Post #14- Emergent Cultures and Game Design

Part of me almost wishes that Pearce had ended her book with her field note section in Book IV.  While I personally feel that it was the most exciting part of her book, the finals few chapters could easily prove invaluable to anyone hoping to do studies of this sort.

Game Design and Emergence

Pearce speaks briefly about her work on the Myst Online Uru Live game, that unfortunately, lasted only about a year.  She details how this ending, the ending of MOUL was drastically different than the ending of the first site, complete with visits from the creators and advanced notice so members could find somewhere else to reconvene after the fact.  She comments, in this section on MOUL, that it was an "eerie moments: to experience firsthand, as a member of the community, the story I had heard numerous times over the previous four years" (269).  Pearce claims to have understood the pain the other members had gone through, though I cannot see how she could have even gleamed it.  There were so many different aspects of the second closing that were missing in the first, so many important aspects.  It seems as though Pearce was pulling at straws, so to speak.  She wanted to experience it the way others did in hopes of connecting with them even deeper, but it doesn't quite work.  At least, not that I can see.

Her discussion of MOUL leads us into the conversation about creating games where emergent culture is going to, well, emerge.  Geared mostly towards game designers, this chapter proved to be interesting in the questions it raised.  Pearce wonders how we can guide emergent cultures.  But really, wouldn't guiding them be changing them, dictating them?  Losing the organic feel of the culture would seem, at least to me, to be watering down the culture as a whole.  

However, Pearce does make an interesting comment about these games and their subsequent games.  Game designers seem to be ignoring the various aspects of emergent culture that arise from the games they build.  These games cease to be theirs, cease to belong in spirit to the designers--a concept which designers might not understand fully, as they are not, according to Pearce, paying attention to the culture that arises in their games and using it when they begin designing other games.  For instance, in MOUL, Cyan did adopt some things, such as soccer balls and posts so that the players could play (as they had seen that the players would use things such as traffic cones for bowling).  If designers would pay more attention to their players, if they were more involved, such as the Second Life creators are, perhaps these cultures would continue to grow and change.  And, according to Pearce, "these issues will become increasingly important as play becomes a more pervasive part of culture, not only in virtual worlds, but in every aspect of life" (275).

Which leads me to comment upon her argument that game designers need to, essentially, accept the fact that their games are going to develop further from what they had intended it to be.  Communities of play foster collaboration and creation and these games and virtual worlds take on various forms and different forms and their creation, while still nominally in the designer's hands, belongs in large part to the players.  As a writer myself, and a game design of text based games, I can understand the plight of the designers--we don't want to necessarily lose control  of our design, but I will say, it is a really neat experience to see the transitions they can make.

Some Thoughts

It is, however, the last thing Pearce says, which I think could be tied up with both Gee and Bogost.  Pearce says that Uru is its players (281) and that the ending is not over, that it is still being written (if we have even gotten to that part).  And indeed, the study of play communities, of video games is not over, and the possibilities seem endless right now.  In relation to Bogost, games which express a procedural rhetoric have the ability to never end, so to speak because they continue to challenge their players, pushing them to think, draw conclusions, probe, draw more conclusions, and the cycle continues.   Which relates directly to Gee's principle of learning which says that in learning (and good video games) the learner/player is required to probe and reprobe the world--again and again.  Which is exactly what Pearce has done in her study--and what, I believe she is partially talking about when she claims that "perhaps the ending has not yet been written" (281).

As a very brief sum up of this class and the books, I would like to say that, for someone who has never considered themselves a gamer, I have sure started to see myself a bit differently.

Questions

1) Does playing inherently lead to creating?  Or can one play without then creating?  Is it just as fulfilling?

2) Pearce speaks about undesirable emergence.  What would be some examples of that and is it anyone's right to alter that?  If we follow Bogost's way of thinking, could playing these games help the player to question the culture?

3) Pearce comments upon the designers need to let go of their projects, to let them move and change.  She also comments that it could be difficult for the designer.  Do you think you would have difficulty letting go of your design?  This can apply to our two games we are constructing now.

