Ghost/Echo

Last night we finished my first-ever tabletop gaming campaign. True to form, though, the tabletop was virtual, my GM in a different timezone. While we couldn’t share a pizza, we did share a good game, the indie Ghost/Echo (from One Seven Design, and part of the Story Games community), and I got a fine example of where story really comes from in games.

We used Skype video chat: it turns out that, at least for Shadowminister, gestures are as important a part of atmosphere creation as bad Russian accents   Skype has a dice-roller which we ended up using after the really versatile online dice-roller we started with broke. Ether Pad was where we tracked the choices and outcomes being rolled for, and that rounded out our toolkit.

In my classes we’ve struggled with the definition of “game.” Whatever a century of academics have said, nothing prepared me for considering the two cryptic pages of Ghost/Echo to be, embody, describe, enable or otherwise have anything to do with something I’d recognize as a “game.”

The website describes Ghost/Echo as

a quick-play aetherpunk adventure module for 2-6 players. It includes the raw materials you need to construct your own setting and characters as well as a complete rules system.

Here’s a link to the PDF that is the whole of the raw materials for Ghost/Echo. It didn’t mean a damn thing to me before we started playing it. What you get is two illustrations, a page of names for people and places, and a page of rules for when to roll dice. And that’s it.

Out of that, Shadowminister, a dice roller and I created a four-night, six hour adventure of high-stakes bluffing, battling and badassery that, thanks to a fortunate final roll of the dice, left me, Coil, a fallen starship builder turned high-value scavenger, into Earth’s dimension-crossing warlord.

Now, this should put to rest a long-standing debate on story in games. It won’t, of course, but it should. Where was the story of how Coil, stuck in the Ghost World with a broken transport and a dazed pilot, played the Russian Mob off a Ghost World warlord to get his crew back together, beat everyone to the Score and stop an alien invasion cold?

Not in the games-designer-as-auteur product, the rule set and mechanics. As the creator says,

//GHOST/ECHO is presented as an ‘oracle game’. It provides only a starting point and a resolution mechanic. You and your friends fill in the rest of the details as you play.

So there clearly was a story in our four-session gameplay. And clearly, it came from the intersection of my imagination with Shadowminister’s and the dice roller.

There! Academic teapot-tempest unstirred!

The game’s a great example of my favorite games definition, from Sid Meyer: “a game is a series of interesting choices.”  Episode 3 ended with me awakening back in the main Ghost World town, covered in ectoplasm and blood, surrounded by bodies apparently killed by my trademark lightning gun, and guards closing in on me.

How did I get there? I’d tried to use my ghost powers to pull a Ghost Spider out of my teammate, Vixen. So we rolled: the goal was to get the thing out of Vixen, the danger that the battle would crash our transport on The Six Arms, a deadly space of grinding planetary spheres with unpredictable, shifting gravity.  In order to up my odds through getting an extra die to roll, I asked for an extra danger. Shadowminister added, the Spider would shift to me.

It was a night of bad rolls. I got one plus and two minuses, as I recall. I took the plus on getting the Spider out of Vixen (reuniting my team was one of my/Coil’s primary, self-selected goals), and took the hit on getting possessed.

In Episode 4 it worked out fine: while I came to being chased by the warlord Chain’s guards, a lucky roll saw me successfully co-opt them to help repel a Ghost attack and set me firmly on the road to my own warlord-hood.

The “interesting choices” made possible by game mechanics provided a series of insights into character, here that “projective character” fusion of me and the scavenger Coil.  Anyone who knows me fairly well could’ve predicted that what would emerge would include deep team loyalty; bluff, blarney and bullshit as tools of first resort; and standup heavy-weapons close-quarters battle as the last.

Now, while it didn’t surprise me that my first “interesting choice” was, in response to

“You turn the corner and face a pack of Ghost Dogs, who growl menacingly at you,”

my response was “I growl back,”  (I won the roll, they slunk away with ectoplasmic tails between their legs), it did generate a good startled laugh from Shadowminister, and set a tone for the game.

So, the psychological/sociological value of those “interesting choices ” is pretty self-evident. My research question, though, is, what are the political implications? What can gaming teach us about how to construct better communities?

No, I don’t think I’m really finishing my dissertation in Spring 2011 either!

Julian Dibbell’s Play Money: Games Being Played

For EDT 691, Research In Virtual Worlds, I’ve been asked to do a writeup for discussion of Parts 5-8 of Julian Dibbell’s Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Mad Millions Trading Virtual Loot:

Game designer Sid Meier famously defined games as “a series of interesting choices.” With that definition in mind, Dibbell identifies in Parts 5-8 of Play Money a number of games, some of which he plays and some of which he observes being played around him. Let’s take a look at those games and the “interesting choices” involved:

1. The Economy Game. This is of course the game that Play Money is ostensibly about: a meta-game of economics that players created around the actual game of Ultima Online. As Dibbell gets deeper and deeper into his personal economic game (since it has a clearly defined goal and end state, it’s much more of a “game” for traditional theorists than the MMO that enables it, ironically), he comes to discover that there isn’t one economic game, but a number of very different ones.

These games can be ranked in order of abstraction, or degrees of distance from the core game of UO. Dibbell begins by acting as a merchant within the context of the fictional UO world: running a mall, buying low and selling high. The story of Play Money through the middle of the narrative is one of Dibbell’s increasing abstraction from the game, until he finds himself fully occupied in currency speculation and looking down upon the people still engaged in the concrete game that first attracted him.

Questions: What are the similarities and differences between the rules, values and goals of the various economic games played around UO and those played around “RL”?  What draws (some) people to find pleasure, or compulsion, in ever more abstract activities, and what are the implications of that phenomenon for games studies, and games in education?

2. Cops and Robbers: One of the most lol-worthy moments of an entertaining book was Dibbell’s narration of Rich Thurman’s scheme to hook his botnet up to the A.L.I.C.E chatbot, to confound corporate investigators. Yet Dibbell defines his victory condition as a legitimate, negotiated and accepted settlement with the cops, reporting his income to the IRS. Dibbell is fascinated by, drawn to, and eventually joins, the robbers: the “series of interesting choices” in his gameplay generates a consistent arc towards the Robbers – yet he retains an end state of being accepted by the Cops.

Questions: is Cops & Robbers a particularly American game? Do we love and yearn to be the outlaw more than other cultures? Yet our legendary outlaws, like Dibbell, yearn for legitimacy – even if they have to buy it. What are the implications of this ambivalence for faction design in games? For the creation and regulation of communities, digital and physical?

3. The Turing Test: The Turing Test is much more interesting than a programming challenge involving natural-language generation. It’s a means for thinking about the social role of virtuality, and about the nature of the human.

Turing described his test towards the end of an era when the Machine was the epitome of the Human: Taylorism in the workplace sought to transform the human into an automaton; military culture had, in the aftermath of World War I, transformed from glorifying the passionate individual into the mass army, the pilot as the extension of the bomber, and would soon reach its apotheosis in a hyper-rationality which transcended into pure nonsense, as depicted in Dr. Strangelove.

Yet, Turing’s test was intended to help create a machine to take on just those characteristics that humanity sought to shed: personal warmth, psychological insight, and sociability. Like Cops and Robbers, The Turing Test derives its play appeal from antinomies.

