10 Big Pieces: Bogost, Persuasive Games

Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames
Ian Bogost
The MIT Press, Cambridge MA 2009

Summary

Bogost takes as his subject matter “procedural rhetorics,” “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, imagies or moving pictures” Videogames thus have a “unique persuasive power,” not, as the Serious Games movement would have it, “equivalent to the content of video games,” but rather “this power lies in the very way videogames mount claims through procedural rhetoric.” Also contrary to the Serious Games movement, which he says “sought to create videogames to support existing social and cultural positions,” videogames “can disrupt and change fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the world, leading to potentially significant long-term social change.” (ix)

Bogost claims that because “computers function procedurally, they are particularly adept at representing real or imagined systems that themselves function in some particular way – thiat is, operate according to a set of processes. The computer magnifies the ability to create representations of processes.” (5) Procedural representation, then “explains processes with other processes… rather than language.” (9)

Citing Sid Meier’s definition of gameplay as “a series of interesting choices,” Bogost observes that “[i]nteresting choices do not necessarily entail all possible choices in a given situation; rather, choices are selectively included and excluded in a procedural representation to produce a desired expressive end.” (45) Thus, “meaning in videogames is constructed not through a re-creation of the world, but through selectively modeling appropriate elements of that world…. some subset of a source system, in order to draw attention to that portion as the subset of the representation. Interactivity follows suit: the total number and credibility of user actions is not necessarily important; rather, the relevance of the interaction in the context of the representational goals of the system is paramount.” (45-6)

Bogost, in discussing a game called Antiwargame, observes that “[i]f procedural rhetorics function by operationalizing claims about how things work, then videogames can also make claims about how things don’t work.” (85) By exposing the procedural logic of political systems, procedural rhetorics “articulate the way political structures organize their daily practice; they describe the way a system ‘thinks’ before it thinks about anything in particular.” (90)

“Procedural rhetoric,” Bogost states, “is precisely what is missing from current uses of technology for political and civic engagement.” Games embodying such rhetoric “can have a political impact because they allow players to embody political positions and engage in political actions that many will never have previously experienced, and because they make it possible for players to deepen their understanding of the multiple causal forces that affect any given, always unique, set of historical circumstances.” (135)

Bogost criticizes Gee’s concept of “situated” or “embodied” learning from What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. He claims “it is not strong enough,” that videogames offer not just meaning and experiences of real and imagined worlds and relationships, “they offer meaning and experiences of particular worlds and particular relationships. The abstract processes that underlie a game may confer general lessons about strategy, mastery and interconnectedness, but they also remain coupled to a specific topic,” taxation in Sim City, or criminality in Grand Theft Auto. (241)

He concludes, “As creators and players of videogames, we must be conscious of the procedural claims we make, why we make them, and what kind of social fabric we hope to cultivate through the processes we unleash on the world.” (340)

Critique and Analysis

Bogost spends much of the book critiquing the Serious Games movement for being a handmaiden to the existing sociopolitical elite, but clearly falls into the same trap, reminiscent of the modernist criticisms of modernism described in Does Technology Drive History. There is seemingly no room for player agency in Bogost’s games – they merely are led through a series of constrained choices to accept a biased rhetorical conclusion. Serious Games would reinforce hegemony, Bogost claims to challenge it, but both using tools of disempowerment and hegemonic discourse.

Bogost’s criticism of Gee comes close to the mark, however, and one of the strengths of the book is that it is grounded in specific rhetorical procedures, in specific games, with specific real-world consequences, not creating abstracted player communities or learning outcomes, as both Gee and Sicart tend towards.

Bogost’s book is a good companion piece to Castornova’s: it is the reality of manipulative power in service to the existing order (whether as proponent or opponent, both buy into and limit their discourse to the status quo) that Castronova is blind to. Couple Bogost’s persuasive tools to Castronova’s real world as game world, and you get a nightmare of the denial of agency and freedom of thought much worse than that of the 20th Century dystopians.

Utility

Any “educational game” needs to address the assumptions of the Serious and Persuasive games movements. There is a narrow channel between their embrace of the light-democracy power structure on the one hand and deracinated utopianism on the other. This is where Post is of particular value, with his focus on gamelike governance structures, with strong player agency (contra Bogost) that manage immense power in the real world.

