Date posted: July 16, 2008
Game journalist Jim Rossignol has travelled far in his quest to answer core gaming questions: Why are they here? and what are they good for?
He tells the story of this journey, and reflects on these worthy topics throughout his new book This Gaming Life. From the story of the author being fortunate enough to be fired from a dull life of financial journalism and to recountings of his encounters with people at the cutting edge of gaming, Rossignol offers observations about current trends in gaming and the cultural position of the medium.
The form is strictly essayistic and the stylistic approach may remind the reader of previous journalistic takes on grand gamer questions such as J.C. Herz (humorous) Joystick Nation and Steven Johnson’s (lucidly written) Everything Bad is Good for You.
Unlike these other authors, however, Rossignol is undecided and even admits to quite conflicting emotions about the value of digital gaming. Video games provides pleasurable experiences for multitudes of people, but at the same time consume large amounts of time with little direct outcome beyond personal enjoyment.
Initially this humble approach feels refreshing. But the questions remain questions as the author prefers to offer a variety of observations to actually tackling the issues in any depth. The book may teach you a few facts and make you rethink old questions, but it won’t make you laugh, it won’t make you change your mind, and it won’t leave you much wiser than you were to begin with. Reading This Gaming Life won’t hurt you, but the hours may be better spent stopping some on-screen alien invasion.
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since June 2007
Date posted: October 1, 2007
Review by Jonas Heide Smith
The proliferation of games for serious purposes in recent years has been nothing short of astounding. Although using games for training and marketing is a phenomenon with a considerable history the present surge of interest marks an unmistakable mainstreaming of the concept that games can be efficient means of persuasion, branding, education, and communication. A telling example is the recent initiative of the Danish agency in charge of recycling of bottles and cans (Dansk Retursystem A/S). Wanting to increase knowledge and compliance the agency launched two web-based games.
The first (see image), which tied in with a larger campaign, lets the player retaliate against non-recyclers by firing trash at them through office building rubbish chutes. The other one which has an optional multi-player mode puts the player behind the wheel of a can collection lorry speeding through town against the clock to pick up irresponsibly discarded cans.
It is clear that communicators across domains have quite suddenly become convinced that games can forcefully help spread messages. What is less clear, however, is why this sudden change of heart (after all, games have been with us for some time) has come about. For instance, it seems difficult to point to new persuasive evidence that games are measurably more efficient than traditional tools for teaching or persuasion.
It is into this landscape of seemingly ungrounded enthusiasm that Ian Bogost, assistant professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, releases his ambitious Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Few seem better placed to do so. For some years now Bogost has refined his thinking on the game medium both through academic channels (Bogost, 2005; 2006; 2007) and through the co-edited (with game theorist Gonzalo Frasca) weblog www.watercoolergames.org, a site which seeks to be “a forum for the uses of videogames in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment”. In parallel, Bogost and his game studio has produced several titles within the category traditionally labeled “serious games”.
Bogost dislikes that label and understanding why is key to appreciating Bogost’s larger philosophy. But initially it is worth considering just what the world of academic videogame rhetorics needs at this point. First of all, the plethora of competing labels and perfunctorily defined buzz-words floating about calls out for a careful survey of the field and a framework for analyzing the variety of specimen in the fast-growing serious games biotope. Second, we need a sense of the relative abilities of videogames to persuade; that is we need a theory of how, why and when they do persuade and preferably some documentation that they do in fact persuade. Bogost convincingly supplies the former but does not fully tackle the latter. No convenient model of game-based persuasion appears fully-formed in Bogost’s text. Instead we get a meticulously researched and clearly composed treasure-trove of examples alongside various hints of a larger theory. Let’s look briefly at what those hints tell us.
Centrally, Bogost argues that the noteworthy communicative characteristic of games is that they can employ “procedural rhetoric” defined as “a practice of using processes persuasively” (p3) whose “arguments are made not though the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models.” (p29). Other media can employ words and images and it is only through representing relationships and processes through rules and reward models that games require and deserve a particular rhetorical perspective. Games, to loosely paraphrase Bogost, lets players participate in the making of claims and through this mental process (as opposed to mere on-screen interactivity) games may persuade.
These persuasive games, importantly, can be of any type. In a criticism of the “serious games movement”, Bogost emphasizes how the study of game persuasion should not limit itself to those games which are self-professedly “serious”. To Bogost, such a delimitation is “a foolish gesture that wrongly undermines the expressive power of videogames in general, and highly crafted, widely appealing commercial games in particular.” (p59).
This criticism carries over to B. J. Fogg’s work on “captology” summarized in his book Persuasive Technologies (Fogg, 2003). To Bogost, the problem with Fogg is that he limits the perspective to deliberate messages and intended outcomes of computer design thus leaving out real social or mental consequences unforeseen by designers. But more pressingly, perhaps, Bogost takes issue with how “captology is not fundamentally concerned with altering the user’s fundamental conception of how real-world processes work. Rather, it is primarily intended to craft new technological constraints that impose conceptual or behavioral change in users.”. In other words, captology is the effort to change the environment and thereby affect behavior, while Bogost’s vision of persuasive games is one in which you change the people. One ties your hands behind your back so you can’t smoke; the other makes you no longer want to light up.
Here we see Bogost’s rhetorical philosophy quite clearly outlined: People should be convinced, not coerced.
From his reflections on the proper communicative uses of games, Bogost goes on to discuss persuasive games in terms of politics, advertising, and learning. Many thought-provoking, some quite funny, and a few directly baroque, examples are scrutinized with a strong focus on the efforts of the designers to actually make statements through processes (and not just through auxiliary text etc.). Bogost’s method is textual analysis. He looks for possible interpretations and thus leans on the logic of classical rhetorical analysis which relied chiefly on the analyst working on a text. The actual listener, or player, in Bogost’s case, is an abstraction. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas orients the player towards its crime-filled missions through its design and from this Bogost argues that
As the player exits the open urban environment and reenters the missions, he does so willingly, not under the duress of a complex socio-historical precondition. This rhetoric implicitly affirms the metaphor of criminal behavior as depravity. (p118).
Bogost does not claim that all players necessarily reach the same conclusions but this type of analysis does arguably make very strong assumptions about actual player interpretations without empirical basis. This approach in turn highlights the rather modest attention in the book to describing the exact working of procedural rhetorics and to documenting its efficiency. We hear little of why engaging with processes are a useful way of understanding the real-world phenomena that they represent. We are given very few leads to theoretical literature that might lend credence to the idea that personal engagement is important in persuasion. And we are not informed of one single instance in which anybody changed his mind or behavior after playing a game.
Bogost does well to tie his discussion to classical and visual rhetorics as well as captology. But practically passing the entire field of “persuasion research” which provides both theoretical models (e.g. O’Keefe, 1990) and empirical studies of the effects of various aspects of computerized persuasion (e.g. Sundar & Kim, 2005) is a curious choice. These omissions may leave the reader on shaky ground as to evaluating the very importance of games as tools for persuasion or critical thought.
Of course, few (sub)fields come nicely gift-wrapped and fully articulated in a single volume. Persuasive Games creates order from chaos and puts recent game developments into a much-needed historical perspective. This is an invaluable service to the field and the thoughtful treatment of a wide range of little-known games is inspiring as a case of game analysis in action. These achievements make me recommend the book warmly, while looking forward to Bogost’s future fleshing out of the theory and empirical merits of persuasive games.
References
Bogost, I. (2005). Frame and Metaphor in Political Games. Paper presented at the DiGRA 2005: Changing Views - Worlds in Play, Vancouver, Canada.
Bogost, I. (2006). Playing Politics: Videogames for Politics, Activism, and Advocacy. First Monday(Special issue number 7).
Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fogg, B. J. (2003). Persuasive technology : using computers to change what we think and do. Amsterdam ; Boston: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.
O’Keefe, D. J. (1990). Persuasion: Theory and Research. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications.
Sundar, S. S., & Kim, J. (2005). Interactivity and Persuasion: Influencing attitudes with information and involvement. Journal of Interactive Advertising, 5(2), 6-29.
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since June 2007
Date posted: August 21, 2007
Updated: Aug 23, 2007
No medium exists in a vacuum. Media draw upon established forms of expression and depends on existing hardware. Only gradually do they evolve towards aesthetic independence and take on forms that are less derivative. As a medium evolves, its practitioners usually try to “liberate” the medium from what is often seen as the dominance of external phenomena – often more established forms – and claim that the medium in question is important, artistically and academically, in its own right. Video games are presently in the late stages of this phase. To illustrate the entire process let us first, as an example, look to another medium which has moved beyond any inferiority complexes.
