Game Culture 11: Co-creative Culture & Labor

The question of material and immaterial labour was the core of today’s lecture, where the questions of exploitation, information and consummation of media were discussed. Basically, the ideas og labour has changed and gained a new perspective in the virtual world. The three cases reflect different approaches to this discussion.

Auction house in Diablo 3

The auction house of the upcoming Diablo 3 will enable players to sell items, crafting materials, and even their characters for in-game gold and real money (RMT). Though Blizzard has always opposed using real money transaction, they have changed their opinion with regards to Diablo 3.

"Their reasoning for finally allowing it, in their own game no less, is twofold: they are able to control the transaction, and they are also able to profit from it. A player will no longer feel the need to go to unreputable websites which may contain malicious software that steals their personal or account information. All of these transactions now take place within the game’s client" (from Diablowiki.net)

Items listed for in-game money and real money in the auction House in Diablo 3

 The allowance of real money transaction brings up some thoughts with regards to play and labour. Can players e.g. make a living farming epic items and selling them? And how will that affect their game experience. As soon as it’s no longer about playing the game, will it continue to be fun and enjoyable? I for example have enjoyed making a new homepage for my medieval re-enactment group. Hours of labour have gone into it, but it has been enjoyable and I haven’t seen it as being work. I think it’s because I had the choice of doing it. But as soon as the homepage turns into a task that I must do, it will start being work. One reaches a turning point where you realise that the labour you put into a cause will have to be paid. It’s become work, not fun.

FIFA 2012

When playing FIFA 2012 from Electronic Arts, the player’s personal information and activities are being tracked, collected, and on that basis play time is translated into commodity. This leads on to the question of whether information is material or immaterial. It’s clearly extremely valuable and can be translated into real money, but it’s also just being there and has been lying there for so long. And then some clever companies started realising that it was valuable and started recording it. And this leads us on to whether we, as providers of information to companies, are being exploited. When producing immaterial labour, such as providing valuable information to a company, there is a range of circumstances that differs from people doing material labour. The players cannot create unions, it’s very difficult to set up or alter terms and working condition (cause what are you really doing?) and it’s also very difficult to establish use value and use trade. You as a player are producing amazing amounts of value, but it's really hard to measure just what its worth. But let’s imagine that players did indeed gather in a union and started demanding some kind of refund for playing games and providing a company with information. I reckon that those players would simply be told that they weren’t forced to play the game and that it was really for their own enjoyment. Why should anyone get paid for something that they enjoy?

Mechanical Turk

This mixture of work and enjoyment might be seen on Amazons Mechanical Turk, a site where companies and private persons can offer very small payments for very small and sometimes fun tasks. This could be filling out a survey or playing a game. It’s an interesting mixture of passion and labour, and the Mechanical Turk site is an excellent example of re-thinking the classic work-model that might just be outdated and unfair.

The "Mechanical Turk" chess machine, excellent at making small, tedious calculations again and again and again... Sounds rather familiar.

Game Culture 10: Rationalization and Instrumentality in Play

The readings for today analysed the topics of rationalization and instrumentality in computer games from a social science perspective. During the class, several discussions were held about achievements and “playbour”. Three study cases, “The Piano Stairs”, the app “The Mini Getaway” and Foursquare were shown as examples of how companies are interacting with its potential buyers through the act of play.

The Piano Stairs was created On the saying that it’s better for your health to use the stairs instead of the escalator, a group of people decided to convert a Swedish subway staircase to a piano in order to see if they could make more people choose the stairs over the escalator. When a person stepped up on a step, the step would play a tune. The MINI Getaway is an app that turned a large area of Stockholm into a playing field, where players could win a MINI Countryman car by “stealing” it from other players. Once a person is within 50 meters of the placement of the virtual car, that person can claim the car as his own. And thus the game begins, as other players are now after the player with the car, and once they are within 50 meters of that person, they can steal the car as well. Lastly, Foursquare is a location-based social networking website for mobile devices, where users can check-in and be awarded user points and sometimes "badges".

At first view all the case studies seem awesome. It’s wonderful that play can be put into the life of adults and help communicate messages in such easygoing and practical ways. But when we look closer at the cases, you come to the unfortunate realization, especially if you are professionally engaged and enamored with games and play, that play is not the answer to everything. In the example of the piano staircase it was apparent that the play aspect congested the stairs and made the users use the stairs in ways it was not meant to (e.g. jumping up and down in the same spot). In the examples with the MINI app and Foursquare the notion that large companies exploit something as sacred as play and the magic circle in order to promote their products. It feels wrong because play was something that in my childhood was “free” and “free for all”. You could use whatever object was near as whatever object you needed. With the imposition of play-objects that have to be made by a certain company, you get left out of the game if you do not fork out.