The Turing Test, though, was initially a game playing off a fundamental antinomy, and in that form may be one of the most widely played games on the internet: that between male and female.

Dibbell, like many people, finds a deep issue raised by the internet to be that of authenticity, an issue at the heart of The Turing Test. He ultimately concludes, “it’s a waste of precious time and creativity to wonder whether the model is the same, on some deep, ontological level as what it simulates. The question, rather, is whether it’s the same in every way that matters for the purposes at hand.”

Questions: Now we’ve reached the question at the core of virtual and games studies. Is the model the same for the purposes at hand? If not, is it better, worse, or another set of playful antinomies? What can the model teach us that is obscured by the original? Is there, ultimately online, any reason to privilege the original at all, or is it simply Life 1.0, a buggy beta to be patched, upgraded, and eventually replaced whole?

KOTOR Wrapup

I was up till 3:30 last night finishing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, playing through till I’d gotten both the Jedi and Sith endings. My final impression? KOTOR is, as I said early on, two games in different genres that go together about as well as chocolate and broccoli.

One game, the  “series of interesting choices” as Sid Meier defines games, is the branching narrative of the Republic officer who awakens on a warship under attack, and is faced at every turn with a series of character-defining decisions, steadily escalating until the fate of the galaxy truly hangs in the balance.

The other is a “kill stuff, level up, get better gear, kill more stuff” RPG.

RPG as roadblock to the story game

You can play the RPG and pay minimal attention to the moral-choices game, just clicking through dialog choices to get on with the action. The character game isn’t an obstacle to RPG play at any time, and can be seen by game-mechanics literalists as just a particularly slow and verbose way of selecting talent trees for your player character. That’s certainly not the way I played it, but I get the sense that a lot of hardcore gamers, and academic game analysts, particularly in the ludology tradition, did.

You can’t, however, play the character game and just click through the RPG: the killing-stuff gameplay sets up roadblock after roadblock to the progress of the character game. It’s just bizarre from a design standpoint.

For example, take the final sequence of the game. Your party’s invaded the Sith Lord’s lair, and you have to fight your way through several levels of really tough lackeys to get to him. Great RPG play: the combat is challenging, well done, and forces some real tactical thinking (the walkthrough I’ve been resorting two has three different approaches to clearing one level).

But it has no effect at all on the character game, except to act as a roadblock.

The character game, stripped of spoilers, goes:  You infiltrate the lair, and fight your way through to someone you know. Do you kill them or persuade them to join you? If you kill them, overall victory against the Sith will be a lot harder, but you may fail to persuade – or you may just want the satisfaction of killing them. You then fight your way through to the Sith Lord. No matter what choices you’ve made along the way, you have to defeat him to end the game.

So, none of the RPG fighting changes anything in there. And the only change it has on the boss fight is, you might have used up too many resources on the henchmen to survive the final battle (as I did my first play through).

Your only choices are fail, re-fight, or proceed as if the trash-mob and mini-boss fights hadn’t been there at all.

I would have loved “KOTOR the character game” immensely. I’d even have enjoyed “KOTOR the RPG.” Together, the games were a constantly frustrating series of pointless obstacles:  “I can’t proceed with the game till I plug in a mouse and shoot down space fighters.” “I can’t proceed with the character game till I clear a level of droids with flamethrowers.”

The consequence was that I ended up bypassing almost all the optional questlines and activities, most of which I would have enjoyed, because I felt I’d wasted so much time on the random roadblocks.

The story game: choice constrained?

I’ve written about choice constraints in the story game, and did a pretty good presentation for Alice Robison’s class on it. There definitely were points where I felt the designer’s concept of options was so limiting as to be immersion-breaking and immensely annoying. However, overall, I feel that I got to express myself pretty well as my “projective identity,” to use Jim Gee’s term.

The choices I had were a pretty good reflection of morality and faction politics in the Star Wars universe, though the extremes of pocket-emptying charity and mustache-twirling villainy often provided gross over-simplifications.

I did want one option that wasn’t open to me, and my Sith play-through in the middle of the night was an attempt to approximate it. I found myself wanting to be the Sith Gorbachev, to be a Light ruler over the Dark forces the way a couple members of the Jedi Council were pretty Dark rulers over the Light side. The branching structure didn’t permit it, but came close enough to let me roleplay it out in my head in a series of endgame choices

An unethical game?

Overall, I find Manuel Sicart’s conclusion that KOTOR is unethical per se as overstated as his similar conclusion about World of Warcraft based on an analysis of a badly-implemented early PvP patch. The character game could have been more nuanced, losing the cartooony moral extremes. The RPG game could have not penalized playing gray: there are powerful Light and Dark Force powers, but in the middle you can’t use the best of either.

I found the character game deeply engaging: I spent tens of hours thinking out my choices in particular situations (the Bendak’s Bounty quest would make a terrific law school final exam), dreamed several nights of my player character embedded in the story, and find the story I crafted through play as one of the very best Star Wars fictions.

The interaction between the two “games” in the game, and the fact that the RPG repeatedly threw up roadblocks to gameplay in the character game, was major, major fail, and would have led me to abandon the game early on had I not been playing it for a class. I’m glad I stuck with it, but that’s no credit to the designers, who served up a near-fatal problem for story-focused gamers.

Next up? Reading some KOTOR fanfic, now that I don’t have to avoid spoilers. And KOTOR II should arrive today: I want to see how a different studio handled the property (I know how badly it was bungled, but still), and I’m hooked enough into the story to want more.

Oh, and the volume of the KOTOR graphic novel compilations that I’d been missing came yesterday. Transmedia ftw!

Link Salad: Story, Violence & Seriousness

I’ve got some sort of bug thing that’s left me not terribly sick, but really stupid and tired for the past few days. There were too many interesting things in my Google Reader feed this morning to let pass, but I’m not up for a deep analysis of them. So, here’s some links and quick thoughts on topics that have come up in my classes this past week.

Violence and Ethics

We’ve been struggling in Alice Robison’s class with the perennial question of whether the depiction of violence leads to violence,  and whether the performative aspect of video games makes game violence different from movie violence.

I can’t figure out how to embed videos in WordPress without buying a pro account for a ludicrous amount of money, so here’s a link. It’s to a trailer for Dreamworlds 3, a documentary on women’s bodies in pop music videos. It’s 5:33, and well worth watching: it makes a strong and compelling case in that time, that music videos are teaching the physical and emotional abuse of women, by normalizing, no, more, glamorizing, the degradation of women.

Gamasutra today ran a very nice long piece, Kill Polygon, Kill: Violence, Psychology and Video Games. It covers all the bases, from designers of ultra-violent games, to researchers, to critics and apologists. What strikes me most, as always, is the willingness of scholars and critics to glorify the depiction of violence… against people who aren’t scholars or critics. It started, as far as I’ve seen, with film criticism in the 1970s, and I find it despicable. For example:

In Edmund, the recently announced winner of the TIGSource Adult/Educational Competition, your pixilated hero has to rape another character. In comparison to other media, the thematic constraints on games are still fantastically rigid. Earlier this year two games that featured rape as game mechanics were removed from Amazon’s marketplace.