10 Big Pieces: Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual World

Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Shaping Reality
Edward Castronova
Palgrave Macmillan, New York N& 2007

Summary

Since “[e]ver larger numbers of people will spend many hours inside online games,” “the public at large will come to think of game design and public policy design as roughly similar activities. This is because, structurally, they are the same…. Because of these similarities, there will be crossovers in know-how…. As the lines between public policy and game design blur, public policy will begin to focus more directly on human happiness, even fun, than it does now. Ultimately, games will force fun onto the policy agenda.” (xvii)

Game design, he says, is “equivalent to public policy design.” (emphasis in original, 110) “Game designers make the rules by which people play, in the same way that governments make the rules by which we all live. “We are witnessing the birth of a new science, the practical science of giving people the sensation of fun thorugh the design of social institutions…. [M]ore and more people will come to view the tenets of this new science as practical rules for running the real world.” (111)

Castronova posits an economic competition between the virtual (“synthetic”) and the real. “Simple economic theory predicts that in this competition, the real world is going to lose,” and therefore “[i]f it is to survive unchallenged, the real world is going to have to offer experiences similar to those available in virtual worlds. In short, the real world will have to become more fun.” (7)

He critiques 1990s radical internet politics on economic grounds: “Sovereignty follows economic and political power, not vice versa. Internet communities, such as they were, did not have an economic or political or cultural base required for civitas. The cart was before the horse….Today, the economic clout is not at a level that would allow a virtual world to impose trade sanctions against the real world, for example, but it is at a level that allows users to feel economically invested in the place, and to draw a substantial income from it..” (38)

He makes a critical distinction between old-style “online communities” and virtual worlds: “The center of gravity in a chat community remains offline, but the center of social gravity in a virtual world is completely online. That’s where the things people care about actually live. The discussion is most about things inside these worlds, not outside them.” (42)

In discussing migration, Castronova mentions the Turner thesis, noting that the internet provides all the benefits that Western expansion did in the last century. (64-5) He observes that “[m]igration tends to equalize living conditions across the places the migrants are leaving and the places they are entering. In the case of real and synthetic worlds, reality will be a constant invading pressure in virtual worlds, something we have seen already in the blurring of boundaries – people using real money to buy coins in a fantasy game, for example. But this also means fun will be a constant invading pressure in the real world.” (70).

He sees a problem with contemporary economics in that it seeks to maximize well-being, not happiness, and can easily result in generating “objectives that we know will lead us to misery.” (85) Therefore, “it becomes clear that the core objective of public policy should be to promote happiness, not well-being,” (88) citing development economist Amartya Sen.

Castronova sketches the outlines of “the fun economy” which he sees resulting from the real world adapting to competitive pressures from the virtual: “Gamer generations will not only expect work to be universally available, but also organized as self-employment with voluntary yet profitable team building” (emphasis in original, 141) “[I]n all likelihood, some concept of leveling will be required for the real world, systems whereby any person who performed a certain task a sufficient number of times would automatically be “promoted” to the next level…none of those people at the top have any authority over those below them (though they do have more prestige and better rewards).” He notes that “[g]eneral economic growth can impede the maintenance of a consistently fun and fair game,” as the goal should be “the growth in wealth and power for individuals.” (151)

He observes that “the rules of the game in virtual worlds break down 80-10-10: 80 percent code, 10 percent terms provisions that are rarely enforced, and 10 percent terms provisions enforced through draconian measures,” (169) noting that “[w]hile governance is not apparent, governing is going on – in the code. People seem to like that.” (170)

Critique and Analysis

This work is a superficial treatment of a profound idea. Castronova’s argument contains the flaw argued against in governance.com – assuming the weakness of legacy systems, ignoring the drag of history and culture. Castronova’s world is abstract, frictionless, and strangely apolitical for a political argument.

Castronova, who strongly prefers games to social virtual worlds, seems blind to imbalance of power between players and developers in game worlds, concentrating his analysis on player-to-player power dynamics. He advocates a game model for nation-states while ignoring the key fact that in games, the developers own everything, and have infinite power in the meta-game relative to players. He cannot seriously advocate a state in which the political rulers own all of the means of production eternally, in return for providing citizens with “fun” and no other civic or psychological value set.

Utility

It won’t be hard to do better than this. Castronova sees the equation between game development and public policy, but fails to provide a coherent value system for either, rather describing the primitive status quo in virtual worlds design as ipso facto some sort of ideal. Taking Castronova’s basic equation, and the notion of a competition between virtual and legacy social systems (though a competition at many more levels, and with a much greater imbalance than Castronova sees), and adding strong democratic theory, theories of learning through self-actualization and agency, and making the process reflexive in both directions (applying ethical game theory to public policy, and strong democratic theory to game design), is what I hope to achieve.

