Mark Danger Chen

(this was my final post for a class I’m taking this quarter called Why So Serious?: Video Games as Persuasion, Politics, and Propaganda)

I’ve been reading a bit from infrastructure studies (Hunsinger, 2009) (which I didn’t know was a discipline until just last week) which posits that various cultural attitudes are normalized and made invisible by how our social world is structured. The basic idea is that we operate a certain way–customs, beliefs, values, etc.–because of how those ideas are supported by the infrastructures in place that let us do what we do. When people do some sort of activity, they operate in a complex system or network that is made up of a whole bunch of different things in relationship to each other (Latour, 2005). These things are invisible to us such that we live in a sort of hyperreality, a condition of modernity (Baudrillard, 1994) (okay, it’s a little more complicated than that, but pretend hyperreality is part of modernity for bit).

An example is driving where it isn’t just a person and a car, but also the road, the material of the road, the history of engines, the geopolitical forces that allowed certain people to make those engines, the way we’ve agreed on certain rules that constrain how we drive such as stop signs, how we know that speed limit signs might or might not really be the speed limit, *other* drivers, etc. These activity systems are supported by the material and social infrastructure of that particular setting. By being dependent on the infrastructure of the setting, people who have a say in how those infrastructures are set up have political power and can present outsiders with bridges or barriers to their infrastructures. But they aren’t political in the overt sense. Instead the term I’ve been reading is subpolitical (Hunsinger, 2009). Something is subpolitical when it is subtle and hidden and its power isn’t exercised through normal overt political or governed means.

Anyway, this subpolitics-of-infrastructures angle could be used to describe games and how each game is dependent on certain ways of working (game mechanics that make up the game play) and these ways of working, or infrastructures, are rooted in historical genres of games *and* historical societal norms for how our world works. This relates to Galloway’s allegory of control (2006), to me, in that games operate a certain way and by enacting or making the narratives progress, players are embodying those ideological infrastructures. An easy example is Bioshock where the Randian themes of power and super-individualism are highlighted by the way the game is relatively linear yet feels like it is open-ended (and major spoiler: the way in which it’s discovered at the end that the player really wasn’t in control at all).

When you look at social interaction in multiplayer games, the boundary between game and non-game gets dismantled completely. For example, argumentation by various people who play WoW about how loot should be distributed follows certain patterns of behavior that reinforce structural norms of proper behavior such that certain players just aren’t as able to successfully become expert players. Expertise for WoW is determined by certain groups of players (and the game devs) who value specific ways of playing (and arguing) over others.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that, yes, all games are political, or at least subpolitical, in that they all reflect certain infrastructures that dictate how things work in those settings.

The tricky question, of course, is the one that kept coming up in class. Ok, games are political, but do they successfully convey whatever message was intended? This is kind of blown apart, though, in that many games weren’t intended to be overtly or even subtly political. Yet, the subpolitical nature of game infrastructures (of even overtly political games) means that ultimately they normalize certain ways of being or acting. Game devs operate within the bounds of their infrastructures and produce games reflecting those structures.

What does this mean, though? I mean, many of us came away from the different games having taken different messages from the games. This complicates the idea that a game has *a* message. Subjective interpretation turns the modernity associated with invisible infrastructures into post-modernity.

• Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation.
• Galloway, A. (2006). Gaming: Essays on algorithmic culture.
• Hunsinger, J. (2009). Introducing learning infrastructures: Invisibility, context, and governance. Learning Inquiry, 3(3), 111-114. http://www.springerlink.com/content/61uv3175wt2h6574/
• Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social.

The Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems is holding their annual summer institute at Skamania Lodge this year. Since I’ve been leaning heavily towards actor-network theory, distributed cognition, and mangle of practice ways of looking at my data, and since it’s so close, I decided to apply. Here’s my research summary I wrote for the application:

Contributions to the Scientific Understandings of Sociotechnical Systems

I research the ecology of gaming and new media (Salen, 2008, Stevens, Satwitcz, & McCarthy, 2008). My dissertation focuses on ethnographic accounts of online gaming practice, documenting expertise development, teamwork, and collaboration in a World of Warcraft player group (Chen, 2009). Using actor-network theory (Latour, 2005) and distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995), this work treats the group as a learning network that successfully enrolled various human and nonhuman resources to thrive in a high-stakes joint-task environment (Taylor, 2009). I find using an analytical lens that recognizes the mangle of gaming (Steinkuehler, 2006, Pickering, 1993) helps to see that distinctions between subject-object or player-game don’t adequately describe in-action learning across settings and time. Rather, a player group’s expertise trajectory is always collaborative and social, always contentious, and always drawing on both micro- and macro-level sociomaterial (Orlikowski, 2007) resources in complex, messy gaming spaces. Analyses of informal learning arrangements using a socio-technical lens are important for science and technology studies, learning sciences, and new media scholars as specific examples of the distributed nature of learning that may lead to a broader conception of everyday practice and learning with new media.

I combine this object-oriented ontology (Bogost, 2009) with other interdisciplinary ways of describing learning arrangements including how people position and are positioned into specific roles and relationships (Holland & Leander, 2004) across timescales (Lemke, 2000) in interdiscursive moments (Silverstein, 2007).

I hope to continue using these ideas to describe learning across all of life’s myriad settings (NRC, 2009). As I am just finishing my dissertation this year, I feel like my options are wide open. Possible future areas of study include continued work in online and offline gaming practices in different player communities to expanded sites of study. For example, one research interest I have is to study software and media piracy networks and the learning and expertise development within those networks.

References

• Bogost, I. (2009). What is object-oriented ontology? Retrieved February 25, 2010, from: http://www.bogost.com/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog.shtml
• Chen, M. (2009). Communication, coordination, and camaraderie in World of Warcraft. Games and Culture, 4(1), 47-73.
• Holland, D., & Leander, K. (2004). Ethnographic studies of positioning and subjectivity: An introduction. Ethos, 32(2), 127–139.
• Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Lemke, J. L. (2000). Across the scales of time: Artifacts, activities, and meanings in ecosocial systems. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 7(4), 273-290.
• National Research Council. (2009). Learning science in informal environments: People, places, and pursuits. Committee on Learning Science in Informal Environments. P. Bell, B. Lewenstein, A. W. Shouse, & M. A. Feder (Eds.). Board on Science Education, Center for Education, Division of Behavior and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
• Orlikowski, W. J. (2007). Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work. Organization Studies, 28(9), 1435-1448.
• Pickering, A. (1993). The mangle of practice: Agency and emergence in the sociology of science. American Journal of Sociology, 99(3), 559-589.
• Salen, K. (2008). Toward an ecology of gaming. In The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games, and learning (1–17). USA: The MIT Press.
• Silverstein, M. (2007). Axes of evals: Token versus type interdiscursivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 6-22.
• Steinkuehler, C. A. (2006). The mangle of play. Games and Culture, 1(3), 199-213.
• Stevens, R., Satwicz, T., & McCarthy, L. (2008). In-game, in-room, in-world: Reconnecting video game play to the rest of kids’ lives. In K. Salen (Ed.), The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games, and learning (41-66). USA: The MIT Press.
• Taylor, T. L. (2009). The assemblage of play. Games and Culture, 4(4). 331-339.

So, I got an email from the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education in Singapore about a Research Scientist position in New Media that I applied for. They want a Skype interview next week! While that is awesome, it’s also complicated. They want me to prepare a 15 minute presentation to launch the interview (which I’m taking as more a conversation to get to know each other). I hadn’t yet created a job talk, so a couple of days ago I started working on one.

The thing is, I don’t really want to do a powerpoint slideshow. A couple of weeks ago, while brainstorming with ESTG different ways for how a conference session could be more participatory, Phil quickly showed me prezi.com. (The conference session mentioned is the one I’m in with Moses Wolfenstein, Ben DeVane, Sara Grimes, and Sarah Walter at the Digital Media and Learning conf later this month!)