But you could buy a DVD of Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, which shows an unedited eight-minute rape scene in a subway and a man’s head being graphically crushed with a fire extinguisher. You could also order a copy of Denis Cooper’s novel Frisk, which ends with a detailed description of a serial killer mutilating and raping victims in the Dutch countryside.

In the Los Angeles Times Michael Silverblatt wrote, “Dennis Cooper, a disturbing and transcendent artist, enters the mind of a serial killer and comes out with a genuine revelation.” Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post called Noe’s film “a genuine work of outlaw art.

There’s an old saying that “a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.” By the same token, I find these critics, who abstract abuse into “art,” are grossly lacking in compassion for the victims of the violence they celebrate.

Story in Games

Larisa, blogger at The Pink Pigtail Inn, one of the consistently most interesting World of Warcraft blogs, argues today that questing in MMOs is utterly disruptive of story. Story, she says, isn’t the slowly-scrolling quest text – which even lovers of story largely dislike or ignore.

If we define immersion as the state of flow, the state of absorbed attention, then it should be obvious that the enemy of this desired state is interruption. Yet the game play design constantly interrupts one’s attention on the story. The failure of questing to absorb me into the story has nothing to do with the way “the story” is written or the fact that it’s text based.

…..

I’ve always seen questing–as I’ve seen killing mobs, playing the auction house, running instances–as tools to absorb me into a fantasy, an alternative world. It’s the game itself that holds my attention. I think that placing the burden for story cohesion and player absorption is asking too much from the questing mechanic as a function of game play design. Questing is a lousy way to tell a story.

Juddthelibrarian, writing from a tabletop gaming perspective, makes a similar point about story.

The goal of games, even narr-heavy thematic games Story Now, is not to make a story. Story happens.

The goal is a night of people making meaningful choices at the table. Story is a by-product, like exhaust coming out of a car.

It is also a by-product of gamist play and sim play. Story just happens.

Looking out for the story leads to constipation at the table. Story does not need to be preserved or looked out for. It is not a just hatched chick that needs everyone to be careful lest it is trampled. Just play the damned game, make choices that are brave. Look at your character sheet, let your character surprise you and story will just happen.

I think he’s right: in games – as in fanfic, machinima, and so many forms of “new media,” story is what we do. Setting is what the devs/producers do. Sure, they can tell stories in their setting too, and their stories can and do enrich the setting. But we’re not here to play in the dev’s stories, we’re here to make, live, tell, our own.

Seriousness

If there’s a player sin to match the dev sin of wanting us to be theme-park riders through their story, it’s seriousness.

One of the first things I saw this morning was the a capella version of “Do You Want To Date My Avatar” from last night’s w00tstock. The song’s charming, and playful, and full of a lot of truth about MMOs and virtual worlds. It appeals not just because it’s fun and catchy (and Felicia Day’s the cutest human on the planet), but because it speaks to truths we’ve learned along the way. It’s an outstanding teaching tool – and I’m definitely going to be using it in the class I”m teaching next semester – in no small part because it is not serious!

By contrast, there was a reply video making the rounds by SListas Pooky Amsterdam and Draxtor Despres, “I’m Too Busy To Date Your Avatar.” It’s well done, and not humorless in its presentation – but it’s kind of sad. It’s not the glorification of violence, but another deep flaw in our culture, aspirational drudgery.

Similarly sad is the article today in Pixels and Policy, with the perfect title, “New York Times Report on Virtual Worlds Totally Misses the Point.” How did it manage to do that? It was an article in the Style section about…. wait for it… *style* in Second Life. And the point it missed? That SL is Serious Business! That virtual worlds can be as drab, humorless and soul-crushing as the RL corporate world – or as the school buildings faithfully recreated there!

O brave new world, that has avatar dress codes in it!

Someone very wise said to me that what virtual worlds do best is provide us with experiences we can’t readily get, or get better, elsewhere. We went to them for heroic adventure, for bacchanalia, for Musimmersion and DynaFleur – and now the advocates of virtual worlds are proclaiming busyness and conventionality as a feature??

Games can fix some things that are profoundly broken in our society, not least of which are its hatred of fun, of sensuality, of creativity.

We need a lot more Felicia Day, and a lot less Serious Business.

It’s *Our* Story: Character & Narrative in Alter Ego, Blue Mars and Dragon Age Origins

I’m not sure how I found Alter Ego, but I spent a few really engrossed hours with it last night. It’s a browser based (also available in Android and iPhone apps) text game, a decision tree covering life choices from birth to death. It’s charming, warm, very immersive, and really delightful. And it provides an interesting perspective on narrative and gameplay, character creation and immersion.

Alter Ego

Alter Ego looks like an iPhone screen, with a branching tree of attractive icons representing family, love, finances, work, health, and so on. Clicking on each icon generates a situation with a choice, that may in turn branch from one to four times. A separate box keeps track of character stats: trustworthiness, happiness, confidence; cash and debt; and a few other things.

And that’s pretty much it. You make choices, choices shape your character, your character shapes the arc of your life. Then you die.

My projective identity (no character names) felt real. I felt her frustrations, her triumphs, her losses – and her death after a healthy old age brought a melancholy completeness: I/she/we didn’t have quite the life I/she/we wanted, but it was rich and full, and very much complete at the end of her days.

It was cathartic, and in a way quite profound. Despite a major rewrite of childhood, her middle age nonetheless looked very much like mine: we’d converged around our core *character* – whether measured by stats or expressed in our choices. That realization gave me an “aha” moment in a way that twenty grand of therapy couldn’t – I lived it and saw it, right there on the screen.

Experiencing it through my projective identity made it real in a way that other means of learning really couldn’: that “alter ego,” that life re-roll, became my story, as much as my own life is (interestingly, WoW Insider ran a column today on “Real Life Character Re-Customization,” addressing something very similar)

A powerful, moving psychological/narrative experience had emerged from some icons and a long list of questions.

Character and Immersion: It Ain’t Graphics

Yesterday saw a bunch of gee-whiz tweets and retweets from the official Blue Mars channels, including a short video of Blue Mars running in panorama on three widescreen monitors.

I didn’t tweet my response, because I wanted to consider it (I’ve been in a “knee-jerk negativity about virtual worlds” phase, and didn’t want to just “bah, humbug” without some thought).  My immediate response was, so what? It’s pretty scenery, and I couldn’t care less. Give me people, give me a UI with effective tools for communication and expression (through text, images and building). What matters is the human world, not pretty reflections off the waves.

I was right. Alter Ego, with no more pretty than some well-designed graphic icons, deeply engaged me for the better part of an evening. Blue Mars, despite my needing to cover the world for a class, hasn’t pulled me back in weeks.

Why?

Realism and immersion aren’t generated by graphics engines, they’re generated by people, real or fictive. This is hardly news to old-time MUDders (I’m not one, but I’ve talked to them extensively), but continues to escape software engineers and too many game designers.

Dragon Age Origins

Another example: I played this week with the Dragon Age Origins character generator.

As Tobold observed, it’s not a character generator, it’s a face generator. As such, it’s really quite good (except, why is it, in game after game, you can make an avvie with nice African features but not African *hair*?).

But, using a D&D-like system, your characters are almost entirely pre-rolled, there’s no way to create a character bio, no real choice of starting talents. And you can’t modify the avvie bodies at all: not only that, the bodies across races and factions are identical aside from height (at least among the humans and elves) – so a human rogue and an elf warrior look pretty much identical below the (choose your length) neck.