Cinema as an example of medium development
In film’s infancy, the enormous possibilities of the medium were poorly understood. While the notion of moving images was awe-inspiring, movie pioneers Louis and Auguste Lumiere were initially satisfied with simply placing a camera on a tripod and leave it to capture whatever went on in the frame. The earliest movies were of workers exiting a factory or a train pulling into a station. There was no staging, no narrative to speak of, and no editing. Essentially, the Lumieres worked as if they had a still camera that happened to capture moving images.
The concept of editing was a radical one. So innovative was this concept that it was unclear whether movie-goers would be able to make sense of a film’s disjointed points-of-view, and lack of a clear real-life counterpart. After nearly two decades of editorial experimentation, in 1913 D.W. Griffiths dramatically altered the future of the medium. Griffiths grasped the importance of a wide range of techniques. None were entirely new, but they had not yet been used efficiently and certainly never combined to form one compelling dramatic vision. Griffiths’s Birth of a Nation featured dramatic close-ups and dramatic cross-editing (cutting repeatedly between interconnected scenes).1
Birth of a Nation
In the midst of these innovations, however, some of Griffiths’s contemporaries used an opposite approach in order to establish the seriousness of films: they sought to link film to already established art forms, mostly theatre. Thus, a surprisingly wide range of films merely showed theatre performances of classics; today the term “filmed theatre” refers to a truly primitive approach to film making. Nevertheless, it represented a particular evolutionary stage that has parallels in game design, as we shall see below.
With the introduction of sound in the late 1920s, the “talkies” paved the way for much more complex narratives and for the wide-ranging dramatic uses of sound that we take for granted today. And with it a new controversy arose, as some argued that the addition of sound changed the audience’s experience and threatened the medium. There is a direct comparison with the now-mostly-historical rivalry between text based adventure games and their graphic counterparts. Text game designers often bemoaned the loss of “that special something” – like the active appeal to a player’s imagination – which made the old games superior, and which they felt was lost with the addition of graphics.
With the introduction of color film in the 1930s we see another interesting shift in the medium’s development. In these early years, color sequences represented fantastic situations or dream moments, whereas “normal” life was rendered in black and white; in The Wizard of OZ, for instance, the bleak reality of Dorothy’s Kansas home is monochromatic, whereas the dream-like vision of Oz is intensely colorful. But today the situation has reversed, and black-and-white film is generally reserved for dreams or flash-backs.
The Wizard of Oz
In the 1960s, cinema entered its rebellious phase. Film was no longer simply entertainment for the illiterate masses. The believers claimed that film had special properties and functions not found in other media. Notably, critics and film-makers associated with the French Nouvelle Vague (or “New Wave”) argued that film was comparable to literature. Although film offered new forms of narrative, the movie director was comparable to the book author2 using his camera “as a pen”. And as several of these auteurs – from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Ingmar Bergman – rose to worldwide prominence, and as the academy grew more interested in an analytical approach to film, the artistic ambitions of the medium could no longer be denied. Today, cinema no longer has to defend itself as a form of artistic expression. No one argues that films cannot be considered art – but we must not forget that this evolution was many decades in the making.
The development of video games as a medium
Let us approach video games in a similar fashion. For present purposes, we are interested in the development of their relationship with other media and other phenomena, rather than their aesthetic development per se.
Did 1962’s Spacewar borrow from previous media? As to form, we cannot say that it copied anything directly, although it is interesting that the one-screen, fixed perspective is reminiscent of the Lumieres’ first films. As to content, on the other hand, the game designers were explicitly inspired by science fiction books and low-brow action movies (Graetz, 2001). Spacewar also borrowed from non-electronic games. It mimicked certain skill-based ball games and, more importantly, it required two players. Thus it was a continuation of previous game types – from tennis to chess – which had mostly been multi-player.
With the growth of arcade games in the early 1980s, game designers drew heavily on pop culture symbols. Game cabinets explicitly cited popular movies, which, although often irrelevant to gameplay, enriched the game experience by framing it within a larger narrative. For instance, Shark Jaws, published by Atari in 1975, shamelessly referred to the blockbuster movie Jaws (itself based on a book) in order to piggyback on the film’s popularity.
1976 was a watershed year for video games for two reasons. First, Night Driver challenged the dominance of the third-person perspective by having the player drive into the screen from a first-person perspective. This mirrors discoveries made by movie-makers in the 1910s and 1920s who found new ways to work with the camera and perspective. Second, another driving game, Death Race, shattered the status of games as harmless fun by sparking widespread fear of the detrimental effects of on-screen violence. The game, (based on the movie Death Race 2000) had players control a car in order to run down “gremlins”, who looked like little men, an activity unacceptable to many.
Although the arcade business involved intense creativity, few entertained the notion that games should be considered anything more than entertainment. This public perception was rooted in the fact that games were closely associated with the teenagers who played them, and the somewhat dark and disreputable arcades that housed them. This perception changed with the release of Zork in 1980, an early adventure game. Games could now approximate literature. Those who wrote about video games started describing them in radically different terms. In return, adventure game designers began the attempt to separate themselves from their less-lofty arcade relatives. Adventure games were called ‘interactive fiction’, story-games, compu-novels etc. (e.g. Rothstein, 1983).
The effort to distance adventure games from other game genres can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, this evolutionary step was could be seen as fully justified, since these game types are radically different and offer far richer or deeper experiences. Compared to then-contemporary action games such as Space Invaders, adventure games could offer far more complex and emotionally rewarding stories. Furthermore, because they were interactive, adventure games were not “mere” stories but offered new techniques and pleasures. They offered a chance to experiment with alternative story lines, and enabled the player to confront the consequences of choice and the very nature of narrative form.
On the other hand, we can see this effort of separation as a case of “filmed theatre”, an unreflective yet strategic attempt to piggyback on the legitimacy of established art forms. Adventure games essentially miss that which is special about games. By confining the player to a linear story, designers display a lack of courage to engage in shared authorship. These games illustrate an immature understanding of the medium, one which merely makes games subservient to literature.
As the reader will have noticed these two positions do not represent answers to a scientific question. Stripped bare, the discussion is fundamentally about what makes games good or bad – and this is not something that can be decided by game scholars. Let us note, then, that adventure games appealed to many, while others considered them boring. Considering the target audience, the struggle by many adventure game designers to frame their work in terms of literature was a successful marketing strategy. Text adventure games vanished from the mainstream in the late 1980s. But ten years later they were followed into near-oblivion by their direct descendants, the graphical adventure games (though there have been a few successful recent titles, such as Microïds’ Siberia from 2002).
The late nineties saw another far more coordinated and successful attempt to argue for the relevance of games as aesthetic objects. First of all, game design had reached a level of complexity where professionalization was necessary. Gone were the days where single individuals worked out of their garage to create popular games. To compete in the game business, “developers” became teams of highly specialized individuals overseen by project managers and backed by dedicated marketing departments. New professional organizations such as the International Game Developer’s Association sprung up and the sharing of knowledge on the intricacies of design and development increased.
Meanwhile, the academic world was rapidly becoming interested in games as aesthetic and cultural objects, rather than as simply a sub-genre of literature or a dangerous social phenomenon. The IT University of Copenhagen (in 2001) and the university of Manchester (in 2002) held the first international conferences on video games. Books such as Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext (1997) or Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy (1999) highlighted the status of games as new and important cultural objects.
Further evidence came with the rise of ludology (see Smith, 2004) which was a move towards studying games first and foremost in their capacity as rule-based systems. Today, both the analysis of video games continues unabated. For instance in journals such as Game Studies and Games and Culture and through the work of associations like the Digital Games Research Association.
The relationship between games and cinema
Video games are compared and contrasted to movies more often than to any other media. As audiovisual works, games have clear connections to cinema and indeed many games have suffered from what we can call “cinema envy”. Though the two differ greatly in the way they present on-screen activity, games have adopted a variety of conventions established by Hollywood style cinema. For instance, games employ a range of “continuity techniques”. Most obviously, they do not skip frames which would disorient the player. The term for a break in continuity is “lag” and is generally considered a flaw. Nor do they normally break the 180° “rule”, which states that you cannot cut between two camera positions that are more than 180° apart from one another. Doing so would reverse the direction of on-screen objects; a person moving in one direction would suddenly seem to be moving in another.
Nowhere is this more obvious, of course, than in games which closely mimic the structure and form of narrative films. Adventure games like Gabriel Knight III uphold these conventions almost completely, as do games with scripted editing like the Resident Evil series.
