Games and Culture recent issues

The Short and Happy Life of Interdisciplinarity in Game Studies

Malaby, T. M., Burke, T. — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:06:33 PDT

The rise of virtual worlds and their demonstrated potential to generate new economies, forms of belonging, and learning—all within spaces that are deeply game-like—makes new demands of our thinking about games and society. A number of scholars have recently begun to forge an approach distinct from past efforts, shifting their attention toward broader, contextual understandings of games, communities, and play. Seeking to treat such spaces neither as wholly determined by outside factors nor as utterly sui generis, they aim to account for the contingent and emergent relationship that these spaces have with other domains of human experience.

The Assemblage of Play

Taylor, T.L. — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:06:33 PDT

This article explores the notion of assemblage for computer game studies. Drawing on this framework, the author proposes a multifaceted methodological approach to the study of games and the play experience. Drawing on user-created mods (modifications) in the game World of Warcraft and an analysis of a raid encounter there, a discussion is undertaken about the relationship between technological artifacts, game experience, and sociality. Primary to the consideration is an argument for the centralizing the interrelation of a variety of actors and nodes when analyzing lived play in computer games.

Virtual Worlds and Their Discontents: Precarious Sovereignty, Governmentality, and the Ideology of Play

Kucklich, J. R. — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:06:33 PDT

In the following article, author argues that virtual worlds are characterized by a particular mode of governmentality. Rather than seeing virtual worlds as analogous to societies in the real world, he suggests regarding them as ‘‘social factories’’ in which the social fabric is inextricably shot through with economic production. While the governmentalization of the global economy and the concomitant economization of governments are processes that originate in the real world, they also result in a ‘‘naturalization’’ of virtual worlds, a tendency which also becomes obvious in the way virtual worlds are discussed in terms of ‘‘population’’ and ‘‘territory.’’ In virtual worlds, the suffusion of governance with economic production thus leads to the formation of precarious forms of governmentality, which are veiled by a pertinent ideology of play.

Discipline and Dragon Kill Points in the Online Power Game

Silverman, M., Simon, B. — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:06:33 PDT

This article discusses the origins and development of the player-innovated dragon kill point (DKP) system as an example for thinking about Foucauldian conceptions of disciplinary power and the production of gamer subjectivity in the contexts of massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) power gaming. The argument considers the generalized hyperrationalism of DKP-based gaming as both an ideal digital form of panoptic control as well as a kind of ironic form of play with the limits of the possibility of control within digital culture.

Rules of Play

Lastowka, G. — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:06:33 PDT

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) constitute social jurisdictions governed by rules of play. When we consider the work of Johan Huizinga and subsequent theorists of human play activities, we find that ludic rules differ from legal rules in important ways. The goals of play also differ from the goals of law. In applying law to MMORPGs and other virtual worlds, it is important to recognize that jurisdictions of play are structured in ways that are fundamentally different from the ways traditional legal rules are structured.

Virtual Worlds: Petri Dishes, Rat Mazes, and Supercolliders

Castronova, E., Falk, M. — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:06:33 PDT

This article argues for using virtual worlds as experimental environments for social science questions at the macro level. The authors can foresee two major objections to this approach and will address them as to show why they do not prove to be significant. The first being that virtual worlds are not like the real world; therefore, one cannot generalize from events within them. The second of these foreseeable objections states that human society is too complex to be controlled in the way that controlled experimentation requires. Humans discover things by building environments suited for exploring the questions the authors have a rat maze is a very abstract environment, yet it is useful for exploring very general questions of mammalian cognition. The authors conclude that virtual worlds are no less valuable, on net, than other established experimental tools. The next stage in toolmaking, after Petri dishes, rat mazes, and supercolliders, should be virtual worlds.

There is No Magic Circle

Consalvo, M. — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:06:33 PDT

Games are created through the act of gameplay, which is contingent on player acts. However, to understand gameplay, we must also investigate contexts, justifications, and limitations. Cheating can be an excellent path into studying the gameplay situation, because it lays bare player’s frustrations and limitations. It points to ludic hopes and activities, and it causes us to question our values, our ethics. In comparison, the concept of the magic circle seems static and overly formalist. Structures may be necessary to begin gameplay, but we cannot stop at structures as a way of understanding the gameplay experience. Because of that, we cannot say that games are magic circles, where the ordinary rules of life do not apply. Of course they apply, but in addition to, in competition with, other rules and in relation to multiple contexts, across varying cultures, and into different groups, legal situations, and homes.

