The Play Ethic

Synthetic Worlds

Almost forgot to post this Independent review I've written of  Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds and Jack Railton's The A-Z of Cool Computer Games - the latter a bit nerdy and rejectable, the former extremely vital and definitive. You can read Castronova's posting on the Terra Nova blog, and here's an interview with him.

The review - also on extended post below - says it all. But Castronova is notable for being an economist that's as interested in spirituality and transcendance as he is in the functioning of markets. Also contained in the book are notes to what he calls "an economy of fun" - ie, what are the economic rules of interaction that keep online players participating in a game-world - which I'm going to ponder heavily, as an enrichment of my own rather sketchy notions towards a players' economy.

He's also a Shakespeare buff, and draws this great parallel in an interview on the Tom Peters site:

I think actually there are deep intellectual similarities between the themes in Shakespeare and what's happening right now in [synthetic worlds]. We have these parallel, almost competing environments growing up, where people can choose what kind of game they're going to play. Are we going to play the game of real life? Am I going to be a worker in Starbucks or a starship captain? That's my choice.

It runs throughout Shakespeare that much of the social world is a world of seeming, of self-supporting equilibrium, where value is contingent upon what everybody says value is. So I find that reading things like King Lear and Hamlet is tremendously congenial to understanding why people get blown away by this phenomenon. It's because they're seeing a structure of society that's always been there, but it's very easy to forget about it and ignore it. Shakespeare doesn't let you do that, and virtual worlds don't let you do it either.

Sue Perman's Big Christmas

Many thanks to old Coatbrige pal Mark Millar for this Xmas clip, (Quicktime, 1.18MB) whose transhumanist sentiments I entirely endorse. (If you pick up the Ian Dury reference in this posting, you win a bag of ludobeans).

And thanks to all of your for contributing, commenting and reading over 2005. The Play Ethic, as memes go, has its own nice little virulence - and hopefully, when the book is released in 2006 in the US (March), and I do my keynotes in San Jose and Brisbane around that time (more later), it'll be even healthier. In between that, I have the next step of my resurgent music career, and maybe another book to kick off, and a 42nd birthday to process (post-punk middle age, hells bells...).

Anyway, have a great season and a fertile 2006. Peace and love, PK

The Gamer as Artiste

Great piece from New York Times (reproduced as fair-use in extended post below) riffing on both the new X-Box 360, and last year's lecture by Steven Spielberg to game designers. Spielberg said that "the medium will come of age when somebody confesses that they cried at Level 17.'' Some of the responses from the gurus are pretty dismissive - why should we mimic the imperatives of older artforms? - but I'm taken with the writers conclusion:

Though games may not produce Mr. Spielberg's tears, they are the one medium that allows users to experience guilt, because they make the player responsible for the actions of a character on screen, Professor Jenkins said. ''If you do something despicable, you have yourself to answer for.'' Few games exploit this potential, but there is nothing preventing future developers from doing so, he said.

But my own experience inside the box raises a different narrative possibility. In a culture that is squeamish about death, games are the first major medium that makes one's own mortality a central element in the experience. In many games, to reach the last level alive is to put the game behind you.

A challenge for game makers, then, is not to make users cry at the death of another, but to find meaning in their own. This is, after all, the one universal human condition. To which games add the one antidote: the ability to press restart.

Craig Ferguson: Scottish Player

Everybody has their web diversion - you know, that corner that keeps you from building empires and meeting deadlines - and this is mine, from my perch in Glasgow: The 'comedy' download page of CBS's Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. There are many reasons why I've been watching this archive over the last few months...

The Self Unbound - Roberto Unger

Been meaning to post here about Brazilian democratic theorist Roberto Unger's work for years, and just clicked onto his new publications page, finding a real treasure trove of stuff. The forthcoming book, The Self Unbound, Unger describes as the truest expression of his philosophy yet (you can download [doc file] the full manuscript).

My interest from a Play Ethic perspective is that Unger grapples with the implications of a player's mentality (that subjective feeling of empowerment and transformation). What kind of social order could support and sustain such an explosive, restless identity? How could we collectively construct a 'state of play' around such a dynamic lifestyle and mindset?

Deathball

Extraordinary new promotional video from Medecins San Frontiers on the Aids crisis in Africa, and the issue of access to medicines. (Thanks to Hunicke for the heads up.) Not only does it look like the missing link between Pixar animation and computer game machinima, but it's clearly inspired by the video game Katamari Damacy, where a little prince rebuilds his father's world by rolling a 'Katamari' round the landscape, which picks up every kind of object. Except in the MSF video, the ball starts with one African villager getting struck down by Aids, which rolls around picking up others... I'll let you watch the clip to experience the full impact.

In any case, with reference to my posts on the military-ludological complex below, this is at least an example of digital counter-culture at its best.

More happiness, or else

Madeleine Bunting writes in the Guardian about the rising credibility of happiness indicators as a factor in social policy in Britain. I've written about this before, feeling more than a little constrained by some of the normative assumptions of happiness research. Madeleine repeats the core analysis of consumer capitalism that much of it is based on: 

The problem is, as Richard Layard argues in his book Happiness: Lessons From a New Science, that the decline of both religious belief (which is a strong predictor of happiness) and the social solidarity movements of the 20th century has left a vacuum of understanding about what constitutes a good life and how to be happy.

Toy Soldiers: Guardian article

Welcome to those of you linking through from my article in the Guardian IT supplement, on the relationship between the computer games industry and the US military. This blog entry features my unedited article in the 'extended post' section below. It's  not radically different, just longer, and embedded with hyperlinked back-up sources.

The topic has been a growing interest of mine for about a year now - ever since I came across the fact that J.C.Herz, the hip nineties cybercommentator, was now a project leader for DARPA (the US Defense Advance Research Projects Agency). I contacted J.C. about this, and never heard back from her - but it lead into a fistful of del.icio.us links on the topic, a few compelling e-mail and phone conversations, and eventually news of a new investigative history of US computer games, which had a major chapter on the military-entertainment-gaming complex.

I could easily write double or triple the amount of words I've already expended on this subject. (And I have a number of day and night jobs I have to return to, so this is probably as far as I'm going). But suffice to say, this is an example of the kind of critique required by my concept of a 'play ethic' - ie, how do we harness our powers of imagination, simulation and experimentation towards the building of a creative, reciprocal and sustainable society.

To say the least, the 'militarisation' of one of our most powerful contemporary play-forms is a challenge to these very ethics. I've only touched on the problem, and I invite others to take it up and extend it further.

All comments, corrections - and new leads - are more than welcome. Please input on the 'comments' link below.

[Note: Below this post is another 'War Games' post, with extra material on the issue of the US Army's data-capture of subscribers' gameplay, in the America's Army online game, and how this is used in recruitment. This isn't in the Guardian piece, because it's a more complex subject, but still worth exploring].

Want to Know More? AA, gameplay data and the issue of recruitment

There’s one aspect of the online version America’s Army which fascinates – the fact that they can collect huge amounts of data about the aptitude and interests of each player. (This is quite a complex matter, so I didn't refer to it in the Guardian article, for fear of simplifying the issues at hand.)

In the Smart Bomb book, one of AA’s progenitors, Mike Zyda, admits that the Army had considered using the aptitude profiles of players as a means of direct recruitment, but that they decided against it. As Heather Chaplin, one of the book's co-authors, put it to me in an e-mail, "they were pretty far along going that way and pulled back at the last minute...As far as I understand it, they considered it then realized it 'wouldn't play'".  I presume that means they feared being portrayed as underhanded or covert in their recruitment techniques, particularly given the target age of the game (early teens to early twenties).