Aloy’s Heroic Feminism in Horizon: Forbidden West

 

The image above represents two of the first results in Google when searching “Horizon Zero Dawn feminism” and clearly depicts how any art criticism works. On one hand we have an example touting Horizon: Zero Dawn (HZD) as a breakthrough, and on the other, as a disappointment. As it ever was, and probably always will be – but where does that leave us when looking at the sequel, Horizon: Forbidden West (HFW)?

The criticism of “Matt C.” from Digitally Downloaded noted above centers on the assessment of Aloy as the female equivalent of a space marine trope who doesn’t feel multifaceted and human. She is, he says “robbed her of any sort of sexual identity." 

In erasing the entire concept of sexuality, [from the game world] Horizon denies Aloy – and every other character in that game – any sense of sexual identity and agency. That’s fundamentally at odds with a pillar of feminist ideology. (Digitally Downloaded)

Matt C. is also critical of the Nora tribe’s matriarchal system of leadership, saying that the game does little or nothing with it, and certainly does not explore or interrogate the differences between the matriarchal Nora and other tribes in the game.

This criticism is misguided, and unfortunately narrows the concept of feminism in media to merely the task of an overt discussion of sexuality and sexism as plot points. This reminds me of the tendency in the games industry to reduce the speaking opportunities of women in the industry to panels about being a woman in the industry, rather than speaking to their technical, creative or professional expertise. This view suggests the ideal (perhaps only?) feminist action that a woman (real or fictional) can take is to talk about female sexuality or otherwise being female.

Just Give Me Two Good Reasons

One of the dominant features of open-world games such as FarCry 5 is that they are big. Really big. The scale of the map is an often discussed feature of such games, but so too are the myriad activities and overall "playtime" that a game can offer. Presumably more is better, but I find myself getting bogged down if a game is too big. 

FarCry 5 follows a familiar pattern of dividing Hope County up into several regions. Three are the main areas for play, with two much smaller zones acting as introductory and concluding bookends. Each of the main three regions are controlled by one of the Eden's Gate lieutenants, and feature some gently stylized environmental features and challenges. For example, in Faith's region, the hallucinogenic 'bliss' is manufactured out of the fields of lily-like flowers found around the region. The basic mechanic is that the player character ("Rook" or "Deputy"), takes on each lieutenant in turn through a network of loosely connected 'story' and 'side' missions. They can also destroy various assets and liberate outposts in each region. 

All of this accumulates as "Resistance Points" within the given region. There are a few milestones where the game suddenly intervenes with some strong deus ex machina to advance the overarching plot. The final milestone in each region is that the lieutenant will call the player out in some way, triggering the final boss-like showdown and finally liberating the region. 

With all that exposition out of the way, I can talk about how it worked for me. I find that the story missions can really derail my enthusiasm for these games. Too much talking to minor NPCs of tremendously varied quality and interest, sending me on the archetypal errand quests of some sort or another. Even though this really is the crux of any open world game, I find myself hitting a limit pretty fast. 

What suddenly happened in FarCry 5 was that I realized there were dozens of challenges that would award my character upgrade "perks" depending on how I played. So, as I browsed the challenges, which range from killing a certain number of enemies with a particular weapon, to killing a certain number of enemies from a certain distance, I suddenly had two birds I could address with one stone (or flamethrower, dynamite, or whatever). 

These challenges are not particularly inspired nor are they unique to FarCry 5. In fact, this sort of encouragement to play the game differently based on weapons and approach is almost as ubiquitous as the open world design described above. 

I argue that it is common because it is effective. I could turn my attention more to the 'how' rather than the 'what' when I got a little bored of liberating outposts or defending territory. Instead of my usual sniper and stealth approach, I used a flamethrower up close in a wildly different playstyle. I was making two sorts of progress, then, and that was enough to get my over a certain hump in the overall game. 

As the unlocks started to trickle and then flow, I found the game easier, since not only did I have more tools at my disposal, but I also had practiced a few different techniques for dealing with the game's challenges. That helped me progress faster, which was the problem in the first place. 

This layering of incentives is a crucial element to longer games. Personally, I'd like to see this design feature extrapolated outside of videogame design. The area I always think of is education. How can we make the incentives more varied and explicit in the years-long process of getting a degree? Is there a way we can help students not endure but enjoy the various challenges we throw at them? 

FarCry 5: Early Impressions

Having abandoned FarCry 6, I've immediately jumped into the predecessor, FarCry 5. I've noticed that this one was much better received critically, and from the initial setup, I am impressed at how well it is put together. I am also, frankly, astonished that a game that frames white American Christians as the villains managed to be published and sold so well at this moment in time. 

FC5 was released in 2018, and was developed by the Canadian Ubisoft studios in Montreal and Toronto. This is probably key to the setup of the game--I truly struggle to imagine an American studio maintaining support for this particular villain. 

Imagine for a moment if Joseph Smith had founded his church in 2000 rather than 1830, and happened to have been in Montana rather than Utah. Perhaps his last name would have been 'Bundy' or 'Koresh' in this case (In the film he'd be played by Jared Leto), and his followers would have combined their religious zealotry with a radical anti-authoritarian perspective on the Federal government.  Indeed, the game opens with a US Marshal and his deputy (the player character) serving a warrant to the Eden's Gate leader, Joseph Seed. Subsequently, of course, the extraction goes extremely sideways, and the helicopter carrying the local sheriff, deputies, the marshall, the player and Seed crashes. This sets up the initial "on your own" situation that FarCry games depend on. 

From what little specific reading I have done about this specific game, it seems that the game (and it's developers) try to walk that same line of creating a very obvious, specific social commentary, while also not actually making a point that might offend parts of their potential market. Critics have been fairly harsh in describing the 'easily digestible evil' of the Eden's Gate members, but I am not seeing it, so far. To be clear, this game is not subtle, or particularly sophisticated as yet. However, when I think of the current batch of real-world radicals such as the Bundy family, Enrique Tarrio, Thomas Ryan Rousseau, and even certain members of the US House of Representatives, I fail to see the aspect of the Eden's Gate that they would find entertaining to gun down. That is, these Christo-facsists seem awfully familiar to me in the current moment. I have a hard time imagining a member of Patriot Front going home after a tiki-illuminated race-rally, and getting their kicks by gunning down the folks who took over Hope County, Montana. 

We shall see how the game pans out. Perhaps the caricature of evil will become too silly to take seriously - but I sort of feel like what we're experiencing in reality is almost beyond parody anyway. 

Lies all the way down

 A while ago, I wrote and published a peer-reviewed article about the "curious" and very deliberate efforts by the developers of certain games to proclaim that their games shouldn't be interpreted in a political way, despite all evidence to the contrary. The abstract goes like this: 

Developers of AAA videogames which feature recognizable military forces, governmental law enforcement agencies, and geopolitical conflicts routinely make claims that their works do not make “political statements.” This article takes seriously the claims made by several developers, revealing their attempts to radically narrow the definition of the term “political.” Through a critical discourse analysis, this article will articulate several key theses held forth by the developers regarding systemic media and expressivity, the responsibility of the player, and the inevitable constraints of production and technology. These points are deployed by the developers to build an argument for a reduced scope of the term “political,” as well as to propose an ideological framing of videogames as an expressive medium, which ultimately serve to obscure the role that ideology plays in the production of videogames. (Ruch, 2021)  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22041451.2021.1902167  

I say "curious" because in the end, it is clear why developers would avoid endorsing any particular interpretation of their game: because publishers they are beholden to (and to some extent, the developers themselves) want to continue selling games to as wide an audience as possible, and there is no quicker way to alienate those paying customers than by making any kind of statement that could be construed as "political." 

So, what we have to deal with is the developer of a game about retaking Washington D.C. from a band of terrorists claiming that their game is about "exploring a new city." 

It's asinine. 

When I wrote the article, I felt like I might have been scratching the surface of something important. I took a videogame and media studies on-ramp to this freeway of the bigger topic: lying. Just straight up, unadulterated fabrication surrounding us, constantly. 

These years later, I feel that this tendency has only increased. Modern media (and society as per our mediation of it) is positively lousy with untruth. 

Surely none of this is particularly shocking in the general principle - we've theorized about misinformation and researched propaganda for... ever. However, I do feel that we have recently gotten closer to a tipping point, where at least some of our most heinous liars are being called into court, where it is still against the actual law to lie, and are being asked to explain themselves. 

This is all well and good, but what about the zealous believers? Those who will not be convinced that the sky is blue, the Earth is round, and Biden is President? 

 I keenly remember the proclomations of the dawn of democratized communication that the internet supposedly heralded. We bespeckled, obsessive nerds could finally reach out and connect with those few others who shared our interests, all around the world. Queer folks, racial minorities, and other marginalized groups were able to connect without regard to geography. But, unfortunately, so could those Flat-Earthers whose beef was with geography itself. 

Now we pump those folks full of self-confidence and validation on a grand scale. It's alarming, to say the least, to realize just how pervasive lies have become. 

Pleasure in Conveyor Belt Games

Over on CapsuleCrit, Kavi Duvvoori explores their particular and somewhat ambivalent pleasure taken in 'extractive captialist' games such as the Rollercoaster Tycoon series and Factorio. In the article, Duvvoori highlights two of the central pleasures videogames tend to feed on, neither of which are the adrenaline-pumping, conflict-oriented "competition" that one might typically associate with games in general, and videogames in particular.

