The Play Ethic

Carnage Not Required: questioning the commercial need for violence in video games

A very useful and extensive psychological study from the University of Rochester, claiming that "the enjoyment from playing computer games likely stems from the healthy pleasure of mastering a challenge rather than from a disturbing craving for carnage":

Video games are enjoyable, immersive, and motivating insofar as they offer opportunities for psychological need satisfaction, specifically experiences of competence and autonomy, to which violent content per se is largely unrelated.

Initially, many games are perceived as being fun. Much of our work is focused on understanding when games reach to deeper levels of satisfaction that often sustain engagement over time, and to identify both the healthy and unhealthy aspects of that play.

The research (free abstract and absurdly expensive paper) also quotes Scott Rigby, president of Immersyve and a co-investigator in the study:

Much of the debate about game violence has pitted the assumed commercial value of violence against social concern about the harm it may cause. Our study shows that the violence may not be the real value component, freeing developers to design away from violence while at the same time broadening their market.

And three cheers for that. I've had too many conversations with game-makers (particularly from my Scottish locus) who, when presented with a range of possible game motivations and scenarios that don't involve spectacular male violence in urban settings, shake their heads and say, "just don't see the game in that, Pat. You gotta see the game." I've always suspected that this was male geek laziness on the industry's part. Incidentally, this report is based on a sample set that was 85% male.

Immersyve have developed a psychometric methodology called PENS (Players' Experience of Need Satisfaction) - be good to hear from some core games researchers whether they rate this. In any case, this is a much needed research distinction for games makers (and those who agonise about games' impact): the "competence and autonomy" that players get out of their game-play does not necessitate conflict or war contexts. (Many thanks to International Hobo for the link).

"Reality's broken/Games aren't/Let games help fix reality": Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal is an extraordinary evangelist for games (computer or otherwise) as learning and activist tools, based at the Institute for the Future in California. She's quoted the Play Ethic in many of her presentations so it's nice to be able to return the favour.

Her ludic thang (first signalled by her 'I Love Bees' marketing campaign for Halo 2 in 2004) is 'alternatve reality games'  - where the boundary between game and life is seamless for the players, and involves running around the real world as much as it does a virtual one, with signs and signals in each realm leading you to greater depths in the other.

In her current futurist guise, Jane is (in her own words):

explores how games are changing the way we conduct and influence real business, real health care, real scientific research, and our real social lives. She focuses on ways that alternate reality games in particular could lead to a higher quality of life in both Western and developing nations, and how they could produce more engaging and thriving democracies worldwide... She also develops massively multiplayer forecasting games.

An exciting agenda. But there's a phrase that been creeping into my vocabulary recently - "that's a real time-suck". Which, apart from being grotesquely ugly, points up a little road-block in Jane's inexorable progress. To the degree that we get that 'cognitive surplus' which Clay Shirky talks about from not being enslaved to the tv, we might well have the social and personal time to invest in games that bring us the same civic motivations and humanist satisfactions as novels, movies, periodicals, music... cooking, attending meetings, caring for elders and children...

You get the point. I'm wondering simply what room there is left in a modern, over-worked life - even if we're becoming less entranced with the tv spectacle - to get "immersed" in "massively multiplayer games". (Although I keep coming back to my European-welfarist answer to the question of whether we have enough time our lives for play).

Jane has a fascinating, progressive answer to this. If we are increasingly interested in the "politics of happiness" in Western societies, then we should be looking to the games sector for inspiration and wisdom. As she says, "games designers have spent twenty years trying to optimise happiness". So maybe we should be prioritising games as a literacy and an experience (the cutting edges of e-education has been doing this for a while), vis a vis other cultural forms. As long as it's something accumulative and generative like Spore or The Movies, and not linear and destructive like most of the rest of the console games I steer my 11-year-old daughter away from, then I'll go with that.

Her recent slogan is "reality is broken - games aren't - so let our game experience help us fix reality". McGonigal wants to take those feelings of meaning, pleasure and community that a well-fashioned game provides, and reconnect them to citizenship - by creating games whose worlds contain recognisable crises and challenges. Her projects like A World Without Oil ("play it before you live it") and Superstruct (a multiplayer forecasting game - which came up with some great projects) attempted this last year. (I was signed up for the latter - but did I have the time, between playing with music, playing with words and playing with children? Nope...)