Erratum

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:06:33 PDT

The name of the author of ‘‘Game Time Modeling and Analyzing Time in Multiplayer and Massively Multiplayer Games’’, (original DOI 10.1177/ 1555412008325479, published in Games and Culture, Volume 4 Issue 2, April 2009), is Anders Drachen who was formerly Anders Tychsen. The article carried the author information incorrectly as Anders Tychsen.

Experts at Play: Understanding Skilled Expertise

Reeves, S., Brown, B., Laurier, E. — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:09:13 PDT

Developing from David Sudnow's accounts of expertise, this article examines the gameplay of Counter-Strike, a popular online game. Although Counter-Strike at first may seem an unsophisticated pursuit, players display remarkable dexterity developed through many hours of play. Through participating in the game and analyzing videos of gameplay, we examine Counter-Strike as an example of expert technology use. As players move beyond the mere physical prowess of chaining their movements with the environment, they develop a sense of the terrain of play as a contingent tactically oriented understanding, rather than as static spatial knowledge. Relatedly, we provide the beginnings of an alternative account of both games and expertise which brings out something of what it is to play a specific game, as opposed to games in general. Moreover, rather than presenting a disengaged general model of skill, the article considers how we might access and describe the situated skills of gameplay.

Putting the Gay in Games: Cultural Production and GLBT Content in Video Games

Shaw, A. — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:09:13 PDT

This article addresses gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) representation in video games from a cultural production perspective. It addresses how members of the video game industry account for the relative lack of GLBT representation in this medium. Previous studies have shown that certain stakeholders actively invest in GLBT representation in media. Factors in the inclusion of GLBT content include (a) the presence of motivated producers in the industry, those that are personally, politically, or commercially interested in GLBT content; (b) how the audience for a text or medium is constructed; (c) what the public backlash from both the GLBT community and conservative groups will be, as well as industry-based reprisals in the form of censorship or ratings; (d) the structure of the industry and how it is funded; and (e) how homosexuality, bisexuality, or transgender identities can be represented in the medium.

I Play Therefore I Am: Sid Meier's Civilization, Turn-Based Strategy Games and the Cogito

Voorhees, G. A. — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:09:13 PDT

Sid Meier's Civilization allows players to build empires that span the earth and the ages. Complementing existing scholarship on ideologies, practices, and subject positions inculcated by the game, this article interrogates the very conception of subjectivity Civilization fosters in players. Building upon ludological and cybernetic principles, the author takes a formal approach to analyze the processes of human—computer interaction that emerge in the course of players' engagement with the game. Characteristics of the turn-based genre as well as Civilization's interface mechanics, representations of historical processes, and manual are considered for the ways in which they solicit player input. The author contends that player interaction with Civilization reifies a conception of himself or herself as a sovereign agent constituted of pure internality.

The Independent Production of Culture: A Digital Games Case Study

Martin, C. B., Deuze, M. — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:09:13 PDT

Throughout the community of game players, developers, and journalists, the term ``independent'' is used in a number of ways to describe a type of development next to, or juxtaposed with, the mainstream process of creating, marketing, distributing, and playing digital games. Yet, this ``independence'' is something quite different from what the literature on independent, alternative, oppositional, radical, or otherwise nonmainstream media tends to suggest or advocate. The contemporary context of game design and development practices throughout the industry forces us to rethink assumptions about independence and autonomy in creative labor, about the communicative practices between media companies across the entire business spectrum of the global media industry, and about diversity or homogeneity in the production of culture. In this article, we aim to articulate more precisely what it means to create, work in, and give meaning to independent computer and video game production.

