loughner's preferred game was a MUD called Earth Empires. Aha! Now we get to the root of things! Richard Bartle, what insidious mind-altering snippet of code did you hide in MUD1 that has spread across the gaming industry and caused all these murders? Come clean, you rogue hacker!
On a serious note, it appears that Mr. Loughner's MUD community was more supportive and helpful to him than the world at large. He got kicked out of jobs and school, but one gets the impression from WSJ's report that EE forum readers never stopped trying to engage with him or give him advice. Certainly - and this is critical - none of the gamers encouraged him in his ravings.
While wandering through Mass Effect 2, I was struck with the vitality of the world. Circa 2004, the main attraction of a multiplayer environment relative to single player worlds was that single player worlds felt dead. Multiplayer, on the other hand, had vitality but also the annoyances of dealing with other people and their inevitable failure to be perfect friends, or perfect foils.That problem can be reduced by Social Engineering (SE): Designers use policy (sometimes enforced by code) to optimize an individual's experience when dealing with others. Judging from ME2, the problem of dead single-player worlds can be addressed successfully using a suite of tools involving digital storytelling, emotive animations, deep conversation scripts, and a strong responsiveness of the emotive/relational space of characters to the protagonist's actions. Altogether, let's call this bag of tricks "Artificial Emotion" or AE. It's not a new term, indeed Professor Turkle has paved the way here, as before.
As the market for fantasy evolves, these two approaches to improving happiness seem to be facing off.
Would humans be happier in an environment constructed just for them, when every other being behaves just so, even though none of those beings are actually people? Or would they be happier to live with other real people in an optimally designed social environment? Is it easier to improve AE or SE?The issues extend far beyond the game industry. In this area as in others, the game industry is charting territory that business and governments will deal with soon enough. If developments in SE dominate those in AE, look for a future of massively-linked online communities whose policies produce much more happiness than offline communities. If AE wins, look for a future involving isolation pods. Most likely, we will have both. As for offline existence, SE advances might translate into better governance in the real world - better companies, better neighborhoods, better schools. AE advances seem less likely to help the offline world.
Life in the soon-to-be-launched Old Republic may combine the best SE and the best AE in one world.
Call me a fan girl, but I think a little revolution snuck up on us while we weren’t looking.
[nepotism alert: I do work at Microsoft, but not currently in games. However I have been hearing about Kinect for a long time, under the codename Project Natal, whispered around the usability labs with a reverance usually limited to the more deserving nirvana or mecca.]
Moving your body instead of your controller(s) creates a range of viscera that surely denote a million possible magic circles. Sure Wii paved the way and some may continue to like that experience, but this is true evolution. The controller-less interface liberates developers to entertain any possibility for interaction. Select the best aspects, refine them, imagine what’s possible, and what people want that they don’t even know they want.
I have been watching my kid play since digital Santa delivered the magic device: dancing, delighted, shouting AWESOME!! repeatedly, enchanted by the physical experiences enabled by a small black bar, with wonder shouting ‘Mommy, I can fly!!’, nurturing pets and programming hamsters to compliment her in the way she loves. Always, always MOVING! ‘You can do two players and you don’t have to select anything, the second person can just jump right in!’, she crows. Techno-ambivalent auntie is even awed as they play dodgeball with one person controlling legs and another controls arms.
I'm enchanted in a somewhat uncustomary way: gamer-me, parent-me, vain-me (unboring exercise!), citizen-me and educator-me. We’re living in the future, people.
And now we have it, a Kinected WoW. Next time you see me: 30 pounds lighter.
A recent report in the Wall Street Journal reveals that Deep Packet Inspection is making a comeback. DPI allows analysts to work over the packets you send out and mine them for patterns relevant to problems like, deciding which ads to send your way. Earlier versions of this technology encountered much blowback due to privacy concerns. The current generation of promoters say that privacy is respected. In discussing how the systems handle privacy, the promoters make some interesting revelations about a completely different matter: Personality. It turns out that if I want to target ads to you very closely, I will tailor my pitches in different ways at different times of the day. You're just not the same consumer at work as you are at home. In a very interesting shift, one vendor mentioned in the article, Kindsight, says that it delivers information not on people but on characters. Characters - just like game characters. Yes: The shifting of character identified by Turkle and others in social media worlds is verified in DPI of our online behavior in general. In fact our shifting selves are so distinct from one another that someone can make money by identifying and tracing the differences.
Do we have shifting identities offline as well? Is the person unified, or is each person actually many people in one? The formula for the Trinity is "One God, Three Persons," and if one objects that that seems awfully contradictory, one is told that it is simply a mystery, something that need not make sense to be true. It is true whether logical or not.
Are we mysteries like this? Can we be one person but also several characters at the same time? An 8-sided die is one unified object and 8 different objects, all at the same time. You might also say it is one object with 8 states. Or, it is one object that appears as a different object from time to time, according to some standard of what makes for a relevant difference.
When we play RPGs we typically make not one character but many. This portfolio of characters - does it basically just extend the same process of character creation that we deploy for our offline selves? A new face for the die? When Kindsight examines my packets, will it treat my game characters just as it treats my workday research character, my evening politics character, and my weekend shopper character? "O, that's his female rogue. She never buys anything. Don't send the ad until The Shopper comes back."
Commenter Dave wrote to say that he's interested in a discussion about Call of Duty's policies toward user-created images.
Quoth Dave:
Recently a gamer asked a CoD developer if using a swastika as an emblem ingame would be ok. The developer said no and it would result in a ban.
Original question via Twitter; recent coverage; blog post by the developer.
Will it ever be possible to clearly separate the 'real world' from the virtual or will we always carry baggage over from one into the other? Will a red rising sun always mean Japanese imperialism to Chinese gamers?
End Quote
Interesting stuff. Thoughts?
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 economy continues to move slowly and economists seem as uncertain as ever about the causes and what to do. Months ago, I began to wonder – could this possibly be the first “exodus recession”? In my first book I sketched out the idea. Suppose economic activity moves from the real world into the virtual world. Human happiness is unaffected or even goes up, however, the goods that produce the happiness are now produced and consumed in a virtual environment rather than the real one. Measurements of economic activity, being all based in the real economy, would begin to show weakness. I argued that contemporary political and economic control systems do not tolerate much weakness, thus, there might well be some sort of crisis in the real world, for no good reason, simply because production and consumption was going “off the books” and into virtual environments. One term for this would be an "exodus recession" - an economic downturn caused by the movement of human attention and energy into virtual environments.
Are we in an exodus recession right now?
First, let's consider the reasoning by which an interest in virtual things would cause a recession in real life. Why would a movement to digital living cause a recession? My point of view has to be preceded by a disclaimer. Despite years of training by macroeconomists, I have to confess that I don’t feel that we (they or I) understand the macroeconomy very well. For better or worse, I tend not to look at macroeconomics using the Keynesian and Monetarist models bequeathed to economics students today. Over the years I’ve become convinced that the macroeconomy is primarily a matter of mass psychology. If we believe that the economy will grow, it will. Employers will invest and hire, workers will borrow and spend. If we believe that the economy will shrink, it will. Employers will hang onto cash and lay off workers, workers will save their money. Log-rolling and self-confirming expectation rule the day, in much the same way that money’s value is a huge social convention. So is the safety of your bank deposit a convention, insisting that the deposit is safe. Convention – think of the economy’s health as a social convention, an aspect of culture. After World War II, Germany and Japan – the most beaten down nations in human history – suddenly became the most vibrant economically. Is it because their governments (and ours) gave them a stimulus? Or was it because their governments carefully preserved the real purchasing power of their currency? Probably not. We call these events “miracles” because the models don’t explain them at all. The economic miracles happened because Germans and Japanese decided, on a cultural level, to be vibrant economies. Workers threw themselves into consumption and work. Companies threw themselves into investing and hiring. The economies grew like crazy. Hope is the thing to hope for; fear fear.The sensitivity of the state of the economy to our cultural understanding of the state of the economy is greater than ever. We live today in a world where the health of the economy is a widely-reported and narrowly-followed pseudo-fact. Business people focus like laser beams on employment figures, GDP growth rates, and so on. If the GDP growth rate falls from 3% per year to -1% per year – Ye Gods! It’s the end of the world! The impact of such changes on the happiness of an individual person is minimal by itself. But when we read about such things, we all react. Hiring doesn’t happen. Purchases are not made. Lo and behold, the drop from 3% to 1% becomes a drop from 1% to -2%, unleashing another round of anguish. People start to lose jobs – which DOES affect their happiness, a great deal.