The new McGonigal project, discovered this morning, is The Signtific Lab (yes, that's the spelling, and here's the blog) - which seems to be an attempt to create a playful space in which future trends in science, technology and society can be collaboratively posted, sifted through, highlighted and then acted upon (here's their first experiment). I promise to get involved in this one - but Jane's energy and commitment will doubtless keep evolving play and games as a necessary social literacy well into the future. She's about as play-ethical as it gets.

Play in a quiet voice: Major Fun visits Israel

One of our play correspondants has found himself in one of the least playful places in the world at the moment - Jerusalem. Bernie DeKoven, guru of the New Games movement in the seventies and an indefatigable innovator with social games, has been giving "laughter" seminars to a range of Israeli teachers and therapists (including some excellent cross-partisan organisations like Hand In Hand). 

Bernie's certainly not political in any way, but I'm moved by his latest post (and others), and delighted by the citation:

As for the Gaza thing: if you're Jewish or Palestinian, it was a violence that was done to you, even if the violence was not your doing - a deep, shocking, deafening violence that was so thunderous you can't hear much of anything else - your family, maybe, your neighbors, your friends. You certainly can't hear anything that comes from the "other side." Not love, not grief, not caring, not explanation, not apology, not words of peace. And most definitely not play.

Play is one of those words that can only be spoken in a "still, small voice," that in times like these can be only be heard over the din of war by children and puppies. The rest of us have to wait for quiet, inside and out. Even clowns can't make themselves loud enough. Even people like the Israeli group called "Pharsh - the official military of the silly revolution" (thanks for the link, Pat Kane), or the "laughter therapists" you nevertheless might find doing their work in the bomb sheters in S'deroth; can't be silly enough to change anything - not right now...

...Teaching laughter, fun, games, play - it's a funny kind of work, a funny kind of gift we have to bring. Not anything that you might call a "cause." Not anything that you might think of as revolutionary. And yet, something having very much to do with peace, after all.

As I wrote in a recent post, there is some precedent in games and play as a force for social cohesion in Israel. One can only hope that the diplomatic "game" about to be conducted by America in the region can display as much grace, poise, imagination and sympathy as Bernie does in his workshops. 

Art games, indie games, weird ambient Eno games

For those of us who are never truly satisfied with their entry point into games culture - or constantly bicker with their children about why PS3 is not necessarily a good idea - some good news from New York magazine: the rise of the indie-games movement (maybe even the art-games) movement is now evident. 

The shift seems to involve broadband (more games-makers willing to stream their games), mobile devices (more people willing to game on the move) and increasing Flash animation skills. (And maybe we could add, a grindingly-established expectation that we-pay-for-access-to-stuff on mobile devices, which the beautiful wide open internet does not intrinsically have). 

All this means that there are markets and outlets for games-makers who don't want to consign themselves to the coding mines for the next Halo or Fog of War. And for consumers (like me), who maybe resist the idea of full, multi-sensory immersion in the time-suck of a powerful console game, we get the game-play we want in various small corners of their life (leaving time for all the other wonderful forms of play available to a healthy human being ;-)). 

And I have to say that my experience with the iPhone app store shows that this 'casual gamer' market - as usefully outline by a games investor here and here - has the opportunity to pull in new consumers. I don't know whether it would quite count as a game - more like a toy - but Brian Eno's iPhone app Bloom - which lets you create loops of notes by creating circles on the touch-screen - has given me many minutes of thoroughly meditative pleasure over the last few weeks, with a feeling (rare these days) that this was £2.99 well-spent. 

DeKoven on Games Community Vs. Play Community

Bernie DeKoven, one of the most indefatigable advocates of the power and potential of play, writes here about the difference between a 'games community' and a 'play community'. (I picked up this link from his "tweet" on Twitter, which at least shows that I'm beginning to understand the damn thing). Here's the main spiel:

Most informal games - street games, pick-up games, playground games – are played by a play community. Most formal games, like Little League and Lawn Bowling, are played by a game community.

Commercial and historical forces tend to embrace game communities, and vice versa. Little League and Lawn Bowling are not just games, they are cultural events, they are sports.

