Co-creative Culture and Labor

The key-expressions this week are "immaterial labor" and "co-creative culture". 

The video "Counter-Strike for Kids" is a double example. In one hand, it shows how user-created mods can be acquired by game companies, either to be purchased with the game they mod or as a new game - in this case, as a new game. When it became the most played mod of Half-Life, Valve developed it further in order to make it a new title. As seems to be a recurrent Valve practice, the company hired the modders for in-house development. Valve made its editor available with Half-Life, so that fans/players could make their own levels. This kind of practice fosters a "co-creative culture", a culture in which players are allowed to create on top of what companies developed in the first place. This originates either better versions of the original work/game or brand new works/games. Counter-Strike is an example of the latter.

The co-creative process doesn't end there, as this video-example shows. Deriving from the mod that became a whole new game, these people created a whole new piece, in this case, a parody video.

When I'm faced with this kind of derived-pieces-of-work, I can't help thinking about my father. He was an art teacher. He's students were usually under 14. When they had drawing exercises in which they could do anything, if they did something that resonated obvious products of pop-culture, like cartoon characters or famous people, he would reject their work and tell them to start all over again. His argument was "you are just deriving others’ work, that's not original or creative!". My father's view questions this notion of "co-creation". I don't share my father's view but I like this challenge. To what extent is derived work co-creative? Where is the border between copy and original work, if the subject is shared by two 'authors'? The answers to these questions are not always obvious. Is this “co-creative culture” a “non-creative culture”, instead?

Rationalization and Instrumentality in Play - presentation

First of all, here's the presentation: https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ddbnq7ts_0fcw2qm3p

The following post was written together with Anette Ottzen.

This week we were invited to discuss rationalization and instrumentality in play, inspired by readings about: a general notion of “rationalization of play”, by Henricks; an analysis of the Dragon Kill Points ‘feature’ as seen through a foucauldian perspective; and, finally, achievements in the Xbox Live.
It was inevitable, in the context of “rationalization and instrumentality” to speak of Gamification. So, to bring this discussion into the table, we suggested 3 case studies: the mini video, the ‘piano stairs’ video and Foursquare. The other case studies are tightly related to some concepts founds in the readings. To illustrate the issue of work as opposite to play, we present a Minecraft video and the case of the mcDonalds employee motivation system. And finally, we suggest Farmville as a problematic example of the panoptic control.

Presenting the case studies “the Piano Stairs” and “the Mini Getaway”, we wanted to show how two major car companies are trying to communicate to /interact with potential costumers using different types of engagement in play.  During the discussion, interesting observations in context to restrictions of the games within time and space - and in reflections on the concepts of instrumentality occurred.
Both games are physically placed in the public space of the city of Stockholm - and both games underlie the limitation of a short lifespan. The Mini Getaway has natural time and space limitations in the construction of the game. Players have one week to capture the virtual Mini within city borders and hold on to it by running away from competitors. This concept carries strong references to the “Getaway in Stockholm” underground street race videos. By engaging players with the promise of a brand new Mini, users will go to great length racing through the city streets to protect their car, a rather predictable - but not sophisticated - game interaction.
The Piano stairs concept is, on the other hand, more blurry, as it is tied up with the novelty factor - that probably runs out within a week (for frequent transients). Placed in a busy train station ,a toy piano is embedded in a stairway in order to direct people to the physical stairs instead of the escalator. Unfortunately, in choosing the Piano Stairs, people created a new problem, clotting in the daily flow of people. Therefore, the notion of instrumental play is questioned in the Piano Stairs video. People engaged did not go straight up the stairs (as would have been the preferred social behavior) but playfully ran up and down, creating chaos, some even jumping on one note repeatedly. The promoted healthy lifestyle presented in both videos does not only seem a bit hypocritical having the sender in mind, but also seems unfulfilled, as the games do not seem to have left any lasting change in the behavior of their users.

