One of the enjoyable things about forging a meme (maybe it's a strange attractor?) like the Play Ethic is the stuff that comes to you, from expertises and disciplines you'd never even thought about. So it's been a knotty delight to read through Nic Groombridge's paper, Playing Around with Crime and Criminology in Videogames. The original document Nic sent me was actually titled 'iPlod', which is a much funnier title. (PC Plod is a British slang term for 'policeman').
As Groombridge tartly notes, the ambition of most criminologists would seem to be either "doing research for the Home Office or speaking out on behalf of the criminalized". He tries to steer round the obvious point of intersection between games and criminology - the debate about whether computer games are a factor in teen violence. (Beware of immersive, isolating personal media platforms that can often engage its user in a set of extreme and dastardly scenarios... Yes, ban the book! And whatever we do, don't put Raskolnikov into a computer game). But he doesn't quite manage, as we'll see later on.
There is indeed a lot of 'cybercrime' around - but defintions are crucial. To help us sort through it, he quotes David Wall's very useful distinction (in his book Cybercrime) between three generations of cybercriminality:
Gen 2: 'hybrid crimes' - old crimes for which computers and networks provide new opportunities. Like internet auction fraud, or cracking/hacking (in the malevolent sense), or paedophile porn networks, or mass identity theft, or information on how to crack digital decoders or make synthetic drugs. This crime would also happen anyway, but not on this global scale, and with not as much virulence.
Gen 3: 'distributed and automated crimes' - crimes which couldn't happen without the internet. For example, spambots which relentlessly attack your computer. Or the 'misappropriation of intellectual property' - which can cover everything, in Wall's definition, from teenage downloaders flouting copyright laws, to vandalism and rape in virtual worlds. (There is a 'fourth generation' to come, apparently, as 'ambient' technologies like wifi and bluetooth bring connectedness into the streets).
Clearly in this third generation of cybercrime, all the ambiguities of play - unleashed in the synthetic worlds of the net - come rushing up to meet the criminologist. But what kind of criminologist? One contracted to the Home Office, gathering statistics on anti-social behaviour - or one seeking to defend and understand the criminalised? It seems to depend what kind of political state you practice your criminology in.
Groombridge quotes Edward Castronova on South Korea's National Police Agency, who recorded 40,000 computer crimes in 2003 - with 22,000 of them being online related. If you've stolen 60 quadrillion pieces from a virtual game-world, the Korean police will eagerly get you for property crime - no hesitation.
Shift, however, to the US, and the phenomenon of "griefers" - where teams of spoilsports go around trashing virtual worlds with stunts and hacks. They thrive in that legal gap between real-life and virtual-life actions that most game-world hosts loudly proclaim. As Julian Dibbell says in his brilliant piece of reportage in Wired, the griefers aim is to point out that "nothing on the Internet is so serious it can't be laughed at, and that nothing is so laughable as people who think otherwise". Sheer anticness: the primordial rumble of play. Not much that the law can do about that.
Groombridge uses his tools to point out many interesting parallels between games and crime. One is between a 'real life' lived (at least in the UK) under permanent CCTV surveillance - and a 'virtual life' where omniscient surveillance is presumed, but not always exercised. That is, the game-makers accept that the rules of their game will present a perpetual goad and challenge to some players. Groombridge's own research has shown that CCTV provokes anti-social behaviour as much as prevents it., with kids coming up with ways to evade its baleful stare. But could our municipal policiers, observing town centres from their bank of screens, be as subtle as games-makers in their panoptical governance? Could they, as Nic says, ignore the feet placed on the seats of the surveilled train?
Here's another interesting criminological tool. Merton's theory of deviance is based on the notion of 'anomie' - defined as "a discontinuity between cultural goals and the legitimate means available for reaching them". On this rather lovely and neat grid of possible responses to cultural goals, the one that strikes you immediately is the "innovation" response - where you agree with the goals, but you don't agree on how you should get there, and dream up your own route.
This actually describes extremely well various actually-existing forms of play-in-society, whether Real Life (RL) or Virtual Life (VL). Groombridge notes how online gamers often abuse, mis-use or hack into their game-tools -not to destroy the game, but in order to achieve the overall ends of the game: surmounting obstacles, amassing wealth, building up your carnage count. (It's an interesting question where the sheer anarchy of 'griefers' sits in this box. Are they 'innovators' because their abuse only makes sense within the game - it accepts the worth of the game space? Or are they 'rebels' that want a new, sceptical attitude towards virtual society? Or are they 'out of their boxes' altogether?)
Nic sees the absence of any consideration of criminality and play in my Play Ethic book - however diverse it otherwise is - as evidence of "crime being seen as too serious" a subject for consideration, never mind "games being seen as too trivial".
Well, he's actually wrong about the book. I write a lot in there about those who self-consciously define themselves as "players" - whether these be City "players" who will bend any financial rule to maximise returns; or street "players" who aim at wealth, status and authority, but reject the humdrum, occupational route to those goals. And in the Education chapter, I look at the Ken Loach movie Sweet Sixteen, whose protagonist (as far as I can see) is a classic Mertonian criminal innovator - an enterprising lad who uses mobile and remote technologies of all kinds (pizza-delivery bike, mobile phone, airgun rife), who organises and leads a team of agile workers, all this exemplary self-discipline and motivation... as he deals drugs in the ghettos of Port Glasgow.
The most interesting point in Groombridge's paper picks up on the parallel between joy-riding cars and disruptive game-play on the net - and makes what I think is a clear ethical point about the differences. Both driving and gaming share an 'automaticity', in his words - an experience of being part of a great, implacable system of rules through which one is processed (generating Merton's "anomie", against which there might be an "innovative" response). Though driving and gaming share "enormous emotional satisfaction and identity formation", Groombridge says clearly that:
As a non-driver - who militantly throws himself onto the collective mercies of public transport, and who is utterly appalled at the four-figure yearly death-toll that we accept in the UK's driving culture - I hear Nic's point loud and clear. Isn't every 'search-for-the-hero-inside-yourself' car advert about defying the automaticity of driving? (Which for me - see Minority Report's automatized cars - could be even more automatic than it currently is.) It's no surprise to me that the most toxic of play's rhetorics - the ego-driven male player - is often explicitly invoked in car promotion.
Of course, with respect to the continuing debate on media effects, we can't crudly conflate VL and RL. Running your car along the pedestrian streets of Grand Theft Auto could be sublimating or managing those rule-bending urges towards real-life joy-riding, as much as intensifying them.
But sometimes, it's actually good to percieve when the complement of our right to play, which I regularly define as the responsibilities of care, should kick in; those finitudes of human fragility that command a clear cessation or slow-down to the infinitudes of human innovation. A "care ethic" demands that you might be a wild driver in virtuality, but you must be the classic "one careful driver" in reality. Or else...you should be saying hello to Officer iPlod.
As Groombridge says, driving (unless it's for sportpersons on a race-track - and welcome to your extreme agonism, gentlemen) is not a game. Because if it becomes one, in our cities (and let's not even go near the subject of how car density has destroyed children's social spaces of play), it gets blood-soaked pretty quickly.
I'm always wondering when I'll recognise a play-ethical moment when I see one - never thought criminology would help out. Thanks, Nic.