Resident Evil 2: The game uses scripted editing that complies with Hollywood conventions.
While similarities stand out, one crucial difference between games and movies relates to the use of editing. Some games have semi-linear narratives and employ almost the entire arsenal of movie conventions, but many do not. Action games like Kung Fu Master and Doom, for instance, do not divide the on-screen action into sequences of shots, but rather display continuous streams of images that stop only when the player reaches a new level. Doom uses two techniques that are impossible in narrative film for dramatic or practical purposes. Firstly, the game uses the first-person-perspective only. The best known attempt to tell a film from the first-person perspective was Robert Montgomery’s 1947 Lady in the Lake; while interesting, the effect is less than compelling. Secondly, the game’s lack of editing is virtually impossible in movies. It would require super-human planning and luck, and would do away with many fundamental film techniques such as close-ups, cross-editing, reaction shots, and establishing shots. Perhaps the ease with which the Doom player orients himself is a testament to the success of letting the player control perspective with his mouse or keyboard.
Cross-media titles
The video game business has a longstanding affair with Hollywood. Mostly, it is a win-win situation. One may piggyback on the popularity or marketing efforts of the other and, increasingly, one may directly use material produced in the making of the other. Also, the two do not really compete for the same money or time. Since the two media generally provide different experiences it is not an either-or situation for many viewers/players.
However, the relationship has undeniably been fraught with artistically questionable products. In this category, Atari’s infamous E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial outshines most others. The game failed so spectacularly that, arguably, the link between movies and video games was compromised for years. It was evident beyond any doubt that a good movie did not automatically make for a good game. For reasons already mentioned, however, the temptation did not vanish. The mid-1980s saw the release of games like Ghostbusters, Gremlins, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Aliens. Since those days, many movie blockbusters (at least those with strong action elements) have been increasingly accompanied by one or more games. Many of these adaptations have worked well, but it is noteworthy that practically none of these games are seen as groundbreaking. Recently, attempts have been made to go beyond the mere translation of movie to game. Enter the Matrix, for instance, tried including scenes that were not shown in the movie Matrix: Reloaded in an attempt to create a more exciting synergy between the media. Reviewers were not impressed. Influential Gamespot.com described it as “just another licensed game that doesn’t do justice to its source material”, while PC Gamer felt that had it not been for the Matrix setting one would be left with “an action game that really does nothing new - and looks pretty average doing it”. More recently (in 2004), Electronic Arts attempted yet another alternative strategy, by releasing the James Bond game 007: Everything or Nothing as an original Bond title without a supporting movie. The developers scanned actors who appeared in the movies in order to have game characters mimic their movement styles and mapped their faces onto the characters. This attempt was met with much more critical success than Enter the Matrix.
We also see movies based on games, but with far less regularity. Oddly enough from a design perspective, the games chosen for the silver screen have mostly been action games. The Super Mario Brothers movie is based on a game which revolves around the less than epic kinetics of jumping between platforms while avoiding small animals. The movie obviously had to move quite far from the defining features of the game. This is less the case with the movies based on street fighting games like Double Dragon, Street Fighter and gory, arena-based Mortal Kombat. These games can be converted into action-packed movie narrative easily and directly, although the movies have not been particularly ambitious productions in terms of budgets. Creepy survival horror games translate almost directly, though the attempt is not always successful. Reviewing the Resident Evil movie, The New York Times despaired that “The movie has a frantic staccato style that is more game-oriented than cinematic.” (Holden, 2002). The first real attempt at a full budget Hollywood game adaptation was Simon West’s 2001 Tomb Raider. Building on the fame of gaming’s most celebrated heroine, Lara Croft, the movie saw Angelina Jolie traveling the world to fight crime and recover archaeological treasure. Practically universally disparaged by critics, the movie was a hit at the box office inspiring a 2003 sequel, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.
Continuity and self-reflexivity
In narrative literature and movies, suspension of disbelief is generally achieved by presenting a coherent, self-contained world and a story that does not call attention to its artificial nature. In mainstream cinema we do not see the movie production crew on-screen and in novels we do not hear about the author. Similarly, we might think that successful games immerse the player in an experience by supporting his suspension of disbelief. But some games seem to sin against this rule by specifically highlighting their gameness. Typically, this happens by referring directly to the game interface (“Now, press X to jump across the gap”). In some cases, however, game designers include more playful features that bridge the gap between representation and real life. In the adventure game Planetfall, for instance, when the player wished to save his position, the robot sidekick Floyd would ask “Are we going to do something dangerous now?”. Something similar happens in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time when the narrator comments on the death of the player with phrases like “No no, that’s not what happened!” drawing attention to the fact that the game’s action is a retelling of past events. In a sequence in Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, an in-game enemy “reads” the player’s mind by analyzing certain data on the PS2 memory card. In many real-time-strategy games (such as Warcraft II) units will start addressing the player directly if clicked repeatedly without being given orders.
Such gimmicks arguably break the illusion and remind the player of the artificiality of the situation. Film makers go to great lengths to avoid drawing attention to “the fourth wall”, a term originating in theatre to describe the imagined wall at the side of the stage from which the audience looks in. From a traditionalist Hollywood perspective, this illusion must be preserved for the spectators to be able to lose themselves in the narrative. Film-makers of the modernist school have challenged these classic film-making conventions. An example is the camera conspicuously entering our field of vision in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, thus stressing the representational nature of the action. Designer Ernest Adams has a very unambiguous opinion about illusion-disruptive techniques in games: “Such cute gimmicks don’t improve the players’ experience; they harm it. It’s a direct slap in the face.” (Adams, 2004). Here, Adams voices a common notion that games and all media must uphold certain rules and conventions that help transport the player to an imaginary space. The slightest incongruence may violently rip the player out of this space, rendering the experience shallow and imperfect. There is an opposing position, however. Game designers Salen and Zimmerman define “the immersive fallacy” as “the idea that the pleasure of a media experience lies in its ability to sensually transport the participant into an illusory, simulated reality.” (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, p. 450). They argue that, to the contrary, we become engrossed in games through the activity of play, which necessarily entails that the player, at some level, is aware that the situation is at once real and make-believe.3
Taken to extremes the idea that “immersion is always broken by self-reflexivity thus hurting the experience” and the idea that “self-reflexivity in games is never an issue since the player is aware of the game’s nature” both pose problems. Even Adams admits that many games do in fact make strategic use of mixing fictional levels. In the case of real-time-strategy games the player is probably less immersed in a narrative than feverishly processing strategic opportunities in her head and thus not likely to be torn from any deep-felt immersion. In games that rely on the progression of a richly textured narrative such antics may well seem inappropriate, however. In other words: we need to take into account genre when considering the effects of immersion-disruptive techniques.
Interactivity
Games require the active participation of players and the way a game plays out depends on input from players. This, at a very concrete and basic level, sets games apart from linear media like novels or movies. A typical game is more like an amusement park than like a novel. Generally, the concept of interactivity has been associated with positive notions of freedom and the liberation of media users. Having people make choices and exert influence was, particularly during the 1990s, one of the greatest emancipatory promises of computing and networking. Game scholar Espen Aarseth (1997) points out that attempts to produce nonlinear fiction are not tied exclusively to computer technology but can be found throughout the entire history of written literature. He aims to cut through the ‘hype’ of interactivity, seeing the term as highly ideological and as connoting revolutionary or utopian expectations that can never be fulfilled:
The industrial rhetoric produced concepts such as interactive newspapers, interactive video, interactive television, and even interactive houses, all implying that the role of the consumer had (or would very soon) change for the better. […] To declare a system interactive is to endorse it with a magic power. (Aarseth, 1997, p. 48).
What is interactivity? Media Scholar Jens F. Jensen has emphasized that the concept is multi-discursive having significantly different meanings in different fields (Jensen, 1997). In particular, he focuses on three. In sociology, the term “interaction” refers to “the relationship between two or more people who, in a given situation, mutually adapt their behavior and actions to each other.” Communication and media studies have a broader definition of interaction including “processes that take place between receivers on the one hand and a media message on the other.” Finally, Informatics uses interaction as “the process that takes place when a human user operates a machine“. These uses are quite different but building upon the most influential definitions of the word, Jensen proposes one of his own: Interactivity is “a measure of a media’s potential ability to let the user exert an influence on the content and/or form of the mediated communication.” This is probably not too far from the colloquial use of the term. Interactivity refers to the meaningful ways in which the user becomes a co-author by directly manipulating variables. DVD viewers are technically able to edit their own narrative and can influence the form of the movie by adjusting the lighting or sound. But the video game player is usually able to determine the configuration of the signs presented to him or her on-screen and through the speakers. Again, the issue is genre-dependent. Although all games have an abstract “potential ability” to allow the user co-authorship, adventure games do this only modestly while MMORPGs lie at the other end of the spectrum, in principle letting every player choice impact the future of the world as long as the server is running.