Here’s my prezi so far:

What’s cool about prezi is that it isn’t as linear as powerpoint can be. You can zoom in and out of points of interest, which works really well, since it lets one load a presentation with a ton of info that can be dived into or not, depending on the circumstances of the presenting. I think what I’m going to try to do is fill my prezi in as much as possible but then just cover the high-level stuff in 15 minutes. At the same time, I’ll share the url with the search committee and they can explore different avenues of my research independently of me giving the presentation. What’d be cool is if people could comment with a live twitter feed or somesuch at the same time as a presentation… or maybe non-live comments a la YouTube.

Here’s some of what I’ve written on a new paper/chapter. Feedback would be lovely. I mean to showcase data from some of the various fights in WoW, what it was like before threat meter, what changed after the addon was introduced, and especially how we actually adopted it and then used it to diagnose the Rags fight (and discover that threat wasn’t the problem).

The Enrollment of a New Actor and the Redistribution of Responsibilities in a World of Warcraft Raid Group

In World of Warcraft, each individual actor in a raid group is in charge of certain tasks and responsibilities. At one point in the life of the raid group I studied, a new actor was allowed into the group. This newbie rendered new services to the rest of the group. The services rendered were essentially rating the actions of the others in the group—that is, assigning a specified number value to their actions—and then remembering who did what to add up the ratings from each particular player. This newbie, though, didn’t actually care one way or the other if these services were used by the others, but if another decided to use them and have his or her rating displayed, that player had to abide by new rules associated with these new services. The newbie wouldn’t verbally announce others’ rating. Instead, a sign was held up and players had to manually look over to read what their ratings were. In that way, the newbie not only served but also demanded, not only taking on the burdens assigned with this new role but also prescribing new responsibilities on the others. Yet others in the raid group, first slowly then readily, came to adopt the use of these new services into their practice as the services’ benefits became increasingly clear. The group came to consider the new tasks as essential parts of its raiding activity, and players could barely remember a time when the rating-remembering services were not used. The newbie became one of them—not a newbie but a veteran—and the group merrily went on its way. But this veteran wasn’t one of them. In fact, it wasn’t even human. It was a technological device, a program, a construct, an “addon” modification to the game.

(More after the break.)

Continue reading “Enrollment of Threat Meter Addon: work in progress”

There’s a bunch of game review websites doing their top 10 best games of either the year or the decade right now. I’m continually moved towards thinking that games that are inherently good can only be great through a combination of intrinsic qualities and external player dispositions, situations, settings, and communities. In other words, I’m inclined towards thinking about gaming moments rather than the game artifacts themselves. To take that thought further, I think what’s even more compelling are moments that stem from the culture around games. And so, here are some great moments that speak of our growing, diversifying (yet also moving towards homogeneity), deeply intricate games culture of the past decade.

I had meant to do a top 10 list, but there’s no way I can think of the best candidates in one sitting, so I’ll start with these and add as people comment (here, via Twitter, via Facebook, or via Google Reader). No particular order:

[Note Dec 18:] It seems like two categories can be made out of the list, those that are trends and those that are specific moments. I’ve tried to keep it to specific moments, but it’s blurry. Also, it’s of course subjective, and, apparently, I have short-term memory since most of these are from the past 5 years.