Post # 13- Research Methods and Becoming Artemesia

The Guild--Avatars =]

In both the movie, Avatar, and the webshow, The Guild, Gee’s ideas of a third character are strongly intact.  We see the main character in Avatar adopting the role of the avatar in order to infiltrate their land, however we see a new breed of avatar come to life, so to speak, as he melds sensibilities he had with those of the avatar people.  And, in The Guild, a web show which parodies MMOGs (in particular WoW, though it is never expressively mentioned), Kodex, the main character draws on her in world persona in order to bypass her nearly debilitating shyness and non-confrontational manner to bring a serious win to her guild.  In both of these examples (and more, I am sure) a third character arises—one that is neither fully the player or the avatar.

                I, Avatar

Pearce’s fourth section of her book dwells on this idea many times, especially in the section labeled, “I, Avatar” and the sections dealing with Pearce’s presentations as Artemesia.  Pearce describes the sensation as , “the screen image of the various ‘mes’ dissolves like a bubble, but Artemesia still exists inside Celia” (216).  This phenomenon extends past Pearce’s merely logging off and feeling like Artemesia.  Instead, it transcends into her working life manifesting in presentations given by Artemesia and books being co-authored by Artemesia.  In fact, Pearce even states that one publisher wanted an agreement signed by Artemesia, despite knowing full well that she was the avatar of Pearce.  Artemesia is not merely an avatar, but, in essence, a person made up of two people—the limitations and concessions of the avatar itself and Celia.

Artemesia

                I think it is interesting to note that people cosplay their characters at gaming conventions, embodying their characters at a time when it is completely okay to do so.  In many ways this is what Pearce does.  She can fully be this third person when presenting at conferences with Artemesia because she is one half of Artemesia.  It may confuse people, as Pearce comments, and maybe even serve as nothing more than amusement, but it can work, and in essence three people are giving that presentation—Pearce, the avatar, and Artemesia.

                One intriguing question that Pearce brought forth in this section is who creates who?  Does the player create the character?  Or does the character, situated within a culture, create the player?  Where do the lines drawn between the two begin and end?  Pearce offers one suggestion, claiming that they create each other, that the culture both are participating in, in this case The Gathering of Uru, helps to shape who exactly both Pearce and Artemesia are.  I wonder though who gets the most.  Logically it may be Artemesia that gets ‘created’ as it is Pearce (the player) who constructs her, but I think the player equally changes.  The intersection of different people and different practices has the ability to create the player, so to speak—and it definitely has the ability to create the third identity.

              

  Field Work

                The two sections, Three and Four, deal with the process of cyber ethnography, in particular Pearce’s experience with it.  This detailed version of how  she conducted her study was interesting and could prove to be very beneficial for someone desirous of conducting their own research on a similar topic.

Within Section 3, Pearce lays out for the reader the methods she undertook while completing this study.  She employed a mixture of field work, interviews, immersion into the culture, and observation (of which immersion and observation could be lumped into field work).  She hit stumbling blocks along the way, questions such as “How immersed is too immersed?” and “What happens when I finish this study?,” questions which ended up being shaped by both her study and the culture. 

Within Section 4, the section I believe I found the most interesting of the entire book, Pearce provides us with a journal of sorts—her field notes told in a very narrative structure, allowing us to essentially glimpse through a window the day to day actions and reactions which occurred in her study.  We are privy to Pearce’s emotions and struggles in a very unscientific manner.  I enjoyed this, maybe because I am a writer, but also because it seems to be a good addition to a more scientific, just the facts ma’am approach.  While I don’t believe it could stand alone as a valid study, I do believe it offers a very much needed other perspective to a study.  It was also enjoyable to read, though at times I was confused at who was talking—which, I suppose, just goes to show how fluid the three facets can be (player, avatar, character).

Questions

1) Can you think of any MMOGs where players are allowed to make disabled characters if they so  

      chose?

2) How do you think you would react to a presentation at a conference being given by an avatar?

3) Why do you think some of the MMOWs Pearce speaks about have such outdated technology 

      when it comes to saving chat logs?  Even AIM saves logs.

Post #12- The Gathering of Uru

Uru banners in There.com

         

       Being as we like to connect with a group, to feel ourselves engage with others of like mind or similar values, these chapters of Pearce’s about The Gathering of Uru were not terribly difficult to grasp.  And, in fact, they proved to be extremely interesting.  It was, perhaps, her chapter entitled “Identity as Place” which interested me the most, much to my surprise (as I thought the one of Avatars would strike my fancy).