The central government responds with stimulus and quantitative easing, none of which will work unless we all believe that a stimulus or QE is just the thing to make everyone believe that the economy is turning around. And if we all have some kind of pessimism about the long haul, if we believe that none of this is going to work, it just won’t – whatever Lord Keynes said.
In such an environment, even a little thing, if persistent, could touch off a prolonged mood of pessimism. Is it possible that the virtual economy is that thing?
George Will recently wrote about the increasing speed with which our experiences are going digital. Using data from Robert Weissenstein, chief investor for Credit Suisse, he notes that “In 2001, the iPod arrived. Less than a decade later, the number of employees of music stores has declined from about 80,000 to 20,000.” And “Three million iPods were sold in 2.5 years; 3 million Kindles were sold in two years; 3 million iPads were sold in 80 days; 3 million iPhones were sold in three weeks.”
Let’s construe the notion of “virtual economy” quite broadly: If you receive an experience by yourself through a machine that runs on digital technology, without doing or buying anything physical (other than press a few buttons), it’s virtual. To download a song and listen to it on your iPod is virtual; to go to a concert is real, to buy a CD and play it is real, to play your own instrument is real. The difference I want to highlight is in the physical nature of the economic transaction. The virtual transaction does not require the movement or alteration of anything physical. Not even physical money changes hands. The real transaction involves material being created, moved, consumed, all by human hands.
Using these concepts, there’s some evidence that an exodus from the real to the virtual is not only already underway (as I argued in my second book) but that’s it’s gotten big enough to affect our sense of a whether the real economy is healthy or not. In support, here’s a series of random judgments about the state of the real world.
TV viewing is down among 18-34 year old males, and movie attendance is flat. Meanwhile, more and more time is being spent online or playing videogames. If you want to get 80 hours of fun watching movies, you need $1000. You can get the same fun from a game for $50. Spending time online or playing videogames simply involves less expenditure in the real economy.
Human eyeballs see a lot fewer ads than they used to. As noted, some people are watching less TV. For most others, the TV they’re watching is increasingly DVR’d or Hulu’d, that is, stripped of ad content. On the internet, we avoid ads easily – they are usually in the periphery, and if not we can click them away, or surf to something else. Advertisers have made an industry on the presumption that ads make people buy things. If they are right, it follows that fewer ads would result in us buying less. Ads are less and less a part of our daily experience. HBO’s success with a show about evil advertisers is perhaps apt now, because we feel we finally have gotten the upper hand on these miscreants. The net result of our power over advertisers, according to their own model, would be a weakness in general real-world consumption.
Facebook is a great way for people to connect. In some FB games, you can buy someone else a beer. You can poke them, write on their wall, friend them. None of this causes anything in the real world to be moved or changed. There are 500m people on FB, hundreds of millions more on other, similar social networking sites. If you’re friending people on FB, you’re ever so slightly less likely to be sending them a real Hallmark card, ever so slightly less likely to write them a note on paper, ever so slightly less likely to give them a call. That’s probably not going to turn around, either. Our ability to socialize online puts a crimp in our general need to move stuff or change stuff in the real world.
People who spend time online don’t have to worry about what they are wearing. Suppose that some percent of a given day can be spent in pajama’s, the rest must be spent in decent clothes. For decent clothes, you need a whole and varied wardrobe. For PJ’s, you need a few comfy ones. Now increase the amount of time that can be spent in PJ’s. The demand for decent clothes falls, if ever so slightly. The internet allows us to do all kinds of stuff in our PJ’s – so it must have an ever so slightly dampening effect on the market for fashion.
One could go on. It is possible, slightly, that there’s a general weakness in consumer spending simply because, to get our social, emotional, informational, and needs met, we just need fewer movies, fewer beers, fewer trips, fewer shoes, fewer things in general. What if the world of human beings suddenly became converted to the idea of consuming less stuff? Why, there’d be a recession, of course. Less buying means fewer jobs and less investment, which means economic contraction. It would mean a general pessimism about the prospects of business.
If our culture suddenly went Green, for example, we would have a recession but we would also understand its cause. We would know that a dissatisfaction with materialism led to economic weakness. But if this conversion to less consumption came from a different and more obscure source, how would we identify it? What if real world consumption refused to grow not because people were becoming hippies, but because they remained selfish materialists who had, however, come to enjoy virtual matter? If an exodus recession were underway, what would the world look like?
For one thing, the general pessimism about the economy in an exodus recession would not extend to the industries that produce virtual experience. Indeed, the video game and social networking industries are booming right now. Computer and digital entertainment hardware and software – doing quite well, thank you. Bold innovations in devices happen every year, and the number of apps is skyrocketing.
Another aspect of an exodus recession would be that consumers, in general, would not be expressing much general pessimism about being consumers. There’d be no sign that people had given up on the idea of buying and selling things. They’d be as interested in money, the economy, and jobs as ever. However, they would consistently say that they’re slightly less interested in buying a washing machine than they were last year. You don’t have to do as much washing when you spend more time living through your avatar. They’re going to be slightly less interested in a car because they’re not going to go driving around quite as much. This has nothing to do with malaise or lack of government stimulus or the conversion of a culture to moderate spending. It begins with people buying digital stuff instead of real stuff. And indeed, we find in the recent US election that people are very interested in jobs and the economy. Yet collectively they seemed to react less powerfully than expected to efforts to stimulate their real-world spending. This would make sense if people are turning their consuming energy to mp3s, FB gadgets, and Xbox Live Achievements. Having a new road is not going to have much effect on an economy based on digital goods.
These are all conjectures, of course. It’s a what-if. Is it possible? I thought we would not see a real-world recession caused by the removal of consumption energy into virtual environments until sometime in the far future. But I didn’t think about the possibility that the term “virtual environment,” in its economic meaning, might expand to environments as diverse as Hulu and Facebook. Are people now spending enough time fiddling around with digital stuff that their interest in physical stuff has weakened to the point that it catalyzes an ongoing cycle of economic pessimism? Perhaps not. But some trends certainly point in that direction. Even if this is not the first exodus recession, one wonders how far off that first one may be.
Mark and I have collaborated on a number of things these last few years, and now that he has finished his doctoral work (woot!), I invited him to guest author and summarize his work for us. Mark is another virtual worlds researcher who relies on traditional anthropological methods to understand social dynamics and learning. He's a great researcher and an extremely passionate gamer.
Using ethnographic methods, Mark Chen focuses on teamwork, communication, and expertise development in situated gaming cultures. Currently, Mark is a post-doctoral scholar at the UW Institute for Science and Mathematics Education, working with computer science folks to study player learning through science and math games that take advantage of massive amounts of computational and human power. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, College of Education, looking at the practices of a group of gamers in the online game World of Warcraft. Prior to doctoral work, Mark was the webmaster and a web game developer for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, OR. He holds a B.A. in Studio Art from Reed College and grew up in the Bay Area as a child of the 80s. You can read more about Mark on his blog...
The other day, a reporter asked me whether video games are art, and thus the waves of Roger Ebert's lately weakly retracted opinion to the contrary crash lap upon our shores. If Roger Ebert can offer a strong opinion just for the heck of it, so can we! So let's dive in.
Here's my take: Good art is shocking, interesting and true.
Shocking: It takes you out of your normal mode of thinking. It forces consideration and reflection.
Interesting: It draws you in. You find yourself unable or unwilling to ignore it.
True: It accords with a proper understanding of the human condition. It pierces the shell of your biases and immaturities, allowing you to come upon thoughts that are neither lies nor myths but rather subtle and profound insights.
Are video games capable of being shocking, interesting, and true?
To answer, let's use these razors a bit and see how they cut.
Cage's 4'33" may be art, but it is not good art.
It's not shocking. It was once shocking for about a quarter-hour, I suppose, but with 30 minutes' reflection it can be seen as an unimaginative extension of Duchamp's toilet. Forever after, the only reasonable thing to say (other than yawning) is "It's been done." Shock value in art is difficult to achieve. The standard is this: On repeated experiences, do I become troubled? Reflective? Moved? Does it feel different each time? Too many artists (Far too many! Please become sheep farmers or recluses or lawyers, please, please, just go away!!) seem to think that any lazily considered move that does not fit within the contemporary norms of un-PhD'd folk must therefore meet the standard of artistic shock. It's easy to shock the housewife in Peoria. Put crucifixes in urine, shit in cans, and buildings in cellophane. But you see, shocking her is not enough. You have to shock me. Good luck with that. "But - it's GREAT BIG cellophane!!" Uh-huh. Yep. Great. Thank you so much for coming. Next, please.