So how is it a character generator?

Simple, if you think like a software engineer: it’s all about the visuals, the surface, the code that generates graphics.

Dragon Age Origins encourages you to upload your characters to a social network (an interesting take on the “alone together” phenomenon of people not really playing MMO’s socially – so Dragon Age Origins is the natural next step beyond being able to solo to level cap in WoW: it’s a solo game where you can show off your achievements socially without having to actually play with other people).

But what do you upload? Some largely pre-set stats and a profile icon.

Why not backstory? Why not the output of a little “character generator” like Alter Ego, that indicated how the character might likely behave: are they dishonest, sexually assertive, likely to try talking their way out of a fight first but brutal in finishing it, uninterested in wealth but drawn to power? How much more interesting that would be than the width of my avvie’s nose and the extra point I put in DEX?

It’s *Our* Story

This week I’ve been reading First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, an anthology covering the ludology/narratology dispute in games studies. Ultra-short version? Academic wank and turf wars. Ultra-short re-roll? “Tastes Great!/Less Filling!”  Short version? Ludology stressed games-as-rule-sets, holding in its extreme view that there’s no possible room for narrative or story in games. Narratology basically wanted to read games as just like movies, with player-actors. Yes, that’s unfair, pejorative, and grossly oversimplifying. If you want the full deal, read the book.

What struck me was that both factions were arguing over the head of the player, as it were. Both seemed to be grounded in an auteur model, just arguing over what was being authored, a rule set or a text.

But what all these examples I’ve mentioned here have in common is player authorship of emergent narrative. I wrote a life in Alter Ego, not the very skilled authors of the questions and decision tree. I created, however tentatively, three characters for Dragon Age, not Biosoft. If anything interesting happens in Blue Mars, it won’t be due to the CryEngine, but due to the people.

Here’s another interesting example: there was a consensus the other day that story is irrelevant in boss fights in WoW. I think they’re only half right. I’d say, Blizzard’s story is irrelevant in boss fights, because we’re too busy enacting the events that will figure into our narratives, our guild’s tale of the time we took on the boss. And note – the bloggers weren’t saying that Blizzard’s story is irrelevant -  not at all – but that it’s best gotten from media that do a better job of delivering authored stories: novels, manga or comics. Let each medium do what it does best.

Good designers give us good tools, an engaging setting, and let us get on with living, and then telling, our own stories. Bad designers (and a lot of academics) still think it’s their story.

It’s our story, all of it.

The Puppet Master Problem

1. The Setup

We discussed Jane McGonigal’s article “Why I Love Bees: A Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming” in Alice Robison’s ENG 553: Videogame Studies on Monday. Alice brought up another article by McGonigal, “The Puppet Master Problem: Design for Real-World, Mission-Based Gaming,” and I mentioned it was one of the most disturbing academic articles I’ve ever read. I’d like to briefly sketch the reasons for that response.

This isn’t intended as a thorough, and absolutely not an original, critique of McGonigal: I strongly suspect other people have covered this territory and done it better. It’s a quick explanation of my own response, coupled with some speculation and associations with things that don’t find themselves linked all that often.

McGonigal introduces “a new mode of digital gaming… I call it the power play.” Power plays are created and run by “puppet masters:” “Unlike virtually any other game you could think of, ‘mastered’ or not, in power plays the player’s actions are entirely predetermined… There is simply no optionality to the power play  – do exactly what you’re told, or there’s no play for you. The underlying power structure requires a level of overt submission from gamers that is simply unprecedented in game culture.”

She discusses critics of “pervasive gaming,” in which a large number of online players direct the actions of a few in the physical world, the reverse of the dynamic in Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) like I Love Bees, which which she was involved. Those critics, she says argue that pervasive games “will naturalize the PM [puppet master]-player dynamic and therefore make players more likely to accept out-of-game puppet masters in their real, everyday lives.”

She addresses that criticism obliquely, not refuting it, but making a case for, essentially, the joy of submission, or constraint.

McGonigal aruges that “reality” is that which is constrained, “virtuality” that which provides options, but then defines contemporary culture as one of virtuality, suggesting that the escape provided by games should be one of escape from the option space of our real virtuality into a game of manufactured constraint:

“In a culture where everything is designed for maximum optionality, and reality is defined by having to accept a situation exactly as it is with no special customization, modification or self-authorship, the most immersively realistic game is the one in which a puppet master tells you exactly what to do, when to do it, where and for how long. For immersive gamers, the escape from constant optionality is the pleasure of the relative powerlessness of a power play.”

2. Games as Learning Spaces

Jim Gee argues that video games are powerful tools for learning (as distinguished from teaching). Gee’s catchily-titled What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy sets out 36 principles of learning, and demonstrates how digital games can and do embody them. One of his first observations is

“Like reading and thinking, learning is not general, but specific; like reading and thinking, it is not just an individual act but a social one. As for learning being specific, video games teach us that a good game teaches the player primarily how to play the game and, then, to be able to generalize to games like it. But all learning is, I would argue, learning to play ‘the game.’”

I’m willing to posit that ARGs, digitally mediated games played out in physical as well as digital spaces, embody most of Gee’s principles of learning. But, in traditional games, as McGonigal discusses thoroughly, what is learned is efficacy, empowerment, mastery. But that empowerment and mastery is reflexive, not transitive. What is mastered is a “semiotic domain,” be it the role of Orc Shaman, or city planner, or poor Haitian family trying to prosper. The empowerment is of ability to act in that semiotic domain, of being able to make choices that lead to desirable outcomes.

What pervasive games and ARGs teach, by McGonigal’s own description, is transitive: it is power over others, mastery of others. In pervasive games, the player is the master over game-runner servants, in ARGs, the player is the servant of the puppet master.

People learn from games.  From good games, people learn to be capable, to be active players rather than passive spectators, to master semiotic domains rather than to be taught “content.” Good games are inherently political: they create citizens in a culture that would have us be consumers. Good games move power from those who hoard and wield it – schoolteachers, old media conglomerates – to the people.

Bad games – and working off McGonigal’s description, ARGs are bad games – teach values that benefit the wielders of power and disempower the people. McGonigal’s defense is “but people want it- submission is joy!” Even granting the truth of that – and I’ll discuss that statement below – it’s not a rebuttal.

Do people learn from games? Yes. Do they learn from power plays? Yes. What do they learn? The joys of submission, or at best, of participating in relationships of power over others, as master or as servant, in a broadly social context. Are these good things? No.  The lessons taught by power plays are antithetical to those of a free, democratic society.

3. Helicopter Parents to Puppet Masters?

So, reading McGonigal’s article, I had to ask myself, “Is she right?” Do people crave escape from option spaces? Is there a desire to submit to the puppet master?

Barry Schwartz coined the phrase “the tyranny of choice” in a 2004 Scientific American article, and later wrote a book entitled “The Paradox of Choice.”  His argument is a fairly specific one about stress from choosing among too many not-really-different alternatives, but it seemed to resonate culturally in a more general sense. When we can be anything, live anywhere, choose any partner or none, how do we make coherent decisions? Certainly political conservatism and religious fundamentalism are seen by their adherents as attractive constraints and submissions in response to a globalized culture without clear rules and mandated roles.

