GE 4102 Video Game: History, Industry, Society, and Creativity

GE 4102 Video Game: History,
Industry, Society, and Creativity
Worlds of massively multiplayer
online games
World of Warcraft
Players complete quests and advance
from level 1 to 100
More collaborative play required at
higher levels
Play against computer controlled
opponents or other players
Collaborative play against
computer controlled opponents
Most play require fighting some
enemies, but may also include
trading, hanging out, chatting, and
traveling
Buying and selling items
Collaborative play
against other players
Map of area around starting location for humans
Northshire, starting location for humans
Grinding
Ding!
Map of area around starting location for humans
Stormwind
Why do people play a game like World of Warcraft?
Bonnie Nardi, anthropologist from University of
California, Irvine, described it as an aesthetic
experience
Art objects have always been closely linked to people’s
life
However, many have associated artworks with
museums and institutions, and overlooked that the
aesthetic experience is part of what we do
On a contrary, artworks in museums have nothing to
do with most of us
10
Lastly, about art as a critique of our society:
“[A]rt is sometimes not a direct expression of life, but an expression of its antithesis. The
idea, of course, is not in the leisure of which Taine speaks, but in a certain antithesis: art
releases an aspect of our psyche which finds no expression in our everyday life. We cannot
speak of an infection with emotions. The effect of art is obviously much more varied and
complex; no matter how we approach art, we always discover that it involves something
different from a simple transmission of feelings. Whether or not we agree with Lunacharskii
that art is a concentration of life, we must realize that it proceeds from certain live feelings
and works upon these feelings,”
In “The Psychology of Art” (Lev Vygotsky, 1922)
Monet. An example of
expressing life not commonly
seen in cities.
Units of the aesthetic experience
Humans are goal oriented, i.e., we do not act without a goal in mind
What drives a majority of people is a form of goal-orientation, and the joy of
accomplishing these goals
Tasks that are more enticing are those with regular, consistent, and predictable
feedback
Ways of getting feedbacks in World of Warcraft
Players watch the experience bar
Experience bar is located at a prominent position on screen
But the aesthetic experience is also woven into our social life
Is WoW a reflection of our life?
According to Dewey, a American philosopher, psychologist, and education reformer,
discussed about the aesthetic experience
After industrialization, social life changed a great deal
A lot of lower and middle class are employed in factories and offices
Regular work hours
Clear responsibility
Often repeated actions that follow corporate policies and procedures
Dewey on corporate structure (wrt policies):
A [customer] is over-charged, or has some other difficulty with an official of a
railroad company. It is … hopeless to look for immediate relief… The conductor …
may later correspond with some higher official, and if patience and life both
persist long enough, he will probably recover… Hence the individual with a just
grievance is likely to entertain toward the corporate the feeling that he is dealing
with a machine, not with an ethical being, even as the company’s servants are not
permitted to exercise any moral consideration in dealing with the public. They
merely obey orders. (p. 503)
The same impersonal relation often prevails between employer and employed.
The ultimate employer is the stockholder, but he delegates power to the director,
and he to the president, and he to the foreman. Each is expected to get results.
The employed may complain about conditions to the president, and be told that
he cannot interfere with the foreman, and to the foreman and be told that such is
the policy of the company… Often any individual of the series would act humanely
or generously, if he were acting for himself. He cannot be humane or generous
with the property of others, and hence there is no humanity or generosity in the
whole system. (p. 501)
Most WoW players are middle class
Corporate life rarely provides the room for feedback and satisfaction
For salary
Delayed and indirect
Working as a telephone operator
Direct and immediate feedback
To help a customer
Similarly, school life and home life may not provide much of a satisfaction in many
regards
Typically, only 20-30% of all students can succeed
Duran Parsi and his life in StarCraft II
Games as arts
Games as an antithesis to cultures
At work and at school, we can be
demoted
We could lose our job; we
could fail exams
In WoW, you may die, but not lose
experience points
Could “game addiction” be a wider
educational problem, i.e., oppression of
a large section of student population?
