The Rawls discussion sparked a provoking line of inquiry on game designers turning their systems expertise to real world issues, and especially voting.
As the conversation grows more sprawling, I have a more difficult time keeping up with the different branches and simultaneous threads.
“The intuitive idea is to design the social system so that the outcome is just whatever it happens to be, at least so long as it is within a certain range. The notion of pure procedural justice is best understood by a comparison with perfect and imperfect procedural justice. To illustrate the former, consider the simplest case of fair division. A number of men are to divide a cake: assuming that the fair division is an equal one, which procedure, if any, will give this outcome? Technicalities aside, the obvious solution is to have one man divide the cake and get the last piece, the others being allowed their pick before him. He will divide the cake equally, since in this way he assures for himself the largest share possible. This example illustrates the two characteristic features of perfect procedural justice. First, there is an independent criterion for what is a fair division, a criterion defined separately from and prior to the procedure which is to be followed. And second, it is possible to devise a procedure that is sure to give the desired outcome. Of course, certain assumptions are made here, such as that the man selected can divide the cake equally, wants as large a piece as he can get, and so on. But we can ignore these details. The essential thing is that there is an independent standard for deciding which outcome is just and a procedure guaranteed to lead to it. Pretty clearly, perfect procedural justice is rare, if not impossible, in cases of much practical interest.”
—John Rawls
A Theory of Justice: Original Edition (Kindle Locations 1510-1520).
tl;dr – scroll down for pix
The photos used in this post & more are available under a Creative Commons (attribution) license here in hi-res. Enjoy!
When I got to San Francisco on the Saturday night before the 2013 Game Developers Conference, I had already been on the road for two weeks, hopping from Copenhagen to Chicago to Ann Arbor to LA to Philadelphia on PhD visits and law school tours. I’ve never done travelling like that, but maybe the worst part is that I kind of liked it. After the first few days, I had a routine even if I wasn’t in a set place— I read a lot on planes, made single serving coffee, sampled the greasy street fare and free art museums of places I’d never been before, walked constantly, etc.
I was eating at a hot dog joint with my folks on the way to the New Orleans airport when I found out about receiving the GDC IGDA Scholarship and I promptly cheered and told my parents. They weren’t that impressed, initially, but once I explained what the slew of letters I had just blurted out stood for, and also that I don’t technically have class this semester, I’d say they were at any rate supportively bemused. I sent the application for IGDA’s GDC scholarship from the deepest pit of LSAT purgatory, and it came sailing back through sattelite transmission to the screen in my pocket at half-time of a chilidog double-header. This is the modern world.
If you’re a student involved in the games industry in any way, I encourage you to check out the IGDA Scholarship program! It can get you to a lot more places than GDC!
In December, nobody in Glitchnap thought we’d be at GDC, but through an incredible spree of luck, we were all going by the time March rolled around. We sent in a ton of applications, hoping that something would pan out, and I ended up with an IGDA Scholarship, then Mads, Joon & Mikkel (as Wolfmans) found out they were selected for a slot at Chartboost University: Boot Camp, a two week session on the tech needed to successfully get a commercial software product off the ground, while we were in the middle of a submission to Mozilla’s Game On competition. A week later, Glitchnap won the Mozilla Game On Grand Prize and Best Multi-Device awards with an HTML5 port of Zumbie: Blind Rage. Through some careful finagling between the various prizes, we were able to get our whole team out to San Francisco. We can’t thank IGDA, Mozilla and Chartboost enough for getting us to GDC!
One of the great things for us was witnessing the global indie community in action first hand (and also getting drunk with them). Before GDC even started, we had a chance to meet some of the people who make games that have started some serious internal rivalries: we played the hell out of Samurai Gunn in my apartment, and I’d been a huge fan of 0space & Shoot First! so it was really amazing to meet Beau Blyth (a.k.a. @teknopants)—here he is on the right next to Paul Veer (a.k.a. @pietepiet), who does a lot of amazing pixel-art for Vlambeer.
Here’s Mads Johansen listening to Dick Hogg (member of Wild Rumpus & creator of Best Game on PSVita, 2012 Tommy Rousse Award-winner, Frobisher Says!) talk about the narwhals of his youth.
As part of the IGDA Scholars on-site tours, we got a chance to tour Double Fine and ask some questions of legendary game designer Handsome Tim Schafer.
Joon & Mads made it to the Rumpus Royale MMXIII finals in Hokra. The team that beat them was Doug Wilson, who was behind the whole Kickstarter that’s publishing the game, and fellow Sportsfriend Noah Sasso, so I’d say Glitchnap made a pretty good showing. I was hoping to dominate at Samurai Gunn, but we had to play on PS3 controllers and I got knocked out of the first round.
Here we are at the Mozilla San Francisco offices!
