Utopic Dreams and Apocalyptic Fantasies: Critical Approaches to Researching Video Game Play 9780739147009, 0739147005, 9780739147023, 0739147021

Citation preview

Utopic Dreams and Apocalyptic Fantasies

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Utopic Dreams and Apocalyptic Fantasies Critical Approaches to Researching Video Game Play

Edited by J. Talmadge Wright, David G. Embrick, and Andra´s Luka´cs

Lexington Books A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

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Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Utopic dreams and apocalyptic fantasies : critical approaches to researching video game play / edited by J. Talmadge Wright, David G. Embrick, and András Lukács. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-4700-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-4702-3 (electronic) 1. Video games—Social aspects. I. Wright, J. Talmadge. II. Embrick, David G. III. Lukács, András. GV1469.34.S63U76 2010 794.8—dc22 2010021097

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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We’d like to dedicate this book to our loving families who stood by us as we worked, played, laughed, and cried through the tedious yet ultimately gratifying process that has become this book: Elizabeth Evans and Madeline Mahrer; Jessi, Samantha, Brittany, and Jasmine Embrick; Kim Hemstreet, Kornél Lukács, László Lukács, and Mária Lukácsné Kócsó.

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Contents

List of Tables

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Chapter 1

Introduction J. Talmadge Wright, David G. Embrick, and András Lukács

1

Part I

Modern Play and Technology—Defining Digital Play

Chapter 2

Play and Cultural Transformation— Or, What Would Huizinga Think of Video Games? Thomas S. Henricks

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“Is He ’Avin a Laugh?”: The Importance of Fun to Virtual Play Studies Ken S. McAllister and Judd Ethan Ruggill

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Capitalism, Contradiction, and the Carnivalesque: Alienated Labor vs. Ludic Play Lauren Langman and András Lukács

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Sneaking Mission: Late Imperial America and Metal Gear Solid Derek Noon and Nick Dyer-Witheford

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Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

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Contents

Chapter 6

I Blog, Therefore I Am: Virtual Embodiment and the Self Alanna R. Miller

Part II

Marketing Culture and the Video Game Business

Chapter 7

Marketing Computer Games: Reinforcing or Changing Stereotypes? Paul R. Ketchum and B. Mitchell Peck

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Censoring Violence in Virtual Dystopia: Issues in the Rating of Video Games in Japan and of Japanese Video Games Outside Japan William H. Kelly Coding Culture: Video Game Localization and the Practice of Mediating Cultural Difference Rebecca Carlson and Jonathan Corliss

Part III

Researching Video Game Play

Chapter 10

Beyond “Sheeping the Moon”—Methodological Considerations for Critical Studies of Virtual Realms András Lukács

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

The Chorus of the Dead: Roles, Identity Formation, and Ritual Processes Inside an FPS Multiplayer Online Game Nicolas Ducheneaut The Quantitative-Qualitative Antimony in Virtual World Studies Samuel Coavoux

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Part IV

Summary and Conclusions

Chapter 13

Virtual Today, Reality Tomorrow: Taking Our Sociological Understanding of Virtual Gameplay to the Next Level 247 András Lukács, J. Talmadge Wright, and David G. Embrick

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Index

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About the Contributors

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List of Tables

Table 7.1. Table 7.2. Table 7.3. Table 7.4. Table 7.5.

Table 7.6.

Table 12.1.

Race and Gender of Characters in 2009 PC Gamer Advertisements

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Stereotyped and Sexualized Characterizations of Race in 2009 PC Gamer Advertisements

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Stereotyped and Sexualized Characterizations of Gender in 2009 PC Gamer Advertisements

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Race and Gender of Characters in 1992 Computer Gaming World and 2009 PC Gamer Advertisements

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Stereotyped and Sexualized Characterizations of Race in 1992 Computer Gaming World and 2009 PC Gamer Advertisements

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Stereotyped and Sexualized Characterizations of Gender in 1992 Computer Gaming World and 2009 PC Gamer Advertisements

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Weekly Game Time, by Origin of Recruitment

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all of our contributors, first and foremost, for allowing us the privilege of reading and including their important research in this collection. We feel that there are very few collections out there like ours and it is because of these researchers that we are able to put together this volume. We are deeply indebted to our respondents and informants who have served as data for our own chapters in this volume, as well as in volume 2. We would also like to thank our colleagues in the sociology department at Loyola University Chicago for their warmth, wisdom, and at times their ears as they listened to us drone on about the sociology of play. Most notably we would like to thank our department chair, Rhys Williams, for his steadfast understanding and encouragement as we pursued this project. We would also like to thank Toby Dye and the staff of Loyola’s Institutional Review Board for working with us closely on human-subject issues and for being open to developing new methods of researching virtual play. At University of California–Irvine, Tom Boellstorff deserves a thank you for helping us with IRB issues in our research as well as Nicolas Ducheneaut at PARC in Palo Alto, California, who took time out of his busy schedule to meet with one of us and discuss the deeper issues of social life and gameplay. Lexington Books, their staff, and our editor Michael Sisskin deserve much gratitude for their patience in seeing this project through and their invaluable editorial assistance. We would also like to thank the members of the Terra Nova guild in the

xi

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Acknowledgments

World of Warcraft for their professional advice as game researchers, as well as our guilds within which we have conducted our game interviews. Finally, thanks to the countless players, for better or worse, who play these games for whatever reason they choose. Without them, we would have little to say about video gameplay.

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CHAPTER ONE



Introduction J. Talmadge Wright, David G. Embrick, and Andra´s Luka´cs

The modern dream of scientific progress, lush economies, and well-fed citizens alternates in today’s political, cultural, and social landscape with apocalyptic fantasies1 of imminent destruction, terror, and uncontrolled nature gone wild. This antinomy born of modernity is nothing new, and can be traced back to the birth of the Enlightenment and even earlier. What is most interesting about this antimony is how it appears throughout the media narratives of contemporary society and what people do with such narratives. Utopian dreams embracing perfect worlds free of want and terror have always formed one of the foundations of human desire, the drama to escape the limited conditions of our everyday lives with its eventual suffering and death. Since 1516, with the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia, images of a perfect world have been treated with skepticism, ridicule, and hostility, even while such images entertained hope that the human condition could substantially change for the better. The very ambiguity of the word utopia has led writers and fantasy makers in general to dream of impractical projects and yet also fear the pursuit of utopian dreams that could lead to totalitarianism.2 Utopian dreams are the stuff that can transform societies and hence are often feared by established authorities. The desire for a better world is not simply driven by fear, terror, or anger but by larger visions of what can be, and of what humans can accomplish to improve conditions for themselves and for the planet. The dismissal of utopian dreams as idle speculation or impractical ideals or dangerous fantasies discounts the need of the human spirit to make meaningful sense out of everyday sufferings.

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Conversely, apocalyptical images of death and destruction, rooted in medieval Christian fantasies of evil, hell, and perversion, followed the progress of the Black Plague in the thirteenth century throughout Europe, coming to define the ultimate fear of divine wrath and served as a mythical explanation of deadly epidemics and human folly. The fatalism of a feudal Europe with its endless wars, poverty, disease, and rigid hierarchies of power was fertile ground for painters and writers alike to image how it all might end. For many, only Christian redemption through the Church could provide salvation. For others brave enough to break away from clerical authority, the developing dreams of science and reason provided hope that the persistent ignorance, superstition, and abuse of power could be swept away in a flood tide of reason and revolution. This persistent tension between utopian dreams of a better tomorrow and the apocalyptical fantasies of punishment, terror, and ultimate destruction define the twin poles of Western dreams and how those dreams are displayed through a vast media apparatus, from books and movies to internet Web sites, and video games. While the content of such dreams and fantasies may change with cultural and political shifts, the logic they form, the social imaginary,3 if you will, remains consistent in Western culture. Modern play, as a social form of self-expression, often entertains these types of narratives and others in video games and other electronic media. Virtual communities formed through this play can easily survive alternating between these twin poles of utopian dreams and apocalyptic fantasies. In earlier historical periods annual and monthly carnivals and associated festivities would provide social outlets for group play, with staged reenactments of sacred tales and sudden displays of body humor, and excess. Play was not simply a preparation for either serious adulthood or for war but also worked to reinforce group norms, by giving permission for periodic excessive behavior within clearly defined social boundaries, that is, “the magic circle.”4 Langman and Lukács will explore some of these issues in chapter 4. While feudal carnivals have been replaced by consumer spectacles in modern capitalist societies, the essence of play, fantasy, and dreams still circulate between us and our technology. In today’s media-saturated oceans we swim through a vast array of mythical narratives calling for our attention, each more colorful than the last. The pleasures of increased detail in images, high color saturations, soothing voices alternating with loud, disruptive sounds and the emotional intensity of success and loss make for an engrossing world that calls our attention over and over again. Playful immersion in the flow experience of digital manipulation now constitutes one of the most widespread pleasures for substantial majorities around the world. Video gaming as this newest technology of representation has emerged as one of the most vivid and pervasive mediums

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through which such narratives are reproduced. Apocalyptic fantasies appear in the smoldering landscape of a devastated Washington, D.C., in the game Fallout 3. And Washington, D.C., is destroyed again in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as Russian troops occupy the U.S. Whitehouse. Utopian fantasies of an Ayn Rand5–styled universe become a horrid nightmare in the game Bioshock. Utopian dreams of endless resources and castles in the sky appear in the online multiplayer game World of Warcraft, mixed with apocalyptic war imagery in a fantasy universe of endless fecundity.6 Such rapid changes in the technology of representation when combined with the loss of social mobility and increased social, political, economic, and cultural inequality have given rise to social fears (e.g., loss of parental control, corruption of youth, technical failures, fears of desensitization, etc.) usually expressed as moral panics, fed by what Howard Becker called moral entrepreneurs.7 Writers and pundits have either railed against these changes or supported them as new forms of “freedom.” Of course, the reality is more likely to exist in that gray area of everyday life where “media effects” are not so clear-cut. These fears of loss of control and identity always seem to arise with each new technical innovation in representation. People complained about the isolating effects of the book when it was introduced as a form of entertainment to the Victorian working class; similar complaints made the rounds with rock and roll, television, and the movies. Now, Internet social relations and digital game playing in particular have assumed this mantle. With generational changes, each new technology has been absorbed into the culture with few negative effects. The 1990s debates about the effects of digital game playing have moved from the narrow psychological models affiliated with the “media effects” literature to looking more closely at what video games are, how they operate, and what are the social implications of spending time with this new technology.8 Isolated academic and business research has morphed into full blown departments of game studies in colleges and universities around the world. Debates initially limited to media effects have broadened, even beyond the border struggles between ludology and narratology, as if video games could be pegged simply as a new form of play or a new narrative. Henry Jenkins’s9 term “spatial narratives” seems to be closer to the mark in comparing the experience of gameplaying with that of amusement park rides. Our point is that these new technologies of representation contain both narrative, interaction play, and a spectacle of light and sound which cannot be easily reduced to formulaic terms. And, indeed, the social reality of this new type of media technology is far more complex in both its development and what people make of it than we have understood to date.

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Our contribution in this volume and a second to be released is to examine what are some of the issues we should be dealing with when it comes to understanding how and what modern digital play looks like. In this volume we have divided the major sections of the book into three parts. The first contains discussions about the nature and theories of modern play and this new media technology, starting with Thomas Henricks’s examination of the ideas of play pioneered by Johan Huizinga. How are these concepts relevant to our modern world? The second part is designed to entertain debate over cultural differences, global marketing, and the business side of gameplaying. How do fans and developers directly and indirectly collaborate for their own pleasure? And how is that pleasure regulated through politics and business practices to generate new markets for media entertainment? Finally, in our third part, we focus on the question, how does one undertake research in this new world of avatars and synthetic worlds? What are some of the questions that researchers and those interested in the meaning of games have to grapple with when understanding what games mean to players and their close friends and relatives? The study of modern play cannot be accomplished simply through an indepth historical analysis of social and cultural data as we saw in the work of Huizinga. Something more has to be done. Surveys, interviews, focus groups, and a whole array of methods have been deployed both for marketing purposes as well as academic research to understand the significance of gaming. Debates continue within both the game industry and academic departments about which methods are most useful for collecting relevant data. The field of game studies is having its share of growing pains like all new disciplines. We hope that this volume and our second one will provide a small contribution to these debates and work to extend a critical, social, and political analysis of digital games to the field of sociology, cultural studies, communication, and anthropology, as well as game studies. Henricks begins the debate in his chapter by arguing for the relevance of Huizinga’s perspective on play. Moving beyond Huizinga’s seven points of play often quoted in classroom illustrations, Henricks is quick to point out the importance of how play is defined and thereby understood in different historical periods. As a distinct mode of human activity, play works to transform culture through the creating of what Henrick’s asserts is “ascending meaning.” This occurs within very specific historical contexts. Play, unlike other human activities, is an assertive or what he terms “contestive” style of interacting with the world, and this contestation finds its home quite nicely in the modern world of video games, and other electronic entertainment, in a manner that often emulates physical sports. Henricks argues that in modern

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society the consuming player, one using a more individualized play, defines how play is expressed. This is quite different than Huizinga’s description of public-oriented play styles. Following Roger Caillois, Henricks argues that play is a distinct form of relating to the world, one which understands that games, as versions of play, are simply normative settings for the expression of play. However, Henricks moves beyond the narrow restrictions of play and game discussed by both Huizinga and Caillois, the strict separation between play and everyday life (i.e., the magic circle), and argues that play is also consummatory in varying degrees (not a strict separation), and play can be transformative. That is, play has varying degrees of separation between the outside world and the world of the game, not a strict separation. This is echoed in T. L. Taylor’s critique of Caillois’s position in her investigation of communication and behavioral patterns in the game Everquest.10 While Henricks does not develop this point in fine detail he does admit to drawing upon the work of psychologist Jean Piaget on how people generate understandings through ritual and communitas. What is clear from Henricks analysis and the work of others on play and human expression is the lack of clarity or ambiguity of definitions of the very concept, as illustrated by Brian Sutton-Smith.11 The multiplicities of definitions for both play and utopia reveal their deeply historical and socially produced nature, a nature born of human desire and hope struggling against despair. Regardless of how human play in the twenty-first century is defined we must attempt to anchor any definition in the particular historical, political, cultural, and social trends of a given society, much as Huizinga attempted to do with pre-modern play. It is necessary to examine the relationship between fantasy, dreams, hopes, and desires and their connection to play and human expression in the digital age. In chapter 3, Ruggill and McAllister remind us that the analytical examination of pleasure and play can often work to neutralize the very object of study. Fun recedes into the background as games- or work-oriented productions are debated—the shear frivolity of games and play is excluded from consideration. It is as if having fun is just not okay, especially fun which works against the dictates of production. We risk destroying the very act of pleasure and fun inherent in gameplaying by our own research methods and research models. Games are both serious and not serious at the same time. To treat video games and modern play in general as simply vehicles for exploring pressing social concerns, as in the serious game movement, or conversely treating the activity as a simple waste of precious time, ignores the complex way in which both approaches speak to a fundamental truth about play and games. The tension between these two sides of play, both focused immersion and light playful action, finds its earliest expression in

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the ritualized purposes of the carnival and the temporary rejection of life’s despair and forced labor. Dealing more explicitly with the carnival in modern life Langman and Lukács in chapter 4 begin by discussing Marx’s critique of capitalist domination. While the ludic festivals discussed by Huizinga brimmed with implicit and explicit critiques of the established order, modern ludic festivals combined with expanded consumption and the joys of transgression are seamlessly integrated into everyday life. Langman and Lukács explore the relationship between culture and domination, exploring the rise of critical theory and its contribution to looking at creativity, fun, and pleasure. The collapse of pleasure into consumption has been a long historical process, the movement from surplus repression to keep people at work to the expansion of consumption, what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation.” It is within this context that they discuss the role of the carnival as an attempt to escape the iron cage of rationality created by modern work. The disenchantment of the world promoted by alienated labor and a profound disempowerment of the general population is refused with magical re-enchantments from magical themes in culture to ludic carnivals celebrating the pleasure of human expression. Even as these cultural forms are integrated into consumer capital they also retain their ability to give joy and provide new visions of transgression. Hence, video games, Internet sites, machinima, and a host of other technological innovations work to expand the realm of human possibility even while the pressure is on to contain those dreams. Noon and Dyer-Witheford’s contribution in chapter 5 begins with an analysis of the video game series Metal Gear Solid (MGS) produced by Hideo Kojima. This combined textual analysis with critical political research reveals how this type of first-person shooter virtual world, complete with political conspiracies, clandestine missions, and exotic military hardware, depicts the fantasy of a world order in decay. From private armies to terror wars and weapons of mass destruction the MGS series exhibits militarist masculinity. However, what makes this analysis interesting is how the authors draw out the contradictions in this view by also revealing how MGS offers a self-reflexive critique of regimes of information control and military conditioning. The usefulness of this kind of textual analysis is precisely in its ability to examine the game from different sides and to recognize that players may not just take the position of imperialist, but also may adopt the anti-imperialist position. Of course, the next step in research of this nature is to then examine how do gaming populations really respond to games such as this? Do they, in fact, exhibit properties of self-reflection that the authors assume exist in both the structure of the game and the game designer’s intent?

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The question of how audiences understand their experiences is intimately connected to the formation of identity as demonstrated by Alanna Miller in the next chapter. Miller, in chapter 6, looks at both the role of virtual embodiment, where electronic visual representations stand in for the physical, live person in a virtual space, and the ability of symbolic interaction as a sociological theory to understand such formations. While she maintains that virtual embodiment is a necessity rendered by technology, embodiment is a social necessity to bring a degree of coherence to the world we live in. Miller raises several key questions about the differences between virtual and physical worlds. How do the tensions which develop between the virtual world and the physical world manifest themselves in struggles between the ideal and true self? In what manner is gender, race, and ethnic identification negotiated within this tension? And what is the relevance of a multiplicity of selves when so much time is spent online? Symbolic interaction assists this analysis by providing a model that looks at the tensions between one’s idealized self and the true self—tensions which invoke issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and a range of other social markers. While the first part of our book attempts to look at the theoretical models which might be used to conceptualize video gameplay, the second part focuses on the business of how changing markets effect the presentation and design of games themselves. It is commonplace for the game industry, like most of mass media, to employ stereotypical representations within their game worlds, if only to encourage identification between their perceived consumers and the product. Paul Ketchum and B. Mitch Peck examine this relationship in detail in chapter 7 by comparing the images of gender, race, and ethnicity between representations presented in Computer Gaming World magazine from the early 1990s and those which are present in more recent issues of PC Gamer. They question whether those representations have changed over time. Since stereotypes are used as shorthand to define who one should interact with and who one should shun, they have an important role to play in how populations define marginal people and, conversely, powerful people. In addition, by examining these stereotypes Ketchum and Peck are able to make a case for how the game industry understands its audience and their assumptions about what that audience can identify with and what they cannot. It would be tempting to argue that industry-produced stereotypes are the result of intentional misleading on the part of the game industry. However, such a perspective would deny that, as in any business, the game industry does not want to alienate what it perceives as its customer base, and wants to encourage that same base to purchase its product. Therefore, the use of stereotyping in games, as in all media products, tells us more

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about the game audience and their conceptions of race and gender, rather than just the intentions of game producers. William Kelly’s work, in chapter 8, on censorship of game violence in Japan and the United States, reveals how different cultural definitions of violent representations come into play when game developers attempt to market their product in different countries. Since media representations of violence often reveal the cultural boundaries of what is considered morally or ethically to be acceptable within a specific society’s context, the struggles over which representation can be seen and which must be concealed also dovetails with considerations of stereotypical imagery and their perceived harmful effects. Drawing upon his long-term research on the production and consumption of video games in Japan and the localization of those games for outside markets, Kelly examines the strategies Japanese video-game developers, publishers, and localized companies use to negotiate the issues of censorship in various global consumer markets. What is excluded in those representations and what is included? Which games are selected for censorship and which ones are considered “safe?” Carlson and Corliss, in chapter 9, examine the manner in which the transnational circulation of electronic media images, especially video games, structure our social imaginations by mediating which images are available to what audiences as fantasy material. Since video games are localized for marketing to specific audiences, altered for international consumption and distribution, what forces are at work to shape this process? Drawing upon research in the game industry, Carlson and Corliss, examine in detail some of those forces that shape the transnational production, circulation, and consumption of video games. Video games and video-game worlds do their cultural work by mediating between one’s personal imagination and the social world of cultural difference. This is anther reason why Kelly’s work on game-advertising stereotypes mentioned earlier is so important. In our third part we explore issues revolving around how one should research digital play. What are appropriate methods given the technological achievements in this day and age? And what are the implications of particular methods for developing a critical understanding of modern play? András Lukács in chapter 10 argues for the need to move beyond the standard textual analysis, survey work, or descriptive reports of games and their players, to an approach which locates games within the larger social, political, and economic forces at work in any given society. The problem with game-study researchers is not simply their choice of proper methods, be it quantitative or qualitative, but a deeper problem of critically understanding the ontological and epistemological issues which emerge in their work. How do we know

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what we know when we think we are researching modern play? The complex social worlds that exist in online gaming communities, as well as other areas on the Internet, make problematic many assumptions practiced by standard old school ethnography. At the same time, while researchers such as Tom Boellstorff12 argue that virtual worlds should be taken at face value with their own internal dynamics, we cannot help but examine how these virtual playgrounds are deeply connected to existing structures of power and domination within our society. Boellstorff’s reaction should be viewed as a spirited defense of game research by looking at the internal social relationships established within game worlds, a necessary defense given the weight of media effects’ models and their automatic and uncritical assumption of player intentions and outcomes. However, we should not let go too quickly the intimate connection between player’s game worlds and their off-world lives. To collapse analysis into a descriptive understanding of the dynamics within virtual gaming spaces without considering one’s external social context risks cutting off any possibility of developing a critical analysis of power, and hence, for why social interactions within games take the form that they do. As we have said before players do not leave their real selves at the virtual door, but bring them inside the game world, affecting others both in the game world and outside in everyday social relationships. Lukács’s chapter also addresses the area of critical audience studies and digital play, especially with reference to how to design a study and what kinds of issues game researchers will encounter when dealing with university human-subjects committees. Those engaged in researching digital play would benefit from a discussion with their Institutional Review Boards (IRB), no matter how contentious such a discussion might become. The methodological issues of informed consent, as well as the systematic respect for those we study, should be paramount in any research agenda. The remaining two chapters grapple with how to understand the patterns of social interaction in first-person shooter games (FPS) and the virtues of mixing methods in virtual world research. Ducheneaut’s work in chapter 11 documents the complexity of player behavior in the game Counter-Strike, through a four-month virtual ethnography. During this period he noted the negotiation of social roles, status, and power practiced by game players, and how game players were socialized into a particular gaming community over time. Using insights garnered from the symbolic interaction perspective Ducheneaut argues for a more flexible definition of how players reinterpret their role within virtual play realms. What does gameplaying mean for the players of Counter-Strike? This approach to game research using recorded chats and participant observation is most useful for capturing the nuances

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of game worlds. While various methods of capturing qualitative data can be used, from screen shots to recording online sessions using computer software, the fact remains that coding this data and making meaningful sense of what is being produced is more of an art than a science. Coded data can reveal interesting social patterns of online talk and as well as the behavior of game participants. This, in turn, can demonstrate patterns of social exclusion and inclusion. Teams of game players constantly negotiate their relationships with each other, whether it is organizing teamwork or deciding how to accomplish a mission. How do players negotiate these complex teamwork interactions? How do people treat each other when there is a success or failure of team objectives? And what can in-game behavior tell us about how we cope with situations of conflict and cooperation in general? Finally, in chapter 12, Coavoux argues for the need to mix research methods in order to overcome the limitations of using only a qualitative, quantitative, or textual analysis approach. Rather, mixing these methods gives a more fruitful outcome when understanding what this new realm of modern play means for society. Coavoux examined closely how players conducted themselves in the online multiplayer game World of Warcraft, using in-depth interviews with players, participant observation, and textual analysis of player-produced texts, combined with online surveys. He makes the argument that our ability to answer a research question is often dependent upon our chosen method. In his own research, Coavoux shifted from qualitative methods to quantitative methods as issues were raised during the research process. He shifted from asking how players were socialized into World of Warcraft to looking at the ways game players differentiated themselves when playing the game. This marked a distinct shift in both the conceptual tool and the methods that were employed. The result was a new and interesting insight into social character of virtual play. In the end, Coavoux encourages game researchers to move beyond the “scholastic point of view,” which leads a researcher to apply his or her own vision of the world to the people studied, to an expanded approach to engage a more complete analysis of the pleasure that comes from playing in these virtual worlds. To conclude, we hope that the critical issues concerning modern play, video games, and game research presented here will prompt others to plunge further into this line of research. Given the importance of virtual worlds of play in modern society and the connection between those worlds of fantasy and consumer capitalism, it is important that we work to develop a critical perspective which keeps in focus the significance of social justice, domination, and liberation. Like radio, television, and movies, these newest technologies of representation are here to stay, and rather than singing their

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praises or conversely dreading their corrupting influence, we would be best served by deploying the best of social science techniques and concepts and work to reveal how this new type of play can both free us in fantasy while also trapping us in conventional narratives.

Notes 1. Apocalyptic fantasies have most often been associated with religious movements which organize the beliefs of their followers around mythic themes of purification of the secular world, and redemption through faith. The secular world perceived as corrupt and beyond human control is purged by fire and brimstone to prepare the ways for the glories of redemption in the mythic divine figure. The secular counterpart of this fantasy are the warrior heroes who impose self-discipline retreating from the idle pleasures of the world to struggle for redemption through war, violence, and the restoration of what has been perceived as lost. Such fantasies can be dangerous breeding grounds for fascist and neo-fascist movements. They are also at the root of much of the Western imagination. 2. Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990). 3. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998). 4. The classic work in this area is that of Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (New York: Beacon Press, 1971). Also see, Roger Caillois and Meyer Barash, Man, Play and Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 5. Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, and the founder of Objectivism advocated a social order completely run by selfish interests absent any moral or ethic social constraints. 6. Debra Jackson, “Utopian Fantasy and the Politics of Difference,” in World of Warcraft and Philosophy: Wrath of the Philosopher King, ed. Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger (Chicago: Open Court, 2009), 131–42. 7. See the work of Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1997); Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (New York: Routledge Press, 2002); Reich Goode and Ben-Yehuda Nachman, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (Oxford, London: Blackwell Press, 1994); and for more recent work Chas Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media (New York: Open University Press, 2003); Karen Sternheimer, It’s Not the Media: The Truth about Pop Culture’s Influence on Children (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Charles Krinsky, ed., Moral Panics over Contemporary Children and Youth (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2008). 8. See J. Patrick Williams and Jonas Heide Smith, eds., The Players’ Realm: Studies on the Culture of Video Games and Gaming (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Com-

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pany, Inc., 2007); Tyrone L. Adams and Stephen A. Smith, eds., Electronic Tribes: The Virtual Worlds of Geeks, Gamers, Shamans, and Scammers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008); Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005); William Sims Bainbridge, ed., Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual (New York: Springer Press, 2010); Celia Pearce and Artemesia, Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009); T. L. Taylor, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); Mia Consalvo, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007); David Buckingham, ed., Youth, Identity, and Digital Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008); Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Y. Sun, eds., Beyond Barbie & Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008). 9. Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, eds. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 670–89. 10. Taylor, Play Between Worlds, 88–91. 11. Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001) 12. Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life, 60–86.

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PART I

MODERN PLAY AND TECHNOLOGY—DEFINING DIGITAL PLAY

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CHAPTER TWO



Play and Cultural Transformation— Or, What Would Huizinga Think of Video Games? Thomas S. Henricks

Studies of human play commonly take a personal or even psychological approach. That is, play is described as something that individuals do, and those individuals are said to receive a variety of (typically worthwhile) effects from their activity. Routinely claimed are such benefits as the strengthening of the body and mind, refinement of life skills, acquisition of socially valued knowledge, practice in emotional management, and so forth. Play, as Sutton-Smith argues, is the place where people expand and thicken the range of their own capabilities.1 Quite different is the perspective developed by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his classic book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture.2 In that work, Huizinga states that play (at least historically) is something that people do collectively. Those public events are occasions to address, articulate, and refine important features of the societies and groups that sponsor the play. In other words, play is less a making of individual meaning than it is a making of public or cultural meaning. When people play together, they create and sustain visions of what the world might become and of the valued (and devalued) positions that each of them might hold in an order so configured. This chapter explores Huizinga’s thesis about the social and cultural implications of play, with an emphasis on video games. Initial comments focus on Huizinga’s general argument and include some criticisms of his approach. The remainder of the chapter addresses two different meanings of the title, “play and cultural transformation.” The first of these meanings is that patterns of play are

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affected by changes in culture. In that light, the author offers an overview of the changing character of play and players in four historical periods: premodern, early modern, late modern (or industrial), and postmodern. Special attention is given to changes in media as these have influenced playful possibilities and practices. It is argued that postmodern versions of play build on—but also alter significantly—earlier play models. The second theme—how play affects or even transforms culture—is addressed through a discussion of the character of play as a distinctive mode of human activity. In that light, the author presents his view of play as a vehicle of “ascending meaning” and of the various “contexts” in which people play. It is argued that play is an assertive, “contestive” style of relating to the world which differs significantly from other styles of expression. Ultimately, the chapter returns to Huizinga’s central concern: what is it that is “playful” about contemporary play—in this instance, video games—and what dangers persist if that truly playful spirit is not honored?

Huizinga’s Thesis Although Huizinga’s work receives general acclaim as one of the great twentieth-century writings on play, it is notable that most play scholars consult the book primarily for its well-known listing of the characteristics of play.3 That listing, it may be recalled, assigns to play such qualities as voluntariness, difference from ordinary or real life, seclusion and limitation, a tendency to be surrounded by secrecy, and an intriguing, tension-filled relationship between order and disorder.4 Rarely do those scholars focus on Huizinga’s central thesis: that play was once an energizing, even culturecreating activity in the life of societies. At some point in history—which Huizinga traces to the industrialization, bureaucratization, and ascendant bourgeois mentality of nineteenth-century Europe—the relationship of people to playful festivity changed. Increasingly, play became managed by non-players; formal organizations and their procedures took center stage; and participants’ attitudes toward their own play became “serious” in new ways. In his view, players once conceived the world in careless, exploratory ways; now they operate inside visions controlled by others. To be sure, there are reasons for the relative neglect of Huizinga’s general thesis. Many of these can be attributed to Huizinga himself. Homo Ludens partakes of an older style of historical writing that paints in broad strokes the great movements of societies or even of “civilization” as a whole. Contemporary scholars have come to be suspicious of such vast portraits or “grand totalizing narratives,” to use the postmodern phrase. Even as a historical

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account, Homo Ludens is less a detailed study of clearly defined social and cultural processes than it is a sort of general anthropology of human possibility, a gathering together of examples from many times and places to support a view that play is not something people do only in clearly identified, “recreational” settings but instead is a more general orientation that people bring to occasions of many kinds. Thus, tennis courts, courts of law, Eskimo song duels, potlatch festivals, riddling contests, philosophical symposia, political debates, and the like are (at least potentially) fields of play, when people confront each other in public contests of skill and daring. At such moments, culture—as a public agreement about the character of the world and the range of human possibilities within this world—is presented and refined. Such claims for the changing place of the social contest or “agon” in history—like those about the changing character of play—are so broad as to make their refutation difficult. Any interpreter of Homo Ludens should also be armed with the knowledge that Huizinga was a confessed admirer of the pre-industrial world—and especially of the European Middle Ages—with its traditions, rituals, hierarchies, privileges, personal relations, and strong emotional contrasts.5 Just as ardently, he deplored its modern, increasingly bureaucratized replacement.6 The reader should know as well that this old-fashioned, swooning-for-bygone-days, and arguably elitist orientation has found its share of critics, who claim that Huizinga’s great book is more a commentary on the exploits of highly placed people than it is a serious inquiry into the role of play in everyday life.7 Whether one criticizes Huizinga for his pre-modern enthusiasms or not, his rather dour view of the human prospect is perhaps not so surprising. Homo Ludens was written as totalitarianism was rising in Europe; its author was placed in a concentration camp and died just before the end of the war in 1945. One cannot know with certainty what Huizinga would have thought about our increasingly machine-dominated and socially complicated world. Such imagining is a central theme of this chapter. Even if Huizinga’s striking thesis about the relationship between play and culture remains largely unproven, this should not detract from the importance of the questions that his work continues to pose for scholars of many types. Such questions include the following: Is the “character” of play in the contemporary era somehow different from what people experienced previously? If it is different, what accounts for this? And what are the consequences—social, cultural, and personal—of the play that occurs in the new, “mediated” formats? Such questions, it should be clear to the reader, are crucial to the current book. New interactive technologies—and especially video games—are, at least in some of their most popular forms, mechanically generated dramas

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that cast up visions of the good (and bad) life and invite people to inhabit, sustain, and negotiate places within those visions. To what extent can participation in video games be said to be “playful” (in any sense that resembles Huizinga’s characterization) and when should other terms be employed? In the most general sense, what “becomes” of the play of modern gamers?

Media, Cultural Change, and Play The following discussion of cultural change and play begins with a truism: for the most part, people play in ways permitted to them by their host societies. That is, people are unable to play with objects not yet invented, language they do not know, bodies unsuited for the task, organizations still to be established, and so forth. Although Huizinga’s book is about the role of play in helping people dream of things that never were and never will be, for the most part play occurs in institutionalized (that is, socially established and accepted) formats. Acknowledging these socially recognized formats allows people to play together, to share their experiences with others, to develop identifiable skills, and to gain the respect that comes from the possession of those skills, and in all those ways to comprehend the relationship of their activity to the self. To take the example that dominates the current chapter, people play video games because it makes sense for them to do so—and because they can. Precisely because people adjust their play to the circumstances of their societies, there have been some important historical shifts in the character and organization of play. This is Huizinga’s theme. As an early proponent of “cultural” history, he focuses his own analysis on the ways in which ideas and manners have been presented in society—with special attention to poetry, art, philosophy, and myth. He considers themes from military history—though mostly in terms of the status and code of the warrior—but he largely ignores changes in economic and political relationships (the Marxian emphasis). Most important perhaps, he does little with shifts in media as these have influenced the possibilities for playing. For that reason, the following descriptions will include observations from scholars of media history. Huizinga himself did not establish distinct historical periods in his own discussion of the changing character of play. Instead, his focus was on the healthful role of play in earlier times and then on the disruptions caused to that pattern by nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrialism. However, in the current author’s view, any “whirlwind tour” of changing play possibilities is easier to comprehend and evaluate if a stage-model is used. As noted in the introduction, the four stages to be discussed are the pre-modern period

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(in Europe, roughly the time before the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), the early modern period (from that time through the eighteenth century), the late modern period (the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), and then a postmodern period (beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century). Once again, these divisions are largely heuristic devices used to categorize a shifting world in which some societies (and parts of societies) change faster than others, play forms themselves follow different patterns, social groups differentially accept and reject changes, and older patterns live on in more or less diminished ways. Detailed studies make plain those complexities; broad overviews ignore them.8

Pre-Modern Culture and Play How was culture (and play) organized in the period before the developments that most scholars associate with modernity—that is, before the rise of nation-states, the European voyages of conquest, individualism, capitalism, science, bureaucratic administration, the Protestant Reformation, widespread literacy, and so forth? What were the terms of life in Huizinga’s beloved Middle Ages? For most people (and for people in isolated, traditional societies still), life was an intensely local affair that focused on obligations to community and family.9 Such groups were the frameworks within which selfhood was understood and expressed. In a world of few information sources, traditional knowledge was critical, and (although Catholicism was also a modernizing force in Europe) much of this knowledge was linked to religious understandings. Although specialized occupational status was developing and people had some knowledge of “different” others through contacts with traveling merchants, fairs, pilgrimage, and the like, people in village communities were relatively isolated and thus forced into social patterns that reinforced their commonality. Even wealthier families were drawn into the rhythms of the agricultural year and the necessities of the local community. Such communities were dominated by a fundamentally oral tradition.10 Information was passed in face-to-face settings. Knowledge was gathered and disseminated through songs and stories. As people were the primary “bearers” of culture, memory was prized. But so was skill at argumentation in public settings. Again, because fresh information sources and alternative worldviews were not readily available, people were profoundly parochial and spoke with the certainty that comes from such limitation. “Records” of what occurred were not prominent, so people had to periodically re-enact events to remind themselves of what was important and what was not. Culture in that

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sense was often “performed,” and skills in dramaturgy and narration were admired. To that degree, “common sense” was forged as an act of collective memory-making. When people got together in large and small settings, they agreed about the skills and ideas that seemed to be of practical use in their locale. More profound, they reaffirmed the importance of a sacred realm—that stood beyond and coordinated the world of everyday affairs—and publicly declared its power. This is the setting that is the foundation for Huizinga’s classic description of play. Ignoring almost entirely the play of children and private acts of play, he focuses on the play of adults in public settings. In his view, play is commonly a social contest—that is, a competition that is normatively regulated, made safe, and otherwise bounded by a host of framing devices (commonly costumes, designated play spaces, new understandings of time, specialized playing implements, and often the most artificial of goals). For Huizinga, preindustrial play tends to be separated from “material” consequences (especially economic payoffs) but it does possess significant symbolic consequences.11 Said differently, public play is often an “identity ceremony” in which people get to display before others who they are, what they can do, and how they feel about those commitments.12 In that context, successful performances sometimes led to enhanced social status—be it for the group or for the individual—in the world beyond the game. Although Homo Ludens is an attempt to isolate the nature and significance of play in history, that project is made difficult by the fact that play in the pre-modern world is commonly set within what Huizinga terms the “play-festival-rite” complex.13 That is, playful activity is typically an expected element of ceremonial events that are legitimated at some level by beliefs about the sacred, are “ritualized” in various ways, and include substantial doses of joyful social bonding. When traditional people play, they reaffirm their broader social and cultural identities at the same time that they creatively express themselves and negotiate limited social relationships within the terms of that broader framework. As wise as that view of “real” events may be, Huizinga’s failure to effectively separate the elements of his play-rite-festival complex has bedeviled the field of play studies ever since. In the worst cases, play becomes little more than a buzzword for pleasant, self-sustained activity that occurs when people “participate” in events of many types. At any rate, Huizinga’s portrait focuses on what the current author calls the (socially and culturally) embedded player. Like early rituals, early play is not “mimetic” (that is, an imitation or reproduction of already existing forms). Instead, it is “mimectic.” That is, early play asks people to “help out” or “make real” visions of what the world can become through their own cre-

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ative resources.14 Although these forays of the imagination (used in the older sense of placing reality into images) are bounded sharply by group values, play events are the public settings where culture is brought to life.

Early Modern Culture and Play Modernity is characterized by two seemingly opposite processes.15 On the one hand, large formally chartered organizations (national governments, churches, schools, businesses, and so forth) emerge and claim the allegiance of their newly conceived members. Correspondingly, older “group-based” affiliations (to extended families, communities, and guilds) decline in importance. Formal organizations are (in a way that groups are not) cultural abstractions. They “exist” as sets of positions, credos, or laws and demand a more intellectualized or principled orientation from the individual. That more intellectualized relationship is one basis for the second theme of modernity, the rise of the individual. In a process that started at the top of society and worked its way downward, people became less the servants of the small groups that defined and coordinated almost every aspect of their lives and instead self-sustaining “agents” who pursued relationships with specialized organizations of every type. Those who moved from the rural areas to the emerging culture of the towns found that they were now freer to succeed—or to starve. And people of various types could now locate themselves in new organizations—centralized governments, national armies, religiously sponsored schools, and civic associations. To that extent—and in ways that were both socially discriminating and quite gradual—ideas of subject-hood or fealty were replaced by those of citizenship. As many writers have emphasized, the printing press was a profoundly important part of this process.16 Movable type (and thus the mass production of written material) destroyed the geographical limitations inherent to face-toface communication and expanded dramatically the circles of communication that could be developed by the passing of hand-written documents. Printing (and thereby cheaper documents) made possible a Bible-reading public and by extension, an individualistic Protestantism. Printing allowed middle-class people to read “copybooks” and thus imitate the habits of wealthier citizens. In the form of cheap periodicals, printing fed the idea of the “news” and opened up the prospect of reading magazines and even “novels” for pleasure. Most significant, it freed people from dependence on their neighbors for information and created the idea of a “public” possessed of common interests. However, printing also encouraged new (and, to some, troubling) habits of cultural engagement. A “reading” person is arguably a “thinking” person

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who sorts out the sense of statements in his own way and at his own pace. Readers are specialized “consumers” who operate at great remove from the producers of their reading matter. In such ways, reading supports a more withdrawn, deliberative style of being. Print allows very sophisticated ideas to be put forward, analyzed, and corrected. It de-personalizes (and de-localizes) ideas and gives them permanence. It “fixes” understandings and makes possible “contractual” relationships.” In such ways, written culture supports processes of individualism, specialization, and fragmentation. What new style of play expresses the sensibilities of the now less socially secure and more strategically calculating type of person? As Elias and Dunning have argued, during this period in Europe, the “parliamentarization” of society led to the “sportization” of pastimes of many types.17 That is, playful activities increasingly followed an “associationist” pattern of sociality. If people in earlier times participated in events as a right of membership in longstanding social groups, now people were expected to cultivate a personal interest in increasingly specialized sports and games. By the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, people might join a club composed of members devoted to this activity.18 Such a club—like parliament itself—might have a written charter, an established list of members (and procedures for membership), officers, and elaborately articulated rules for play. In such ways, sports and games became focused activities rather than informal accompaniments to holiday frolics and fairs. This transformation was also supported by the “enclosure” of publicly accessible common lands and by the growth of cities. With less open space in which to play, people were shifted to commercial settings (bars, bowling alleys, theaters, music halls, amusement parks, and so forth). For the wealthier classes, play in private parklands and domestic interiors became increasingly important as centers of leisure and indicators of status. New public identities like the “sportsman” or “gamester” emerged. In that context it should be acknowledged that some of the impetus for the new infatuation with rules was the popularity of gambling.19 In a more socially fluid and anonymous society (where money was an important medium of interchange), play was an important way in which people displayed their “character” and capability (including the ability to honor one’s debts). Successful performances on the field of play might lead to other social and business relationships. In any case, “public” play of this type was a way of honoring the sponsoring organization and the persons conforming to its principles. That the activity was so pointlessly artificial (hunting, but not really for food; fighting but without real harm; ball play; cards; and so forth) made the act of social courtesy all the more apparent.

