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”