Instead Duvvoori highlights a curiosity to discover "what happens if...?" given a certain level of mastery over the game. These sorts of games require/allow the player to construct elaborate (or simple) chains of cause and effect, which shuffle entities (in most cases, paying patrons, as in Rollercoaster Tycoon or Theme Hospital, for example), from beginning to end. The general idea is to extract value from those customers. In Factorio, the metaphor is more industrial: construct vast networks of literal assembly lines which add and modify components in an ever-increasing network.

I'd suggest the "what happens if?" question arises in the mind after a certain point of mastery. The initial questions are usually more like "how do I [do something specific]?" The game usually requires a certain level of proficiency in order to make the machine work at all, so players will typically have a series of smaller, more concrete goals which create a self-sustaining assembly that accepts whatever input is available, and creates a positive feedback loop more or less ad infinitum.

Often, these games will offer a wide array of objects whether rides and attractions, as in Rollercoaster Tycoon, or resource gathering and production equipment, as in the Anno series (trade routes being nautical production lines). These give the player a fixed goal to aim towards on the way to learning the basics of the system. The key is to combine these in such a way that they create more than the sum of their parts. Whether we term this resonance or positive feedback, the goal is to multiply value exponentially.

However, I feel that those numbers of imagined value are a skin over the top of the more primal pleasure of figuring out how a gadget works, then setting up ever-increasingly complex versions of that gadget to manipulate. The pleasure comes not only from setting and meeting goals, but from something primordial in humans - the same itch that is scratched by watching a ridiculous, convoluted and pointless Rube Goldberg machine work successfully. We needn't justify them in any other way than to say it feels good to build something that works.

Warcraft Time

World of Warcraft is ... well it's a game because they sell it at game shops, and you 'play' it. But it is also a virtually interminable social space in which people interact in competitive, cooperative, and myriad other ways. To put it simply people spend time there, together.

The most recent expansion has been controversial for a number of reasons, but this article stood out to me. In it, James Whitbrook describes an unexpected melancholy that was immediately recognizeable to me. I wonder how many other players have experienced the dawning realization of real, mortal time passing based on milestones in that game. I wrote about mine years ago, when I learned of the one-off sale of one of the original WoW servers.

These years later, I've had similar feelings of nostalgia and the sensation of quiet loss that growing older brings with it; I wonder how much the association with WoW for both Whitbrook and myself is simply the context in which we've turned a corner. We've realized a new metric or scale of time. We can measure things in years - longer than high school, longer than college or that job we had in our early twenties. Yet, something has caused us to notice that the relationship we have with WoW to change. For me, the server, for Whitbrook, the burning of Teldrassil.

It would be interesting to compare these anecdotes to the players of professional sports. Someone who played basketball through high school, college and professionally. How do they relate their life to their game? Is it any different?

Designation of a "Gaming Disorder" by WHO

In January 2018, the World Health Organization identified a "Gaming disorder" as follows:

as a pattern of gaming behavior (“digital-gaming” or “video-gaming”) characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.

For gaming disorder to be diagnosed, the behaviour pattern must be of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning and would normally have been evident for at least 12 months.

Many in the gaming community would typically circle the wagons and defend the medium, as has occurred for decades, typically with respect to causing violent behaviour in players. The mantra has been that games have no impact on players and should not be singled out as being more effective at modifying the thoughts or behaviour of the players than any other media form.

Reading the above diagnosis carefully, however, one must focus on the explicit criteria for the disorder, specifically "despite the occurrence of negative consequences." This is not stating that playing videogames (to any particular measured extent) is a negative consequence in and of itself.  For this diagnosis to be valid, the player must be experiencing "significant impairment in personal, family, social educational, occupational or other important areas..." Meaning, then, that only when the focus on game play takes precedence over other important (necessary?) life functions does it become a problem.

My view on these matters has always been cautious scepticism. Describing videogames as having no effect on their players is tantamount to saying they are meaningless - hardly a tenable position for a media scholar to take. I've argued vehemently in the past for an R18+ rating in the Australian classification system not because I believe strongly that mature games should be restricted to adults (though I think some kind of warning or guide is certainly useful) but because such a rating would ensure mature games are not banned outright. In the Australian context, such a 'restriction' is actually a liberalisation of an already parochial system.

Though I don't agree with him on every point, Jeremy Ray proposes that such a designation by WHO is a necessary step in the maturation of the medium. He focuses in particular on the compulsion exploiting design employed by videogames, derived very clearly from the gambling industry and Skinner-type psychology.

From my limited understanding (after all I am not a medical doctor or psychologist!) it appears that the WHO designation takes a sober view of game practices. Unlike the Australian classification system which excepted videogames from the R18+ category due to their purported "higher impact" baseline, WHO appears to be focused on the relative impact on other aspects of the player's life, not on some exceptional, unique aspect of videogames themselves. This, then, is only fair.

Videogames and the Gilette Model

Original Post: November 6, 2012

Lately I’ve noticed a slew of products I can buy, which will subsequently force me to buy ‘refills’ of some description, in order to keep using them. On top of this, I have noticed an increase in the number of household products which determine how and when the consumable is used, to better schedule the re-purchases. Here are a couple examples:

Dettol hand wash – dumps a precise amount of soap into your hand through the magic of infra-red sensors. Of course you can’t fill it up with any old soap…

Auto-bug and freshener sprays – two different ways to fill your house with a fine mist of chemical sprays, set to a timer to empty the can right on schedule.

Lots of cleaning supplies and body cleansers have transformed from bottles into wipes, which you run out of at a pretty steady rate. You can’t really use just ‘a little bit’ of a wet, soapy wipe the way you can use just a little bit of soap. Those cages you hang in the toilet to freshen it up operate on a similarly automatic principle, as do air or water filters.

The ‘Gillette model’ is a method of selling consumer products where the initial buy-in is very low-cost, but relies on the purchase of a complementary product which is relatively more expensive, and certainly a higher profit for the manufacturer. The most famous example is the source of its name, Gillette razor blades: you can buy the handle for your razor (with one or two blades) very cheaply. But the new blades are extremely expensive by comparison. But you must buy them, or the handle is useless, right? This isn’t all smoke and mirrors—obviously many products like disposable razors, ink-jet printer cartridges, and air fresheners need to be replaced, they are consumable. It’s the pricing model that’s important to note.

What it achieves is a more predictable, steady flow of revenue for the particular manufacturer. Since you have to buy new razor blades occasionally, if you already own a Gillette razor handle, you’re more likely to buy Gillette refills. The schedule mentioned above simply regulates this a bit. Dettol want you to buy their soap regularly, so they make sure you use a certain amount of it every time you wash your hands. The automatic freshener sprays promise to fill the air with a pleasant scent to mask odours before you even notice they are there—also they use up a can of spray like clockwork.

What the hell does potpourri spray, soap and shaving have to do with videogames?? 

Videogame publishers, like Gillette and SC Johnson are businesses. They want money just like any other business. Further, they’d love to have a nice predictable stream of revenue they can use to make investments and placate shareholders. As the price of development in the AAA range continues to increase, the risk of failure increases also. Publishers are searching for ways to mitigate that risk, and new financial models are one way to do so.

If a game costs two hundred million dollars to develop, and is sold in a traditional, $60-100 one-shot transaction, the risk to the publisher is huge. What if the players simply don’t buy that particular box? Even if players do buy, once they take the game home, the publisher never hears from them again. Firstly, the publishers won’t know very much about the reasons the customers did and did not spend the money. Secondly, what if some population of players was willing to spend more than the sticker price? Thirdly, once the initial rush of ‘new game release!’ purchases are over, that publisher’s revenue stream plummets to a tiny trickle until the next big release. That could be as far as two or three years away—not a good interval between pay days, I think we’d all agree.

There are a few possible answers, experiments that developers and publishers have already been trying for a number of years. The first is pretty obviously DLC: you buy the game, and then a month later shell out another few dollars to inject some fresh cash into the developer/publisher. The second is the GOTY Edition, a phenomenon that has little (or nothing) to do with critical awards, but exists merely as an opportunity to package the DLC together with the original game to perform another exercise in marketing.

In the end, though, both of these are merely repetitions of the first practice, on a smaller scale: create a game/content, fire it off into retail stores and hope.

A more fundamental change has been creeping across the videogame industry. Speaking very broadly, the goal of publishers is to avoid these big, one-off purchases which exist as a point in time. Instead, they wish to set up a dialog between game and player, a kind of ongoing conversation which is spoken with money. So, the player is continually engaged in the process of buying something, and the publisher is constantly engaged in providing whatever it is that’s being purchased. There is obviously a point at which this begins, but no clear point at which it ends. Think, for example, of buying a new MMO, and setting up a subscription. Many videogames, like air fresheners and hand soap, are transforming from a product into a service.

This kind of steady stream of revenue is far more predictable and less volatile. After launch (still a risky proposition), a publisher can observe positive or negative sales trends over time. Assuming that the launch goes well enough, the developer can try things in real time to increase subscribers, rather than wait until their next game is ready to try anything new. MMOs are currently the only genre of game to require these kinds of straight-forward subscription fees, and players expect a certain amount of content to be added to the game over time without cost. To me, this is very similar to the Gillette model described above. Buy into the game, keep on paying to access the content you are increasingly invested in.