Speaking of yawning, 4'33" is not interesting. Silence is not interesting, nore are its equally overused siblings, noise and abstraction. Silence and noise and theoretical shapings are not interesting, they are BORING. Music, the repeating art, is interesting when it establishes expectations and then satisfies them in an unexpected way. Silence and noise don't do that. In visual arts, mere abstraction confronts the viewer with a closed door. Thus: Mondrian is BORING. Rothko is BORING. Intellectual art similarly drives the person away. If I have to read seven books on art theory and history to grasp the significance, it is not good art, it is BORING. Deconstructions, destructions, critiques, ready-mades, and reductions are not bad because they are too easy ("My kid could have drawn that!") but because they offer, on reflection, no good reason to pay attention. What's a "good reason"? It comes down to my humanity which, I must report, I am not at all ready to surrender. I am a human being. In this dull, dull, dull world of office buildings and "Click here to win!" banners, I need to encounter things that massage my aesthetic sensibilities and keep them alive. I am concerned about the engagement quality of art not because I am a petulant sensation-seeker but because I need art that lives in my world with me. My world is a battle between steel, silicon, and blood. If art does not have blood in it, does not engage me in my human needs, and that right quickly, it merely contributes to the oppressions that the rest of experience imposes.
Finally, 4'33" is not True. I am a Christian and a Catholic one at that (cf. "blood," above). At various times I've been a capitalist, a progressive, an atheist, a militarist, an internationalist, an anarchist, and God knows what else. Like you, I have mulled many approaches to life (with the frequent help of art), and like you, I have molded these thoughts into a trash heap of stances that I take, more or less, as my "position." It's an ugly and disordered pile, yes. But it's mine, and dearly earned. It has changed over the years, but lately it has become pretty stable. Maybe I'm just old, I don't know. I keep kicking it and throwing stuff at it, just as I've always done, but there's a core to it that I (shock of shocks!) am comfortable calling The Truth. The Way It Is. Just the Facts. Saying this opens an easy and devastating move for those of you who don't believe in truth-with-a-capital: You can just say that the guy is an old-school Universalist and Absolutist whose views have been long discredited; Derrida said so, so did [insert names of 100 Frenchmen here], so, toss the essay. Hold, however, for one moment, so I can confess to you that my junk-heap is consciously post-ironic, post-deconstruction, post-critical. After destruction comes renewal, and I'm with the renewers. Well, whatever. This, my pile, such as it is, gives me a perspective on art, and having a perspective is essential to the act of aesthetic judgment. The junk-heap of Things You Have Decided Are True, whatever they may be, forms a standard that protects you from art that is mere ideology, sugary myth, or outright lie. Speaking of which: In my junk heap of stances, there's a big old couch in the middle, one of those comfy 100-ton things, that says "The Universe is not silent. It is filled with a voice of sentient love." From this perspective, I sense that silence is not true. In the same way, Duchamp's toilet is "not true," does not accord with my truthpile. Human artistic endeavor, including the institutions that frame it, does not amount to a toilet. Furthermore, those institutions cannot turn a toilet into art or silence into music. That just ain't the way it is. Thus, gg 4'33". You can have some respect or appreciation for art that does nothing more than attack or praise your comfy old couch, but mere attacks and lauds are not enough. The art must resonate with the couch, enlighten your understanding of it, grasp it and help you grasp it. Otherwise its not art, its just entertainment (or less).
Very well, 4'33" is not good art. What is? Take Richard III. Not a deep play at all, but when staged in a way that respects the author's intentions (Yes, authors have intentions, and we can know them through the work itself), it's good art. It's shocking - encountering the depravity of Richard in his pitiable body always takes you out of your comfort zone. It's interesting - Shakespeare wrote for *everybody.* The groundlings liked his plays, so did the Queen, so did the other playwrights. Art can and should appeal to lots of people at the same time and in a similar way. That, by the way, is the standard for democratic art; I'm amazed at the flippancy with which contemporary art is described as democratic even when its offerings are impenetrable (BORING! Admit it!) to other thinkers, let alone the guy on his way home from work. Finally, Richard III is true. We know all too well that narcissists crave thrones and will manipulate our sympathies to get them. Moreover, there's a pattern of such broken people, empowered, doing awful things. It all accords with my Truthpile. As much as I might dislike being reminded of it, some people that I feel sorry for can be dangerous to things I care about. It's a fact of human life that I ignore at my peril.
Given all that: Can a video game be art? You bet. Consider Fable.
Shocking: These days, we normally think of Evil as something rather noble. Evil acts, it is said, are merely misunderstood acts. The skills of moral discernment have fallen into disuse (or are in no more use than they ever were, I suppose). In the public sphere, even acts of profound wickedness are massaged into the acts of crazed minds - not minds under the influence of a Deceiver. The whole idea of thinking in such terms is considered childish and impolite by many otherwise reasonable folk. Thus there's great confusion (not debate - confusion) about what's good and what's evil. You see this in most games. Play the "evil" side and you're really just a dark hero. Not so in Fable. Play as an evil character there and you get the actual experience of being a monster. You murder the innocent, oppress the weak, steal from the poor, and scare little kids. As a result, people shriek when they see you. They hate you. They disrespect you. They curse your name. They seek to keep you from their company; they shun you; they make you alone. They would kill you if they could, and the person who drove the lance into your heart would be hailed as a redeemer. This treatment of evil - as an utterly pathetic and ignoble choice - is, in contemporary contexts, quite shocking. It may be shocking for other times as well; evil is said to have a glamor. Perhaps the reminder of what evil amounts to always has shock value. In any case, Fable is shocking, and not cheaply so.
Interesting: Fable is a fun game.
True: Somewhere in my pile is a huge stack of histories according to which there have been many evil acts, and, on a thorough review, there really hasn't been anything noble or heroic about those acts. They are typically sophomoric outrages perpetrated by lazy thinkers (mine certainly were are). Those who commit bad deeds are not secretly brilliant, unfairly marginalized victims of society's oppressions. Villains like to think of themselves this way, as did Shakespeare's Richard, but the record shows that your typical villain is just an emotional toddler with weapons and a theory. The villain's lack of self-control and compassion rightly earn ostracism and imprisonment. We do well to control such people if we can, run away if we have to. Thus the treatment of evil in Fable accords well with my Truthpile.
Putting it all together: Yes, video games are capable of being art.
That's my answer to Roger Ebert! What's yours?
On IGN, an announcement for the Michael Jackson MMO we've all been waiting for: Planet Michael. The announcer 'couldn't stop laughing'. No violence. You win using 'the power of dance'. Using your keyboard, not your actual body. Free to play. Virtual items will be available for 'real-world currency'. Charitable contributions enabled.
From the press release:
Planet Michael will be an immersive virtual space themed after iconic visuals drawn from Michael’s music, his life and the global issues that concerned him. Entire continents will be created that will celebrate Michael’s unique genius in a way that underscores his place as the greatest artist of all time. Michael’s longtime fans will feel at home as they find themselves in places that seem familiar and yet unknown at the same time, and new generations will discover and experience Michael’s life in a way never before imagined. At its core, Planet Michael is a massive social gaming experience that will allow everyone, from the hardcore fan to the novice, to connect and engage in collaborative in-game activities with people worldwide.
Though my initial inclination was to disparage, maybe this could work... MMO universes drawn from the world-views of famous individuals. Elvis-verse? BeatlesWorld? DalaiLamaUniverse? PicassoPlanet? LadyGagaLand! I'm impressed that Planet Michael's mechanics are designed to uphold his pacifist leaning and philanthropic efforts, and I can imagine that forays into his imaginings are ripe with possibility <chortle>.
I predict the vanity MMO will become a trend, and as much as I hate to say it, could be the break-through-to-the-mainstream (the Second Life commercial push all over again). What do you all think? Will we see the Housewives of Beverly Hills obsessed with their first virtual worlds?
Monday, March 30th at 11am Pacific Time, Tom Boellstorff, Celia Pearce, Thomas Malaby and I will be in Second Life on a panel discussing the following question:
What can qualitative and experimental methods tell us about virtual worlds and culture?
Roland Legrand of the Belgian news outlet MediaFin, and author of Mixed Realities, will moderate the panel. Click here to get details on attending the event in Second Life.
And read on for the dramatic backstory!
Earlier this month, I had cultural anthropologist Tom Boellstorff on Metanomics, along with Prof. Celia Pearce, for a discussion about anthropological research on virtual worlds. We had some great discussions, before and during the show, about how traditional methods of anthropological research apply to virtual world settings.