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In the author’s view, this period in history features what might be termed the productive player. As in the “social contract” theories of human governance that became popular during this period, socially dispersed players gathered together on common ground to make agreements about how they will conduct their relationships with one another. Their acknowledgement of that quite “artificial” framework is the means by which they identify themselves as “sportsmen.” From that status, they effectively “create” the play world. As in the cases of musical and artistic creation, games are constructive enterprises that are said to have some social value to the public at large. That “productivist” view of culture (and play’s role in it) is a key theme of Homo Ludens.

Late Modern Culture and Play The themes and practices described above became accentuated in the industrial era, the period receiving the brunt of Huizinga’s criticism. City populations expanded dramatically and the commercial classes rose in political power and public prominence. The invention of the steam engine supported a factory-style organization of work and the identification of human producers as a working class. Railroads and steamships made possible the gathering of resources from around the world and the wide-spread distribution of finished goods. Mechanized national armies and imperialism were the order of the day. The new administrative sensibility was applied to public education. Much was done in the name of national destiny. Historical periods are marked by their inventions.20 During the nineteenth century, the development of the telegraph and then the telephone overwhelmed physical distance. By century’s end, the controlled production and distribution of electric current—and especially the electric light— changed the meaning of night and day, winter and summer. Photography and processes of graphic reproduction altered ideas about the momentary and revolutionized the notion of the person as seer, transcriber, and interpreter. During the earlier twentieth century, moving pictures (and then “talkies”) mass-produced dramatic scenarios. Radio “broadcast” information instantaneously across widely dispersed populations. In such ways, populations became “publics,” aggregations of widely dispersed individuals united by their shared interest in mass-produced products, policies, and information. What qualities of play were pertinent to the industrial order? The “associationist” style of the preceding period became more firmly established, as did the sponsorship of play by schools. Against views of play as useless frivolity or time wasting, proponents of organized recreation argued that games

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and sports had important instrumental value.21 Games built strong bodies, developed leaders, developed habits of character, and—in the case of team games—cultivated understandings of a socially based morality. Leaders of schools and religious organizations like the YMCA sought to limit the influences of individualistic rural sports like hunting, to curtail gambling, and to show how society might function best if people operated by the terms of fairly regulated competition. An amateur creed was espoused, in part because the opposite of that creed—a professional code—was now rising. Whatever its benefits, this organizationally regulated style of play troubled Huizinga. In his view, the joyous participation of earlier days was being supplanted by a much more determined, “athletic” style.22 The industrial techniques of businesses had been applied to play. At any rate, during the nineteenth century, members of organizationally sponsored teams had become relatively “permanent,” training procedures were in place, records were kept, everything was done with an eye to efficiency and success. Huizinga even objected to the formal development of card games like bridge, which he felt had devolved into “sterile excellence.”23 And not surprisingly, he was strongly opposed to the rising popularity of professional athletics, whose practitioners were not infrequently the functionaries of non-playing gamesters. Moreover, professionalism highlighted the distinction between two categories of persons: those who perform and those who watch.24 At any rate, such activities expressed what he considered to be a prosaic, utilitarian, and bourgeois spirit. Gone now, in his estimation, was the ethos of aristocrats and peasants—people more or less assured of their respective positions in the world—who could comport themselves fancifully and spontaneously in public settings before one another. People in previous ages could engage in all manner of creative foolishness; they could imagine alternative worlds. By contrast, during the nineteenth century “work and production had become the ideal, and then the idol, of the age”25 and even play itself had become frenetic and work-like. In this author’s view then, the industrial era is marked by the managed player. Like other institutions, play in this period is now bureaucratically administered; and play participants are now specialized as owners-managers, performers, officials, spectators, and even producers and readers of public information. Like Marx’s disenfranchised laborers, players (as performers) are necessary to this well-established enterprise but they do not control its operation.

Postmodern Culture and Play Scholars disagree on whether the latter half of the twentieth century ushered in new, significantly different styles of understanding and relating—that

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might be called “post” modernity—or whether people continue to live under the conditions of late or “advanced” modernity.26 To be sure, many of the themes of the industrial era remain with us—huge economic and political organizations, formal education and rule by certificate holders, expanding and increasingly mobile populations, legalism, bureaucratic administration, and the like. Machines play more dominant roles than ever. Occupations (at least in the wealthier countries) have shifted toward the development and servicing of machines, the provision of (machine-assisted) personal services, and “information” creation and dissemination. People working in all fields, including the above-mentioned information or knowledge industries, find themselves increasingly dependent on a series of electronic inventions, including the computer. Institutional affairs—business, media, political, educational, recreational, and even social—now cross national boundaries. The concept of a global society gains currency. It is difficult to know whether these processes will lead to a coherent social order (either good or evil) or whether countervailing factors—social and cultural gigantism, ethnic and religious diversity, differential economic standing, and so forth—will spawn marginality and endless conflict or, indeed, make discussions of good and evil irrelevant. Of special interest amidst these changes is a mid-twentieth-century invention—television, which its most famous proponent Marshall McLuhan understood to be a technological extension of many of the previously discussed forms.27 Television—in part because of its screen size, grainy resolution, and opportunities for channel selection—was said to invite people into its scenes. TV supported small gatherings of people in living rooms, bars, and dens. In McLuhan’s view, television is especially suited to closeup pictures of people in emotionally animated conversations. In such ways, television recaptures some of the themes of the pre-modern society, when information was linked to visual displays and to the personal qualities of presenters. An image-based, multi-sensory style is once again made possible. Indeed, television’s reach is so vast that it now makes possible a “global community,” in the sense that it allows viewers to witness (and perhaps feel an emotional connection to) human activities from around the world. Contemporary people, it is sometimes argued, have the personal, social, and cultural sensibilities of TV viewers.28 Compared to book-oriented populations, people seem to prefer getting information in short doses that are emotionally rich and personalized. We postmoderns are intrigued by little dramatic scenarios; we are pleased that these fictions have been contrived to entertain or even “court” us.29 Because we cannot control this flow of sight and sound (unless it is by “tuning out”), we let the images run across us and

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do not subject them to the same kinds of logical scrutiny that we apply to the relatively immobile claims of written documents. In that light, televised information is frequently presented with the intent to shock, captivate, or amuse—that is, to disrupt routine cognitive processing by interventions of the “new.” At any rate, much has been made of contemporary people’s purportedly short attention spans, need for emotional stimulation, and “lazy” desire to have enjoyment packaged up and presented to them. And (whether this can be attributed to television or not) most of us are said to have the social habits of television viewers. We wander in and out of public gatherings to get drinks and go to the bathroom, lounge in our chairs, engage in side conversations, and are very quickly “bored.” As Sennett has argued, an ethic of personal intimacy now floods the public sphere.30 Postmodernism has seized on such themes in its treatments of cultural transformation.31 More than ever, culture has become unhinged from its human bearers. Increasingly, publicly accessible information occurs as a firestorm of electronically generated images. The origins of these mass-produced “messages” are more or less hidden from view as are their connections to any underlying “reality” that would explain their character. The airwaves are filled with competing presentations of this sort; each seeks to break through the “clutter” and capture the attention of the viewer. Postmodernism’s preferred example of this is commercial advertising, where pleasant images are pasted together to offer scenarios that viewers can enter.32 Individuals are encouraged to interpret the “meanings” of these scenarios in their own fashion; to that extent, they “write” the narratives they consume. Understood in this way, culture is a patterning of seemingly endless (and not infrequently contradictory) symbolic references. There is now, it is sometimes claimed, no deeper logic or “truth” that unites the whole system. Accounts are merely rhetoric, ideologies, or “narratives” that forward the perspectives of their makers. People wend their way through this labyrinth and contemplate each glittering sign as they come upon it. Such a world is particular, transient, superficial, sensuous, and open to the interpretations of its inhabitants. The computer aids and accelerates such themes. Computers are essentially points of entry into realms of symbolic possibility. People travel electronically to sites; their movements are seen as “web-crawling” or “networking” instead of some structurally ordained, uniformly recognized progress. Like the operating system of the computer itself, each site is permitted to have its own distinctive logic, which it is the viewer’s requirement to discover. Ascertaining that logic is a largely technical enterprise; that is, viewers try to learn the routes and techniques that will help them reach (quickly) their own private goals. Against TV’s relatively passive observers, Internet users are more akin

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to car-based tourists who drive to self-determined destinations, get out and roam around for while, make a few modest changes to the environment they encounter, stay as long they wish (unless their behavior requires expulsion by the manager of the site), pick up (or “download”) a few mementos of their stay, get back in their cars, and drive on. Like tourists of every sort, the visitors select the activities they will participate in at each stop. At times, they merely gaze at the sights; at other times, they engage in a game or in a dialogue with others gathered there. However, in any case, they tend to come and go according to their own (subjectively assessed) interests and needs. To that degree, an instrumental ethic prevails. Visitors of this sort want to attain the pleasures that come from privileged access. They have less enthusiasm for the burdensome responsibilities that are the lot of ongoing relationships with “real” (that is, with flesh-and-blood) others. What kind of entertainment suits this understanding of the cultural participant as user, consumer, or “playa”? Video games—whether through arcades, game platforms, or computers—are increasingly prominent features of contemporary life.33 As other chapters in this book will develop in more detail, video games are settings of their own sort—replete with distinctive versions of space and time, visual imagery, casts of characters, goals, challenges, and permissible behaviors.34 Such fields of imaginative and behavioral possibility are largely cut off from the routine responsibilities of those who play. Because they involve the development of specialized (and sometimes highly artificial) skill sets, video games—like other games—effectively distill and express themes of personal character and commitment. To that degree, they conform to Huizinga’s conception of play. Similarly—and as Huizinga remarked about play in general—video games promote the formation of social groupings that conduct their affairs within the context of a society that sometimes considers that activity trivial, foolish, or worse. That sense of escape, secrecy, and subversion—traits elemental to so many of the activities of younger people—is surely part of the pleasure. As in Huizinga’s idealized conception, players are granted the right to enter and exit the play setting as they desire, a freedom that is accentuated in the online versions of games that involve thousands of players at every moment of the day. Furthermore, skill at gaming—like skill at sport, dancing, music, and the like—becomes a source of status—or even a centerpiece of identity—among those who play.35 Gaming is a welcomed respite (and sometimes obsessive escape) from daily activities, an occasion to host the gathering and making of friends, a chance to sort out the character of those comrades, and a way to see where the player himself fits in such circles. Gaming allows people to pursue lines of behavior in intentionally abstract or even exotic settings and

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to work through the implications of those behaviors—frequently a kind of symbolic death—in ways that afford them little harm. As in other forms of drama, protagonists die so that observers may reflect on those public failures and go on with their own lives in newly committed ways. Unlike most other dramatic formats (such as books, plays, movies, and television shows), video games are what some scholars have termed “cybertexts.”36 Players do not simply read and reflect on the qualities of characters, they take on (in a strategically distanced way) the identity of a particular on-screen character and direct its fate.37 Such quasi-involvement suits well the postmodern spirit. Contemporary people have grown accustomed to the “masks” or personas that they put forward in myriads of settings.38 They understand well what Goffman described as role-distance, the sense that all of us are only partially involved in our roles as student, businessperson, soccer coach, church member, parent, political advocate, and so forth.39 No pretense is made that these roles are equivalent to one another or that they fully involve the person. Always something is held in reserve. To that degree, we do not inhabit but rather play our roles in society. Moreover, we recognize that we are “in play” as much as we play.40 That is, we know that other persons have images of us in their minds and that they wish to control (and sometimes block) many of our actions. We know that most of these machinations are role based; in other words, our social contacts are typically not about ourselves as persons (in any broad sense) but rather about the versions of ourselves we present to others. In the postmodern view of things, the human condition is to find oneself at a busy intersection in a crowded city. “Cultural” traffic of many types is whizzing by from every direction. It is impossible to grasp the totality of what is occurring, to know all the different logics that animate that movement. For that reason, the successful life becomes a matter of attuning oneself to the rhythm of the scene, accepting emotionally that this scene has unknowable or even “random” elements, attending to particular sign-bearers that seem to be interested in (or are of interest to) us, and holding close to companions (however temporary those alliances may be) that are headed in directions similar to our own. As at a busy flea market, shopping mall, or casino, it is difficult to know one’s position in the larger arrangement and to determine who is friend and who is foe. In any case, the quest of the actor is frequently the same: to return home from the excursion safely and with some personal embellishment—goods, information, tokens, experiences, and other forms of booty. It is not surprising that visions of this sort have become central themes of video games. To complete the author’s characterization of changing player types, the postmodern era seems marked by the consuming player. The production and

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consumption of cultural “goods” has become so separated that a quasi-independent identity of consumer has become established. That identity includes an “active” component understood to be a process of making selections from among these goods, arranging those choices in self-styled ways, and then dubbing the whole affair “creativity.” Play of this sort is a personalized rendition of cultural possibility; to that degree, it differs from Huizinga’s somewhat more “public” model.

Conclusions on Media, Cultural Change, and Play The preceding pages have argued that “new” ways of playing have arisen through history, and that these changes in personal and social disposition are related to shifts in technology, economic developments, population movements, organizational inventions, value formations, and the like. Whether they are permitted to do so by “authorities” or not, in every age players revision ideas of time and space, “appropriate” culturally relevant objects and techniques, and work through the sets of concerns that are pertinent to people in their societies. In that general sense, Huizinga considered play to be the cutting edge of history—and play events to be the settings where people try out those possibilities. But what of past play forms and styles? Are they left behind? Inherent to postmodernism is the view that history should not be understood as a clear succession of stages; nor are earlier formations entirely abandoned. Rather, cultural artifacts and memories exist as “resources” that can be exhumed and re-presented in contemporary accounts and dramatizations. People live—and play—with the knowledge that earlier customs and practices have existed; sometimes they try to recreate those earlier forms—as during Renaissance fairs, old-timey picnics, military re-enactments, and the like. No one would claim that these contemporary renditions bear more than a passing resemblance to their predecessors. Contemporary people play games with the knowledge that there are many other games they could have chosen, including games from other times and places. That “wisdom”—if such a term may be used—undermines the cloistered intensity experienced by Huizinga’s medieval players. As Salen and Zimmerman note, “immersion” for the contemporary person is problematic.41 However, it should also be emphasized that the earlier play forms that the author has attributed to the pre-modern and modern world are still known in some fashion to contemporary players. After all, most of us know something of frolics and festivals. Frequently, our play with (trusted) others is careless and spontaneous. Whatever media theorists say, oral discourse is

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still the dominant medium of our lives. When people play video games, they commonly gather with their friends to laugh and joke. People’s fascination with the computer-generated “realities” on the screen before them modifies but does not replace that timeless sociality. Similarly, modernist themes of interest-based associations and crafty, status-driven individuals are still prevalent today—in computer gaming as in other activities. People register for participation at various online sites, keep track of their own (and others’) accomplishments, proclaim their skill to others, and recognize that there are canons of fair play or sportsmanship. For the most part, they acknowledge the right of site authorities to sanction spoilsports and cheats.42 Understood in that way, online video games are sometimes a pathway to social interaction that would otherwise be denied people who cannot meet those friends face-to-face. These longstanding patterns of human sociality contrast with a contemporary mythology of video games that portrays the player “bowling alone,” deep into the night, in a room illuminated only by a computer screen. That postmodern nightmare may well be a reality for some but there is little evidence to suggest that it is a dominant pattern.

What is Playful about Video Games? In one of the best-known critiques of Homo Ludens, French anthropologist Roger Caillois argues that Huizinga’s work is marred by its failure to separate the playful and game-like qualities of events.43 That is, although Huizinga is keen to define and analyze the place of “play” in history, he frequently embeds play in “game” forms, especially the social contest or agon. For Caillois, the “ludic” quality of events (that is, their normative or rule-bound character) is not the same as their “playful” quality (that is, the degree to which they express the player’s desires and impulses, often in quite spontaneous ways). And, to continue Caillois’s critique, there are other ways (besides the agon) of engaging the world playfully, as in activities featuring chance (alea), vertigo and balance (ilinx), and role play (mimesis). There are, to be sure, various definitions of the term “game.”44 However, the author supports here Caillois’s general point that games tend to be normative contexts or frames for play. When people play, they typically acknowledge pre-existing frameworks—or create their own—so that their activity can occur as a pattern of shared interaction, be communicable to others (both present and not present), become a basis for reflection and comparison, and indeed be comprehensible to the self as a distinctive line of activity. When people begin a game, they know that their activity will have recognized beginnings, middles, and ends and that there will be

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acknowledged goals and procedures, equipment, costuming, etiquette, and so forth. They know that what they are doing is likely to be an event of a certain type and that whatever takes place inside that event will have an anticipated level of significance in the broader world. Although games are often said to be “texts,” they also feature “paratexts,” cultural understandings that connect the game to other matters and tell us how to organize our involvement in them.45 Armed with such knowledge, people who begin a game can envision the character and implications of a stretch of activity in space and time. When game forms are well established, those visions become expectations. Accepting the terms by which activity is to occur is a profoundly important thing. It is not the same thing as playing. Like Caillois, the author argues that play is a distinctive way of relating to the world, involving an assertive, creative, and even defiant spirit. After all, Huizinga’s book is not about the observance of order or form—one could study religious ritual if that were the purpose—but about the degree to which play is an engine of history, a creator of patterns yet unknown. Keeping alive the distinction between play and games is important because it draws attention to the restless, improvisational energy of players. Do all games honor equally that playful spirit or are some games more playful than others? Are many of the currently popular video games worthy examples of play? Such themes are explored below.

Play’s Nature Just as there are many ways of defining “games,” so there are many conceptualizations of “play.”46 In the author’s view, those characterizations of play—including Huizinga’s—tend to display prominently two themes.47 The first is that playful activities are “consummatory”; that is, they are forms of interaction cut off from the wider world in various ways. Participants focus on the meanings that are found inside events and “enjoy” themselves by confronting and resolving the tensions occasioned by the logics of those events. The second theme is that play is a “transformative” way of relating to the objects and processes of the world. The author has described elsewhere that pattern as a kind of rebellion of consciousness against the forms and forces of the world—involving what he calls the construction of “ascending meaning.”48 When people play, they “take on” the circumstances of their lives; they attempt to render or “transform” those conditions in accordance with their own desires. Players—against other types of actors—do not conform or acquiesce; they confront situations as “challenges” to be resisted or overcome. Through acts of resistance, they mark the world and make it their own.

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It is not the purpose of the current chapter to develop this view at length. However, it should be acknowledged here that the theory owes some of its origins to Piaget, who argued that people create understandings in two opposite ways.49 The greater part of life involves what Piaget terms “accommodation,” an adjustment of the psyche (the ego and its personal strategies) to external patterns. People model their thoughts and behaviors in deference to those formations. The resulting patterns of acquiescence, imitation, and immersion are what the current author describes as instances of “descending meaning.” Its great exemplars are ritual (the instrumental pattern of acquiescence to form) and communitas (the “consummatory” or experience-focused version of this). To be sure, games—including video games—commonly feature both ritual and communitas. We enter into and rely upon existing formations to frame and coordinate our actions. Sometimes we accept these rules and formats because we want to advance our standing in the world beyond the event (as in ritual); sometimes we do so for the sheer joy of acceptance or immersion (as in communitas). Whatever our motivations, when we play games we enter and indulge ourselves in form. For Piaget, play refers to the assertive, oppositional stance of the ego. When people play, they impose their own schemes on otherness; they make the world dance to their own tune. Piaget’s term for this movement is “assimilation,” a sort of psychic imperialism in which people manipulate the elements of the world because it gives them pleasure to do so. Players do not receive or conform to otherness; they invent and impose their own strategies on it. Although Piaget’s famous theory gives play a somewhat wooden, repetitive quality, that quality is not necessary to, or perhaps even typical of, play. How people assert themselves in play depends on the character of the objects and patterns they address. When the player is able to control inert or weak objects, play may well take the form of “manipulation,” as Piaget describes. However, play can also be “rebellious” (when objects are much more powerful than the player and resistance is the only course), and play can also feature a kind of give-and-take or “dialogue” when player and object are well matched. Most interestingly perhaps, play can take the form of “exploration,” when the player is not directly involved with the object and instead turns it over imaginatively in the mind. Whatever these differences in orientation, play typically expresses a defiant, oppositional, “contestive” stance. When people address and render the world for instrumental (beyondthe-event) purposes, their activity is called “work”; when they do so for satisfactions found inside the event, they have turned to “play.”

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Such distinctions are introduced here to make plain the point that video gaming—or indeed any activity—can be seen as a process of both resisting and complying, of asserting oneself against external patterns, instead of being merely guided by them. All this raises the question: when people play a game, to what extent are they moving about in self-determined ways or otherwise “managing” their own destiny and when are they conforming to formations provided by others? That issue is made much more complicated by the fact that people can be “involved” in games in different ways at different times (or simultaneously) and that the “game is on” at different “levels” or “contexts.” That latter issue is discussed briefly below.

The Contexts of Play As Erving Goffman (following William James) once noted, at the start of every social inquiry is the question: “What is it that’s going on here?”50 This question is especially pertinent to the study of video games. What goes on when people play a video game? In what ways are they involved and are all of these involvements playful? A simplified view of gaming activity—such as the conception of a player’s directing a character through series of challenges represented by images on a computer screen—is not an adequate description of that involvement. As Goffman himself argued, the process of strategic choice-making that goes on “inside” the game is perhaps less interesting than the social by-play which attends the game.51 How is it that people manage to stay focused on an “official” line-of-action (the playing of the game itself) against such potential distractions as hurt feelings, ringing telephones, weariness, and other external commitments? How do they sustain the reality of the game—as something that is interesting and important—in the midst of all the other things the player could be doing? Indeed, in what sense(s) is participation in any game real? In the author’s view, human activities and experiences—including the playing of video games—can be understood as participation in a variety of contexts. The identification and analysis of those contexts is the historic contribution of the social sciences. Major contexts that social scientists study are the psyche, the organism or body, the physical environment, the social, and culture. Each of these contexts displays patterns of relationship; that is, structures and processes occur in the body, in the environment, in society, and so forth. Each context features patterns of its own sort. To take two examples, social relationships are the not the same as cultural relationships; psychological processes are not reducible to physiological processes. Many

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of the ongoing patterns in these contexts effectively frame existence; that is, people live inside their formations (often without being consciously aware of those commitments). Other patterns we recognize and accept consciously as things we must adjust our thought and behavior to. Still others we recognize and then confront in more assertive ways. When people participate in a video game, they engage in all these fields of relationship. Now commonplace is the idea that video games are “cultural” formats or artifacts, devices that invite the player to enter realms of symbolic meaning.52 Games are said to have their own distinctive logics (which players must comprehend if they are to advance their standing in the game), but games also invite people to draw connections between the movements on the screen and publicly shared understandings of characters, actions, scenes, goals, rewards, language, and so forth. Making sense of the event—as a game, a quest, a drama, a battle, and so forth—is dependent on this external referencing system. For the most part players operate inside this set of public understandings. Less frequently—although this is the theme of Huizinga’s book—people are able to transform those understandings, to put forth new “public” understandings of how they and others should think, feel, and behave. In any case, much of the debate over the “meaning” of video games centers on their (putative) value as literary or dramatic forms, offering elaborate scenarios or worlds that the players enter, explore, and ponder.53 Different from this is the patterning of human relationships that sociologists designate as the “social.” To be sure, on-screen characters have a faux sociality that is important and should be analyzed at length. However, games are not simply dramas but rather events involving the actions of real people in opposition to or alliance with one another. Studying a game means also studying how players relate to one another as they play.54 How do groups form, dissolve, and re-form? Who plays and who watches? What do people say to one another as they play? What happens after the game or during its pauses? For the sociologist, games are gatherings of people that possess all the complexities of other venues of human relating. And what goes on within the game setting—whether that setting be a small group of players in a teenager’s bedroom or some fabulous online congregation—both influences and is influenced by relationships in the broader social world. Several of the chapters in the current volume are developments of this theme. Different again are the “psychological” dimensions of games. Games are opportunities to try out personal strategies on objects of play, to reflect on the consequences of those strategies, and to re-evaluate those patterns. As Gee argues, games involve intensive kinds of mental work or even learning (as the development of more persistent forms of skill or disposition).55 In games,

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people think about the actions going on around them and connect those perceptions to their ongoing beliefs, values, and concerns. We play games of every type to match what we know—including our assessments of who we are as persons—against the momentary realities of the game. However, games are not just occasions for cognition or reflection. Games also foment feelings; ideally, games are “fun,” and that sense of fun sustains and rewards the action and (in its imagined version) motivates the play.56 Psychologically, players register the emotions of what it means to be an actor in changing circumstances—as a character in an on-screen world, as a player involved with other players, and even as the director of that on-screen character’s prospects for (virtual) life. Games are occasions for thought and feeling, and much can be made of the trails of symbolic meaning to be discovered there. However, games also involve concrete behaviors; people do things to make the action unfold. To be sure, in video games the player spends a good bit of time watching a screen and reacting to what is occurring there; however, that rather passive and adaptive role is countered by the fact that players rely on “controllers” to shape the characteristics of that on-screen world. Such games are, to use Aarseth’s term, ergodic.57 That is, they entail work-like or instrumentally focused physical actions. These actions engage complicated systems of the body.58 Players rely on highly developed skills of noticing the smallest details in complex visual fields; they display remarkable hand-eye coordination; they overcome physical weariness and distraction; they adopt postures and movements that suit their objectives. Few would argue that the skills pertinent to manipulating a controller or joystick are as healthful as those involved in more robust physical behaviors like sports; but it is also undeniable that video games feature physical activity and that some of the newer forms (Dance Dance Revolution, Nintendo’s Wii, and so forth) involve large muscle groups. Finally, video games are encounters with physical environments of a distinctive sort. At bottom, video games are interactions with a machine—with the physical images that it presents to the viewer, with its playing equipment, and even with the mechanically controlled opportunity sets that are the game’s hardware.59 A skilled player’s interaction with this equipment is fascinating to watch. Players exhibit distinctive mannerisms in their handling of the playing devices; they react physically in different ways to the ebb and flow of the action; and game makers for their part have added sensation-producing devices to the equipment to magnify those feelings of involvement. All this is only part of the game’s physicality; for there is also interaction with the broader environment—chair, room, lighting, other bodies in the room, and so on—that is the setting for the play.

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To return to Goffman’s observation, many different kinds of things are going on when people play a video game. Patterns of culture, sociality, psyche, body, and environment are the contexts within which any game is played. All of these contexts deserve study. Relationships of these different sorts are, for the most part, the backdrop or “taken-for-granted” setting of the activity, but some objects and elements of each sort may come to conscious attention and be subject to the fiercest sort of scrutiny and assertion. To be sure, a person can decide that everything that occurs within game contexts is “play” and leave the matter at that. However, to do this is to disregard Huizinga’s challenge to play studies. If play is a distinctive set of actions that are more assertive, voluntaristic, and creative, aren’t some games—and styles of relating to games—more “playful” than others? Can some games be playful at a physical level—displaying spectacular bodily exertion—but be relatively ritualistic at psychological or social levels? Do other games express the opposite pattern? Most pertinent to the present chapter is whether games allow people to creatively recast cultural matters or whether—in the manner of puzzles—they simply invite people to move along pre-determined routes to predetermined endings. Games always invite concentrations of energy. To what end is that energy directed?

Conclusion: Endangered Play Huizinga’s central concern in Homo Ludens is that modern play has been taken over and managed by “external” elements and forces. In his view, play was once more exuberant, spontaneous, and self-managed. Now (though “now” for him is the nineteenth and early twentieth century), business and political organizations have recast play in their own terms. Contemporary play serves the interests of non-players, who set the terms by which enjoyment occurs. Worse perhaps, play has become work-like or instrumental. Under the latter circumstances, people play because they wish to become good at what they do and to somehow profit from that achievement. Such quests for excellence detract from the proper role of play in society, which is the joyful exploration of human possibility. Huizinga develops two examples of play gone wrong. The first is what he termed “false play.” Keeping in mind the Nazi parades and sporting spectacles that were the backdrop to his writing, he describes false play as those instance in which “play-forms may be used consciously or unconsciously to cover up some social or political design.”60 Events of this type turn people to purposes not their own. Participants imagine themselves to be in control of their own affairs and manufacturing their enjoyment; this is not the case.

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False play focuses on narrow, even technical matters. Players explore the world but only in settings—and for reasons—concocted by others. The second danger to play is termed “puerilism.” Puerilism is a kind of socially legitimized regression, a re-enactment of an earlier (typically romanticized) stage of personal or cultural history.61 Once again, Huizinga has in mind a theme of the Nazi movement, a memory (invented, surely) of a “purer” stage of civilization when ethnically similar people gathered together in adolescent confraternity, sang drinking songs, and otherwise “thought with the blood.” An adult clinging to stages he should have outgrown is not child-like; he is childish. Although play commonly returns to familiar themes (as when we repeat old games again and again), play should not be a wallowing in the past. Even when play features tried-and-true forms, people play to discover new things about the world and about themselves. Through those discoveries, society moves forward. Because Huizinga deplored so many characteristics of his own society, it is easy enough to offer the opinion that he would also have deplored the video games of our own era. Moreover, it should be emphasized that the bulk of his more general concerns about play—about the machinations of large political and business organizations and about the possibilities for humans becoming misdirected in their play impulses—have been developed by scholars in critical theory, sociology, and cultural studies.62 However, Huizinga’s work remains important because he linked these concerns about human freedom directly to play and because he understood, perhaps better than any other writer, the vast range of the play spirit and its implications for the vitality of societies. A more fitting conclusion then is to ask whether the makers and players of video games can rise to Huizinga’s challenge, which is to bring into being play forms that both honor and expand the expressive capabilities of persons and make communities of people recognize new possibilities of living. It is hardly controversial to say that many of the currently popular video games offer rather limited (and sometimes fairly dys-topic) scenarios for human amusement.63 The same, of course, can be said about many popular novels, television shows, magazines, and movies. However, video games are perhaps more powerful than these other forms just because people must interact with video games to explore their themes. For the most part, players do not interact with computer programs on the players’ own terms; instead they follow what Salen and Zimmerman call “designed interaction.”64 More extreme, as Lahti argues, the real lesson video games teach is how to think like a machine or even more profoundly, how to “become” a machine.65 Ideally, the next generations of virtual reality will provide many more settings that

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encourage something other than individualistic maneuvering within the logic of machines—and provide powerful alternatives to Huizinga’s own agonistic model of social relating. In that sense, Huizinga’s challenge is to have people do more than consume pre-fabricated worlds and acquire the tokens offered them by the makers of those worlds. Instead, they should collectively produce those worlds and live through the human implications of their own creations.

Notes The author wishes to thank Jon-Paul Dyson of the Strong National Museum of Play for his encouragement and suggestions of resources, as well as his son David Henricks for helping him learn about a world that he knows well—the world of virtual play. 1. Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997), 214–31. 2. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1955). 3. Thomas Henricks, “Huizinga’s Contributions to Play Studies: A Reappraisal,” in Conceptual, Social-Cognitive, and Contextual Issues in the Fields of Play, ed. Jaipaul Roopnarine (Westport, Conn.: Ablex, 2002), 23–52. 4. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1–27. 5. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1954). 6. Johan Huizinga, In the Shadow of Tomorrow (New York: Norton, 1936). 7. Margaret Duncan, “Play Discourse and the Rhetorical Turn: A Semiological Analysis of Homo Ludens,” Play and Culture 1 (1988): 28–42. 8. Robert Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society: 1700–1850 (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1973); James Walvin, Leisure and Society (London: Longmans, 1978). 9. Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 47–106. 10. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1982); Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988). 11. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 13. 12. Thomas Henricks, Disputed Pleasures: Sport and Society in Preindustrial England (Westport, Conn: Greenwoood, 1991), 7–12. 13. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 31. 14. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 15.

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15. Erich Kahler, Man the Measure: A New Approach to History (New York: George Braziller, 1956). 16. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: New American Library, 1964); Ong, Orality and Literacy. 17. Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986). 18. Henricks, Disputed Pleasures, 129–65. 19. J. H. Plumb, The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth Century England (Reading, England: Reading University Press, 1973). 20. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1963). 21. Eric Dunning and Kenneth Sheard, Barbarians, Gentlemen, and Players: A Sociological Study of the Development of Rigby Football (New York: New York University Press, 1979). 22. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 198. 23. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 199. 24. Gregory Stone, “American Sports: Play and Display,” Chicago Review 9 (1955): 83–100. 25. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 192. 26. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 10. 27. McLuhan, Understanding Media. 28. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 2005). 29. Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Harper Colophon, 1962), ch. 5. 30. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). 31. Pauline Rosenau, Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, Intrusions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); Scott Lash, Sociology of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990). 32. Stuart Ewen, All-Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 33. Mark Wolf., ed., The Video Game Explosion; A History From Pong to Playstation and Beyond (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2008). 34. Mark Wolf and Bernard Perron, eds., The Video Game Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003). 35. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 461–501. 36. Eespen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspective on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 37. Mark Wolf, ed., The Medium of the Video Game (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).

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38. Kenneth Gergen, “The Healthy Happy Human Being Wears Many Masks,” in The Truth about the Truth: De-Constructing and Re-Constructing the Postmodern World, ed. William Anderson (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1995), 136–44. 39. Erving Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), 85–152. 40. Thomas Henricks, “Play and Postmodernism,” in Theory in Context and Out, ed. Stuart Reifel (Westport, Conn: Ablex, 2001), 51–72. 41. Salen and Zimmerman, Rules for Play, 450–51. 42. Mia Consalvo, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007). 43. Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (New York: Free Press, 1961). 44. Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play, 70–83. 45. Peter Lunenfield, ed., The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). 46. Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play; Thomas Henricks, “The Nature of Play: An Overview,” American Journal of Play 1, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 157–80. 47. Thomas Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 181–220. 48. Thomas Henricks, “Play as Ascending Meaning: Implications of a General Model of Play,” in Play Contexts Revisited: Play and Culture Studies 2, ed. Stuart Reifel (Stamford, Conn.: Ablex, 1999), 257–77; Thomas Henricks, “Play as Ascending Meaning Revisited: Four Types of Assertive Play,” in Play as Engagement and Communication, ed. Eva Nwokah (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2010). 49. Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood (New York: Norton, 1962). 50. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper Colophon, 1974), 8. 51. Goffman, Encounters, 34–35. 52. Wolf, The Medium of the Video Game. Wolf and Perron, The Video Game Theory Reader. 53. Jesper Juul, “Games Telling Stories?” Game Studies 1, no. 1 (July 2001). Available online at www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/ (accessed July 6, 2010). 54. Gary Alan Fine, Shared Fantasy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 55. James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning (New York: Palgrove MacMillan, 2003). 56. Ralph Koster, A Theory of Fun for Game Design (Scottsdale, Ariz.: Paraglyph Press, 2005); Melanie Swalwell and Jason Wilson, eds., The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on Cultural History, Theory, and Aesthetics (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2008). 57. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. 58. Melanie Swalwell, “Movement and Kinaesthetic Responsiveness: A Neglected Pleasure,” in The Pleasures of Computer Gaming, eds. Swalwell and Wilson, 72–91.

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59. Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play, 213–28. 60. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 205. 61. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 205. 62. Meenakshi Durham and Douglas Kellner, eds., Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004); Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995); Juliet Schor and Douglas Holt, eds., The Consumer Society Reader (New York: The New Press, 2000). 63. Kostner, A Theory of Fun for Game Design, 174. 64. Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play, 60–61. 65. Marti Lahti, “As We Become Machines: Corporealized Pleasures in Video Games,” in The Video Game Reader, eds. Wolf and Perron, 157–70.