Blizzard (and many other MMO-makers) have somehow managed to combine the box-buy (purchasing the CDs) and the subscription fee. That the initial WoW buy-in, as well as expansion packs, costs about the same as any other AAA game without the on-going fee strikes me as fairly remarkable, distinct from the cheap Gillette handle with expensive blades model. An even more precise comparison is found in ‘free to play’ videogames.

The other name for the Gillette model is ‘freebie marketing.’ That is, you can practically (or literally) give away the first chunk of whatever your product is (the handle and first blade, the first ink cartridge, first tier of gear in your RPG), and rely entirely on the steady flow of revenue that this initial buy-in encourages. Quite a lot has been said about the merits and faults of this kind of financial arrangement, I won’t repeat here. Suffice it to say that free to play videogames work to gain buy-in from their players by generating an emotional investment in the game, before halting progress and asking for some cash. This can continue for as long as the player wishes to continue to progress.

Blizzard have created two much more subtle examples of videogames as services: Starcraft II and Diablo III. Strangely, perhaps, Blizzard/Activision have not monetised Starcraft II in the way I might have predicted. Other than releasing what is ostensibly one game in three distinct parts, there is no other way to keep paying Blizzard money. However, on a technical level, Starcraft II represents a clear example of this new videogame service: an always-online experience, constantly updated, connected to a news server and social network. This is not a game you buy, consume, and put away when done. One can easily imagine fees being leveraged for access to the highest (or otherwise ‘special’) league ladders, or personalised livery being implemented. All the infrastructure is already in place.

Blizzard’s cleverest new business model, however, is the new Diablo III auction house. This is literally providing videogame players a service: a virtual eBay for virtual items of which Blizzard can create an infinite supply.

Diablo III is (at one level) a complex gothic-fantasy slot machine. Each time a player kills a monster, the wheels spin ‘round and every so often, the game pays out. It isn’t quarters or even nickels that spew forth, though, it’s a virtual item with no exchange value outside of Blizzard’s system. By integrating the real-money auction house into that system, Blizzard have made it possible to cash out of the Diablo casino, effectively allowing players to convert their play time into cash. But it works for Blizzard too. Each time anyone does cash out, Blizzard takes it’s slice of the earnings.

So Blizzard/Activision have found a way to turn your play time into dollars. Realising this is incredibly important for the developers of certain kinds of games. Diablo is not the kind of hyper-consumable or disposable experience bought for 99 cents on the App Store. Diablo is the kind of game many, many people will sink many hundreds of hours into, as the norm. This vast amount of play time is, effectively, an untapped resource. It even makes sense for the consumer, in that a game you are willing to spend 300 hours in might be worth more money to you than the kind you will play through the campaign of 15 hours once and put away. If we don’t have to cough up the grand total all at once, all the better. I know I would never have bought World of Warcraft up front for the total price of all the subscription fees I ever paid.

Not everyone will participate, of course, not everyone will cash out either. But a large number will. Anyone who uses the auction house at all is participating in this economy, in the monetised dialog between Blizzard and their player base. Anyone who turns their play time into a commodity by placing it on the auction house is creating the opportunity for Blizzard to make a little more money. This, and similarly long-lived relationships between publisher and player are a very important aspect of the future of videogames. One need only look to the other experiment Activision are running in a very different game, with Call of Duty: Elite, to see how widespread this trend is. Not all games will go down this route—there will probably still be a many game experiences sold and consumed like candy on the App Store, or like films enjoyed intensely for a relatively long. but finite. time. But increasingly, publishers will be finding ways to maintain and then monetise long-term relationships between themselves and players.

The Gatekeepers of Videogame Culture

Original Post: August 20 2012 (Kotaku AU) 

There are hundreds of millions of games played across the world every day, there are clubs, conventions, and publications dedicated solely to the practice. In economic terms, the video game industry is certainly a powerful one, growing to rival any other kind of entertainment or media form one cares to mention. This is video game culture, and it is important.

So the ‘culture’ of people-who-play-games has begun to evolve to a point where we ‘gamers’ tend to self-identify. We proclaim ourselves gamers and partake in video game culture. What does this mean?

What is video game culture? What are the boundaries and who are the gatekeepers of the culture?

It seems fair to say that for many gamers, voicing an allegiance to game culture is prideful. We like video games, we wish to demonstrate our affinity for the pursuit, whilst hoping to receive a modicum of respect for our choice of entertainment. We value the experiences had while gaming, and wish others to at least appreciate the value of those experiences.

This process explicitly creates a rift between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ We often acknowledge the positive, that is, finding a sense of belonging and fraternity amongst like-minded souls. Yet the negative exclusionary practice is just as important. Those people who “don’t get it” are the ones on the outside, those who “don’t play” are automatically excluded. “We” are alike, and together, we are different from “them.”

As video games themselves become more diverse, battlelines begin to emerge between the people who play different kinds of games. The perception is that some gamers are “real” gamers and others aren’t. Some are casual while others are “hardcore.” Some are “more” gamers and others are less. Some, then, “belong” as part of the culture, and others are pretenders.

As is usually the case amongst self-identifying groups of people, the ‘most dedicated’ or ‘hardest core’ or ‘longest serving’ members are those who look down upon anyone with less pedigree. This elite priesthood is often situated historically–that is, if you “weren’t there” at a certain point in time, you’ll just never belong as much as we do. Obviously, then, there is always a set of people who will always have a sense of superiority over relative newcomers.

As the pool of game players expands, we find other ways to distinguish between each other. The way we play, how often, the platforms we use, the genres we enjoy are all markers of our status within the game-playing population. Gamers begin to identify themselves through which brands or franchises they buy and play–not unlike skaters who identify with brands such as Globe, or car enthusiasts and Ford or Holden. Or by how much money we spend on our “gear.”

Increasingly, there is a certain ferocity about publicly identifying as a gamer. I am no sociologist so I can’t quite explain it, but perhaps the stridence comes from years of defending gaming from a disdainful mainstream. Perhaps gamers are predisposed to finding the competition in life, and are therefore simply playing at being the best gamer. Perhaps the most dedicated gamers need a way to rationalise their (over-?) investment.

This ferocious distillation of video game culture down to a potent, pure hardcore is distressing. There is a strange agenda that seeks to purge anything from “game culture” which might somehow dilute the field. That is, if something does not satisfy the criteria of a self-appointed cultural gatekeeper, it must be expunged.

Casual games. Consoles. Zynga. The Sims. Women. Free2Play games. Critical writing on games. All of these are often targeted by the elite priesthood as not being ‘real’ or ‘necessary’ to game culture. They “aren’t relevant.”

In reality, the elitist notion of a pure, hardcore games culture is a fantasy. There is no such thing as a video game culture hermetically sealed-off from the rest of the world. Of course there are concentrations, where or when individuals focus on some things over others, but cultures do not exist in Tupperware containers sitting neatly organised on shelves.

By being a gamer, I do not stop being a man, a university lecturer, a mediocre sports fan, an American, an immigrant, a husband, a son, a musician. I am not a one-dimensional creature that is composed entirely of, and sustained by, video games. I am not defined by gaming and only gaming.

That anyone should want to be is morbid.

That anyone should demand it of anyone else is evil.

No one who plays and enjoys video games is required to ignore every (or any) other aspect of what makes up their identity, in order to be considered a gamer. People do not work that way. Culture does not work that way.

In fact, the integration of wildly varied and diverse people into video game culture is literally the best thing that could possibly happen to our medium. Without different, new ideas smashing into each other our medium will stagnate and die. Our culture will become so incestuous that it will no longer function. We need to bring new people in, not keep them out.

This kind of exclusionary practice is not unique to video game culture. Like the skating or car cliques mentioned above, other hobbies are just as exclusionary. Read up on heavy metal or punk music for an interesting comparison.

But, like music in general, video games are a creative, expressive medium. They are an art form. As a result, video game culture bears a greater burden, that of art.

Art is communication. As individual yet social animals we are largely defined by our ability to communicate with one another, through speech, stories, pictures, and other media. By communicating, we learn to balance the tension between our uniqueness and commonality. Every human being has a right to be part of this artistic conversation, whether as a creator or an audience.

Through art we are able to embrace one another’s perspective, at least for a little while, and maintain the empathy that human society requires to exist.

So, when someone self-identifying as a gamer claims that someone else’s experience with or interpretation of a game is not relevant, the first gamer is attempting to stifle the other’s attempt to come to terms with life.

Simply put, video game culture does not exist. There is no stone tablet inscribed with commandments. Only gamers exist, and their experiences, ideas and interpretations are what create and sustain video game culture. That culture is a vapour, constantly about to disappear, and only remains through the actions of the people involved.

Video game culture does not define who is and is not a gamer; people who play, talk or write about, and make games define what video game culture is. So when Patricia Hernandez is reminded of her trauma by a video game, then rape is relevant to game culture. When Lisa Foiles finds some aspect of a video game funny, then humour is part of game culture. When Kirk Hamilton analyzes the soundscape of a game, music is relevant to game culture. When Dan Golding or Brendan Keogh (or hey, even me) talk about video game studies, academia is part of game culture. When players scream obscenities at each other through voice chat, trash talk, casual racism and homophobia are part of game culture. When female developers, critics or players are derided based on their gender or appearance, then misogyny is part of game culture.