10 Big Pieces: Kamarck and Nye, eds., governance.com

governance.com: Democracy in the Information Age
Elaine Ciulla Kamarck and Joseph S. Nye Jr., eds.
Brookings Institution Press, Washington DC 2002

Summary

1. “Information Technology and Democratic Governance,” Joseph S. Nye Jr. Nye examines the causes of a decline in public confidence in government, stating that analysts “need not fall into the fallacy of technological determinism to see that technology is one of the significant causes of social and political change.” He sees governance as the diffusion of elements from the 20^th Century nation-state core out to a broad variety of other institutions, driven in part by “the Information Revolution.” (4-8) Information technology affects politics by reorganizing work to break down pyramidal bureaucratic structures, reinforcing globalized production strategies at the expense of traditional nation-state control, decreasing the importance of both commodities and territory, changing the nature of banks and money in a way that challenges taxation and central monetary policy, developing virtual communities untied to geography, fragmenting the unitary communities fostered by broadcasting, and revolutionizing education. He notes, however, that none of these changes is irreversible, but that the challenges faced by traditional governments are grave and escalating. (8-11)
2. “Failure in the Cybermarketplace of Ideas,” Arthur Isak Applebaum. “One must resist, here and elsewhere, the temptation to compare the ideal form of one’s favored institutional arrangement with realized instantiations of the disfavored alternatives.” “[I]t is easy to confuse the enterprise of designing actual legitimate institutions with the enterprise of modeling the principles of morality or of justice as the outcome of a hypothetical deliberation conducted by idealized persons under idealized contitions.” (25) He offers by contrast a defense of Madison’s political engineering, seeing representation as a feature designed to control “bad will” rather than a bug for which strong democracy is the fix.
3. “James Madison on Cyberdemocracy,” Dennis Thompson. Presented as an email from Madison to the previous author. The author claims that Madison missed the potential of minorities to use the technologies of government to rule tyrannically, and notes that information technology may enable such rule by either majorities or minorities. On the other hand, the diversity of the internet offers greater attractions than politics, making the (astonishingly counterfactual) claim that “ The less politically interested (and therefore less politically competent) devote their attention to other activities and leave government to those who know best.” (35) The author sees the convergence into like-minded groups enabled by the internet as a democratic flaw: “Democracy, properly understood, requires technologies that support forums accessible to citizens of diverse perspectives and opportunities for active and regular interchange, all governed by norms of mutual respect and openness.” (38). The author sets out “five amendments to the constitution of cyberdemocracy,” in formal and informal language: No bozo filters, no lurking, no churning, no flame bait, and no cookies. (39)
4. “The Impact of the Internet on Civic Life: An Early Assessment,” William A. Galston. Galston frames a conflict between two “principal cultural forces” in American society: “the high value attached to individual choice and the longing for community,” which give rise to a desire “for finding ways of living that combine individual autonomy and strong social bonds.” The result is “voluntary community,” marked by “low barriers to entry, low barriers to exit, and interpersonal relations shaped by mutual adjustment rather than hierarchical authority or coercion.” (42-3) Analyzing whether there can be online communities, he states (contra Sclove) that “it is important not to build place, or face-to-face relationships, into the definition of community. To do so would be to resolve by fiat, in the negative, the relationship between community and the Internet.” (45) Using “Bender’s classic definition of community” as involving “limited membership, shared norms, affective ties, and a sense of mutual obligation,” he investigates whether online communities exist. Under “Limited Membership,” he contrasts “exit” and “voice” as strategies of dissent, claiming that the development of “voice” is a “a traditional function of Toquevillian associations,” but unlikely on the internet, given low barriers to exit, which result in more homogenous associations. Under “Shared Norms, “ citing Ostrom, he argues that “despite the anarcho-libertarianism frequently attributed to Internet users, the medium is capable of promoting a kind of socialization and moral learning through mutual adjustment.” (47) Under “Affective Ties,” he claims that online identities are dissociated from offline ones: “the Internet facilitates the invention of online personalities at odds with offline realities,” and thus is “not readily compatible with the development of meaningful affective ties.” (48) Under “Mutual Obligation” he argues that online groups fail to develop it, but that offline society has failed as well. (49-50) He concludes that internet associations “may intensify current tendencies to fragmentation and polarization in U.S. civic life.” (54)
5. “Power and Interdependence in the Information Age,” Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye Jr. Noting that “the state… has been more resilient than modernists expected,” the authors claim that critics of the state, like boosters of information technology, “moved too directly from technology to political consequences, without sufficiently considering the continuity of belief systems, the persistence of institutions, or the strategic options available to leaders of states.” (162) The authors argue that information technology “creates a new politics of credibility in which transparency will increasingly be a power asset.”” (164) They conclude that information technology will not, contrary to conventional wisdom, lead to an equalizing of power among states, due to network effects; that states will find it more difficult to control messages and information flows; that soft power and credibility will become much more important vis-à-vis hard power; and that “geographically based states will continue to structure politics in an information age, but the processes of world politics within that structure are undergoing profound change.” (177)