Dragon Kill Points: The Economics of Power Gamers

Malone, K.-L. — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:09:13 PDT

World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG). The end-game consists of complex encounters requiring highly organized groups (raids). This complexity has caused the organizing of raiding guilds (self-governing player communities). Raiding guilds have hierarchical political structures in which leaders must legitimate their positions to demand participation. In a symbiotic relationship of political structure and individual desire, guilds must guarantee advancement in tandem with individuals' acquisition of items (loot); but game mechanics make this problematic. Each end-game encounter defeated offers less loot than players needed. To compensate for this raiding guilds use DKP (intra-guild economic systems). It is DKP, I argue, that generates the political cohesion necessary for guilds to successfully engage the end-game. DKP is guild specific, but important for its effects on value and reciprocity. It creates player obligation through a rationalized system measuring commitment.

Technologies Between Games and Culture

Crogan, P., Kennedy, H. — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:08:04 PDT

This article introduces and situates the ensuing collection of four essays on the theme of games and technology. It argues the need for videogame studies to develop a more rigorous and focused perspective on the theorization of technology as it relates to research into games and culture. The ``and'' in games and culture cannot begin to be understood comprehensively without a thinking of the profound reliance of both terms on technology. Players and their cultural and collective involvements should be taken not as stable categories of research and development but as processes of becoming intertwined with lineages of technological development and disjunction which are the condition of these processes. Video games are not the least component and proponent of these technological lineages today. The essays collected in this section of the journal issue are described and characterized as offering such a focus on ludic technicity through their diverse but intersecting considerations of game hardware, software, game play, and other practices appropriating game technologies.

Resident Evil's Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations

Kirkland, E. — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:08:04 PDT

This article uses Bolter and Grusin's notion of remediation to explore analog media technologies—cinema, photography, cartography, television, and radio—in digital horror videogames. Such moments illustrate what Lister et al. term the "technological imaginary" of both old and new media technological imaginary of both old and new media. Old media technologies contribute a sense of the real perceived as lacking in digital media, yet central to a generically-significant impression of embodiment. Critical theorization of these forms within media studies illuminate their function within digital video game texts; such processes illustrating the cultural, institutional, and aesthetic meanings and mythologies of both analog and digital media, while continuing traditional use of media technologies within discourses of horror and the supernatural.

Controller, Hand, Screen: Aesthetic Form in the Computer Game

Kirkpatrick, G. — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:08:04 PDT

This paper tries to clarify the place of the handheld controller in computer game aesthetics. It starts from the premise that aesthetic form, perhaps the central category of modernist critical theory, is present in our play with computer games. The central argument is that controllers and our use of them are repressed in gameplay and that this repression facilitates a diversion of the player's energy that helps explain the compulsive nature of good games. Our sense of participation in events in game fiction is bought at the price of a loss of interest in our hands. The smooth integration of players into the rough, faltering world of gameplay is made possible by an excess of energy that passes from the unacknowledged tension in the hand into the imaginary relation we have with on-screen action.

Events and Collusions: A Glossary for the Microethnography of Video Game Play

Giddings, S. — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:08:04 PDT

This essay draws on a number of recent research projects that record and analyze video game play. The ``microethnographic'' approach that they develop suggests methodological strategies, both for analyzing gameplay and for identifying and conceptualizing relationships between technology, agency, and aesthetics in everyday technoculture across and between the virtual and the actual. It suggests a new model of technoculture in everyday life, shifting analytical and critical attention away from established research objects and notions (the ``impact'' of technologies, consumption, identities and subjectivity, interactivity) and toward the ``event'' of gameplay as one with nonhuman as well as human participants, and brought into being by relationships, and translations, of human and nonhuman agency.

A Techno-Semiotic Approach to Cheating in Computer Games: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Machine

Kucklich, J. — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:08:04 PDT

This article is an attempt to understand cheating in digital games as a practice that highlights the machinicity of the process of digital gameplay. The significance of this endeavor lies in the fact that digital gameplay is often naturalized—by the digital games industry, by players, and by scholars in the burgeoning field of digital game studies—which leads to an obfuscation of the inherently cybernetic character of videogames. Cheating and other ``de-ludic'' practices can counteract this naturalization and reveal the process of ``becoming-machine'' that lies at the heart of digital gameplay.