There are no neutral video games, or experiences of video games. No one stops being who they are as they play a game. So, everything that happens in the game, and everything said about the game, is always already being filtered through whatever lenses the player brings with them wherever they go. So, the female games critics can no more prevent their gender from being part of their experience than I can, or than you, the reader, can. Simply because some players aren’t aware that their gender, race, wealth, privilege, age or whatever is impacting on their experience with a game does not mean it isn’t happening. The same is true for the people who create video games.

Being understood as an artistic practice alongside writing, painting, music or film certainly aids in elevating the status of video games in the wider social context. They become something a person can learn from, enjoy, and enrich their lives with. But there is a caveat: everything is relevant to art. There are no limits.

So like video games themselves, game culture is what we make of it. We are all, individually, the gatekeepers.

Videogames, aggression, Anders Breivik – let’s not join the dots

Original Post: April 20, 2012 (The Conversation AU)

“Violent videogames cause people to become violent in real life”. It’s a familiar refrain for anyone who has read a newspaper in the last 15 years.

Today, the media reporting surrounding the trial of accused mass-murderer Anders Breivik has dusted off this old chestnut to explain a shooting spree and bomb attack that claimed the lives of 77 people in Oslo last year.

Breivik has testified that he used World of Warcraft and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to train for his attacks. He also testified to be a member of the anti-Muslim militant group Knights Templar and refused to recognise the authority of the federal court system.

The fact that videogames play no demonstrable part in Breivik’s (or any other) act of violence hasn’t stopped the media from creating and re-creating this narrative, even to the point that university media officers are picking up the chant.

The research shows what?

A University of Gothenburg press release about a new study is entitled Researchers questioning link between violent computer games and aggressiveness.

The release reports that the authors are “questioning the whole gaming and violence debate”. The study itself, published in the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning is entitled How gamers manage aggression: Situating skills in collaborative computer games.

Taken together, these two titles might lead one to interpret the study in a similar vein to researchers Craig Anderson or Christopher Ferguson. That is, it would make sense to argue either that violent videogames do (Anderson) or do not (Ferguson) have a meaningful effect on players' aggression levels in real life.

Instead, the research is actually a detailed study of how players of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) – such as World of Warcraft – cooperate to manage the attention of powerful, dangerous enemy characters (known as bosses). In MMO parlance, that attention is known as “aggro”.

The aggression being managed, then, is not that of the players, but of the computer-controlled enemies. How, then, is this research linked to the debate about media effects?

Hint: it’s not.

The ‘media effects’ narrative

As Dan Golding pointed out in an earlier article on The Conversation, the media only seem equipped to discuss videogames in three ways:

1. as moral panic
2. in terms of (always surprising) economic profit and
3. as an exotic artefact or sub-culture.

The press release announcing this new study, as well as coverage of Breivik’s trial by the Sydney Morning Herald, among others, falls right into the first category.

The notion of media effects and transfer (from medium to real-life) is perhaps as old as communications media themselves. Even Plato was wary of the power of the poet “because he awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings and impairs the reason".

Today’s “violence and videogames” narrative is well-worn. So much so that even a public relations officer at a university takes a study on videogames with the word “aggression” in its title to be examining a “link” between mediated depictions of violence and real-world aggression.

But the link to the media effects research such as Anderson and Ferguson’s is not entirely facetious: the Swedish team of researchers are in fact questioning the basis of the videogame violence debate; the “transfer” mentioned earlier.

Transfer, as the study points out, is a contentious construct of educational theory. It is, to quote from the article: “the appearance of a person carrying the product of learning from one task, problem, situation, or institution to another”. In this case, the “transfer” of aggression from videogames to real-life.

The authors of this study rightly point out that the nature of transfer is contentious, ill-defined, and rarely agreed upon. Thus, there are disagreements about how to empirically measure the effects of media on an audience.

But instead of pursuing this, the paper moves on to conduct a close study of raid encounters (where numerous players attempt to take out a boss together), documenting the skills and knowledge used by players who cooperate successfully.

These skills include:

• spatial awareness and the importance of positioning one’s avatar in the immediate geography around the boss before and during the fight
• case-specific knowledge about additional enemies entering the fray and appropriate responses
• reacting to other unexpected events during the fight, such as the death of a healer (a team member who’s role it is to heal fellow players).
• The depth and precision of the details presented in this study are valuable and will certainly provide excellent reference material for future scholars who are researching and writing about MMO gameplay. But this study simply isn’t focused on violent videogames leading to aggression in the real world.

Overcoming the narrative

The aim of the study I’ve been discussing was, in fact, to take a step back from the debate entirely and avoid assuming the straightforward transfer of media, with regard to videogames.

The authors “approached collaborative gaming where aggression is represented as a practice to be studied on its own premises”.

To that end, the study is working around what media researcher James Paul Gee calls “the problem of content". That is, looking past the representations of violence shown on screen and measuring what the human players are actually learning to do while playing the game.

In this case, players deploy very specific knowledge about the geography of terrain, the behaviour of bosses and the various skills their individual avatar possesses.

This study does not suggest that causing an avatar to swing a broadsword will incite the human player to do the same, or similar, the next time he or she steps out of the house for some milk.

Even though there’s no consensus on media effects nor the relationship between videogame and real-world violence, the international press still get completely lost in a frenzy as they pump out hysteria-filled headlines.

Gaming news outlet, Rock, Paper, Shotgun has called out a range of global outlets on their reporting of the Breivik case. Thankfully, publications such as these are interested in clarity and truth and refuse to allow the popular mythology of videogame violence to cloud basic reporting.

Azeroth from the Outside

Original Post: February 16, 2012 (Kotaku AU)

The view of the Earth from the moon fascinated me — a small disk, 240,000 miles away. It was hard to think that that little thing held so many problems, so many frustrations. Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don’t show from that distance. — Frank Borman, Apollo 8.

***

As astronauts blast into the dark frontier of space, their minds look with wonder at the mystery before them. Distant moons, quasars, asteroids and comets spinning out their lives, impossibly far away, impossibly numerous and impossibly alien. Yet the most sobering experience many space travellers have is not from looking outward — which most of them have done all their lives.

No, the most altering moment is when they look back, and for the first time in their lives, they see our Earth, suspended like a drop of shining blue water in an infinite sea of black.

Our understanding of a place hinges almost entirely on our individual perspective, the point of view from which we observe that place. From inside, almost any environment can seem comprehensive, all-encompassing and immersive. Anyone who has ever visited their former high school after many years will understand how the transition from insider to outsider vastly changes the nature of that place. Not only do the classrooms and hallways seem smaller, but so too do the rivalries, difficulties, and even the friendships and pleasures the place offered. As an adult, you can simply walk out of the gates, get in your car and go away. The whole grounds seem tiny, enclosed and just another small part of a much larger, infinitely more complex world.

***

Azeroth is a big place — if you’re inside it. I remember quite clearly the first time my Night Elf warrior jogged to the crest of the first big hill in Ashenvale. The sweep of the Ashenvale basin spread out before me, and the sheer size of the continents began to dawn on me. I realised, as I checked my maps and counted up the zones, that my journey through Warcraft would be a long one. More than seven years have passed since I first set out upon that journey, and though I have taken substantial holidays from Warcraft, I have recently returned to the realm. A little like returning to high school, the game feels in some ways smaller, though if anything, there is more in it.

And then I saw it, I saw a whole world of Warcraft, sitting on a table. Like Julian Dibbell witnessing the LambdaMOO server at Xerox for the first time — I knew what to expect, more or less, but it was no less a surreal experience. And I was only looking at a photo of the real thing, I can only imagine what it would feel like to hold the entirety of Azeroth, Outland, all its races, the Alliance and the Horde, Onyxia and Hogger, Ironforge and Warsong Gulch — the entire history of a world — in my hands. Or to buy it from Blizzard, with proceeds being donated to the St Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

The_Author realises now that during all those months he never really doubted LambdaMOO was in this box, compact, condensed, its rambling landscapes and its teeming population all somehow shrunk down to the size of The Server’s hard-disk drive. – Julian Dibbell, My Tiny Life

***

The artificiality of the world of Azeroth was never a mystery — any gameworld is obviously a product of human design. But that does not diminish the significance of my memories. There was the grind to farm my leather for a tanking set, so I could step into Karazhan. There were the times, when off-tanking Gruul whre I couldn’t help but overtake the main tank’s threat generation, mixing pride with sheepish guilt if he took the vicious strike I was there to soak up. But all these pale in comparison to the social, political and personal relationships that had little to do with ludic goals.

I started a guild before I knew about raids and had no concept of a raiding schedule. Yet we had a good time. The days of my ‘Flickering Colours’ guild are my fondest memories of the whole game, a convivial family of friends playing for fun, rather than calculated progress. I met friends who are now long, long forgotten, but in those few months were terribly important.

Though many are gone, some of my longest acquaintances began and have been maintained almost exclusively through Warcraft. One of the two has since moved on to The Old Republic, but I chat to him almost every day regardless. Another was still there, in Azeroth, waiting to welcome me back and reminisce about old times — times we both know will never be replicated no matter how many pieces of gear we transmogrify. There is the girlfriend, then fiancée, then wife who I can still play with, share a space and quest with, and who is the only reason I have gone back to play at all.

