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.
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