Identity and Place         

       Pearce launches into a description of Uru Prologue.  This game was launched by Cyan and Ubisoft in 2003 as a beta testing site for the Uru Live based off of the Myst games.  This game had the capabilities to be played single player (Uru Prime) or multi player (Uru Prologue) and players had to wait on waiting lists to join the beta testing phase.  The game’s demographic was predominately middle aged players, many of whom had never played video games and especially MMOGs.  The reason for this?  It is possible because this game involved a generally non violent game play with puzzles to be solved.  Whatever the reason, the game developed quickly with at least 10,000 members.  However, Cyan and Ubisoft decided to close the site in what appeared to be a combination of low turnout and the “instability of the client-server architecture” (87).

                It was this cataclysmic event which caused the Diaspora of Uruvians, and from which Pearce launches this chapter.  These players, and their in-game avatars, attempted to protest this ending and gathered in game in groups—an image which, in my mind, resembles the ways in which people gather after a tragedy.  Their attempts were futile, with the site closing regardless, and, according to Pearce, this moment has been immortalized in many of their memories.  The players of Uru had lost their home.

                The members of the game dispersed into other MMOWs, such as There.com and Second Life hoping to rebuild their home after the tragedy.  They gathered in groups within these worlds, clinging together for comfort for familiarity, despite some personal misgivings about the particular world.  The Gathering of Uru, the group Pearce studied most frequently became fiercely knit, in essence waging a battle against a faction of Thereians from There.com who felt that the Uruvians were taking over their territory.  I found that particularly interesting because it seems to straddle the line between high school cliques and large scale immigration.  It also shows the deep connection these players had to their world and budding culture.  The Uruvians, in particular The Gathering of Uru, were not about to dissolve. 

                That whole event reminded me of the time when a board I was part of closed.  A small group of us transported ourselves and our characters to a different board (the closest we could find that would accommodate our characters) and attempted to keep what culture we had.  While it was a much more mild version of what happened to the Uruvians, when I read this chapter I could relate to the feelings of loss.

            

Avatars

Uru avatar

    And, before I end this blog, I want to touch on Pearce’s chapter on the “Inner Lives of Avatars.”  Because the creation of avatars and alternative personalities interests me, I found this chapter and in particular the study of Lynn’s character fascinating.  Lynn who is a deputy mayor of The Gathering of Uru is stuck in a wheelchair due to a spinal condition.  Within Uru and then There.com, she is able to transcend that state, be the person she wants to be, the person she was before her condition committed her to the chair.  She was able to be the person she wanted to be, the person she knew she was.  This entire chapter really seems to highlight this ability of avatars and these relationships between player and avatar.

                Pearce gives one more example in this chapter which illustrates a very important aspect of avatars, especially when they relate to a group.  In this particular case, a man had a female avatar and the female avatar had been integrated into the world.  The other players knew this person as a woman (even though he was not transgendered in real life) and even when they found out the player was a male, they wanted him to keep playing a female.  The other players had become attached to the woman avatar.  In this case, the group identity was more important than the individual’s identity. 

                There is a culture which springs up through the interactions with the group, a culture which manifests because of the relationships between the members of the group, their bonding, their shared history.  Having that threatened can be a traumatizing event, especially when it had already been threatened (and then made stronger) by the closing of Uru Prologue.  It’s hard to know if this group’s culture would have been so strong if it did not need to cross worlds and resettle, but it’s interesting to consider.

Questions

1)     1)  Do you think this particularly game and group (Uru and The Gathering of Uru) was the best subject for studying emergent culture?  Could it have been better to study an emergent culture that did not rise out of tragedy?

2)    2)   Can the “flow” which is characterized by Csikszentmihalyi be applied to either of our two games?

3)      3) Do you think this Dispora would have happened differently and perhaps the culture would have ended had the majority of players been of a younger age bracket?

