Nobody Reads Your Blog

By this point there are a few models of how the player identifies with the character floating around; they could use some sorting out. James Paul Gee in his book suggests a three-part model — character, player, and player-as-character.

We raised some questions along these lines the other day in John Black’s seminar. What about games where there is no avatar to identify with, the classic exception-to-many-rules again being Tetris? How do you identify then? Is it appreciably different from the engagement you experience when playing a game in which you have an avatar?

(A few more questions off the top of my head: If particular players strongly feel that their identity is unitary and inflexible, do they not not gravitate towards games in which identification with a character is central to play? Or if they do, do they play differently? And finally, how does your level of agency affect how your identity is enlisted in play?)

Someone in Black’s practicum raised the question of why puzzle and computer card games are more motivating to some people than to others. I have heard it mentioned a few times lately that card players actually make up the largest percentage of computer game players; in that light, it’s worth trying to tease out the range of purposes that video games serve in various players’ lives.

One aspect of this is the social meaning of video gaming in general. Peter Bell, a researcher for the Pew Internet and American Life project, brought up that adult gamers, a growing group, have to contend with the childish image associated with video gaming. This is being made easier by the incorporation of games into cel phones; one can play in public without carrying a game device more associated with children such as the Game Boy. New identities, such as the “wired urban nomad,” are also developing which incorporate gaming in a way that fits into adulthood.

Greg Lastowka, an intellectual property lawyer, talked about the burgeoning field of law covering the virtual worlds of EverQuest, Ultima, the Sims, NeoPets and other role-playing games and simulations. He mentioned there.com and Second Life; these are basically online “worlds” which are mostly oriented towards women and girls. I was a little disgusted to find that in one of them, you can pay actual real-world money for virtual Levis to clothe your character (and then follow a link to buy the same actual clothes for your meatspace body).

Lastowka mentioned that some people involved in these worlds approach them as games, while others treat them more like worlds and places to explore. This is an interesting distinction for us to consider, I think; it places video gaming in a broader but related field of recreational virtual-world interaction, which is perhaps where we ought to be anyway if we want to consider interactions of bulletin boards, web surfing, simulations, and role-playing with games. I think a lot more may already have been written about non-game worlds like this from psychosocial perspectives, specifically Sherry Turkle‘s Life on the Screen and Janet Murray‘s Hamlet on the Holodeck.

How and where video games fit into academia is still very much up for grabs. This ambiguity surfaced a few times at the Princeton conference. Tevis Thompson, who did an insightful “close reading” of the game Super Mario Brothers at the conference, advocated that actually playing the games should remain part of studying them; he taked of critics using their “hand-eye” (analogous to a film-studies use of the “cino-eye”) to make sense of what they are seeing onscreen.

David Thomas, a writer for the Denver Post and the game theory site buzzcut.com made a passionate case for maintaining an accessible vocabulary, mostly for the sake of keeping the players who have already contributed a great deal to game evolution involved in the development of the field.

I think it was Thomas who expressed concern that video game studies (or “ludology,” as it is being called in some places — Greek for the study of play) was in danger of being “colonized” by other disciplines. In informal discussion, a few conference attendees agreed, expressing annoyance that critical theorists and scholars in the field of cultural studies already seem to be making inroads into the discipline and cluttering it with esoteric jargon.

Some academic camps have made more claims to the discipline than others. There are apparently established schools of video-game thought in Italy and Scandinavia. Barry Atkins, a Principal Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, spoke out against what he saw as a tendency in these two camps to take all the fun out of games (witness their desire to name the field ludology rather than give it a more accessible title). The opening salvos fired by Atkins have led to some heated battle online.

Atkins expressed concern that games were often getting discussed in terms of labor, and made a case for maintaining a sense of the aesthetic pleasure of gaming within the academic study of games. The problem, as Atkins noted, is that this returns our discussions to the realm of subjectivity… never a position that academia finds defensible, and an especially difficult one for those of us in education under the Bush regime, with its ever-stricter demands for quantitative data.

A sorting out of play itself seems to be in order. John Voiklis, one of my TC peers, made the distinction between “play” and “playfulness” the other day in John Black’s practicum. He pointed out that work can be like play, if we enjoy what we do and approach it in a spirit of creativity and fun. One distinction there, I guess, is that play-like work doesn’t enjoy the social moratorium that actual play does. I personally am hoping to get some time to go back and look at the literature on play and its purposes in learning and society. I’ve already done some reading on creativity, mostly in the context of television, and this has touched on the subject.