The point made in the Dragon Kill Points text underlies a distinction between work and play. To question this distinction, we look at Minecraft, more specifically to one of the most famous fan videos uploaded to youtube - “Building Megaobjects in Minecraft”. In this video, a Minecraft player is showing one of his in-game constructions, a 1:1 scale model of Star Trek’s Enterprise, and asking for help to build some of its parts. It is clear that this player spent a lot of hours playing the game, and that he has put a lot of effort and planning into this task. This kind of endeavour looks very much like work.
As employee at mcDonalds, you are the subject of different achievement systems and gaming mechanics as part of the employee motivational system. Starting you carrier, you are obligated to set six month goals for your time of employment. When this happens, employees do not know that the system is very rewarding and that advancement in the mcDonalds hierarchy happens rappidly. Although, almost every employee succeeds in personal progress within the time period and is, of course, rewarded in doing so. Another game mechanic at play is the “Super Size” sales system that encouraged employees to persuade costumers into going larger when buying menus - this sales behaviour is rewarded by points that transfer into prizes at a later point.
These examples show how the line between work and play can be very thin. It’s also a current trend to try to bring ‘playfulness’ into work environments and bring fun to usual work-related tasks. But how is this intrumentality of play removing meaning from it?

Two of Foucaul’s concepts used in Silverman and Simon’s text are control and disciplinary power. The panopticon comparison is used to explain the community control made possible by the Dragon Kill Points system and its effects in ranking and power structure maintenance. In Facebook Games, namely Farmville, neighbors are of key-importance to progress in the game. These neighbors - people who are playing the same game and who accepted to become neighbors  - have an active role in one’s game. They can visit each other’s farms, help each other and send each other gifts. The more a player interacts with her neighbors, the more she will benefit - progression, game money, and useful gifts. Community control is necessary for progression, giving it a role that is different from the role of dragon kill points in Everquest. In the case of Farmville, control doesn’t have a power-structure maintenance function, but it is necessary. Friends and friend-control is necessary for the progression in the game and it doesn’t have major ranking-consequences - it is a game rule.

The Foursquare example appears to illustrate Jacobsson’s text on Achievements. It was chosen because we considered it would be the ultimate example of a design whose core is achievements. Interestingly, the discussion in class brought a new question: “are badges the same as achievements?” Foursquare rewards its users with badges when they complete certain ‘goals’ - checking-in for the first time, being in the same local more than 3 times in one week, being in a boat, etc. When we first brought the case to class, we were seeing these as achievements, motivated by the argument that old Activision badges could be seen as achievements found in Jacobsson’s text. the interpretation of the difficulty or effort put into obtaining that achievement is, though, an interesting point. We would argue, though, that the way in which Foursquare implements badges resembles achievements in the sense that they motivate users/players in the struggle to reach a goal - become the mayor of a certain place. These badges are side-goals, they seem to have been thought of just as achievements. The fact that “less” effort is put into getting those badges or a certain game’s achievements relates to the nature of the game itself. If we consider foursquare a game, we can argue that it being a game that is ‘easy to play’ explains why its beadges/achievements are also ‘easy to get’. We can, inclusively, predict the existence of players who approach foursquare badges differently, maybe in ways that meet Jacobssson’s “approaches to achievements” - casuals, hunters and completists.  

/ Anette and Maura

Emergent Play & Control

This week we look at game rules - constituative, operational and implicit ones (according to Salen and Zimmerman), paying special attention to the role of implicit rules.

As we mentioned in class, it is easier to think about rules (of all three kinds) in the board-game context. Video game rules tend to be forgotten, since the constitutive and operational ones tend to be less ‘maleable’ or ‘mangeable’, as Steinkuehler puts it, than in analogue games - they are imposed by the code. So, looking at situations when people play with the rules in a digital context is usually related to tricks players find, as the videos suggested as case studies show. 