Game Time: Modeling and Analyzing Time in Multiplayer and Massively Multiplayer Games

Tychsen, A., Hitchens, M. — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:08:04 PDT

Game time is a core feature of game design and study, and forms part of the gaming experience on a variety of levels. It can be viewed from multiple perspectives, for example, the time of the playing of the game or the flow of time in a game world. In this article, a comprehensive game time model based on empirical research as well as recent theory is presented. It proposes various perspectives on game time and integrates them to allow coherent representation of the same events in the different perspectives. The model has been tested across tabletop and digital formats, and its applicability across game formats is demonstrated. Emphasis is placed on multiplayer and massively multiplayer role-playing games because these feature complex game time behavior not previously evaluated. The model considers game time as an interactively created and nonlinear feature of games and game play.

Blackless Fantasy: The Disappearance of Race in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

Higgin, T. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:30:32 PST

This article focuses on questioning and theorizing the visual and discursive disappearance of blackness from virtual fantasy worlds. Using EverQuest, EverQuest II, and World of Warcraft as illustrative of a timeline of character creation design trends, this article argues that the disappearance of blackness is a gradual erasure facilitated by multicultural design strategies and regressive racial logics. Contemporary fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) privilege whiteness and contextualize it as the default selection, rendering any alterations in coloration or racial selection exotic stylistic deviations. Given the Eurocentrism inherent in the fantasy genre and embraced by MMORPGs, in conjunction with commonsense conceptions of Blacks as hyper-masculine and ghettoized in the gamer imaginary, players and designers do not see blackness as appropriate for the discourse of heroic fantasy. As a result, reductive racial stereotypes and representations proliferate while productive and politically disruptive racial differences are ejected or neutralized through fantastical proxies.

The Gray Haired Gaming Generation: Findings From an Explorative Interview Study on Older Computer Gamers

Quandt, T., Grueninger, H., Wimmer, J. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:30:32 PST

The market for adult computer gamers is growing considerably. However, there are nearly no empirical works that are primarily focusing this age group. Therefore, there is an urgent need for explorative studies on these gamers. In a qualitative in-depth interview study with 21 gamers aged between 35 and 73 years, this article describes their gaming careers, the integration of gaming into their everyday life, and aspects of social interaction within real and virtual life. Overall, the findings of this study sketch a lively picture of adult players. Many of the interviewees show a very strong interest in the social aspects of gaming. However, gaming can put some strain on their family life, and many older gamers feel that their partners and peers regard their hobby as being inappropriate for their age. Still, most of the interview partners successfully manage to combine occupational and private duties with their gaming activities.

Communication, Coordination, and Camaraderie in World of Warcraft

Chen, M. G. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:30:32 PST

In applying traditional game theory to multiplayer computer games, not enough attention has been given to actual player practice in local settings. To do this, the author describes a team of players in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. This motley group learned how to defeat an end-game dungeon through collaborative improvements on communication and coordination. It focused on sustaining and building player relationships and learning together rather than the accepted norm of obtaining magical items. Trust was forged through a desire to ``hang out and have fun'' and was evidenced by the joviality of their communication. The group's ability to reflect and be consistent about its desires for camaraderie allowed it to recover from a poor performing night, which threatened to disband the group. The team's success depended on its ability to define and retain a coherent group identity and establish shared social incentives rather than individual incentives for participation.

Alien Games: Do Girls Prefer Games Designed by Girls?

Heeter, C., Egidio, R., Mishra, P., Winn, B., Winn, J. — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:30:32 PST

This 3-year study used a mixed-method design beginning with content analysis of games envisioned by 5th and 8th graders, followed by a survey of students in the same age range reacting to video promos representing these games. Results show that the designer's gender influences the design outcome of games and that girls expected that they would find the girl-designed games significantly more fun to play than the boy-designed games, whereas boys imagined that the boy-designed games would be significantly more fun to play than the girl-designed games. Boys overwhelmingly picked games based entirely on fighting as their top ranked games. Girls overwhelmingly ranked those same fighting games as their least preferred. Girls as designers consciously envisioned games with both male and female players in mind, whereas boys designed only for other boys. Both 8th-grade boy game ideas were liberally ``borrowed'' from a successful commercial game.