When you step outside of your world, whether it’s high school, the planet or a fictional universe, your perspective changes: it enlarges. I realise that the blade server on which the copy of Warcraft resides is a small thing, and one of many you can stack on top of each other, turn on and turn off, and put in a closet for storage. But the measure of the world is not in physical size, or even gigabytes of memory. The measure is in time. Blizzard inscribed the active lifespan of the server on each one they retired because of the importance of when.

There will never be another time like the first years of my Warcraft history, so no matter what other places into which I will venture, I will not find the same feelings, experiences and adventures. Slowly, I have come to accept this. Like high school, I wouldn’t want to go back, back to my ignorance, back to a certain kind of solitude that allowed me to start playing. I will remember, and maybe visit for a while, but I don’t think I’ll ever live there again.

There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. — Carl Sagan

***

Adam Ruch is a PhD Candidate and thinks of Azeroth as a second home. You can follow him on Twitter, or check out his blog, Flickering Colours.

The Australian Videogame Industry

Original Post: October 19 2011

The Australian videogame industry is suffering right now, in a bad way. Though the small, more agile teams and the two juggernauts of iOS games Halfbrick and Firemint are going gangbusters, the larger-scale, higher budget sector has been all but obliterated over the past four or five years. Following this, there is a perceived 'brain drain' (how often we hear that with regard to the Australian workforce...) or an 'exodus' of talent moving overseas, particularly to Canada. Why are the pastures so much greener in the snow-covered gardens of our northern Commonwealth brothers? What has happened to the local industry to cause such a drought? How can we pick up the pieces and carry on?

I've been talking to a lot of people about this, and I have some thoughts. 

Firstly, I think its important to recognise that we have the talent here in Australia. There are dozens of designers, programmers, artists etc who have worked in the A-grade industry environment for a number of years, and a whole lot of them are out of work. We have even more graduates of an increasing number of videogame related tertiary qualifications from both private and public universities or colleges. Local talent is not a problem. If (and when) we do lose some overseas, we are very well-placed to produce more.

Further, our talent is being nurtured by this new wave of videogame degrees. I am responsible for one of them! Increasingly, the academy is working on enhancing the education these graduates receive. Rather than simply a programming degree working in UDK one semester, we are incorporating the critical artistic skills that differentiate an Arts/Humanities graduate from a TAFE tradesman. Our talent will have more going for them than the ability to follow instructions and program what their creative leads tell them to. Our talent will be the creative leads. They won't just know how to create videogames, but why it's worth doing so.

The international developers know some of this. According to Anthony Redden, formerly of THQ Studio Australia, after the exposure the closure of his studio received in the media, international recruiters were contacting him with job opportunities. These overseas studios actually want the kind of talent we have here in Australia. Further, some of the talent is obviously willing to move, internationally, to wherever the work is. To me, that means there is an opportunity to import talent if we need to--Canada is doing it, why shouldn't Australia?

The question becomes how do we manage to keep the work here in Australia. To understand this problem it's worth taking a moment to note where the work came from in the first place, to know why it all dried up so suddenly. Several of studios that have closed recently: Blue Tongue and THQ Studio Australia, Pandemic and Visceral Games, Team Bondi, Krome and now KMM, relied significantly on foreign investment. Blue Tongue and THQ Australia were subsidiaries of THQ, Pandemic and Visceral Games both belonged to EA, and Team Bondi, well... they worked with Rockstar and fell apart for their own special reasons. The executives at Team Bondi were former Team Soho Studio employees, so foreign in a different way.

The relationship a lot of Australian game development work had to the publishers was essentially outsourcing. Many of the games developed by these studios, while big enough to often be casually classified as 'AAA' (whatever that means...) were not of the same ilk as the work being done by the other studios these same publishers own in other countries. The Ubisoft studios in Montreal, for example, or Rockstar North were not making licenced games such as Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots (Blue Tongue), The Last Airbender (THQ Studio Australia). Nor are those other studios tasked with sequels like De Blob 2 (Blue Tongue) or Star Wars game after Star Wars game (Pandemic and Krome). So many Star Wars games...

This isn't to cast dispersion on the work that was done by those studios, but as a bit of a reality-check. These studios weren't valued for their original creations, they were used by the larger companies that owned them to produce the middle-range film tie-ins and other licenced material. We were a high-quality outsource location, not a producer of original, unique content. Consider Pandemic, who produced the Saboteur--an original IP and a game I really quite liked--who were promptly shut down after its release. My goals with the work I do at the university is to equip my graduates with skills that enable them to do much more than follow a brief handed down from the licence lawyers at International Publisher Headquarters via email. I want my students to be the creators of art, not the factory workers of the videogame industry. I really hope I'm not the only one in Australia who wants this.

The question is, if Australia is a world-class country full of the talent that international corporations are willing to invest in, willing to recruit into their closer-to-home studios, why are we acting like an outsource location? Why aren't we, as Australians, creating our own original content and keeping control over our IP and our industry? Why are practically all the major studios (including Firemint now) owned and operated by overseas publishers/developers?

Obviously the game development scene in Australia needs a bit of a boost if it is to continue. I am not a proponent of the "let's just all make iPhone games forever!" attitude. Those kinds of games already don't need the kind of help I'm talking about, and they do not have the kind of potential I will describe below. They lay a great foundation for where we need to go from here: the kind of game you pay $30-40AU for on Steam, right up to genuine AAA games. Personally, I like the big-budget, richly immersive games that take me to another place and time, cast me in an exotic role, and tell me a new story. I am really tired of tapping cartoons on my iPhone. I like the games that give me a little something to think about other than how to knock down the next pile of sticks and ice blocks. There is no reason these can't be made in Australia. Videogames are not a physical resource that has to be mined from the ground. They can come from anywhere.

These kinds of games require an investment framework that allows them to work for a number of months or years towards a large-scale, higher-risk release. Yes, there is risk. This is why the international investment has dried up: the cost of doing business in Australia no longer outweighs the risk associated with larger development projects--even projects assured of some degree of success because of their licences. As the global economy has struggled over the past few years, the Australian dollar has become increasingly valuable, so the cost to foreign companies rises. If the invesetor was Australian, however, they might not run for the hills the moment our currency reaches parity with the US dollar. Its a tragic situation when, as our economy actually shows some strength and resilience, this particular sector all but collapses because the whole paradigm relies on the weakness of the dollar through the late 90s.

So, yes, there is a lot of room for governmental incentives of the sort Canada offer to court the big players back to Australia. But there is even more room for better incentives to encourage Australian investors to set up an end-to-end development and distribution industry locally that does not rely on international investment. International sales? Absolutely, go for it. But we shouldn't be waiting around asking for permission from the big American publishers to make our own products. We shouldn't consider ourselves lucky for being able to work on something that Rockstar North or Ubisoft or THQ Montreal don't want to because they are too busy with Grand Theft Auto 5, FarCry 3 or Warhammer games.

That image at the top of this post is of a sunset, and is one of the saddest pictures I think I've ever seen. But, even if this is an end of an era, we have the opportunity to start a new one. Its a lot of hard work, believe me, I know. There weren't any game design or studies units at Macquarie University when I got here, there certainly weren't any degrees or majors in the area. There are now. This stuff can be done. It will be done, so long as we don't give up. We could flip that image of sunset around so the game development industry is looking into dawn instead.

Sustaining Content Providers, redux

Original Post: August 10 2011

I wrote an article over a year ago in response to Ars Technica openly discussing their dilemma regarding generating cashflow. Theirs is the same problem faced by many, if not all, commercial websites providing media content. I am inspired to bump that article again here, as the problems have come to a head today. The Escapist have, up to now, hosted a remarkably successful video series Extra Credits. A very nasty disagreement has erupted quite publicly between the two.  From Extra Credits, there are accusations of non-payment and breach of contract, along with unreasonable claims made on charitable donations to cover medical expenses. From the Escapist, various explanations, mitigation, and an admission that they simply didn't have the money to pay their content providers, such as Extra Credits. (Here's a post that seems to be tracking and updating the situation.)

Siding with the perceived 'little guy' in this situation is all too easy, especially since I really like the content Extra Credits produce. Yet I feel for the Escapist in this situation too, as a representative of a huge slew of online publishers that I'm learning a bit more about lately. Paying creative producers like the EC team is an absolute necessity, I have no doubt about this. But where does that money come from? The standard set all those years ago is that content on the internet should be free, so the money doesn't come directly from the consumers, that's for sure. The alternative, up to now, has been to rely on advertising revenue. Is it working? Well I'm not privy to the accounts of enough websites to know for sure, but from what I do know, online games sites aren't all rolling in cash.

So I ask again, all the same questions that are in the article, one of the first I wrote for this blog. Where to now? 

Ads, AdBlocker, and Sustaining Content Providers

Recently Ars Technica presented 'their side' of the story regarding free websites and ads. Of course, we all know that creating and hosting a website costs money, and most of us know that money doesn't grow on trees. Advertising on the website can generate a significant amount of revenue for a high-traffic site like Ars, but when those ads are not viewed, they won't.

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis.

I must admit, I was one of those people who thought something along those lines, if I really thought about it at all. The problem is almost as old as the internet itself: how do we get people to exchange money for content in an environment where end users have been trained to expect everything for free? Andrew Zolli over at Newsweek has some ideas on the matter and some speculation.