It all comes down to the weird behaviors of humans that large companies and games such as Farmville are cleverly exploiting. Players, who invest time, labour and money in a game world also becomes attached to it. And the more labour you put into your Farmville farm or WOW character, the more loss you'll feel when giving it up. And humans hate loss. We even deem losing something as extremely negative, while winning the same thing/amount does not hold the same inverse value. And I cannot stop but feel cynical and exploited, at least on behalf of the poor players actually caught in these things. 

But then again I do play "Pocket Frogs" on my iPhone almost every day. 

...

And yes, I've so far bred 4.890 different frogs and only have 14.614 to go.

...

And yes even though the game is free I've actually paid a little for certain upgrades in the game so that I could breed frogs faster.

And yes I feel really stupid right now.

Game Culture 9: Emergent Play & Control

Today's topic looks at rules in and around games. In Rules of play by Salen and Zimmerman, rules has been divided into three categories that we will use when discussing today's topic:

1. Constitutive rules are the core rules (logical, mathematical rules) of a game.
2. Operative rules are the rules a player should know in order to play
3. Implicit rules are the unwritten rules made by players such as social rules about how one should behave when playing a game.

Steinkuehler
There are formal rules and social rules, and in order to understand a game, you must understand both layers of rules. Steinkuehler uses the term mangle of play to cover how a lot of different actors contributes to both the operative and social rules of a game. These actors are not restricted to the players and the designers, but also includes broader social issues and other issues such as the materiality, access etc. of a game. The different actors are pushing their own agenda, making the rules of the game a construction and production of the actors' intentions. These actors interactively stabilize a game, by player-policing  and creation of rules and events that stabilizes the game.
The interesting question in this context is when does manglability start? Is it when a game is multiplayer, unbalanced or...?

Case Study
Three videos were shown depicting players taking advantage of faults and glitches in different games. I find it particularly interesting that players actually took their time to find these glitches, either by accident or by trying again and again. I find it even more interesting that these players continue to exploit the glitches to bend the rules of the game, and thus change the game experience.

But emergent play is not just about players exploiting that a line of code has not been executed correctly. I remember when I started playing the first Sims game that players would invest hours in setting up a scene, take pictures with the picture tool and publish their pictures as little graphic novels online. This practice continued in Sims 2 with the video tool. Along the way, competitions were made where players tried to make compelling stories and music videos. And then, as EA apparently saw the huge alternative output of their games, the Sims 2 expansion “Seasons” were marketed by EA by reenacting popular music videos made in Sims 2.

Sims 2 version of Lilly Allens "Smile" music video

So why do players do this? Are they bored with the game as it is? Do they feel confined within the game and strive towards a more freeform game experience? It seems that as soon a game developer provide its players with a tool that lets them create or enact some sort of creativity and to publish this within the player community, some players will pour their souls into creating detailed masterpieces.

Maybe in the end it all comes down to why we play games. And this is not an easy question to answer, as the answer varies from one player to another. Richard Bartle looked into four approaches to playing MUDs, which also divided MUD players into four categories: achievers, explorers, socialisers and killers. Even though the paper is old, going as far back as to 1990, we might look at these types to find an explanation to emergent play.

Achievers

”Players give themselves game-related goals, and vigorously set out to achieve them”.

Some players set a goal, and achieves it no matter what. The achiever mindset is clearly seen in the hours players use to get the positioning of props and their player characters just right, before they rocket launch themselves onto a truck/into space/in a weird position etc.

Explorers

“Players try to find out as much as they can about the virtual world. Although initially this means mapping its topology (ie. exploring the MUD's breadth), later it advances to experimentation with its physics (ie. exploring the MUD's depth).”

The experimental nature of the explorers is spot on when it comes to finding the glitches of a game, whether they stumble upon them by accident or actively searches for them online through other gamers. On a personal note, I relate quite a bit to the explorer type, and must admit that I always try the "no clipping" cheat, if available, when playing a game. Finding hidden rooms and things that players never should've seen, is a goal in itself.