All of this week’s case studies are related to tricks players developed to make their gameplay more effective, more beautiful or maybe just to show off their game knowledge. I would say these videos illustrate ‘special interpretations of the game rules’  rather than “ways of playing with the game rules”. This same issue is underlying Jakobsson’s piece. What he calls ‘playing with rules’ is ‘interpreting the rules’, a basic element of game play. The extent to which one can ‘play with the rules’ or the number of different interpretations for a game’s ruleset varies according to the nature of the game. Some designs afford more ‘interpretations’ that others. This resonates with the ideas in “Staying Open to Interpretation: Engaging Multiple Meanings in Design and Evaluation” , by Sengers and Gaver. In this paper, the authors argue that “new techniques in HCI itself are converging to suggest that multiple, potentially competing interpretations can fruitfully co-exist”, this is what I see happening in the games where the cases were taken from. The designs afford multiple interpretations, some being more obvious than others. These examples show some less-obvious interpretations of the rules. The ‘obviousness’ of these interpretations relate to the player’s creativity and knowledge of the rules.

The tricks players develop, besides showing how rules can be interpreted in many ways, show Steinkuehler’s point that “the game that’s actually played by participants (...) is the outcome of (...) [a] ‘mangle of practice’ of designers, players (...) and broader social norms”. Those tricks are a result of players exploration of the designed game rules that have to be evaluated by the game community and that occur in a context. The rocket jumping mechanic was common among several game communities, it didn’t go against its norms. The twixt example, though, is an example of a trick that was within the designed rules but not within the community rules. Social norms dictated this case as an example of “breaking the rules”.

Race and Sexuality in Games

Before analyzing the case studies suggested by the group in charge this week, I can’t resist commenting on the ‘Resident Evil 5 Trailer’ case. It resonates with the ideology text by Hall and his notion of encoding/decoding and it is also interesting to show the dangers of designing for masses. 

In one hand, I believe game designers, specially from big studios have a special responsibility towards their players and should, therefore, be specially sensitive not only to what would be interesting or fun for them, but also to what would be considered harmful. Following this line of thought, I would say that designers have the obligation to consider themes like racism and homophobia and the possibility of their work being interpreted as racist or homophobe. 

On the other hand, every design can be interpreted in many different  ways, and those are sometimes unpredictable. The messages designers believe to be encoded in their works/games aren’t necessarily the ones people/players will decode. However, both encoding and decoding have an ideological context that influences both processes.

I believe my own judgement and reading of the video in strongly influenced by the colonialist values transmitted to me via education and culture. Coming from Portugal, I’ve been educated to look at the colonialist era as “the golden age of Portugal”, and not owning a big empire is a national matter of shame. A lot of the books we read in school were either written back in the 1500’s or more recently, about those times, when Portugal was “a great country”. This built a big tolerance to images of white supremacy, or even ‘white normality’ and that’s probably why I can’t read racism in Resident Evil 5’s trailer. But I’m guessing, I know my judgement is made in the light of the ideology I was raised in, but, since ideologies are made natural, it’s hard to say which judgements are a result of my own critical thinking or of that ideology. 

And this is also an important dilemma to have in mind when looking at these issues of race and sexuality in video games. Sometimes those messages aren’t intentionally encoded in the text of the video game, but they end up being interpreted like that. On the other hand, it seems to be a ‘fact’ that video games tend to have the white heterosexual male and the preferred player, and so, they tend to adapt to what they believe are this preferred player’s natural choices. The Dragon Age 2 example shows how homosexual behaviors are introduced in video games as identical to heterosexual ones. The game was designed for one kind of behavior, and then the characters involved in the sex scenes just changed. Probably for technological reasons, man and woman have identical physical structures so both heterosexual and homosexual scenes can work on top of the same algorithm. I don’t know if we should see this example as homophobic or just as an example of resource economy. It seems that the designers thought about this feature late in the developing process, so everything had to be rushed. And this same reason would explain the lightning of the black character example, in Mass Effect. 

There’s something I find specifically interesting about the lightning example in Mass Effect. We discussed this example in class as a reflection of a certain degree of homophobia in games. To me, though, this could be read just as a normal bug and not a sign of disrespect towards the black community. This shows, again, the encoding/decoding problem I talked about earlier. The conflict between encoded and decoded messages problematizes the discussions about gender, race and sexuality in videogames, since they rely in individual interpretation.