What I see is not so much a lack of willingness to pay for things, as Zolli points out. We--people like myself who are the second wave of the early adopters--are coming of age. We are online almost constantly. We may never have purchased a newspaper for ourselves (and if we have it was probably for a plane flight where we can't be online). But the important bit is that we're growing up and we actually are starting to have the money to buy things. Back when I first started surfing, I didn't, so I couldn't have paid for things I wanted, now I can.

What is holding us back, I think, from paying for online content is just how fiddly it would be. Imagine having to register your credit card with every news site or blog you visit. Firstly, many people wouldn't want to do that for safety's sake. But forget that for a moment, think instead of having to go through the form that would have to pop up between the link on your friend's Facebook page, and the content of the article you want to read. Wouldn't happen. But would you kick in $0.05 to read the article if it just ticked over in an account you maintained with your PayPal information? I think some people would.

If we can add a widget to Firefox that allows us to add links to Facebook, Digg or whatever else we use, surely there is a way to click one button to authorize a tiny exchange of cash directly to the publisher. The key is to create trusted links between the content provider and the plugin we use for our browser, which enables us to authorise the transaction without having to type long numbers, fill in forms, or really break the flow of link-to-story at all.

I name PayPal because its the one transaction system I know of that's large and trusted enough to support this kind of thing, but there could be others. The service should allocate a set amount of funds for this kind of thing, and warn you when you are approaching your 'cap' so you don't suddenly realise that you have spent $500 browsing through Gamasutra and didn't realise you were paying for every pageview. Alternative options would be a few dollars for unlimited access a month (pretty standard subscription). Pop $5 into your account, surf away at some reasonably small fee per story, and keep an eye on your balance in the plug-in's toolbar. Think of it like the E-tag systems modern toll roads use. Get a tag, drive through and it debits your account. Top up the account every so often, and off you go.

Overall, the system has to be EASY. iTunes and Steam prove that people are willing to pay (in significant numbers) for content that is available to be pirated illegally, why not for other kinds of content? The trick is, as especially iTunes demonstrates, make it easy.

Questions for further thought: How much would one user's read of the story be worth? How much are sites pulling in via the ads? Would the paid version eliminate the ads (keeping in mind there are ads on cable TV)? What about printing, or re-reading the same article?

R18+ and Managing Information

Original Post: July 22 2011

So this is a knee-jerk response post to the R18+ discussions at today's meeting of the Standing Committee of Attorneys General in Australia. While the reporting on this issue is likely to be all over the usual outlets (GameSpot.com.au, Kotaku.com.au, ABC's Tech site and it seems likely the Laura Parker will be featured on the major TV news broadcasts tonight), its also a little confusing. From what I can tell, despite the reports of NSW AG John Rau opposing the rating earlier in the week, he doesn't actually oppose it. Further, ABC's story calls this a delay, when in fact this meeting signposts the most progress since, well, ever on this issue.

So all around this is good news, though apparently South Australia consider a ten year old and 17 year old to be the same thing, such that any game rated MA15+ will be rebadged with the R18+ stickers before being sold. Bizarre. As someone deep in my Twitter feed said, this only deepens the gulf between ultra-childish and ultra-adults only. Its a deep conception of games, that they are either entirely juvenile, or entirely pornographic with no middle ground whatsoever.

Still, the most disturbing thing I heard flew a little below the radar, regarding a proposal by Rau to make Facebook an 18+ website... somehow. Of course he didn't go into details, but rather gave anecdotal evidence of a mother who was concerned about the slutty pictures her 13 year old daughter was posting on the site. Having discovered them, the mother found that she could not force Facebook to take them down. So this is why Australia should prevent all children in the country from using the single most widely accessed website in the history of the internet, because one woman is a terrible mother. Not only can she not keep enough of an eye on her own offspring to stop her from taking, then posting the pictures, but she is unable to sit down with her, explain the situation, and have the daughter take the pictures down herself? I'm sorry but I call bullshit.

This is obvious avoidance of parental responsibility. Out of the hundreds of millions of users of Facebook, some percentage are going to get themselves into trouble. That can't mean a government needs try to legislate this fact into non-existence. Rau trotted out the same old "Parents can't be around their kids 24/7 to watch what they do. Gee whiz kids these days are so clever," argument that is so prevalent in these kinds of discussions. But this is not a new thing. Parents have never been able to do this, why are we suddenly making laws about it in the case of new-ish media? I mean, any parent who doesn't realise their kids are a little different at school or in that God-forsaken space between school and home is delusional. Of course the difference in some kids is greater than in others, but there aren't any laws against this. Where and when did today's adults learn to swear or talk about sex and drugs and whatever else? Around the kitchen table? I think not.

At one point, I heard the phrase "Managing the flow of information through the internet." They still don't get it. They don't get the internet and they don't get liberal democracy.

Won’t Somebody Think Of The Children? So I Don’t Have To…

Original Post: June 28 2011 (Kotaku AU)

Early this morning the United States Supreme Court finally judged that Video Games were a form of speech, therefore deserving of protection under the First Amendment. In Australia, video games, or any form of media for that matter, are not granted the same rights. Adam Ruch, as an American living in Australia, can’t understand why and, in this compelling piece, discusses the issues with censorship in this country.

Won’t Somebody Think Of The Children? So I Don’t Have To…

The US Supreme Court has ruled that videogames are like other forms of media in that they express ideas and are therefore deserving of the same protection under the First Amendment. Specifically this ruling was made in response to a California State proposal that would ban the sale of ‘ultra-violent’ videogames to minors. This situation is almost a perfect inverse to the what we now face in Australia, and may help us to understand our own circumstances better.

First a criminally broad background discussion of the American Constitution, which is a wonderfully idealistic document that has influenced every aspect of American government for over two hundred years.

Generally, the spirit of the Founding Fathers was one of individual liberty, enshrining the rights of men to live their lives largely unencumbered by oppressive government. The government was there to provide for the society, but a society made up of individuals with their own capacity to make decisions and duty to accept responsibility for their actions. The idealism boiled down to many practical rights, such as the right to bear arms as to facilitate the raising of a powerful militia to oppose the national military, should the need arise. The right to privacy, including requiring the government’s agents to secure a warrant, through the judicial system, to prevent unreasonable searches of a man’s home. The right to free religion. And finally the right to freedom of expression, to prevent the government from silencing dissent. The earliest Americans experienced a need for all of these things, under the rule of the British monarchy, which led to the founding of the United States in the first place.

I have lived in Australia for almost 15 years, and am an Australian citizen, but I was born in the United States. I have had the American sense of individuality engrained in me right through my childhood and increasingly supported by rational decisions into my adult life. Notions of personal freedom coming at the cost of personal accountability are second-nature to me. I believe it is absolutely the right of each person to make his or her own decision, with the knowledge that decisions have consequences that one cannot shirk. From this perspective it is difficult for me to fathom the reasoning behind a government mandating what I can and cannot put in my PlayStation 3. If anything, living in a country that was not founded on this principle has caused it to become stronger within me.

In Australia, personal rights are much weaker than in the US. There is no precise equivalent to the Bill of Rights for Australian citizens, for example. There is a provision for free speech in the Australian constitution, but it only applies to political speech (perhaps explaining the idiotic performances in parliamentary question time). As a result, the government has always had the power to regulate artistic expression, legally. So, here we have a National Classification Scheme, which is a piece of legislation that brings the full weight of the punitive justice system to bear on infringements.

Historically the earliest incarnation of the Classifications Board was in a single agent known as the Chief Censor, who was part of the Customs Department. He, and his subordinates, literally checked books and reels of film as they entered the country for obscene content. Their aim was to protect the morality of Australian society from the evils of the outside world. Now, our classifications mostly revolve around the protection of children, and so the sale of many types of media to minors is an offence. Yet this notion of preserving the overall purity of Australian society remains in the legal ability of the government to expunge certain content from the country entirely.

Of course the United States has a range of classification schemes as well, but they are not legally enforceable. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) are industry sponsored bodies that work to satisfy the community’s desire to protect children from material that may be difficult for them to manage. Whether the film, for example, is very violent, sexy, full of obscene language, or even simply scary, the MPAA will weigh these factors against their standards, and make a recommendation for rating. In effect, the MPAA or ESRB work very much the same way as our own NCS, only they cannot make arrests if a person doesn’t follow the rating, as they are only guidelines. They do not attempt to control citizens, only to advise them.

The American system rests on that assumption that people are free to make their own decisions, because they are ultimately responsible for themselves. Further, parents are responsible for raising their own children. The opponents of an R18+ rating here in Australia show surprising contempt for the ability of parents to act as such, especially considering that some of the loudest voices come from family and parenting groups such as the Australian Council for Children and the Media. In the ACCM submission to the SCAG consultation in 2010, the group claims that the “present sale and hire system prohibitions are not effective in preventing access by minors.” They also respond by rewriting one of the questions regarding the potential R18+ game rating from a suggestive to a declarative. The question read: “Is it difficult for parents to enforce age restrictions for computer games?” In the space for response the ACCM wrote: “This question should read ‘It is difficult for parents…’” (Italics in ACCM source)

This group, more than others, also claims widespread illiteracy in the NCS, and that an R18+ rating would only confuse the issue, where “the message that an R18+ category might send is unnecessary if such games were Refused Classification.” Time and again they demonstrate a preference for governmental censorship over the expectation of parental vigilance and decision-making, as well as completely ignoring the right of adults stated in the NCS code to consume what media they want.