Today's readings

• Steinkuehler, “The Mangle of Play”
• Jakobsson, “Playing with the Rules”
• Chen, “Communication, Coordination, and Camaraderie in World of Warcraft”
• Montola, “The Invisible Rules of Role-Playing”

Game Culture 8: Race and Sexuality

Stuart Hall

In today's lecture, a lot of attention was directed at Hall's paper The Whites in their Eyes that talks about the medias construction of ideologies on race, sexuality and gender. We are constantly being bombarded with images and ideologies through pictures, television, magazines, games etc. These ideologies teaches us about the world around us. It becomes a pre-language, a form of a common sense that we are constantly enforcing and that enforces us back. Ideologies are sets different from each other, and meaning may change from one set to another (e.g. the notion of freedom in a communistic and liberal society). We formulate our intentions within ideology. It's unconscious and seems natural to us, as the constructed positions of identification makes out conceptions "make sense".

Hall proceeds by applying his theories to the question of race and racism. He distinguishes between two kinds of racism:

• Overt racism is when people or the media openly speaks or addresses any “racist polict or view”
• Inferential racism is that factual or fictional representation embedded within the plot of and media form. This is often seen in television programs and movies where ethnic stereotypes such as the obedient/sly slave/servant, the proud/feral native and the clown/entertainer is still alive and kicking.

Inferential racism is especially relevant to his earlier theories as a great example of inferential racism is how media creates representation and "truths" about our world. If we do not have any representing e.g. a specific race, gender or sexuality in our everyday lives, the media fills the vacuum with stories about how the world works. So when a game is criticized as being racist, and the designers specify that they did not see how their content could be racist, it's a case of intention phallacy.

Case Study

Very little gay content can be found in games. Often it’s coincidental, restricted or ridiculed. Coincidental gay content is in a game because the source code does not distinguish between males and females. In the Sims games, it’s possible for the player to let their sims have a relationship with sims of both gender because they all share the same code. Restricted content seems to allow a certain amount of gay content, as long as it appeals to the average player. In Mass Effect it’s only possible for a female, gay character to have a sexual relationship with an npc. A gay male character can flirt with other male npcs, but cannot have sex with these npcs. Finally, ridiculed content uses gay content in a way that makes a situation/character/thing seem funny. In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the police officers in San Fierro will say various things one would expect from a comical homosexual. There is also both a clearly gay employee working at the counter of an athletic apparel store who makes flirty comments towards the protagonist, CJ.

Another example of homoerotic ridicule can be found in the Japanese game Cho Aniki, which translates to “shit game”. Here players can battle giant men with artificial wombs, shooting penises and sperm-like substances after the player. The game is centered on the two main characters, the cape-wearing, muscular hero Idaten and sexy, blue-haired, busty maiden Benten. They are accompanied by two brothers Adon and Samson, both huge muscle men with a hole on their head that can shoot laser beams. The game uses homoerotic content such as phallic symbolism, suggestive poses involving several men and fight moves representing sexual acts, all pictured in a bizarre and silly way. But most of the sexual ridicule and silliness happens outside of the two main characters. Here, Cho Aniki becomes an example of use of racial differences in games as well. It is the side characters Adon and Samson that with their large smiles and exaggerated bodies and behaviors take on the roles of the goofy helper, very similar to the stereotypical “slave” character. Adon and Samson distinguish themselves from the main characters by being dark skinned and “alien” (They both have a hole in their head). They are not made so that the player can project himself into them; they are there for the laughs and can be subjected to homoerotic ridicule without any problems.

 

 

While gay and black clichés, stereotypes, and stock characters are deployed by videogames with benign aims, they generally perpetuate ideologies of heteronormativity and racism. The only alternative seems worse: the absence of discussion surrounding homosexuality and race.

 
With BioWare's strongly customizable protagonist, all of a sudden a new mode of communication must be accounted for. If one wants to play Dragon Age 2, one can do so with any fictionally represented skin color, sexuality and as either male or female. In March of 2011, a self-proclaimed speaker for the "straight male gamer" chided BioWare for "Forgetting their main demographic." He explained that Anders, a male mage in DA2, openly suggested that he and the player's male avatar become romantically involved. Obviously upset at having to assert his virtual-life (and most likely real-life) sexuality in his recreational time, the poster told BioWare that because more straight men played their game, they should be catered to. Lead designer David Gaider gave him a lesson on the evils of male privilege and in his politest words told him to fuck off. While one might consider that this is progress for gay rights in games, there are other, less scandalous, but equally problematic events that result from inclusivity on a tight budget. BioWare, it would seem, codes and constructs a story for a sexy white male, and as an afterthought allows players to skin the sexy white male polygons as they please. If one choses to make their character black, one must come to terms with the fact that the story presents you with a white sister, a white uncle and a white mother, without explaining why you are obviously unrelated by blood. Besides having to deal with the cognitive dissonance produced by the fiction, its presentation is also problematic.