I got a chance to check out Ian Bogost’s Zen Atari game Guru Meditation 1
At the same exhibition, here’s avant-garde weirdo tabletop game Everything is Dolphins! (bit of a misnomer, really, as the game I overheard a lot of things seemed to be swords/maces/halberds held by dolphins) with David Kanaga’s Panoramical in the background.
Of course, getting an All-Access pass to GDC also meant going to some really outstanding talks. I wrote up one of those talks, by QWOP Maestro Bennett Foddy, over at Killscreen. I got a chance to see talks by Blizzard and Riot Games, plus I got a chance to get on stage and play some folk games with Doug Wilson. One of my favorite talks of the conference was the indie rant, and the highlight of the indie rant was an impassioned reading & reinterpretation of Cara Ellison‘s “John Romero’s Wives” by Anna Anthropy.
A lot of other awesome stuff happened at GDC– the Wild Rumpus party, exhibiting LAZA KNITEZ!! at the infamous IGDA/YetiZen shindig, going to Five Rings with the IGDA Scholars, meeting Jenovah Chen and all the awesome Mozilla folks, and lots of other stuff but with all the running around I did, I often found myself without my camera when I really wanted it.
Going to GDC made me feel like I had some kind of grasp on the videogame industry and the various factions it’s composed of, from academics to indies to AAA developers. Seeing the whole ecology at once gave me a better idea where I fit in, and even that there might be a place for an academic with a newly discovered passion for game design. Getting to mill around the IGF booth and “see the future” of indie gaming was pretty unforgettable!
Special thanks to Luke Dicken, Kate Edwards, Heather Decker-Davis, Sheri Rubin, & Molly Malone for all their great work putting the IGDA Scholars program together this year!
I’ll be starting a joint JD/PhD with Northwestern Law & the School of Communication’s Media, Technology & Society program in the fall. I did my bachelor’s degree in American Studies at Northwestern and I worked in an MTS-affiliated lab for a year before studying in Copenhagen. I’m proud to be going back to Evanston and Chicago. The JD/PhD process was fairly torturous, but I’m very happy to be on the other side. I was fortunate to have had no bad choices for graduate school, and I had a chance to meet some amazing scholars and see beautiful campuses on the first part of my little U.S. tour.
I’m editing photos now for a recap of my trip to the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco last month. That post will be coming soon.
I have a couple of thousand-word journal posts which I’m contractually obligated to file in the next ten days or so. Gotta get them ECTS, you know. In case you missed it, I also recently published a recap of our experiences last year as winners of the 2012 Nordic Indie Sensation Award for Copenhagen Game Collective.
Before returning to heady academic analyses, though, I’ll briefly regale you with a tale of my impending journey, whereby I set off across the amber waves of grain, etc. of my insecure homeland in pursuit of fame, glory and swag. In that noble pursuit I’ll be criss-crossing the country in search of a new home. My time in Denmark is growing short; if everything goes according to plan, I’ll be done with my Master’s thesis in early June and I’ll decamp from Europe some time during the summer.
For roughly the last four years, I have been trying to become a JD/PhD candidate. While I dimly recognized then that gaining admission to two programs at the same school, each with a perilously slim acceptance rate, would be a harrowing task, I was then but a naive waif wholly unprepared for the mountains of paperwork, the legions of bureaucrats, the Sisphyean tasks and the Augean stables piled high with horseshit. But I’m standing now on the cusp of that elusive goal, having been accepted into three PhD programs and two accompanying JDs (still waiting on that third one!). So I’ll be headed off into the United States for some college tours. This is the first time I go on a college tour, because I went to Northwestern as an undergrad sight unseen.
That’s the first leg of the tour, plus some time to recoup with dear friends and allies in Chicago and Los Angeles along the way. For the second part of the tour, I have to explain Glitchnap to you. Glitchnap is Team Buttfighters redux— look we came up with that name after six hours of brainstorming, and never expected our game design group to last for two years and counting! So we needed a new name. Mads, Joon, and Jonas, the other three handsome fellows in Glitchnap, are sitting in San Francisco now at Chartboost University Boot Camp learning about how to become a successful startup, along with our good friend Mikkel. Because of some EXTREMELY AWESOME NEWS that I can’t share with you yet, our whole team ended up getting free trips out to GDC.
I’m heading out to GDC thanks to the IGDA Scholars program. I just recently found out that I’ve been assigned Tom Buscaglia, the Game Attorney, as my IGDA mentor, and I’m thrilled to be meeting him soon. After GDC I’ll be heading back to Copenhagen for about a month before shipping back out to the U.S. for the Extending Play conference at Rutgers, where I’m on a panel with fellow ITU-Copenhageners Miguel Sicart and Douglas Wilson. I think I’m going to be heading out to a bunch of other crazy conferences before my thesis gets handed in June 3rd (yikes!), but mum’s the word on that until I hear a little more. I’ve got to row my ducks and get to packing, but that’s a quick update on what I’m up to over the next three weeks. See you in San Francisco!