Australian parents are, according to the R18+ opponents, so inept that it is literally inevitable that, should adults-only games be allowed to exist in this country, children will get their hands on them, they will be mentally and emotionally damaged by the content, and in sufficient numbers that the problem warrants a federal law banning them more strictly than alcohol, cigarettes or operating an automobile.

The ruling of the Supreme Court this week takes an astonishingly different position, particularly Judge Scalia’s opinion. His opinion could be used as a point-by-point counter to the arguments presented from the anti-R18+ camp over the past … aeon:

Firstly he refutes the assertion that because of interactivity, videogames should be considered specially apart from other media, which is the fundamental reason that the R18+ rating wasn’t included in the Australian NCS in the first place. Had Scalia been part of the Classifications Board in the 1990s, this may never have been a problem for us.

“Crudely violent video games, tawdry TV shows, and cheap novels and magazines are no less forms of speech than The Divine Comedy, and restrictions upon them must survive strict scrutiny-a question to which we devote our attention in Part III, infra. Even if we can see in them ‘nothing of any possible value to society… they are as much entitled to the protection of free speech as the best of literature,’” says Scalia.

Second, he refutes the science that is always trotted out to demonstrate that any time a child plays a violent videogame, they are made more violent: “California relies primarily on the research of Dr Craig Anderson and a few other research psychologists whose studies purport to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children. These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason: They do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively (which would at least be a beginning). Instead, ‘[n] early all of the research is based on correlation, not evidence of causation, and most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology.’” I cannot actually explain why this point has been so difficult to make in the Australian debate. Those who use this research, time and again, to support their ideological position simply refuse to abide by the logic, rather than opinion, expressed here by Scalia.

Finally, the most basic point for me is the government’s role in all of this in the first place. Is it not the parents’ place to act as parent to our children? Scalia says: “While some of the legislation’s effect may indeed be in support of what some parents of the restricted children actually want, its entire effect is only in support of what the State thinks parents ought to want. This is not the narrow tailoring to “assisting parents” that restriction of First Amendment rights require.”

Here, he clearly states that it is not the government’s place to determine for its citizens what constitutes appropriate or inappropriate media. Some parents may indeed feel their children should not be exposed to certain videogames, as is their absolute right. But do they need a federal law to ensure this happens? In Australia, only the unsupported claim that children will access whatever media they want justifies our law. And what of the parents who do not feel their children need to be restricted from this media? This Californian proposal would restrict them from making their own choice, so effectively the pro-restriction parents are acting as guardians for all American children—as the NCS currently acts not only for Australian children, but Australian adults as well.

Surely here in Australia, we can see the sense in this decision. Surely Australians are not more primitive beings than our American counterparts that we cannot parent our own children, nor discern gameplay from reality. Surely there is some merit in a Supreme Court ruling that the science of Anderson et al. is not the last word on media effects. Surely the fact that the MPAA and ESRB have emerged in a country where this is no legislated requirement for classification demonstrates that a community can work together with industry to maintain a civilised society. Is Australia less able to do the same? Our government certainly seems to think so.

A Riposte to Blunt Criticism

Original Post: May 10 2011

A few days ago I was cited in a piece by Danc on his Lost Garden blog as being an example of “shallow game criticism.” While I don’t take personal offence to the citation, nor even the tone of Danc’s article, I feel compelled to respond (as many have before me) to its argument. In a way I welcome the opportunity to clearly enunciate my own position, even if it is from a defensive posture. And like any good narcissist, I’m pleased anyone is reading my work–even when they disagree! So, herein lies something of a personal (please note, personal) manifesto.

The two points that Danc seems to take issue with are the nature of criticism in general, and the purpose of videogame criticism in particular. He has not engaged deeply with the concept of criticism of other art forms, so I can only speculate about what he feels the nature and purpose of literary criticism is, and I may well do so throughout this discussion.

Firstly, about videogames themselves:

Yet though games do possess evocative elements, they also are driven by a functional heart that resists being reduced to only the softest of sciences. Bridges, though undeniably aesthetic and cultural objects, can also be understood as functional or economic creations.  Playthroughs, aesthetics, rhetoric, literary theory, film theory, art history may be one set of valuable perspectives, but if you only rely on these, you will fail to paint a complete picture the babbling, whirring human-mechanical reality of a games.

Games have much in common with functional works involving mathematics, psychology, governments, economics or other complex systems.

As for games criticism, he is quite particular. Games criticism must be:

Grounded: Are you basing your theories off empirical evidence?  Do not write something merely because you had a feeling to express.

Aware: Do you know what other people have written in the past?  Do the research and be an informed commenter.

Insightful:  Does your writing add a substantial new perspective or tool that moves the conversation forward?  Do not rehash the same old thing simply because you have an opinion on the currently popular meme.

Actionable:  Does your writing identify a course of action that previously was obscured? Do not let an exploration of an idea wander off into vague hand-waving.  Ask the reader to perform an experiment that increases the knowledge of the community as a whole.

Of my piece, he says:

Yet the essay is little more than a series of personal descriptions of how he feels when he plays certain games.  There is little insight that couldn’t be gained by sitting down with a beer and a controller. There is no attempt at gathering empirical evidence. Adam could have saved everyone a vast amount of time with the TL;DR summary: “In 3rd person you can see (and thus empathize) with a visualized character and in 1st person, you can’t.” Once you strip away the laborious language, you have yet another bit of fluffy gamer opinion written by a young student.

And follows with:

He is a student acting as an academic, writing what is essentially a playthrough that in turn masquerades as game analysis.  The fact that he is a student writing a playthrough is fine.  The multiple levels of deception are what initially raised my hackles.

Given this, if you fail to disclose your perspective, you are very likely wasting the precious time of your reader.  If you deliberately obscure this information (as I’ve seen many student or indies tempted to do) you are being a dishonest member of our community.  Hey! Stop doing that…there is no shame in writing openly and honestly about your perspective.

So working through some of these points, perhaps to quibble a little before I launch into what I really want to say here:

Regarding the “disclaimers” that Danc seems bent on, whereby each writer will post a bio or resume at the top of each of their pieces, I did that. I was introduced as an academic. My title (with the help of Kotaku’s editor Mark Serrels) is a riff on the content and purpose of the article. “What’s Your Perspective?” The title was a question, my essay was an answer. The purpose of the article was to give my perspective, follow my thought process, and provoke others to do the same of their own thoughts and reactions to games. In that, I feel eminently successful. The article sparked the most successful debate and discussion anything I’ve written has so far accomplished. It’s even been linked by someone who disagrees with me vehemently! It was a perspective piece, informed by my own reasoning.

A “playthrough” is a new term for me, maybe like a walkthrough, which is an unbiased description of events as they unfold, explaining the how-to’s of a game. Nowhere in my piece does it instruct anyone on how to play any of the games I mention. It would be a woeful playthrough, in fact, in its lack of detail. Perhaps the problem here is the word Danc chose to apply: “analysis.” If he has a specialist understanding of “analysis” which requires empirical datasets, graphs and metrics, then my piece is not analysis. Yet he is the one who used that word in the first place. Personally I have a broader definition of the word which includes the careful study of an object by one person reporting his findings, supported by a logical argument. Further, if Danc had ever read any of my genuinely academic writing, he would find that I engage quite specifically with the mechanics of videogames as a matter of course. In fact, I almost never only talk about the story, or a character, or other elements of fiction without engaging with how they function as part of the system. Instead he reads one of my pieces, on a public enthusiast blog site, and fails to appreciate that even that one is actually a question of the most basic mechanical nature: player perspective, and writes me off as a ‘shallow game-illiterate’ when in fact I have Crawford, Zimmerman and Koster on my shelf right now. I’m also not sure what he believes the difference is between a student and an academic.

Regarding his four-point checklist for a critical article: I frankly and unreservedly disagree with his first point. If I have no right to express what feelings a piece of art instilled in me as an individual human, then all is lost and we should all just go home now. The primary occupation of humankind is coming to terms with being a human, and understanding the feelings and experiences we have in life. Criticism is a parallel to artistic practice in helping us to do so (more on this later). Secondly, it will become evident throughout this piece that I believe Danc has himself failed on his next point, that of being informed about the research into what has already been said on this subject. He can drop names like Koster, Zimmerman and Crawford, but this is cherry-picking in the extreme and demonstrates no awareness of the ebb and flow of theoretical perspectives in recent game study and criticism (more on this later too). With his third point, Danc seems to be stating that not everyone has a right to express their own personal interpretation (as indicated in the first point) of a game experience. He seems to value his time quite highly, so we writers should think of him and question whether he has read something similar at some other time. Also, if the article in question does not answer the (Danc’s) questions satisfactorily, then we should also not bother…which brings me to the fourth point: action. Rather than introduce my objection to this here, it will appear in more detail below.