McGonagle noted in “Why I Love Bees” that the 2004 game’s participants were “largely high school and college students.” It’s entirely possible that “the pleasure of relative powerlessness” has a generational appeal: having been “helicopter parented,” considering their parents their closest confidants, that population may find being puppet masterered a warm return to the safety of childhood, an escape from the hard and fearful work of becoming adults. One suspects that Generation X, who were autonomous “latchkey kids,” finds the notion incomprehensible, and the rebellious Boomers find it anathema.

4. Is Electronic Love to Blame?

(with apologies to Apoptygma Berzerk)
OK, the first thing I thought of wasn’t helicopter parents, but the prevalence of D/s (Domiance/submission, or power exchange) in digital worlds. I’ve said more than once that the Second Life tutorial should include a couple hours of BDSM education, and I’m not entirely facetious about it.

I think there are three different things going on with digital D/s, and only one of them bears on McGonagal’s claim – but it definitely does.

The first is, some of the motivation for BDSM sexual practices is a desire to heighten sensation to compensate for lack of physical contact in online sexuality: it’s “I want (you to) really feel this,” when the intercourse is aural, textual, audiovisual, and not flesh-to-flesh. So, the tightening of a restraint, the sharper bite, the harder push, compensates for the lower bandwidth of the medium. To generate enough physical arousal digitally, some might have to increase the stimulus. So, sadomasochistic sex doesn’t have any bearing on the issue.

(technosage also points out that when sex is mediated through language, whether spoken or written, it necessitates practices much like those of D/s, in which negotiating what you want done or to do, monitoring sensation levels, and giving commands are important. She also suggests an excellent research agenda for someone: does electronic sexuality (phone sex, sex in virtual worlds, etc.) lead to greater inclusion of D/s or D/s-like practices in one’s physical sexuality?)

The second is aesthetic: outfits and toys that are fairly impractical in the physical world can work digitally, and that can be pretty and fun. Ballet heels? Latex? Spanking skirts? Ball gags? Spreader bars? Painful or risky in the physical world, but the digital world allows the aesthetic enjoyment without the lower back pains One of the most ubiquitous pieces of Second Life furniture, the St. Andrew’s Cross, can’t be separated from the visual affordances and  constraints of the screen: it’s pretty, it’s easy to move the viewpoint camera around, and it’s an iconic, conversational object in a way the bed isn’t.  So, the digital popularity of bondage-inspired fashion doesn’t have any bearing on the issue.

But the third, the real D/s community, the people who’ve made the Restrained Life Viewer one of SL’s most popular tools – they have bearing on the issue. D/s isn’t a subset of sexual practice, but about the joy of submission, of restraint, of surrendering one’s options to another’s will (mediated through software in the case of the RLV and RLV-compatible toys). So, digital spaces allow for an expression of D/s different from that of the physical world: there’s no RLV for RL. They also, of course, enable similar D/s practices to those of the physical world. But clearly, digital spaces and tools offer an opportunity to explore D/s, and that exploration is very popular (and big business).

Yet, I don’t think that the RLV is bad, while I think the ARG power play is.

D/s can become political (see, e.g., Gorean communities), but it isn’t, inherently. It doesn’t ordinarily structure social relations, let alone political or economic ones. However, the power play takes the D/s impulse and translates it into a social medium: it makes that joy of submission into a political act.

That is a perversion, in a fundamental, literal sense of the term.

The great triumph of social media has been its politicization of individual expression: it has reclaimed creativity from a professional elite and returned it to all of us. It has taken power from corporations, from political parties, and returned it to the people. The ARG takes the deeply intimate impulse of D/s and turns it to political and commercial ends: it teaches a joy of public disempowerment, a profoundly immoral act.

5. Slumming

If there’s anything that says “spoiled yuppie brat,” it’s “I’m so oppressed by my freedom, I need to play at powerlessness.”  What’s next, an ARG theme park featuring the “North Korean Blackout” zone, the “Smuggled Across the Border” ride,  the “Chain Gang” mixer, the “Thai Slave Brothel” teahouse? Playing for the frisson from the conditions that still ruin the lives of millions is contemptible.

You feel oppressed by your freedom? Give mom and dad back their tuition and go work at WalMart, and try to keep your health insurance and car payments up. There’s a fun game – and it’s just like reality!

Do Android Shrinks Analyze Boolean Dreams?

Do Android Shrinks Analyze Boolean Dreams?
Chapters 4 through 6 of Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen

(an assignment for EDT 691, Research in Virtual Worlds)

In Chapters 4 through 6 of Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle addresses the parallel evolution of conceptions of human and machine intelligence in psychoanalysis, in artificial intelligence research, and in adults’ and children’s folk views.

Turkle argues that, in each of these areas, the underlying metaphors have moved from a modernist, mechanistic conception in the 1960s through 1980s, through concepts of “emergence” of complexity from simple elements, to a view of “a fundamental kinship between human and machine minds.” While Turkle does effectively trace connections and synergies between psychology, AI research and popular conceptions, she slights the social uptake of new technologies, in which the changing perceptions of the computer fit a fairly standard pattern. A sociological perspective might have provided her with a more parsimonious explanation and more comprehensive framework for her observed results.

Chapter 4 begins with a discussion of the 1966 ELIZA software, an attempt to create a natural-language interface for a psychotherapy program (a project dementedly over-ambitious for its time in a way that goes right past “hubris” to “facepalm”), in a time in which computers for most were utterly foreign objects, known only through metaphor and fable.

People often took the ELIZA software to be sentient, which is frankly astonishing. The note on the ELIZA website today reads

ELIZA has almost no intelligence whatsoever, only tricks like string substitution and canned responses based on keywords. Yet when the original ELIZA first appeared in the 60′s, some people actually mistook her for human. The illusion of intelligence works best, however, if you limit your conversation to talking about yourself and your life.

This javascript version of ELIZA was originally written by Michal Wallace and significantly enhanced by George Dunlop.

Note: Eliza is dumb! This is common knowledge. Please don’t write to me telling me she’s dumb, or how to fix it. If you don’t like the way she works, you can change the code yourself. Just view source on this page to see the javascript, and save it to your hard drive. Then do a search for javascript documenation, and you should be able to make Eliza act any way you want.

The evolution of responses to ELIZA is fascinating, and I think much richer than Turkle’s tale of academic trickle-down. But it’s a good story in her telling, just the same.

When her early interviewees considered the nature of psychotherapy software, they answered in terms of “the computer” “understanding” them, attributing sentience and agency to the machine, rather than perceiving the software as a set of tools. By the 1990s, her subjects saw software as a tool akin to a book, rather than as a therapist ex machina.

Popular understanding of the computer began with images and tales, remote from personal experience. Turkle states that the “rigid, hyper-logical machines of the original Star Trek television series evoked most people’s vision of advanced computers during the late 1960s to the early 1980s.”

By contrast, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the popular image which underlay people’s concept of a “computer psychotherapist” derived from the android Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, an unthreatening, “user-friendly” presence quite akin to that associated with Apple computers, in the same era giving many their first direct experience of the machine.

Turkle charts the way forward through “emergence” to a vision of the computer as just like us – the contemporary image would be Six, from Battlestar Galactica: almost indistinguishable from human in biology and psychology, but culturally alien.