Most discussions of interactivity in video games are muddled by the fact that they assume that users of other media are passive. This corresponds poorly to the understanding employed by most media scholars who argue that media use such as television viewing demands a high degree of cognitive activity on the part of the viewer. To understand a novel, a movie or a television drama, the reader/viewer must make a large number of inferences, fill in a number of blanks and often deal with numerous narrative threads. The meaning of a movie is something that the viewer must largely construct cognitively from what are essentially patterns of light on a screen. Also, media users sometimes make interpretations that are different from or even opposite to the intended meaning. When discussing the interactive elements of games we must be careful not to be swept away by the positive connotations of the term and we must be quite precise about what we mean so as not to ignore the “active” nature of all media use.
A few remarks towards the end
We can, contrary to common arguments, learn much about video games by looking at other media, even film. While analogies can of course run out of control, the cultural development of games has many similarities with that of film and the two media obviously inspire each other thematically and aesthetically to great extents.
At present, studies of the cultural reception of video games during the course of their four decades of existence are sparse. In particular, cross-national studies of how various cultures have dealt with the arrival of video games on the cultural landscape would be illuminating; not least for developers and publishers who are still facing some opposition from policy makers and from those who would delegate gaming to the domain of children and the young. Such studies would help us understand an important part of the video game ecology, the effects of which - however subtly - influences both games, their creators, and their players.
References
Adams, E. (2004, 9th of July). Postmodernism and the Three Types of Immersion. Gamasutra.com.
Graetz, J. (2001). The Origin of Spacewar! In V. Burnham (Ed.), Supercade, a visual history of the videogame age 1971-1984. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Holden, S. (2002, 15th of March). They May Be High-Tech, But They’re Still the Undead. The New York Times.
Jensen, J. F. (1997). ‘Interactivity’. Tracking a New Concept in Media and Communication Studies. Paper presented at the The XIII Nordic Conference on Mass Communication Research, Jyväsklä.
Poole, S. (1999). Trigger happy : the inner life of videogames. London: Fourth Estate.
Rothstein, E. (1983, 8th of May). Reading and Writing: Participatory Novels. The New York Times Book Review.
Salen, K., & Zimmerman, E. (2004). Rules of Play - Game Design Fundamentals. London: MIT Press.
Smith, J. H. (2004). Does gameplay have politics? [Electronic Version], 2004. Retrieved 13th of April 2004 from http://www.game-research.com/art_gameplay_politics.asp.
Aarseth, E. (1997). Cybertext : perspectives on ergodic literature. London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- It also, unpleasantly, features the Ku Klux Klan as heroic protectors of sound values creating an unfortunate situation for film historians who tend to praise the movie’s form but not its contents. [↩]
- The term used was auteur, which does not necessarily translate into (book) author. Their point was that the director, although engaged in a collective form of expression, could be the single determining force behind the movie. [↩]
- This is also Jesper Juuls’s argument in his book Half-Real (2005). [↩]
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since June 2007
Date posted: June 18, 2007
Pat Herrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (eds.): Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media
A review by Julian Kücklich.
It has been three years since my review of First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game appeared in Dichtung-digital. To say that the review created a controversy would be an understatement; in fact, the backlash against the review was so intense that I refrained from writing reviews for more than a year after its publication. To this day, the review is accompanied by a warning that informs the reader that “this review contains inaccurate information about the circumstances of the book’s publication.” This is due to my claim that the contributors to First Person were “given the opportunity to update their writings, but elected to squander it” – which turned out to be false.
Three years older, but none the wiser, I approach the task of writing a review of Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media with a certain wariness, but also with the hope of righting wrongs that I may have inflicted unintentionally because I simply had too high expectations. Therefore, I started reading Second Person with my expectations significantly lessened, but still expecting it to be an improvement on its predecessor– which should allow me to write a more level-headed review of the book. The fact that Second Person is no longer entrenched in the theory wars between narratologists and ludologists, and draws on a more diverse pool of contributors, makes this task much easier.
First off, the list of contributors bears some reflection. In their introduction, the editors assert that the “authors, artists, and theoreticians in Second Person address the exigencies of playable media in a number of ways, and a number of voices.” However, I cannot help but feel that the chorus of voices could be much more diverse. Of the 50 contributors, eleven are women. Most of the authors live and work in the United States. Their backgrounds are almost exclusively Western. Admittedly, this is a problem that plagues not only new media studies but also many other fields of research, but this is precisely why it is a point worth reiterating.
Another point that should be addressed before I talk about the content of Second Person is the book’s format. First Person was set up with much fanfare as an “imagined panel discussion” between the contributors, which meant that each essay was accompanied by two respondents’ commentaries as well as the author’s reply to these commentaries. This sounds confusing, and indeed it was. In my review I described it as a “tangle of arguments and fragmentary counter-arguments” in which the reader frantically searches for a common thread. Therefore, I am very pleased to see that this concept has been abandoned.
The essays in Second Person are divided into three sections, entitled “Tabletop Systems”, “Computational Fictions” and “Real Worlds”. While the first one deals with role-playing and storytelling systems that do not require a computer, the second part is about interactive media including computer games, cyberdrama, and hypertext. The third part is dedicated to games and artworks that are designed in such a way that they change the players’ perception of the world they live in. Additionally, there is an appendix that includes games by Greg Costikyan, John Tynes, and James Wallis.
In their introduction, the editors claim that the contributors to Second Person are “not interested in questions such as ‘What is a game?’” – however, this question lurks in the background of almost all the essays in the first section of the book. Thus, Greg Costikyan defines a game as a “system of constraints” and uses this definition to differentiate game-like storytelling devices such as Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch from game systems which can be used to tell a story. In doing so, Costikyan covers a lot of ground that has already been covered by scholars such as Espen Aarseth, but he does not add anything to his structuralist analysis of ergodic texts.
Costikyan thus sets the tone for the first part of the book. Like many other contributors to Second Person, he still clings to the ideal of ‘interactive fiction’ – an art form that has been superseded commercially, aesthetically and technologically – and propagates the myth of the game designer as romantic author. This is also true for Rebecca Borgstrom’s borderline incoherent, formalist analysis of her game Exalted: The Fair Folk, in which she comes to the unsurprising conclusion that a role-playing session is an information-generating process and that “it is possible to go significantly further in developing a formal language for studying this process […], and that this would facilitate more efficient role-playing game design.”
The formalism that haunts the field of game design theory – represented by writers such as Jesper Juul, Katie Salen, and Eric Zimmerman – is thus revealed as a powerful meme that has taken root in the minds of many game designers. However, while Salen and Zimmerman at least recognize the fact that games are inscribed into cultural contexts, the embeddedness of games is largely disregarded by the contributors to Second Person. This becomes especially obvious in the accounts of the development of various RPG systems – from Dungeons & Dragons to Call of Cthulhu – which make hardly any reference to the socio-political climate in which their development took place.
Overall, however, the first part is especially interesting for researchers in the field of digital games, because it demonstrates the manifold possibilities of integrating storytelling and games in non-computational media. The second part, by comparison, offers less interesting examples and less interesting writing. While some of the descriptive pieces in the first part are nothing but post mortems or thinly veiled advertisements, some of the shorter contributions in the second part seem to serve no purpose than to include the names of some renowned researchers in new media, such as Lev Manovich and Marie-Laure Ryan.
Again, there is an abundance of examples, particularly in the area of interactive fiction, but ultimately most of these are so obscure as to render them invisible outside of the small circle of academics who study them. Thus, I found Jordan Mechner’s fairly technical post mortem of The Sands of Time much more relevant to contemporary media research than the theoretically sophisticated contribution by Nick Montfort on interactive fiction. On the end of the spectrum, Chris Crawford’s speculative essay about a programming language for interactive storytelling is so completely out of touch with the reality of contemporary media that it borders on science-fiction.
One of the few genuinely ground-breaking essays in the entire book is D. Fox Harrell’s essay on the computational narrative generation system GRIOT, in which he manages to blend the domains of cognitive linguistics and algebraic semiotics, arriving at a non-deterministic model which goes significantly beyond the structuralist paradigm so prevalent in Second Person. This is a conceptualisation which could help to overcome the limitations of formalist approaches, such as Mateas and Stern’s framework for their interactive drama Façade. Accordingly, Mateas and Stern’s contribution to Second Person focuses more on the failures than the undeniable achievements of their model.