Finally he implies some level of dishonesty, even out-right deception using me as an example for argument, suggesting that people like me (students or indies) wilfully obscure their identities. I have never done this. I don’t even use an alias (Danc is your real name?) in my work, my university email address is my public contact information, I am introduced in my article as a PhD student, and have the same posted on my blog. I am also easily accessible on Academia.edu. In any event, the identity of the author should be secondary to the quality of the writing. If Danc judges the work by the author, he commits a grievous act of prejudice that I simply do not have time for.

 

The Purpose and Nature of Videogames Criticism (for me).

Are videogames art? Are they machine? Are they emotional, evocative? Are they calculating, engineered? Are they narratives? Are they games? Yes. Of course.

These are questions theorists such as myself have been battling with for over a decade now, and have more or less moved on from. The hybrid nature of the videogame has become evident, almost taken for granted. We have gradually specialising videogame theorists such as Aarseth, Juul and Frasca who have moved from a hardline ludological position towards a middling perspective, and back again—more at peace with those of a different perspective than in 2003. On the other side there are people like myself, Ben Abraham, Monica Evans, Ewan Kirkland, Miguel Sicart, Julian Dibbell, T.L. Taylor, Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg, Jack M. Balkin and Beth Simone Noveck, and Nate Garrelts who perform (or edit collections of) analyses from a wide range perspectives.

Game critics, whether their testamur reads BSc or BA, must and do acknowledge the varied character of their object of study. That is, in fact, the entire focus of my PhD thesis: an analysis of the structure of a swathe of videogames in an attempt to articulate how and why their active systems engage with the fictional content they present, and how that fiction works to contextualize otherwise meaningless code. In his piece Danc is echoing rather loudly the hardline ludological position perhaps best personified in Markku Eskelinen or Jesper Juul ten years ago. Eskelinen’s most famous quote reads: “If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.” Like early ludology, there is no room in Danc’s position for a literary or aesthetic criticism of videogames because games are, essentially, mechanics.

Yet in a similarly blunt fashion, I could ask whether Danc (or Markku, should I ever encounter him!) sees code or characters when they look at Red Dead Redemption. What is on the screen, flowcharts and algorithms, or people and places? Why do we spend millions of dollars on the scripts, voice actors, motion capture, environment modelling, musical score and sound effects if what games are, really, is code and mechanic? If at the end of the day, all that fiction stuff is mere fluff why is it there at all?

The truthful answer is always “both.” The horse I ride in Red Dead is both animal and subroutine. Videogames are a medium, evocative and emotional, but they are a systematic medium. Videogames are unique among games in that they are media, and unique among media in that they are games. So, indeed, a critic who fails to address the systemic nature of the videogame is ignoring something fundamental to the object itself. But a critic who fails to appreciate the human experience of playing is missing the point of videogames in the first place.

The point, if videogames can be said to have one, is to affect the player. Designing a working system is trivial, at this point. If a computer programmer cannot create a working system of zeros and ones, then he is not a programmer. Yet this meaningless accomplishment is not the goal of the game designer. His is an artful craft, with the same humanist goals as other art: expression, communication, even communion with humanity, explorations of what it is to be human. Videogames are the medium that expresses our new(ish) understanding of life, the world and the whole stinking thing as a network of related agents moving in patterns, affecting each other in different ways, with consequences and potential both realised and unrealised. See Ben’s favorite Latour, Foucault or Deleuze and Guttari for various network theories about reality.

Danc repeats a familiar ontological assessment: the rules of games are “real” and “true,” therefore residing on the “real” side of an ontological divide between “real life” and “fiction.” They are objective, like geology or physics. This is simply, patently untrue. The rules that define Super Mario are entirely contrived, man-made and ultimately, arbitrary. They are not found, discovered, in nature the way rocks and gravity are. They lie on the same side of the ontological divide between truth and fiction beside Robinson Caruso and the Force. The rules of a videogame are ontologically identical to the rules that define the speed of Warp 9 or the difference between a Jedi Knight and a Sith Lord. The difference is their presentation, manifestation, not their ontological nature. In a film or novel, we imagine the rules that bind the fictional world by modelling them internally based on the examples we are shown through description and action in the narrative. In videogames we have an almost direct access to the rules, with which we can experiment to observe their cause and effect ourselves. They remain fictional rules, only “true” inside the fictional world bound within our PlayStation, instead of between book covers or title sequences and credits. This concept of mine is influenced by a ‘transmedial’ understanding of fiction/narrative described by Marie-Laure Ryan mostly in Avatars of Story.

Given that videogames are in fact entirely fictional, though systematic, they are just as open for personal reflection and deep, individualised criticism as any other artform. Danc’s preference for empirical data to somehow find the “truth” of what a game… is? means? …is laughable. I do not require a survey to explain why Romeo and Juliet is tragic. I do not require a set of metric data to understand my experience of the Shawshank Redemption. To suggest that only through qualitative data will we ‘understand’ a film, novel or painting is ridiculous. Following from this, how will the quantitative analyst even know what questions to ask, without a treatise from an individual player thinking about his own experience? How did we come up with words like ‘fun’ or ‘immersion’ or ‘agency’ in the first place if not by attempting to describe personal experience in words rather than numbers?

Criticism in the artistic tradition is a method by which a person reflects deeply on the work of an artist to elucidate and/or disseminate its meaning more widely than is likely to occur without such work, whether that meaning is obscured through difficult or complex text, genre convention, specific social or historical context, or some esoteric symbology or allegory. For further reference on a traditional critic, see The Intent of the Critic by Wilson, Foerster and Ransom. For an example, read something by Pauline Kael. Artists in other traditions are assumed to be masters of their craft, or at least assume themselves to be such that they do not look for validation or “tips for improvement” from a (mere) critic (though the working relationship between Modernist writers such as Eliot, Pound, Woolf and Joyce is worth thinking about). The critic is not writing so much for the artists as for the audience, the same audience he shares with the artist. The responsibility of the critic is indeed, as Danc suggests, to “know more” than the average reader/viewer/player as to make his observations appear insightful, or the connections made seem meaningful rather than obvious. A critic making obvious observations can indeed be said to not be doing the job. But it is simply not the critic’s primary job to tell the artist what to do next—any artist standing around idly waiting for such instruction is a sad fellow! Coupled with this exploration and explanation of meaning is a judgement, an assessment of either why this artwork is indeed so meaningful, or where it falls short of the mark. Perhaps a film is confusing, but isn’t meant to be—this is the job of the critic to point out. No, dear viewer, you are not missing something, this is just poorly edited film. Or, instead, this film is about confusion and is not meant to be easy to understand (Memento? Fight Club?)

I wonder what Danc would think of the essays regarding Ayn Rand and Objectivism that Bioshock inspired. Is this all useless babble because it didn’t give a bulleted list for improvements to be made in Bioshock 2? Is he so caught up in the commercial-industrial nature of videogame production that what exists no longer matters, and only what is yet to be made has any relevance? What of criticism in other artforms? Should a critic of Shakespeare limit himself to analysing the grammatical style or other ‘functional’ aspects of a play, with the goal of writing a better play, at the expense of enjoying Hamlet? The fact is, these Bioshock essays were adding meaning to the game for players not immediately familiar with Rand or Objectivism. The critiques (which can be positive, by the way) were allowing the less informed players (like myself, initially) to understand more of what Bioshock had to offer, effectively making it a better game for those players. The only call to action there would have been to read Atlas Shrugged and then play Bioshock again.

Yet even that last sentence isn’t true. I have written criticism of videogames like Bioshock and Assassin’s Creed, both of which I really liked, specifically addressing shortcomings in the mechanics of both games. The question I put to Danc, is why would I do that? What makes a game “better” in his own terms? He never really articulates what he thinks a “better” game would be, he seems to take the end goal for granted. To me, a “better” game is one that marries the systemic mechanics (ie. What you can and can’t do, and what happens as a result) with increasing tightness to the narrative. See Clint Hocking, Ian Bogost and Jonathan Blow for these kind of ideas. So, a game called Thief should be about hiding and sneaking, not running and gunning or farming. How do we know what makes one mechanic better than another? If we can only refer to hard science, the answer is: as long as the bridge doesn’t collapse its fine. Nevermind that it’s ugly! So as long as the game doesn’t crash, its fine? No… that’s just wrong and I’m not even sorry to say it.

In summary, Danc does not want to read game criticism. He wants a report written by a systems analyst for purposes of systems design. I actually have a qualification in that field, from my undergraduate degree. I have both a major in English Literature and Information Technology, with a third major in “Informatics” (now called Digital Cultures) which is essentially the deliberate marriage of the two. I have a further major (serendipitously) in Art History and Theory. I have written systems analyses, designed algorithms and databases, and I realise that many of the same skills apply in the development of a videogame. The same can be said for cinematography: an electrician is required to set up the lighting, a sound engineer to record and edit sound and maintain equipment, a camera operator to maintain and use the correct cameras. To suggest that only technical knowledge and insight is required to produce a film  is preposterous (or any other artwork: novels have grammatical syntax, painting has linear perspective and chemistry of paint, thinner and colour theory, sculpture and architecture rely on geometry and physics). Of course, many of these technical skills are found within the artist himself: an author will likely know the grammar of the language he is using; the director will probably have experience in most aspects of film technology. But art is not the sum total of its techne. I choose to view videogames as art, and not as pure technology. Danc may choose to view videogames differently, but has no ground upon which to stand in condemning my work and the work of others for not satisfying his purposes.