An example of poor lighting when playing as a dark-skinned character i Mass Effect

Simply put, the game is lit for a white character and often one will only be able to see the whites of their protagonist’s eyes. Finally, if one choses to play as a female, one must contend with the fact that during sex scenes the protagonist’s body will grow to meet the motion captured animations of a male having sex. This means suddenly becoming taller and wider, but also behaving as BioWare imagined a male would behave during sex. So while feminine gendered clichés are gone, we now have to contend with the problems of simply inserting different races and genders into the roles of white men and watching them behave as such.


Today's readings

• Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes” 
• Leonard, “Virtual Gangstas, Coming to a Suburban House Near You” 
• Shaw, “Putting the Gay in Games”

Game Culture 7: Gender and Gaming II

We continue last weeks gender discussion, this time in a game-related perspective. In the 90s, the digital game market saw the first wave of gender specific games. The pink games were directed to young girls, in the hope of making them more interested in technology, but as no data existed with regards to what these girls actually liked, the resulting titles were heavily influenced by a stereotypical view of young girls. These games included titles from Purple Moon franchise and Barbie games had good sales, usually from parents or grandparents that finally could buy "proper" girl games for their kids. The games were met with a lot of critique, sparking a discussion as to whether the games were what the young girls really wanted, or if the games made the girls into what it wanted them to be.
Today, a second wave of game designing for young girls is moving away from the pink games stereotypes, to a more nuanced game design.

Nick Yee
Yee talks about how women do want to play, but they are hindered by physical and social barriers. It's e.g. hard to escape the label og being "the girlfriend of..", when women are introduced by their husbands/boyfriends.
What's interesting with this claim is that one should look at the expectations the games set up for their players for ideal gameplay. Time is of the essence, and if you don't have the time to play a game as it should, because you are responsible for a large part of labour in the home, you cannot play the game properly along with the other players.

Hollin Lin
Lin takes the point of Yee further, and discusses how the physical barriers, or the game space characteristics produce gender specified differences in gaming experience. Female's physical space simply prevents them for gaining access to a computer/console.
It doesn't matter that you might like games, if you are never introduced to them, it's quite hard to get started. As kids, few girls are introduced to gaming by their parents or older siblings. Either the home simply does not have access to a gaming device, or the girl is excluded from playing with e.g. elder brothers. As the girl gets older, the activity of playing digital games are viewed as not-fitting (Just try walking into a cyber café, if you are a girl that is. Is the reaction from the other café-goers different than if you were a boy?). A girl should get our there, be social, party and shop. Not sit in a LAN room with 30 other guys, eating cheetos and drinking mountain dew.

Case study
Three questions were discussed during the course's presentation.

Age vs. Gender! Would a game succeed more if marketed to age instead of gender?
Granted, people do have a lot in common within their age group. But there's also a bunch of people, the same age, that have nothing in common. The age normalization would be just as discriminating as the gender normalization, as age is treated differently one culture to another. People, regardless of gender, are individuals, and while there is a lot of influence from the people surrounding them, making them more inclined to like the same as their peers, I fail to see how that would make a person not like something that he/she finds amusing. Games are fun! How would you deny having fun and then refuse to seek out that sensation again?

Are you really a female! How to normalize the female gamer?
Why do we need to normalize the female gamer, when the male gamer have not been normalized? The preferences of a female gamer is, in my opinion, just as diverse as the male gamer. Looking at gender in game design seems fruitless, and I'd rather look at player's type than their gender.

Equal Playground… Is it really impossible to design a gender neutral play space?
No. I think the new generation will see a lot more female gamers as parents from a gaming generation involve both their sons and daughters to play with them. But as a female gamer I might be biased here. I think it all comes down to what you know and remember from your childhood as a parent. My father played digital games, but was unsecure about involving me and my sister, as he didn't know the working of little girls and how they should behave. My mother didn't play, and she certainly knew how a little girl functions, so she encouraged us to do what she did as a kid, which did not involve playing digital games. So when I say that the new generation of gamers will include both gender, it is because both their parents have played digital games.