For the Game Cultures seminar at ITU, I presented a companion lecture for our session on Co-Creative Labour and Culture. For that class, we read Hector Postigo’s “From Pong to Planet Quake,” Henry Jenkins’ “Interactive Audiences?”, a chapter of Jon Dovey & Helen Kennedy’s Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media titled “Interventions and Recuperations?” and “A Playful Multitude? Mobilising and Counter-Mobilising Immaterial Game Labor” by Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford (I’ve previously discussed their book, Games of Empire, in this journal).
Almost all of the discussions of immaterial labor we read for class discussed exploitation, but they also generally took the term for granted without going into too much detail about its specifics. I was reminded of the first paper I had written about game studies several years ago, an essay on Caillois’ four elements of play. In that paper, I had argued that each of the four elements was focused on the displacement or temporary abandonment of the ego. Since then, I have been intrigued by the relationship between games and alienation. I think they have a number of striking formal similarities, and I wanted to share my preliminary thoughts on these matters with the class and get their feedback. Fair warning: these ideas are even more germinal than most of the stuff I share on this journal, and if I wasn’t getting graded on this little sojourn I’d probably keep it to myself until I had done some more work on it. But if you have any suggestions or criticism, please let me know.
To establish a common theoretical ground I briefly outlined Marx’s concept of alienation as expressed in the essay “Estranged Labour” from The Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844. In this “early Marx” essay, Marx describes four sources of alienation caused by wage labor:
1. Alienation from the product— Workers produce for the benefit of someone else, and seldom use the commodities they make. These products are sold and generate a profit, the whole of which is not given to the worker.
2. Alienation from the working process— In the structured environment of capitalist production, workers must pursue their work in specified ways which do not allow them the opportunity for self-expression and exploration that they might seek in non-alienated labour. The focus of their labour is also defined by the needs of the market, rather than their own needs or their creative urges (e.g. a worker might want to devote his labour-power to writing poetry, but the market forces him to flip burgers instead).
3. Alienation from the fellow worker— In the competitive marketplace, each worker who enters the labor pool reduces the value of his fellow laborers. The “reserve army” of the unemployed makes individual workers easy to replace and drives wages down. Thus, workers come to compete with each other, and do things that are in their individual self-interest but not in the interest of the working class as a whole.
4. Alienation from the species-being— This element of alienation is perhaps a little too much to explain in a capsule like this. In short, Marx believed that humans are creative by their nature, and the wage labour system constrains the essential activities that define man as a species.
Can we imagine four similar types of alienation caused by games? Perhaps we can think of games as an alienated form of play— I owe a great debt here to Bernie DeKoven’s Well-Played Game, which does an excellent job highlighting gaming’s many failures to produce joyful flow experiences. As a thought experiment, I proposed:
1. Alienation from the product— As Caillois puts it, games are an “occasion of pure waste.” They are essentially unproductive, and no goods are produced during their execution. Naturally, recent phenomena such as real money trade considerably muddy this criterion, but for the vast majority of games it is still accurate.
2. Alienation from the playing process— Consider Bernard Suits’ claim that games are a less efficient means of achieving a goal. More generally, the rules of a game inherently restrict the more freeform conception of play— DeKoven suggests that the competitive basis for most games diminishes the opportunity to participate in a truly playful and joyful experience.
3. Alienation from the fellow player— Most games create an artificial conflict between two groups of players, often reinforced by geographic boundaries or affiliation with an extraludic group. While these players could enjoy a common bond (after all, they need each other to engage in a common game), they are more likely to come to dislike their opponents because of the obstacles they represent, especially if teams are fixed or the consequences of the games are stretched over time (as in a football season). The competitive nature of most games intensifies this phenomena. (Of course, in professional sports, the alienation from the fellow worker still exists, as this excellent New York Times profile of a would-be NFL player demonstrates.)
4. Alienation from the species-being— If you subscribe to Johann Huizinga’s homo ludens theory, then essentially all of Western civilization is actually the alienation from the species-being. On the other hand, (if you even subscribe to the essentialist notion of a species-being at all) we frequently conceive of the gamer as being somethings set apart from the normal, practical self. That basic conceit lies at the heart of the magic circle.
In short, both games and labour can be seen as competitive systems with artificial constraints that are both commonly construed as being “outside” of our normal selves. When we are “on the clock” or “on the field,” we recognize that we are different in some way from our typical life.