WoW players progress linearly, from 1 to 100 levels
There is always a sense of progression
Players typically level up more rapidly in the beginning, when they have less friends
and purposes in the game
Leveling up slows down as players turn their attention to other activities,
e.g., crafting and collaborative play
This experience is also found in other activities
A piece of work in finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its
solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eating a meal,
playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book, or taking part
in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not
cessation. (Dewey)
The aesthetic experience is similar to flow, proposed by the psychologist,
Csikszentmihalyi
Flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and
represents perhaps the ultimate experience in harnessing the emotions in the
service of performing and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just contained
and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. The
hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a
task although flow is also described (below) as a deep focus on nothing but the
activity – not even oneself or one's emotions. (wikipedia)
For Csikszentmihalyi, happiness (lasting satisfaction and fulfillment) does not come
from hedonic experiences, e.g., taking drugs or eating
Hedonic leads to bodily pleasure, but does not last very long, and does not motivate
Flow leads to life long happiness and satisfaction by being able to get into a zone of
focused experience
Differences between aesthetic experience and flow
Aesthetic experience pays attention also to social circumstances and gratification after
the experience, i.e., a sense of fulfillment and accomplishment
Used as a basis of promoting better educational and social systems
Enemies of aesthetic were the inflexibilities of modernity (conventions,
rigidity, and coerced submission) that defeat how people like to engage in
such experiences
Flow refers to the state of mental and bodily concentration—the process itself is
gratifying
Used as a basis for studying high performance individuals
Bonnie Nardi et al. (2006) describes play as a form of collaborative activity
Collaboration happens when a group of people work towards common goals
In gaming, the goal may be said to be “having fun”
“Random” acts of fun in World of Warcraft
flirt, dance, drink, hug, joke, smile, laugh, and cheer (e.g., /dance)
The prompt says the player “bursts into dance” and the player will begin a genderand race-specific dance
While arguments about social life on the Internet have suggested that it may lead to
social isolation, or, at best, weak social ties, it is common for WoW players to play with
offline friends and family
Nardi and Harris, 2006. Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft
Players standing in line to attend a guild party
Nardi and Harris, 2006. Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft
College roommates and friends often play together
Two college friends who
played WoW in Shihezi,
Xinjiang, China
WoW can be a topic of offline conversation for people who play together
Nardi and Harris, 2006. Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft
Nardi et al. interviewed a player named Halbarde, who said:
“i think [playing WoW] has made me less social in real life. i will quite often pass
on doing things to stay home and play. however, that isn't a bad thing, as before, I
was quite the opposite and was having to learn to be by myself and enjoy my own
company.”
In our society, there is a social bias seeing online relationships (e.g., playing WoW) as
having less quality than offline relationships (e.g., attending a party)
Debatable
What could online relationships do that offline relationships could not?
What kinds of relationships are formed in World of Warcraft
Persistent communities, for example, guilds
One-time collaborative “knots”
unique groups that form to complete a task of relatively short duration (e.g.,
attending a seminar)
WoW instance run involving up to five players
Even though WoW involves only online relationships, it still requires players—strangers and
friends—to develop collaborative structures
Highly organized collaborations involving guilds
Short-term, weakly organized, collaborations involving temporary groups
WoW may lack a deeply cultural, historical-based, sense of communities (e.g., village life)
Gemeinschaft is a form of intimate, close relations of a group of people who know one
another well and share history and tradition
WoW communities are more fragile than gemeinschaft
But these online relationships are also more flexible; relationships within gemeinschaft
may require long term commitments (e.g., brotherhood) and are unsuitable for the
online environment
socializing in WoW is brief, lightweight, informal fun; players are free to seek out other
games they may enjoy
World of Warcraft as a social performance
Performance: An activity that requires constant attention and skill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12TuK6MacNU
As players begin to play more collaboratively, social rules began to emerge so as to
ensure a congenial environment
Examples of basic rules
1) No spamming in public channels, including participating in "anal, murloc
or Chuck Norris" jokes.