Post #11- Playing in Virutal Worlds

Play is not a new concept, and neither is the idea that we all belong to various communities of play, groups in which we can adopt different roles, take on different aspects of ourselves or our other selves.  Upon reading this first chapter I made a list of the play communities I am apart of to help further understand this idea Pearce puts forth in the beginning of her book Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds.  I am a text based RPer, I am part of the hoop performer/festival community (similar to her Burning Man example), I am a convention goer who dresses up in various personas, I was a part of the Society of Creative Anachronisms (people who like to reenact Rennasance and Medieval aspects of life), and I used to be part of the theater community.  In essence, all of those communities are communities of play, communities which exist “quite sonciously outside ‘ordinary’ life” and are “ ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing theh player intensely and utterly” (5).

                Pearce opens up her book on play communities with a brief outline of playing, how it started, what it was like, and asserting that in many ways these MMOWs and MMOGs are a return to a more “natural order” (7) as games used to be mostly multiplayer.  It wasn’t until technology advanced in the most recent centuries that games because predominantly solo played.  In many ways it seems as though we have taken a step back, drawing in and away from communication with others, until the birth of MMOWs and MMOGs.  And, it is within these sorts of worlds that creative inquiry burgeons.  With table top RPGs there was miniature paintings and fan art (though we still see fan art a lot today with Con Badges con goers have commissioned of their characters).  Within these specific communities of play (and others) we have a growth of creativity through avatars, avatar art, ingame fashion design, etc.

Avatars      

My avatar on GaiaOnline.com

      There are specific ways in which virtual worlds are structure, specific characteristics which help them succeed including that they must be spatially diverse, explorable, persistent, inhabitable, populated, exhibit worldness, and allow the player to participate (all of which I am going to bypass over except for the identities part in this blog).  As a writer and someone who engages in text based games primarily (though I am an avid member of Gaiaonline.com), the avatar, arguably one of the most important aspects of virtual worlds, fascinates me.  It allows the player to expand themselves, reach into what they want to be seen as.  With the ability to alter so many things on many avatars, players can chose to represent that they look like (perhaps young/old, thin/fat, bald/full head of hair) or they can project themselves the way they want to be seen.  Basically, Pearce harkens back to Gee’s concept of the player as the hero.  Even in games where there is no definitive beginning or end, the player has the ability to posit themselves as “hero.”  Throughout all of the avatars I have had, I often keep some times the same—for instance, I try to make all of my avatars fit into the “goth” persona, one which I would dress more if it were culturally acceptable (I used to and that just ended badly!).

           Culture     

Perhaps the greatest topic Pearce dwells on within this second of the book is emergent cultures within these virtual worlds (which is, granted, part of her general goal of the book).  Pearce writes that “emergent behavior in games and virtual worlds arises out of a complex interaction between players and the affordances of the play space they inhabit” (24).    Basically, if we chose to consider these virtual worlds as real worlds (which begs the question, what exactly is real?), the cultures that evolve come from both interactions between players and the constraints/rules of their worlds.  These emergent cultures can take the form of “online weddings, game-wide protests, social organixations, and various types of social and fashion trends” (46).  Much like real culture, though time on the internet can be accelerated which place these virtual worlds as prime places to study.  All of this is to prime the reader for the remainder of the book which delves into an in depth study of the Uru Dispora and the culture that arose from there.        

                Pearce, in these first several chapters provided us, the readers, with a good handhold to start from as we delve into this idea of emergent culture in virtual worlds.

               

Questions:

1)      1) Continuing the thought of communities of play, what communites of play are you involved with?

2)      

2) Which sort of “world” is better?  Or rather, which do you enjoy more?—One, like There.com where player content cannot be introduced without extensive review?  Or one like Second Life/Minecraft where the players have the ability to shape and create their world as they desire?

3)       

3) Will the two games we are creating have the ability to develop emergent cultures?  Is that necessarily important for our games?

Post #10- Education, exercise, and Bogost vs. Gee

Image from: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/

Now that we’ve come to a close on Bogost’s book, we have hit the pedagogy chapters, the ways in which videogames have the potential to be used for teaching, in educating.  Bogost and Gee would seem to disagree on many points in the conversation regarding videogames and learning, although that might be the result of their very different approaches to education. 