Of course, while wage labor is essentially forced in Marxist terms, participation in games is usually marked by freedom. Naturally, this makes professional players a particularly thorny issue for theorists who define the “voluntary” nature of games as a core theoretical definition. Caillois excludes them from play altogether, a position that I have always found unconvincing and counter-intuitive.
"Morgana, the Fallen... Baker?" From Riot's Journal of Justice. Click for source.
My last post provoked some interesting discussions. The next lengthy post will focus on Taric and sexuality in League of Legends. In order to deliver on the promise I got myself into by labeling the last post Pt.1, I wanted to get into the responses and some of the things I learned as a result.
First up, my discussion of the two user-submitted photos on the “DAT ASHE” shirt product page. One of my friends from high school, Liz, has much better personal perspective on participating in game culture as a woman than I do. Notably, she is a woman, and also has the highest Xbox Live gamerscore out of any of my friends. She responded with some excellent insight on Facebook.
I don’t see the same dichotomy or meaning behind the two photos. I mean the second photo is probably cropped so weird, because it was instagrammed and thus had to be square. So her options were either cut off her face or cut off her shirt. Which, yeah, most women would have a problem posting a picture of their boobs without their head in the frame, and we all now instagram is ~so~ hip. Also, I feel like you might have overlooked the idea that the girl could be a lesbian, which isn’t a big deal, but she could be flirting in a different manner by wearing that shirt. And I feel like dick doesn’t have to be a gendered term. If you’re playing a game online as a girl, and keep a gender neutral username (which many women do), than you’re used to be calling a dick, it’s not that big of a stretch. Would you expect them to say (but don’t be a dick or a bitch)? Would you expect the internet to be able to exist without penis references?
—Liz Dunn, personal communication
Like Nathan Jurgenson, I love talking about Instagram, so this was a pretty exciting idea for me. Plus it’s got some juicy political implications from material frameworks stuff going on. Unfortunately I popped open the image properties and figured out that the image as posted didn’t have the 1×1 ratio that Instagram requires. Liz clarified that it was about more than the specificity of Instagram:
even if it’s not exactly 1×1 or made with instagram, it could still be reflecting photo trends? it’s weird the way square dimension photos are in fashion these days.
i also tend to assume women crop photos out of self-consciousness, (since I do that a lot), so only showing your breasts and not your stomach makes sense, too. i get what you’re getting at in your post, i just don’t have the same initial reaction is all. i don’t even see it as a particularly important question. like, a woman is wearing a shirt with sexual connotations. Why is this exciting, and why does it matter if she does it to make herself feel better, or attract the attention of men or women? Why do we over-analyze her photos in particular? In a sense you’re analyzing a woman expressing her sexuality, which is a bit of a slippery slope. I like the part about you analyzing how LoL expresses their character’s sexuality, though, because that’s the game creators, making some obvious, bold choices about their female character’s sexuality.
I’m admittedly moving from an extremely anecdotal basis in my previous analysis, but Liz’s comment made me realize I hadn’t elaborated much on what I found peculiar about it. Hell, after thinking about it, I guess it isn’t that peculiar.
My uncritical analysis went something along the lines of: “J!nx exists to sell products, here’s a picture of the product, here’s a picture of a user that obscures the product.” Amazon.com has a fairly hegemonic grip on my conception of online retail, and the few user-submitted pictures featured on that site are usually pretty boring and useless photos of books on people’s floors, so it seemed different and somewhat remarkable to me, regardless of the subject of the t-shirt. As far as I can tell, J!nx doesn’t feature any kind of vote-based reward scheme, so the only gamified incentive provided by the platform is for posting pictures of “XP” and “gold.” The problem is that I don’t really know anything about these sort of retailer-focused online communities, and I drew on my own insufficient personal experience.
I ended up creating an account so I could look around on J!nx, and I noticed two things 1.) this photo is almost identical to the other dozen or so photos this user has posted and 2.) lots of photos feature the user more heavily than the product. This makes a fair bit of sense. Plenty of fashion shoots and advertising campaigns don’t feature the product they’re nominally about. It also speaks to why Amazon user-submitted photos are so few and so boring— one picture of a book on somebody’s table is just as good as the next, and multiple copies don’t particular increase the genre’s charm.
Over at the ludology subreddit, I bummed out vdanmal by not discussing Riot’s response to the sexualization of female characters and Ashe’s lore development in the Journal of Justice. (The kitchenified Morgana above is from the Journal of Justice.) Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
So as the game has progressed, Ashe has married the champion Tryndamere— not for romantic reasons, but as a realpolitik move to cement an alliance between her people and Tryndamere’s barbarians. A fascinating move on Riot’s part, and a nice counter to my points about speculating on Ashe’s romantic life.
Turns out Riot also has a lot to say about the sexual representation of their characters. You can check out an excerpted version of a lengthy discussion with IronStylus here, and an excellent detailed critique of that response here.