Critique and Analysis

The authors represent the views of the political-science establishment, and as such provide a counterpoint to the less mainstream authors on the list. Applebaum’s argument for weak democracy is useful, but thin – even for a short article, he fails to make a robust case, although Thompson’s critique is poorer, theory untainted by practical experience in internet life. Galston’s essay is rich with fodder for engagement, though his point on identity is unsupported, and contrary to any evidence or psychological theory. His point that internet groups foster their own tyrannies of the local, at least as severely as any geographic community, is a strong retort to my critique of Sclove’s passionate defense of strong geographic communities. While his conclusion that internet associations may be weakening US civic life is somewhat beside the point (so what? what does it create in its stead, is the more interesting question), it does remain to be engaged with, particularly in the context of projects of governance working within the resilient state structure Keohane and Nye describe.

Utility

Galston in particular is a strong critic of my digital-community boosterism, and stronger versions of his arguments will need to be sought out and addressed. Likewise, Keohane and Nye suggest that, however desirable, the wholesale replacement of legacy institutions is unlikely to happen soon, and that new systems will exist in competition with them for the foreseeable future. The volume as a whole is a caution against internet triumphalism, and a reminder that the current order must be engaged, rather than dismissed, in any attempt to model or create new systems of developing technologies and governing institutions.

10 Big Pieces: Gee, What Videogames…

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
James Paul Gee
Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY 2007

Summary

Gee’s project is to find the “theory of human learning built into good video games,” but also built into “gamers and the gaming community.” (4) He centers his approach within three related areas: situated cognition (or “thinking as tied to bodies that have experiences in the world”), New Literacy Studies (viewing reading and writing as “social and cultural practices with economic, historical and political implications”) and connectionism (a model of cognition that sees humans as primarily “powerful pattern recognizers”). (8-9)

He defines literacy in that context by holding that “people are (or are not) literate (partially or fully) in a domain if they can recognize (the equivalent of “reading”) and/or produce (the equivalent of “writing”) meanings” in a particular semiotic domain. (20) Doing so is “active learning:” “experiencing the world in new ways, forming new affiliations, and preparation for future learning.” (emphasis in original, 24) “Critical learning” involves a further step: being able to innovate in that domain. (25)

In speaking of “design grammars” particular to the semiotic domains of games, Gee states that “players need to know what patterns or combinations of elements the game’s internal design grammar allows. They need to know, given the situated meanings they have given to each element in the pattern or combination, what the whole pattern or combination means in a situated way useful for action.” (32) Such knowledge comes from two sources: the game architecture itself and the community of players. (38) This contrasts with teaching in schools, with removes learning from context. (84)

Gee describes the content (and, implicitly from the overall discussion, value) of videogames as “They situate meaning in a multimodal space through embodied experiences to solve problems and reflect on the intricacies of the design of imagined worlds and the design of both real and imagined social relationships and identities in the modern world.” (emphasis in original, 40-41)

Gee sees the person in the game space as a “tripartite identity” composed of their real-world identity, the identity of the avatar in the game space and a “projective identity,” an aspirational construct bounded by the constraints of the gameworld and the desires of the player for the character in the gameworld. (50-53). As “all deep learning – that is, active, critical learning – is inextricably caught up with identity in a variety of ways,” the tripartite nature of identity in the game space is the key to deep learning, not just in such spaces (54-55), but in any space: “If learners in classrooms carry learning so far as to take on a projective identity, something magical happens. The learner comes to know that he or she has the capacity, at some level, to take on the virtual identity as the real-world identity.” (63)

Gee then sets out 36 principles of active learning, discussing them in the context of specific game examples, and contrasting them with typical classroom techniques.