For those who don't follow the field, Tom is the Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, but despite his lofty credentials, has spent a good deal of time in Second Life, where he conducted the research behind his recent book, Coming of Age in Second Life. Celia Pearce is a former doctoral student of his, and has studied the "Uru diaspora" in There.com and Second Life. You can get all of the links and background information on them here, as well as the audio, video and text transcripts of the discussion, and even the inworld backchat. (We at Metanomics take our archives seriously!).
Anyway, leave it to me to stick my foot in it at the end of the show by making a rather Castronova-esque proposal:
Virtual worlds give anthropologists a fascinating new opportunity—to actually create cultures. Virtual world developers have already been doing this, as our guests showed so clearly over the last hour. So let’s bring research anthropologists into the mix, right up front, and use VWs as a laboratory to test and refine the predictions of anthropological theory.
Naturally I elaborated on the benefits of the experimental method, and the promise and challenges I saw with such a research program. I didn't intend to be controversial, but cue the rotten tomatoes, in the form of this blog discussion.
Frankly, I think there is a lot less disagreement than it seems on the surface--research methods should complement one another, at least as much as they compete--but there are also a lot of substantive issues that could benefit from further discussion. Discuss them we will, and I hope some Terra Novans will join us.
Feel free to weigh in on the debate (you might start with Boellstorff's reaction to Castronova's suggestion along similar lines), and pose questions for the panelists.
I recently read and enjoyed a paper that has been posted to ssrn on gaming and guanxi in China, and I wanted to post about it here because this is the kind of new scholarship on online gaming that we need. Guanxi is the management of relationships of reciprocity in China, primarily through gift-giving, and it is a topic with a long history in the anthropology of China. Here, Silvia Lindtner, Scott Mainwaring, and Yang Wang accomplish what has been a relative rarity in game studies -- they give an account of how the rise of online gaming there shapes and is shaped by this longstanding cultural practice. What is really impressive about this kind of new work is that it resists two common temptations. They do not reduce online gaming there to existing cultural forms (which would be the old wine in new bottles argument), nor do they argue the exceptionalist position -- that online gaming changes everything and sweeps away the past. While I would like to see this kind of work weave in more participant observation data (the emphasis here is on interview material), this is a step forward. Highly recommended.
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.
In the piece I look at how anthropology as a discipline stumbled a bit in thinking about play, but simultaneously managed to develop a useful approach to ritual. This approach avoided making the litmus test of a ritual whether it brought about religious experience, and therein is a lesson for those of us studying games and play. Pushing further in this direction, I assert that the ideas of William James and the pragmatist philosophers in general may hold the key to moving forward in our understanding of games and play.
Here is an excerpt (the many footnotes excised here, for convenience):
Huizinga set the tone for much of the inquiry into games and society in the latter half of the twentieth century with his book Homo Ludens. This book bears much responsibility for fostering the unfortunate view, developed more rigidly still by Caillois, that games are culturally sequestered and consequence-free activities. Still, here as in many such midcentury works of cultural history, illuminating contradictions abound. As Huizinga’s argument develops, near the end of his text he focuses on something quite different: “Civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play…it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.” Huizinga is much more enlightening when he speaks of the “play-element” (just the type of experience or disposition that interests us here), rather than of “play” as a (separable, safe) activity. For him the play-element -- marked by an interest in uncertainty and the challenge to perform that arises in competition, by the legitimacy of improvisation and innovation that the premise of indeterminate circumstances encourages -- is opposed above all to utilitarianism and the drive for efficiency. Caillois likewise, despite his misleading claim that games are occasions of “pure waste,” recognizes the centrality of contingency in games. Huizinga felt that the play element had been on the wane in western civilization since the eighteenth century, threatened by the drive for efficiency and the routinization of experience it brought.
These tantalizing recognitions of the contingent nature of experience in the world direct us to sources and analogues in philosophical thought. American pragmatist philosophers broke from the Western tradition in their rejection of an ultimately ordered universe: for them the universe was, as Louis Menand put it, “shot through with contingency.” The pragmatists were not alone in this insight. The phenomenologists also gestured toward it, notably in Martin Heidegger’s concept of “thrownness” (which was developed in anthropology by Michael Jackson). The ideas of “practice theory,” as Ortner described it, are also consistent with this picture of the world as an ongoing and open-ended process: Pierre Bourdieu, Marshall Sahlins, Michel DeCerteau, and Anthony Giddens each have sought in different ways to overcome determinative pictures of the world. Although the scope of this essay allows only a broad description of these connections, I suggest that we are at a point where, in recognizing these commonalities, we can begin to forge a useful concept of play that will inform our understanding of experience in a uncertain world.
What are the features of play as a disposition toward the world in all its possibility? First, it is an attitude that is totalizing in the sense that it reflects an acknowledgment of how events, however seemingly patterned or routinized, can never be cordoned off from contingency entirely. As the scientist James Clerk Maxwell put it, the “metaphysical doctrine that from the same antecedents follow the same consequents... is not of much use in a world like this, in which the same antecedents never again concur, and nothing ever happens twice.” The earthier popular sentiment in American English, “Shit happens,” signals the same conviction. Second, the disposition of play is marked by a readiness to improvise, a quality captured by Bourdieu in his development of Mauss’ concept of the habitus. To be practically equipped to act, successfully or not, amid novel circumstances is the condition of being a social actor at all, Bourdieu argues. One can also note Dewey’s argument that uncertainty is inherent in practice, and that it is in contrast to this practical open-endedness that theoretical claims to certainty seek to marginalize and denigrate practical knowledge. Finally, play is a disposition that makes the actor an agent within social processes, albeit in an importantly restrained way; the actor may affect events, but this agency is not confined to the actor’s intent, or measured by it. Rather, it allows for unintended consequences of action. This is consistent with Oliver Wendell Holmes' “bettabilitarianism,” his answer to utilitarianism; every time we act, we effectively make a bet with the universe which may or may not pay off.
I look forward to any comments.
P.S: I am moved to post this by the kick in the pants given to us here at TN by Keith Ellis, who has reminded us to continue to involve TN in our thinking through of these issues, even as our changing circumstances tend to sap our time and pull our attention elsewhere. Many thanks, Keith.
[UPDATE: As with some other posts on TN, the comments for this post have become borked, and are not showing up properly. My apologies to those who have tried to post, Chris most recently. -TMM]
[UPDATE II: Comments are fixed! TN has now incorporated the code that allows you to navigate through multiple pages of comments. See the "Next" link at the end of their first page (after 25 comments). Huge thank you to Greg for sorting this out this week! -TMM]
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...
When it came to generalizability, Maxwell (yes, that Maxwell) was ready to wield a not-so-subtle hammer against those he saw as seeking to hitch science to a positivist view of the world. He said (in a speech the text of which is available here):
It is a metaphysical doctrine that from the same antecedents follow the same consequents...[I]t is not of much use in a world like this, in which the same antecedents never again concur, and nothing ever happens twice.
By highlighting the irreducibly contingent nature of the world, Maxwell joined Charles Darwin in a view of scientific inquiry that saw its provisionality as perfectly consistent with a world that was not, in the last analysis, law-driven and ordered. Instead, they argued that the proper aim of science was to explore the processes that are in place under different conditions, with an awareness that those conditions never perfectly reproduce themselves (for Maxwell, this anti-positivism was also tied to his religious views).[fn 3]
In a sense, all academic research is based on critical observation of such situated events and circumstances. It may be concerned, yes, with making provisional comparisons across them when possible, but it is just as often concerned with understanding the specific processes in place that led to unique outcomes not generalizable elsewhere. For this reason attempts to trumpet generalizability as the primary (or exclusive) aim of the social sciences (where I see it happening quite often) not only marginalize particularist work by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and others, but (ironically, to me) thereby also seek to exclude a vast swath of the natural sciences (such as much work in paleontology, geology, and biology, to name a few).
As work in the sociology of science has shown, expert critical evaluation (usually associated with the humanities), observation, and hypothesis-testing are all used by all branches of the natural sciences. Efforts to claim special status for the natural sciences (or any field) by pointing to hypothesis-testing ignore not only this, but also the fact that, as Maxwell suggests, hypothesis-testing in the absolute sense does not, in fact, exist (what you have instead are very very very very close approximations of it, and this is only possible for certain kinds of conditions).
What this means for research on virtual worlds is that we must be wary of how the drive to fight for resources may prompt researchers to claim that a certain kind of project (generalization, particularization), or a certain kind of methodology is "scientific" (or, one might imagine, "humanistic," although the comparative lack of money makes this more of a localized danger!), while others are not. A broad view of science, in all its variety, and, ultimately, of academic inquiry, should inoculate us from this kind of divisive maneuvering. Critical observation, exploratory research, and hypothesis-driven work are all going to be vital components of understanding what virtual worlds are all about.