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CHAPTER THREE



“Is He ’Avin a Laugh?”: The Importance of Fun to Virtual Play Studies Ken S. McAllister and Judd Ethan Ruggill

We are poor, we have unlearned how to play. We have forgotten it, our hands have unlearned how to dabble.1

In the British Broadcasting Corporation series Extras, Andy Millman (Ricky Gervais) finally gets his big break after what seems an interminable stint in a series of small, non-speaking roles on movie back lots and theater stages around Britain.2 Millman’s idea for a television comedy about English workingclass life is optioned for production, and when When the Whistle Blows finally gets off the ground it is an instant pop culture phenomenon. Indeed, it quickly becomes hard for Millman to go anywhere without being asked to deliver the show’s signature line, “Is he ’avin a laugh?” The problem is, Millman seems to be the only one in Britain not “’avin’ a laugh.” He hates When the Whistle Blows because of the many changes he has been forced to make to his original vision in order to bring the show to air. He also hates the clownish role he plays in the show: campy Ray Stokes is in no way Millman’s idea of a serious part, and he bristles as his long-time rival Greg Lindley-Jones (Shaun Pye) grows increasingly famous and critically acclaimed for the kinds of star-studded acting opportunities Millman longs for and feels he deserves. Hence, the delicious irony Extras explicates in excruciating yet glorious detail: the manufacture and analysis of fun—in this case, the writing, acting, directing, and evaluation of a sitcom—often has little to do with fun itself. Indeed, it generally works to contravene fun, sometimes in profoundly uncomfortable ways. Moreover, the mysterious

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pleasures and play at the heart of fun can be vitiated merely by the act of nominating them, which makes even thinking and acting upon them as ruinous as it is illuminating. This phenomenon is by no means limited to scripted television comedy. The problem of creating and thinking about fun is fundamental to mediated experiences of all types, from cinema and orchestral music to radio talk shows and computer games. The alchemical acts and transmutations these experiences depend on and produce tend to fade when their construction is revealed. Think of the pointed experience of discovering an index finger intruding on an otherwise beautiful snapshot, or the distraction of seeing a stage hand mucking about in the background during a play’s denouement. Much of the magic of mediated experiences lies in their phantasmic inexplicability and seeming spontaneity, in the moments they produce that are far away from knowing. This is not to say, of course, that divining how a thing works cannot be pleasurable; indeed, as any scholar will attest, quite the opposite is true. There is a great deal of fun to be had in peeking under the hood or behind the screen. Rather, unpacking a specific pleasure by definition tends to make that pleasure less otherworldly. It becomes something more mundane, which drives hard against the manifestation of fantasy. This problem of generating and studying fun—a problem conjured by the interplay of mystery and understanding, whimsy and utility, immersion and estrangement, play and work—is particularly noticeable in computer games and other explicitly playful media, because even the most reasoned and rule-based play is at the outset meant to be fun. When a game’s mechanics are flawless, its interface invisible, and its conceits captivating, the game can transfix players, making hours (and sometimes days) drift by as if they were but etesian breezes. When these clockworks are done poorly and appear noticeably visible, by contrast, play time passes agonizingly slowly until at last it ceases altogether. It is then that even the most devoted of game players will move on to something truly fun, or even to something merely productive—the last desperate refuge for the earnest gamer. Understandably, issues of mediated pleasure are central to the computer game industry, which is in the business of stimulating consumer delight. These issues, however, are also of growing importance in academe. There has been a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years in the pedagogical possibilities of computer games: how and what they teach; the ways they are being used in the classroom, boardroom, and war room; how engagement with them alters the social contract; and so on. Despite the nascency of the computer game studies field, scholars have already made careers (or in the

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case of James Paul Gee and Henry Jenkins, second or even third careers) seriously studying games and the power of game-based learning. Much (if not all) of this work is laudatory and polemical, arguing that computer games and the play they evoke are profound and nuanced teachers of multiple things in multiple ways. Games always mean something important goes the rhetoric, and mean it deeply; they are not the silly, frivolous, child’s pursuits that parents, pundits, and politicians attest.3 And yet, the inverse is also true, which rarely receives mention in the academic study of computer games (or even in the commercial development and marketing of the medium, which tend to focus on the power of the playful experience). Computer games cannot help but be silly, frivolous, and stupid. They are as whimsical, unnecessary, useless, dumb, mindless, unproductive, and unimportant as they are the opposites of these terms. This is part of what makes them games and not something else. It is also an integral part of their power to teach and make meaning. Computer games allow for significance to be insignificant, for the difficult work of play to appear fun and translucent. Herein, then, lies the paradox of virtual play (and by extension, its study): it is only as serious as it is inconsequential. Virtual play is meaningful precisely because it is meaningless, because there is nothing perceptibly at stake other than pleasure, exploration, and experimentation. Playful objects can be picked up or put down at will, a freedom that allows for all manner of curious possibilities and innovative acts (e.g., convincing players that managing taxes and pollution can be fun, à la SimCity), thus offering significant moments for reflection and transformation.4 True, computer games always teach, and often do so incredibly well, but this ability flows from dalliance rather than a sense of import—something virtual play scholars have largely left unattended in favor of the more pressing (and perhaps rightfully so) logistical work of establishing the legitimacy of the field and its objects of study. As a result, the virtual play work done to date has been largely built on what Ernst Bloch would call “a principle of hope”; it has been about the rhetorical and pedagogical promise and potential of the play act, rather than that act’s innate frivolousness. And play’s frivolity itself may be seen as both utopic and dystopic—utopic in that it cuts loose from the moorings of convention, seriousness, and production and aims to make life better (even temporarily), and dystopic in that its ideological burdens can distance players from real world exigencies that, if engaged, might offer them a radically transformed life, one that opens out not merely to a better life in a particular moment, but to a better world from this moment forward. In this chapter, we argue that the study of virtual play needs to better reflect the paradox of the act of virtual play. Specifically, we claim that just

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as virtual play itself is both utopic and dystopic, so too can be its analysis. Virtual play studies, on the one hand, hold the promise of easy, profound, and nuanced transdisciplinary collaboration and transformation: in reaching deeply into and across the arts and sciences, computer games and other playful artifacts cannot help but create all manner of unusual opportunities for cross-disciplinary partnerships, synergies, and learning experiences. On the other hand, the very act of studying virtual play works to demystify and even degrade the many alchemical transformations play produces, essentially eliminating the magic and whimsy so important to them and their effects. As evidenced by the dismal failure of Edward Castronova’s Arden: The World of William Shakespeare, the more virtual play seems to be taken seriously by scholars, the less serious it becomes in its effect.5,6 As a result, virtual play’s transformative potential persistently slides from reach. Our thesis is that in order for virtual play studies to approach their utopic promise, they must recognize the Janus-face of play in general. To facilitate this recognition, we draw on Ernst Bloch’s work on revolutionary utopianism as a way to respond to the overly optimistic perspectives that often appear in virtual play studies. These perspectives, while understandable for their streamlining of the complexities of new media analysis and their slightly defensive positions toward criticism of the intellectual study of a non-obviously academic subject, ultimately disserve the field of virtual play studies because they fail to account for the fact that in a vital sense computer games (for example) are equally silly and serious, inconsequential and profound, unproblematic and dangerous. For the artifact to hold, to not suffer a static collapse, both components must coexist. Within this dialectic lies virtual play study’s truly revolutionary utopianism, and it is through this dialectic that scholars may glimpse the importance of virtual play to twenty-first century communication and culture.

Hope, Utopia, Apocalypse, and Virtual Play7 Ernst Bloch, the enigmatic and unorthodox Marxist philosopher alluded to above, has much to offer scholars of virtual play as they struggle with the potent and obvious contradictions of their field. Instances of these contradictions include the problematic that virtual play both fosters and discourages intimacies, that it retards and advances visions of a transformed real world, and that it relieves and exacerbates life’s manifold social, material, and psychological stresses. Bloch proposes that it is precisely under these complex everyday conditions that the “spirit of utopia” thrives, and he argues further

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that it is imperative that cultural critics recognize the ideological dynamics of such conditions when they do their work. As Vincent Geoghegan notes: Popular culture is therefore a field of dreams. This gives Bloch hope, for although many of these dreams contain illusion, the act of dreaming is indicative of an inner vigour, a stubborn desire for happiness. The real enemy of humanity is therefore not illusory dreaming but nihilism, the loss of the capacity to dream at all. Good dreams can develop out of bad, but nothing emerges out of despair.8

This analytical perspective, oriented by, as Bloch terms it, “critical-militant optimism,” means that any human activity or any human-made object may contribute to the generation of hope, which in turn can provide a stepping stone toward a better life, a better world, utopia.9 Unlike the abstract utopias that Marx and Engels so roundly critiqued, Bloch’s “utopia” is a concrete, if always future-oriented objective, always processual and always connected to the past and present. As Geoghegan points out, “utopia” is “Bloch’s reformulation and further development of Marx’s concept of praxis, the unity of theory and practice; it is both goal and the actual creation of that goal.”10 For this reason, Bloch’s utopia is quite attainable (hence, “concrete”), requiring only the practiced harnessing of what he calls the “Not-Yet-Conscious”—a liminal state where new ideas percolate, congeal, and break forth—and the pursuit of the “Not-Yet-Become”—the time of activity that follows the breaking forth of a new idea when it is explicated and integrated into history. For Bloch, hope and utopia are inextricable, as he outlines in the introduction to The Principle of Hope: Only with a farewell to the closed, static concept of being does the real dimension of hope open. Instead, the world is full of propensity towards something, tendency towards something, latency of something, and this intended something means fulfillment of the intending. It means a world which is more adequate for us, without degrading suffering, anxiety, self-alienation, nothingness.11

The purpose of analyzing cultural artifacts, then, is not simply to perform the critical functions of epideictic, of praise or blame, but to see opportunities for revolutionary action everywhere one looks. Just as Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach contends that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world,

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in various ways; the point is to change it,” Bloch suggests that the critique of culture—high, popular, or mass—is ultimately destructive if it does not subsequently inspire real action amid the world’s materiality.12 No matter how penetrating, critique without earnest pursuit of the Not-Yet-Become, without corrective and reconstructive action, is nihilistic and inspires only despair. Bloch chidingly refers to such critique as aiming at “partial enlightenment,” and he suggests that to undertake a cold-blooded analysis without acting on the results is akin to a detective who skillfully gathers up a case’s clues, but then never uses them to exonerate the client. “Genuine enlightenment,” by contrast, is both “detective and liberator,” not only of all things economic, but also of the many oddities of everyday life: “it takes the fairytale seriously, takes the dream of a Golden Age practically; real debit and credit of hope begins.”13 In an interview conducted by Horst Krüger and Theodor Adorno some two decades after the writing of The Principle of Hope, a more mature Bloch stated the same point this way: But what is true is that each and every criticism of imperfection, incompleteness, intolerance, and impatience already without a doubt presupposes the conceptions of, and longing for, a possible perfection. Otherwise, there would not be any imperfection if there were not something in the process that should not be there—in particular, as a critical element.14

In short, to critique is to hope. Or so it is as long as the critique is genuine, a point to which we will return to shortly. Finally, there is the apocalypse. From his earliest writings forward, Bloch repeatedly returns to the function of apocalypse. Citing numerous mystical and prophetic texts, Bloch describes an apocalyptic, even eschatological, process that has the power to strip away every kind of deceit. In his book on the radical sixteenth-century German theologian Thomas Müntzer, for example, Bloch writes: “To this world of faith rises the smoke of the pure dawn of the apocalypse and precisely in the Apocalypse it gains its final criterion, the metapolitical, indeed metareligious Principle of all revolution: The beginning of the freedom of the children of God.”15 Apocalypse, explains Bloch, burns away an artifact’s dross, all that is ideological, false, and hopeless about it, leaving only “the Novum,” the substance that is true and radically new. For Bloch, “apocalypse” is not a metaphysical but concrete experience that can take many forms, from newspaper editorials to full-blown socio-political revolution. Taken together, hope and apocalypse collaborate in the utopian process, wherein hope inspires apocalypse, which in turn lifts the veils of deception

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and reveals through the Not-Yet-Conscious a glimpse of the Not-Yet-Become. This revelation itself inspires hope, and thus the cycle draws endlessly toward the future, emerging always out of present and past materiality. To cast this process into the conceptual framework of this book and its meditations on virtual play studies, Bloch’s utopia is its own virtual space. That is, utopia is a very real, inhabitable, and malleable place. It is forever unfolding both on its own and at the behest of its inhabitants. In this sense, virtual space is ineluctably liminal and yet fully present, always futuristic and yet made so by the planting and harvesting of the surviving seeds of utopia. It would be a compelling project to develop an understanding of virtual spaces generally, and especially those designed to be played in, through the lens of Bloch’s radical utopia. Such a project could clarify, for instance, why this type of play is so popular, what revolutionary utopic motivations are just below players’ consciousnesses, and why those motivations often seem to restrain rather than liberate real-world transformative action. Indeed, one of the most attractive aspects of studying virtual play is that the object of study is capable of producing a multitude of transformations, irrespective of Bloch’s theoretical framework. Play theorists from Johan Huizinga to Brian Sutton-Smith have argued, for example, that play in general has an uncanny ability to establish spaces where possibility pullulates.16 As Huizinga notes, there must be a kind of “magic circle”—“a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own”17—for play to even occur, and it is within this circle that anything is possible (consider the paidia or free play Roger Caillois identifies).18,19 This is especially true for computer games and other playful virtualities. Players can become futuristic commandos (e.g., Crackdown), abstract, atavistic animals (e.g., Cubivore), single-celled organisms (e.g., Spore), robot aircraft (e.g., Thexder), malevolent gods (e.g., Black & White)—anything the human imagination is capable of summoning—and this becoming can be as complete as it is temporary (all games must end, after all).20,21 Players can also partner with or play against one another and the computer itself in acts that depend upon and sometimes work against algorithms of varying purpose and complexity. These transformations—from workaday subjectivity to virtual fantasy, and individual agent to (un)willing collaborator or savage competitor—can even extend beyond the confines of the magic circle, as when Team Fortress 2 players strategize over missed in-game opportunities as they drift off to sleep at night.22 Another kind of play-based transformation emerges out of the transdisciplinary collaboration involved in the creation of playful virtual objects. Even the simplest of computer games are profoundly collaborative works. They are the products of sustained and variegated human-computer interaction

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focused on a calculus of aesthetics, play logics, algorithms, programming languages, and of course the operating systems and hardware that enable these diverse elements to synergize as playable (and hopefully enjoyable) games. Computer game development thus draws on a host of skills across a range of disciplines, from graphic design and computer science to psychology and engineering. Things grow geometrically more complex and transdisciplinary with the size of the game; commercial title development often involves many different kinds of development tools and dozens (sometimes even hundreds) of diverse team members who must regularly negotiate each others’ epistemological, interpersonal, and organizational boundaries if a game is to be developed to completion. In essence, computer games represent an ongoing series of simultaneous, nested, and multivalent dialogs between and across human and machine ways of seeing and doing, dialogs that both disturb and reiterate notions of work, play, and communication. This idea that both computer games and their development are inherently transformative activities is becoming increasingly well surveyed. What is less well analyzed is the fact that the study of the multivalent dialogs among humans and computers in the context of play is proving equally transformative. Not only are computer games and their effects starting to be explored throughout the academy and the intellectual public sphere, but also this study is being done by expressly multi-disciplinary teams (e.g., the faculty and students of Georgia Tech’s Experimental Game Lab).23 Artists are partnering with engineers (e.g., www.valuesatplay.org/), computer scientists with English professors (e.g., www.bedfordstmartins.com/newcatalog. aspx?isbn=0312468849), archaeologists with dietitians (e.g., the Native Dancer Diabetes Education Video Game project being developed at North Dakota State University)24—all for the purpose of trying to illuminate (or at least capitalize on) the many secrets of the computer game medium and its cultures. Moreover, this work is being funded by high-end grants and investments that directly push collaboration (e.g., the MacArthur-funded HASTAC’s Innovation in Participatory Learning Awards).25 If this game work were frightfully challenging, it would occur infrequently, if at all. The economic, cultural, and professional realities of academic life make the pursuit of difficult, time-consuming, and counter-epistemological projects unviable. Indeed, how does the average professor justify work that does not readily track to disciplinary promotion and tenure standards and the intellectual traditions these standards flow from? Or, where does work that argues against a well-defined and disciplinary core teaching mission find a place in an institution struggling to uphold that mission in the face of economic crisis and rapidly increasing teaching loads? The answer, from an

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administrative point of view, is that these kinds of pursuits are generally not justifiable. They may be intellectually interesting, but they are not institutionally useful. And yet, game work is blossoming. There are now hundreds of schools throughout the world at which to study computer games.26 There are likewise increasing numbers of books, journals, and conferences devoted to exploring the medium and its cultures, as well as a panoply of online “studies” groups (e.g., gameology.org), research collectives, and other communities. Clearly, a key path to twenty-first-century knowledge-making runs through the multidisciplinary collaborative act, and at the moment this path leads directly to computer games and other playful and social media. The reason is as simple as it is mystifying: fun. The transdisciplinary collaborative study of computer games recalls and amplifies the fun and edifying facets of game play and design. Incongruous elements can be conjured and combined without the taboo of violating disciplinary ontologies, and the knowledge which emerges can in turn be freely assayed. Just as with computer game play and design, the touchstones of virtual play study are exploration, experimentation, and openness to the sense-making possibilities such behaviors produce. All of this ferment in the field suggests that computer game and virtual play study is not frightfully challenging at all; on the contrary, it appears as if game work is relatively easy (or at least so invigorating as to seem so). This in itself may be the most striking transformation of all: the acceptance (though not necessarily acknowledgement) of scholarly work as the playful act it must be. The sum effect of this transformation and the others noted above suggest that Bloch’s Not-Yet-Conscious is starting to surface, that the Novum is beginning to break out not only within the industry but even in the meta-industrial region of scholarship. Jack Zipes clarifies how parochial transformations are broadened so that they become disciplinary and even societal transformations when he concludes that for Bloch, Humans have a type of consciousness, formed by the impulse of hope, in which inklings of what they might become manifest themselves. For the individual, the not-yet-conscious is the psychical representation of what has not-yetbecome in our time and its world. . . . It is by moving away from the darkness of the immediately experienced moment and toward the intimations of a better world sighted in the not-yet-conscious that the darkness will become clarified and we shall know what we experience.27

Again, for Bloch, this movement “toward the intimations of a better world sighted in the not-yet-conscious” occurs in the cultural artifacts humans

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produce. It is through art—through playfulness and whimsy as embodied by painting, literature, music, and, we would argue, computer games and computer game scholarship—that the intimations of a better world are evoked and explored. Without doubt, this development signals a rising hope, one that now extends far beyond a commercial motive and into a humanistic one: the questions “how can we make more profitable and compelling computer games” now coexist with the questions “how do these games mean and what does that tell us about ourselves?” These latter questions are, we propose, part of the iterative process that Bloch considered utopian. They convey a vision of the game medium—and the cultures that emerge out of and help constitute it—that imagines, and sometimes even calls for, transformation. This is transformation not only of industrial practices such as those concerning design, labor, and law, but also of those practices connected to education, social adaptation, and even healthcare. So potent has this call become that it is increasingly being heeded by players, developers, students, professionals, and scholars of all types. One area still in need of exploration, however, is that of computer games studies itself. This is not a criticism of the discipline, but rather a sign of its relative youth: the field is still highly focused on developing a substantive and varied body of scholarly literature, so it is early yet for many meta-studies to have emerged. As should be clear by now, however, Bloch provides an excellent starting point for such a meta-study principally due to his insight into how particular cultural artifacts are always bound to the emergence of history. As Bloch would put it: What is stopping the discipline from making the leap from partial to true enlightenment?

The Problem of Play In Bloch’s criticism of “partial enlightenment”—his term for the analysis of socio-cultural phenomena without any plan for subsequent action and thus no hope for substantive transformation—there may not appear to be parity with the issue we raised earlier with game studies, namely, that the emergent field’s critiques have thus far largely neglected the fundamental whimsy of games. Situated in contrast to the ubiquitous polemics about computer games as insipid (even dangerous) media artifacts, game studies scholarship elaborately—and for the most part correctly—documents the fact that these artifacts represent a set of cultural, educational, economic, and even artistic developments that signify nothing short of a new era in human history—developments that ought to be appreciated and harnessed rather than dismissed as mere flummery. A longer view of the game studies discipline suggests, however, that there is parity, that in principle, critique that supersaturates the inquiry process

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with hope is no better than critique that decimates it. In Bloch’s call to move beyond the mere identification of the subtle and unsubtle ways that cultural “ornaments” reproduce dominant, even fascistic ideologies, he is proposing a project far greater than an attitude adjustment for pessimistic cultural studies scholars.28 Rather, in his interweaving of critique and utopia, Bloch establishes a motive for cultural critique, one that is no less than to change the world for the better. Seen in this light, critique that offers no hope as well as critique that offers nothing but hope effectively work the same way once their underlying ideologies have become mainstream: they freeze the utopic trajectory.29 Bloch’s solution for critique devoid of an ultimate and hopeful corrective—an alternative plan of action that puts critical analysis in the position of not just meaning but also of doing something—is to criticize “any distortions in an ideological product, but then [go] on to take it more seriously, to read it closely for any critical or emancipatory potential.”30 Bloch never addresses the possibility that this solution could be pressed too far, though there are at least two features of his philosophy that convincingly suggest that if he had, he surely would have established this overextension as equally damaging as nihilism. First, there is Bloch’s deep commitment to dialectic. Wayne Hudson documents this devoir, noting in fact that among Bloch’s most earnest projects was “to develop a new concept of the dialectic in Marxism.”31 No incidental phenomenon, the materialist dialect for Bloch, says Hudson, “is not simply the law of thought or ‘a method,’ but the law of movement of material being. . . . For Bloch, the materialist dialectic is inherently teleological.”32 Thus, it seems unlikely that Bloch—a philosopher who saw contradiction (including self-contradiction) and the unrest of the present in relation to the future as a fundamental and universal state of being—would grant a dispensation to scholarship verging on hagiography. A critique that offers something less than a dialectical analysis, in other words, one focused solely on a cultural product’s profound limitations or its limitless significance, is not wholly irremediable, but it is close. Without treating the dialectical condition of an artifact, suggests Bloch, the critic offers little more than an ideological commentary. Second, there are Bloch’s attacks on certain forms of popular entertainment—attacks that are nothing short of vicious—and that indicate Bloch’s sensitivity to the difference between “hope” and “embellishment.” Consider Bloch’s oft-cited assessment of the popular dances of the early twentieth century: Nothing courser, nastier, more stupid has ever been seen than the jazz-dances since 1930. Jitterbug, Boogie-Woogie, this is imbecility gone wild, with a corresponding howling which provides so to speak musical accompaniment.

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American movement of this kind is rocking the Western countries, not as dance, but as vomiting.33

Bloch similarly attacks Hollywood filmmaking, not because he disapproves of filmmaking generally—in fact he holds the medium in high regard34—but because the hyper-commercialization of the form too often obliterates its potential for inspiring social change: In Hollywood, as we know, [film] is so far removed from such work of enlightenment that it almost exceeds the crudeness and mendacity of the magazine stories; thanks to America the film has become the most desecrated form of art. The Hollywood cinema does not only supply the old kitsch: the sloppy kiss-romance, the nervebasher, where there is no longer a difference between enthusiasm and catastrophe, the happy end within a completely unchanged world; without exception it also uses this kitsch for ideological stupefaction and fascist incitement.35

Clearly for Bloch (and Adorno for that matter), jazz dancing and popular Hollywood movies, while saturated with the excesses of vitality, are in fact nothing but empty decoration. As Bloch puts it: The merely embellishing element, although it definitely does highlight things, has for the most part no counter-move in it all, but merely dubious polishing of what exists. . . . The highlighting of what exists then occurs as an illusory, at best premature harmonization, and it is surrounded by nothing but smoke or incense of false consciousness.36

Given Bloch’s dialectical grounding and his recognition of and antipathy toward artifacts that pretend at the utopian process but are in actuality the “incense of false consciousness,” it seems fair to assume that even extending beyond popular culture and into academe, Bloch would find non-dialectical scholarship that merely “polishes what exists” to be dystopic rather than utopic. We are left, then, with the project of imagining how Bloch would have framed a utopian game studies. We propose that it would be more playful, and it is with some brief remarks on this proposition that we conclude this chapter.

Play, Anamnesis, and the Utopia of Game Studies The epigraph heading this chapter—“We are poor, we have unlearned how to play. We have forgotten it, our hands have unlearned how to dabble”—is drawn from one of Bloch’s earliest works. This concern with play, with the

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natural inclination to be joyfully and wholly engaged, as well as with the trials of adulthood that train away this vitality, fascinated and troubled Bloch to the end of his life. It was not that he thought life should be all play, but rather that play and work should be balanced and desirable, both individually and socially. This is apparent through the subjects Bloch chose to study, the pleasures he clearly derived from the arts, the enduring friendships he maintained, and the nature of his project overall. Who but a true devotee of play would try to reshape Marxism and the contemporary political landscape through the application of a marginal sixteenth-century radical theologian’s rhetoric, a variety of Kabbalistic and alchemical treatises, a dash of cheap detective fiction, and Christian eschatology? Bloch’s grasp of the momentousness of play also extended to the principle of “flow,” now a stock concept in media studies, but which Bloch described in the context of music and dance long before Raymond Williams and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.37 In its most concentrated form, flow is experienced by gamers as sliding into and along the play experience, even as the seriousness of extra-ludic life fades into the background. This state, while not entirely utopic in a Blochean sense, is certainly euphoric. As such, flow can prove liberatory to the spirit, a fundamental quality of the utopic process Bloch suggests. The rubbish of culture is not irredeemable. Subjected to a dialectical apocalypse—one supplemented by the perspective that even society’s junk contains secrets about the nature of the human soul—the most inconsequential of artifacts can keep utopia proceeding apace. When the dross is burned away, the better world becomes easier to discern, easier to have hope for, and easier to transform. Furthermore, when Bloch’s position is retracted to its antipode, it becomes clear that hopeful embellishments are functionally equivalent to hopeless ones when they are situated in a context devoid of dialectical complexity. To be sure, a celebration is in order: while not eradicated, the days of the blanket dismissal of computer games, virtual play, and the study of the complex to which they belong are winding down. But now the tables are turning, and this once ludicrous sub-discipline is emerging as a twenty-firstcentury academic powerhouse, one capable of giving the bum’s rush to any who would challenge the importance, value, significance, and (above all) the seriousness of virtual play. This, Bloch would tell us, is idolatry and ideology. We propose that “anamnesis,” a term that literally means “the loss of forgetting” and that Bloch uses often to describe how critique and hope gradually illuminate one another, provides a new path for game studies, one that is more utopian than the one it currently treads. This course correction is relatively small, but over time will prove radically transformative for the

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field, ensuring its equilibrium by reducing the likelihood of compensatory counter-reactions both within and external to it. During computer games’ early years, critics attacked their frivolousness, stupidity, uselessness, and unimportance. They had forgotten the fact that play—virtual or otherwise—is fundamental to human development. The backlash against this amnesia was not long in coming, and today its results are decisive. But in capturing this important ground, game scholars have themselves forgotten something, namely, that in a very real, even definitive sense, games are frivolous, stupid, useless, and unimportant. Until scholars of virtual play embrace anamnesis, until we begin to strive consistently to lose our tendency to forget and recollect the fun inherent in the artifacts that consume us, game studies will be forever embellishment, never utopia.

Notes 1. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 10. 2. British Broadcasting Corporation, Extras—The Complete Series, DVD (HBO Home Video, 2008). 3. We have argued this point many times in a variety of scholarly and popular publications. Indeed, we argue it here as well. 4. Maxis Software, SimCity, computer game (Infogrames Europe, 1989). 5. Edward Castronova, Arden: The World of William Shakespeare, computer game (Edward Castronova, 2008). 6. Despite generous support from the MacArthur Foundation, Castronova abandoned the project shortly after its release, stating that the game is “rather boring, as I’ve said before. We failed to design a gripping game experience.” See Edward Castronova, “Two Releases: Arden I and Exodus,” Terra Nova, terranova.blogs.com/ terra_nova/2007/11/two-releases-ar.html (accessed September 14, 2009). 7. The brief introduction to Ernst Bloch provided here should be considered only a very rough sketch of Bloch’s profoundly elaborate, even labyrinthine, philosophical trajectory. For a more detailed overview, we recommend the following: Vincent Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch (London: Routledge, 1996); Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (London: Macmillan Press, 1982); Wayne Hudson, “Ernst Bloch: ‘Ideology’ and Postmodern Social Philosophy,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 7, nos. 1–2 (1983): 131–44; Richard H. Roberts, Hope and Its Hieroglphy: A Critical Decipherment of Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope (Atlanta: Scholars’ Press, 1990); and Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan, eds., Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch (London: Verso, 1997). 8. Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch, 61–62. 9. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 446. 10. Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch, 38.

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11. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 18. 12. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1995), 123. 13. The critique of “partial” or “half” enlightenment is embedded within much of Bloch’s oeuvre, sometimes couched in terms of attending to the outside world without comparable attention to the “Within” (e.g., Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom, trans. J. T. Swann. [New York: Herder and Herder, 1972], 207–8); working up to “the leap” but not ultimately not taking it (e.g., Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 243); or, as in both Atheism in Christianity (69–83) and in The Principle of Hope, the metaphor of the detective. See Hudson’s “Ernst Bloch: ‘Ideology’ and Postmodern Social Philosophy” for an extended analysis of this theme. 14. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988), 16. 15. Ernst Bloch quoted in Roberts, Hope and Its Hieroglphy, 14–15. 16. See Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); and Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 17. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 8. 18. Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 19. This is not to say that such a space is impermeable or homogenous. Indeed, oftentimes ludic and non-ludic space are mutually constitutive, inflective, and simultaneous. 20. Realtime Worlds, Crackdown, computer game (Microsoft Game Studios, 2007); Saru Brunei, Cubivore, computer game (Altus U.S.A., 2002); Maxis Software, Spore, computer game (Electronic Arts, 2008); Game Arts, Thexder, computer game (Square, 1985); Lionhead Studios, Black & White, computer game (Electronic Arts, 2001). 21. So complete can these transformations be, in fact, that players have died in flagrante delicto (cf. BBC News, “South Korean Dies After Games Session, August 10, 2005, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4137782.stm [accessed September 14, 2009]; Victoria Kim, “Video Game Addicts Concern South Korean Government,” Associated Press, USA Today, Oct. 6, 2005, www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/200510-06-korean-game-addicts_x.htm [accessed September 14, 2009]). Some players have even chosen death as a way to more completely join the denizens of their beloved game world (cf. Xinhua News Agency, “Chinese Heroes vs. World of Warcraft,” China View, August 30, 2006, news3.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-08/29/ content_5021545.htm [accessed September 14, 2009]). For an exploration of these and other forms of “death by computer,” see Marcel O’Gorman Marcel, “Death by Computer,” in The Computer Culture Reader, eds. Judd Ethan Ruggill, Ken S. McAllister, and Joseph R. Chaney (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 176–91. 22. Valve, Team Fortress 2, computer game (Valve, 2007).

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23. egl.gatech.edu/. 24. See nativedancer.ndsu.nodak.edu/home/. 25. The call for the 2009 Innovation in Participatory Learning Awards states that “Collaboration is strongly encouraged” (www.dmlcompetition.net/). 26. For a comprehensive list of these programs, see gamecareerguide.com, “Schools,” www.gamecareerguide.com/schools/ (accessed September 14, 2009). 27. Jack Zipes, “Introduction: Toward a Realization of Anticipatory Illumination,” in Ernst Boch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988), xxxii. 28. Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 10ff. 29. Indeed, David Buckingham makes a similar point in After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000). 30. Douglas Kellner, “Ernst Bloch, Utopia, and Ideology Critique,” Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, eds. Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan (London: Verso, 1997), 83. 31. Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, 127. 32. Ibid. 33. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 394. 34. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 406ff. 35. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 410. 36. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 149. 37. See Ernst Bloch, “The Philosophy of Music” in The Spirit of Utopia, 131, and The Principle of Hope, 395.

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CHAPTER FOUR



Capitalism, Contradiction, and the Carnivalesque: Alienated Labor vs. Ludic Play Lauren Langman and Andra´s Luka´cs

Introduction On April 15, 2010, Blizzard Entertainment launched the online sale of a vanity mount for its marquee game, World of Warcraft, for US$25. The Celestial Steed offers no measurable advantage in the game, yet on launch day, enthusiastic and dedicated players were ready to wait more than five hours in a digital queue with 90,000 people in front of them to purchase it.1 Considering the production, reproduction, and marketing costs associated with this virtual commodity, Blizzard’s first purchasable vanity mount was an excellent cash crop. For the players, it represented yet another leet [sic] addition to their virtual livestock that often exceed hundreds of exotic mounts. In virtual worlds, items like the Celestial Steed often serve as status displays, as primary props to create presentations of a digital self. From a critical standpoint, it would be rather simplistic to dismiss the enthusiasm with which people manage and accessorize their online avatars. The grotesque online representations and cultures they are engaged with are not simply another form of consumerism, or even worse, a form of false consciousness that diverts attention from structural inequalities and the economic, political, and environmental processes that characterize global capitalism. Something more is going on here. We contend that the critique of domination must understand the power and the deeper cultural logic behind people’s fascination with fantasy, the grotesque, and the transgressive. Using the lens of critical theory, our aims in this chapter are to trace the historical process that shifted the locus of self from work to leisure and play, 59

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and at the same time show how non-commodified, yet episodic transgressions, the carnivalesque, became persistent, an integral part of capitalism. Central to this process is the dismantling of medieval communities of meaning (village, church, etc.), the disenchantment of everyday life and the establishment of nationalism and consumerism as identity-granting institutions. We argue that while contemporary carnivals, including certain virtual realms and video games, are persistent, commodified, and seamlessly integrated into everyday life, they still represent episodic moments, times, and spaces where people can experience collective effervescence and empowerment. The examination of the dialectical tension between alienated work and the ludic, and the shift from surplus repression to consumerism can help us understand the growing popularity of cultural forms that offer the possibility to escape the “iron cages” of everyday life. When Marx began his critique of capitalist domination in 1844, the fundamental contradictions of capital were located at the moment of production. More specifically, when the worker sold labor as a commodity, both the product and self were alienated from the worker who in turn also became a commodity. The working class’s growing disillusionment and frustration manifested itself in various forms of resistances and revolutionary actions that forced a number of changes in the nature of work, taking off some of its rough edges. With better wages, entitlements, and benefits, revolutionary fervor quickly waned. However, alienated labor remained alienated and the thwarting of self-transcendence often turned upon displays of violence and destruction—as expressed in fascist mobilizations, nationalism, or racial and ethnic violence.2 As a response, capitalism provided a number of palliatives that made alienated labor more palatable: encapsulated realms of consumption and the dissemination of a mass culture that would provide compensatory meaning and gratification. These ludic realms of culture were located apart from onerous work and made that alienated labor acceptable. The locus of self and identity for many people then migrated from work to leisure, play, and culture. Ludic realms are indeed the realms of consumption; commodities that generate profits for a few, while reproducing capital and labor power. These are the exact conditions that enable play and creative possibilities. With consumerism, a genre of culture emerged that extols participatory spectacles. Similar to the carnivals of medieval Europe as described by Bakhtin3 and whose demise was lamented by Huizinga,4 these transgressive celebrations, festivals, and cultural forms can be viewed as a critique of existing social conditions and resistance against elites, their norms and lifestyles. More than episodic moments, these celebrations have and do provide people with genu-

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ine experiences of collective gratification and joys of transgression. Recent technological developments allowed these grotesque celebrations to take place digitally and engross wider demographics in the social spaces created by video games and virtual worlds.

Alienated Labor, Nationalism, and Consumerism The capitalist system rendered workers increasingly powerless, devoid of agency and creative potential. Nonetheless, alienated labor produced vast amounts of surplus value, and in turn “has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”5 The exponential growth of production continued throughout the twentieth century—assisted by technological innovations, electronic communication, and cheap transportation. The bourgeoisie have harnessed the power of the atom, traveled to the moon, and produced drugs that enable the four-hour hard-on. When Marx began his critique of capital, not only was the worker alienated, but also when the “satanic mills” that had threatened life and limbs were abandoned, the worker’s home in the tenements of Manchester, amid the animals and refuse, erased whatever residual humanity might have survived the working day. For Marx, human beings were loving, cooperative, creative subjects, agents of their own selfhood. Yet, with the domination of capital and alienation of labor, the subject was crushed, reduced to little more than a beast of burden, his/her selfhood dominated, thwarted, left bereft of community and estranged from his/her fundamental nature, species being. As he commented, Self denial, the denial of life and of all human needs, is [capitalism’s] cardinal doctrine. The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save—the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour—your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life.6

Workers had little time and few resources to realize the creative potentials in culture or play outside of scattered engagements with “hobbies.” Alienation curbed creativity and produced estrangement between people and from the natural world. Marx did provide a space for the ludic; a realm of playful creativity. But, under capitalism this has been reduced to a narrow cultural realm of commodified consumption, apart from the exhausting demands of everyday work.

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The stability of early capitalism depended on the naturalization of restive sentiments among the suffocating rentier class and proletariat. While the elites’ control over the means of coercion can secure overt compliance in the short run, long-term stability and the growth of capital could only be secured by hegemony—the “willing assent” of the masses to their own domination. Nationalism would glue the fragmented society of the disfranchised into the cohesive “imagined communities” of citizens, all equal before the law, all devoted to the glory of the nation, and willing to die for the of its causes. Nationalism shaped the growing school systems, the growth of museums and “national populars” that extolled the virtues of one’s culture at the expense of others, thereby limiting the appeals of internationalism. Nationalism not only justified imperialism, but the wealth gained through imperialism led to better standards of living for many of those workers within the core countries. Thus, imperialism helped to export the contradictions of capitalism from the core countries, to the developing world. With the resistance of workers in the core countries, capitalist elites finally consented to allow union organizing, labor legislation, and the growth of entitlement programs. This raised the standard of living of core country workers providing a rich base from which to develop new domestic consumer markets. The new palaces of consumption department stores and later shopping malls, along with the rapid growth of marketing and advertising, stimulated greater and greater levels of consumption in the core capitalist countries. Both nationalism and consumerism create identity granting communities of meaning that each in their own way directed consciousness away from the conditions of alienated labor and routinized work. Nationalism and consumerism both provided the sentiment of compensatory gratification absent from work. Thus, while the citizen might be proud of his or her country’s history, culture, army, language, and glorious future, the consumer would take pride in owning designer outfits, fancy appliances, new luxurious cars, the latest electronic devices, or even virtual goods.

Critical Theory Marxist theory had become a caricature of itself by the end of the nineteenth century. Radical economic reductionism and its authoritarian subtexts caused many scholars to rethink Marx’s critique of domination in face of mass production, huge national armies, consumer goods, and mass media. This was quite clear to Karl Korsch7 who lamented the displacement of philosophy from the critique of domination. At about this time, Georg Lukacs wrote his seminal History and Class Consciousness8 and scholars established

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the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (Frankfurt School) in order to revise Marxist theory. Three fundamental moments of the Frankfurt School are relevant to the current argument: (1) The discovery of Marx’s Economic and Political Manuscript of 1844 that together with Lukacs’s notions of reification made alienation-reification, estrangement-objectification an essential moment of the imminent critique; (2) the “demystification of the world”: how the displacement of magic from the world and its domination by instrumental reason meant that most workers, blue or white collar, producing good or services, were both locked into “iron cages” of rule bound rationality and consequent dehumanization, as Max Weber9 explained; and (3) according to Freud, the development of character was a process that involved moving from polymorphous perversion guided by the “pleasure principle” to anal compulsivity under the “reality principle” demanded by civilization.10 Nevertheless, as Wilhelm Reich11 argued, and Marcuse12 would later note, Freud conflated civilization with its capitalist forms that demanded a level of repression above and beyond the need for social harmony and creative work, to insure internalization of authority so that people would accept dehumanizing, reproduction, and alienating sale of labor power. These concerns with alienation, entrapment, and self-desire would inform later theories of consumption. Examining the Nazis’ effective use of mass-mediated propaganda and the emerging American culture industry, the Frankfurt School noted that the very conditions of capital and alienation had been transformed by mass production, commodification, and escapism. Culture, when produced and standardized for the market, no longer served as a realm of creativity and collective celebration, but became another source of alienation where people buy their own pleasures, prepackaged for privatized consumption.13 As mass culture disseminated an ideology of capitalism as the best of all possible worlds within its entertainment, people became further integrated into the “administered society.”14 Meanwhile mass culture masked the immiseration that undergirded capitalism and distracted people from both self-awareness and critical reason. Adorno argued that the power of culture emerged from its interaction with other institutions, most important the economic and political sphere.15 In this respect, understanding audiences and cultural consumption are intertwined with concepts of power, ideology, and the tendencies of capitalism. While not without its shortcomings, the Frankfurt School’s multidisciplinary approach encompassing philosophy, sociology, and physiology attempted to resurrect the dialectical critique of modernity and paved the way for the emergence of the British.

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Cultural Studies Model Consumerism, as both an ideology and a source of profit, not only colonized desire, but also eroded various repressions since it was necessary to render the superego pliant if one was to indulge in impulse buying as a means of gratifying other impulses. To devote one’s life to privatized hedonism through accumulating goods was to distort the self’s possibility and to lose one’s life. It was at this point where Marcuse16 noted the dialect of sexuality; it was much like consumerism. On one hand, it was repressed for the sake of early capitalism that required the “surplus repression” of libido, sublimated into the “performance principle,” for the worker, alienated labor was his/her reality. But with the growing productivity and profits of capital, there was also an increase of leisure time that became a new realm to colonize through consumption. But to encourage consumption over frugality, sexuality had to become “free and colonized.” Marcuse called this “repressive de-sublimation.” The important point is that previously repressed feelings and desires could be safely gratified through consumer capitalism. Consequently, both leisure and entertainment became important aspects of late capitalist economies.

Carnivalization and the Escape from the Iron Cage Since the Marxian tradition was primarily focused on work and the nature of production, it does not provide an adequate perspective to understand the joys of transgression and fantasy. On the other hand, the Dutch researcher Johan Huizinga was concerned with the cultural logic of play. Huizinga asserts that the advent of industrial capitalism demanding alienated labor and entrapping workers in its iron cages, annihilated the festivity, playfulness, and, most of all, the laughter of the late feudal world. With capitalist modernity, a colorful, spontaneous, expressive, and, most of all, playful quality of life was destroyed.17 Bakhtin’s analysis of the carnival presents a synthesis between Marx and Huizinga as it shows how celebrations of the grotesque, transgressive, lampoon, parody, laughter, and play create resistance to domination and offer a utopian moment of freedom. The carnival was a special time—an episodic festival apart from the quotidian cycle of peasant life. In the days of Lent proceeding Easter, the common people celebrated carnival—a participatory festival of transgression; a celebration apart from the everyday “official” worlds of work and power. It was an expression of resistance to elite power, an inversion of dominant

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lifestyles and values, and a critique of fixed social hierarchies of feudalism. Carnival time stood apart from and was opposed to the “official life” of the jousts, feasts, and tournaments that reflected the wealth and power of the aristocratic elites. Bakhtin saw the various ludic expressions of the peasant carnival as “grotesque realism,” celebrations of the body and bodily functions, inversions and reversals of dominant values and its parodies of the elites. Within the carnival, play gave people a sense of agency and control over their lives; people felt united, their selfhood recognized, and creative potential realized even if for only a brief moment. Carnival, as play, would provide a sense of meaning, while also preserving the “official life” of the society. The basic elements of the carnival included: 1. Ritual Spectacles: The carnival was a pageant of quite distinct outfits and activities: parades, festive rituals, games and practices. It is founded on pleasures, wine, frolic, unbridled lust, and frenzied dance. Grotesque images and transgressive actions generally inverted or reversed typical standards of either appearance or action; there were monsters and masks, games, dramas, and processions not otherwise allowed into ordinary life. It was a participatory ritual that had to be lived and experienced, not simple a celebration to be watched. 2. Bawdy Tales: Important parts of carnival were comic fables, typically of a ribald nature that was transgressive, either by violating norms, ridiculing elites, or most often, both. The bawdy tale was designed to evoke laughter, as a sign of irrepressible human freedom for Bakhtin. Laughter was a protest, a rebuke of the official life, a symbol of agency in a world of domination. The people’s laughter was the strongest degradation of authority; it symbolized the collective comprehension and shared affirmation of satire, of the “we” identification of the ordinary people. The targets of the bawdy tales and derision were “them,” the elites. 3. Billingsgate: Carnival was a place of billingsgate, endless curses and the incessant use of vituperative obscenity and colorful invective. It indicated anger toward someone or something, but billingsgate is different from ordinary swearing. This profanity, as a way of debasement, was a way of bringing someone “down to earth,” and indeed by reducing him or her to a lower body orifice, or an excremental product, or describing their bodily functions or acts, that not only debases him or her, but such epitaphs act as a parodic critique of the very system that creates hierarchies of elites and peasants.