[@technosage argues that a better metaphor would be Boomer – that the issue around artificial intelligence of particular resonance for our time comes not from our perception of them, the central issue for Data in ST:TNG, but of their own self-conception, of the psychological consequences *to them* of being, or discovering that they are, artificial. “Are we all now Pinocchios?” is a question to bear in mind while reading Turkle’s Part 3, “On The Internet.” This suggests an entirely different take on the notion of a “computer therapist” than Turkle’s!]

Turkle states that “different paths for coming to terms with the idea of machine intelligence have developed in relation to evolving technologies,” one being that the machine is alive, the other that of the banalization of technology, a process she describes as the “force of familiarity and utility.”

She refers to “treating programs as social actors” in this era, an interesting conflation of Latour’s Actor Network Theory (one thinks immediately of Michel Callon’s scallops of St. Brieuc Bay as “actors” alongside the people fishing for them) and the pathetic fallacy of children with their plush toys – which may be taken as commentary either on the wisdom of children or the childishness of French intellectuals, as one pleases!

She tells the story of the banalization of the computer, as it passes from “just like a calculator” to the object onto which utopian and romantic visions are projected, to a tool to be used in new and unexpected ways, to a household appliance – as the Galactica crew would say, a “frakking toaster.”

Unfortunately, Turkle spends half a paragraph describing a path of technological adoption that would provide meaning for her observations of people’s changing reactions without the need to delve into the dialog between psychology and engineering that drives these chapters.

Similarly, Turkle addresses the role of embodiment in intelligence in a paragraph, as embodiment was not the focus of the psychology/AI dialog during the decades she studied. She notes that “students were suggesting that computers would need bodies to be empathetic,” but dismisses those responses as “reflect[ing] people’s images of psychotherapy as much as their images of the computer,” then dismissing them in favor of an analysis of psychotherapy’s own discourse in that time.

Her focus leads her to gloss over data (pardon the pun) invalidating her theory that the academic discourse drove popular understanding: embodiment was critical to popular engagement with artificial intelligence, from Data’s seduction in ST:TNG’s second episode on through the “morphing” of the Terminators and Power Rangers she discusses in a different context in Chapter 6. Today, embodiment is one of the key areas of dispute within AI and its associated culture of transhumanism, a development which readily could have been predicted from both popular culture and the dialog between AI and neuroscience, which flourished after the publication of Life on the Screen.

Awakening from “AI’s Boolean dream,” that intelligence could be created from sufficiently exhaustive formal rules, both AI research and psychology moved towards a concept of emergence, of complexity arising from simple initial conditions. This emergence is demonstrated by A-life, whose development Turkle charts from the famous 1960s “Conway’s Game of Life” to Will Wright’s Sim series. Her chapter ends with an introduction to a “culture of simulation,” to be developed in Part 3 in relation, at last, not to the machine, but to other persons as mediated through the machine.

In discussing the rise of “decentralized models” underpinning notions of emergence and simulation, Turkle cites a parallel between the historical development of decentralization as a key trope of psychoanalysis and AI research – while completely ignoring the spread of the trope through politics, media and culture through the same period.

Narrowing her focus to two disciplines, she does highlight the extent to which an actual discourse took place, yielding a theoretical convergence between conceptions of the human mind and of the artificial mind. However, the loss of a larger political and cultural context gives rise to an impression of causation – that this academic dialog produced changes in popular concepts of computers, artificial intelligence and artificial life, rather than themselves being part of a much broader cultural turn.

Here, at the end of Chapter 6, Turkle turns to matters of more direct interest to a class on educational technology, as she introduces simulations as a powerful tool for thinking about the nature of life, intelligence and complex systems. While she writes extensively about hacker culture, her work predated the fusion with simulations of the “get under the hood and tinker” approach which had already begun to fade with the advent of closed, opaque hardware systems like the Mac. The ability to tinker with the assumptions of simulations, to write one’s own rules for the development of A-life, to run historical counterfactuals in Civilization, adds a powerful tool for understanding, and hopefully, living in and working with, complex systems.

That such “godlike,” as Turkle describes, powers are now wielded as toys by children and adults alike offers hope that we may come to grips with planetary-scale systems before we are destroyed by them. Doing so would seem to be education’s greatest priority, and Turkle depicts, if not adequately explains, the early evolution of the tools that may enable us to do so.

KOTOR Hour 17: Disempowerment & Reflection

I’ve completed the quests that unlock the major plot device of the game, and I’m completely frustrated in several respects.

Gameplay that Unlocks Narrative

First, I think I’ve learned why I gave up on adventure games on the Playstation 1, and haven’t played the genre in ten years. I’d like to draw a distinction between games in which the gameplay creates narrative (Civilization, Sim City, and, I think, World of Warcraft) and those in which the gameplay unlocks or reveals narrative (KOTOR, Bioshock). I like stories. I read a lot of them, and I tend to gobble rather than savor them. So, when I play a story-based game, I find the gameplay is an obstacle to the narrative: I want to know what happens, not kill mobs and pick up loot!

When I used to play adventure games, back when I was a lot more addictive/compulsive than I am now, I used walkthroughs constantly: I must have spent a fortune on phone calls to the helpline for King’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry (well, I would have, except I made them from work at a law firm when I was being paid to wait out a recession), pushing past the game elements to get to the resolution of the narrative.

(Note: I did subsequently play, and really enjoy, the Monkey Island games. How are they different?)

In my previous KOTOR post, I wondered if my frustration was the meta-game consequence of KOTOR’s theme, that impatience leads to the Dark Side. Now I think it’s just a problem with the genre, that playing a fighting game to unlock bite-size chunks of a narrative is like chocolate and broccoli, not chocolate and peanut butter.

Constraints

Miguel Sicart, in the difficult but essential The Ethics of Computer Games, flat-out calls KOTOR an “unethical game.” One of his grounds, the reduction of ethics to a game mechanic, I don’t buy as unethical, and I think directly contradicts his own praise for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on what I read as similar grounds. But I do agree that KOTOR is a “closed system,” one in which the player doesn’t get to enact their own ethical choices, but has to choose from a limited and sometimes arbitrary-seeming system. As Sicart says

This creates an ethical experience of both disempowerment, since the player cannot exert direct moral action on the game world, and reflection, since players have to reflect on the values they are playing by.

About KOTOR specifically, he says that it and Bioshock

intends to be open ethical games, since they aim to create a game experience in which ethics play a role in the relation to a responsive game world. They do not succeed because the developers overemphasized the closedness of the game experience, not allowing players to reflect on and experience the game as a moral agent.

That was my response to Bioshock, too, which I played for about an hour. I thought the setting was gorgeous and intriguing, and I wanted to explore the city and its history. I had no interest in shooting everything around me, though, and considered playing a shooter too high a price for the visual and narrative payoff.

Here’s an example of the closedness of KOTOR. I’d mentioned earlier that I’d picked up a quest from a woman to recover her “kidnapped” sex droid, and suspected from the get-go that he was a runaway. When I find the droid, he says that he ran away because his owner had developed an unhealthy attachment to him, and he felt that if here were gone, she might find a “real person” for a lover. He then begs me to kill him. My choices from the menu then are to kill him, to tell him that I’m going to tell his owner why, or lie and tell her he’s still out there, or to say that she’s *really* upset that he’s gone. I take the latter, and he says he’s been selfish in putting his own desire for freedom ahead of her needs, and returns to her, where she very creepily says she’s going to take him home and ensure he never gets out again.