[fn 1] Alert TN reader "Rex" (aka Alex Golub) pointed out this issue in the comments on that post, and I have long wanted to give that observation a proper response.
[fn 2] I am also moved to write this because there is something of an ongoing conversation about scientific "truth" and methodologies here on TN (one example).
[fn 3] For further critical discussions of the limitations of generalizability see the Preface of Anthony Giddens' The Constitution of Society, and Chapter 8 of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue.
Right now I’m reading about player behavior in MMOs. I keep thinking how similar those player behaviors and game worlds are to the fantastical real-world-overlays we know as religions. Both imbue players with feeling of elevated direction.
Religions and MMOs give believers/players a lot in exchange for their subscription. Believers get a realm to achieve in that doesn’t necessarily affect what most people hold to be the real world. Recurrent personalities exist at the same time as the believers, but persist regardless of the life span of any one believer. Your grandmother's Jesus is your Jesus. The NPC you met last week during a quest will be there two months from now when you sign up a secondary character. And lastly, religions and virtual worlds both contain objectives that can be broken down into steps for the believer. Religions almost always require believers to do at least one thing, even if it's only to take an NPC into their heart. That action is not much different, and frankly, takes much less time, than solving riddles, collecting items, or grinding XP.
On a daily basis, religions exist mostly as information overlays on the everyday lives of people that subscribe to them. Believers translate the information they receive from the 3D graphical world into strategic information which determines their action in that world. This action-to-strategic-decision chain can be as ephemeral a believer getting a feeling after prayer that a problem has been resolved by that prayer. The believer may continue in the world without needing to confront the problem through any other action, secure in the knowledge that ‘something has been done.’ What other human activity offers this kind of achievement?
Players communicate, often on a daily basis, with other human beings that are participating in their personal instantiation of the experience. But religions can be pretty different from each other, or at least they contain varying teachings and characters. So are religions just shards of the same virtualspiritual world that humans have concocted? If you’ve ever seen the “all religions have a Golden Rule" posters (“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” et cetera) then you’ve seen that the underlying values of nearly all religions are the same.
Players also communicate with the personalities directly tied into the
fiction of the world. Saints, gods, buddhas - or NPCs? Though a very
High Level of NPC is ususally barred from communicating with the
believer, until a certain “level” has been reach, at some point the believer will go to heaven, reach nirvana, or ascend. Or does the believer just level up?
Religions even have their power gamers. I think of John Donne
as a religious power gamer. He left the Catholic church for the
Anglican church. It might be more that he left one guild for another, seemingly more
powerful, guild. His poetry, in which he pleads, demands, and then
cajoles with an unmoving non-player character seems as efficient a
strategy as any in a world in which your turns are very limited... And
he wasn’t even a self-fashioned god or prophet. Aren’t self-fashioned prophets and saints just demanding more agency in the game world? It is called god mode, after all.
Here I am not positing that virtual worlds are religions, but rather that religions are virtual worlds.
What do you think?
Due to my interest in the global aspects of MMOGs and games generally, I wound up at a really interesting session at GDC a couple of weeks ago. It was titled "Self-Censoring Potential Content Risks for Global Audiences: Why, How and When" given by Tom Edwards from Englobe. His talk went far beyond the "avoid blood in Germany, stay away from the Taiwanese flag if you want China as a market" tidbits I've seen before. He argued for something beyond localization--adequate culturalization of games, which makes increasing sense, given the emerging markets and necessities for creating games that appeal to more than one cultural/national/whatever group. Yet his talk was focused on single-player and offline multi-player games, and I began to wonder, how would MMOGs fit in?
Going back to his (great) talk, he mentioned various areas that can cause trouble when games leave their studio (and I should point out that he also mentioned the United States as a "potential hot spot" for some content, which is really no surprise). Potentially troublesome themes include religion (including borrowing from actual religions or making up religions that look suspiciously similar to real world ones), ethnicity (again, using the real, or creating fictional races that might be mistaken for real ones), history, politics and cultural systems, and particular types of content (including character design, text, images, maps, audio, packaging and marketing). Whew! Makes you wonder how games ever make it past such 'content police.'
But his main point wasn't to erase anything potentially provocative from games, but to be aware of what might cause trouble, to get rid of what you really don't need in games, and to build your arguments for content you think must or should be included. Fair enough. But again, all of the examples he drew from were not MMOGs. How might they fit in? They certainly have a global audience, and we know some elements are localized, yet I haven't seen systematic work that examines those changes or any potentially troublesome examples. So my question is-- do you know of material that has been altered for various "versions" of MMOGs (different servers/countries), or problems that have arisen because of such content? And do MMOG designers take such things into account?
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 paradigmatic example of an institution which faces this question of political legitimacy is the modern bureaucratic state. As Max Weber famously observed, the state is the entity "that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory" (1946:78, emphasis in original; online version here). The legitimacy is important, of course, because ruling by illegitimate force is costly -- one wants to release the hounds only when necessary. But on what grounds is this legitimacy claimed? The bureaucratic state, by itself, can refer only to its procedures as right in and of themselves, and this is a weak foundation on which to construct a sense of belonging and legitimate rule amongst a citizenry. The nation, however, is a rich font of such meanings, containing as it does arguments about shared language, culture, history, and territory (all in the context of an "us" that is not "them"). So the story of the nation-state (as it is usually called in the literature) is one that involves an intimate relationship between the institutional apparatus of the state and the symbolic resource of the "nation". (NB: I am collapsing to an unforgivable degree what is an enormous body of scholarship on the state and its relationship to the nation -- this list is a place to start, at least.)
For virtual worlds, however, there is no central metaphor of the nation already in place. Certainly, as they persist they are generating shared languages, meanings, and practices, to a certain degree, and one sees attempts to port offline categories of territorial belonging into virtual worlds, with varying degrees of success. But I have noticed something else, and it leads me to ask whether games and the indeterminate outcomes they generate can be a source of political legitimacy.
Recently, a graduate student of mine, Krista-Lee Malone, posted a paper at ssrn (Malone 2007) based on the master's thesis she completed at UW-Milwaukee. The thesis was about hardcore raiding guilds in World of Warcraft, and the paper looks comparatively at the adoption of DKP systems by two guilds. Malone suggests that DKP systems create "player obligation to the guild through a rationalized system intended to measure commitment" and that they therefore constitute a core practical component of how guilds as institutions establish legitimate rule. The gameness is relevant in DKP, because player performance in the game is a factor (50 DKP MINUS!).
Similarly, when doing research at Linden Lab I noticed a number of attempts to deploy games as mechanisms to generate outcomes that could stand as legitimate and, importantly, be an alternative to, for example, top-down decision-making, or democratic voting. One such attempt was through the application of the Elo Rating System.
Second Life is a good example of a project – and Linden Lab has been a good example of a company – that is deeply informed by the “left-libertarian” attitude toward technology and its promise which has shaped everything from the structure of the early internet to the proliferation of personal computers, but about which I do not have sufficient space to say more here (see Turner, 2006). Suffice it to say that in a political sense Linden Lab in 2005 was characterized by an almost overpowering faith in technology, matched only by a similarly monumental suspicion of vertical authority – especially bureaucratic authority, although charismatic authority was suspect as well. The paradox for Linden Lab was how to realize the ongoing creation of Second Life in a way that was consistent with their idealized vision of individual creativity and liberty, while remaining indisputably and unavoidably the single most powerful institutional player on the scene.
Over the course of my field research at Linden Lab, I discovered that this tension between vertical control and horizontal, “emergent” governance was not only a key to understanding their struggles to make Second Life, but also of their struggle to make themselves as an organization. For as Second Life grew in size and complexity, so did Linden Lab, and this tension came to be the preoccupying focus of their own organizational lives as well. This preoccupation was the result of the same politically-charged disposition, one which tended to treat top-down or vertical decision-making as the antithesis of empowered and creative collaboration. As people at Linden Lab witnessed their creation and their company growing, this fear of a loss of liberty reached, at times, a fervent pitch, and in this ongoing predicament they are not alone in high-tech circles. Google, as recent coverage by several journalists has revealed, is similarly shaped by a disposition that combines a deep faith in technology with a rejection of vertical authority. Julian Dibbell has also recently charted the strange advent of what he calls ludo-capitalism, wherein labor experience is increasingly framed as (and constituted to be) a game. We should therefore be eager to understand how the entities that have their hands deep into the recesses of our digital lives are going about trying to solve their version of the challenge that famously preoccupied nation-states: how to establish legitimate institutional power in the face of practical and undeniable imperfections and limitations.