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Thus, much of the carnival activity consisted of symbolic challenges, parodies, inversions, and reversals of “typical” norms that might lampoon, mock, and hector the elites. The carnival was a critique of the rigid social hierarchy of the dynastic elites, their manners, morals, and lifestyles. It was a time in which everyday people lampooned or parodied the king, the clergy, and authorities at higher ranks and their values; it provided a “second life” of freedom and gratification. For a brief moment, the lowest and the highest stood at the same level, there was an egalitarian humanity that brought together those who were usually divided by cultural and class stratification. The norms of social station that comprised the highly codified patterns of “appropriate” manners of deference and demeanor to elites were frequently transgressed through various inversions and reversals of social roles. Private body parts, normally hidden, were exposed, so that what was typically silent and concealed found voice and audience. Unlike most other festivals, the carnival extolled alternative values, ludic, creative expressions, and transgressive practices that were otherwise severely proscribed in everyday life. Its many transgressions created an equality of repudiation against the rigid hierarchies of feudal society. All that was otherwise prohibited, generally by religious doctrine, was tolerated and indeed valorized. These transgressions were primarily aesthetic and moral rather than criminal: the primary elements of the carnival included privileging the grotesque over the “beautiful,” the transgressive over the normative, the ludic (playful) over the practical, and the de-sublimated (impulsive, bodily hedonistic) over the repressive. Sexual norms and standards of modesty were often discarded; unlikely and prohibited liaisons took place. These symbolic expressions and forms of anger and discontent allowed the peasants to “blow off steam” toward the nobility in ways that left the social and political arrangements unscratched. However, with the rise of industrial capitalism the playfulness, festivity, and the laughter of the late feudal world vanished into tamed official sports, county fairs, and organized hobbies.

Liminality and the Joys of Transgression Every social structure generates an anti-structure that threatens its status quo, order, and equilibrium. Stable social structures must isolate, yet tolerate, marginalized and more chaotic moments of its liminal anti-structure—the tendencies toward frenzy and transgression.18 The liminal, as a submerged, marginal, “betwixt and between” time and space, has been always been part of society. The continual reproduction of society depended on the toleration

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through isolation of moments of frenzy, scrutiny, and reflection. Liminality therefore consists of times and spaces that stand quite apart from ordinary life; yet it is also a realm of potential outcomes and possibilities. In addition to that, every society has “ritual processes” that ensure social continuity from a previous time. Victor Turner suggested that “if liminality is regarded as a time and place of withdrawal from normal modes of social action, it can be seen as potentially a period of scrutinization of the central values or axioms of the culture in which it occurs.”19 The carnival is the time in which the liminal moves to center stage, even if for just a brief moment. Commercialized capitalist culture with its rationalized, alienated work fosters particular forms of the carnivalesque in its liminal spaces. To resist the alienation of work, the entrapment within cages, whether iron or neon,20 some people find escapes in Dionic spectacles of “irrationality” and emotionality in which the ludic “joys of transgression” find gratification. Since modern civilization depends on repression, transgressions not only provide the otherwise forbidden indulgences, but the very fact of violating the norm and “getting away” with it provides another pleasure. For Katz21 certain kinds of criminal behavior were not motivated by any concern with material gain: the “seductions of crime” were the emotional gratifications of violating the norms. Thus, the gratification of “forbidden desires” whether erotic, exhibitionist, narcissistic, or aggressive is even more pleasurable due to the very transgression of the norm.

Carnivalization Today The origins of carnival might be traced back to Dionysian rites. Indeed some pre-modern fertility cults in which unbridled sexuality was an essential part of the ritual, suggest its origins well precede written history. Much of what might be called carnivalization has long been contained in the liminal zones of the society. The medieval carnival was a response to the social condition of the age when dynastic rule based on land ownership was the norm. With the rise of modernity, as reason supplanted myth, as work displaced play, and coffee replaced ale, the carnival receded from a major celebration to a more isolated residual of seasonal culture. Thus, while the medieval carnival might not have had any direct impact or influence on the carnivals of today, both were responses to a hierarchical society which was grossly inegalitarian, oppressive, and where mobility was rarely possible. The rise of modern carnival, however, is tied to the era of the civil rights movement, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the sexual revolution. The changing music scene, public repudiations of mainstream values over

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clothes and appearances, the increased popularity of certain drugs, and the sexual revolution changed standards of morality and opened the way for new forms of body and soul liberation. As the feminist movement gained more and more followers, sexuality became an expression of equality and women’s claim of agency over their own bodies. Sexual freedom, while often a political act, normalized sexuality. This meant that expressions of transgressive sexuality shifted to the subcultures including porn chic and swingers. Interestingly enough, this was the beginning of globalization—factories were closing, rustbelts grew, and people began to write about the “de-industrialization of America.” The peace and love of the hippie generation began to face certain grim realities of unemployment, underemployment, economic stagnation, and subsequent decline. The music changed from the peace, love, and drug highs extolled by the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, or Janis Joplin to the angrier revolutionary sounds of punk, rap, and heavy metal. This was the time of the Sex Pistols, Clash, or Ramones followed by Public Enemy and gangsta rappers. Soon after the tie-dyed color shaded to black; headbands were discarded for chains and studs. The limits of tolerable “morality” of the culture industry were in transition, and in 1971, Deep Throat and I am Curious (Yellow) forever changed what could be shown in a movie theater. It would also engender porn chic as a major moment in popular culture. When MTV appeared and the music video became the new “must have,” it was apparent that the endless hours of erotica disguised as music targeted the hyperhormonal set. The carnivalesque is lived and experienced in contemporary, popular celebrations of grotesque imagery and transgressions of religion, the body, gender-sexual norms, or politesse that invert, parody, or lampoon the dominant values, identities, and lifestyles. Carnivalization reverses what most people consider normal, acceptable, and desirable. It creates episodic, alternative, topsy-turvy worlds and utopian realms where the transgressive becomes the norm. Many forms of transgressive sexuality, from rainbow parties to fraternity parties, spring break, erotic resorts, and Mardi Gras, porn chic and sexercise displays stand as critiques of rationality, patriarchy, and the legacies of repressive Puritanism.22 Many rock concerts express their critique through grotesque lyrics, costumes, and stagecraft. Repressive morality and elite hypocrisy are condemned in lyrics and “choreography”—the latter of which has, at times, included sexual simulation and, on occasion, actual sex acts on stage. If the carnivalesque grants people times and spaces of empowerment, freedom, recognition, humanity, and “authenticity,” it also serves as a critique of the society where these are denied.

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Virtual Carnivals With recent technological advances, virtual realms became important settings to witness, experience, and participate in transgressive behavior. These digital spaces encompass the dialectical tension that characterizes contemporary carnivals: while the majority of virtual world are developed, published, and operated as commodities by for-profit business enterprises, they likewise offer a possible social space to temporarily escape the “iron cages” of bureaucratically administered capitalism. Some video games have attempted to capture the spirit of modern carnival through representations and storylines by relying on the grotesque and liminal. While technological barriers seriously limited the roles players can assume in early horror (Sweet Home, the Alone in the Dark series, etc.), erotic (e.g., Beat ‘Em & Eat ‘Em, the Leisure Suit Larry series, Strip Poker, etc.) or first-person shooter games (e.g., Wolfeinstein 3D, Doom, etc.), their grotesque, exaggerated, extravagant, or sometimes over-rationalized gameplay offered the audience engagement with hidden or prohibited fantasies. As Klevjer has pointed out, the repetitive and ritualistic aspect of single player games enabled “a playful mimicry of real-life practices of production and violence in modern capitalist societies.”23 Even though single-player games created idiocultures and fandom similar to television shows,24 the collective effervescence of transgressive carnivals was still not reproduced. Multi-user game environments (MUDs, for instance AberMUD or TinyMUD) developed simultaneously alongside the single player–oriented game graphic engines. And yet faced with early technological limitations, they attracted only a narrow niche user base. As developers overcame this technological bottleneck, the graphic engines of single player games and the multiuser milieu of MUDS morphed into entire virtual social realms. Whether the setting of these social spaces is a medieval fantasy (Ultima Online, Everquest, World of Warcraft, etc.), a futuristic science fiction (EVE Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Star Trek Online, etc.), or something that more closely resembles our everyday environment (Second Life, etc.), they created a dynamic user culture reminiscent of contemporary carnivalization. These new social spaces proved to be a fertile soil for germinating digital carnivals. The existing representations and user-generated content allowed idiocultures to engage with grotesque and transgressive imagery. Playing the role of powerful heroes, gamers can experience a real sense of empowerment and empowering utopia: teenagers lead adult players to overcome mighty enemies, the unemployed and stay-at-home moms manipulate game markets much as powerful businessman play the stock market, the disabled are offered

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new perspectives through virtual embodiment. Hidden, repressed, and unconventional sexual behaviors are expressed and explored through participation in various digital subcultures25 or in virtual realms combining liminal sexuality, dating, and social-networking sites. Interestingly, virtual realms re-create the contradiction of leisure and alienated work: however empowering or carnivalesque they might be, given their persistent nature, participation becomes routinized, chore-like, resembling work.26 Virtual realms offering the possibility of escaping everyday life turn into cages themselves, fostering rebellion against game rules, customs, and hierarchies. Transgressive play within these permanent carnival spaces is a manifestation of players’ disillusionment of the inner logic of static game environments, power gaming, and modern rationality.27 While griefing, cheating,28 virtual harassment, offensive verbal scripts, and virtual billingsgates (for instance, spamming obscenities and sexual jokes in public chats) are against the official game rules and cultures codes, they are all attempts to transgress virtual alienation.

Conclusion This chapter proposed a historically grounded framework to examine the resurgence of modern carnivalesque culture by looking at the dialectics of alienation and play. Contemporary play embodies two contradictory elements—it can be seen as collective moments in various realms of freedom and spontaneity whereby groups gather together and engage in various forms of socialization, the ludic forms of interaction quite apart from the realm of alienated labor, entrapped within rule bound organizations. Yet at the same time, most forms of play and leisure (whether shooting hoops or a deer, taking a vacation or riding imaginary ponies in virtual realms) involve the consumption of commodities securing profits and legitimating consumer capitalism. For Marx, the central position of alienation was the commodification of wage and labor. Wage labor alienated and objectified the worker; the worker became powerless, thwarting his or her self-realization, left bereft of the community and estranged from the human being. As onerous as feudalism may have been, there were holidays, festivals, realms of play, freedom, and spontaneity. This play element, as an essential moment of culture, waned in the faces of industrialism and the demands of urban life. Marx’s theory of alienation and commodification followed by Bakhtin’s analysis of the carnivals of transgression and Huizinga’s lamentation of the decline of play provide a good theoretical framework for explaining the nature

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of the present anti-structures of the ludic. More specifically, the changes in U.S. society over the past several decades, from the restructuring of work to the promotion of neoliberal policies, have led to greater inequality and more alienated, regimented work. Yet, at the same time, the dominant themes of mass culture, with their predictable themes of escapism and conformity, were themselves seen as alienating and inauthentic by large sectors of youth. At this time, various elements of the heretofore liminal moved from the margins to center stage. The dialectic of domination and freedom can be seen in realms of transgressive play—many of which are provided as commodities. Despite many variations by age, gender, or income, the various festival moments of the transgressive ludic show certain common features. They are, first and foremost, Dionic—they demonstrate participatory expressions of inversions, reversal, parody, and lampoon. To simply dismiss carnival as false consciousness is to ignore how understanding the carnivalesque and the joys of transgression offer a far more insightful and nuanced critique of contemporary capitalism. Disgruntled workers go to a rock concert and shout endless obscenities; bored college students go to spring break or Mardi Gras while their folks travel to Burning Man. Others turn to virtual realms and wait in long queues to purchase their Celestial Steed for their virtual avatars. Carnivalization, thus, provides times and spaces where alienation and rationality can be overcome, where people can assert humanity that refuses to be rationalized and dehumanized and find creative fulfillment in play. Unless the critique of domination valorizes play as freedom, as did Marx and Huizinga, it will remain irrelevant for most people.

Notes 1. terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2010/04/how-to-make-a-cool-2mm-in-oneday-with-a-sparkle-pony.html (accessed April 15, 2010). 2. Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1973). 3. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 4. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (New York: Beacon Press, 1971). 5. Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” in The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 477. 6. Karl Marx, “Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 95–96. 7. Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970 [1973]).

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8. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1971). 9. See chapter 11 in Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 2, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 10. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1930). 11. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1946). 12. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). 13. Thomas Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 60. 14. The extent to which elite interpretations are privileged, the audience is homogeneous, and people are passive has been criticized by many, most important the Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. 15. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 41–72. 16. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (New York: Beacon Press, 1968). 17. Henricks, Play Reconsidered. 18. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (Chicago: Aldine Press, 1969). 19. Turner, The Ritual Process, 167. 20. Lauren Langman, “Neon Cages: Shopping for Subjectivity,” in Lifestyles of Consumption, ed. Rob Shields (London: Routledge, 1992), 41–82. 21. Jack Katz, The Seductions of Crime (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 22. This is not to say that transgressive sexuality is free of patriarchy. 23. Rune Klevjer, “Danzando con il Grottesco Moderno. Guerra, lavoro, gioco e rituale nei First Person Shooter run-and-gun,” in Gli strumenti del videogiocare. Logiche, estetiche e (v)ideologie, ed. Matteo Bittanti (Milano, Italy: Costa & Nolan), 223–49. English version available: folk.uib.no/smkrk/docs/dancing.htm. 24. Cornel Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). 25. See chapter 6 in Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008). 26. See Mark Silverman and Bart Simon, “Discipline and Dragon Kill Points in the Online Power Game” in Games and Culture 2009, no. 4: 353–78. 27. Espen Aarseth, “I Fought the Law: Transgressive Play and the Implied Player,” available at www.digra.org/dl/db/07313.03489.pdf (accessed July 6, 2010). 28. Mia Consalvo, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007).

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CHAPTER FIVE



Sneaking Mission: Late Imperial America and Metal Gear Solid Derek Noon and Nick Dyer-Witheford

Snake: Where were you before . . . ? Delta Force? Raiden: I was part of the Army Force XXI trials. Snake: Force XXI? That’s about tactical IT. Any field experience? Raiden: No, not really. Snake: So this is your first. Raiden: I’ve had extensive training, the kind that’s indistinguishable from the real thing. Snake: Like what? Raiden: Sneaking Mission 60, Weapons 80, Advanced . . . Snake: VR, huh. Raiden: But realistic in every way! Snake: A virtual grunt of the digital age. That’s just great. —Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001)1

Introduction: Late Imperial Gaming The 2008 release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (MGS4) brings a provisional conclusion to an ongoing epic of digital play—Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear video games. Produced over nearly two decades, this series now comprises six major games—two early Metal Gear titles and the famous four-part Metal Gear Solid sequence—some in significantly varying versions for different computer or consoles systems; numerous shorter episodes and expansions; and a penumbra of graphic novels, music albums, and special 73

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feature releases. It has been both widely acclaimed and, occasionally, derided by gamers, game journalists, and a handful of game scholars.2 Though Kojima intends to add to the saga (a new game has been announced for 2010), MGS4 effectively draws together all its narrative threads to date, and seems to finalize the story of its most celebrated protagonist, the covert-operations warrior Solid Snake. We therefore take the occasion to assess the remarkable intervention of the Metal Gear games in the politics of virtual play.3 The explosion of academic game studies since 2000 was at its onset marked by conflict between “narratologists,” who saw games as texts, analyzable, like books or films or television, in terms of story, character, and symbol, and “ludologists,” who insisted on their unique properties as games, revolving around rules, goals, strategy, and tactics.4 The polemics clarified the specific attributes of games as a cultural form, and forged a critical vocabulary for their discussion. In our view (and apparently that of several exhausted combatants and bystanders), the most important outcome was, however, to reveal the mistaken nature of the debate’s initial polarization: all video games are, albeit in differing proportions, both story and sport: narrative unfolds through play, play is structured by narrative. What both ludological and narratological accounts share, moreover, is a certain formalism, staying within the “magic circle” of the game world, rather than connecting outward to the political and cultural contexts within which play is set.5 Recently, however, several studies have reversed this trend, attending to games as simulations that both model and mutate extra-ludic realms. Such analysis usually refuses older linear “media effects” perspectives, yet restores to view the dialectical relation between on-screen game worlds and their “IRL” (In Real Life) referents.6 Our analysis of the Metal Gear series takes this route, examining Kojima’s creations as “games of empire” whose virtualities are inextricably imbricated in the conditions of American global power.7 The strong links between virtual games and the U.S. military–industrial complex are now well documented.8 The origins of such games in Cold War computing, the importance of war games as an industry genre, and the use by the Defense Department of game technologies for recruiting, training, and even for the treatment of post–traumatic stress disorder, make virtual play an important part of what James Der Derian terms the “militaryindustrial-entertainment-network” and Nick Turse simply “the complex.”9 What opposition there is to militarist tendencies in digital play is usually seen coming from the “counter-gaming” of an alt- or indie-games scene that has, post–9/11, generated a wave of Flash games for the personal computer, agitprop machinima, and guerrilla interventions in online shooters.10 Far less explored is the possibility of counter-perspectives within mainstream games,

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particularly those for the video game consoles that dominate the market. Here, the supremacy of risk-averse publishers, “hardcore” gamer preferences, and connections between developers and the military seems to assure a culture of what Stephen Kline and colleagues term “militarized masculinity.”11 There are few suggestions that bestseller video games might be capable of challenging the dominant perspectives on U.S. power. This picture is, however, complicated by the Metal Gear games. Their virtual worlds of conspiratorial politics, clandestine missions, surreal weaponry, and biotechnologically conditioned warriors reference the actuality of late American empire in complex, contradictory, but often critical and always highly self-reflexive modes.12 It is as a ludic exploration of U.S. efforts to secure and maintain flagging planetary ascendancy by the wielding and preempting of weapons of mass destruction, the waging of wars on terror, the deployment of special forces and privatized armies, the development of futuristic armaments, the erosion of civil liberties and international law, and not least, by an increasingly comprehensive regime of informatic control in which virtual play is itself implicated, that we situate Kojima’s games.

From Hiroshima to Kojima Productions If the depiction of U.S. power in the Metal Gear series is heterodox, this is in part because, though bestsellers in North America, they are Japanese games. Ever since Nintendo, SEGA, and later Sony saved the game industry from the glut of low-quality software that in 1984 annihilated a nascent North American game business, virtual play has been shaped by trans-Pacific traffic. Japan’s game studios were a source of creative innovation within game culture, not only because of the technological expertise of its programmers and engineers and the acumen of its business leaders, but also because of its manga arts traditions, which brought to video games vivid graphics, narrative depth, and character development.13 Manga content ranges from the innocently childish to the demonically violent, its worlds chimerical, full of fantastic organic-machine, animal-human, natural-supernatural hybrids. Many commentators see the post-war flowering of manga inspired toys and games as marked by the trauma of Hiroshima: Anne Allison ascribes its culture of “polymorphous mutability” to two factors—an atomic sense of mutation, literal and metaphorical, and the pell-mell pace of Japanese post-war hightechnological development, both fueling an imaginary “of mixed up worlds, reconstituted bodies, and transformed identities.”14 U.S.–Japanese video game hybridizations include the delightful Mario and whimsical Pokémon, but also disturbing, subversive themes largely otherwise absent from Western

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game culture. Metal Gear exemplifies this dynamic, for the ambivalences of its depiction of war reflects both the encounter of Western action genres with Japan’s own traditions of militarism and unabashed hyper-violence (Snake owes much to the ronin tradition of wandering samurai warriors), and strong strands of opposition to nuclear weapons, hostility to American global dominance, and alarm at the mutant machine-human melds that populate the battlefields of contemporary techno-war. These general contradictions of Japanese-American culture are alive in the very particular subjectivity that created Metal Gear, that of Hideo Kojima, perhaps Japan’s most celebrated game auteur. Kojima, who was born in 1963, has said that his father told him stories of how, in the bombing of Tokyo, “he was running the streets searching for shelter from the bombs and fires” and “carried wounded children to safe places.” These stories had “a tremendous impact” on Kojima. His father’s attitude to the United States “was like walking a tightrope”; he “hated the Americans for the war” but “when he got older . . . accepted and finally fell in love with American culture.” Kojima remarks “I believe I share that tightrope ambiguity with my father.”15 One of a generation of Japanese who saw the manga culture, previously strongly associated with radical students, commercially absorbed to provide the basis of Japan’s new internationally successful animation, comic book and video game industries, Kojima made his career as a game designer with one of Japan’s largest developers and publishers, Konami. Although initially regarded as eccentric, the success of the first two Metal Gear games, released in Japan in 1987 and 1990, propelled him on a meteoric rise. He was allowed to foster an elite team of artistic talent at Konami’s Development Studio 5, dubbed the “The Kojima Clan,” helping Kojima to eventually rise to the position of vice president of Konami. In 2005, however, Kojima Studios was spun off as an independent unit, so that the studios could focus on creative rather than business concerns, though its games continue to be published by the parent company.16 Kojima directs his studio in an intense, charismatic, and idiosyncratic style. The studio projects a sophisticated approach to game design emphatically repudiating the stereotype of games as mindless entertainment. Its mission statement declares: This era (SCENE) has no memory. Even if a product makes a profit, no memories (MEME) are left behind. With games, before there was business, there was a culture. Are games simply products that help you gleefully kill time?17

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Though Kojima’s pronouncements of design philosophy are cryptic and elliptical, they unmistakably express an ambition to make virtual environments that are more than stage-sets on which to win high scores or follow predictable storylines: I don’t want people to play them just for fun, or because they have nothing else to do, I want the players to find something more, to enrich their lives through games. . . . Your outlook on life might change as a result of playing Metal Gear Solid.18

The stringent profit calculations of transnational video game publishing have created an industry notorious for stifling developer innovation in favor of proven formulas. Kojima, however, is one of a handful of superstar game designers whose commercial success has won him a high degree of creative freedom (in North America, Will Wright’s position in Electronic Arts is comparable). Konami, while not in the very highest tier of global video game corporations with Sony, Microsoft, EA, and Activision, is usually ranked among the top fifteen such enterprises. Through its early association with Nintendo it has a long experience of promoting its games in the crucial North American market. The first two Metal Gear games were made for the MSX home computer, a system almost exclusively used in Japan, although some bastardized versions were available on Nintendo consoles. It was not until the late 1990s, when the Metal Gear Solid series was released for Sony’s PlayStation—then the dominant home video game console—that Kojima’s games became an international phenomenon. Its four installments, Metal Gear Solid (MGS, 1998), Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (MGS2, 2001), Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (MGS3, 2004) and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (MGS4, 2008) have among them sold more than 19 million copies.19 To understand why they have been so popular we must examine some of these games’ exceptional features.

The Sneaker: Stealth Missions and Cut Scenes Metal Gear created a new kind of video game, officially dubbed Tactical Espionage Action, but more commonly referred to as the Stealth game or simply as the Sneaker. Today this has become a recognized genre: Thief: The Dark Project (1998), Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (2004), and Assassin’s Creed (2007) transpose its formulae to a variety of settings. Kojima’s initial iteration was, however, audacious. The originality of the Stealth game lies

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in its differentiation from another game genre, the First Person Shooter (FPS). Shooting scenarios of various types have been a staple of the game industry. In the early 1990s id Studios produced in games such as Wolfenstein and Doom, a peculiarly gripping version where the player’s point of view was “first person,” through the gun sights of a warrior protagonist. Whether the hero was an anti-Nazi resistance fighter or a space marine, the recipe for the FPS was simple and compelling: twitch reflexes, speed of movement, and judicious selection of armaments were necessary to survive waves of enemies in a relentlessly hostile environment where progress through increasingly difficult levels depended on racking up kills. The result delighted millions of predominantly male players while throwing their moral guardians into panic over the effects of virtual violence. Metal Gear both derived and departed from this tradition. The player adopts the identity of a super-soldier of the type very familiar from the shooter genre: the main protagonist, Snake, is a highly skilled U.S. Special Forces operative. Though the narrative arc of the entire series is, as we discuss later, staggeringly complex, in each of the games the mission structure is essentially the same: disable or recapture a weapons system that has fallen into the hands of dangerous, shadowy opponents and that is protected by formidable ninja-cyborg antagonists, some with strange super-armaments, others with abilities nothing short of supernatural. These missions, however, are matters of clandestine craft rather than sheer violence. Game play— which can be conducted either in a first- or third-person mode—emphasizes unobserved movement, subterfuge, camouflage, evasion, trickery, and outsmarting enemies, not just shooting everything that moves. This is not to say that Metal Gear games are peaceful. Far from it: sniping, knifing, and martial arts are all important in Snake’s skill set; his deadly chokehold move became famous among gamers. His arsenal of equipment includes a full array of small arms, explosives, and missile launchers. With a frequency that depends on the players’ competence and preferences, games can periodically detonate into sheer mayhem. As Pat Miller points out, however, they also provide incentives for players not to utilize violence.20 These incentives vary—in the early Metal Gear games, it is sometimes simply easier to attain objectives by avoiding combat; in MGS2, the highest-end game ranking (“Big Boss”) is only attained by completing the game without inflicting any fatalities (a tranquilizer gun helps); MGS3 maintains this, and adds valuable camouflage equipment that can only be attained from non-lethally disabled opponents. Much of the challenge of the game thus depends on a tension between the avail-

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ability of an arsenal of deadly weaponry and the rewards for a “no-kill” completion. The “zero kill theme” is, Miller argues, not an incidental element. Snake’s conversations with other characters make clear his distaste for unnecessary slaying, and he is even teased about it. The issue is foregrounded in an encounter in MGS3, between Snake and an opponent, the Sorrow, a psychic Special Forces member who can communicate with the dead. Their battle is set in a haunted jungle river: Snake [must] wade upstream, dodging bullets and encountering the ghost of ever single life he took, ranging from jungle animals he killed and ate to gruesome shadows of enemy soldiers who recount exactly how the deed was done . . . despite his extensive arsenal and elaborate hand-to-hand combat training, Snake couldn’t fight back—all he could do is continue upstream and do the best to dodge the ghosts.21

How many ghosts Snake meets is determined by the choices the player has made in the game to this point; if he has been a profligate assassin, the sequence can take up to twenty minutes to complete, a confrontation with the consequences of violence compelled by game design. The other formal feature that distinguishes Kojima’s series from conventional action games is the extraordinary length of the cut scenes—the cinematic interludes at a game’s introduction, conclusion, and breaks between levels. Cut scenes are a matter of controversy among gamers and game critics, either abhorred for interrupting gameplay, or adored for the opportunity they offer to amplify character and narrative. The Metal Gear series, it is generally agreed, represents an extreme case: cut scenes are frequent and long, with the conclusion to MGS2, for example, equivalent to watching a two-hour movie. James Newman says such episodes make the Metal Gear series the “apotheosis of narrative” in video games.22 Coupled with the stealthy play, the long cut scenes produce an affective quality very different from that of the adrenalin-pulsing FPS, drastically slowing the rhythm of play, generating a slower, more reflective mood. It is in the cut scenes, moreover, that the series’ political commentary emerges, posing questions about power, war, and weaponry that are atypical within mainstream game culture. For example, much of the plot hinges on missions to prevent nuclear weapons falling into the hand of foreign powers or hostile conspirators. In most games this theme would simply be a device on which to hang fast action, and perhaps, a final apocalyptic explosion. In MGS, however, the cut

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scenes become the occasion for disquisitions on the problems of nuclear power. A character comments on the disposal of radioactive waste: Palmer: Have you ever seen a warehouse full of nuclear waste? Snake: No. Palmer: Drums and drums of nuclear waste stacked this high as far as the eye can see because there is still no real way to use it or dispose of it. Snake: So they just close the lid and pretend it will go away? Palmer: Essentially, yes, and they’re not even doing a good job of storing it. Many of the drums are corroded, with nuclear waste seeping out of them. Snake: Unbelievable . . . Metal Gear Solid (1998)23

Other scenes we will discuss later raise equally problematic issues about virtual training, the arms trade, and genetic engineering. They also explain the games’ labyrinthine plot, to which we now turn.

The Patriots’ Plot: Conspiracy Theory and Cognitive Mapping The complexity of the Metal Gear series’ plot, legendary in game culture, is impossible to summarize without falsifying the experience of play. Video games are “ergodic” texts, in which the overall arc of the narrative is often not clear to readers as they read or gamers as they play.24 Discovery of (and befuddlement by) what is going on is intrinsic to the pleasure of such artifacts. In the case of Metal Gear games, however, the narrative twists and turns, intractably mystifying to many players and happily lampooned in game reviews, are exceptionally Byzantine, involving a vast cast of secret operative characters, intricately related to each other (some, it turns out, are clones of one another, and others become biotechnologically fused!). The multiple betrayals, changes of objective, and switches of allegiance are only gradually (if ever) grasped as the player progresses, not just through one game, but the entire series. This difficulty is intensified because the sequence of the games’ production does not correspond to their narrative chronology; thus MGS3, released in 2005, set the scene for and explains MGS, released in 1998, so that players of the series to that point had to partially amend their arrived-at understandings (a process further complicated because part of MGS2 turns out to be “virtual experiences” undergone by the characters, compounding narratological puzzles with ontological uncertainty). MGS4, released in 2008, finally filled in the gaps and mysteries, tracing the vast web of plots

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within plots, but not reducing them. Sketching a series’ grand narrative structure thus fundamentally betrays a game experience far more episodic and confusing than retrospective omniscience can suggest. Nonetheless, we offer the following synopsis. MGS3, the historically “earliest” game, although the third release, sets the scene. Shortly after the Cuban missile crisis, Naked Snake, a U.S. Cold War operative, is sent to assist the defection of a Russian scientist working on a nuclear missile–launching tank whose mobility gives it a terrifying first-strike capability—an early version of the eponymous Metal Gear. This mission is apparently betrayed by his female commander, the Boss, who goes over to the Russians with her elite and eccentric Cobra Unit. Snake eventually defeats these opponents, prevents an attempt by Russian generals to start a nuclear war, and delivers Metal Gear to the U.S. government, giving it an edge in the arms race that eventually results in Cold War victory and single superpower status. These exploits earn Naked Snake the title of “Big Boss.” MGS and MGS2 are set some forty years later, in 2005 and 2009, and both involve attempts by renegade units within the U.S. “black ops” community to steal new versions of the Metal Gear weaponry. The agent dispatched to stop them is Solid Snake, the son of Big Boss, assisted in MGS2 by a novice operative, Raiden, from whose perspective that game is mostly played. In both games the maverick units are partially frustrated, but not finally defeated. Over the course of these games it gradually emerges that the force driving events is conspiratorial. “The Philosophers,” a cabal drawn from the societal elites in the United States, the Soviet Union, and China at the start of the twentieth century, was originally dedicated to the construction of a benign world order, and aimed to prevent projects of racial supremacy. After 1945, however, it fragments into national segments competing to control the society’s vast funds and legacy of technological projects. The U.S. faction, deeply ensconced within the national security apparatus, changes its name to “the Patriots,” and works exclusively for what it defines as America’s national interest, in a struggle which the initial Metal Gear mission is a part. After their victory, the Patriots seek to impose social discipline through a regime of information control and pursue a clandestine agenda of high-technology development, aimed at the creation of post-human soldiery, the “Les Enfant Terribles” project. Solid Snake, it transpires, is a product of this program, a clone of his “father.” The struggles over possession of Metal Gear technologies reflect splits within the Patriots between a dominant, quasi-fascist faction and a dissident libertarian group. Solid Snake discovers, too late, that he has been manipulated by the authoritarian side to repress their opponents, and belatedly attempts to oppose the Patriots increasing control of digital

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and genetic information through his own non-governmental organization Philanthropy. By the time of MGS4, in 2014, however, the Patriots have created a worldwide “war economy” based on a system of mercenary armies, a massive arms trade and large-scale military research and development. Perpetual conflict drives global finances. An oligopolistic group of “Private Military Companies” (PMCs) spawned from the Patriot’s organization dominate the planet with weapons such as the biomechanoid Gekko, an agile fighting machine fusing organic and robotic components. Solid Snake, now dying from a premature ageing process caused by genetic tampering, attempts to disable the massive artificial intelligence systems the Patriots rely on to manage the planetary system. Although again deceived and manipulated through much of the action, he finally, with the help of a web of secondary characters and the parallel efforts of some of his antagonists, disables this AI system, which has in effect become the Patriots, leaving social infrastructures intact and ending the dominion of ongoing war and secret power. In a famous essay on cinematic “conspiracy narratives” Fredric Jameson characterizes such films as “a degraded attempt . . . to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system”25: an unconscious, collective effort at trying to figure out where we are and what landscapes and forces confront us in a . . . century whose abominations are heightened by their concealment and their bureaucratic impersonality.26

MGS storyline, fusing its fiction of the Philosopher’s legacy with historical events such as the Cuban Missile crisis, Watergate, civil war in Mozambique, the Gulf War, and the invasion of Iraq, evidently fits this description. There are, however, many different kinds of “conspiracy narrative,” with varying political implications. Determining where MGS falls in this spectrum is complicated by the decade-long evolution of the series and the changing political contexts against which it must be set. For example, in the late 1980s, when Kojima’s games first appeared, one of the most current forms of conspiracy theory came from the U.S. far right. As vision of American national power undermined by a shadowy new world order directed by Jewish bankers and the United Nations, a plot whose outward manifestation were the over-flights of sinister black helicopters, informed the extensive American “patriot” militia movement.27 This was a conspiracy theory that found all too real-life expressions at Ruby Ridge and Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing. At first sight, the Metal Gear series,

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with its clandestine cabal pulling the strings of U.S. government and heroic paramilitary protagonists seems close to this version of paranoid politics. On examination however, it is apparent that something different, indeed diametrically opposite, is going on in these games. In playing Snake, the gamer is interpellated as a subject who struggles against the global supremacy of the United States; the “Patriots” are the “bad guys” whose nationalist agenda threatens a wasteland of planetary militarization. The decline of the Philosophers’ project from a benign alliance for global good to antagonistic nationalism is an obvious parable for the collapse of the War II alliance against fascism, leading to the maneuvers of the Cold War. The success of the Patriots in winning control of the Philosophers’ legacy corresponds to the Reaganite victory in this struggle, a victory which in real life was largely based on achieving a first strike–nuclear capacity that the USSR bankrupted itself to match. The Patriot’s project for U.S. dominance is manifestly an echo of Washington consensus politics: in the Official Guide to MGS4, introduced and sanctioned by Kojima, the Patriots’ project is described as being to “ensure the supremacy of the United States” and “imposing the political, economic and social model of the US on the rest of the world” while “standardizing other nations through subtle manipulation, nurturing facsimiles of their own cultural and political landscape.”28 If one had to select a real-life contemporary analog for the Patriots, the most likely candidate would be something like Project for a New American Century, the neoliberal Washington think tank, that from 1997 to 2006, energetically promoted U.S. global leadership and rearmament, forcible regime change, and preemption of imperial challengers. Indeed, the Metal Gear games can be seen as a sort of virtual “magical realist” account of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld regime, one in which the game’s most bizarre and exaggerated fictions hardly exceed what actually happened. Let us briefly consider some elements of this parallelism. First and foremost is the astronomical growth of the U.S. military entity that is in a way the collective protagonist of the Metal Gear series, whose $1 trillion real-life budget funds research on projects no less strange than Kojima’s bizarre weaponry. These include the 4,000 unpiloted autonomous vehicles in use in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (in MGS4, Snake is constantly accompanied by a minirobot whose IRL counterpart is used for reconnaissance and bomb disposal); the fully computerized battle gear of the Future Force Warrior Program, due to be rolled out in 2010; the Peak Soldier Performance Program that will chemically enable troops to stay awake, alert, and effective for up to seven days without food and water; the Exoskeleton Human Performance Augmentation Program, which promises self-powered, controllable, and wearable exoskeleton

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devices and/or machines; insect-size spy drones based on moths and dragonflies, projects emulating gecko-wall climbing and octopus ink-camouflage capacities, “roborats” with brain-implanted electronic nodes and “neuromic” devices—or brain machine interfaces—that, so far, enable monkeys to move a robotic arm by thought alone.29 The strange shamanistic, psychic opponents Snake encounters seem no more than successful graduates of documented “paranormal” military research programs into telepathy, telekinesis, and suggestibility, which tend to shade over into the nightmare world of experiments and interrogation into psychic disorientation by means of drugs and sensory deprivation, field tested in the war on terror.30 Metal Gear centrally invokes the importance of U.S. Special Forces, and the way covert operations tend to pass beyond rule of law, normal chains of command, and oversight mechanisms, fading into a “shadow” or “parallel” government, with innumerable possibilities for blowback and maverick operations. This process was exposed in 1986 (as Kojima was working on the first Metal Gear games) by the Iran-Contra affair. It has emerged again in revelations about the role of Special Forces Command as the lead military agency in the war on terror with its expanding “black world” of special rendition, secret prisons, interrogation by torture, and recruitment of foreign paramilitaries.31 The Private Military Companies of MGS4 are, of course, barely disguised versions of the private army contractors such as Blackwater, DynCorp, and Triple Canopy on which the United States now relies so heavily for quasi-official security operations, and, only slightly more obliquely, war profiteering of corporations such as Halliburton.32 One does not have to embrace the wilder shores of conspiracy theory—whether in video games or by the 9/11 truth movement— to acknowledge the scope for unauthorized, informal, and anti-democratic exercise of power at the intersection between the “overworld” of wealthy or privileged factions of the U.S. ruling class and this “deep state” of military and intelligence organizations, as documented, for example, by Peter Dale Scott in his account of the interactions, over the period between Watergate and 9/11, between the U.S. government and the domains of the oil business, the arms trade, covert financing, and parallel security structures.33 Critics who have elaborated on Jameson’s account of conspiracy narratives as attempts to represent the vast ramifications of global capitalism have tended to emphasize the34 “degraded” nature of these efforts: their emphasis on cliques and cabals (especially imaginary ones, like the Patriots) at the expense of structural forces; their habit of making malefic computer networks (such as the Patriot’s AI system in MGS4) synoptic scapegoats for entire social systems; their resort to what Timothy Melley calls “agency panic,” positing scenarios of omnipresent control by nefarious powers, then

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reassuringly reaffirming individual powers of resistance (such as Snake’s) in a way that backhandedly restores the power of liberal individualism. These criticisms accurately identify the ideological limits of the Metal Gear games. But we also note Jameson’s verdict on the conspiracy genres is not exclusively negative: “In the intent to hypothesize,” he says, “in the desire called cognitive mapping—therein lies the beginning of wisdom”35; Metal Gear offers a ludic version of such “mapping.” Like many games, Metal Gear in fact has in-game, on-screen maps of the areas in which Snake finds himself, tantalizingly revealing only those areas he has so far traversed. His ergodic exploration of this cartography, his slithering, sliding, sneaking progress through secret installations, ruined cities, and swampy jungles, from Alaska to the Middle East, Latin America and Eastern Europe, is a journey which gradually discloses a web of power relations that shape his mission and his very existence. What Snake discovers is a project of imperial domination. The game’s ludic and narratological elements play out in a strange counterpoint: the player’s mastery of, and choice among, tactical skills and super-weaponry contrasts with his powerlessness in a relentlessly unfolding narrative of deception and exploitation. What is interesting in this is not actually the final revelation: the story of the Patriots’ conspiracy is ultimately banal, certainly less instructive as a guide to twenty-first-century power than reading Noam Chomsky, and probably fatally misleading if taken seriously. But what Metal Gear does communicate as it explores its conspiracy trope, in a way that only video games can, is a visceral sense of the effort of political demystification, literalized in painful encounters, mistaken directions, laborious backtracking, and frequent disorientation. The struggle to navigate the levels is also, in a very felt way, an epistemological challenge to figure out “what is going on,” both existentially and politically: things are not as they seem; those who command loyalty do not deserve it; purported enemies are friends (for example, at one point in MGS4, Snake, to complete his mission, is likely to have to fight with Hezbollah-style guerrillas against the Patriots’ corporate security forces); the official version of the map is incorrect: we are not doing what we believed, nor are we who we thought we were.