1. 2007: Very touching story about a mom who sent letters to her son through Animal Crossing. The story is touching. The fact that the letters might have been auto-generated, well… it’s still a touching story. Read about it (joystiq) or watch the story (YTMND).
2. 2004: “Bow, nigger” and New Games Journalism.
3. 2008: Project Chanology and Anonymous. Ok, technically not exactly games specific, but its basically griefing writ large. Good summary of griefing: Julian Dibbell’s article in Wired on Patriotic Nigras and Second Life (yay, guildmate!).
4. Terra Nova blog (speaking of guildmates). Games (virtual worlds) culture needs people to write about it. Read all about trading real-world currency for in-game gold and items, for example.
5. 2006: Million Gnome March in World of Warcraft.
6. 2006 and 2007: South Park episodes on WoW (info) (video) and Guitar Hero (info) (video). Good example of gaming hopping into other media. (via Jen Stone)
7. Settlers of Catan more popular than Monopoly and taking top selling toys and games spot on Amazon. (via Chris Ferejohn)
8. 2005: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Hot Coffee controversy. (via Sean Duncan)
9. Pro gaming actually exists. Eg, Fatal1ty featured on MTV and owns h1s own product l1ne.
10. MC Chris’s, Fett’s Vette in Star Wars Galaxy machinima. First, it’s an example of nerdcore hip hop (also see MC Frontalot and MC Lars). Second, it’s an example of machinima. Third, it’s an example of how all these different media are bleeding into each other.

So, I played Dragon Age for a couple of weeks. It’s engrossing. Very engrossing. But I *was* disappointed with how little change there is to the plot or storyline with each of the six different starting conditions. Each start story was really well done, so to have the narratives from a particular one be mostly forgotten once you get to the main game… Well, on the official forums, SLPr0 wrote up a nice overview of some of the ways in which the plot could have been so much more (included after the break). Head on over to the forum thread (Literary Criticism in Regards to Flopped Plot Opportunities and the Human Noble Origin) to read the ongoing discussion.

And, of course, there’s Yahtzee’s take on Dragon Age, which is, as with all his Zero Punctuation videos, hilarious and spot on in that scathing-yet-there’s-a-bit-of-truth-there kind of way.

Continue reading “Dragon Age plot flops and Zero Punctuation”

• Dissertation (simultaneously working on proposal and actual diss, to be finished this year as a collection of previous papers plus intro chapter and new chapter on the enrollment of a third-party mod to my raid group in terms of distributed cognition and actor-network theory).
• Toying with the idea of a paper on exploring activity theory, actor-network theory, and positioning theory through two DS games, Valkyrie Profile and Devil Survivor.
• Applying for academic jobs starting next school year right now. If nothing comes through, applying for other jobs. Looking for a research position in Learning Sciences or maybe Comm or Media Studies that lets me focus on learning in games, collaboration in games, games culture, new media culture, etc.
• Also, obsessively playing Dragon Age. Very strong betrayal theme in the game’s plot and in the world’s lore.  Makes me think about previous Bioware games to try to identify the the one-word theme for each… Doable?
• Editing paper with Sarah Walter on comparing collaboration in WoW and Lord of the Rings Online through a distributed cognition lens. It’s turning out pretty good, I think!

Sat morning 8:30-10:00

Raced 3D Digital Identities: Critical Interrogations of Race, Embodiment, and Identity
Cassandra Jones, Samara Anarbaeva, Anca Birzescu, Radhika Gajjala, Franklin Yartey
Bowling Green State University

ethnographers of Second Life from a class
the moderator seems to be tweeting this panel like mad. @cyberdivalive
and actually, this makes twitter a horrible choice for a backchannel

Journey from First Life to Second
Samara Anarbaeva

How do ppl’s offline IDs affect SL IDs?
“SL lets one make their true self.”
creation of ID is an ongoing process

interview data
racial passing, gender passing, desire to authenticate race

(I wonder how intimidating it is to have Pathfinder in the audience…)
lots of citing of Nakamura and Boellstorff. http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Age-Second-Life-Anthropologist/dp/0691135282 nice.

appearances seem equally important in SL as in offscreen life

So…
Racing the Vampire: Exploring race and identity in second life
Frankey Yartey

“So, I almost became a vampire.”

the boundaries between onscreen and offscreen life are blurry

autoethnography

“As you can see now, I’m scrawny… but my avatar was muscular.”

Nakamura. Wright: double-consciousness for the african-american diaspora  conflation of IDs since an ID was imposed on them

I think this was Frankey’s first presentation… stilted presentation though interesting look at vampire life in SL.