Elo rating systems are a group of statistical methods for calculating the relative skill levels of large numbers of players for two player games. Based on a system developed originally by Arpad Elo for generating a ranking of chess players, they have since been both modified and improved within chess and adapted for other two-player games. A ranking system generates a rating for each player, and is seen as legitimate in the degree to which these ratings seem to accord with the matches that do manage to get played. Thus, a key aim of these systems is also to predict the outcomes of matches between rated players, and its accuracy is thereby judged (and thus the system may also come to be modified). In this way, Elo rating systems generate an emergent ordered ranking, and this emergent quality made this technique an attractive solution for the challenge that faced Linden Lab: how to generate a ranked order of prioritization from a heterogenous collection of company tasks.
In mid-2005, one developer at Linden Lab, himself quite familiar with chess ranking systems, set about to code onto Jira a system built on Elo’s algorithm. He created a webpage that pitted two (and only two) tasks against each other for Lindens to choose. These “matches” would over time generate a list of highest-ranked to lowest-ranked Jira tasks. Rosedale enthusiastically supported this effort, and in two days the programmer had created the system and sent an email over the company-wide email list containing a link to the site. Upon arriving at the site, one saw a simple presentation of two Jira tasks, including each one’s title, unique Jira number, and a brief description. Employees were simply to pick one of the two (or pick a “draw”) and the system would record that match result and generate another match of two more tasks (soon after they were each asked to pick winners of ten such “matches” a day). Many Lindens tried out the system with some enthusiasm, as it seemed relatively un-“gameable”. Hundreds of matches were “played” in a short span of time (a matter of days), and a ranked list was generated. For Rosedale, this was a step on the road toward realizing an ideal of company decision-making from the ground up. For others, the system was suspect at the point of participation; presented with two entirely heterogenous tasks (add a urinal to the men’s bathroom vs. add a web browser to the Second Life client), they felt that picking between them was nonsensical. It was eventually abandoned in practice and other game-based (and non-game-based) initiatives to tap into the wisdom of Linden Lab’s crowd were tried.
So, I am left with a lingering question. Was the ultimate illegitimacy of the Elo-ranking system due to something deeper -- the fact that it was an attempt to incorporate a game into corporate decision-making? The suggestion I would like to make is that, for institutions, games are in fact quite difficult to domesticate, precisely because they can generate outcomes that challenge or outright contradict any existing, more coherent, narratives. And I would add to this another issue, just as important, and that is how the legitimacy of a game's outcomes is directly related to the community of its players or the institution which controls it (as in the case of organized sports). When games are mobilized for purposes other than the playing in and of themselves, who gets to interpret the outcomes, and say what they mean? The sponsoring institution, or the participating players? To me, these are central questions as we see more and more institutions attempting to govern through games. While Julian has rightly focused on what this means for labor and exploitation, in the Marxian sense, I think there is a related (Weberian) question that we must attend to as well -- how are institutions learning to use games to establish legitimate governance?
References
Malone, Krista-Lee. (2007). Dragon kill points: The economics of power gamers. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1008035.
Turner, Fred. (2006). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Weber, Max. (1946). From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Being a researcher interested in the user experience of interactive technologies, I have always been following how video games are employed as a platform to explore certain topics and practices, especially in social sciences/psychology. The use of such kind of platform has already been discussed in the human computer interaction field for a long time. In psychology, especially, you have papers from 1995 about "Video games as research tools" by Donchin or some statements by HCI researchers (like Holmquist in "The right kind of challenge").
Several scholars have stressed the interest of using virtual environments like video games as research tool for psychological investigation by citing three major reasons.
First, computer games are motivating and fun, and successful experimentation is easily achieved. Maintaining one’s undivided attention in video games is certainly easier than in other experimental environments. The use of a game metaphor has the advantage that it allows the presentation of complex problem solving tasks in an enjoyable environment, thus maintaining a high level of motivation amongst subjects. Besides, recent developments in augmented reality described by Nilsen have highlighted the motivational value of using game in HCI. Second, a game, especially a mobile computing one, involves participants in a context with a certain ecological validity. A game in public space indeed creates a certain kind of complexity with passers-by or real-world features. Another useful aspect is the fact that they attract “participation by individuals across many demographic boundaries such as, age, gender, ethnicity, educational status and even species” (quoted by Kowalski). We thus expected participants to have a higher level of involvement in a game than in another kind of complex task. However, these statements only hold for subjects that find such games enjoyable, those with little interest in games can fail to engage with the game, finding both the task and the interface difficult and confusing. Therefore, we chose to design simple games to avoid failures and misunderstandings.
What is intriguing is that psychologists often use virtual environments as a way to study phenomenon in physical space that can be difficult to explore. Virtual environments are then used as a substitute, which draws questions concerning the transfer of results from virtual environments to the physical. As described in a paper by Yvonne Slangen de Kort, this is not trivial:
"Whether research in VEs will – to a smaller or larger degree – substitute for research in the real world remains to be seen and will definitely require significant progress in technology and a more thorough understanding of the human factors issues involved. However, the fact that VR-technology has already been embraced by large numbers of professionals in design, urgently calls for research to increase our understanding of person-environment transactions in virtual worlds. The need for more research that addresses applications of perceptual simulations in general and related questions of validity and reliability has been stressed ever since the emergence of environmental simulation as a research paradigm."
Ted's Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University convened the second Ludium Conference this past weekend in Bloomington. Attendees were charged with hammering out a well-considered platform to guide virtual world policy. We were successful, and the Declaration of Virtual World Policy [Edit: along with its wiki] has been posted by the conference's designers, Studio Cypher. Here it is for your perusal and comment (along with more details):
A Declaration of Virtual World Policy
made by
representatives of law, industry, and academia, assembled in full and
free convention as the first Synthetic Worlds Congress.
Whereas virtual worlds are places with untapped potential, providing new and positive experiences and effects, we resolve that:
-A self-governance group of virtual world stakeholders should be formed
-A players’ bill of rights should be drafted and should include the right of free speech and the rights to assemble and organize.[Edit: FN1]
-A universal age verification system should be created to support the individual rights of all users
-Virtual world designers should have freedom of expression
-Virtual worlds should include plain-language End-User
License Agreements (EULA) to enable all individuals to understand their
rights
-There are different types of virtual worlds with different policy implications
-Access is critical to virtual worlds, so net neutrality must be maintained
-Game developers shall not be liable for the actions taken by players
-Fair use may apply in virtual worlds that enable amateur creation of original works
-The government should provide a comprehensive package of funding for educational games research, development, and literacy
[Edit: FN1 Modified to reflect correct wording voted on at Ludium 2.]
SWI plans to send this platform to all major candidates for the presidency and for all contested congressional seats in the coming 2008 election. I'm sure these statements will prompt a lot of discussion and debate (I hope so), but I thought I would remind everyone that the congress is concluded, and these are SWI's policy recommendations, at least until the next Ludium ;-). I'm sure that registration for that one will be open, as it was for this one.
The Ludia are conferences structured as games, and this one was modeled
on a political convention, the first Synthetic Worlds Congress. Studio Cypher deserves a lot of credit for creating a game that generated incentives to both compete and collaborate. All attendees began in districts (of three delegates), and started by forging platform planks, combining them regionally (3 districts to a region, 3 regions total) by the end of the first day. On the second day, all voted in multiple straw polls on 30 potential planks, with merging of planks and refinement of language prompted by the game design, the end goal being a list of 10 planks, as determined by a final vote. The list above is the result. In addition, the conference elected me as its Speaker, which basically puts me forward to direct the traffic of media and policy-maker inquiries about the declaration to the appropriate legal, industry, and academic experts. In the process of determining the speaker as well there was a greater interest amongst the nominees (Corey Bridges of Multiverse, Joshua Fairfield of Indiana University Law School and TN, and myself) in focusing on the platform, and the breadth of expertise in the room that would be able to speak to its specific planks, then on the race for the position.
We all know that well-designed games are good at generating incentives for their players, and in a way I took it as a sign of the success of this one that before the first day was even completed many players were eager to concentrate on the content of the planks rather than press for every advantage that the game mechanics gave them to accumulate "influence points" or the currency, gold coins. It quickly became apparent that the Ludium had sparked useful ideas and discussion about virtual world policy. The feeling that we were succeeding in hammering out a useful set of policy guidelines only grew over the course of day 2.
The Ludium was also the setting for related news from Ren Reynolds, who took the opportunity after final voting was completed to let us know about the Virtual Policy Network he is spearheading, and organization based in the UK that will tackle similar policy matters from a European as well as global perspective. Bravo, Ren!