Fission Mailed: Absurd Humor and Simulated Simulation This brings us to a third aspect of the Metal Gear series—its acute self-reflexivity. Ian Bogost has written of how virtual games work on what he terms a “simulation gap” exciting players’ exploration of the differential between virtualities and real life.36 In Metal Gear games, this gap is explored through a play of intertextuality, irony, and recursive absurdism often seen as characteristically

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postmodern.37 This self-consciousness emerges in some startling game play moments, a vein of dark, surreal humor—and a critical engagement with the relation of virtual play to military power. Metal Gear’s foregrounding of its own artifice is layered in a number of ways. Kojima, famous for his cinematic cut scenes and camera angles, fills the games with homages to the American films he loves. Snake takes his name from the hero of Escape from New York; his trademark headband is supposedly inspired by Robert De Niro’s in Deer Hunter; another character, Sniper Wolf, is modeled on Stanley Kubrick’s female Viet Cong sniper in Full Metal Jacket; the credits of MGS3 copy those of Casino Royale, just one of many signs of Kojima’s well-known admiration for the Bond films; the opening battle scenes of MGS4 invoke Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, and so on.38 As the series progresses, however, the game also starts to cite itself: in MGS2 Snake finds Metal Gear promotional material littering the buildings he sneaks through. Heading down a corridor, the player sees an unmistakable and ominous shadow falling on the wall, the signature bald head, towering frame, and handheld canon of Vulcan Raven, a monstrous “boss” character defeated and killed in MGS. As you cautiously round the corner he stands before you . . . eight inches high, plastic, and propped up beside a flashlight projecting his silhouette from a Metal Gear “action figure,” the commonplace spin-off of successful video games. This joking around is part of a broader irony. Though Kojima’s plot mobilizes an ostensibly familiar repertoire of espionage stereotypes—grizzled mercenary soldiers, geeky scientists, and villainous ninja super-warriors—these are shot through with elements of self-parodic phantasmagoria. “Fatman,” a mad bomber who puts cologne on his C4 (plastic explosive), drinks red wine, and is always on rollerblades, manages to come off as merely quirky when compared to “Vamp,” the Transylvanian knife-wielding transvestite who drinks blood, runs on water, and is seemingly unkillable. The whole charisma of “special ops” is suddenly sent up when the radio messages between field operative Raiden and his remote support, Rose, become cluttered with discussions about their romantic relationship, his “intimacy issues,” and her pregnancy that are only resolved when the couple finally come face-to-face as credits roll to sentimental lounge music. The games slip from intense action and somber meditations on nuclear weaponry and virtual identity to vaudeville comedy, such as the intrepid Snake’s slipping and falling on seagull droppings. Metal Gear’s tendency to self-satire manifests in the outright silliness of certain obtainable items of “equipment”—for example, the cardboard box, which attains an iconic status. Various such boxes appear: a wet box, a box

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for different Konami games, and a fruit box, all used to hide under when guards are near. The sight of a cardboard box running away from (or into) enemy fire became a common joke among MGS players. Other absurdist situations involve colored wigs, a six-foot-long headband for Snake, which trails behind him and around corners (for enemies to see if the player is not careful), and a crocodile headpiece for disguise in marshy environments that becomes surreal when used in other levels. The player is encouraged to use these grotesque items because they confer benefits, such as extra allocations of ammunition; Kojima clearly designed his game to include moments that go quite over the top. This self-parodic strain—which certainly alleviates the game of taking its rather ponderous conspiracy tale too seriously—could be dismissed as simply an archly fashionable affectation, an ostentatious gesture of knowing gaming cool. Where this self-subversion becomes more consequential is when Metal Gear interrogates its own status as a simulation. This theme is opened in MGS, where Snake encounters a telepathic “boss” character, Psycho Mantis, who draws upon his mental powers to describe the player’s personality by first assessing his past performance in the game so far (“I see you are a very methodical man, the sort who always kicks his tires before he leaves”) and then reading the memory card on the video game console to discover what other games he has played (“I see that you like Nintendo games. You enjoy Silicon Knights games, don’t you? Did you enjoy playing Eternal Darkness?,” etc.), while shaking the controller via the “rumble pack” and apparently anticipating every attack. Psycho Mantis becomes far easier to beat, however, if you switch the console controller into the second port, a discovery that completely shatters normal gaming conventions by “breaking the fourth wall,” in a moment of virtual Brechtian Verfremdungseffektor (“alienation effect”) that makes the player acutely aware of the game as a game. MGS2 takes this theme to new heights. The plot hinges on the interaction between the veteran Snake and Raiden, a rookie operative on his first actual mission, but with thousands of hours logged in Virtual Reality (VR) training. In the field Raiden nevertheless often turns to Snake for advice. As Snake explains to Raiden the details of the mission they are involved in, he is surprised that Raiden hasn’t been properly briefed. It gradually becomes clear that the preparation he claims to have received amounts to no more than the VR Missions bonus disk that Konami released after the success of MGS, featuring Snake in extra training scenarios. Raiden, the VR trained soldier, is just the equivalent of a Metal Gear fan. When Snake, exasperated with Raiden’s ineptitude, finally asks, “What are you really doing here?” Raiden doesn’t respond, but the answer is clear—playing a game. As

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the simulation curls round on itself, it raises the issue of the role of virtuality in military training. About to enter a large area in which many enemy guards must be engaged, Raiden asks, “Snake, have you ever enjoyed killing someone? . . . Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between reality and a game.” Snake responds, “Diminished sense of reality huh? . . . VR training will do that to ya.” Snake, the perfect soldier in this video game world, shows disgust at the idea of “war as a video game” and comments, “what better way to raise the ultimate soldier.” This point is underlined when it transpires that a large section of MGS2 is set—unbeknown to the player—within a virtual world constructed by the Patriots to test their ability to create virtual identities for super-soldiers, the mysterious “S3” plan: Solid Snake Simulation. Snake succeeds in sabotaging the system with a computer virus, and, as he does so, the “Colonel Campbell” who was supervising Raiden’s mission via an implanted radio or “codec” is revealed as an Artificial Intelligence programmed to shape his behavior. As the AI starts collapsing, Raiden—piloted by the player—receives a codec call: Colonel: Raiden, turn the game console off right now! Raiden: What did you say? Colonel: The mission is a failure! Cut the power right now! Raiden: What’s wrong with you? Colonel: Don’t worry, it’s a game! It’s a game just like usual. You’ll ruin your eyes playing so close to the TV. Raiden: What are you talking about!? Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001)

Players who obey and switch off the game lose their progress. Even more devious is a segment where Raiden and Snake are surrounded and must defeat a large group of attackers. During the battle, the game suddenly appears to inform the player that his character has died—easy to believe under such a hectic attack. But if you look closely, the screen does not say “mission failed” as usual. Instead, it says, “fission mailed,” and the little box in the corner that should be showing your dead body sprawled on the ground has you alive, still under attack, and controllable. It is easy to “actually” die in play before you put two and two together. In the end, in a twist that takes even expert players by surprise, it becomes apparent that the virtual simulation in which Raiden has been involved is a subtly altered replay of the first Metal Gear Solid game. Raiden has become Snake, the stereotype of the perfect soldier. Revolver Ocelot, the (apparent)

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villain, confronts Raiden with the information that “everything you have done here has been scripted . . . Given the right situation, the right story, anyone can be shaped into Snake. Even rookies fight like men of experience.” But, if this is the case, the implied question is, has not the player perhaps also been conditioned? During the game, the gamer will have been routinely asked to supply the usual personal information many games keep for records: name, birth date, nationality, and so on. In the last scene Raiden suddenly notices his dog tags and sees . . . whatever the player inputted earlier. “Anyone you know?” Snake asks. “Never heard the name,” Raiden answers, before throwing them away, his earlier identity having been made irrelevant and rejected. Metal Gear Solid 2 thus achieves a mise en abysm in which Raiden’s unwitting virtual training, enacted by the player, becomes a metaphor for the player’s own potential conditioning for war by virtual play. Its cognitive map of U.S. late empire includes a place for digital game culture. The Patriots’ S3 project can be loosely seen as a metaphor for the real-life United States post1989 doctrine of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which proposed an advantage in various forms of information war as key to maintaining a position as the world’s sole military superpower. In this official vision there is a seamless continuum between virtual training (tactical, operational, and strategic), virtual intelligence gathering, virtual target acquisition, and smart weapons delivery systems and virtual management of public opinion on the home front—a doctrine convincingly tested in the first Gulf War and the U.S. Balkan air campaigns that earned the moniker “Nintendo Wars.” Virtual play becomes involved in this doctrine in many ways: the U.S. Defense Department’s development of the online multiplayer game America’s Army as a recruiting tool; the institutional rendezvous of the military, Hollywood, and the game industry at the Orwellian-named Institute of Creative Technologies, and its sponsorship of games such as Full Spectrum Warrior that double as military simulators and consumer commodities; and official support for a wide range of militainments.39 Beyond this, however, lies the ever-intensifying convergence of actual weapons and command systems with virtual game technologies. The best directors of remote-controlled armed aerial drones such as the Predator and Reaper now crucial to the U.S. war in Central Asia are, apparently, not air force pilots, but hardcore video gamers, who, installed in trailers in Virginia or Nevada, controller in hand and monitoring multiple screens, virtually deliver actual attacks on villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan, occasionally logging off for meals and family time.40 For an even more futuristic example of how virtual games spawn in and out of imperial battle space, we can,

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however, take the Defense Advanced Research Project’s plans for a “Deep Green” supercomputer that will generate automatic combat plans for military field commanders. “Deep Green”—a khaki variation on the name of IBM’s famous chess-playing computer, “Deep Blue”—has several interlocking components: “Sketch to Plan” reads a commander’s doodles, listens to his words, and then “accurately induces” a plan, “fill[ing] in missing details.” “Sketch to Decide” allows him or her to “see the future” by producing a “comic strip” of possible options; “Blitzkrieg” quickly models alternatives, while “Crystal Ball” figures out which scenarios are most likely, and which plans optimal.41 Skeptics say Deep Green will never work; but even as a multi-million dollar boondoggle, it will generate innumerable spin-offs for the game industry. If it succeeds, future wars in Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, or Kazakhstan will be truly plug-and-play, and Deep Green will approach the status of the AI Colonel Campbell in MGS2. The later games never hit quite this intensity of critical self-examination: MGS3 and 4 are more concerned with setting up and resolving the series’ bewildering plot, than with generating a vertiginous self-awareness. There are exceptions, such as when Psycho Mantis makes a brief return in MGS4 and becomes frustrated that the upgrade from the Playstation to the Playstation 3 hardware has left him without memory cards or rumble packs to manipulate. But it is the theme of technological conditioning for war that remains particularly persistent. In MGS4, for example, the key component in the armies of the Private Military Companies is a repression of their troops’ battlefield trauma and distress managed through nanotechnological implants monitored via a virtual network. When these inhibitions are interrupted, the soldiers abruptly collapse under the stress of released fear and pain. Other biotechnological mutant weapons are, it is explained, built from subjects who have been so traumatized by war so as to welcome conversion into killing machines. The capacity of the military complex to fabricate the human subjects it requires, by means of a technological apparatus of which games and simulations are one component, remains a persistent theme.

Conclusion: Digital War Heroes, Winter Soldiers, Monstrous Empires Boss: Politics determine who you face on the battlefield. And politics are a living thing that changes with the times. Yesterday’s good might be tomorrow’s evil. The President and the top brass won’t be there forever. Once their terms are up, others will take their place. People’s values change over time. And so do leaders of a country. So there’s no

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such thing as an enemy in absolute terms. The enemies we fight today are only enemies in relative terms, constantly changing with the times. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004)42

Metal Gear conjugates the virtual rehearsal of covert military tactics; a narrative of American elite conspiracy for global hegemony; and a meta-commentary about the role of information technologies, including virtual games, in the preparation of society for war. What are the politics of this strange ludic brew? Critics have been divided in their opinion of the series; some see it as an “anti-war game,” others as “a conventional action game.”43 Robin Johnson, though admitting that the game caters to “liberal sensibility” nonetheless analyzes it as an essentially conventional, and conservative, saga of a “digital war hero.” There is some truth in this. The game is played from a position of “hegemonic white masculinity”44:—though the cast is multi-ethnic and contains several strong female characters, none of them can be identified with as Snake can. We would add that the serie’s convoluted oedipal drama and rather tortured gender relations, even though mitigated by campy irony, often have a misogynist tinge, perhaps most notably in MGS4, where the bioengineered opponents that hunt Snake—Raging Raven, Screaming Mantis, Crying Wolf and Laughing Octopus—are all female-animal-machine hybrids whose destruction in gruesome boss battles is reminiscent of the male warrior fantasies documented by Klaus Theweleit’s analysis of the dreams of German freikorps members.45 Those who are skeptical about the weight we give to the critical elements in the game could also suggest it ignores the range of choice players are given, particularly the option to skip the controversial cut scenes, bypassing the plot details and the philosophic reflections in which the critical content is concentrated. The tactical components of clandestine war, can, in turn, be explored as an exercise either in “zero kill” stealth or extreme violence. From this point of view, the game allows plenty of space for the player to simply project his or (perhaps) her preexisting political dispositions—a mark, possibly, of a shrewdly marketed commodity that covers its bases by allowing each customer to get from it exactly what they already want. It can also be claimed that, when all is said and done, much of Kojima’s prodigious artfulness and technical virtuosity is devoted to activating the thrilling affect of war: the skill, suspense, speed, and spectacle of the battlefield. When we carefully adjust our sniper rifle to account for the lovingly modeled beating of Snake’s virtual heart; or, as the novice Raiden, exhale after a frenzied round of hand-to-hand combat and survey, with satisfaction, a room strewn with

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opponents’ bodies; or stare from hiding at huge bipedal biomechanical tanks leaping through devastated cities toward the horizon, we remember Jean-Luc Godard’s aphorism that all art about war is basically for war. What we find extraordinary about the Metal Gear series, however, is the way it posits a critique of imperial power from within mainstream gaming’s culture of “militarized masculinity.” It operates, that is to say, by offering a subversive possibility even while remaining within a cultural niche very close to the heart of American empire’s military-industrial-life complex—that of the “hard core” male gamer who is the most reliable consumer of war and espionage games. Metal Gear certainly occupies this position only at the price of certain “take it or leave it” optionalities—or by allowing the gamer to “have his cake and eat it too” in the sense of both enjoying the action and thinking about the politics. But what distinguishes Metal Gear from other action games is the way it articulates and amplifies the schizophrenias within warrior masculinity—the tensions between deadly craft and automated battlefield, between soldierly autonomy and the engineered subjectivity that battle space demands, between loyalty and the lying systems in whose service it is activated; and also, in its reflexive address of gaming practice, between the pleasure of virtual war play, and the horror of the system in which such play is implicated. The exploration of these themes is not programmatic. Kojima in interview certainly indicates that he sees his games as critical of war: “MGS had a nuclear theme,” but in MGS4 “I focused more on the growing power of private military companies, the presence of unmanned machines and the plight of child soldiers. I want people to become aware of these global realities by playing the game.” But there is very little to suggest a systemic philosophy. The complexity, heterogeneity, and richness of the games is far more suggestive of the working out of sets of contradictions at multiple levels: those between Kojima’s evident fascination with the aesthetics of war and war machines, and his revulsion at their consequences; the larger ambivalences of Japan about the America that bombed and occupied it; the calculations of a gamepublishing industry willing to allow, and even celebrate, a certain radicalism from its star designers, but probably only up to a limit; and also, insofar as the success of Metal Gear depends on its reception, the tensions within North American video-gaming culture that is itself increasingly permeated with the tormented doubts and fears about both its domestic safety, the integrity of its government, and its imperial wars. Kojima once declared what he hoped players of the series to feel: “I want to enter this world of lies again tomorrow.” Metal Gear is a game of lies, and doubts about lies, political and ontological. As Snake the player is interpel-

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lated as the ultimate subject of empire—its life and death agent—whose skills and identity are completely tied to fulfillment of its assigned missions. This position is then, however, progressively destabilized and subverted: by the discovery that our side is not what it seems, but riddled with corruption and secrecy; by the realization that the authorities are untrustworthy and pathological; by the intimations that the very constitution of warrior heroism and espionage allure is a thin, absurd tissue of cultural textualities; and by the assertion that perception itself is conditioned by the technologies of imperial power, of which the game virtuality itself is one. Metal Gear games offer no out from these dilemmas; its critique is at once limited and intensified by the condition that there is no available position beyond empire; only the experience of being inside, and subject to, a system whose corruption ever more intensely revealed as the games go on. At the end of the series, Snake, prematurely aged by the technologies used to maintain him (in a way that reminds us of the victims of Gulf War syndrome), realizes he has been consistently deluded into fighting against the objectives he thought he was upholding: he may be a “digital war hero” but he is also a virtual Winter Soldier, the West’s warrior disaffected from the empire that has not simply trained but created him, and then misled and betrayed him. This empire is monstrous—monstrous in its secrecy, monstrous in its dependence on nuclear weapons, and monstrous in its generation of biogenetically fabricated and virtually manipulated servants. As an intervention in the field of mainstream gaming, a field already occupied by myriad virtual soldier-subjects, the ambiguities of the Metal Gear series appear as not just indeterminacy but also as infiltration, camouflage for an apparent game of war that actually uncloaks as something rather different, smuggling subversion into, and perhaps carrying surprised gamer subjectivity out from, military-industrial game space; in that sense, the Metal Gear series is a sneaking mission into the hearts and minds of late imperial America.

Notes 1. Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, video game (Konami, 2001). 2. Steven Poole, Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames (London: Fourth Estate, 2000); James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); James Newman, Videogames (New York: Routledge, 2004). 3. We designate Kojima’s entire series “Metal Gear games,” making clear as necessary when we refer specifically to the first two games and when to the later Metal Gear Solid sequence.

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4. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, eds., First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004). 5. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), 21. 6. Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). 7. Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 8. Ed Halter, From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006); Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne, eds., Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games (New York: Routledge, 2009). 9. James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-MediaEntertainment Network (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2001); Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (New York: Henry Holt, 2008). 10. Galloway, Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture, 107–26. 11. Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter, Digital Play: The Interaction of Culture, Technology and Marketing (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s, 2003), 98. 12. Here we draw on, but also revise, concepts from Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter. 13. Chris Kohler, Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life (New York: Brady Games, 2004). 14. Anne Alison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 11. 15. Edge, “Kojima versus the Big Robots.” Edge Magazine, 136 (2004): 73. 16. Edge, “Kojima versus the Big Robots,” 68–74; Edge, “Solid States,” Edge Magazine 173 (2006): 54–65; Frank Rose, “Metal Gear’s Hideo Kojima Talks Conflict Between Games, Stories,” Wired (March 26, 2009), www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/03/ of-the-worlds-t/. 17. Hideo Kojima, “An Open Letter from Hideo Kojima,” gametrailers.com (March 19), forums.gametrailers.com/thread/an-open-letter-from-kojima-/763760. 18. Hideo Kojima, “Interview,” Metal Gear Saga Vol.1 DVD, released as a PreOrder Promotional DVD with Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence (March 14, 2006). 19. Rose, “Metal Gear’s Hideo Kojima Talks Conflict Between Games, Stories.” 20. Pat Miller, “Metal Gear Pacifist,” The Escapist 29 (2006), www.escapistmaga zine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_29/177-Metal-Gear-Pacifist. 21. Miller, “Metal Gear Pacifist.” 22. James Newman, Videogames (New York: Routledge, 2004), 89. 23. Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear Solid Video game (Konami, 1998). 24. Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997). 25. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1992), 38. 26. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 3.

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27. Lane Crothers, The Rage on the Right: The American Militia Movement from Ruby Ridge to Homeland Security (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Morris Dees, The Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat (New York: Harper Collins, 1996). 28. Anonymous, Metal Gear Solid 4: The Complete Official Guide (New York: Piggyback Interactive, 2008), 190. 29. Nick Turse, The Complex; P. W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and 21st Century Conflict (New York: Penguin, 2009); Tim Blackmore, War X: Human Extensions in Battlespace (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 30. Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats (London: Picador, 2004). 31. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New York: Dutton, 2009); Turse, The Complex. 32. Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Arm (New York: Nation, 2007); P. W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, 2007). 33. Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California, 2007), 267–71. 34. Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000); see also Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999); Peter Knight, ed., Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia of Postwar America (New York: New York University, 2002). 35. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 3. 36. Bogost, Unit Operations, 121. 37. Tim Rogers, “Dreaming in an Empty Room: A Defense of Metal Gear Solid 2,” insertcredit.com (July 7, 2004), www.insertcredit.com/features/dreaming2/. 38. Nick Des Barres, “Kojima Highlights 15 Movies That Influenced MGS,” 1up. com (January 20, 2009), www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3172389. 39. See Der Derian, and Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter. 40. Singer, Wired for War, 134. 41. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), “BAA 08-09 Deep Green Broad Agency Announcement (BAA)” (2007), 3, www.darpa.mil/IPTO/solicit/ baa/BAA-08-09_PIP.pdf. 42. Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater video game (Konami, 2004). 43. Poole, Trigger Happy, 239; Viviane Gal et al., “Writing For Video Games,” in Proceedings of the VRIC 2002 (Laval, France: Cedric, 2002), 245–52, cedric.cnam.fr/ PUBLIS/RC359.pdf. 44. Robin Johnson, “The Digital War Hero: A Textual Analysis of the Production of Whiteness and Masculinity in the Metal Gear Solid Series,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Washington, D.C. (August 8, 2007), www.allacademic.com// meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/2/0/3/8/0/pages203804/p203804-1.php. 45. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

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CHAPTER SIX



I Blog, Therefore I Am: Virtual Embodiment and the Self Alanna R. Miller

The virtual and physical worlds collided during the 2009 Super Bowl. An advertisement for Coca-Cola featured a young man walking through a city populated by avatars. Avatars are virtual characters used to represent people in the physical world. In this commercial, people, engrossed in their electronic devices, passed the young man. And as they passed, they transformed into avatars. He entered a diner; a Coke was placed on the counter. He reached for it, brushing hands with a giant ogre. The ogre instantly turned into a pretty girl who smiled at him.1 The conceit of the commercial is that the virtual world takes us away from the more legitimate interaction of the “real world.” With the increasing social use of the virtual realm, however, the notion of physical interaction being the only legitimate interaction is outdated. Life is increasingly not lived in the physical world. The virtual world now rivals the “real world” in its scope and importance to those populating it. In 2008, the online game Second Life had a larger population than New Zealand with approximately 4 million citizens2 and the number of blogs in China alone exceeded 100 million.3 Questions of how the virtual and physical worlds influence one another now permeate our society. In another 2009 commercial for Mountain Dew, an avatar battle spilled into the checkout line of a grocery store when allegiances for different Mountain Dew products were revealed, implying that virtual allegiances transcend the computer screen.4 Two movies released in 2009, Surrogates and Gamer, explore ideas of virtually representing one’s self and its link to the physical body. And,

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of course, audiences worldwide flocked to the highest-grossing movie of all time, Avatar,5 a movie which examines representational self as a preferred self. We as a culture are increasingly comfortable and fascinated by our virtual selves. Participation in the virtual realm has very real implications for who we are. But what exactly are those implications? Despite disparate research on representation online, no one has examined the fundamentals of virtual embodiment as a concept and its impact on our sense of self. Examinations of virtual embodiment up until this point primarily examine it from a phenomenological standpoint, which tends toward a preoccupation with authenticity of experience.6 Virtual embodiment is always measured against the physical body as the true standard of embodiment and therefore biased as a lesser phenomenon. Furthermore, phenomenological examinations of virtual embodiment, although valuable for philosophical questions of being, have limited value for our modern world. As I will illustrate, virtual embodiment, along with being an experience of embodiment, has an individual and social impact that renders discourse about authenticity irrelevant. Further examinations of virtual embodiment focus on virtual bodies as sign systems that reflect who we are rather than constructing who we are. But to fully understand virtual embodiment, then, we must examine our virtual self as a social self.7 We construct our virtual selves in the same way we construct our selves, through interaction with one another that has lasting consequences on our selves outside the virtual realm.

Does My Blog Look Fat?: What is Virtual Embodiment? Virtual embodiment is as varied as virtuality itself. In the virtual world, we live our lives in a manner the physical world would never allow. We can transcend time and space. We can wag our tails. We can fly. Virtual realms are limited by our technology, but also our own minds. The limitations on how we represent ourselves are located in our technology and minds, not our biology. Cyberspace is defined by this domination of cognition and technology. Cyberspace is defined by the absence of the physical. Virtual embodiments are any visual manifestation used in the virtual realm to represent something in the physical world. Anything from the expression on a blog to a Facebook profile to an avatar in a massively multiple online role-playing game (MMORPG) can be categorized as a virtual embodiment. Virtual embodiment is a technological necessity, but it is also a social necessity. If the goal in virtual interaction is to communicate with someone or something we need an agent to do so.

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Embodiment refers to the articulation of a body rather than it’s literal manifestation.8 I use the term “embodiment” rather than body because of its intangibility—the essence of body rather than body matter. But it is always important to remember that embodiment does exist in the physical world: we feel embodied because we have a body.9 Virtual embodiment as an intangible representation of body essence is directly related to the concept of the self, which is a “symbolic referent to the individual.”10 The self always has to be represented with symbols and these abstract symbols can be physical or virtual. Virtual embodiments can include both graphical and textual representations. So, for example, the dwarf you create with a character generator in World of Warcraft is an embodiment of you, but what you say in chatting with participants is also an embodiment of you. In games where there is only text interface, it is important to note that your virtual embodiment is the collection of words you produce. This logic can be extended to the expanding Internet environment. With the increasing popularity of social-networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, what constitutes virtual embodiment and how it manifests itself should be expanded to encompass all the ways we transform ourselves in order to enter the virtual world. Logically, your Facebook profile is a virtual embodiment, as is your blog. You use it to represent yourself to others in the virtual realm. Interaction with others is key to virtual embodiment. Virtual embodiment is social. But socializing is not the only element in the creation of our virtual identity. Much of our thinking about identity and technology relates to our relationship with technology in general. In examining this relationship, we must ask the question posed by Allucquere Stone: what is new about technologically mediated interaction?11 She gives two answers: nothing and everything. If nothing is different then this new technology can be seen as telephonic, transmitting messages one place to another. If everything is different, then “computers are arenas for social experience and dramatic interaction, a type of media more like public theater, and their output is used for qualitative interaction, dialogue, and conversation. Inside the little box are other people.”12 Stone neglects the most accurate answer, however, which is both nothing and everything. As varied as new media can be, it can be used both telephonically and interactively, sometimes simultaneously. As humans interacting online, we are not reinventing communication. We are modifying it for a new medium. Some things will stay the same fundamentally, while some will radically change. We must therefore open ourselves up to the idea that gaming and the Internet are both a brave new world and our old familiar home. Therefore, when looking for a framework in which to examine new media it is as important to look backward as it is to look forward.

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In many ways, the virtual world mirrors the physical world. In textual embodiment, the rules of language and social courtesy, such as the prohibition of profanity, may still apply. In graphical embodiment, certain social rules, such as nudity or social customs of greeting, may still apply. The degree to which these parameters rule social interaction depends on the virtual environment or context in which the embodiment resides. For example, Facebook has a prohibition on nudity in pictures,13 but another, more niche social-networking site, AdultFriendFinder, allows nudity.14 MMORPGs over time develop their own codes of avatar body language, which members of those communities learn to interpret.15 As a developing society, it both uses the old customs with which its members are familiar and adapts others to suit its environment. Other parameters, however, emphasize the difference between the physical and virtual worlds. The limitation of technology is not present in the physical world. For example, software constraints can limit options for creating graphical embodiments. This parameter can be seen as similar to the laws of nature in the physical world. But with the right know-how, these parameters can be overruled. Knowledge of programming can create Godlike control over the virtual world. This question of control is paramount to understanding virtual embodiment. These limitations illustrate two levels of power distribution in the sociality of virtual realms. First, the technology is limited by the programmers and the culture in which they operate. This culture is subject to the social laws of the physical world. Second, the virtual world is limited by our minds, which keep recreating the social laws of the physical world in the virtual world. Many negative assumptions exist about the virtual world. Tom Boellstorff identified some of them, including the presence of rampant capitalism and consumption, the intent of participants to escape reality, and an inability to make generalizations both among virtual environments and to the physical world.16 But Boellstorff insists that all human experience is mediated by culture and, in that respect, virtual environments are not so different from the physical world. As a result, he concludes, we should always steer clear of both utopian and dystopian discourse about technology. Virtual environments must, to some extent, inspire new forms of interaction. But to forget that this interaction is somewhat controlled by humans, who have preexisting ways of communicating would be the greatest oversight. First and foremost, there is expanded control over communication in the virtual environment. It is this control that is the “essential note” of our relationship to the technology: “people controlling devices through comput-

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ers that give them the feeling of feedback as if the devices were parts of their bodies.”17 Our interaction with technology defines our technological self just as our interaction with each other defines our social self.

No Avatar is an Island: Symbolic Interactionism and Physicality Virtual embodiments do not exist in a vacuum. If they did, they would lose all purpose. To whom would you be representing yourself? Virtual embodiments’ purpose is to interact with the virtual environment around them, those in the physical world, and, of course, with other virtual embodiments. Virtual embodiments also interact with the social world. This means control over identity is not completely held by those creating virtual embodiments. This is another direct similarity between the virtual world and the physical world. In the physical world, identity is not entirely controlled by those who lay claim to it. Identity as a much-studied concept comprises an amalgamation of social and individual sources. Symbolic interactionism, the social theory that reality is socially constructed through symbolic action, provides a rich theoretical ground for exploring identity and these two social worlds. Symbolic interactionism deals frequently with questions of identity and the self. What is the self? Of what is it composed? How is it developed? What is its use? For the answers to many of these questions, scholars turn to our social world. “In its widest possible sense, however, a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank account.”18 William James reached this conclusion because of a person’s emotional attachment to the things listed. James posited emotions as the body’s way of internalizing its experience with the world. The things in the list are both things considered natural to attach one self to and those it is socially encouraged to value. Self is therefore both a personal choice and thrust upon us by society. Charles H. Cooley saw human beings as inherently social. Identity is formed through seeing ourselves through others’ eyes: the “looking-glass self.”19 He divides this into three parts, how we see ourselves, how we imagine others see us, and the feelings both generate. The looking-glass metaphor is worth examining further. A looking glass or mirror implies the importance of the physical body in forming the self. And so the ability to locate one’s self relative to others in the physical world is important to who we are. Cooley’s

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“self” is sometimes characterized as conformist because of its dependence on others,20 but really a more useful characterization would be a comparative similar to Hegel’s path to knowledge: one can only know oneself through contrast.21 Given the limitations of our social world, construction of our selves becomes deductive. We do not enter the world and invent our selves purely from our imagination. Our interaction in the social world consists of carving out our place in it by narrowing from a preexisting system. To do this we must live in the world and interact. “It is impossible to conceive of a self arising outside of a social experience.”22 Other people and our conception of other people are instrumental to forming identity. William James divides the self into four parts: the material Self (which includes the body), the social Self, the spiritual Self, and the pure Ego.23 This partitioning out of the self does create false boundaries among the constituents of the self, but is useful in looking at different elements and functions of the self. The self interacts with the world, develops a belief system with which to guide one’s life, exists in the physical world, and so forth. To James, however, the Self was something one owned, a point disputed by later scholars. George H. Mead specifically believed the self was “a process in which the conversation of gestures has been internalized within an organic form.”24 But Mead was careful to point out, unlike James, that the body was not part of the self, but distinct from it. “Such a self is not, I would say, primarily the physiological organism. The physiological organism is essential to it, but we are at least able to think of a self without it.”25 It is this seemingly contradictory stance that holds the key to the beginning of our examination into how the self and virtual embodiments are related. We need bodies. They are important to who we are, but they are not what we are. In a virtual world where physiological bodies cannot exist, it was necessary to build virtual bodies to develop our technological self. Identity, as used by Gregory Stone, is closely related to the Meadian self, but also includes James’s tenet of ownership.26 Identity is both something we enact and the things we possess: our names, our clothes, and our social relations.27 Identity places people where they belong in the societal system. It involves both social categorization by others and a tacit agreement by oneself to those same categories. Social life is ruled by identity. It touches every aspect of our interaction with others and ourselves. Stone, in fact, proposes that without identification communication would devolve into nonsense,28 for in order to reach an unspoken agreement on meaning we need to orient ourselves and make sure we are standing on the same ground within the same context. Stone divides identification into two processes: “identification with” and “identification of.” In one, we are allying ourselves with a part of

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the existing social order and in the other, we are classifying others within that social order.29 Locating oneself within society is therefore imperative to forming the self. The ability to locate oneself implies physicality, a sort of orientation on a map of the society. When that map moves into cyberspace, locating oneself must occur without a biological frame of reference. Virtual embodiments can provide that reference, but are fundamentally different than their biological equivalents.

Traveling through the Looking Glass: The Virtual Environment and Identity New media literature frequently uses the very elegant metaphor of traveling through the looking glass. The metaphor both evokes Cooley’s looking-glass self and helps us realize we are, like Alice through the looking glass, a wideeyed child traveling through technology, past this old sense of self, to gaining a new perspective on the world. This metaphor switches Cooley’s looking-glass self from a reflexive singular process to an interactive process with the virtual world. We find our selves through the transformation the technology provides. Our technological self helps us realize our physical and social self. The idea of a technological self was one of the first foci of social scientists’ examination of virtual environments. In her seminal work on identity and new media, Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle discussed how this new technology reflected back on the self and aided in identity-work.30 Turkle proposed that unique psychological identity-work could be performed in cyberspace because it was a space between the real and the unreal.31 Setting aside the terms “real” and “unreal,” which imply our virtual experiences may be less real than our physical ones, this thought resembles the thinking about the identity-work done in fantasy and play. Symbolic interactionists note this identity-work is essential to the development of self.32 But as Lipton explains our technological selves are freed from the regular limitations of time and space. This makes the construction of self more complicated because of the inability to take the role of the other as in the physical world and as demanded by role-playing in symbolic interactionism.33 Using this logic, we need a physical reference in order to communicate and therefore realize our self. But if physical bodies are also social bodies and reality is socially constructed, it is the mental reference we require in communication not a physical one. Virtual embodiments are that mental reference. It is from virtual embodiments that we cognitively try to place one another in order to role-play. Virtual embodiments fill the social gap when we leave the physical world behind. As virtual embodiments are not physical bodies, however,

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the interaction is different than those we have previously examined with symbolic interactionism. “As players participate, they become authors not only of text but of themselves, constructing new selves through social interaction.”34 Turkle then concludes that identity is a variety of roles we enact and that the Internet is a “social laboratory” for exploring these roles.35

All the Web is a Stage: Appearance and Presentation The social roles we enact are central to the study of identity online. This emphasis on roles has made theories conceptualizing communication as drama popular among new media theorists. Communication as drama demands an emphasis on both presentation and appearance. Stone purported outward appearances, such as clothing, were influenced by identity as well as influencing identity.36 Similar to the self, appearance is a combination of inward impulses and societal pressures. Appearance is both symbolic and social. The concept of appearance is the collection of nonverbal symbols where identification is formed.37 In communication, participants assess these dimensions of the other person using their appearance. The physical holds a principal role in identity-formation. Erving Goffman also saw interaction as a drama. In this drama, everyone performs. Those performances are strategic. At every point in our social lives, we are performing. Subconsciously, we all enter into an agreement to maintain these performances. Interaction, therefore, has unwritten rules to which we must adhere. The shared meaning of the symbols with which we communicate creates impressions that define existence.38 Goffman is often criticized for deemphasizing the importance of the body.39 On the contrary, Goffman was extremely aware the body had its role in performance. Goffman’s concept of the body idiom is the “conventionalized discourse” we engage in with the body upon meeting one another.40 The body could give away unintended messages, leaking cognitive information and emotions.41 “Although an individual can stop talking, he cannot stop communicating through body idiom; he must say either the right or wrong thing. He cannot say nothing.”42 The cognitive can be interpreted physically. Goffman used the body as a tool in communication; it is another method with which we give expression.43 The key consideration in self-presentation is impression management or information control.44 “In its simplest and basic form, ‘appearance’ denotes the fact that some things are at a particular time evident, patent, overt, open, outstanding, conspicuous, in contrast with others which are hidden, concealed, latent, covered up, remote.”45 When enacting a drama, what is withheld is more

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important than what is presented, as there is so much more withheld than is displayed. The maintenance of interaction requires performers to withhold information about themselves.46 In order to adhere to the scripts, this must be done. Without a script, shared meaning cannot be created and interaction will be severed. Information control is the most important concept when considering the value of virtual embodiment. The level of information control is considerably greater than in the physical world. Our physical bodies often leak information, such as releasing unconscious gestures,47 or worse, demand a release of information for biological reasons. “Despite our sometimes heroic attempts at bodily self-control, the organic body is an unruly subject.”48 The ability to control the body can be seen both as the ability to control the Self and society.49 Controlling the body then becomes an issue of the power to create and control reality. Bodies express meaning that language is not capable of imparting.50 Virtual embodiment creates an unprecedented opportunity to communicate fully. Virtual embodiment is, then, the embodiment of our ideal selves. Always a bellwether of the socially acceptable, politicians have already taken full advantage of that control; researchers have found the heightened activity of politicians online to reflect socially desirable traits.51 Self-presentation is strategic or goal oriented. Therefore, in constructing a virtual embodiment online there is a conscious movement toward creating an embodiment that will adhere to the status quo in society. If we wish to examine how our society wishes us to see ourselves, we need not look any further than the virtual world. Self-presentation, therefore, is a transformational process favoring a preferred identity. One’s identity is not just a valueless object. “The impressions that the others give tend to be treated as claims and promises they have implicitly made.”52 When those claims and promises are violated the person is punished by society, most especially if they violate the socially agreed upon rules of the drama.53 A psychological crisis occurs when the performance is, for whatever reason, broken and the communicator appears out of character.54 Embarrassment exaggerates the core dimensions of social transactions, bringing them to the eye of the observer in an almost naked state. . . . Since embarrassment always incapacitates persons for role performance (to embarrass is, literally, to bar or stop), a close analysis of the conditions under which it occurs is especially fruitful in the revelation of the requirements necessary for roleplaying, role-taking, role-making, and role performance in general.55

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The implication of this crisis is that the scripts we perform in life exist to maintain a status quo, a homeostasis. The performance therefore is a psychological necessity both individually and socially. The creation of identity is ideological. In creating self, we also create the world around us. We should keep this in mind as we consciously create virtual embodiments. Virtual embodiments help create virtual environments, but also our ideological world.