The contributors in the third part of the book look at alternate reality games (ARGs), persuasive games, and massively multiplayer games, as well as more experimental forms of play such as improvisational theatre. Clearly, this is the miscellaneous section of the book, and it is hard to discern any kind of overarching theme in the contributions to this section. The blend of technological utopianism with thoroughly conservative modernist aesthetics which is evident in John Tynes’ opening essay, is characteristic of the contributions to this sections, most of which adhere to a televisual logic of exposure and persuasion rather than a new media logic of multitudinous manipulation.
This attitude is obvious in Tynes’ insistence on overcoming the paradigm of escapism, and arriving at “authentic experience”, but it is also present in the contribution by Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca, who describe the process of creating a persuasive game used in an electoral campaign in the United States. This is a particular interesting example of how theoretically advanced positions are rejected in favour of simplistic models of representational identity and monolithic citizenship in order to package politics into a game. Considering Bogost’s sophisticated argumentation in Unit Operations, this political naiveté is particularly unfortunate.
A similar unwillingness to reflect one’s role as a researcher in the creation of games is evident in Jane McGonigal’s contribution to the book. While she is aware of the problematic power relationship between the players of an alternate reality game (ARG) and the ‘puppet masters’ who orchestrate the game, she only reluctantly admits her own role in ‘I Love Bees’, and she never mentions the fact that the game was part of the marketing campaign for Halo 2. This refusal to engage with the economic context in which ARGs take place threatens to render her entire argument moot because she disregards capital as a source of power. Even more dubious is her suggestion that player performativity solves the problem of unequal power distribution in ARGs.
While there are some essays in the third part which raise interesting questions – particularly Jill Walker’s reflections on networked quest structures in World of Warcraft – this must be considered the weakest part of the book. This is at least partially due to the fact that it lacks coherence, and there is hardly any interplay between the individual essays. This, however, is a problem that plagues the book throughout. While there is a semblance of coherence in the first two parts, it is quickly revealed to be superficial. While First Person tried to hard to engage the contributors in a conversation, Second Person has given up on the idea of intertextuality almost entirely.
In this respect, Second Person is very much like an RPG source book. It contains a lot of information, but most of this information is only potentially useful. And while I wouldn’t want to fault the book for trying to integrate description with analysis, the balance between these two modes appears off-kilter, especially considering the fact that it is much easier to find good descriptions than good analyses of games. Considering the recent inflation of game-related books it would have made much more sense to create a companion website with background materials for the book than to put all this material in the book itself.
In the final analysis, then, Second Person is clearly an improvement on its predecessor, albeit a small one. It is a relief to see that the theory wars and the concomitant essentialist theoretical positions do no longer occupy much space in this book, and that the editors chose to continue their integrative policy vis-à-vis phenomena that would not necessarily fall under the ludological definition of a game. At the same time, it remains unclear which audience this book is trying to reach. Most academics will probably reject it as too shallow, while game designers are likely to shun it for its lack of practical advice. Considering that Second Person strikes me as fairly cliquish and exclusionary, I fear that the only people who will take an interest in it are the contributors themselves.
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since June 2007
Date posted: May 9, 2007
Updated: Aug 23, 2007
Review by John Edwards (John Edwards is pursuing his MA at the University of the West of England and plans to begin PhD studies in games during 2007)
The title of this book suggests a comprehensive overview of the field of game studies and possibly answers to fundamental questions. Alarm bells begin to ring, however, in the Preface, where the editors discuss the potential in games for ‘new ways of developing and telling stories’, and how games have ‘become a focus for new enthusiasms, expertise and communities’, declaring that ‘digital games sit at the centre of a significant combination of cultural, industrial, technological and social phenomena.’ All of this may well be true, but the authors here tend to steer clear of what lies at the heart of the gaming experience, choosing instead to map out areas on its periphery. The editors describe it as ‘an attempt to pull together the diversity and richness of research on digital games’ but there’s very little here about the practice of playing games. One of the contributors, Alberto Alvisi, recognises that ‘games are about creativity, eye-to-hand coordination, skill and fun, and to some extent can be considered a new form of art’, but such considerations are barely touched upon throughout this book.
The book is divided into three parts: History and Production, Theories and Approaches, and Key Debates. In Part 1, John Kirriemuir offers a beginner’s thumbnail chronology of the evolution of game technologies. As such it is a useful precis, although claims such as: ‘we moved from a dot on the screen, to games which share the style and technology of many Hollywood blockbusters’ are pretty useless in that they refer only to the visual aspect of games.
Aphra Kerr takes a political economy approach to the international business of making games, from the pre-development stage to retail. She includes a lot of sales charts, and traces the ‘cycle of activities involved in creating a game and delivering it to the consumer.’ Kerr does an impressive job of marshalling her stats, but her conclusions are unsurprising, for example: ‘Recent research would appear to suggest that the growth of licences combined with consolidation in the digital games industry is making it increasingly difficult for new ideas and third party developers to enter the market.’
Stages of game design are examined by Jon Sykes, who offers (dread phrase!) ‘a set of conceptual tools’. He claims that ‘interactive digital games are but another chapter in the long history of gaming, and the process of game design is much the same, regardless of the actual medium in which the game is situated.’ To support his case he identifies five stages of game design: 1. Concept identification 2. Research 3. Defining game mechanics 4. Balancing game mechanics 5. Game evaluation. He describes game developers’ use of a persona, ‘a fictitious character who embodies the desires and needs of the target audience’ and seems to think this is a good idea. He also recommends the use of ‘mood boards’ to help define and communicate the ‘affective tone’ of a game.
The theories and approaches of Part 2 are derived from existing academic fields. Julian Kuchlich questions how applicable literary theory is to analysing games by attempting three approaches, Poetics (conventions and rules), Hermeneutics (meaning) and Aesthetics (effects). He believes that ‘the terminology of literary studies - terms such as “text”, “narrative”, “protagonist” and so forth… remains indispensible’, although he does recognise that ‘to regard digital games as a storytelling device is not only an oversimplification but a distortion of the medium.’
Geoff King & Tanya Krzywinska demonstrate how concepts from film studies can be used to engage with the visual elements of games, although they understand that ‘games are not films, or some kind of interactive cinema, and should not be studied as if they were.’ Once again, a ‘valuable set of tools’ is offered, including such concepts as point of view, mise-en-scene, iconography and spectacle.
The only authors here willing to discuss players at play with their games are Seth Giddings & Helen Kennedy. They look at games as a form of new media and argue for the importance of the player’s interaction with technology. They concentrate on the newness of digital games and the forms of engagement and experience facilitated by their status as computer hardware and software, showing particular interest in user intervention strategies such as modding and skinning. The concepts of interactivity, simulation and technological imaginary are applied to Tomb Raider, The Sims and Quake.
Part 3 is the least successful section of the book, in which Bryce, Rutter & Sullivan rehearse debates on the relationship between gender and games, and review literature on the relationship between playing games and violent behaviour, questioning assumptions of causality in past studies. Dumbleton & Kirriemuir look at the use of games in education, examining the benefit of using games in the classroom, with inconclusive results.
Rather than arriving at an understanding of games and play, Bryce & Rutter seem more concerned with inviting academics from other fields to find their way into the study of games. They state that Understanding Digital Games is ‘for those approaching the study of digital games for the first time or those wanting to develop an understanding of approaches outside their own discipline.’ They aim to promote a multidisciplinary approach, arguing against game studies as a new discipline, stating that ‘drawing boundaries around academic fields is not necessarily a productive activity’. They see that games ’sit at a junction between a wide range of established academic interests’, but seem more interested in those established academic interests than they are in the games themselves.
Unfortunately for them, they fail to make a convincing case for a multidisciplinary approach by assembling a range of essays that shuffle tentatively around their subject and notably fail to lay a glove on the key issues of gameplay. Their book ‘celebrates the fact that research on digital games provides great opportunities for exploring the potential links and divisions between the different academic areas’. This sums up what’s wrong with this book by betraying its focus on academic fields and their boundaries. This is not the fault of the contributors, who will have been asked to write from their own particular perspective, but what this book lacks is any sense of true engagement with the actual playing of games.
Understanding Digital Games is a misnomer. Perhaps Understanding A Range of Possible Academic Approaches to Digital Games would be a less concise, but more accurate title.