[Edit: Some Ludium2 reports from attendees have appeared. Christian Renaud of Cisco has a post here, and Mia Consalvo has a post here. Ron Meiners has blogged about it at Virtual Cultures, Garrison LeHearst weighs in here, and Michelle Senderhauf of ARGNet posted during the conference. Richard, of course, blogged about it here, and Peter Jenkins has a post on his blog as well. Any I've missed? Drop a comment below and I'll add the link!]
I've said this statement and so have others and for many computer environments this can be true and hopeful. But what about those who cannot access an online gaming environment because the menu system the game used didn't work with the assistive technology they were using? Or what if the gamer, due to the type and/or severity of their disability felt awkward joining in because they were afraid that they'd feel the need to disclose their disability to explain certain things such as having to game at a different pace? If you do not have a disability, do you feel the need to disclose other factors about yourself such as gender, race, or sexuality in order to give others reason to understand your style of gaming? Probably not, unless you are playing at a role that is not your reality.
But I wonder how many people "play at" having a disability in a gaming world. Is it viewed socially as somehow more or less acceptable than saying that you are female or male when you are not? This is not to say that being either male or female is a "disability" but it does bring with it certain assumptions -- right or wrong -- about the person you've chosen to go into battle with online. This is also not to say that if someone were to disclose a disability that other gamers would run away as fast as they could. I don't believe that people, in general, are that...well, evil. But if a gaming experience is to include social interaction, a person who types more slowly and/or prone to making wording errors (for example, I do, as a gamer who has dyslexia) might be seen as a more frustrating gaming partner/clan member. I, too, might feel -- and I'm not sure that this is the right word but it's the one I'll use for now -- "guilty" about being the one who slows down the group.
Thoughts? How can we make MMOGs more inviting and accessible and playable and, yes, FUN for those with disabilities?
Discussions of emergent types of game play and questions about whether MMOs are more than “just a game” have made my anthropology senses tingle. In a previous post I brought up ritual but now I’m beginning to wonder why games aren’t tapping into all the different kinds of human culture that encourage human sociality?
Interactivity, room for player controlled practices in-game, a sense of realism and participation in a “living, breathing” worlds all seem to be major VW design goals reflected by the drive for ever better graphics – yet it seems that content writers and designers inevitably fail to acknowledge what it is that makes us human. Although MMO back-stories are often extraordinarily rich and detailed, where is the “culture”?
In every human society we find: 1) some kind of family structure, 2) religion/shared value systems, 3) communication networks, 4) social complexity (government, social organization, leaders/followers, etc), 5) recreation/arts, 6) education, and 7) economics/goods procurement and sharing (food, clothing, etc). Though these social forms are interpreted very differently between cultures, they exist universally as categories in every documented culture past and present.
Of these cultural universals, even the most advanced MMO genuinely incorporates only economics and some basic form of social complexity into their world systems. Yes, there are churches and priests in WoW, but there are no coherent religious belief systems clearly functioning, motivating characters and NPCs, impacting the world. Where are the mechanisms to participate in player-conducted rituals or create new branches of a religion? When will creating your character include constructing a dependant or family that can then play a role in that character’s own motives and missions? Where are the in-game mentoring systems through which you can actually teach other players powers available in no other way (taking it a step beyond City of Heroes and Asheron's Call)? These basic cultural systems help us make sense of our own world and can only advance our attempts to create more immersive virtual worlds. Can’t we create missions that involve a character’s dependant (they kidnapped Aunt Em, go save her!), provide room for people to create in-game cults or become part of existing religions that have all the benefits and restrictions of membership, provide tools for players to conduct meaningful rituals such as initiations, weddings, coming of age events that change the status of their characters?
Here’s my question – is it even possible to provide players with meaningful activities and tools with which they can develop these kinds of fundamental social structures in a way that is integrated with game play? If possible, why are these things still missing from MMOs? Perhaps because we still believe that it is “just a game”?
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).
I should state at the outset that studying cheating, griefing, and similar topics is not a principal part of my research, and there are several esteemed folks around here that do it, so I hope to learn from them if they'd like to weigh in. Here, I'm just following through on some ideas that have been percolating on meaning and games, and how they might help us answer Steven's question.
To begin this speculation, the first thing I'm going to do is narrow the topic a fair bit. Rather than discuss "griefing" in the broad sense, I'm going to focus on one activity in MMOGs that is often seen as griefing: ganking. Very specifically, I'm talking about a human player, piloting a higher-level/better geared toon, attacking a toon that is much lower level, without any other circumstances (game objectives and narratives), histories (they, or their guilds, know each other or similar), or players (on either side) involved. This is simply the killing (frequently, one-shotting) of another toon by a vastly more powerful toon. I'm drawing my sense of this phenomenon from the open PvP servers of World of Warcraft -- other games/server types may vary considerably and interestingly.
What I would like to suggest is that this kind of PvP is meaningless. Or, perhaps more precisely, that the meaning it has is so narrow, rationalized, and improverished that it is outside of, or rejects, the game in which it is situated. Games, as ends in and of themselves, are things that can generate new meanings and experiences. For the ganker, however, ganking is a means to other ends ("Personal best crit!"), not a potentially generative new experience. (And, by the way, please keep in mind that I am not talking about all PvP -- there are many other kinds, both institutionally designed by the developer and emergent, which would not fit with the argument I'm making here.)
I'm speculating that ganking happens when a player who does not want to be challenged to play a game (i.e., encounters where the outcome is contingent), instead opts to do something where the outcome is a foregone conclusion: kill a player that is vastly lower in capabilities. If meaning is found at the meeting point of inherited systems of interpretation (cultural expectations) and the performative demands of singular circumstances (something I talked about here), then ganking is a denial of that meaning. It is a retreat from the demands of the new, and it signals a disposition that does not want to be performatively challenged. Ganking lower level players is, then, a somewhat pathetic attempt to feel, well, something. But that something is not the meaning that participating in a challenging game would create -- it is removed from that. If there is no contingency, it follows that there is no meaning -- all you have left is an impoverished environment where pointless negative reciprocity (I was ganked at L24, so I’ll gank at L60) reigns.
It might be argued against this that an environment of open PvP, rather than erasing contingency, actually spawns it, generating a wide open landscape of ganking possibility for the lower level players. This would be a way to argue that there is still a game, on a broader level, and it is a cat-and-mouse game. The difference in capabilities once the battle is joined is not in question -- the cat wins -- but the game is actually about avoiding that encounter (thanks to David Simkins for voicing this argument to me). This is an interesting way to go, and I agree that it can turn out this way, under certain game design conditions. I would argue, however (again, I'm being provocative to see where this leads), that in WoW this doesn't hold, because the architecture of the game is not very flexible about alternative places to go to accomplish objectives. The quests for any given level are in a small set of vastly distributed places, and the transportation costs (in time) for low level characters are high. This means that if someone is trying to get quests done in Stranglethorn Vale, there is not a viable game in avoiding the gankers -- they have every advantage also in the "meta" game of cat-and-mouse. For most players, this means that the ganking feels, again, like a foregone conclusion, it is only the question of when it will happen that is utterly contingent (that is, too contingent). In neither aspect is there a performative challenge for the gankee or the ganker. One is left with either too much determination, or too much chaos; either way leads to a loss of meaning.
So why does it happen at all, if it's so meaningless? To answer this, one would have to make a normative, critical claim (and goodness knows those are popular around here). One would have to say that what happens is that the game objectives get replaced by utterly personal objectives, individualistic and empty goals that are the simulacra of actual (new) meaning. Gankers, this argument would say, are getting their jollies in an endless circle of confirming their own expectations, mistaking the increasing number of notches on their belt for actual personal development. In fact, this line of reasoning would argue, they are each stuck in an iron cage of false objectives.
Now, I can spin this argument out, and understand how to get from point A to point B, and it's consistent with my experience and preferences. But, on the other hand, I have lots of friends who enjoy open PvP, even the random but inevitable ganking part of it, so I hesitate. I'm also certainly one to be wary of normative claims about other people's experiences ("Yes, yes -- you say you're having a good time, but you're really just deluding yourself").
On the other hand, the argument that if people choose to do something in these domains it is just a different "style of gameplay," and therefore morally unassailable, also rubs me the wrong way. It seems to rest not only on a separation of play from real experience (and I have a whole set of strong empirical objections to that view), but also on a modernist, individualistic ethic -- it's all about the individual experience, this seems to say, and that should be our final arbiter of all matters ethical.