Game Culture 06: Gender & Gaming I

There's a lot of research on gender in and around games. Most of it is based on a very broad theoretical framework, where the definitions of gender is not really specified. This lecture tries to introduce some gender theories, but it won't be applied to games until lecture 07.

First and foremost we distinguish between sex and gender in the way that sex is your physiological state (Do you have a vagina) and gender as an identity created by cultural influences. I'm not saying that gender is created by culture, but it is influenced by it (As conceptions of feminism and masculinity changes from one country to another). Also, I'm not going into transsexualism or the related areas of that, as that is simply way to big. For now, we will look at masculinity and femininity only.

There are different ways to look at gender:

• Gender assignment (Birth gender)
• Gender Identity (What do I feel I am)
• Gender roles (How do I need to function so society will see me as a specific gender)
• Gender attribution (The evaluation of signs and practices when we look at someone and determines the gender of that person)

In all of these, there are a myriad of signs, symbols and behavioral patterns, such as physical, behavioural, textual (names), mythos (archetypes), communication practices, sexual orientation, biological attributes, leisure choices, work choices, domestic arrangements and so on. What's important to notice is that gender is dependent on interrelations. You cannot talk about masculinity without talking about femininity.

So how is gender enforced? West & Zimmerman states that gender is something so natural and automatic, that we do not think about it in everyday life. And since it is something that is so natural to us, not displaying gender-correct behavior makes society, react and correct. You are constantly being held accountable for your gender behavior, and as we are constantly being watched, we learn to discipline ourselves so that we still act gender-accordingly when alone. You simply cannot avoid "doing gender".

Pascoe divides masculinity into different forms:

• Hegemonic masculinity (The stereotypical, dominating male)
• Complicit masculinity
• Subordinated masculinity
• Marginalized masculinity

While there are different types of masculinity, Pascoe argues that all kinds holds a benefit that he calls the patriarchal dividend. This benefit is the reason that men are in a higher position than females. This statement is countered by Connel who explains that there are benefits and costs within both genders. And that these cannot be easily compared.

Today's readings

• West & Zimmerman, “Doing Gender”
• Hargreaves, “Femininity or ‘Musculinity’: Changing Images of Female Sports”
• Connell, “Rethinking Hegemonic Masculinity”
• Pascoe, “Making Masculinity”

Game Culture 04: Reconfiguring Interior and Exterior Lives

In old days, the hearth was the natural center of the home. It provided the only source of heating and lighting when the day turned into evening, and gathered the household in one room, before going to bed. The hearth has in modern times been replaced by the first the radio, then the television. Most living rooms are equipped with a large television screen. But how does the modern hearth reconfigure our lives?

When I grew up, the television was placed in the back of our living room, right in the middle, with chairs and sofas pointing towards it. My sister and I could watch it whenever we liked, though not too loud, and we had to move as soon as my mother or father wanted to see stupid, boring adult-television. There was a hierarchy connected to the television set. Our television did not just provide our family with entertainment, but also a political agenda. And we were not the only family. Today's readings describes how every family adjusts themselves to the television in various ways dependent on their culture.

But what about the game console? Here a strong distinction between two types of people appears: The ones who want to hide technology in the form of their computers or consoles, and the ones who want to showcase it. And those who want to hide it, is mostly my generation's parents, forcing gamers to adapt to the television-living-room setup if they wanted to play console games on the television. I remember lying on the floor, pillows under my chest and arms, in order to be placed comfortably and nearer the television. I also remember the "office", where my sister, father and I would play computer games. It usually ended up with my mother sitting on the couch talking to us, although not being the least interested in computer games.

And that leads me back to the politics of all things. A console is a very social object. It's only for gaming, you have a certain distance to the screen so that onlooker can watch and chat, and you are somewhat more mobile, needing only the small controller which you can hold in many, many position. The computer however is more private. You might be checking confidential e-mails, so you don't just walk in and start looking at the computer screen. You are also situated quite close to the screen, leaving little room for potential onlookers.

There are so many ways that digital objects have reconfigured our homes, both physically and socially. For example I doubt that I will have a living room in my future home. I'll have a game room for entertainment and being social, and a dinning room for eating. And everything in between must fit into one of these rooms. Just as I had to adapt myself to a childhood home with a different political agenda than my own.

Today's readings:

• Turkle, “Computer Games as Evocative Objects”
• Flynn, “Geography of the Digital Hearth”
• Lally, “The Domestic Ecology of Objects”
• Poster, “Everyday (Virtual) Life”