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Date posted: December 22, 2006
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since June 2007
Date posted: November 16, 2006
By Tony Tulathimutte
Given the genre’s staggering growth and diversification over the last decade, the trust issues surrounding massively-multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are becoming as diverse and complex as those found in real-world systems. MMOGs like Second Life and The Sims Online created environments where real-life social phenomena are encouraged and replicated, while games such as World of Warcraft, Lineage, and Everquest, in virtue of their role-playing and fantasy settings, create new social dynamics with few practical real-life analogues, which in turn create new bases for trust.
User Demographics
As of June 2005, there are an estimated 9,250,000 active MMOG subscribers, with the games Lineage, Lineage II, and World of Warcraft comprising 67% of the market share (Woodcock). According to an online survey of 30,000 MMOG players, the mean age of users is about 26, and ages range from 11 to 68; weekly use averages 22 hours (Yee, “Demographics”). Though in most MMOG populations male players outnumber females by a wide margin, gender proportions are steadily converging, and in many respects (e.g. guild membership) females tend to be more dedicated to certain aspects of gameplay than males (Yee, “Norrathian”).
Massively Multiplayer Online Games – Background
In addition to an initial software purchase or download which costs around 50 dollars, MMOGs typically charge a monthly fee of 10-25 dollars, excluding one recent game (Guild Wars). Players are encouraged to meet, cooperate, and socialize in the game environment; users in my survey reported that they meet and play in a group with new players every time they play. Common tasks include informal adventuring for the sake of gathering items and completing predefined mission objectives, meeting to socialize and role-play, and creating and exhibiting player-created content such as items, furniture, character models, organized performances, and so on. Often times, tasks are designed such that they are too difficult to realistically complete with only a single player. Most MMOGs have a form of “guild” system which allows players to organize into a semi-hierarchical group with fellow players, and there is data to suggest that the majority of players belong to a guild (Yee, “Norrathian”).
The games are offered as entertainment, but many more serious uses and abuses of MMOG systems have since emerged: “farming” characters for retail (Loftus), real-world attacks prompted by in-game actions (Levander), and high-profile allegations of virtual underage prostitution (Ludlow). Since MMOGs are subscription-based services owned and maintained privately, players are subject to strict end-user license agreements and terms-of-use policies, as well as less formal game etiquette standards established both by the game companies and the player communities. However, the extent of repercussions for transgressive in-game behavior has thus far only amounted to account suspension or cancellation; there has yet to be a criminal investigation arising from actions between in-game characters. This may have to do with the regular patrolling of game environments by company-employed officials, or “GMs”, who have the ability to move undetected, observe remote exchanges, and eject any players from the game at will; moreover, most game actions and dialogue are recorded in server-side logs. The lack of privacy makes the use of MMOGs for illicit legal conduct risky; however, the otherwise lax repercussions make more minor behavioral infractions prevalent, such as verbal harassment and item stealing.
Trust Issues and Benefits in MMOGs
In almost every sense analogous to the offline world, trust serves numerous functions between MMOG players. Trading and bartering of equipment, items, and property occur much as they do in real life, and cooperative tasks such as exploring dungeons and defeating enemies form the bulk of gameplay in games such as World of Warcraft. As such, MMOGs share many trust issues with online transactions, such as those found in e-commerce and online auctions like eBay and craigslist, where participants are mutually anonymous and direct retribution for fraud is difficult. Similar to those sites, then, MMOGs have implemented reputation systems of their own; however, the entertainment-oriented environment of MMO worlds makes certain abuse and fraud issues all the more salient for their ease of execution (Appelcline). Corritore et al. cite risk as a defining factor of online trust (241), and since online play environments are typically designed to be risk-free, people are more willing to trust more quickly and on weaker grounds.
Naturally, players have found many ways to exploit reputation systems in MMOGs. Since certain actions will enhance one’s trustworthiness according to the conventions of the game, players can write “macro” programs to repeat these actions ad nauseam, or simply invest time in performing the actions themselves, artificially inflating one’s reputation score, and thereby their perceived trustworthiness. Moreover, since new characters and identities are easily created, it is easy to falsify positive reputation from many different sources, which is a common basis for judging overall trustworthiness online.
Finally, the anonymity and lowered stakes of the MMOG environment have spawned a category of players known as “griefers”, who take pleasure in the intrinsic appeal of annoying others, going to great lengths in-game to cause slight-to-major annoyance to other players; this is less common in the real world, where such people might incur severe consequences for this behavior. Griefers confound the motivations for evaluating trust and trusting reputation scores, because some griefers will build reputation for long periods of time simply to grief more effectively, and they are not motivated by self-interest where game standing or welfare is concerned.
MMOG groups share several similarities to temporary systems and virtual organizations in the real world: like temporary systems, groups can easily be described as “a set of diversely skilled people working together on a complex task over a limited period of time” (qtd. in Meyerson et al. 168). Players often interact in highly transient, lightweight situations, and many users report that they play with different players nearly every play session, and often only once. As in the real world, this pattern of play makes it difficult to form long relationships upon which one would otherwise base trust; rather, players must employ swift trust (167). Furthermore, player-created groups lack the kind of authoritative “institutional mechanisms” into which team members in real-world teams invest their trust (187); there is often no “leader”. An effective reputation system is therefore critical for providing a surrogate basis for trust and facilitating cooperation.
Reputation Systems in MMOGs – Background
Reputation systems of all sorts have been in widespread use in online games ever since the first mainstream MMOG, Ultima Online (UO), was released in 1997. Most often, reputation systems have been criticized for being “gameable”, or capable of being exploited, allowing a player to either artificially inflate his own reputation or defame another player’s. Raph Koster, one of the lead designers of UO, had this to say about his experiences with reputation systems:
…the game system attempted to detect good and bad actions, and adjusted a stat on the character based on their history of actions. It led to all the bad guys having sterling reputations and all the good guys with terrible reps because they were willing to sacrifice their good stats in order to take down the bad guys (who had great reps through abuse of the system). I suppose that in some ways this is an accurate simulation of real life.
After that failed we moved on to one where transactions were assessed by a human, rather than by the computer… Each murder you committed gave the victim the choice to report you, and to submit cash towards a bounty on your head… Numerous tricks had to be put in place in order to curtail people working off the murder counts over time (we believed that people needed to be able to reform, which led to people “macroing off murder counts” in their homes… (Koster)
In addition, players criticized the system because it was unclear to them what types of in-game behaviors would lead to gaining or losing notoriety; for example, looting corpses or slaying non-player characters (NPCs) would cause one to lose points, but looting other players and trespassing in people’s houses would not (Fitzpatrick). Interestingly, although players could give other players positive karma (by forfeiting 5 points of their own), the development team described the system’s intent as “to make this into a roleplay thing–it has no real gameplay consequences” (ibid.). Rather than a system intended to indicate trustworthiness to other players, it was only intended to govern interactions with NPCs.
Other notable instances of online reputation system implementations have been World of Warcraft’s “Honor system”, which rewards players who fought with other players of comparable experience levels with access to special titles and items; the idea is that players who fought fairly would be more trustworthy. However, as one user pointed out, one’s honor ranking typically has more to do with how much time is invested in fighting, rather than exactly how honorable a character is. The socially-oriented MMOG Second Life allows players to rate other players with positive or negative feedback, for a fee of game money. Though the fee has reportedly served as a deterrent to exploitation, it also means that rich players have greater leverage—which is even more problematic due to the fact that game currency can be bought offline with real money. Finally, The Sims Online’s “Relationship system” (shown at left) consists of a visualizable network of everybody the player has made a transaction with; friends are indicated by green links, enemies by red, and the length of the links indicates the depth of the relationship between two players, as measured by the number of positive or negative transactions shared between them. This system provides a quick means of assessing not only how reputable a character is, but who the source of the reputation is. Unfortunately, this aspect of the system is not as useful if the user does not know who those sources are, which is often the case. Furthermore, TSO’s system has been subject to one of the most well-publicized abuses, in which a group of players calling themselves the “Sim Mafia” accepted payments of game money to gang up on a player and perform a “hit”, bombarding the player with negative ratings. This was highly disruptive to the target of the hit, because TSO links a player’s access to game features with his reputation, ironically, in an attempt to encourage goodwill.
A Proposed Implementation of Reputation in MMOGs
I propose a general design for reputation systems in MMOGs which, although not ironclad, hopefully resolves many of the loopholes and vulnerabilities of previous attempts at encoding trust into a system operated by the population of players. In doing so, I have attempted to identify the bases of trust that apply specifically to MMOGs and apply theories of online trust accordingly; I will enumerate these after describing the proposed system.