Amateur Machinima
Cassandra Jones

started killing Sims… being a deathdealer

started killing out of boredom. but then started making short films… machinima

machinima-ists used powerful cheat codes.. was a doorway into the technical constraints of game… becoming more hardcore (to borrow from Konrad from my session on Friday)
cheat codes

Audre Lorde and Nakamura

When reigns are wrested away from master, do we create something new or do we just create what existed before?

Teapot Tempest Productions short film Utopia
basically, a school’s students are replaced with blonde, white clones
it reminds me of commie critiques in shows like the Outer Limits but exposes those as hypocritically not applicable to non-dominant groups in the US.
the American rhetoric of individualism is a lie for people of color.
in the end, the resistant recreates dominance

I presented at 8 this morning (it went well, thanks!). Didn’t take notes in the next panel after mine. Skipped the first afternoon one. Here’s the only one I took notes for. :)

Friday 5:00-6:30

Gran Turismo B.C. and A.D.: The pre-history of racing games
Charlie Breindahl

first driving games 1974! Gran Trak 10
but actually.. 1924! Motor Racing Game (with electric shock)

so, what is a game?
just looking at form, Motor Racing Game is first one, but hardware matters…

Are we in the post-ludology era of game studies?

computerized games move towards simulations such that they can be games for pleasure as well as games for training.

“The voices in my head are idiots” Rethinking Barriers for Female Gamers & the Importance of Online Communities
Tracy Kennedy

a look at GamerChix online forums and personal emails about women console gamers and their experiences, mostly sexual harassment but also some really good community building with other women.
GamerChix supports women to know how to deal with negative experiences.

Alone Together: Mixed-Mode Communication at Computer Gaming Events
Bryan-Mitchell Young

not presenting what he proposed… how ethical is that?
actually presenting on Quake 2 – Quake 4 and cyborgs and LAN parties and players as cyborgs
white male LAN goers resist or push at the idea of cyborgs (from Harraway)

With Friends Like These: Participation and Protest in Six Facebook Games
Elizabeth Losh

politeness is inherently political

fb games are political, need some socialness, and push at politeness norms
they push at politeness norms because of the way fb itself focuses on networks
network proliferation > politeness norms
and like with scrabulous, network proliferation can include using available online resources (nonhuman actors) in addition to proliferation of human actors… its the new norm. it isnt cheating

I suppose these notes are more for myself to remember what happened. I may fill in thoughts about each session later once I get back to Seattle…

*A lot* of stuff is happening in the irc backchannel which has sort of supplanted the todaysmeet one. If you want to join and don’t have an irc client, you can go to http://java.freenode.net and join the #aoir-general channel.

Thursday, 3:30-5:30

Wii are Familii
Shira Chess

a look at Mii creation and how it builds family togetherness
no hands really puts control in hands of players

the way that the Wii is targeted and advertised reifies feminine stereotypes about food is love -> play is love -> play as emotional labor

Wii and Empathii
Amanda Rotondo

Miis are persistent and created by player – these build empathy… also other Miis are in the background and that keeps them in players’ minds.

Covered some theoretical thoughts on empathy and then how the Wii/Mii embodies that.

Could Miis be used to teach empathy? How does self-resembling Miis matter to empathy?

Closing the Door and Opening the Hood on the PS3
Roger Altizer

Sony is marketing the PS3 as the everything box, but because they need control over pirates and other stuff, they’ve actually constrained what the box can do.
They are actually marketing obedient consumption. and it’s actually a corporate computer, not a personal computer.

Opening the XBox
David Bello

Using Racing the Beam chart of Levels of Abstraction and applying it to the Xbox and XBMC Media Center.

Open and Closed Platforms and Emotional Labor
Casey O’Donnell

Why did Bob really want to develop on the GBA and DS?
Homebrew is not the same as modding. Not sanctioned necessarily.

platform irreverent play/work

Homebrewers embody the whole idea of market driving development and the whole idea of generating / embracing game culture. Yet, console manufacturers continue to oppress / suppress / control them.