Let My Avatar Go: Power and Ideology in Virtual Embodiment Power is distributed somewhat differently in cyberspace than in the physical world. Those with the ability to program have the power, making cyberspace an ability-based dictatorship. “As much as it may blend into the linguistic terrain, programming must always be recognized as the privileged language game of cyberspace. As such, it is capable of purely constructing reality rather than in any sense reflecting it.”56 Of course, programming power has traditionally been held by those with the means to learn and fund it, which has historically been upper-middle class, white males. This same group is both encouraged toward and welcomed into programming culture. Historically, as the population online has been dominated by whites, there has been a general assumption of whiteness among online participants.57 The virtual environment is biased by the culture creating it. This is yet another reminder that in examining the virtual world we cannot leave the world outside behind. In examining the ideology of our virtual bodies, we must look at the dominant ideologies of society. Gender and ethnicity in virtual embodiment are partly influenced by the options available within the virtual environment. For example, female characters are consistently more sexualized than male characters in video games.58 No matter what the intent, designers inscribe their own social assumptions into game design. “Designers of virtual environments also need to remember that they inscribe their vision of the user within their products through means other than simply the content. . . . Designers need to remember that in designing technological systems for social interactions, seemingly minor design decisions can have unanticipated consequences.”59 But the actual meaning of any representation is a negotiation of meaning between players and the game’s designers, both contributing their assumptions about the world to form an amalgamation of assumptions that form the actual meaning read.60 We are consistently recreating our own social inequalities in cyberspace. “These spaces, as much as any physically embodied discussion, are

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heavily populated with assumptions, antagonisms, fears and power plays.”61 Social inequality is not based on our physical differences, but the differences we create in our minds. That is why they are carried to cyberspace. Scholars examining gender and ethnicity in virtual culture usually branch into two predictions for the impact of virtual embodiment. One prediction is that freed from the physical body, the virtual environment can become a utopia where everyone is equal. Indeed, online dating is popular among women precisely because it allows them to escape stereotypical gender roles.62 The other position, however, suggests that as long as humans control virtual embodiments the basic assumptions of racism and sexism remain. This position is based in the logic that any embodiment is never just physical or virtual—it is also social. Symbolic interactionism has always recognized the physical body as a social tool. These virtual-social embodiments are performances. Goffman identified social embodiments as inherently ideological because we control the information we reveal to adhere to social rules and standards.63 For example, scholars have found reinforcement of these social rules and standards through performance of gender stereotypes in MySpace profiles,64 online forums,65 video games,66 and online dating.67 This is contrary to the idea that virtual embodiment allows the freedom to break with the ills of the physical world. Why, if participants have this freedom, do they choose to simply recreate the physical world and all its inequalities? Perhaps the answer lies in identity experimentation online. Identity tourism and passing are two examples of such experimentation. In identity tourism, a participant in the virtual environment embodies the ethnicity, gender, or sexuality of a marginalized group, but in doing so enacts stereotypes from the physical world.68 This person leaves the experience feeling as though they understand what it feels like to be a member of a marginalized group, when, in reality, they are contributing to unfair and fractured misunderstandings of the plight of repressed groups. Identity tourists are indeed interacting to create a warped meaning of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and reality. This practice illustrates that the problem of social inequality lies not in the freedom to change society, but in the participant’s inability to escape society’s inculturation. The physical world bleeds into the virtual world because they are both social worlds sharing common participants. Similar in action but different in intent, passing involves a member of a marginalized group performing as a member of the dominant culture. Passing predates cyberspace. It is a practice Goffman describes as the disguise of “deviant identities,” deviance as anything that violates societal norms.69 As Lisa Nakamura asserts, this can destabilize difference and therefore be

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positive in terms of cultural understanding. More often than not, however, it displays a discomfort with one’s own identity and therefore contributes to the dominant hegemony.70 Even Turkle noted this new freedom to escape the social plight of her gender online: “From my earliest effort to construct an online persona, it occurred to me that being a virtual man might be more comfortable than being a virtual woman.”71 Nakamura coined the term “cybertyping” to address “the distinctive ways that the Internet propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism.”72 She suggests cybertyping is fundamentally different than stereotyping because of the magnitude of interactivity and the social construction of reality online. The intangibility of virtual embodiment complicates discourse about race. Participants’ transient choice in appearance requires different discourse than that attending to more stable images of race. The interaction performed by virtual embodiments is inherently different; the social implications of these classifications online, therefore, are inherently different. But the cybertypes Nakamura finds online are shockingly familiar to those of the physical world. This illustrates the duality of approach which needs to occur online: that of looking backward and forward at the same time. Gender, ethnic, and sexual inequalities may yet be challenged by the continually changing notions of these concepts online. For now, however, it is still the physical world which dictates social standards of the ideal. In the physical world, our self is tied to our ideal self. Our self is composed of three selves within all of us: the actual self (who we are), the ideal self (who we want to be), and the ought self (who society thinks we should be).73 Numerous studies of Internet dating have found when people have control over their self-presentation, people repeatedly represent themselves in terms of what is socially desirable outside the virtual world.74 These findings could be a result of the intended goal of Internet dating: outside interaction. But studies of gaming, where participants may never meet, also have found this bias.75 Attractiveness, a physical but socially defined trait, is found to be one of the most common deceptions.76 The attractiveness of one’s virtual body also dictates online popularity.77 Virtual embodiments as ideal selves takes on a new meaning when dealing with those with disabilities in the physical world. Those with disabilities can be limited by their physical bodies from social interaction. Technology has always been seen as an asset to this group in overcoming the barriers of their physical body.78 Virtual environments can greatly increase the social interaction of someone with a disability as well as providing an avenue of support otherwise not available to them. But, again, the physical world cannot be

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completely dismissed: “While the body may be represented in a multitude of ways in virtual reality, the pain and dysfunction remain.”79 Many participants online with physical disabilities wonder about the quality of their online relationships and whether their disability would affect the relationship if they met in the physical world.80 Beyond an ideal self, many virtual citizens see their embodiment as a “truer” version of themselves.81 The word “true” here of course implies that anything other than that embodiment is a lie, meaning the physical body. Bryan Turner sees the physical body as both constraint and potential; biology both hems us in and moves us forward socio-culturally.82 The control in creating virtual embodiments results in a technological utopia where virtual embodiments are free from the petty concerns of the physical world. The anonymity and freedom from the social conventions of self-disclosure which the virtual world provides have been viewed as reasons our true selves are revealed online, as well as fantasy selves. Relationships formed over the Internet have been found to be stronger than those formed offline due to the freer expression of communication.83 The lack of emphasis on superficial concerns, such as reputation and physical appearance, are said to foster deeper friendships.84 Online interaction significantly helps shy users with their social interaction.85 “Under certain conditions the online medium may enable participants to express themselves more openly and honestly than in face-to-face contexts.”86 Using this logic, the physical body is an impediment to interaction and therefore to finding identity. “Certainly men have been ready to disown their very bodies and to regard them as mere vestures, or even as prisons of clay from which they should some day be glad to escape.”87 Virtual embodiments would then provide the only lifeline to those feeling trapped by this physical body and prevented from living their “true” identity. In contrast to a “truer” version of self being revealed through virtual embodiment, many researchers approach virtual embodiment in terms of quantifying “deception.” Goffman saw all social interaction as a gamble because of the tendency to misrepresent oneself.88 Deception is, then, a social necessity. Many new media studies, however, interpret this deception more narrowly as anything contrary to the physical self. But, if we are to address virtual embodiment as a valid way to represent self, the notion of “deception” and “misrepresentation” of appearance are old-fashioned characterizations in cyberspace. By using them, we invalidate the technological self, clearly privileging the physical world. Those who see the physical body as the lie would clearly take exception to that.

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The Ghost in the Machine: Mind, Body, and Virtual Embodiment One cannot define the physical body without addressing materiality. “Bodies are not just the objects of our will, whether individual or social. They are also our fate. Joy is here, it is not just an interpretation; horror is here, it is not just the effect of a discourse.”89 The body’s relationship with the mind is both physical and cognitive. What bodies are is therefore dependent on this relationship. With virtual embodiment, materiality is undermined. The nature of the mind-body relationship is therefore important to understanding what virtual embodiments are as well. It is important to reiterate that the body is social. “The body is fashioned, crafted, negotiated, manipulated and largely ritualized in social and cultural conventions.”90 The body not only performs in the social world, it is shaped by it. It is a social tool. We use the body to signal to others who we are. Concurrently, it is something others use to categorize us. We both control the body and are controlled by it. Technology and science increasingly allows more control over the body in the form of genetic engineering, plastic surgery, and just a better understanding of health and nutrition.91 Virtual embodiments take this control even further. They are, within certain programming and social parameters, controlled by what it is embodying. This is a unique degree of control for a signified object. The definition picks its word. Some scholars see virtual embodiment as revealing a previously misconstrued relationship between the mind and the body, which can be traced to Descartes’s assertion of a mind-body separation. Cartesian dualism insists that the mind “is something nonphysical, something crucially not part of the world we see and touch.”92 Social theory took up this mantle and understood that the body’s role is shaped by both cognition and social interaction.93 It is the mind which is socialized, the mind rules the body, and therefore the body is socialized.94 If this were true, then virtual embodiments would have more in common with the mind than the physical body. But this thinking has always been a subject of much debate. James proposed that the mind and body were intricately connected. Rather than a unidirectional model of the mind controlling the body, James proposed they interact with one another to form reality.95 Virtual embodiment takes this idea even further. Virtual embodiment allows the mind to create the body, and together they construct the virtual environment. According to James, the influence between the mind and the body is unconscious.96 In the virtual world, much of relationship between the

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mind and body becomes conscious because of the level of control wielded by the participant. Virtual embodiment emphasizes the problems with the assumption of a mind-body separation by exemplifying a body nearly completely controlled by the mind. It is through virtual embodiment we see true Cartesian dualism, a virtual body truly separate from the mind. “[Virtual] embodiment was significant because it challenged a long-standing presumption of cognition as disembodied.”97 Another important difference in physical and virtual embodiment is the feedback we receive from the body in the physical world. It is technology, not skin, which informs us of the world around us. The feedback is cognitive, rather than bodily. For James, emotion, rather than being the seat of irrationality, is the method with which we internalize experience and discover our sense of self: “For the central part of the Self is felt . . . just as the body is felt.”98 So how can we find our technological selves without the sensory feeling? Many scholars have found however that the level of cognitive control over virtual embodiments is the exact reason for our emotional attachment to them.99 Emotion and cognition are not separate systems, but are linked to each other as they both are linked to the self. “Emotion in its entirety is a mode of behavior which is purposive, or has an intellectual content, and which also reflects itself into feeling or affects, as the subjective valuation of that which is objectively expressed in the idea or purpose.”100 These emotional attachments are just as real as those of our physical bodies. “In interactive video games, there is no parasocial interaction with a fictitious character, no felt connection per se, but an actual, tangible connection between the gamer and a fully functional, completely controllable avatar.”101 In the recorded instances of violent virtual crime involving avatars, there is indication that real psychological harm was done to those the avatar was embodying.102 Therefore, as William Thomas asserts, the reality we construct is real in its consequences.103 Emotion is the key to “embodied sociality,” emotion is the result of both virtual embodiment and the body; it serves both a social purpose and holds social consequences.104 It is emotion that integrates embodiment with social interaction. The same emotional process is present in both worlds leading us to conclude that there is a technological self, which parallels our self outside the virtual environment. Social interaction demands some form of embodiment to fully communicate. Goffman referred to this necessary sense of embodiment as co-presence.105 “As a result of this demand, we always attempt to locate ourselves in reference to the physical bodies from which we are working in virtual embodiment.106 But does telepresence, the “perceptual illusion of nonmediation” provided

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by technology, create co-presence?107 The emotions and relationships people form online suggest it does. Furthermore, presence literature exposes the misconceptions we have in how our brain processes the virtual environment. It was previously assumed our brain chooses between the real and virtual environment when we inhabit both places.108 But our brain does not distinguish between “real” and “virtual,” it all enters our brain the same way as sensory stimuli.109 This indicates there is no reason to privilege the physical at all. Our virtual embodiment and our physical embodiment are at their core performing the same processing function. Furthermore, Hegelian philosophy informs us that all experience is mediated.110 Thus all our experiences with our physical body is mediated. It is our sense of presence in our body that makes it seem nonmediated. Virtual embodiment is the participant’s link to the virtual environment. And bodies are used to locate oneself in society, even the virtual society: Online participants assume that other participants do have bodies and that those bodies, if seen, would reveal important information. The assumed congruence between certain types of bodies and certain psychological, behavioral, and social characteristics results in the expectation by online participants that aspects of the hidden bodies—of, in effect, other participants’ “true” identities—can be deduced (if imperfectly) from what is revealed online.111

Participants’ physical bodies are still the reference point for virtual interaction. Many online participants need to discover aspects of acquaintances’ physical body, such as gender, in order to gauge how to interact with them in the virtual world.112 The physical world and its social rules reach into the virtual environment rather than creating a world where these physical characteristics no longer exist. They exist in the minds of the participants and are therefore projected into the virtual world. Many theorists concentrate on the hardware as an extension of the body.113 Indeed, comparisons of the body to a machine are popular in the philosophy of the body, stretching back to Descartes.114 But this preoccupation of the body as a machine can cause theorists to miss the point. Since virtual embodiment is defined and limited by human agency, it is the social action that a virtual embodiment performs rather than what it is which forms identity. Therefore, the elements that comprise any body are only relevant to our selves in terms of their use and meaning to us. In that respect, those theorists are correct: technology is an extension of ourselves, but only because we make it so.

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Some scholars see virtual embodiment as leading to complete disembodiment, where the mind and body will be strangers to one another. If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality.115

Disembodiment is a great ill among social theorists, who see it as also a severing from reality, itself. A person who does not recognize his body as a part of himself does not think his thoughts are his own—a schizophrenic point of view.116 But if we view virtual embodiment as a real psychological phenomenon, and if we recognize that we do incorporate virtual bodies as part of ourselves, we realize that disembodiment is not a logical result. The result is hyperembodiment, where we have many possible bodies to incorporate into our sense of self.

Will the Real Virtual Embodiment Please Stand Up: Multiplicity of Self Implicit in the idea of social interaction as a performance is the idea that we present multiple selves to the world. Those multiple selves are all us. This is an idea running through the work of James, Goffman, and Stone and one shared to some extent by postmodernism. The self, as understood by the symbolic interactionists, is both elastic and transitory, which is completely consistent with technological selves. Goffman particularly discussed a multiplicity of role, some of which are “dominant” while others are “adjunct.”117 Since our roles must adapt for different contexts we must take up multiple roles. To Goffman, however, these multiple roles were unconscious,118 whereas the multiple roles or embodiments we take up online are quite conscious. In the virtual world, the idea of multiple selves is quite literal and concrete. Most, if not all, participants in virtual environments have multiple virtual embodiments for multiple purposes. Some even have multiple embodiments in the same MMORPG or social networking site to attend to different audiences and associations. These multiple selves create a unique opportunity for perspective on the self. Many new media scholars see these multiple selves as adding to the identitywork performed in cyberspace. This identity-work is achieved similarly to the

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role-playing in fantasy or play. Mead saw play as another form of empathetic role-playing through which a child develops self, not through the external definition from others, but through the reflection of self seen by the individual.119 It is through this experience of different identities that we find ourselves. Virtual embodiment creates a very real psychological experience of embodiment, which differs from our physical embodiment in its true ability to role-play. Multiplicity of identity has also been seen as destabilizing the power structure, which a unitary self may reinforce. “When identity was defined as unitary and solid it was relatively easy to recognize and censure deviation from the norm. A more fluid sense of self allows a greater capacity for acknowledging diversity.”120 But as Nakamura reminds us, these multiple selves are “menu-driven,” meaning they result from preexisting social categories of society, not an exciting world of identity hybridization and invention.121 Hevern posited the metaphor “threading identity” for the process of interaction between multiple selves, a play on the word thread, a topic in blogs where Web participants post responses.122 Identity threading can be taken one of three ways: in terms of a journey or pathway, in terms of the act of spinning, or in terms of weaving a tapestry. Any of these three perspectives can be seen as a fair representation of what we do with our online embodiments to find the self: either using the multiple selves to build upon our knowledge of self, creating different masks with which to role-play, or finally integrating many diverse identities with our sense of self. Some scholars see multiple selves online as eclipsing the unitary self and harming identity in the physical world. This is the “protean self” of Robert Jay Lifton, named after the Greek god Proteus, God of the sea, for its fluidity.123 According to Lifton, proteanism can lead to fundamentalism, stagnation, and dissociative tendencies.124 This logic reflects an attachment to a unitary self, which in a world where we can adopt multiple embodiments as our own, is old fashioned. The observations of scholars such as Goffman and James suggest we’ve always had multiple embodiments. Since our bodies are social and change with the environment in which we reside there never was a unitary self. And the fear with which many scholars see our multiple selves online may just be a reflection of the fear of technology itself.

I’d Like to Buy the (Virtual) World a Coke and Keep it Company For many, experiences in the virtual environment are worth studying as oddities. Some would relegate online and gaming experiences as meaning-

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less diversions. As these diversions take up more of our time and sociality, we must take a closer look at how we are transformed by them. These are legitimate human experiences with legitimate identity-work being performed. We, as participants, internalize these experiences and take them with us through the physical world. It is clear from the standpoint of symbolic interactionism that the body is a mode of communication and that communication is a way to understand self. But what is happening when we deconstruct that body and reconfigure it in a virtual environment? To understand this process, we must understand our relationship with our physical body as being symbolic and social. Therefore, when we reconfigure the body in cyberspace, it is directly transferred. As with every trip through the looking glass, however, the journey itself alters the character of the body. This both makes it directly reflective of our physical body and something completely new all at once. This allows it to both perform its social function in the virtual world and give us a new understanding of who we are outside of it. “It is in being virtual that we are human. Virtual worlds reconfigure selfhood and sociality, but this is only possible because they rework the virtuality that characterizes human beings in the actual world.”125 Differences between one’s physical body and virtual embodiment naturally alter one’s perception of both. Through virtual embodiment, we explore our desires, merits, and limitations involving our physical body. And it is through the physical body that we situate and locate our self in our virtual embodiment. With life in the virtual realm becoming more crowded by virtual embodiments, it will be interesting to see how our understanding of self will evolve. I suspect our technological self will rival our physical self for prominence in our psyche. The level of emotional attachment and cognitive control over these representations could cause these embodiments to surpass our physical embodiments in our minds as a preferred way of representing ourselves. Perhaps in the future Coke commercial, the moral will be that it is through our virtual selves (and Coke, of course) we truly connect as humans.

Notes 1. Avatar Super Bowl XLII television commercial. National Broadcasting Company, www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNPV-lquuTI (accessed February 1, 2009). 2. Jeff Roberts, “Are You Ready for Avatar Rights?” Toronto Star, July 5, 2008, 07(ID). 3. “China-based Blogs Exceed 100 Million—Official.” BBC Worldwide Monitoring, November 7, 2008.

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4. Game Fuel 2009 television commercial. www.mountaindew.com/#/home/game fuel/video_youtube_gamefuel_ad.php (accessed August 8, 2009). 5. Andrew Stewart, “Global B.O. Hails ‘Avatar’ its All Time King,” Variety, February 7, 2010. 6. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 197; Craig D. Murray and Judith Sixsmith, “The Corporeal Body in Virtual Reality,” Ethos 27 no. 3 (1999): 315–43. 7. Nicola Green, “Beyond Being Digital: Representation and Virtual Corporelity,” in Virtual Politics: Identity & Community in Cyberspace, ed. David Holmes (London: Sage, 1997); Paul James and Freya Carkeek, “The Abstract Body: From Embodied Symbolism to Techno-Disembodiment,” in Virtual Politics: Identity & Community in Cyberspace, ed. David Holmes (London: Sage, 1997). 8. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 197. 9. Murray and Sixsmith, “The Corporeal Body,” 319. 10. Dennis Waskul, Self-games and Body Play: Personhood in Online Chat and Cybersex (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 74. 11. Allucquere Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 15. 12. Stone, The War of Desire, 16. 13. “Content Code of Conduct.” Facebook. www.facebook.com/home.php?#/ codeofconduct.php (accessed March 4, 2009). 14. Joel Stein, “The ‘Accidental’ Friend Finder,” Business 2.0 Magazine (2007), money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/04/01/8403370/index. htm (accessed March 4, 2009). 15. Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 2008), 130. 16. Boellstorff, Coming of Age, 26. 17. John M. Phelan, “CyberWalden: The Inner Face of Interface,” in Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, eds. Lance Strate, Ronald L. Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 1996), 39–48. 18. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1918), 291. 19. Charles H. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1922), 184. 20. Douglas Schrock and Emily M. Boyd, “Reflexive Transembodiment,” in Body/ Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body, eds. Dennis Waskul and Phillip Vannini (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2006), 51–66. 21. Georg Wilhilm Fredrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard. web.mac.com/titpaul/Site/Phenomenology_of_Spirit_page_files/Phenome nology%20of%20Spirit%20%28entire%20text%29.pdf (accessed February 20, 2010).

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22. George H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 140. 23. James, The Principles of Psychology, 292. 24. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, 178. 25. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, 139–40. 26. Gregory P. Stone, “Appearance and the Self,” in Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interaction, eds. Gregory P. Stone and Harvey A. Faberman (Waltham, Mass.: Xerox College Press, 1970), 394–414. 27. Stone, “Appearance and the Self,” 399. 28. Stone, “Appearance and the Self,” 397. 29. Stone, “Appearance and the Self,” 396. 30. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 180. 31. Turkle, Life on the Screen, 188. 32. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, 152–64; Gregory P. Stone, “The Play of Little Children,” in Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interaction, eds. Gregory P. Stone and Harvey A. Faberman (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 1981), 545–54. 33. Mark Lipton, “Forgetting the Body: Cybersex and Identity,” in Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, eds. Lance Strate, Ronald L. Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 1996), 335–50. 34. Turkle, Life on the Screen, 12. 35. Turkle, Life on the Screen, 180. 36. Stone, “Appearance and the Self,” 403. 37. Stone, “Appearance and the Self,” 397. 38. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959). 39. Dennis Waskul and Phillip Vannini, “Introduction: The Body in Symbolic Interaction,” in Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body, eds. Dennis Waskul and Phillip Vannini (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2006), 1–18. 40. Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (New York: Free Press, 1963), 33–35. 41. Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 52. 42. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, 35. 43. Asimina Vasalou, Adam Joinson, Tanja Bänziger, Peter Goldie, and Jeremy Pitt, “Avatars in Social Media: Balancing Accuracy, Playfulness and Embodied Messages,” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 66, no. 11 (2008): 801–11. 44. Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 141. 45. John Dewey, “Appearing and Appearance,” The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 3. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 56. 46. Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, “Awareness Contexts and Social Interaction,” in Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interaction, eds. Gregory P. Stone and Harvey A. Faberman (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 1970), 336–48.

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47. Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 51–58. 48. Spencer E. Cahill, “Building Bodily Boundaries: Embodied Enactment and Experience,” in Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body, eds. Dennis Waskul and Phillip Vannini (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2006), 69–81. 49. Clinton R. Sander, “Viewing the Body: An Overview, Exploration and Extension,” in Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body, eds. Dennis Waskul and Phillip Vannini (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2006), 279–90. 50. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University, 1991), 56. 51. James Stanyer, “Elected Representatives, Online Self-Presentation, and the Personal Vote: Party, Personality, and Webstyles in the United States and the United Kingdom,” Information, Communication & Society 11, no. 3 (2008): 414–32. 52. Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 249. 53. Cahill, “Building Bodily Boundaries,” 70. 54. Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 169. 55. Edward Gross and Gregory P. Stone, “Embarrassment and the Analysis of Role Requirements,” in Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interaction, eds. Gregory P. Stone and Harvey A. Faberman (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 1970), 174–90. 56. Michael P. Beaubien, “Playing at Community: Multi-User Dungeons and Social Interaction in Cyberspace,” in Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, eds. Lance Strate, Ronald L. Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 1996), 179–88. 57. Lori Kendall, “‘Oh No! I’m a Nerd!’: Hegemonic Masculinity on an Online Forum,” Gender and Society 14, no. 2 (2000): 256–74. 58. James D. Ivory, “Still a Man’s Game: Gender Representation in Online Reviews of Video Games,” Mass Communication & Society 9, no. 1 (2006): 103–14. 59. Jerome P. McDonough, “Designer Selves: Construction of Technologically Mediated Identity within Graphical, Multiuser Virtual Environments,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 58, no. 10 (1999): 855–69. 60. McDonough, “Designer Selves.” 61. Elizabeth Atkinson and Renee DePalma, “Dangerous Spaces: Constructing and Contesting Sexual Identities in an Online Discussion Forum,” Gender and Education 20, no. 2 (2008): 183–94. 62. Helene M. Lawson and Kira Leck, “Dynamics of Internet Dating,” Social Science Computer Review 24 no. 2 (2006): 189–207. 63. Goffman, The Presentation of Self. 64. Melissa Joy Magnuson and Lauren Dundes, “Gender Differences in Social Portraits Reflected in MySpace Profiles,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 11, no. 2 (2008): 239–41. 65. Atkinson and DePalma, “Dangerous Spaces,” 192; Kendell, “‘Oh No! I’m a Nerd!,’” 271; Slater, “Trading Sexpic on IRC,” 100. 66. Ivory, “Still a Man’s Game,” 105; McDonough, “Designer Selves,” 867.

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67. Catalina L.Toma, Jeffery T. Hancock, and Nicole B. Ellison, “Separating Fact from Fiction: An Examination of Deceptive Self-presentation in Online Dating Profiles,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34 (2008): 1023–36. 68. Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet (London: Routledge, 2002), 13–14. 69. Michael Atkinson, “Masks of Masculinity: (Sur)passing Narratives and Cosmetic Surgery,” in Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body, eds. Dennis Waskul and Phillip Vannini (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2006), 247–59. 70. Nakamura, Cybertypes, 31–60. 71. Turkle, Life on the Screen, 210. 72. Nakamura, Cybertypes, 3. 73. E. Tory Higgins, “Self-Discrepancy: A Theory Relating Self and Affect,” Psychological Review 94, no. 3 (1987): 319–40. 74. Lawson and Leck, “Dynamics of Internet Dating,” 198; Toma, Hancock, and Ellison, “Separating Fact from Fiction,” 1031. 75. Katherine Bessière, A. Fleming Seay, and Sara Kiesler, “The Ideal Elf: Identity Exploration in World of Warcraft,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 10, no. 4 (2007): 530–35; Edward Castronova, “The Price of Bodies: A Hedonic Pricing Model of Avatar Attributes in a Synthetic World,” Kyklos 57, no. 2 (2004): 173–96; Vasalou et al., “Avatars in Social Media,” 806–7. 76. Sonja Utz, “Types of Deception and Underlying Motivation: What People Think,” Social Science Computer Review 23, no. 1 (2005): 49–56. 77. Boellstorff, Coming of Age, 99. 78. Wendy Seymour and Deborah Lupton, “Holding the Line Online: Exploring Wired Relationships for People with Disabilities,” Disability & Society 19, no. 4 (2004): 291–305. 79. Seymour and Lupton, “Holding the Line Online,” 292. 80. Boellstorff, Coming of Age, 138. 81. Taylor, “Living Digitally,” 54. 82. Bryan S. Turner, “Recent Developments in the Theory of the Body,” in The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, eds. Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan S. Turner (London: Sage, 1990), 1–35. 83. John A. Bargh, Katelynn Y. A. McKenna, and Grainne M. Fitzsimmons, “Can You See the Real Me? Activation and Expression of the ‘True Self’ on the Internet,” Journal of Social Issues 58, no. 1 (2002): 33–48. 84. Samantha Henderson and Michael Gilding, “‘I’ve Never Clicked this Much with Anyone in my Life’: Trust and Hyperpersonal Communication in Online Friendships,” New Media & Society 6, no. 4 (2004): 487–506. 85. Werner G. K. Stritzke, Anh Nguyen, and Kevin Durkin, “Shyness and Computer-Mediated Communication: A Self-Presentational Theory Perspective,” Media Psychology 6, no. 1 (2004): 1–22.

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86. Nicole Ellison, Rebecca Heino, and Jennifer Gibbs, “Managing Impressions Online: Self-Presentation Processes in the Online Dating Environment,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11, no. 2 (2006): 415–41. 87. James, The Principles of Psychology, 291. 88. Lawson and Leck, “Dynamics of Internet Dating,” 200. 89. R. W. Connell, “Bodies, Intellectuals and World Society,” in Reframing the Body, eds. Nick Watson and Sarah Cunningham-Burley (Hampshire, England: Palgrave, 2001), 13–28. 90. Waskul and Vannini, “Introduction,” 6. 91. Shilling, The Body and Social Theory, 3. 92. Anthony Dardis, Mental Causation: The Mind-Body Problem, 17. 93. Judith Butler, “Performativity’s Social Magic,” in The Social and Political Body, eds. Theodore R. Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 29–44. 94. Randy Martin, Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1990), 26. 95. William James, “What is an Emotion?” Mind 9, no. 34 (1884): 188–205. 96. James, “What is an Emotion?,” 197–98. 97. Boellstorff, Coming of Age, 134. 98. James, The Principles of Psychology, 298–99. 99. Boellstorff, Coming of Age, 57. 100. John Dewey, “The Significance of Emotions,” The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898, vol. 4. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 172. 101. Melissa L. Lewis, Rene Weber, and Nicholas David Bowman, “‘They May be Pixels, but They’re MY Pixels’: Developing a Metric of Character Attachment in Role-Playing Video Games,” Cyberpsychology & Behavior 11 no. 4 (2008): 515–18. 102. Jessica Wolfendale, “My Avatar, My Self,” Ethics and Information Technology 9 no. 2 (2007): 111–19. 103. William I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, “Situations Defined as Real are Real in their Consequences,” in Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interaction, eds. Gregory P. Stone and Harvey A. Faberman (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 1981), 154–56. 104. M. L. Lyon and J. M. Barbalet, “Society’s Body: Emotion and the ‘Somatization’ of Social Theory,” in Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, ed. Thomas J. Csordas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 1994), 48–66. 105. Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1963). 106. Kate Argyle and Robert M. Shields, “Is there a Body on the Net?,” in Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, ed. Robert M. Shields (London: Sage, 1996), 58–69. 107. Matthew Lombard and Theresa Ditton, “At the Heart of it All: The Concept of Presence,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, no. 2 (1997), jcmc. indiana.edu/vol3/issue2/lombard.html (accessed July 2, 2010).

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108. Frank Biocca, “A Three Pole Model of Presence,” presented at the FET PR Venice event, Venice, Italy, May 2003; Mel Slater and Anthony Steed, “A Virtual Presence Counter,” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 9 (2000): 413–34. 109. David Nunez, “Working Memory and Presence: Reconsidering the Role of Attention in Presence,” proceedings of the seventh International Workshop on Presence (PRESENCE 2004), 44–47, Valencia, Spain, 2004. 110. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit. 111. Kendall, “Oh No! I’m a Nerd!,” 260. 112. Boellstorff, Coming of Age, 138; Lipton, “Forgetting the Body,” 340; Turkle, Life on the Screen, 264. 113. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman; Phelan, “CyberWalden”; Stone, The War of Desire. 114. James J. Sheehan, “Part Two: Humans and Machines: Introduction,” in The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines, eds. James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna (Berkeley: University of California, 1991), 135–40. 115. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 5. 116. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 59–60. 117. Gross and Stone, “Embarrassment and the Analysis of Role Requirement,” 179. 118. Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 64–66. 119. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, 152–64. 120. Turkle, Life on the Screen, 261. 121. Nakamura, Cybertypes, 104. 122. Vincent W. Hevern, “Threaded Identity in Cyberspace: Weblogs & Positioning in the Dialogical Self,” Identity 4 no. 4 (2004): 321–35. 123. Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 1. 124. Lifton, The Protean Self, 190–212. 125. Boellstorff, Coming of Age, 29.

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PART II

MARKETING CULTURE AND THE VIDEO GAME BUSINESS

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CHAPTER SEVEN



Marketing Computer Games: Reinforcing or Changing Stereotypes? Paul R. Ketchum and B. Mitchell Peck

In recent years, personal computer (PC) games have realized sales of more than US$900 million per year.1 Though that number is significantly less than console game (e.g., Wii, Xbox, Playstation) sales, PC games continue to be on the cutting edge in game development, with many of the best-selling console game titles coming from the PC platform. When sales of PC and console games are combined, the sales in U.S. dollars rivals that of the Hollywood film industry.2 Given the significance of the market influence of PC games, we chose to examine how race and gender are depicted in PC games, specifically through an analysis of advertisements and reviews in PC game magazines. The framing of minority and female portrayals in advertisements suggests how these groups are viewed by those targeted by marketing, as advertising reflects and often magnifies social inequalities.3 Given the legal advances in assuring equality for women and minorities in recent decades, a critical examination of how these groups are portrayed, especially in a media that was created and developed after (most) legal barriers were eliminated, promises to shed light on the comparison of de jure and de facto discrimination4 faced by these disadvantaged groups. Research has consistently shown that stereotypes have long-term consequences regarding how “others” are perceived and impose limits on intergroup interactions.5 Stereotypes are generalizations about individuals based upon their group membership6 and are created and maintained as a barrier to “others” who are in close proximity to a community,7 reinforcing relative group hierarchies.8 As “others” become more fully embraced, stereotypes may

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be expected to change and even disappear.9 With this in mind, this chapter will examine the role of racial and gender stereotyping in computer games with the expectation that fewer and less intense racial and gender stereotypes may signal a greater inclusion of racial minorities and women and that more common and/or increased intensity of stereotypes suggest the opposite. While there is a significant amount of research on gender and racial imagery in other areas of mass media, such as film, television, print media, and console games, there is little existing research on stereotypes in the computer game area. The research presented in this chapter fills an important void given the large and rapidly growing area of entertainment that is PC games.10 This chapter addresses two simple questions. First, do computer game images reinforce racial-ethnic and gender stereotypes or does the computergaming world embrace equality more so than other media? And second, how has stereotyping in computer games changed over the last two decades? To examine this, we analyze the images in advertisements and reviews for computer games in industry magazines. The images in the advertisements are ideal in that: (1) visual imagery is a common vehicle for expressing or suppressing stereotypes11; (2) magazines include advertisements and reviews for many different genres of computer games; and (3) computer-game magazines are more likely to be read by active gamers,12 rather than first timers, making it more likely that stereotype rejecting and stereotype reaffirming imagery will be viewed repeatedly, as each new issue is released and read. We focus on two measurements to examine racial and gender equality in PC game media representations. The first is proportional representation. For computer-gaming magazines sold largely in the United States, the representation of minorities and women in the advertisements should roughly mirror the racial-ethnic and gender makeup of the U.S. population. Thus with a reasonably large sample, we would expect approximately 12–13 percent of the people represented in the advertisements will be Black, that about 4–5 percent will be Asian, about 80 percent White, and so on. We would also expect that roughly half of those portrayed in the advertisements will be female. Along these lines, we would further expect proportional representation of those with dual minority status, in this case, women of color. The second measurement we examine is the role and/or quality of representation of minorities and women in the advertisements. Here we focus on whether women and minorities appear as tokens or if they constitute a substantial presence in video-game advertisements. If race no longer matters, we would expect Blacks will appear in both hero and villain roles, as main characters as well as supporting cast, at a rate of about 12–13 percent. The same would be true for Asians and Whites at rates of 4–5 percent and about

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80 percent, respectively. Women would also be portrayed equally, as likely as men to be hero or villain, leader or follower, central or peripheral to the plot, and be objectified and/or sexualized no more than men. We hypothesize that race and gender images will reflect current trends of inequality in society. That is, we expect race to be portrayed in a biased fashion, with Blacks and other racial minorities (1) appearing less often than proportional representation would require; (2) as token characters rather than the focus of interest; and (3) more likely to be portrayed negatively (as “evil” or “villains” as opposed to “good” or “heroes”). We expect to see ethnic minorities over-represented in stereotyped roles. It should be noted that, unlike under-representations of race, under-representations of ethnicity are difficult to examine in computer game advertisements, as ethnicity is not typically expressed by observable physical characteristics. For instance, ethnic Hispanics can be racially White, Black, Asian, Indigenous or any combination of these (or other) racial groups. Because ethnicity is not always expressed visually, we will examine ethnicity only when it is referenced in the advertisement or otherwise made clear visually through the use of other identifiers, such as specific settings, clothing, or language. Interestingly, Nakamura used similar identifiers to detect the racialization of avatars in online games.13 We further expect women to be portrayed in the following ways: (1) strong; (2) having gained access to occupations out of reach just a generation or two ago; yet (3) still minimized by being portrayed as highly sexualized and objectified; (4) only as young and beautiful; and (5) appearing less often than men and in less important character roles. In short, we expect to find that computer games are designed and marketed for white, adolescent male tastes with evidence of both color-blind racism and overt sexism in the advertisements. As a result of the continued dismantling of the 1960s “Great Society” programs since the Reagan era and continuing through today,14 programs that were designed to minimize the impact of institutional racism and sexism, we further hypothesize that the computer-game advertisements examined from 2009 will be more racially and gender biased than those of the early 1990s. To examine these research questions, we collected data from computergaming magazines. To describe and assess the current degree of racial and gender stereotyping, we collected data from the magazine, PC Gamer. PC Gamer is the best-selling PC game magazine in the world, with an average monthly circulation of 32,619 in 2008.15 We collected data from all issues available in 2009 (January–September). As a comparison to current trends, we collected data from Computer Gaming World issues in 1992. Computer Gaming World was a top-selling PC game magazine in the late 1980s and early 1990s.16

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Using a content analysis approach, we developed a coding scheme through an iterative process.17 First, we created general coding categories based on theoretical grounds and an initial examination of a sample of gaming advertisements. Second, we developed a coding sheet with operational definitions for the characteristics of interest in the advertisements. Finally, we included a section for description and comments on observed racial or gender stereotypes in order to add detail and understanding, especially as many characters were humanoid, rather than human. The initial coding sheet was reviewed by the authors and graduate students who worked on the project. After finalizing the coding sheet, we trained four undergraduate students. The student-coders trained several weeks by filling out practice sheets. The research staff then checked these sheets, noted problems, and provided additional training as necessary. Once the trainers were assured the coders understood the coding categories and operational definitions, the student-coders coded the advertisements in the magazines. All data were coded independently, with informal checks occurring periodically to ensure the coders stayed within training parameters. We evaluated inter-rater agreement among the coders by randomly selecting 10 percent of the data for double coding. The coders were not aware of the results of the prior coding. We computed kappa statistics (κ) for variables coded as yes/no or absence/presence of a characteristic or event in an advertisement. The κ-statistic evaluates the extent of agreement between two or more independent evaluations of a categorical variable. The κ-statistic takes into account the extent of agreement that could be expected on the basis of chance. We examined five variables for agreement between the coders. We examined the extent to which the coders agreed on the gender and race of the primary character depicted in the advertisement. We also examined the extent to which the coders agreed on the presence of a gender or racial stereotype, and whether or not the primary character depicted in the advertisement was sexualized. Agreement between the coders was very good. The κ coefficients ranged from 0.75 to 1.00 (average κ = 0.94). The lowest agreement among the coders was for the presence of a sexualized main character. The highest agreement was for the race and gender of the characters. The primary variables of interest are those ascribed characteristics most often used in media stereotyping: race and gender. As noted in the section above, all variables were measured from trained coders examining advertisements in magazines that cater to PC gamers. The descriptions and observations of racial and gender stereotypes were recorded as written descriptions detailing the stereotyping observed. This data was also coded and analyzed for reoccurring themes by the authors.