2) Guild tabs are for guild member use only. Do not send items to nonguild
alts or sell on AH or to vendors.
3) No begging in guild or in public channels
4) No profanity... family guild.
5) Please keep religion, politics and sexual content out of guild chat.
6) Send a mail to Mystrea agreeing to follow these rules within 24 hours of
joining.
Examples of high level group rules
Recruitment
Applicants have to be at least level 85, be outfitted to match the guild's needs (including, but not
limited to, class, equipment, talents), and be able to keep up at least 80% attendance. The
minimum age is 18. Recruitment is currently the responsibility of the guild leadership, although
members are asked to recommend strong players.
A trial is added to the guild and given the rank of squire. After approximately 1 week a topic will be
created on the forum where the squire's positive and negative aspects can be discussed. After at
least 4 weeks the squire will be either promoted to knight or removed from the guild. The guild
masters ultimately decide, but they are required to listen to the officers and any knight of the
same class before deciding.
Raiding
You are not allowed to join non-guild raids to the current top-end 25man instance. An exception is
made for alts, and for knights after we have cleared the instance.
Our usual raid schedule is as follows: Sunday - Thursday 19:30pm - 24:00pm. This depends on the
amount of raid content available. Ingame raids are open for invites at around 19:00. The GMOTD
will reflect this and specify the name of an officer that is currently the raid leader. Whisper 'inv' to
this officer to get an invite into the raid.
You are expected to join at least 80% of the raids. If you are unable to join the raid for a longer
period, please notify the leadership beforehand. If you do not, you risk getting demoted to social,
or removed from the guild.
To improve raid efficiency, the leadership may remove and invite guild members of any rank to the
raid at any time.
Mods that help to enforce rules
CTRaidAssist (CTRA)
Tl Taylor, a game researcher, observed that after a bad raid, her guild leader began to
enforce rules:
“I am going to be watching his [the next monster’s] target and if I see one of you agro him you are getting
minus DKP [dragon kill points, a cumulative reward system guilds often use].”
DKP is a form of performance indicator used in WoW
At its heart, CTRA is very much a surveillance tool
Leaders can monitor how much damage its group members are dealing and the
equipment they had brought into raids
What if a player does not want to install a the CTmod?
Now that feels like work!
Hard to divide between work and play
Play
A subjective experience of freedom
An absence of social obligation and
physical necessity
A subject experience that is absorbing,
compelling, or pleasurable
Occurrence in a separate realm sometimes
referred to as the magic circle
For top students, studies could be like play
But for bad students:
“night ppl [people] c u [see you] after the first
day of hell I mean skool”
WoW could feel like work in some circumstances
“i do more homework for wow than I do for school lol”
Another player observes
“[Games] hire us for imaginary, meaningless jobs that replicate the
structures of real-world employment… If games are supposed to be fun…
why do they go so far to replicate the structure of a repetitive dead-end job?”
Some Chinese players said:
Peng: Our guild is like a work unit, you belong to a certain team.
Chui: You have to participate [in raiding] everyday from 7 pm to 12 pm. That feels
like work.
Lefen: It is very exhausting to participate in regular guild activities, especially for
classes whose task is to watch the combat for a very long time. Thus, after
finishing a guild activity, we are too exhausted for anything else.
This often degenerates into a “class conflict” between expert and novice players, as a
guild master summarized:
“So where does that leave everyone? People are free to remain here or to go their
separate ways if they so choose. If guild is more important than raid to you, that is
fine. If raid is more important than guild to you, that is also fine. It’s your game,
you choose how you want to play it.”
From my own casual (unscientific) observation, guilds began to require more rules at
about 100 members, and conflict begins to emerge at about 200 members
Guilds with more than 300 members are much more formal