Gender and Gaming II

In her blog post about this week’s cases, Stine asks, at some point, if male players don’t meet any barriers when playing games and how do those intersect with age, sexuality, race, etc. 

As we talked about in the last few classes, it is easier for a girl to cross certain gender-borders than it is for boys, specially if they are young. And even, most of the times, sexuality is brought into the table when they do. On the other hand, cultural context, age, class (and, therefore, status) determine the consequences of certain behaviors. My friend who plays farmville because his mother invited him, for example, is constantly giving justifications, even though we (his circle of friends) never said anything or made fun of him. The key explanation here is context. Farmvile has a wide audience and it isn’t necessarily seen as a “pink game”, so he isn’t judged by other people in the same game. Besides, gender-border-crossing is usually policed by those who are closer to the subject - friends and family. In this case, all of us in his group of friends play “pink games”, even the more hardcore players in the group have no prejudice against facebook games, or more embodied games (Wii games, dance dance revolution, etc). We all play sing star and dance dance revolution together when we meet, so we don’t have “the morals” to judge him. In fact, we were more surprised by the fact that his mother, who’s in her 50’s, was playing - both because she’s a woman, and because she’s not exactly young. Considering this is all happening in Portugal, it is very surprising that someone in her generation is playing anything, since she’s part of a generation who had access to card and board games only. Playing in public spaces hasn’t been common in Portugal. Cyber cafés never became popular and arcades were really hard to find some years ago.

Actually, the reason why we all started playing Dance Dance Revolution is also interesting. In my group of closer friends there is a boy who owns a metal pad. He tried to make us all play with him. In the beginning, no one, except for girls, wanted to play. As time went by, because that metal pad would be present in every party, more and more boys joined the group and now that’s one of the group’s favorite games. The guy who introduced the group to DDR is gay, and that’s probably another reason for boys taking so long to give the game a try. But, once they overcame prejudice, no one was judging anymore and we were just having fun together. The fact that we were too old to make fun of each other might have helped the transition. As this example shows, the first and the biggest step is to overcome prejudice - easier said than done. The only real barrier to female or male gamers is the community’s prejudice.

When watching the video Stine and Pernille suggested, I was struck by the fact that I was being exceptionally disturbed by the fact that women were discriminating men and not the other way round. The video shows a series of common behaviors male players show towards female players, as described by Yee, but reverses roles, so women are either underestimating the male player or offering him gear. If the video showed the usual situation, I would think “oh yeah, this is so typical.”, but because it was reversed, I was really disturbed, just because it goes against everything I’m used to.

Another thing I find interesting is that, in MMORPGs, players don’t really have to reveal their gender, age, race, etc, and yet some players are interested in exploring these offline-characteristics in game, even if it doesn’t help the playing at all.

Performance & Audience

Our colleagues brought to class two case studies to illustrate the theme “performance and audience”: DotA and DotA 2, and Guitar Hero. These example show the two apparent “trends” of performance: the “embodied/dance-like” and the “strategic/sports-like”. The literature analyzed brings that dichotomy too, which is an interesting dichotomy and shows how ‘confused’ we are when we talk about performance in video games. 

Outside the realm of games we use the term ‘good performance’ to evaluate different criteria. In class, Isaac gave the example of the guitar player in a rock concert. In this case, it seems there needs to be an extra theatricality showed by the artist for the audience to consider it a good performance. It isn’t enough to be a good player to capture the audience. A guitar player is, most of the times, required to do “extra things”, he needs to show-off, to prove he can play the guitar in strange situations - with his teeth or feet, holding the guitar behind his head, etc... In this case, besides being good at doing what he’s supposed to do, he needs to add something the audience can see and understand even if they don’t play a guitar. This is the kind of performance we usually associate with “more physical” games like guitar hero. The videos our colleagues showed, however, problematized this notion. 