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The analyses are primarily descriptive. The primary focus of the analyses is not prediction, but description. As such, for the quantitative analysis, we present basic frequencies, percentages, and two-way frequency tables. We supplement the quantitative analysis with qualitative descriptions and examples from the advertisements in order to provide more insight into how stereotypes operate in computer-gaming advertising. A total of 302 advertisements are included in the analyses. There are more than 200 advertisements in the 9 issues from 1992; there are 78 advertisements in the 9 issues from 2009. This difference is largely explained by the type and size of the advertisements from the two years. In 1992, there was a higher percentage of small advertisements (half page or smaller). In 2009, there were more full-page and multi-page advertisements. Most of the characters portrayed in the advertisements were human, though the data show an interesting shift from 1992 to 2009: the number of non-humans in the advertisements declined significantly. In 1992, almost a quarter of all characters in the computer-game advertisements were nonhuman (alien, fantasy, or cartoons). In 2009, only about 5 percent of the characters were non-human. This is likely the result of improved technology, especially in the quality of screen resolution, and the ability to generate more life-like characters in the games. There is a similar trend in terms of the race and gender of characters depicted in the advertisements. In 1992, almost a quarter of the characters did not have a clearly identifiable race; while about 10 percent of the characters in the 1992 advertisements did not have a clearly identifiable gender. In 2009, the number of characters without a clearly identifiable race or gender was nearly zero. To assess the current depiction of race and gender in computer games, we examine two factors: the proportional representation of minorities and females and the quality of that representation. The former examines whether racial minorities and women are represented in advertisements at roughly the same proportion as their representation in society. The latter examines whether racial minorities and women are depicted in terms of stereotypes and/or sexualized. Table 7.1 shows the numbers and percentages of the race and gender of the primary characters in the 2009 PC Gamer advertisements. The data suggests that racial minorities and women are represented in the advertisements at roughly the same proportion as the general population. In 2008, the general population in the United States was 80.1 percent white, 12 percent Black, and 7.9 percent other races.18 The PC game advertisements in 2009 showed nearly identical numbers, with 82 percent of the primary characters

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Table 7.1. Race and Gender of Characters in 2009 PC Gamer Advertisements N

%

Race of Primary Character in Ad White Black Asian Not Applicable

64 7 6 1

82.1 9.0 7.7 1.3

Gender of Primary Character in Ad Male Female Other/Unclear

40 37 1

51.9 48.1 0.0

being White and about 18 percent being non-White. The representation of women in the advertisements shows a similar pattern. In 2008, women accounted for 51 percent of the U.S. population.19 Women accounted for 48 percent of the primary characters in the advertisements. The data clearly suggests racial minorities and women are represented in current PC games proportionate to their numbers in society. We turn now to an assessment of the quality of that representation. Table 7.2 shows the stereotyped and sexualized characterizations of racial groups in the 2009 PC Gamer advertisements. The data suggest that all racial groups are depicted using racial stereotypes, minorities especially so. Of the seven Black characters in the advertisements all seven were depicted in a racial stereotype. In the advertisement for Neverwinter Nights, the illustration shows a group of male elf characters. The elves are trim and physically fit and all have pointed ears. All but one of the elves are racially White, which is an odd (but not uncommon) concept for a mythical species. Stranger still is that the sole Black elf not only has black skin, but his nose is noticeably broader and more Table 7.2. Stereotyped and Sexualized Characterizations of Race in 2009 PC Gamer Advertisements (Numbers are Percentages) White N = 64

Black N=7

Other N=6

N/A N=1

Stereotyped Character No Yes

46.9 53.1

00.0 100.0

16.7 83.3

100.0 00.0

Sexualized Character No Yes

46.9 53.1

100.0 00.0

66.7 33.3

00.0 100.0

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flat than any of the other elves. While adding a Black elf is an admirable effort at inclusion, it is unfathomable why the stereotypical large, broad nose is added, especially as the stereotype is applied to a non-human. The advertisement for NBA 2K9 also attempts to be racially inclusive, with uneven results. This advertisement included two images. In the first, ten players are pictured playing basketball. Each team consists of four Black players and one White player, with a White referee pictured. The second image is a much closer view of the action. This image shows two White players under the hoop. The majority Black players are nowhere to be found in the second image, leaving the role of hero to the White characters. When race was identifiable, heroes in military-themed games, such as Battlefield Heroes, also tended to be White. Left for Dead 2 was the most racially and gender-progressive game observed. Of the four main characters in this game, two are Black. In fact, the only Black female to appear as a major character in any of the advertisements in PC Gamer is from this game. We will address her character in more detail below. The male, Black character is an athletic coach and former athlete. Despite the fact that there are more Black doctors and lawyers in the United States than there are Black professional athletes,20 the image of the Black man as physical rather than intellectual is much more common,21 though his inclusion is still noteworthy. Arguably, none of the advertisements detailed to this point are trying to be racially insensitive. In fact, each seems to make an overt, if not always successful, effort to be inclusive. Grand Theft Auto IV and Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, though, appear to go out of their way to include racial stereotypes, so much so that a review of Call of Juarez in PC Gamer points out how racist it is. Among the images for the game are an American Indian chief, with full feathered headdress, who says “How!,” and a menacing Old West, Mexican bandito, dressed in a flat black felt hat and bandoliers (criss-crossed ammunition belts across his chest). Similarly, Grand Theft Auto IV includes an image of two Black males with automatic weapons, dressed in urban street clothing, evoking the classic street thug image. Whites were also stereotyped, though, for males, those images tended to be more class-based White images. In Fallout 3: Point Lookout, one of the characters shown is a skinny white “redneck,” shirtless and standing in front of a moonshine still and an old cabin, in what appears to be a swamp. This is consistent with the contention that race and gender do not operate in a vacuum, rather all frames of reference use middle-class or better, White, heterosexual males as the norm, with all other groups being compared to that norm.22 Rather than illustrate an exception to the significance of race, the

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image shown for Fallout 3: Point Lookout simply adds yet another layer to the complex interaction of race, gender, and class. The interaction of race and gender falls into two categories in this study, as Black women are largely ignored or relegated to “helping” roles. In classic “good news-bad news” form, the good news for the depiction of Black women in computer-game advertisements is that they are not reduced to sexual objects for the entertainment of men. The bad news is that the ideal for beauty, in the advertisements, ignores Black women altogether. This leaves Black women safe from being victimized as sex objects, though victimized by their exclusion from the world of computer games. This is not unique to computergame advertisements. In a study of TV advertisements in 1990, Coltrane and Messineo found strikingly similar results, leading them to conclude, “A lack of such exploitive imagery for African American women could be considered positive, except for the fact that it is part of a larger pattern of excluding African American women from images of fantasy consumption and personal fulfillment.”23 The exclusion of Black women as objects of desire would end our comments on this section, however we noticed a review for hospitality-training software in one issue of PC Gamer, which evoked some of the oldest racialized images in U.S. history. During the slavery and Jim Crow eras, the mammy image was used to show that Black women were content in servitude. In the 1930s and 1940s, the mammy character repeatedly appeared in films. Black actresses Louise Beavers and Hattie McDaniel each had long careers playing the mammy role. This character was always an overweight, maternal, sexless, plain-looking Black woman, whose seeming sole purpose and joy in life was to make the White family’s life easier. This character was not limited to films of the 1930s and 1940s. Hollywood seems to have revisited the use of the mammy character numerous times. The 1950s TV show Beulah revolved around a matronly mammy character, also played by McDaniel for part of the run of the series, caring for a White suburban family. In the 1980s TV series Gimme a Break, actress Nell Carter played a sassy mammy character, strikingly similar to those played decades earlier. The mammy character was not limited to Hollywood. Advertisers were quick to use the image. Aunt Jemima, first created in 1889, is today both the best-known and arguably the longest-lived of these, but “[t]he mammy image was used to sell almost any household item, especially breakfast foods, detergents, planters, ashtrays, sewing accessories, and beverages.”24 While the Aunt Jemima mammy character has been updated, softening the racialized images somewhat, the PineSol lady, portrayed by Diane Amos since 1993, has clearly taken over as the new mammy face of advertising.25

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This imagery emerged unexpectedly in our content analysis of computergame advertisements. While it was not included in the quantitative analysis of this study as the article it was not about a computer game, it is worth noting that only two more Black females were pictured in any of the issues of PC Gamer. Both appeared in one article, in a screenshot for PC-based training software for Hilton Garden Inn Hotels. Unlike the game advertisements, the two Black females, who are the only characters in the picture, are both refreshingly average looking. One appears to be in her thirties or forties and the other, with grey hair, appears to be in her fifties or sixties. It is disconcerting that, other than the character in Left for Dead 2, these are the only Black females who appear in any of the issues, and they are portrayed as maternal, sexless, plain-looking Black women, whose seeming sole purpose and joy in life is to make travelers’ lives easier. As noted earlier, the only Black female to appear in any computer game advertisement is a character in Left for Dead 2. While attractive, she is a bit older than most of the female characters (the game Web site lists her age as twenty-nine) and significantly less extreme in looks than most of the White female characters. Within the confines of Left for Dead 2, this character could be considered an image of sexual fantasy, which is a rare portrayal of Black women in the media.26 However, when compared to the extreme figures of the White female game characters, she no longer stands out as a sexual fantasy, but instead appears average looking. Table 7.3 shows the stereotyped and sexualized characterizations of gender in the 2009 PC Gamer advertisements. The data suggest a very clear and prominent trend. Women are stereotyped and sexualized to a much greater extent than men. More than 97 percent of all female characters in the advertisements were depicted by stereotypes. Similarly, more than 97 percent of the female characters in the advertisements were sexualized.

Table 7.3. Stereotyped and Sexualized Characterizations of Gender in 2009 PC Gamer Advertisements (Numbers are Percentages) Male N = 40

Female N = 37

Stereotyped Character No Yes

97.5 2.5

2.7 97.3

Sexualized Character No Yes

32.5 67.5

2.7 97.3

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As noted earlier, the literature examining stereotyping in computer games is limited. Console games, however, share many of the same game titles as computer games as well as similar demographics for players. A few reoccurring themes appear in the literature for gender roles in console games. Male characters are the focus of most games as males appear more often on game covers,27 in advertisements appearing in console game magazines,28 and in actual game play.29 Male characters also have more fully developed storylines and are more integral to the game than female characters.30 Female characters in console games are typically young (late teens to mid-twenties), beautiful and scantily clothed, and more likely to be sexualized than are male characters.31 Male characters tend to be older than female characters and wear significantly more clothing, even when identified as sexualized.32 Sexualized characters exhibit distorted gendered physical characteristics with sexualized males being unnaturally muscled and females having near-impossible, Barbie-like bodies.33 Prior to the creation of Lara Croft, female game characters tended to be women in need of rescuing,34 or the occasional, relatively nondescript, female character in combat games, such as Streetfighter II.35 Lara Croft exhibits an interesting duality. Physically, she is the embodiment of objectification as she is young and posses an impossibly large (yet gravity defying) chest, an inhumanly small waist, and well-rounded hips. On the other hand, she is strong, smart, independent, and, in many ways, the ultimate feminist hero. Toby Gard, designer of Lara Croft, explains in an interview that he intended to make the character’s chest 50 percent bigger, but a slip of the mouse caused an accidental 150 percent increase in her chest measurement.36 Lara Croft first appeared in a computer game in 1996, when screen resolution was only a fraction of that available today. It could be that exaggerated physical characteristics for early female game characters were simply a method of easy visual gender identification of early game characters. Gard claims that the exaggerated physique of Croft only became a marketing tool after the fact. The success of the Lara Croft character may explain the trend of current female game characters to have Croft-like measurements. Almost all of the females portrayed in the computer-game advertisements mimic the physical appearance of Lara Croft. With few exceptions, which will be noted later, all of the female characters appearing in the advertisements and game reviews in PC Gamer magazine had each of the following characteristics: young (late teens to mid-twenties), beautiful (by current U.S.–Western standards), very large breasts (unrealistically large, similar to Lara Croft), very small waist, fairly large hips, resulting in a “curvaceous”

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look, and White. All females were dressed either in tight, form-fitting clothing such as in Star Wars: The Old Republic and Underworld: Rise of the Lycans or, much more often were scantily clad, such as those portrayed in Aion, Damnation, Elven Legacy, Borderlands, Sacred 2, and Age of Conan. In either case, the all-but-impossible to achieve physical beauty of these characters is emphasized. By current U.S.–Western standards all have beautiful bodies. In fact, even a zombie-like character in an advertisement for Prototype had a beautiful body but no discernable face. All but two of the women in the advertisements were young, appearing to be in their late teens to midtwenties. The only exception could be found in Arma 2 was an older white woman, dressed as a peasant or farmer, possibly Eastern European. Women were not only dressed to appear sexy, they were often portrayed in sexualized situations. Grand Theft Auto IV used two such scenes in its advertisements. In one, a sexy White female is suggestively sucking on a lollypop, while in another advertisement, a White female, wearing only a thong, is standing in front of fully dressed White male, who is admiring her in what appears to be a run-down motel room. The Sims 3 advertisement shows a scene in which two sexy White women are passionately kissing. While it is possible that scene is simply portraying a loving lesbian couple, it appears staged to titillate men. Male body types tend to fall into two general camps: physically fit, but otherwise average-sized men (Wanted: Weapons of Fate, Dragon Age, Mount & Blade) or hyper-muscled, extra large men (“Brick” of Borderlands, Duke Nukem). In the advertisements, however, male is always equated with power. Non-human, powerful characters were either modeled after the human male physique, as in Demigod or one of the robot-like characters shown in Supreme Commander 2 or animal, such as the feline-inspired robot, also in Supreme Commander 2, but never female. The analysis of the 2009 data suggests that minorities and women are represented in proportions roughly equal to their proportion in the general population. How minorities and women are depicted in those advertisements, however, is a very different story. Both racial minorities and women are more likely to be portrayed by stereotypes. Women are more likely to be sexualized. We now examine whether these trends have been fairly steady or if the current trends represent a change in the depiction of racial minorities and women. To assess changes in the depiction of race and gender in computer games, we examine the same two factors, the proportional representation of minorities and females and the quality of that representation, at two points in time, 1992 and 2009. Table 7.4 shows the numbers and percentages of the race and

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Table 7.4. Race and Gender of Characters in 1992 Computer Gaming World and 2009 PC Gamer Advertisements 2009 N

Percentages

1992 N

Percentages

Race of Primary Character in Ad White Black Asian Not Applicable

64 7 6 1

82.1 9.0 7.7 1.3

165 5 4 50

73.7 2.2 1.8 22.3

Gender of Primary Character in Ad Male Female Other/Unclear

40 37 1

51.9 48.1 0.0

169 31 21

76.5 14.0 9.5

gender of the primary characters depicted in the advertisements from 2009 PC Gamer and 1992 Computer Gaming World. The data indicate a few interesting trends. The role of minorities in PC games increased over time, as did the depiction of white characters. This increased representation of all racial groups is accompanied with a decrease in the number of characters with no racial identification. As noted above, this likely is the result of more human characters and fewer aliens, fantasy, and cartoon characters in PC games in 2009 compared to 1992. The role of women in PC games also increased significantly from 1992 to 2009. Only 14 percent of characters depicted in the 1992 advertisements were identifiable as women, compared to more than 48 percent in 2009. Table 7.5 shows the stereotyped and sexualized characterizations of racial groups for the two time periods. The number of non-White characters at both times is very small (four to seven cases). As such it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about the change in stereotypes and sexualized characters. Because the number of White characters is relatively large at both time points, we will limit comparisons across time to White characters. The use of stereotypes to depict White characters decreased over time, 74 percent of all advertisements in 1992 versus 53 percent in 2009. The use of sexualized characters, however, increased for Whites. In fact, the use of sexualized characters was higher for all racial groups except Blacks. None of the Black characters in 1992 or 2009 were sexualized. Table 7.6 shows the stereotyped and sexualized characterizations of gender for the two time periods. The data reveal several interesting trends. The use of sexualized characters increased from 1992 to 2009. The percentage

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Table 7.5. Stereotyped and Sexualized Characterizations of Race in 1992 Computer Gaming World and 2009 PC Gamer Advertisements (Numbers are Percentages) Computer Gaming World 1992 Asian N=4

N/A N = 50

PC Gamer 2009

White N = 165

Black N=5

White N = 64

Stereotyped Character No Yes

26.1 73.9

20.0 80.0

00.0 100.0

74.0 26.0

46.9 53.1

Sexualized Character No Yes

63.6 36.4

100.0 00.0

100.0 00.0

90.0 10.0

46.9 53.1

Black N=7

Other N=6

N/A N=1

00.0 100.0

16.7 83.3

100.0 00.0

100.0 00.0

66.7 33.3

00.0 100.0

of sexualized characters increased for both males and females. Stereotyped women are the norm at both time periods, though the percentage increased over time, from 84 percent to 97 percent. The percentage of male characters sexualized, by contrast, decreased markedly over time. The findings from PC Gamer show that, contrary to our hypothesis, women and minorities are portrayed in numbers proportional to the U.S. population. As we hypothesized, however, minorities are more likely to be stereotyped than are Whites and women are significantly more likely to be stereotyped and sexualized than are men. White male characters are overrepresented in positive and powerful roles and women and minorities are Table 7.6. Stereotyped and Sexualized Characterizations of Gender in 1992 Computer Gaming World and 2009 PC Gamer Advertisements (Numbers are Percentages) Computer Gaming World 1992 Male N = 169

Female N = 31

Stereotyped Character No Yes

23.7 76.3

Sexualized Character No Yes

75.1 24.9

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PC Gamer 2009

Unclear N = 21

Male N= 40

Female N = 37

Unclear N = 00

16.1 83.9

100.0 00.0

97.5 2.5

2.7 97.3

00.0 00.0

25.8 74.2

100.0 00.0

32.5 67.5

2.7 97.3

00.0 00.0

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overrepresented in inconsequential, stereotyped or, in the case of women, sexualized roles. Both Black men and White women were largely relegated to tightly constricted roles with Black men limited to athletes, street thugs, or military-support personnel. Women, though possessing physical strength and some level of empowerment, are relegated to second-class status as sexualized objects. Consistent with color-blind racism or overt sexism, social class, a potential gateway for equality, is severely limited for non-White and female characters portrayed in the advertisements. When advertisements from 2009 are compared to advertisements from 1992, the proportional representation of both minorities and women improve dramatically, though this may be explained, in part, by the greatly improved quality of graphics over that period. With the greater level of detail available in computer games, distinctions between racial groups and gender become easier to convey, essentially allowing for greater diversity. With the dramatic increase in visibility of women in computer games comes a related increase in the sexualization of women; however that increase in sexualization is limited to White women. It is unclear if the differences in rates of sexualization between 1992 and 2009 are due to increased resistance to the gains made by women in the 1960s and 1970s or gains made in graphic quality allowing the greater expression of sexualization. The differences found between the advertisements from 1992 and 2009 appear consistent with our hypothesis. Women are slightly more sexualized than in 1992 yet men are significantly less sexualized. Overall, minorities are limited to the periphery of computer game world existence. They are part of the picture, but limited to stereotyped roles and excluded from the closest relationships. Women, on the other hand, have come to the forefront of the computer game world, though as objects of desire, rather than as equals. Based on our analyses, it appears that no significant gains have been made in the portrayal of either racial minorities or women, as an increase in the rate of appearances has resulted greater rates of stereotyping of minorities and women. Despite the roughly twenty-year difference between the PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World issues used in this study, all of the magazines analyzed in this study were published in the postcivil-rights era. We recommend future studies include magazines from the 1940s through the 1970s, marketed to similar demographic groups, as inclusion of analysis from both the Jim Crow era and the civil-rights period would give a clearer picture of any changes in how minorities and women are portrayed in magazine advertisements.

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Notes 1. Dennis McCauley, “Power Up: Do PCs Stand a Chance against Consoles? Maybe,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (April 18, 2008). 2. McCauley, “Power Up.” 3. Michael Schudson, “Advertising as Capitalist Realism,” in Advertising in Society: Classic and Contemporary Readings on Advertising’s Role in Society, eds. Roxanne Hovland and Gary B. Wilcox (Lincolnwood, Ill.: NTC Business Books, 1989). 4. By de jure discrimination we are referring to discrimination that is a matter of law such as slavery or hate crimes. De facto discrimination, by contrast, refers to discrimination that exists in reality or due to peoples’ attitudes, such as hate groups or racist or sexist humor which is not punishable by law. 5. See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001); and J. G. Shaheen, “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 588 (2003): 171–93. 6. M. M. Lauzen, D. M. Dozier, and N. Horan, “Constructing Gender Stereotypes through Social Roles in Prime-Time Television,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 52, no. 2 (2008): 200–14. 7. R. McVeigh and D. Sikkink, “Organized Racism and the Stranger,” Sociological Forum 20, no. 4 (2005): 497–522. 8. Lauzen, Dozier, and Horan, “Constructing Gender Stereotypes.” 9. Bonilla-Silva, White Supremacy and Racism. 10. Bonilla-Silva, White Supremacy and Racism. 11. Hernan Vera and Andrew Gordon, Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 12. The Nielsen Company, “Grand Theft Auto: The Brand That Hits (and Injures and Steals And . . . Sells),” Nielson Report (New York: The Nielsen Company, 2008), www.mediainsight.nl/media/grandtheftauto4_final_8_11_08.pdf. 13. Lisa Nakamura, “Head Hunting in Cyberspace: Identity Tourism, Asian Avatars and Racial Passing on the Web,” The Women’s Review of Books 18, no. 5 (2001): 10–11. 14. See Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000); Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub, Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points through Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 15. Future Publishing, “Pc Gamer International Licensing,” www.futurelicensing .com/home/titles/PCG (accessed October 26, 2009). 16. Games.net, “Game Magazines: Then and Now,” IDG Entertainment, www .games.net/article/feature/117221/game-magazines-then-and-now/ (accessed January 4, 2010).

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17. Anselm Strauss and Juliet M. Corbin, Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory, Procedures and Techniques, (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1990). 18. Jennifer Cheeseman Day, “Population Projections of the United States by Age, Sex, Race and Hispanic Origin: 1995 to 2050,” U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population reports, P25-1130 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2008). 19. Day, “Population Projections of the United States by Age, Sex, Race and Hispanic Origin: 1995 to 2050.” 20. Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, eds. Russel Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). 21. John Hoberman, Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (New York: Mariner Books, 1997). 22. Bonilla-Silva, White Supremacy and Racism. 23. S. Coltrane and M. Messineo, “The Perpetuation of Subtle Prejudice: Race and Gender Imagery in 1990s Television Advertising,” Sex Roles 42, no. 5–6 (2000): 363–89. 24. David Pilgrim, “Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia: The Mammy Caricature,” Ferris State University, www.ferris.edu/JIMCROW/mammies/ (accessed October 5, 2009). 25. Lorraine Fuller, “Are We Seeing Things? The Pinesol Lady and the Ghost of Aunt Jemima,” Journal of Black Studies 32, no. 1 (2001): 120–31. 26. Coltrane and Messineo, “The Perpetuation of Subtle Prejudice.” 27. M. C. R. Burgess, S. P. Stermer, and S. R. Burgess, “Sex, Lies, and Video Games: The Portrayal of Male and Female Characters on Video Game Covers,” Sex Roles 57, no. 5–6 (2007): 419–33. 28. Erica Scharrer, “Virtual Violence: Gender and Aggression in Video Game Advertisements,” Mass Communication and Society 7, no. 4 (2004): 393–412. 29. Berrin Beasley and Tracy Collins Standley, “Shirts Vs. Skins: Clothing as an Indicator of Gender Role Stereotyping in Video Games,” Mass Communication and Society 5, no. 3 (2002): 279–93; T. L. Dietz, “An Examination of Violence and Gender Role Portrayals in Video Games: Implications for Gender Socialization and Aggressive Behavior,” Sex Roles 38, no. 5–6 (1998). 30. Sharrer, “Virtual Violence.” 31. Beasley and Standley, “Shirts vs. Skins”; Burgess, Stermer, and Burgess, “Sex, Lies, and Video Games”; Scharrer, “Virtual Violence.” 32. A. Brenick et al., “Social Evaluations of Stereotypic Images in Video Games— Unfair, Legitimate, Or ‘Just Entertainment’?,” Youth & Society 38, no. 4 (2007): 395–419. 33. Kevin I. Norton et al., “Ken and Barbie at Life Size,” Sex Roles 34, no. 3–4 (1996): 287–94.

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34. Maja Mikula, “Gender and Videogames: The Political Valency of Lara Croft,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2003): 79–87; K. O. Norris, “Gender Stereotypes, Aggression, and Computer Games: An Online Survey of Women,” Cyberpsychology & Behavior 7, no. 6 (2004): 714. 35. Toby Gard, “Interview with Toby Gard,” Conde Nast Publishing, www.lara croft.name/archive/97-01.php (accessed November 14, 2009). 36. Gard, “Interview with Toby Gard.”

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CHAPTER EIGHT



Censoring Violence in Virtual Dystopia: Issues in the Rating of Video Games in Japan and of Japanese Video Games Outside Japan William H. Kelly Introduction One question which arises in considering the dystopic and utopic worlds of video games is whose utopia and/or dystopia is it? Are dystopic and utopic visions specific to the cultural contexts from which they emerge or do such visions have a more transcendent and universal quality? In other words, are the utopic and dystopic visions conjured up in game worlds culturally specific in their resonance and appeal? As digital games have become more immersive questions of how issues such as “culture” and “identity” are reflected in virtual spaces come to the fore.1 This is especially true for virtual role-playing games (RPGs), massive multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs), and other synthetic virtual worlds (although their status as “games” is debatable) where players spend increasingly long periods of time, associating with other “players,” creating, outfitting, and adorning their avatars (their in-world representations) and manipulating and/or contributing to their virtual environment. Does it become appropriate to speak of the culture of these virtual game worlds? To what extent do video games reflect the shared values and collective norms of the particular societies and cultures from which they have emerged? In short, do games and other virtual spaces have culture? There are no doubt many ways of exploring this question within the context of video games and other virtual realms. One way is to examine the censorship and rating of games in Japan. Censorship provides an interesting lens on culture for several reasons. First, it is an integral step in the so-called localization of video games and one which therefore occurs at the interface 143

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between different consumer markets and thus, to some extent, different cultures. Game content which is acceptable in one cultural-market context may be problematic in another and examining both the patterns of acceptable and problematic content and the possible reasons underlying these patterns provides some insight into the collective sensitivities and “cultural” particularities of different consumer markets. In terms of methodology, since the censorship, rating, and, more broadly, localization of games is carried out by particular individuals working within discreet organizations, it is relatively easy to conduct interviews about the changes made in localizing games for particular consumer markets, and, more important, the justification for such changes. Drawing on more than thirty formal and informal interviews and conversations conducted with the creators, producers, and publishers of video games in Japan, with those involved in the localization of games both to and from Japan, with officials of the Computer Entertainment Rating Organization (CERO) and with representatives of the video game–related media inside and outside of Japan,2 I will discuss the censorship of violence (and symbolic violence) in Japanese games sold both at home and abroad and games produced outside Japan which have been localized and sold in Japan. Following a brief outline of the system for rating video games in Japan, the paper suggests several emergent patterns in the censorship of violence, concluding that differences in the ways in which violence is perceived and regulated may reflect widely shared cultural perceptions in Japan related to the impurity of death, the body, bodily fluids, and injury.

Censorship, Violence, and Video Games in Japan Almost all of the major global markets in which video games are sold have a system for reviewing and “rating” games prior to their being released for sale.3 Like films, all video games sold in a particular market, regardless of whether they have been produced “locally” for domestic consumption or imported from outside and localized, must first be assigned a rating. For video games, the major rating boards include the ESRB (United States), VSC and BBFC (United Kingdom), USK (Germany), PEGI (Europe/EU), OFLL (Australia), KMRB (South Korea), and, in Japan, CERO (Computer Entertainment Rating Organization). Each of these boards work to reflect local sensitivities with regard to what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable content in video games and determine who in society should be restricted from purchasing them. Although there is considerable overlap among rating boards worldwide with regard to what is considered acceptable or offensive content, there are also notable differences and this paper, in focusing on those differ-

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ences with particular reference to games moving into and from Japan, seeks to provide some sense of how collective notions of shared morality in different markets is reflected in the game localization process. Before elaborating the process for rating video games in Japan, some general background information may be helpful. First, many interviewees have pointed out that the video games industry in Japan is, essentially, selfregulating. CERO, unlike analogous rating organizations in other countries, is not a government entity and has not been brought into existence by government legislation, but is instead a non-profit organization, originally set up by the Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association (CESA)—the body which represents the interests of the Japanese video game industry—in order to provide standardized guidelines for the games industry with regard to game content, especially content of a violent or sexual nature. This has several important implications. First, in contrast with the situation in many markets outside Japan, recommendations by CERO are not legally binding. A judgment by CERO that a particular game with controversial content should not be sold in Japan does not necessarily need to be adhered to.4 Additionally, CERO, as an initiative of the video games industry, has developed along its own trajectory, independently of other censorship and rating organizations, for example those which monitor or rate the content for films, animation, or manga. According to the director of CERO, the criteria for assessing and rating the content of video games is therefore not necessarily the same criteria used in the assessment and rating of film.5 A second general feature of the censorship and rating of games in Japan is that, from its inception in the late 1990s, the main issue with which it has been concerned is violence and the violent content of video games. Whereas the ESRB (Entertainment Rating Software Board) in the United States is concerned with a wide spectrum of issues, most notably sexual content, but also racial and religious symbolism and images of tobacco, alcohol, and gambling, for example, as well as instances of violence, CERO is primarily concerned with the violent content of games. As one informant, a localization specialist for SEGA who I will refer to as Mr. H., succinctly put it, “Japanese are less forgiving about violence, but more forgiving about sexuality.”6 According to one explanation, this sensitivity to violence in particular is historical and derives from a fear in the games industry of negative publicity in the Japanese mass media. According to Mr. H., the basis for this fear was the linking of high profile crimes in the 1980s and 1990s with an obsessive interest in popular culture and media such as manga, animation, and video games, especially those with extreme content.7 It was at about this time that the term otaku emerged as a derogatory descriptive for a new

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breed of obsessive hobbiest who spent long periods confined to his (usually a male) room or haunting the streets of Akihabara (Tokyo’s premier shopping district for computer and electronics goods which has been described as otaku sacred ground) in single-minded pursuit of his interests.8 This association between popular culture and media such as video games with anti-social and criminal behavior led to a storm of criticism in the mass media regarding the effects of media such as manga and video games, for example, on youth and, by extension, society as a whole. Although this criticism was not specific to video games, video games were implicated along with other media, causing alarm and caution throughout the video game industry vis-à-vis violent content and is probably one reason that the industry in Japan has evolved as “self-regulating.” This sense of caution with regard to violent content in video games was (and continues to be) particularly acute for larger software producers and especially for platform holders such as Sony and Nintendo. The main reason for this is that these companies are perceived to be relatively more accountable to the public. To cite the hypothetical example given by Mr. H., if a small-sized software maker of just a handful of employees makes a game with particularly hardcore or contentious content, and if this game is then criticized in the media as being “problematic,” it is not the small-scale producer of the game software who will be blamed, but rather the platform holder who allowed the game to be published on its platform. Mr. H. explained that this particular feature of the structure of the games industry in Japan as consistent with the wider principle of “the stronger protecting the weaker.”9 To summarize, by the mid-1990s, the rapid expansion of the domestic market for video games in Japan was accompanied by a growing speculation about the potential negative effects that this relatively new and booming media might be having on its population of (primarily) youthful users. This was fueled by media criticism of video games based in part on their association with anti-social and criminal behavior, leading to a cautiousness in the games industry—based, essentially, on fear of negative publicity. It was within these circumstances and, in fact, in no small part as a response to them that both CERO and system for the censorship and rating of video games emerged. No doubt, the need for standardization in the monitoring and regulation of video game content and for a rating system analogous to those in place in other global markets were important, but the need to be seen by the Japanese media and the public to be doing something to monitor, regulate, and evaluate the content of video games and to both inform and protect the public (or at least to be seen to be informing and protecting the public) were primary considerations.

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Censorship System in Japan Every video game sold in Japan—whether produced at home or abroad—is evaluated and rated by CERO (Computer Entertainment Rating Organization). Games are assigned one of five, age-based letter ratings—A, B, C, D, and Z—with A signifying “All rating for all ages,” B ages 12+, C ages 15+, D ages 17+, and Z ages 18+. This system of letter ratings is relatively new, having been agreed upon in 2005 and implemented in 2006. Prior to 2002, the rating of video games was the responsibility of CESA (Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association), which established a committee of seven to ten individuals, mostly representatives of game software companies or others working in the games industry. The committee, which met monthly to examine and rate games, focused mainly on issues related to violence. Due in part to the increasingly large volume of games requiring rating, the system was reorganized in 2002 from a committee of seven to ten to a pool of forty “examiners” whose membership constitutes, in principle, a representative cross section of society. Games are now rated daily by a group of three to five examiners, working in rotation (from the pool of forty). CERO, a non-profit organization, was established in the same year, assuming responsibility for the rating of games. CERO examines and rates between 100–120 games per month, spending anywhere from twenty minutes to between two and three hours per title. In contrast to the previous, committee-based system, ratings of game content are now based on the consensus of a particular group of citizens at a particular time and may change according to changing mores in society, as measured through market research periodically conducted by CERO. According to the director of CERO, this flexibility allows it to adapt to the development of future games, game formats, and game genres which cannot necessarily be anticipated. In addition to letter ratings, there is also a “violence mark” which appears on games with violent content. This mark was initiated with the publication of the game Biohazard (Resident Evil outside Japan), first released in Japan by Capcom in 1996. CERO is gradually assuming a more dominant regulatory role in the historically self-regulating games industry. Game console (hardware) makers in particular have exerted considerable influence in the regulation of game content. Since video games (software) are developed for use on specific or often multiple game consoles or “platforms” (hardware) such as Sony’s Playstation series, Nintendo Wii or DS, and Microsoft’s Xbox/Xbox 360, for example, hardware and console makers are in a position to influence not only what games are published, but the content of those games as well. Nintendo, for example, has made its name publishing games devoid of sexual and violent

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content and therefore suitable to a wide spectrum of players of both genders, from children to the elderly, and has also been successful in promoting its games to families. One interviewee described Nintendo’s games as being “like cartoons,” suggesting that this was in part a result of the company’s long-term history as a maker of games suitable for children.10 Game content is also self-regulated by software companies, some of which localize their own games in-house and who nevertheless perform their own in-house checks of game content in preparation for submission of games to rating boards in different markets around the world. For example, in localizing its games for the United States, Japanese game software maker Konami first sends the game to its U.S. offices, where it is read and checked before being submitted to the ESRB (the American rating board) for rating and approval.11 One of the requirements of the ESRB is that all potentially problematic words and scenarios be reported by games software makers with the game’s submission. Failure to do so can result in penalties. In the United States, potentially problematic scenarios include those related to violence or blood and nudity, but also those involving gambling, drinking, or smoking, for example. Whereas in Japan, CERO is not concerned about a reference or word pertaining to gambling in a game title, in the United States, all words and scenarios pertaining to gambling, smoking, and drinking—as well as violence, nudity, and blood—must be reported. One interviewee mentioned that even a reference such as “I’ll bet you (some amount) that I will make it back alive,” must be reported to the ESRB.12 Software companies have therefore become very adept at not only recognizing and monitoring potentially problematic words and scenarios within the context of particular global markets, but anticipate these during the production process. Therefore, much of so-called censorship regulation—whether for domestic or overseas markets—takes place long before the game has even been seen by the official censorship and rating bodies. To summarize, Japan, like other countries, has its own particular standards and criteria for rating video games. Mediated through a “jury style” rating system, these standards supposedly reflect collective sensitivities with regard to issues such as violence, nudity, and sexuality. The system is presented as flexible, reflecting the views of a cross section of Japanese society, rather than being based on a rigid set of rules and guidelines. In contrast to rating systems outside Japan, judgments by CERO are only recommendations and are not legally binding. Finally, although the role of CERO is becoming increasing more significant in the regulation of video games and, specifically, the standardization of regulatory guidelines and practices, responsibility for

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the monitoring and regulation of video game content in Japan continues to be shared by CERO and video game hardware and software makers working together in tandem.

Censorship Issues In his discussion of the forms of social solidarity, Emile Durkheim defines a crime not in terms of the intrinsic nature of the criminal act or action itself, but rather in opposition to certain collective sentiments. According to Durkheim, “an act is criminal when it offends strong and defined states of the conscience collective.”13 “In other words,” claims Durkheim, “we must not say that an action shocks the conscience collective because it is criminal, but rather that it is criminal because it shocks the conscience collective. We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.”14 A criminal action is not therefore necessarily universally so, but only with reference to the extent that it shocks the sensibilities of a particular community of people. This formulation of Durkheim’s might also be applied to video game censorship, in as much as there is no universal definition of what constitutes acceptable or unacceptable content within the context of a video game, but rather it depends on the degree to which it offends the sensibilities of a particular community of individuals (as mediated through official censorship organizations). The main categories of game content subject to censorship include violence, encompassing blood, death, dismemberment, and torture; nudity and sexuality; religious and other cultural symbolism and references; racial and ethnic references; and a whole host of culturally, historically, and geographically specific elements which may be subject to misinterpretation in new social milieus.

Violence Violence in video games has been a (if not the) major target of critiques of video games, a cause for concern regarding their potential harmful effects on users and one of the main focuses of both public, media, and academic discourses related to video games. Violence is also one of the major attractions of video games for users and violence of one kind or another has been a prominent feature of games produced in the major video game-producing markets, including Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom and Europe. It has also been one of the key targets of censorship and an important criterion in the rating of video games, with rating boards in different countries regulating the articulation of

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violence in games in accordance with local sensibilities. Drawing on examples of both video games produced outside Japan and localized for Japanese consumers, and Japanese games localized for consumers in the United States, the UK, and Europe, this section examines the limits of acceptability with regard to patterns of violence.

Killing Although the killing of persons in video games is by no means taboo in Japan, whereas some forms of killing are acceptable, others are less so. According to one interviewee, as a rule of thumb, whereas killing for the greater good or for some higher social purpose is acceptable, superfluous killing is avoided.15 Killing of children and “innocents,” such as civilian bystanders, is also generally prohibited. For example, in the original version of the American-made games Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto IV, in which the player-protagonist steals cars and drives recklessly through the streets of virtual Los Angeles, pedestrians can be hit and killed. In the Japanese version, however, pedestrians struck get up again. Similarly, in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, two “side missions,” in which the purpose is to kill a civilian, have been removed in the game’s Japanese version. Also removed is a scene in which a player attacks a fallen person. Similarly, in the game Driver: Parallel Lines (published by AQ Interactive; released on PS2, October 12, 2006), the ability of a player to run over a civilian with a car in the original version is omitted in the Japanese version and when another car is destroyed by the player in the Japanese version, the civilian driver does not die as he (usually he) might in the original version. In the Japanese version of The Godfather: The Game (published by Electronic Arts for PS2 and Xbox 360), the player’s character cannot kill innocent people who are peripheral to the main plot. Whereas in the American version of God of War (published by Capcom; released for PS2, November 17, 2005), the player’s character can kill civilians to restore his health, this is not possible in the game’s Japanese version. Finally, in a somewhat unusual example, the game House of Dead (published by SEGA; released for Wii) was sold in Europe and the United States, but not in Japan, due to objection by CERO with regard to the killing of innocent civilians. As one of my interviewees explained, evil characters can be killed, but not innocent civilians.16 In addition to this general taboo on violence against innocents, a second taboo is that the player-protagonist should not assume the role of killer or perpetrator of (unnecessary) violence. For example, in Hitman, a so-called stealth game which was developed by the Danish company IO Interactive

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(now a division of Eidos International), there is a scene in which a man is being tortured in a basement. Whereas in the original version of the game, one option is for the player to assume the role of torturer, this is not allowed in the version of the game localized for Japan.17 Another example is a PC (personal computer) murder mystery game in which the player discovers at the end that they are actually the killer. The idea of converting the game from PC to console format was forbidden by CERO, who objected on the grounds that the player is not supposed to become the killer.

Dismemberment, Blood, and the Handling of Dead Bodies In addition to restrictions on killing and assuming the role of killer or perpetrator of violence in Japanese video games, there are also restrictions with regard to the depiction of blood, dismemberment, and, more generally, the handling of dead bodies. As a general rule, dead bodies should not linger in the virtual game world, but should disappear from the frame quickly. Mistreatment of dead bodies is, if not prohibited, certainly avoided in video games sold in Japan and is a frequent target of CERO in rating games imported to Japan from outside. For example, in the Japanese PS3 version of the game Saints Row 2 (published by THQ for PS3 and Xbox 360; released December 4, 2008), dead bodies instantly vanish so that players cannot attack them. Similarly, players cannot take bodies as human shields as in the original version. In both PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game, human bodies do not catch fire as they do in the game’s original version. The general prohibition against the defilement of bodies, living or dead, in Japanese video games and games sold in Japan is perhaps most clearly illustrated through the example of body dismemberment, which is strictly regulated in Japan. This seems to extend to the superfluous visual depiction of blood as well, at least in certain circumstances, although the policy with regard to blood is more ambiguous. Examples of the censorship of dismemberment actions and depictions of blood are plentiful. For example, in the illustration on the packaging of the Japanese version of the game, Left 4 Dead (published by Electronic Arts; released in Japan for PC and Xbox 360, January 22, 2009), which depicts a hand with four fingers but no thumb on the packaging of the game’s original version, a thumb was added to the Xbox 360 version of the game and a label was added where the thumb would normally be in the Japanese PC version. In both cases, the (apparently) dismembered hand is “corrected.” In the game, Fallout 3 (published by Bethesda Softworks for PS3; released in Japan, January 15, 2009), body parts of both human characters and ghouls

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who have individual names (and therefore an individual identity) cannot be dismembered as in the game’s original version. Similarly, a scene in which one character shoots another, literally blowing his head off was changed in the Japanese version so that the victim of the shooting cannot actually be seen. Finally, the image of a dismembered finger in the game’s original version is changed to a scroll and referred to as “evidence of a bad guy,” instead of “finger.” In games such as Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway (published by Ubisoft for PS3 and Xbox 360; released in Japan, November 27, 2008), and Conan (published by THQ Japan for PS3 and Xbox 360; released in Japan, December 6, 2007), depictions of bleeding and body part dismemberment have been removed in the Japanese versions of these games. In the Japanese version of Gears of War (published by Microsoft for Xbox 360 and PC; released in Japan for Xbox 360, January 18, 2007), depictions of dismembered body parts are obscured from the player’s view. In the Japanese version of Dead Rising (published by Capcom for Xbox 360; released September 28, 2006), a zombie game developed by Capcom in Japan and heavily influenced by the movies of George Romero,18 the zombies are not dismembered as they are in versions of the game developed for export. In several other games, depictions of blood have either been completely removed, such as True Crime: New York City (published by Spike for PS2; released in Japan, July 27, 2006) and Saints Row 2 (mentioned above), or toned down, as in the game Driver: Parallel Lines (mentioned above). The sensitivity to blood is particularly acute in the German market, where the depiction of red blood in video games is forbidden. In adapting games for the German market, blood is therefore either turned green or removed completely, conventions which seem gradually to have been adopted more widely. For example, the color of blood was turned to green in the version of the game Left 4 Dead (mentioned above) for Xbox 360 and the removal of blood for the German version of Hitman became an optional feature of the game in all markets.19 In other words, the player could choose either the bloodied or bloodless version even in markets without formal restrictions.