Critique and Analysis

While Gee consistently couches his theory and analysis in terms of learning, contrasting that which takes place in videogame spaces from that taking place in the classroom, his is essentially a political theory, and not only because it provides a devastating critique of a powerful and far-reaching organ of the state. Gee provides a tacit theory of citizenship: if the goal of learning is to develop people’s capacity to be both literate and innovative in a range of semiotic domains, it follows that the proper society is one which enables both broad choices and open opportunities to participate in such domains.

As the school has reflected the interests of the dominant political and economic institutions of the 20th Century, the bureaucratic state and corporation, Gee is essentially calling for learning systems which would reflect a very different social order, one not unlike Sclove’s “strong democracy.”

Utility

As with each work on this list, Gee’s book suggests the unity of values in the design of a learning system and the design of a political system. Gee mirrors Sclove: while it would be interesting to design a game design process using Sclove’s political principles, it would be equally interesting to design a political system using Gee’s learning principles. I hope to do both.

10 Big Pieces: Post, In Search of Jefferson’s Moose

In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace
David G. Post
Oxford University Press, Oxford UK 2009

Summary

Post’s goal is to provide “a Jeffersonian natural history of cyberspace…. to explore, to try to understand something about the way life proceeds there, so that we can begin the process of imagining, and perhaps bringing into being, the new structures and institutions that can help us govern it wisely and well.” (18)

Post compares Jefferson’s demographic analysis of Virginia to the growth of the internet, noting that both displayed exponential growth for similar reasons: network effects resulting from an efficient point-to-point network for the transmission of information. He then uses a fundamental distinction between Jeffersonians (liberty, chaos, the many, diffusion, centrifugal thinking) and Hamiltonians (authority, order, the few, concentration, centripetal thinking) to frame a debate over “The Problem of the Extended Republic.” (108-110) Hamilton argued that scaling democratic government across a continent necessitated a strong central authority, while Jefferson argued that scaling could actually benefit a democratic structure.

Post frames the history of the West (and of the settlement of cyberspaces) as “Hamiltonians, though, inevitably make their way to Jeffersonian places (certainly once gold is discovered there!), claims of order and authority and power assert themselves, and struggles over the shape of the place begin in earnest.” (117) Similarly, Post borrows Lessig’s dichotomy of “East Coast Code:” statutes and regulations, and “West Coast Code,” software protocols, as the basis for an analysis of the governance of the internet.

From there, he discusses the governing rules and processes of the Internet Engineering Task Force, which functions on a combination of “rough consensus” and “running code:” testing changes by open engineering and political processes simultaneously. Noting that “the rules for a common global language were developed by consensus,” he concludes that Jefferson was right in hypothesizing that “consensus government can scale,” because of the especial legitimacy (citing Froomkin on Habermas) of the IETF’s open processes, compared with similar efforts by the UN using traditional, closed, bureaucratic decsionmaking in its Open Systems Initiative. (139-140)

He analyzes ICANN’s “Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy” as a body of law, or quasi-law as the basis for a discussion of theories of internet jurisdiction, here contrasting Unexceptionalists (e.g., Easterbrook) who reduce internet law questions to matters of underlying state jurisdiction, and Exceptionalists who regard the internet as a realm unto itself, calling for a coalition around the notion of “bring[ing] law to the inter-network community while preserving the diversity of values and viewpoints that characterize the global community.” (170)

He argues that the current Unexceptionalist system of competing jurisdictions fails as law, in that it is impossible “for the participants in any transaction to know, in advance, what the law governing the transaction might turn out to be.” His solution is self-governing communities on the Internet deciding for themselves what rules to apply to their own conduct. (184-5)

Critique and Analysis

Post’s strength is in examining law as a technology in itself –a set of tools for solving specific problems in specific circumstances. This view is utterly foreign to many writing about law and politics, who attempt to find timeless, universal solutions. Grounding this view in a close reading of Jefferson’s work solidifies Post’s case: the analogy between the search for new solutions of governance in the unique circumstances of the early United States and that of the internet is a strong one in many ways. I would have preferred a more extensive description of the counter-argument, but the work is short and the citations extensive.

Utility

Post’s standards converge with those of Sclove and Sicart, while staying closer to the workings of the underlying technological processes of governance than either author. While his treatment of the counterarguments is brief, he presents them more openly (and with vastly better citations) than other authors: a cogent case for using strong democratic design processes to develop a game of strong democratic design processes will need to come to grips with Hamiltonian and Unexceptionalist arguments, and Post will be the gateway to addressing them.