The two examples of “good performance” in guitar hero showed people who scored high in the game, their skill was recognized by the game itself (through the score) but they didn’t really add the ‘extra’ the real guitar player needs to add in order to perform well, according to the audience. To me, those videos illustrate a non-embodied performance more than an embodied one. What they were doing with their bodies wasn’t different from what the starcraft professional gamers do. There’s an important difference between objective and subjective evaluation of performance in games, and that distinction is tied to the embodied/strategic distinction. An objective evaluation of performance is one made by the machine - score, winning a battle, etc. In this case, the game itself quantifies performance. The evaluation of performance can only be subjective when players add something extra to the quantified performance that the machine can’t really “read”. This is the case of the DDR dancers who added a whole choreography on top of the moves required to have a perfect performance for the machine. In this case, the performance sort of has two layers, if I may say so, the machine performance and the bodily performance, added just to capture the audience. This doesn’t mean, though, that a quantified performance doesn’t please the audience. It means that a quantified performance demands knowledge of the game while the second one can be pleasing even for those who don’t know the game. 

Tied to what I call a performance of “objective evaluation” is the concept of deep play (borrowed from Clifford Geertz by Christian McCrea). Deep play depends on a culture surrounding the game, this culture helps creating a narrative around the game/situation that can be shared by the group - players and fans/audience. The audience engages in the playing situation not because the ‘performer’ is doing “something extra-game”, but because there’s a culture around the game that makes every game event meaningful and part of a shared narrative. This is what happened with DotA, it became part of the culture, reaching a lot of players all over the world and creating a competitive community around it. Performances, in tournaments, or in a battle, is evaluated by both the machine, other players or the audience, in tournaments. This audience, though, doesn’t evaluate something “extra-game” players do to show-off, they are interested in the game itself and the way it is played, the strategies used to attain what the machine tells is a “good performance”. In this case, players and audience share this culture around the game and understand its stakes.

Embodied & Material Play

(I'm going to cheat a little in this post - I'm going to use the present tense as if I was posting just in time.)

This week's discussion about embodiment was inspired by texts with different focuses. Dovey & Kennedy's "Bodies and Machines" reflects about the cyborg and the importance and role of the body when playing games. Simon's "Geek Chic" looks at case modding as a way for moders to express themselves, to bring games outside of the virtual sphere and to make technology present, visible and obvious. Kirkpatrick's "Controller, Hand Screen" proposes an artistic view of the interactive/gaming experience, looking specifically at the materiality of the controller.

Our colleagues driving the discussion suggested some case studies: the sixth sense, by MIT and the 3ds AR tattoo. These two different paradigms of interaction suggest two different views of technology-use. The sixth-sense says interaction is more intuitive if technology is somehow hidden. In this case, the user moves her fingers in the air to produce results, without having an 'intrusive' or 'obviously material' interface. In the second example, the 3DS AR Tattoo, the technology becomes part of the body, as if it was what we first think of as a 'normal tattoo'. The fact that your always carrying this piece of technology around would work as a form of showing off technology, a little like the case modders who change their machines to make technology evident. When looking at these two examples, we tend to try to predict which interaction paradign will outcompete the other one. But it is hard to foresee the future. The notion of 'intuitive' technology is very ambiguous and we need to consider the adaptability of the human. Some forms of interaction may seem 'not intuitive' but after some use they become 'natural'. If we look at today's controllers, they don't look 'natural' at all, while interaction with the kinect would easily be qualified as 'natural'. Yet, for gamers, because they are used to it, using a controller is considered 'natural' and other forms of interaction can cause some discomfort. This makes it hard to choose a paradigm over the other.
Personally, in one hand, I like having a sort of material "portal to engagement", an object that marks the gaming moment as a gaming moment and not a working moment or other. But, at the same time, I can have a lot of fun playing wii or kinect and laugh at the way me and others move while playing. In the latter case, I'm more strongly connected to the physical world and I am more aware of the fact that I am playing a game. That isn't so different, though, from the experience of playing a tabletop roleplaying game - there are no visible controllers and yet I don't feel that my engagement is compromised.