I can’t begin to count the ways in which this is fucked up, but let’s stick with the gameplay basics. My choices are to kill a runaway slave or return him to his abusive mistress. I was trying to find an option *I* considered moral – enabling him to confront her directly about her treatment of him, and/or to help him escape. But I wasn’t given those options. My choices were to kill a sympathetic sentient being, or deliver him back to slavery. The constraints did give me grounds for reflection: which is worse, death or slavery? But I was disempowered from my ability to enact my own moral alternatives by the limitations of the gameplay. As Sicart put it

the player is bereft of her creative capacities, leaving a system that evaluates and labels her actions according to moral standards that are external to those the player has created.

Exactly.

Appeal of the Narrative and Frustration With the Gameplay

One of the major attractions of the Star Wars universe for me is the complex politics underlying the simplistic Light/Dark approach of the Jedi. Their self-righteous Manicheanism has the potential for immense corruption, a theme at the heart of much of the Star Wars narrative, movies as well as Expanded Universe. Their relations with the Republic are fascinating, and full of 20th Century and contemporary analogs: are they the Communist Party running a subservient state apparatus? Are they the moral equivalent of the World Bank, dictating policy to the state? Are they the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms? The Iranian Basij?

KOTOR presents the moral complexity of the Jedi: a master fakes her death in order to drive her apprentice to the Dark Side as a test of her strength and a cautionary tale; young Jedi leaders become convinced that their strategic ability is greater than that of the Republic, and turn to the Sith for a superweapon to fight their enemies; an inadequately trained neophyte (the player character) is sent down a path that led well-trained and respected Jedi to become Sith, out of political expediency… it’s good stuff.

So, I’m interested in the storylines that intertwine this narrative, not just the main “find the mystery whoosit and defeat the Dark Lord” plot but the stories of the supporting characters that intertwine it. But, to proceed along those storylines to the conclusion, I’ve got to do a bunch of side quests (dealing with runaway slaves, gangsters, wild animals), kill a whole bunch of stuff, and do more of those progress-blocking minigames to get there.

I’m pretty sure if I weren’t playing this game for class, at this point I’d call the broccoli/chocolate ratio unfavorable and bag it. As it is, I’m on the Wookiee homeworld, about to fight my way through forest monsters to find a star map.

Oh, excitement. Or, as my Wookiee teammate would say, “AAAAAAAGHHHHHH!”

Harshing Your Squee

We had a rare treat yesterday in Alice Robison’s ENG 553: Videogame Studies: Jim Gee dropped in for an hour and a half chat.

Jim ranged from the politics of healthcare in the US, to the lack of innovation in distance education, to the wild success of the American school system in turning out docile, uncritical service workers. A couple student questions, including one of mine, turned on his concept of “affinity spaces,” as distinct from another popular term in the literature, “communities of practice.”

He stressed that affinity spaces are purposeful communities, where, paraphrasing, other issues are left at the door. He gave the example of a pickup group in World of Warcraft, where you don’t care if the other player is a good person, or shares your opinions and values, but only on how well they play their class. He also said that internet-based affinity spaces give you the opportunity to set aside your physical-world signifiers like race, gender and class, but implied that it’s more than an opportunity, rather more of a mandate, since those things are seen as extraneous to the purpose of the space.

I didn’t, and don’t, buy it, but I didn’t have a ready and compelling critique. Reading Miguel Sicart’s The Ethics of Computer Games today, I came across a useful tool to hang a critique on.

Sicart (the book is adapted from his PhD dissertation in philosophy, so the language is difficult – though he’s amazingly clear for a philosopher) presents a model called the “ludic hermenuetic circle” (warned you!). Unfortunately, the diagram isn’t online, and my scanner’s not working, so bear with me here…

One of Sicart’s main points is that the player of a game isn’t some being that popped into existence at the login screen: they bring a lifetime of experience, both in games and in the world, and they bring their culture(s). What the diagram conveys is that the gameplay is an interaction of the affordances and constraints of the game, the player’s experiences, the game community and the player’s involvement with it, and the player’s culture and values. It’s all a whole.

So, for example, when I’m playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, my play experience is directly informed not just by what’s on the software disc, but by my knowledge of the Star Wars saga, my experience as someone who sucks at console shooters, my mouseless laptop, and my own history of thinking about, and experiencing, matters of race, gender and sexuality. Your play experience will have some commonalities and some differences.

Now, say I enter into an active community of KOTOR players. Gee’s formulation would have me check my personal history, values and culture at the door.

Really?

No, not really.

What this view means in practice (though I’m sure it’s not Gee’s intentional formuluation – I’ll come back to issues of intentionality either below or in a later post) is, “check your *minority* attitudes at the door.”

Sicart makes an outstanding point about game culture:

If the community is comprised exclusively of those who can afford to log onto the Internet regularly and/or spend vast amounts of time participating in the common creation of the game culture, then there may be silent web-less majorities that do not follow the values of the community, thus distorting the values of the game as they can be perceivedd. That is, the values of the game as deduced from its communtiy may only be the values of an elite group with time and technical knowledge and capacities.

There’s a concept of “reflexive” and “projective” users, that’s useful here (from Christina Lindsay’s “From The Shadows” in How Users Matter, Oudshoorn and Pinch, eds.): designers often design for other people just like them – that’s the reflexive user. They also have views, maybe broader and more nuanced, of who their users are – that’s the projective user. These categories are often narrower, and sometimes have very little relation to, the actual users.

So, in the KOTOR case, the projective users of the game were experienced Xbox players. Then the game was ported to PC, and actual users came in who weren’t familiar with or skilled at console games – and those mingames that formed gates for console players became barriers for people without console skills. Actual users varied from projective users, and they found problems the designers never intended.

Now, the same thing happens with race, gender, sexuality and class.  One of the things happening on the Blue Mars forums was actual users confronting the designers’ decisions to make avatars look like the developers’ reflexive users: young white and Asian guys, with limited and really fake opportunities to present oneself as female, conservative, older, of African ancestry.

Now, there are three responses. One, “STFU and play,” was taken by a developer in a recent post (with a terrific critique by Cuppycake here). This view says that your identity is irrelevant to the play experience. But if it was irrelevant, then the designers would happily play gay, shapeless African women. That doesn’t happen. So what they actually mean is, your *minority* identity is irrelevant to our *majority* creation – *your* identity doesn’t matter, but *mine* does.

The second is I think what Gee is getting at, though I may be wrong. “Look, here’s your chance to pass as a buff, high status straight white guy! Lucky you!” Despite my sarcasm, there’s some real value here. People *can* set aside their low-status signifiers and be judged on the merits of their play, commentary or creations, and that’s of enormous value. However, there’s a price, and that price is being seen as a projective user, rather than as an actual user.

I think this is where a lot of racewank comes from, though it’s a subject I’m very weak on. In a space where nobody has signfiers, most everybody assumes most everyone belongs to the projective users, to the majority. And then somebody says something about a minority that they’d never say if they thought there actually were minorities present, and a flame war starts.