In my system, which I will refer to as “RS-Tag”, ratings are based on a “tag” system similar to one proposed by a poster on the TerraNova game development blog (AFFA). A player (player A) can assign another player (player B) up to one negative or positive rating, which can be modified at any later date if the player changes his mind. Each rating is accompanied by a mandatory 30-character comment “tag” which describes the rationale behind the rating. Although the ratings are initially valued at either +1 or -1 reputation points, if another player C also gives player B the same rating, and either C is on A’s friends list or A is on C’s friends list, then RS-Tag count their two combined ratings as only one point. That is, each of their ratings are divided by the number of friends giving another player identical ratings. So, for example, if players A, B, C, and D were all friends, and they all rated player E positively, then each of their ratings would only be worth 1/4th of a point, so the “voting bloc” is restricted to a single point. The relationships between A, B, C, and D would be checked whenever the E’s reputability was assessed, so that the friends could not temporarily remove one another from their friends list when assigning the rating and then simply add each other later. Furthermore, the database of all tags would be publicly available, such that if you checked player A’s public profile, you could see what all other players have said about player A, with links to the other players’ own profiles and trustworthiness. Finally, multiple characters from the same account could only form one rating of another character, and all characters on a single account share the same rating.
RS-Tag focuses on improving two elements of MMOG reputation: removing the incentive to game the system, and preventing factions of players or high-level players from inflating their own ratings (as in UO) or driving down other people’s ratings (as in TSO). First and foremost, all ties between trust scores and game content have been severed; as soon as there is some tangible benefit conferred by a high trust score, there is a huge motivation to game the system. Unlike UO’s reputation systems, RS-Tag ensures that the reputation system’s only purpose is to assist players in forming judgments of trustworthiness. The text tags emphasize this by giving specific details about the character’s trustworthiness, and their mandatory provision simply adds another deterrent to making artificial ratings .
Furthermore, the “bloc voting restrictions” prevent groups of friends from performing hits on players. They also cause slower gain/loss of reputation than the one-player, one-vote system; as a result, the player’s reputation score is more trustworthy. In order to have a score of +5, a player would have had to cooperate with at least 5 distinct groups of players, which is considerably different than cooperating once with a group of 5 players. This slow growth of trust could be effectively used as a surrogate for “slow trust”, since it would take a player quite a lot of cooperation to achieve any significantly high score, and conversely, quite a lot of grief to many different people in order to earn a low score; thus, there is an adequate basis upon which to base swift trust.
There are fallibilities to RS-Tag, but hopefully the cost of exploiting these vulnerabilities would be too great to appeal even to dedicated griefers. First, the bloc voting restrictions could simply be circumvented if a group of friends all remove each other from one another’s friends lists; however, the benefit to this group would not be very significant (adding or subtracting a few reputation points to some player), but the loss of communication between them would be very inconvenient, as friends lists are becoming more vital for managing in-game communication, so hopefully this trade-off will deter this behavior. Another possible exploit might involve a player opening up several distinct accounts, but this would require acquiring many subscriptions with distinct credit cards, and few players would consider this practical. Also, players who give other players positive ratings in order to receive one in turn might later change their minds out of spite; this is easily remedied by a notifier which informs players of when other players have changed their ratings, so they can respond in turn. RS-Tag also prevents players who prefer to play solo or always with the same group of friends from earning a high reputation score; but then, such players would not have any use for trust systems at all. If anything, RS-Tag encourages players to meet and cooperate with as many separate groups of people as possible, which indeed is one of the underlying tenets of the MMO genre at large.
RS-Tag is a synthesis of previously postulated ideas, coordinated in order to provide players with a basis for trusting other players. It has nothing to do with role-play; that is, it is not meant to represent a character’s trustworthiness, but the trustworthiness of the player controlling the character . However, in the future, it might be interesting to study source-orientation effects to see if reputation assignments are influenced by the appearance or in-character behavior of an avatar, even when players are explicitly instructed to rate the person controlling the avatar. If the effects are significant, then this might be another potential failing of RS-Tag, which assumes players are able to distinguish between in-character and out-of character behavior. However, the alternative would be to put reputation in the hands of automated behavior monitoring algorithms, none of which have yet succeeded in resisting exploitation by any player with enough friends or time on his hands.
Works Cited
AFFA. “TerraNova: Reputation.” 21 December 2003. 6 August 2005.
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2003/12/reputation.html
Appelcline, Shannon. “Future Memes, Part Four: Community and Reputation.” 24 January 2002. Skotos.net. 10 August 2005. http://www.skotos.net/articles/TTnT_58.shtml
Corritore, C.L., Kracher, B., Wiedenbeck, S. “On-line trust: evolving concepts, evolving themes, a model.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. 58:6. 2003.
Fitzpatrick, Rob. “Ultima Online: Social Accountability for Good and Evil.”
(Presented 2/22/05 to Georgia Tech Game Seminar in the EGL)
Koster, Raph. “TerraNova: Reputation.” 21 December 2003. 6 August 2005.
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2003/12/reputation.html
Levander, Michelle. “Where does fantasy end?” Time Magazine. 157: 22. 4 June 2001. http://www.time.com/time/interactive/entertainment/gangs_np.html
Loftus, Tim. “Virtual worlds wind up in real world’s courts.” 7 February 2005. MSNBC.com. 3 August 2005. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6870901/
Ludlow, Peter. “Evangeline: Interview with a Child cyber-Prostitute in TSO”. 8 December 2003. Second Life Herald. 7 August 2005. http://www.alphavilleherald.com/archives/000049.html
Meyerson, D., Weick, K.E., & Kramer, R. “Swift trust and temporary groups.” Ed. R. Kramer & T.R. Tyler, Trust in Organizations: Frontiers of Theory and Research. 1996.
TSOMania.net. “Game Guides :: Relationship System (Friendship Web).” 2004. 10 August 2005. http://www.tsomania.net/gameguides/relationship_system.php
Woodcock, Bruce Sterling. “An Analysis of MMOG Subscription Growth” MMOGCHART.COM 12.0. 29 November 2004. 1 January 2005. http://www.mmogchart.com
Yee, Nick. “The Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively Multi-User Online Graphical Environments.” Diss. Stanford University. http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/pdf/Yee_MMORPG_Presence_Paper.pdf
–. “The Norrathian Scrolls: A Study of Everquest.” Diss. Haverford College. May 2001. http://www.nickyee.com/eqt/home.html
Appendix A: Sample Questionnaire
Below is one sample response to the questionnaire I sent to a dozen people. Salient comments are in bold.
Answer these questions about your MMO(s) of choice. Be as detailed or as concise as you please, but answer completely.
–Which MMO games do you play most often?
World of Warcraft
–How often and in what cases do you cooperate with people you’ve met in-game and have never met face-to-face?
All the time. Pick up groups require at least 5 people—I have only been in a group of 5 people I know from RL twice maybe. Meanwhile, any sort of end game raid (40 people) definitely requires cooperation with people I do not know face to face. Essentially every time I sign on there is some cooperation required with people I do not know from real life.
–How often and in what cases do you cooperate with people only once or for brief spans of time?
Mostly for 5 man instances, it is possible to cooperate with somebody only once. While there is no guarantee that the cooperation will only occur once, there is no assumption of further interaction in many cases. For the brief span of time one it is either when someone asks for help “briefly”, if we notice we are working towards the same simple quest, or if the group sucks and it falls apart.
–Do you tend to play with people you’ve played with before, or do you tend to play with people you’ve never played with before?
A little of both, and often both at the same time. The class structure in wow requires a variety of classes to be successful in an instance. If people I know of a certain class are on, I try to query them first, but if they are unavailable I just take anybody who responds to my LF “this class” messages in chat. Sometimes if I am particularly bored I’ll also join groups in a similar scenario—they are looking for somebody and I fit the bill. This is often the case as I play a healer class and they are in demand, so there are great swings in the familiarity I have with my group mates.
–How well do you feel you typically get to know people that you’ve met in-game?
This is a difficult question. I feel you can get to know a lot about their personality and their playstyle, but that unless you really go out of your way, you won’t find out much about their real life undertakings (work/age/etc). The exception being, if they have “off-hour” jobs, leading them to be at work 2-10 pm Saturday and Sunday, at which point it becomes common knowledge they are waiter or something. Once you get on to a voice chat server with your guild for more complex raids, the amount of familiarity with individuals increases. Also, while I have certainly put my time into the game, I have played a lot (/played 20 days), but not as obscenely much as others (/played of 40 or more…)
–Are you in a guild?