I don't have any real answers here, but I'm quite taken with the notion that ganking is, effectively, not a game, and with thinking through the consequences for meaning and experience that follow from this. To what extent this could be extended to other kinds of griefing, I'm not sure, but it does seem to me that quite a few players out there actually don't seem to want to play a game at all.
Traditional ritual is specifically designed to trigger certain emotive, interpretive, and physical responses. Imagine the Pacific Islands ritual with heavy drumming and men in horrifying costumes of spirits believed to inhabit the island. Or the 48 hour shadow play of Indonesia where everyone is eventually exhausted while the performers tap into the beliefs, fears and desires of those watching. Or ancient Maya bloodletting and human sacrifice. Or an aria in a Cathedral. All of these experiences are enacted as a community within a larger socially constructed narrative reflecting general social beliefs and attitudes.
For most of human history, shared “entertainment” was couched in the context of a religious celebration and/or social narrative. Even village storytelling was to some extent ritualized and clearly reflected existing social values. Durkheim’s notion of “collective effervescence” was based on the idea that society is founded upon rituals designed to allow us to share interpretive experiences in order to bring us together. The contemporary social sciences interest in the phenomenology of experience also ties to the relationship between our embodied reactions, feelings, sensations, and interpretations of those experiences in a coherent framework co-created by a community.
As new social forms emerge in virtual communities such as MMOs and Second Life is it possible that we are seeking these kinds of shared experiences through these virtual worlds?
Much has been written about the non-localized community created through exposure to the same pop-cultural media. For example, we watch the latest episode of Lost on TV and that gives us something we can all talk about at work the next day.
Yet these types of cultural experiences are heavily knowledge based. We know the same information about an event on TV and can discuss theories about and feelings related to that event. Most video games fall into this same mold – I can play through Half Life 2 and I have an incredibly immersive experience. I can then share that experience and knowledge of that world with my fellow gamers that have also played Half Life 2. But, an important aspect of this shared knowledge is that it is not a shared experience.
Unlike these isolated forms of media, shared virtual spaces do allow for the co-creation of genuinely shared experiences. Not only is there a knowledge based community (we can all laugh together about Leroy Jenkins or the Peanut Butter Jelly Dance) but then we can also reinforce those ties through shared experiences that perform many of the functions that ritual performs. Our community values are shaped through guild raids, our community beliefs are co-created and reinforced as we share an epic PvP battle against the Alliance noobs.
While I do believe that virtual social spaces can and do fulfill many of the roles that ritual can, my question is to what extent can we imagine that the shared experiences and concerns, shared vocabulary, and shared mythologies constructed in virtual worlds create legitimate communities? Does that great Molten Core raid with my WoW guild create the same kinds of ties that playing hide and seek in the neighborhood might? I would love to see some fMRI or other research investigating whether playing these types of games create experiences that are more akin to reactions induced while participating in event. I do see playing an MMO as participation in a form of social ritual but I still haven’t quite decided how much I believe this can/should replace other forms of experiential community formation.
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.
Krista-Lee plays a priest (one with more purples than I'll ever see for my druid, I'm sure), and what she said was (paraphrasing), "I can healbot Molten Core in my sleep, but if I'm thrown into a new situation, I can't heal at all." While that's probably an overstatement, it suggests something about the nature of raiding guild discipline -- at least, pre-TBC. It turns out, and this is not unusual, that the guild power-leveled her toon and then taught her to follow a very specific and detailed script for the instances they were running, starting with UBRS and then through Naxx.
Michel Foucault famously argued that the power of modern institutions is driven, at root, by the ability to discipline people, or, more directly, to discipline their bodies -- to mold those bodies and order their actions in ways that allow groups to achieve institutional objectives effectively. To do this, they draw on practical techniques developed first in places like early Christian monasteries and the Roman legions. Bodies are organized, regimented, taught to sit, to stand, to kneel, to match their singular shapes to the demands of regularity -- no pinky out of place, the leg held just so. The effect of this "bio-power", as he most convincingly shows in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, is not only effective institutional control over otherwise unruly subjects, but in fact a re-shaping of their selves. They come to see this discipline as consitutive of who they are, as shaping their very desires. The classic (and idealized -- practice is messier) example is the panopticon, where prisoners are architecturally situated in view of an invisible and authoritative observer. The guard watches from in a darkened room while they are laid out in a brightly-lit Cartesian grid. It comes to matter little if the guard is there at all, as the prisoners internalize the surveillance.
I'm not saying that Krista-Lee was a prisoner of her guild. Um, exactly. Foucault argues (in later works) that this disciplining of bodies is something taking place all around us, particularly as we learn to act within highly-regulated contexts, like schools, the military, hospitals, and airports. And, like the prisoners, he asserts that we come to accept and even celebrate the kind of self the institutions have made of us.
All of this is to get us thinking about to what extent hardcore raiding guilds should be seen in a similar light. The essence of disciplined bodies is that they are malleable; they can be shaped to perform in lock-step (literally) under a command hierarchy. The tension, of course, is that this strategic control always involves a tradeoff with the tactical, the ability of a group to respond on the fly, to emergent situations. For Krista-Lee, this effect was directly discernible -- while she enjoys soloing and quest-grouping, she felt lost in new instances, when there wasn't an explicit script to follow.
As I've pointed out, for WoW, this had -- before the expansion -- created a mutually constructive relationship between the 5(10)-person instancing and the large-scale raiding. While small-scale grouping not only allows for, it depends upon, tactical rethinking on the fly, large-scale groups narrow and leverage the set of available class skills (maybe hunters begin to leave pets behind, druids get pushed into healing, only one hemo rogue is called for) into more strictly-defined roles. The small-scale was, perhaps like boot camp in the military, an intense and necessary part of enculcating a set of competencies (what is a pull, sheeping, aggro), but one that ultimately is left behind, smaller in comparison to the institutional ambitions which these competent bodies now serve to realize. Rationalized systems of resource distribution, like DKP, along with political structures and communications tools, play a role as well for these institutions, harnessing individual desire into organizational discipline, to get the 40 people needed together all at one time, ready to down Onyxia, or tackle a world boss.
The reason I think this is particularly interesting for us to think about now are the cases of both WoW and Second Life and some of the recent changes these VWs have undergone. The downsizing of endgame instances in WoW, the availability of soloable loot roughly on a par with Tier 1+ in Outland, and (to my unsystematic eye) the prevalence of small group quests there with excellent rewards, all suggest that Blizzard's moving away from supporting the emerging institutions (guilds) of its creation, ones which had dominated server culture for pretty much the whole game. This is an interesting contrast with past TN conversations, like the one here.
By contrast, the revamped estate tools in SL (which I'm sure many folks out there know more intimately than I), increase the amount of governance by island owners not only over a piece of property, but also over a group of people, and in fact these tools have thereby become deeply intertwined. To my eye, this enables the generation of institutional players on the SL landscape that LL has never had to deal with before. I'm not thinking first of the existing external institutions with a "presence" in SL, but rather of those entities that until recently we could somewhat reliably continue to think of as individuals, but which are now better understood as institutions. While the relationship of LL to some of its major content creators has been undoubtedly cozy, one can't help but wonder how long that will last -- institutions are competitive. The interesting thing about Second Life is the extent to which Linden Lab has had a "free-ride" for a long time, effectively being the only large institutional player in the arena. Social convention was emergent from the users, and was (is) something with which to contend -- a lot of time at Linden is devoted to this "community management". But architecture, the market, and "law" (others modes of governance, as I see it) were all firmly in Linden's hands. That's changing now, and the question is whether Second Life will fly apart at the seams once these other institutionalized interests find their footing.
All this is really just to wonder whether we're entering an era where the relationships between virtual world makers and the people involved them are changing. It is probably wise for us to get in the habit of thinking just as readily about developer/(in-world) institution relationships as we do about developer/individual player relationships. I actually think this will be a hard habit to break -- the idea of the game maker/game player relationship as primarily institution-to-individual is just one instance of the engrained tendency for those in industrialized societies to think about social institutions primarily as they relate to individuals.
WoW and SL both demonstrate, at a very broad level, different solutions to the emergence of institutions within their creations, an emergence that was, I believe, inevitable once resources began accumulating within these persistent and contingent domains. Foucault, like Weber, thought that people banding together to accomplish something was fine, but was wary of what happens next. Once any nascent institution begins looking for something else to accomplish, its primary raison d'etre has already changed. At that point, it's more interested in its own reproduction than in its original aims or purview. Once that happens, look out.
[Addendum: Ever-alert Julian Dibbell points to ShaunConnery's Rapwing Lair. Surely the script in Krista-Lee's guild never sounded so good.]