So “no signifiers” *never* means “race, gender, sexuality, age, don’t matter.” It means “each of us assumes all the others are members of the majority.” Which is equalizing, but equalizing at the price of people losing their particularity, their history, their culture.

But we *don’t.*

As Sicart says, we’re all embodied players, and we carry our past, our values and our culture with us. We *can’t* check them at the door.

I’m reminded of one of the early Death Knight quests in WoW, where we, as a servant of the Lich King, steal and don the Scarlet courier’s gear – and suddenly all the Scarlets, whom we’re at war with, appear as friendly to us. Sure, I can stand and talk to High General Abbendis in the middle of the Scarlet army and chat with her, safe in my Scarlet disguise. But let me tell you, if I said “HAI GUYS IZ SCOURGE”  I’d get killed on the spot.

That’s the experience of being any sort of minority, cultural or player, in a lot of “affinity spaces.” As long as we’re all Scarlets here, it’s all happy fansquee. But just go and say “I’m really enjoying my undead lifestyle,” and just watch the flame war start!

The third response is that of the actual user who says, “deal with me, respect me, give me the affordances as a minority that you give to the majority.” *You* get an avatar that looks and moves like you – give me one. You get to flirt with the NPCs you find cute, give me the same ability.

Somehow that’s immensely controversial in the community of developers and players who fit the reflexive-user model.

So, when we speak out in affinity spaces, most of us really aren’t there to harsh your squee by bringing nasty real-world politics into your game space. We’re just bringing *ourselves,* just as you do, but want *our* selves to be acknowledged, represented and respected in the space just as *your* selves are.

I want to squee too – but it’s hard to do with a lame-ass avatar!

Blue Mars, Bakhtin and Burning Man

Two articles today touched on the very heart of philosophies of governance in virtual worlds. Both, interviews with former Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale and with current Avatar Reality CEO Jim Sink, pointed towards the choices facing creators of virtual worlds. At the most basic level, creators need to answer, “who is the world for?” Failure to have a coherent answer and appropriate policies dooms VWs, as Google Lively quickly learned. Both CEOs, though, missed – or in Rosedale’s case, was in full retreat from – a strong, coherent answer to that question.

In discussing virtual worlds, one of the first questions one’s often asked is, “why?” It’s an excellent question, both at a personal level and and at the level of the world/business.

I hadn’t had a good personal answer for some time, and hadn’t logged into SL but a few times in a good eight months, when I had a chat with a prominent SL resident who’s been thinking of leaving. Paraphrasing, what they said was that SL is at its most personally rewarding when you’re using it to get something you’re not getting in the physical world, and least rewarding when it’s substituting for something in your offline life.

I’d been using SL as an augmentationist, going to the same sorts of talks and conferences that I go to as a grad student. And that wasn’t holding my interest. Rather, the lag, the technical problems, the policy foolishness from Linden Lab, outweighed any benefit, and left me feeling pretty negative. On thinking about that bit of advice, and asking myself what I wasn’t getting outside of SL, I found renewed purpose and presence. While my crazy schedule this semester is eating time, my online and offline lives are complementary now, rather than conflicting, and I’m enjoying both more than ever.

Now, that advice I got, while seemingly practical and somewhat conservative in the light of personal choice, is potentially radical at the level of worlds.

What if a virtual world conceived of its market niche as providing something powerful and deeply satisfying, that many people don’t get in their offline lives?

Well, they’d be MMOs. MMOs provide an expression of aggression, of competition, of challenge, reward and achievement most of us sadly lack. And as a result, they’re deservedly popular. They deliver the satisfaction of real needs that our culture’s largely failed to address.

What if a non-game world were to do the same thing?

That was the initial premise behind SL – that it would be the Burning Man festival, delivering community, creativity, bacchanalia, but not one weekend of the year in one remote place, but always, globally. And Second Life largely became just that – a geeky carnivale.

But the creators and funders of this expression of creativity, this outlet of sexual energy, this global community of the brilliant and bizarre, craved legitimacy. More and more they denigrated, disrespected, often insulted, their core customers in the pursuit of endorsement from corporate enterprise and higher education. And finally, Philip himself has come to say that SL needs to abandon its Burning Man roots, in order to reach “hundreds of millions.”

Reach them and do what?

What deep need, that goes unmet in the offline lives of “hundreds of millions,” can SL meet by abandoning its roots in the technophilic bacchanalia of Burning Man?

To that question, Philip has no answer.

Meanwhile, Blue Mars, just in open beta (and no, I don’t have a beta key, which will make fieldwork in that world for EDT 691 this semester…interesting), has recognized the possible answers to that question and admitted they don’t know yet which one will work for that world, an admission I found charmingly honest and direct.

There seem to be three paradigms for virtual worlds: food court, science museum, and Burning Man. The food court model offers sanitized sociability and inoffensive goods for sale: Lively and Sony Home, along with most of the corporate-sponsored worlds like MTV’s Laguna Beach, seem to follow this model. One might say that neither the physical nor the digital food court meets any deep human need, but rather aims to numb them, if not erase them, and substitute consumerism. At any rate, most of us have plenty of malls and food courts in our physical lives, and digital version offer only substitution, a recipe for failure by my friend’s astute analysis. And, the market seems to bear that out.

The second, science museum, would bring high culture out of the downtown edifice and into our homes. It’s an excellent and noble goal, and I expect to work in this field to some large degree. As an answer,it’s a good one. As a market, I’m rather less convinced. My discussions with the Blue Mars representatives at the Games Learning + Society conference this summer gave me the impression that this is one of Blue Mars’s core answers. I wish them well, and I’d love to work with them, but I’m not entirely convinced this model can keep the lights on and the servers running.

The third is Burning Man. Here, I think the need is profound: desperately in an America washed to blandness by the determined inoffensiveness of corporate entertainment and the brutal puritanism of the religious right, but still profoundly across an increasingly disembodied, dispassionate West, we need our bacchanalia, our Bakhtinian carnivalesque, our passions to be expressed in music, in the surreal, in the sexual, to match our passions expressed in violence and competition in MMOs.

So why are some five to 12 million (depending on your estimation of how many accounts are owned by gold farmers) people active in World of Warcraft and only some fifty thousand 750,000 (thanks to Hamlet Au for the correction – 50K is concurrency, 750k is monthly users) (depending on your estimation of bot traffic) active in SL?

There are a lot of reasons, some cultural, some corporate. One has to be that Blizzard Entertainment has determinedly, creatively *met* the emotional needs of its user base, while Linden Lab, embarrassed by its customers, has largely worked to hinder theirs.

I’m left with an image from my course readings this week: Clifford Geertz’s Deep Play: notes on the Balinese cockfight, in which the village cockfight is raided by state authorities, the result of “pretensions to puritanism” by a state seeking orderly, id-free nationbuilding rather than the passion, the status contests, the not-so-sublimated sexuality, of the ring.

Will the villagers of SL, and the academics among them, soon scatter before a raid by Linden troopers, in the name of the legitimacy of church and state? And if so, whither Burning Man, whither our needs for the creative, the sensual, the passionate? Will we be left with only outlets for making Warcraft, not, um,… Lovecraft? One suspects our cultural Cthulu cannot long be repressed, and hopes that some smart entrepreneur will seek out the market Philip would abandon.