Yes.
–How/why did you join?
Pretty damn necessary in WoW. Very few 60’s are not in a guild and they are usually Chinese gold farmers, or people who were dissatisfied with their guild or whose guild was dissatisfied with them. I joined because I was grouped with an individual who seemed nice enough (and skilled enough) and they asked if I wanted to join.
–Do you regard your fellow guild members as trustworthy? Why?
For the most part, yes. Partly from having grouped with them over time—they pass the Turing test of trust, if you will. Also, because I know they have more to gain over time through cooperation than by defecting. This is not the prisoner’s dilemma—word gets around in the guild and by working together they can be more rewarded than by stabbing me in the back. Once again, especially since I am a healer and in short order. I leave the guild, they start having a lot of trouble .
–Do you prefer playing in a guild / with a team of friends, meeting people on your own, or playing alone? Why?
All of the above but the last. I think I enjoy playing with friends the most, but also enjoy the socialization and potential “human capital research” derived from playing with new people. You don’t get more skilled, cool friends by not meeting new people. The last option I don’t go for too much—the game is all right solo, but the complexities and challenges only emerge in group play. The AI is cheesy and boring—it’s working with people that is interesting. Also, being a healing class while people really need me, I also really need people. Killing things on my own is extraordinarily slow.
–Do you consider in-game reputation systems effective and/or reliable?
While the game does not have one in place, except for, arguably the PvP honor system, I am wary of in-game reputation systems. You have a bunch of maximizing nerds with a fair amount of time they dedicate to the game—the system would have to be rather robust to withstand attempted cheats or reputation would not have to be rewarded enough for cheating to be worthwhile. If reputations were publicized it would be impossible to control how much individual players reward positive reputation, thus making the goal of a robust, impossible to game system more important. I doubt whether I would believe people’s abilities based on their reputation score.
–If applicable, in what cases have you rated a person positively / negatively?
Not applicable. On the extremes are the only two personal options available—adding them to your buddy list, or deciding never to group with them again. I have added about 30 individuals to my buddy list, and have decided to never group with, I’d say, about 5. Most of those are from personality and not skill disagreements though…
–What does it take for you to trust other players, both in low and high risk situations? How long does that take?
Well, risk is actually never that high, but I guess the time loss can be huge. You know within the first 5 minutes of a group how skilled the players are (are they fulfilling their needed roles?), and if they are doing something wrong you will know after the first 10 minutes if they are willing to be open and work as a team. Or usually you do. Meanwhile they are many systems in place to make sure you don’t have to completely trust individuals either. Synchronous trading, master looting system, hierarchical guild powers all prevent people from having too much ability to abuse trust.
–Do you feel that you can easily distinguish between in-character (IC) and out-of character behaviors?
There is basically no role-playing that goes on on the server I play on. Everybody knows they are playing a game with people on the opposite keybord—I would feel comfortable with saying everything is OOC. Your character says what you want to say—thus night elf, humans, dwarfs, and gnomes (from the alliance) will all talk the same about how 1337 their crits are. Haven’t played on a role-playing server though, so not sure what it is like there.
–A priori, do you consider other players generally trustworthy or generally untrustworthy?
Generally trustworthy. Doesn’t mean I’ll trust them though.
–Which modes of communication do you typically use to communicate with other players (i.e. text-only, text + avatar, text + avatar + voice chat, etc.)?
Text for people I don’t know. Avatar chat is usually used for trying to do silly things while waiting for something. (Or occasionally doing some taunting at your cross-faction opponents—who can’t read your text chat). Voice chat for in guild (and some of my RL friends) cooperative efforts. Once voice chat enters the text screen becomes rather muted.
–What are the most desirable traits in an MMO partner/companion? The most undesirable?
Patient, nice, competent, fair. Hurried, distracted, belligerent (they always think they can do no wrong and anybody making a slight mistake is just the worst thing in the universe—often these people spend way too much in game/have too much invested in achievement in game), unwilling to be flexible with their play to benefit group. And no fucking ninja looters.
–What do you consider a successful in-game partnership? A failed one?
A successful one is any partnership that keeps me entertained and not frustrated. I have done many failed instances with funny people. Ultimately though the surest measure of PvE success is the number of “wipes” (or everyone in the party dies) while seeking out whatever goal was had in the instance. No wipes is good, one is pretty much expected, 2 is reasonable. Above two and I start questioning my commitment to continue. Even that can be okay though, but that would probably be considered a failed run. (on the other hand, for some more complicated things, if the group performs better, a learning experience can be considered a success). A complete failure is a group that fragments before it reaches the instance, where somebody has to leave in the middle, or where a total self-centered ass wastes my time with his douchity. And ninjas.
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since June 2007
Date posted: November 15, 2006
By Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen (sen@game-research.com)
This article presents some thoughts on educational use of computer games focusing on why we should look to socalled process-oriented games rather than games that relies more directly on narratives for providing the game experience. One may start by asking where the infatuation with computer games for education stem from? Is it just a passing phenomenon so well known from other new media emerging or does it have more holding power? Educational researchers have embraced radio, television, computers, and computer games for their ability to engage and motivate students (Calvert, 1999; Prensky, 2001). The idea of using computer games for education is not just a concept forged by educators and hopeful game researchers but is also found in game designers description of the most basic incitements for playing computer games. In the words of game designer Chris Crawford (1982) “The fundamental motivation for all game-playing is to learn”. Apparently a very basic premise for playing computer games is to engage with an unknown universe, and slowly find ways to surmount seemingly impossible barriers.
For a computer game to work the player on a very basic level need to learn. Computer games may have different tolerance levels for bad learners but in all games you need to learn to advance. This makes computer games quite different from other media as the responsibility for the game activity and progress lies with the player. The role of the player have important ramifications for learning through computer games as it presents an alternative to the distanced, abstract, and representational form in other media. When computer games work best they give an internal understanding of a given system by embedding the player in the game universe (Gee, 2003). The player will not only be presented with text, pictures, sounds, and explanations but will have to act on these connecting them meaningfully to the actions performed. The player cannot abstain from constructing a meaningful response to what happens in the game, as this will in effect bring the game to a stop (although this may just mean a restart) (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2003a).
The learning in computer games may take very different forms in the action game Space Invaders you improve your ability to react swiftly with utmost precision shooting down those damn aliens. In adventure games like Leisure Suit Larry you are forced to constantly acquire new knowledge, solve puzzles to advance, and understand the mindset of the avatar Larry. If you fail to get a clue or figure something out, you are stuck. The game will come to a halt. The demand for actions and making the play situation meaningful by connecting the different output is closely related to everyday learning experience.
This paper will argue that the structure found in computer games are more similar that other media to our everyday life, and how we learn from everyday situations. Computer games may therefore be a way to cross the border between an educational setting and an everyday setting that have notoriously been a hard nut to crack for educators. With other words making sure education is accessible outside the setting, where the learning experience takes place. Narratives will play a central role to understand how we can engage with everyday situations. Narratives can potentially play a central role in computer games facilitating learning .
On the above background it doesn’t make much sense to treat learning in computer games from a narrow perspective, where learning is perceived as occurring only in computer games specifically constructed for educational purposes or other specific genres. This is also in line with James Paul Gee’s (2003) argumentation concerning learning in computer games. I furthermore find that all computer games possess a potential for educational use, with some more explicitly catering for the instructive dimension. Of course, depending on your educational goals some computer games may be more or less appropriate for education. However, whether a computer games is considered educational or not is more than anything a question of perspective. The decision as to what is educational primarily rest on what knowledge, skills, and attitudes we as a society find relevant to nurture.
The focus on simulation games in educational game research
Some educators have intuitively identified some computer games more worthy of pursuit than others for educational purposes, often after growing weary of traditional edutainment titles relying mostly on drill-and-practice learning principles. It has almost become a mantra for people talking about computer games and their educational potential to bring forward SimCity, a second after Simcity has been mentioned other familiar titles will emerge like Civilization, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and Railroad Tycoon. However it seems that SimCity is the game when it comes to having a metaphor for education through computer games. The other titles are not too different from SimCity but can be described as process-oriented computer games. The genre process-oriented somewhat overlap with what is called simulation and strategy games but are more explicitly open-ended in the sense that you don’t have to complete specific goals. I will in the following elaborate on what I mean by process-oriented by looking at the characteristics of SimCity. By this I do not mean to state that SimCity should be our pre