                Bogost begins his third section of the book with an outline of two very prominent educating methods—behaviorism and constructivism.  Behaviorism is very popular is school systems, focusing on the reinforcement tactics such as students receiving A’s for good work and F’s for poor work.  Those who adhere to constructivism focus often times on the individual, their learning experience, and their ability to “play” or “do” in order to learn, bringing in past experiences as building blocks.  We see this method a lot in kindergarten and the Montessori schools.

Education           

    These two popular theories are at odds within the education system in America and thus pose various different problems for video games.  Because both systems focus on different aspects of games, we seem to hit an impass.  How can games be useful in the educational system? 

And this is also where Gee and Bogost seem to veer off—although I believe that Bogost might merely be a more elaborate build up of Gee’s.  According to Gee, good video games allow a players to engage in embodied learning—that is, video games, when played actively “situating meaning in a multimodal space through embodied experiences to solve problems and reflect on the intricacies” (241) of the world (both real and imagined.  Bogost, in this chapter, argues that no meaning or experience is general, but rather, because video games are rhetorical, there must be a correlation between particular worlds and relationships.  Hence, why it seems as though Bogost is building and refining upon Gee, rather than driving a clear divide between him and Gee.  This, of course, leads Bogost into his definition of procedural literacy as “any activity that encourages active assembly of basic building blocks according to particular logics” (257).  If this is the case, perhaps what we are creating within Second Life and Minecraft are helping to grow/build out procedural literacy. 

                Continuing along with the concept of schooling and education (two ideas which Bogost claim are completely separate and I must admit, I agree), Bogost transitions into the value systems which are instilled within the traditional school system and work places.  These two cultural institutions help to drive home the ideas of consumption and value in work.  We go to school so our parents can work so they can purchase products that advertisers say we need.  Children, in school (and essentially at home), learn the value of work so that they can then go out into the world and work and consume.  It’s a vicious cycle.  But, if games provide a strong internal rhetoric through the procedure of the game, these values (including ones that have to do with faith) can be examined—looked at under the hood, so to speak.  Games such as Animal Crossing help the player to explore and think about the culture of consumption, giving the player the tools to make decisions about consumerism.  Bogost also speaks about the game Cold Stone Creamery: Stone City which “exposes the corporate business model” (261).  Like Animal Crossing it helps to expose a system through its procedural rhetoric.

Exergames

Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Dance_Dance_Revolution_North_American_arcade_machine_3.jpg

I found the section of exergames to be particularly interesting, though I had trouble seeing them as hosting any sort of procedural rhetoric.  Of all the video games we have spoken about, I am most familiar with these, being an avid DDR player and having the Zumba game, as well as Wii Fit Plus and the Biggest Loser Wii game.  Bogost leads us through a history of these games, attempting to posit that video games have long since been infiltrated with physical activity (though I feel that this was a major stretch). Bogost suggests that games such as DDR allow players to be both the exerciser and the personal trainer.  The game uses procedural tactics to general feedback from the motivating (or sometimes unmotivating) voice.  However, despite the fact that some games might have some procedural rhetoric, our culture and values might be what persuades us from actually engaging in these games.

Persuasive Games and Evaluation

Persuasive games, those that employ procedural rhetoric and probe the player into starting conversations (with themselves or others) about the procedures exposed by the act of play, must submit to evaluation just as any other game.  However, unlike other games or products where a counter can be ticked everytime someone plays, these are best evaluated by their ability to conjur up conversations and critic—which is exactly their purpose, according to Bogost. 

Within the constructs of our institutions of education, politics, and advertising, games with a strong procedural rhetoric are the games which take Gee’s concepts of embodied experience and allow a closer and particular experience to be had.  As Bogost claims, “videogames get to the heard of things by mounting arguments about the processes inherent in them” (339).

Questions:

1)      Would you consider our game design within Second Life to be more constructivism than behaviorism?  And, because of the problems inherent in both, is there a way we can use aspects of both within the game?  Or do we want to?

2)      Through the creation of our projects in Second Life and Minecraft, how would you say our procedural literacy is growing?

3)      Is there a way to reconcile Bogost and Gee?  They seem to have some very different ideas via the educational potential of games, but I wonder if it is possible to find an example where both of their ideas are present. Maybe there isn’t, but I’m curious.