Ultimately, the majority of people aren’t good enough to participate in the kinds of games played by game communities, especially when compared to the skills of the masters and grandmasters of the game.

Ultimately in the play community, everyone is good enough. Because it’s not any particular game that people have come together to play. Because the reason they have come together is to play, not necessarily to win, or even to keep score, but to play together, and be part of an event in which anyone can play, in which everyone is a master.

In the play community it’s mystery, not mastery that draws people together – it’s the mystery of shared imagination, of spontaneity and synergy, of generalized laughter and much mutual admiration, of shared fun.

When children are young, they first form play communities, and usually, if they can avoid formal intervention, they’ll continue expanding and diversifying the play communities they support and that support them well into adulthood.

It is no coincidence that the Internet, though it serves both kinds of community (play and game), is so easily characterized as a play community, dependent on openness and trust shared by its players, succeeding to the degree in which it can respond to their constantly evolving, individual and collective interests.

Most often, game communities share characteristics with play communities, and vice versa. In both, members show mutual respect for play - for supporting fantasy, keeping rules, observing boundaries…

This is very similar to James Carse's distinction between finite and infinite games - games you play to win, games you play to keep enriching and expanding the game. Also to Robert Wright's distinction between zero-sum and non-zero-sum games as drivers of social evolution - the first ends up in the war of all against all, the second in the global interdependency of the internet. (Luckily for us, Wright thinks the second kind of game is a Darwinian inevitability.) 

It's a beautiful, hopeful distinction - probably the easiest kind of 'play ethic' to grasp and apply.  

Whistle while you jerk? The hard labours of modern gaming

Here's two excellent examples of games-theorising, from a broadsheet-arts perspective. The LRB's John Lanchester - whose recent essays on the financial crash have been essential reading - turns his attention to computer games in the latest issue. The headline is a bit F.R. Leavis ("Is it art?"), but the piece is an open-minded appreciation of the very nature of game aesthetics, where the comparisons with other artforms are mutually illuminating rather than faintly patronising. The second comes from a footnote in Lanchester's piece - linking to Steven Poole's recent public lecture, "Working for the Man: Against the Employment Paradigm in Videogames". 

Poole and Lanchester (the first a Guardian writer, the second from the Telegraph) come to roughly the same conclusion about the future of video-games. They want the game experience to be less about point-scoring, power-ups, submission to the rules of the game - what Pools calls the "machine paradigm" - and more about hanging out in a virtual world, enjoying the beautiful pixellations and architectures that powerful consoles can generate. In Poole's words:

...we might imagine a new videogaming manifesto inspired by the Slow Food movement. It would speak of games where you really could choose your own adventure, but also where, if you preferred, you could just take time to smell the coffee, with no shadowy boss figure watching your clock and tapping his foot. It would be called Slow Gaming. Gamers of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your boring virtual jobs.

Great stuff. I grappled with some of this in my academic symposium at York University a few years ago, riffing off an essay by Alexander Galloway about the "labour metaphysic" raised by games like World of Warcraft. It's overly theoretical, but I'm essentially agreeing with Lanchester and Poole that there is more to game-play than contestive and victorious play:

Is there an irreducibly open, primordial aspect to play, the sheer difference celebrated by Derrida, driven by mammalian adaptive potentiation? Yes. And if so, then that provides the ‘adjacent possible’ within any social system (as the complexity theorists put it) to imagine different forms of [dis]play than those which currently canalise the energies of the informational multitude.

Integrating through soccer in the Middle East

As the Gaza situation continues horrifically, a tiny countervailing (and playful) wind. Tamir Sorek's Arab Soccer in a Jewish State, The Integrative Enclave is a sociological study of how Arabs and Jews have made a conscious choice that football - clubs and stadia - are places where integration across Israel's ethno-religious divides can happen. Not easily or simply, but consistently. Many of the reviewers (here and here) quote this passage:

In May 2003, Al-Aakhaa al-Nasira, the team from Nazareth, ascended to the Premier League for the first time in history. Azmi Nassar, the team's coach, climbed the fence to conduct the chorus of rejoicing supporters in the bleachers. In a hoarse Hebrew voice he said, ‘You see, this is how it should be—in soccer, as in life, on our team there are Muslims, Jews, Christians, Druze—there is no difference.'

There's a useful few preview pages on Google Books.