Suicide Suicide is another form of violence that is restricted across societies. Whereas the acceptability of suicide in Japan as a means of restoring honor or as a potentially honorable form of death in certain circumstances is well established, suicide has, particularly in Christian countries, been treated as an illicit form of death, subject to moral and/or legal prohibitions.20 The

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historical restriction against burying those who have committed suicide in hallowed ground is one example of the way in which the stigma of suicide was manifested. In the context of video games localization, this is most often an issue for Japanese games being localized for markets outside Japan. For example, in the original Japanese version of the game Kingdom of Hearts II a scene in which a male character threatens suicide, holding a gun to his head, has been amended in the North American version of the game such that the character is depicted just lowering the gun, with no visual intimation of suicide. Similarly, whereas the Japanese game Jûsô kihei valuken (Assault Suits Valken) features a scenario in which the leader of an evil empire commits suicide, in the North American version, titled Cybernator (published for PS2, 2004), this scenario is absent.

Symbolism and Symbolic Violence In addition to those images related to overt violence—killing, dismemberment, bodily injury, blood, and suicide—images that convey or have the potential to convey “symbolic violence” are also the target of censorship bodies and rating organizations.21 Examples include religious iconography, but also symbols which may be sensitive for their cultural, historical, or political associations. Within the context of video game localization, well-known examples include the symbol for Buddhism, which is the exact inverse of the swastika and which is therefore removed from Japanese games sold in Germany, and the Star of David, which has been either excised or altered in the localized version of games from both Japan and Taiwan.22 In a relatively dramatic example, the Japanese game Top Secret: Hitler’s Revival (published by Capcom for NES; released in Japan, July 20, 1988) was published in both North American and European markets as Bionic Commando. All swastikas and references to Nazism which appeared in the original Japanese game were removed and the name of the leader or boss figure was changed from Adolf Hitler to Master D. In a final example, the game Innocent Sin (published by Althus for Playstation; released in Japan, June 24, 1999) was never localized for markets outside Japan due to the appearance of Adolf Hitler in the game. Not surprisingly, allusions to events related to the Second World War, particularly the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are a sensitive area in terms of censorship.23 In the version of the game Fallout 3 (mentioned above) which was localized for Japan, the player cannot detonate an atomic bomb (that destroys an entire settlement and its inhabitants) as in the original version, and the name of the weapon is changed from Fatman, which was also the name of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, to Nuka Launcher. In the

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North American market, the analogous historical sensitivity seems to be race and images which might be interpreted in racial terms are often the target of the ESRB, the American video game-rating organization. For example, in the original (Japanese) version of the game, Earthbound (published by Nintendo for SNES; released in Japan, August 27, 1994), there are characters wearing purple hoods over their faces, inscribed with the letters HH (Happy, Happy). In the version localized for the North American market, the letters have been removed, so as to minimize possible associations with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Censorship in North America is also characterized by a general avoidance of religious allusions or of any iconography that might be construed (or misconstrued) as referencing religion. In the Japanese game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (released by Nintendo for SNES, November 21, 1991), a subtitle in the Japanese game containing the word kamigami (Gods) is translated so as to avoid any religious referencing. In the same game, several hieroglyphic-like symbols in the imaginary in-game language Hylian are removed due to their possible conflation with religious symbolism and the lead villain, Agahnim, is changed from a priest in the Japanese version into a wizard in the English version. Finally, in the back story to the game, the part of Japanese instruction booklet which mentions that the enemy is sent to the world by Gods is excised in the English version. Verbal allusions are similarly avoided. In the North American version of Final Fantasy IV (Final Fantasy II in North America), the name of a particular spell is changed from Holy to White and the name of a building from Tower of Pray to Tower of Wishes. In the same game, the term “Jihad” is changed to “Crusader.” In the North American version of the Japanese game, ActRaiser—released by Enix (now Square-Enix) for SNES, December 26, 1990—the name of the protagonist has been changed from kami—literally “God”—to the master and the name of the lead villain changed from Satan to The Evil One, although these might be seen as almost synonymous. Finally, in the game UnJammer Lammy (published by Sony Computer Entertainment for Playstation; released in Japan, March 18, 1999), a scenario in stage 6 of the Japanese and European versions in which the protagonist dies and goes to hell has been drastically altered in the North American version so that the character does not even die, let alone go to hell. Reference to the devil (which appears in the Japanese and European versions) has also been removed.

Analysis and Conclusions As this chapter has hopefully demonstrated, both physical violence and what I have referred to as symbolic violence (borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu)

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are areas commonly targeted by censorship and rating organizations worldwide. In the case of symbolic violence, which is conceived of in this paper as almost any image or allusion deemed offensive or inappropriate within a particular social or cultural context, the basis for censorship is fairly clear and the problematic nature of allusions to Nazism in Germany, nuclear bomb references in Japan, the Star of David in parts of the Middle East, or the irreligious uses in one context of symbols deemed religious in another context requires no further explanation. However, in the case of physical violence, how might sensitivities to particular patterns of violence—within the context of the censorship of video games for consumption in Japan and, in the case of suicide, the censorship of Japanese games for consumption outside Japan—best be understood? A definitive explanation would depend on the results of further field research, but one possible explanation lies in the conception of purity and impurity with regard to death, the body, bodily injury, and blood in Japan and, in particular, the association between death, impurity, and the spirit of the deceased as reflected in death rituals. Shinitani, for example, in his classification of impurity, includes blood, fluids, grime, nails, hair, injury, and illness under the heading of “body impurity” and death under the heading of “contagious impurity.”24 The dead body is a particular source of impurity (kegare) and the corpse’s impurity can “inflict harm on the living if one either touches the decomposing body or draws near the raging and undisciplined spirit that the body has released.”25 The correct treatment of the deceased following death involving the correct preparation of the body for funeral and burial and purification of both the body and its immediate environment are essential in protecting the living from the pollution of death and in ushering the soul of the departed into the next life. This is reflected in the modern funeral industry, where “the handling of the deceased, whether transporting, dressing or bathing, is the most important responsibility of funeral professionals.”26 Suzuki cites the unfortunate example of the dismissal of an employee following an accident in which the back door of the vehicle transporting a recently deceased corpse flew open, delivering the casket and its contents unceremoniously into the road. The source of death pollution derives not only from the body itself, but more specifically from the close relationship between the body and the spirit or soul that resided therein and the aim of the sequence of death, funeral, and post-funeral rituals is to facilitate the smooth separation of body from spirit or soul and to usher the latter into the final stage of existence, ancestorhood. The period immediately following death is therefore particularly problematic, due to the close relationship between the spirit and the corpse.27

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Another consideration is the way in which the person died. Not all spirits are the same in terms of the danger they pose to the living and wandering spirits (muenbotoke) pose a particular danger. Muenbotoke “are those spirits who either have met an unanticipated and usually violent death or have died in some sense unfulfilled and thus reluctant or unable to quit the world of the living.” According to Suzuki, wandering spirits can include either kin or non-kin, noting that “non-kin who have died by violence away from home, are always considered harmful and dangerous. They linger in the place where they die, bringing misfortune to the living unless they are cared for and placated.”28 Suzuki notes that in all cases of death, whether kin or non-kin, “the deaths of young persons and violent deaths, whatever the age of the deceased” are particularly traumatic.29 Finally, a consideration in caring for the corpse of the deceased is a belief that death is not final until cremation, “a person experiences death twice, once at the hospital and again at cremation.” In the interim, the deceased “is treated as if still alive, and death is delayed until the end of the funeral.”30 In this sense, the period between physical death and cremation might be seen as a liminal phase during which the corpse is neither dead, nor alive, with the purification rituals aimed at both neutralizing the contagion of death and easing the transition into the next world (culminating in cremation) still pending. Returning to the censorship of violence in video games in Japan, the basis for an aversion to lingering images of dead bodies in the game world or to the mistreatment of defilement of dead bodies may become somewhat elucidated. Not only are deaths in the context of video games usually violent and untimely, but conceptually, they also fall into a category of muenbotoke discussed by Suzuki—non-kin wandering spirits who have died violently—and thus are, potentially, particularly harmful and dangerous. The mistreatment of dead bodies, which is almost something of a trope in certain genres of American action movies, for example when a protagonist uses the corpse of a recently deceased enemy (usually) to shield himself (or, more rarely herself) from incoming gunfire seems to be avoided in analogous Japanese media and is certainly a target of censorship in the case of video games. Whereas the finality of physical and biological death as it tends to be conceived medically means that what happens to the corpse thereafter, is, at least in certain circumstances, immaterial—that is to say, it really makes no difference as the person is dead anyway—physical death in Japan does not seem to be conceptualized has having quite the same degree of finality and the corpse of the recently deceased is, in terms of its proximity to harmful spirits and its potential to inflict harm on the living, still very much

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alive. Neutralization of the pollution associated with death and of the danger posed by the recently deceased corpse depends very much on the care taken by the living in performing the necessary rituals of purification. This imperative is particularly acute in the case of so-called wandering spirits, including non-kin who have died violently and/or prematurely, and in a somewhat paradoxical inversion of relationships amongst the living in Japan, care for the spirit of the stranger who may have been “invisible” in life becomes a particular responsibility of the living (even living non-kin), if only to neutralize the considerable danger posed by the spirits of those who have died while disaffected or disenfranchised in life. To conclude, this paper addressed the issue of violence in video games in Japan, including both the way in which the video game industry in Japan is orientated vis-à-vis the issue of violence in video games and the particular ways in which physical violence is manifested (or not) in the content of video games themselves. Whereas the general orientation of the games industry toward violence can be understood with reference to the history of critical media discourse and public perception of video games and the structure of the games industry, the particular ways in which physical violence is manifested in the censorship and rating of video games in Japan may be elucidated with reference to the relationship between purity and danger31 as articulated in the context of Japanese death and funerary rituals, but also with reference to dismemberment, bodily injury and blood. Although confirmation of this interpretation would depend on the results of further fieldwork, the research is at least suggestive of several tentative observations. First, with regard to the question of whether games and other virtual realms reflect or encode culture, this chapter suggests that censorship provides an interface for examining the way in which certain aspects of culture are mediated in the context of the production and localization of games. It also suggests (to return to the question posed at the beginning of this paper) that the visions of dystopia imagined, for example, in the postapocalyptic world of Fallout 3 or in the mean streets of Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto IV are culturally circumscribed. Things happen there which, while acceptable or at least tolerated in one cultural context, may be inconceivable or undesirable in another, even if it is just virtual dystopia.

Notes The author would like to thank The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation for financial support of the research upon which this chapter is based. Thanks are also due to interviewees in video game–related industries in

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Japan and the United Kingdom who were generous with their time and information and to the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, University of Oxford and the School of Global Studies, Tama University (Japan) for their institutional support. Special thanks to Mr. R. Hasegawa at SEGA for his generous assistance in compiling examples of games censorship, to Vitor de Magalhaes for reading and commenting on an earlier version of the paper, and to Dr. Dixon Wong for kindly arranging usage of the library at the University of Hong Kong. 1. Tom Boellstorff, “A Ludicrous Discipline? Ethnography and Game Studies,” Games and Culture 1, no. 1 (2006): 29–35; and Kurt Squire, “Cultural Framing of Computer/Video Games,” Game Studies 2, no. 1 (2002), http://gamestudies.org/0102/ squire/?ref=HadiZayifla.com. Both touch on the relevance of culture and/or social context. 2. Interviews were conducted in Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, mostly between March 2007 and March 2009, with representatives of at least a dozen Japanese game software (or hardware and software) producers, including large companies such as Sony, Nintendo, Konami, Capcom, SEGA, and Taito and smaller companies such as Hudson, iNiS and From Software, for example. In addition to interviews and company visits, dozens of presentations related to the creation, development, production, and localization of games were attended at Game Developer Conferences in San Francisco (2007, 2009, 2010) and in London (2007) and Brighton (2007) in the United Kingdom. Interviews were also conducted with representatives of about ten companies engaged in games localization, including four to five companies engaged exclusively in the localization of games and four to five game software and/or platform producers which undertake games localization in house. These were supplemented by several visits to and interviews with representatives of the Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association (CESA)—the body which represents the interests of the computer games industry in Japan—and the Computer Entertainment Rating Organization (CERO), which is responsible specifically for the assessment of video game content and the rating of video games in Japan. 3. A possible exception is Hong Kong, where both original and localized versions of many games seem to be bought and sold relatively freely. In the case of some Japanese games, for example, both the original (Japanese) version and localized versions are available. 4. An example is Grand Theft Auto III, which was not recommended by CERO for sale in Japan, but which was nevertheless released by its Japanese publisher, Capcom, selling more than half of a million copies and becoming a considerable commercial success. 5. One explanation for the differences in criteria used for assessing video games as compared with films is that the former is immersive and therefore the player is directly involved in the action, whereas the action in film is extraneous to the viewer. 6. Personal interview, March 10, 2010. 7. One case specifically mentioned was the kidnapping and murder of four young girls by Tsutomu Miyazaki in 1988–1989. After his arrest, it was discovered that his

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apartment contained thousands of pornographic and pedophilic videos and magazines which, although not directly linked with video games per se, were nonetheless important in establishing the connection between media and anti-social behavior in the minds of the public. 8. The meaning of otaku, which is said to have been first coined by editor and columnist Akio Nakamori, has migrated somewhat over time. Whereas its original connotation was of a person whose interests were hardcore, unwholesome, and antisocial, it is currently used in a more sympathetic and innocuous way—something akin perhaps to an endearing nerd. The image may have been enhanced by the publication of Densha Otoko, a story about an otaku who finds love on a train after shielding a young woman from a drunken would-be harasser. Supposedly based on a true story originally posted on the Japanese social-networking site, 2 Channel, Densha Otoko has been released as a movie, a television series, a book, and manga in multiple versions. 9. Personal interview, March 10, 2010. 10. Interview, From Software, December 2008. 11. Interview, Manager, Konami Digital Entertainment Co., Ltd., November 2008. 12. Interview, Manager, Konami Digital Entertainment Co., Ltd., November 2008. Possible exceptions to this generalization include the Metroid and Castlevania series, which, while strongly associated with Nintendo platforms, contain more mature content. 13. Anthony Giddens, Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 123. 14. Giddens, Emile Durkheim, 123. 15. Interview, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (London), November 1, 2007. 16. Interview, R. Hasegawa, March 23, 2009. 17. Interview, H. Steino, November 2008. 18. Keiji Inafune, head of Research and Development at Capcom and a big fan of George Romero’s zombie movies since junior high school, claims that he asked his staff at Capcom to watch Romero’s movies for inspiration. He noted that the female members of his staff, in particular, did not like the films, explaining that in Japan, “zombies are weird and scary” (lecture given at the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco, March 8, 2007). 19. Interview, H. Seino, November 2008. 20. As Maurice Pinguet, Voluntary Death in Japan (Cambridge, Mass: Polity Press, 1993), 3 observes, “In Japan, there was never any objection in principle to the free choice of death—a question which Western ideology has always found difficult to pronounce.” In a more recent discussion of debtor suicide in Japan, Mark D. West notes that some of his interviewees considered suicide to be “some combination of ‘traditional,’ honorable, selfless and ‘courageous.’” See Mark D. West, Law in Everyday Japan: Sex, Sumo, Suicide and Status (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 249. 21. I borrow Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence to mean the violence of symbolic images in video games or, specifically, the capacity of imagery which may not be overtly violent in a physical sense to cause discomfort, offense, or oppression.

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As a slight variation on Wright’s observation that “what violent images mean in one context can mean something entirely different within another context” (2006: 3), within the context of games localization, a symbol which has a neutral or innocuous meaning in one context may very well have a powerful (positive or negative) meaning in another. See Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Talmadge Wright, “Killing Zombies, Terrorists, and Aliens: The pleasure and anxieties of symbolic violence.” Paper presented at the Midwest Sociological Society, Omaha, Nebraska, April (2006). 22. In March 2001, Saudi Arabia’s religious authority banned the Pokémon series and related spin-offs, which it claimed “promotes Zionism and involves gambling” (BBC News, Monday, March 26, 2001). The main issue was the appearance of the Star of David as a symbol in one of the Pokémon cards. The symbol also appeared in the title of a game published by Taiwanese company, TGS (between the first and second words of the title), and had to be removed in versions of the game localized for both European and North American markets. 23. See Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan (Armonk, N.Y., and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1991) for an account of censorship of this issue during the post-war occupation of Japan. 24. Cited in Hikaru Suzuki, The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 28. 25. Suzuki, The Price of Death, 27. 26. Interestingly, this was the theme of a very popular recent movie, Okuribito (2008) or Departures in English, which was directed by Yojiro Takita. The story is about an unemployed cellist who unwittingly accepts a job as an apprentice undertaker. The movie is a highly aestheticized account of how the body of the deceased is treated and prepared for burial. 27. Robert J. Smith, Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), 44. 28. Suzuki, The Price of Death, 32. 29. Suzuki, The Price of Death, 83. 30. Suzuki, The Price of Death, 61. 31. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo. (New York: Routledge, 2004).

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CHAPTER NINE



Coding Culture: Video Game Localization and the Practice of Mediating Cultural Difference Rebecca Carlson and Jonathan Corliss

Media(ted) Imaginings “See, okay, the problem is, I want to be Japanese. That’s my problem.” Sophie1 laid her sunglasses down on the table and smiled, a bit embarrassed; it was clear that our conversation had been orbiting this point since we started talking about her interest in Japanese television dramas over an hour ago. Sophie explained to me that she felt drawn to Japanese dramas, just as she’d first been drawn to the anime shows she saw on Toonami2 when she was in middle school. Now that she was a college student, her fascination with Japanese media was motivating her to study Japanese: I guess, when I started watching anime and the dramas in particular, I got really attached to the culture. I don’t even know what it is about it, there’s something about the culture that really drew me in and I wanted to get to the point where I could be on the same, I guess I’ll never be on the same level because I’m a foreigner, but where I could have a good conversation with a native or even at some point go there and live and maintain a job and attempt to integrate myself into the culture.

Sophie laughed at herself as she completed this statement, acknowledging the tenuous prospect of fully integrating herself into Japanese society. Sophie was particularly self-conscious of the ways in which her experience with, and her excitement for Japanese mass culture, had produced in her a mediated imagination of Japan. She described for me the way the narrative structure

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of Japanese romance television dramas—which typically feature a brooding male protagonist who, in the end, is won over by the female lead—helped to create in her a “false conception,” an idea that most Japanese men are similar to their television counterparts. Yet, despite Sophie’s skepticism, and her full awareness that she is more engaged with an imagined, media-constructed Japan than an actual place she has yet to encounter, her desire to be(come) Japanese remains. As Benedict Anderson argued,3 national identity is constructed as an imagined belonging to other (mostly distant) people and places, and is produced in part with the help of nationally oriented media objects such as newspapers. Sophie’s longing suggests that national, even ethnic identity is a modern dilemma staged at a site of contestation; while embedded in the imagination and produced through engagement with media as Anderson suggests, identity (both personal and national) becomes a matter of consumer choice, a bricolage filled, possibly, with tension and inconsistencies. Quite obviously, the cultural mythologies we produce as we sift through and devour global media impact, in turn, the ways we imagine our selves. Arjun Appadurai links what he argues is a “new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities”4 directly to (a shift in) the work of the imagination. The imagination—expressed in dreams, songs, fantasies, myths, and stories—has always been part of the repertoire of every society, in some culturally organized way. But there is a peculiar new force to the imagination in social life today. More persons in more parts of the world consider a wider set of possible lives than they ever did before.5

Appadurai cites the increasing(ly rapid) circulation of electronic media and of people as the major contemporary features that texture the work of the imagination, and he draws attention to the sites of their contingent intersection: “As Koreans in Philadelphia watch the 1988 Olympics in Seoul through satellite feeds from Korea, and as Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran . . . moving images meet deterritorialized viewers.”6 While these examples focus on the meeting of migrating—but categorically analogous—people and media, audiences that appear as stationary subjects may be equally transformed by circulating electronic texts, a joining of people with a global media that doesn’t remind them of a “home,” but ignites in them an excitement for places they have yet to go. As these audiences search through and filter the narratives and images presented to them, they engage with and produce (alternate) identities; as in Sophie’s case,

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an identity that resonates with difference. Subjectivity then may be actively created and performed through an engagement with circulating—and therefore often not local—people and things.

Channeling In her discussion of Appadurai’s work on the imagination and the digital portable “pet” tamagotchi,7 Anne Allison ties contemporary experiences of migration and media (more broadly figured as interactive technology) to the cultural state of late capitalism. With increasing mobility, necessary or desired,8 and the blurring of previously impervious borders (of all kinds), Allison argues that subjectivities—as they are formed and performed—are themselves reconfigured in ways directly connected to “flexible accumulation, fragmented demand, and postindustrial capitalism.”9 Characteristically then, subjectivities are fashioned from and through engagement with difference, mobility, flux: In our postmodern era of technologized labor and play, people acquire subjectivity not through seeing or thinking of themselves as whole beings (interpellation through mirroring) but through interactive relations (interfaces in chat rooms, Internet, e-mail) that split and shift.10

If, as Appadurai argues our subjectivities are increasingly constructed from— and through engagement with—materials in global circulation, and as Allison adds, these materials are often uneven interfaces, then it is important to remember that spaces like Internet chat rooms—and other types of objects with which we form “interactive relations”—have been produced deliberately and with particular motives, often profit. Once they have been designed, crafted, packaged, shipped, and advertised, these objects (media texts, sound bites, images) go in motion; these movements are rarely uncontested, rather they are challenged, complicated travels, during which goods are negotiated, reworked, and revalorized at various stages along their routes. Indeed circulation—whether it is of objects, ideas, people—is never free-form, neutral, or apolitical. The movement of people and things, and the hands, perspectives, and laws that motivate and process these migrations, do much more than facilitate or create interconnections and networks; instead global movements are active processes which involve the “recarving of channels and the remapping of the possibilities of geography.”11 Similarly for Steiner, goods enter and exit “border zones,”12 moments when global circulations are slowed to a standstill while mediators wrestle with and negotiate the meaning and value

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that goods will assume when they “land” (or get downloaded or streamed). These mediations shape not only what goods and images global consumers have access to—as various forces work to determine how easily or along what routes things can travel—but also in turn, construct the imaginative possibilities from which people are able to craft understandings of their selves and of the globe. Video games are especially relevant to Appadurai’s and Allison’s argument. Products like video games (in their range of formations13) have achieved unprecedented success across international markets—these products represent the social and technological vanguard of emerging interactive media. Not only do video games circulate transnationally themselves, modern video games increasingly serve as interactive platforms that enable a sort of virtual mobility through which gamers might chat, interact, and play both cooperatively and competitively with people from other regions of the world. When video games (distributed through legitimized means) do circulate— crossing borders in search of international profits—they are “localized,” or altered for their international distribution. They are translated and they are adapted for national regulatory boards and regional software requirements. Images, animations, and overall design aesthetics, game mechanics and interface, narrative, and even button-mapping might be modified to accommodate the perceived differences between regional markets. Notably, localization is predicated upon origins and destinations—specifically, navigating the difficulties of linking two groups of locally situated people. Over the years, there have been countless examples of entrepreneurs who profit from their ability to successfully navigate cross-cultural negotiations. As economies rely more and more on the rapid transnational circulation of goods, services, and finances, and on global networks of high-speed digital communications technologies, they have also come to rely increasingly on the incorporation of cross-cultural “expertise” in various forms. People like translators, international marketers, and localizers, then, may have a more direct and immediate impact on our everyday lives than in the past. Most important, these people are often in the position to mediate aspects of our knowledge about the world. When a marketer says a game will not sell in the United States, or when a translator changes a joke to make it more “culturally appropriate,” they become a kind of gatekeeper, shaping and channeling (and sometimes preventing entirely) the transnational circulation of these stories and images. Thus it seems especially important to examine the contexts and consequences of these decision-making practices. Pointing out the way Appadurai’s discussion of the imagination remains “sketchy on the issues of both power and production,” Allison asks: “How

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precisely is the imagination produced, by and for whom, in what forms, and with what vested interests?”14 We are interested in the agents and institutions that structure our social imaginations—and our subjectivities—by mediating which images are available to what audiences to imagine through. In this essay, we consider the power at play when intermediaries—in our case, video game localizers—filter the images and narratives that are sold and marketed to global consumers, and the way these mediating processes in turn are produced by, and productive of, (cultural) imaginings. Furthermore, while localization practices are often framed by a discourse that positions cultural differences as both incommensurable and easily and discretely bounded by the borders of nation-states, the day-to-day work of localizers typically involves a much more nuanced negotiation of contradictions, dilemmas, and interests.

Localizing Play In the video game industry, localization refers primarily to the translation of text and voice-work within a game, the game’s instruction manual and any additional packaging. In this usage, a “localizer” is very specifically a translator, editor, or tester involved in this translation process. When we use the word “localization,” however, we are referencing the broader sense, which encapsulates any of a wide range of activities designed to adapt products to the perceived differences between local markets. In this sense, individuals who do not specifically identify as “localizers” are responsible for much of the localization process. Many aspects of video game localization begin well before there are even any assets to translate—deciding, for example, where the game will be sold, and what languages it will be translated into. A game developer might decide not to invest in a Japanese localization if market research predicts low enough sales in Japan, and this is a localization decision. As a visual medium, localization often involves making decisions about images that may or may not be culturally “appropriate”—what symbols might not make sense in different cultural contexts, what character designs might attract or alienate different regional audiences.15 Erik Louden, a localization engineer for ENLASO Corporation explains: In different parts of the world, colors, symbols, wording and shapes can have different meaning . . . or no meaning at all. . . . One project I worked on had a light bulb that signified an idea in the pop-up help text. However, in the target language a light bulb signified nothing more than a light bulb. The graphics were replaced with the translation for the word “idea.”16

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This can mean limiting cultural references as much as possible in the production stages of a game (for example, stressing the use of generic characters over specific references) or altering references to fit new audiences. At the same time video games are interactive, and localization might even entail adjustments to gameplay mechanics. As an example, for the U.S. version of the 2006 Square Enix game Dirge of Cerberus, the movement speed of the player’s onscreen avatar was 150 percent faster than in the Japanese version—industry “experts” hold that U.S. game players prefer faster-paced gameplay while Japanese players are more subject to video game–induced motion sickness (the in-game ability to execute a “double jump” was also added). Another important aspect of video game localization is the technical nature of the video game medium. Video game software must be adapted to different regional hardware standards. A translator might be responsible for translating text strings, but a programmer has to make sure the translated strings fit on screen, or that the appropriate character sets are enabled. One of the most important aspects of video game localization is the negotiation of national regulatory boards. Video game ratings boards function much like the MPAA does for films released in the United States. While submission to the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) is strictly voluntary, most U.S. retailers refuse to carry an unrated video game, which, as Chandler explains, “can be bad for game sales.”17 The ESRB reviews game content and provides both an age rating (from “Early Childhood” to “Adults Only”) as well as more informative “content descriptors” (for example, “cartoon violence,” “crude humor,” or “simulated gambling”) for games released in the United States. Different regions have different regulatory boards, varying submission procedures, and vastly divergent sensitivities. Games deemed appropriate for all ages in one region may require heavy censorship in another, or be banned entirely. Successful video game localization, then, includes understanding and carefully navigating the idiosyncrasies of these regulatory boards. While the immersive, interactive nature of the video game medium requires a different, more intensive process of localization than an average print advertisement or television commercial, localization across a broad variety of forms share several basic ideologies and organizing principles. Central to these is the naturalization of a (particular kind of imagined) “global world” that must be proactively managed by producers in order to see their goods “make it” in today’s international marketplace. In Michael Anobile’s introduction to the second edition of The Localization Industry Primer, published by LISA (the Localization Industry Standards Association), he explains: A company’s products, services, documentation, customer support and maintenance procedures, marketing, etc. must all reflect the needs of the local market

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in terms of culture, language and business requirements. Multiple local market versions have to be produced simultaneously to stay ahead of the competition and ensure a return on investment within today’s shrinking product lifecycles.18

This conception of the global marketplace—in addition to reflecting the flexibility and obsolescence characteristic of late capitalism—also assumes that products must appear as if they were manufactured domestically, suggesting that consumers only want goods that feel familiar and “local.” This understanding is facilitated by the fact that products like software do need to be translated for regional markets if they are to be used and understood (of course, linguistic translation for regional markets is most often a privileging of the dominant, or national language). Additionally, many goods still contend with borders as they are physically transported across national lines; even Internet-circulated commodities (downloadable games, Web sites) must adapt to local languages and, at the insistence of governing bodies, submit to local laws (Google China for example). As a result, nation-states remain dominant organizing categories and convenient geographies for localizers to map their “regional markets,” collapsing the textures of linguistic and cultural diversity into smooth homogenous zones. Video game localization then often develops a logic rooted in cultural divides bounded by the borders of nation-states: conservative Germans don’t like blood, competitive American gamers are naturally better at first-person shooters, and the isolationist Japanese don’t like anything that isn’t Japanese. This type of cultural categorization, also characteristic of business textbooks and manuals, is reminiscent of, for example, that used by American forces when they occupied post-war Japan in the 1940s: “The victors arrived with briefing papers outlining salient features of ‘the Japanese personality,’ some of which were perceptive but many of which were cartoons. (Japanese intelligence agencies, in turn, were waiting with their own lists of ‘American characteristics.’).”19 Implicit in the activities and discourses of localization agents is a structuring logic that simultaneously naturalizes cultural mythologies and the need for localizers to navigate those differences. Addressing the role of “glocalization” in advertisement, Michael Maynard suggests that it becomes possible to systematically re-fashion media to better “suit” the tastes of another culture. In his cross-cultural comparison of two Gillette magazine advertisements, Maynard writes: Each ad reflects the culturally preferred posture a woman would assume in washing. Also, in the U.S. ad the woman appears to be nude, whereas in the Japanese ad, the woman is wearing a bathrobe. In these differences, Gillette

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the global brand, is accommodating to the local, and positioning the Sensor Excel as compatible with Japanese sensibilities.20

Echoing Maynard, Anoblie describes the kinds of details, or assets, that concern localizers: “Product presentation (size and shape, language, colors, graphics, icons, etc.) and functionality must be adapted to local conventions.”21 For video games, interactivity again complicates the localization process where functionality is a central concern. Gamers don’t simply scan an image or flip through text, they very clearly use a game. As participatory agents, game players without at least suitably translated manuals can find game play difficult to impossible. However, clear-cut standards and rules for making these kinds of changes (a nude woman in the shower transformed as a seated women in a bathrobe), become tools for imagining, then fixing cultural tastes and differences; as a result localization rhetoric tends to strategically reify localities, as well as local tastes, humor, and meanings—in hopes of successfully anticipating the desires of regional audiences and generating a profit.

Lost in Translation Surprisingly, cultural differences and divides are often supported, enforced, and elaborated on by “locals.” In an article by Steven Kent titled “Video Games That Get Lost in Translation: Why Most U.S. Titles Don’t Fare Well in Japan (and Vice Versa),” Capcom director-producer Hideo Kojima suggests, “Japanese players do not like being thrown into an arena in which they are given very little instruction.”22 Kent suggests Japanese gamers “prefer fantasy, strategy, and role-playing games, while U.S. gamers prefer crime, shooters, and sports”; Namco managing director Keiji Tanaka adds, “Violent games are not so popular in Japan.”23 Kojima’s quote, referencing the unsuccessful Japanese launch of the Western blockbuster Grand Theft Auto III (Rockstar Games Inc. 2001), disregards two important details: the Japanese version was released with notably poor localization; and despite the industry’s widespread anticipation for the title to flop in Japan, steady long-term sales “mostly due to word-of-mouth” have in fact established Grand Theft Auto III’s popularity among Japanese audiences.24 Similarly, the spectacular and unwavering Japanese success of Capcom’s graphic survival-horror series Biohazard—from the original, genre-defining 1996 release to the 2005 multiplatform “Game of the Year,” through more than ten sequels, remakes, and spin-offs each refining the disturbing flesh-eatingzombie formula and imagery to increasingly gory heights—represents only

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one example of market evidence to call into question the all-too-common argument that “violent games do not sell in Japan.” Such misleading generalizations often reveal more about distributors’ motives or preconceptions than the tastes of international game audiences, though this does not limit their lingering impact on localization practices. For many years, Japanese games were made explicitly less difficult for U.S. audiences—or simply not exported as in the case of Final Fantasy V. J. C. Herz writes: “The theory is that Japanese children are more proficient at video games and what they consider challenging fun would simply frustrate and quash American grade-schoolers.”25 More recently, the reverse is true, with higher difficulty levels accompanying U.S. releases. Andrew Vestal quotes Japanese developer Tomonobu Itagaki’s insights on this: [The best players come from] North America. The basis of this opinion comes from Americans’ extremely active attitude towards video games [and] the inherent competitiveness present in their national identity.26

While both accounts theorize the difference in skill sets between U.S. and Japanese game-players, Vestal proposes that the changes in difficulty level do not reflect differing skill levels between game-players at all, but differences in markets.27 Japanese laws prohibit video game rental, encouraging instead a lively used-game market where fast turnovers keep gamers happier without damaging a developer’s profits. By purchasing a title at full price and completing it quickly, players maximize the game’s buyback value, so higher, more time-consuming difficulty levels are neither popular among gameplayers nor profitable for developers. On the other hand, American developers live in mortal fear their games will be deemed “just a rental.” Developers strive to make their games “rental proof” with more hours of gameplay than can be easily completed in a single rental. The best way to do this is to have tons of content; the less elegant way is to increase the difficulty and slow the player’s progress.28

Despite an overarching rhetoric that reifies inherent cross-cultural differences, localization practices are tied to a variety of forces, including as Vestal illustrates, deftly calculated marketing strategies. The industry’s “mantra,”29 that localizers work to make games appear as if they were made for each local audience, obfuscates the fact that localization decision-making practices reflect a wide range of aims and influences, and not simply imaginations of discrete regions of marketable cultural difference.

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Managing Uncertainty It is important to point out that we do not suggest that “markets” are not themselves cultural; as Theodore Bestor explains in his discussion of commodity chains, transnational networks as well as “the markets they flow through—are inherently cultural in their processes and effects.”30 In this respect, the market is a social institution that not only supplies perceived demand but also acts to produce and construct consumer needs and desires.31 Commodity chains and the “markets they flow through” are not disembodied entities of economic processes; rather they are both distinctly tied to and embedded within social institutions and everyday interactions. What we do hope to suggest, however, is that the cultural mythologies—produced and employed by localizers—are often dislodged from social realities; as Vestal’s example of video game sales and rentals in Japan illustrates, it is the imagination of “natural” cultural differences made manageable by cultural “do’s and don’ts” checklists that become discursive scapegoats of other, more nuanced factors. The cultural checklists that do appear may be, in some ways, implemented and circulated in an attempt to manage uncertainty. As the above example illustrates, the assumption that market preferences and consumer desires are determined above all by national or cultural difference (specifically a desire for goods that appear to be “madefor-me” local) is often positioned in localization discourse as the primary motivation for localization. However, as Marianne Lien demonstrates in her research of marketers in Norway,32 the discourse used by marketers to talk about what they do often varies a great deal from their day-to-day experiences and decision-making practices. As Lien discusses, “talk” surrounding the practices she observed tended to frame marketing as warlike, a battlefield where consumers and their purchasing power were fought for and over. However, the ways marketers made decisions in the everyday practice of selling goods was quite different, characterized instead by continual inconsistencies and uncertainties. We are similarly interested in the ways that video game localizers frame what they do, for themselves and for others, along divides of presumed “natural” cultural differences, while the practice of localizing a video game is in fact a much more nuanced act which negotiates, rather than always takes as given, cultural, linguistic, or national difference. Additionally, localization practices are shaped by, and react to, a variety of (often unacknowledged) forces and pressures that frequently have little to do with cultural divides.

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Negotiating Nations In his article “Rights of Passage: On the Liminal Identity of Art in the Border Zone,” Steiner writes about the way definitions of fine art are contested when objects travel across national borders. Steiner argues that, as things (including works of art) pass through “border zones,” their mobility, and their momentary “in-between” status, provoke various forms of reclassification or evaluation. He writes: “The emergence of definitions of value out of the very liminality [are] engendered by transit and passage across formal boundaries.”33 For many game developers, the early stages of localization entail attempts to craft games, stories, and characters that transcend territorial boundaries in order to court a perceived “global” audience. Later stages—translation, local and regional adaptation, marketing, encounters with national regulatory boards, for example—each explicitly entail the negotiation and transformation of meanings and values. Steiner’s image of rapidly circulating material culture objects slowed for a moment as they shift between cultural systems, between regimes of value or frameworks of meaning—temporarily held still for the necessary evaluations, negotiations, reclassifications—is helpful for thinking about video game localization. In addition, Steiner emphasizes the importance of not overlooking the significant political and economic implications of these decision-making practices. Consider the argument that some software localizers have made, that Castilian functions as a universal, neutral Spanish. Typically, however, developers release two Spanish-language versions of a title, one for Spain and one for Spanish-speaking Latin American markets. But why not release a Mexican Spanish version or accommodate any number of the widely varied Latin American Spanish-speaking communities, or even dialects within Spain itself? Of course, there are occasions when developers determine that the extra expense for even two versions is unwarranted and release a single Spanish-language version across all regions. Sometimes this makes practical sense—for example, a game that uses so little language (“START” and “QUIT”) that the versions would be identical. Sometimes it is a budgetary decision. But even preliminary localization decisions such as which languages to release in (and which to not) are obviously neither politically nor economically neutral. When video games are submitted to national regulatory boards, they enter a “border zone” where their meanings are explicitly re-categorized and redefined. Yet often, localization discourse makes the tenuous leap in logic from ratings-board regulations to cultural realities.

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We sometimes need to make changes to account for cultural differences. We all know about removing blood and gratuitous violence from games for the German market.34 Concerning cultural differences, we regularly remove blood and violence from the German versions of our titles.35

Both Pitts and Clune are of course referencing the well-documented stringency of Germany’s mandatory ratings system, not German “cultural differences.” But perhaps in hopes of anticipating the likelihood of a game’s success in different regional markets, or in an attempt to proactively manage the hurdles put forward by regulatory boards, and in order to consistently streamline and standardize localization tasks, culture and national politics are reified and then neatly collapsed into each other. In any case, games must remain flexible if they are to traverse the multiple, subjective, and divergent censorships of ratings boards. For Kearney, “globalization implies the decay of [center-periphery] distinctions,” and these processes make it inherently more difficult to think in terms of borders or boundaries.36 Instead, we would suggest that, as likely as both transnational processes and processes of globalization are to disrupt center-periphery distinctions, national borders, or similar instantiations of territorially inscribed power, it is essential to acknowledge that they are equally likely to participate in the maintenance or reproduction of those relationships in any given context. Appadurai evokes the image of nation-states “struggling to retain control” against transformations brought about by the increasingly rapid transnational circulation of electronic media.37 At the very least, the fact that global and transnational phenomena have the potential to “conflict with the jurisdiction and power of states”38 might be enough of a provocation for states to institute new or more rigorous mechanisms of “border patrol”—even if only a kind of backlash, these mechanisms are inextricably linked with transnational and globalizing processes. What we find interesting is the way this “border patrol” becomes integrated into the day-to-day practices of localizers. Through the enacted politics, power, and censorship of ratings boards, nation-states act to reterritorialize games for the people, places, and cultures they contend to circumscribe. Developers and localization vendors then, enacting decisionmaking practices enforced by these forms of censorship and mediation, often equate politics of nationalism with culture; in turn, they reproduce this discourse through the production and distribution of localized (modified, censored) games.

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(De)(re)territorializing As authors writing about globalization have reminded us (see, for example, Barrett),39 whatever processes may fall under the umbrella of “globalization,” they seem to simultaneously move in directions of both cultural differentiation and convergence. This is helpful for thinking about the way video game localizers often seem to be moving in two different directions when preparing software for different regional markets. Consider, for example, the way in which “foreignizing” and “domesticating” has been used to describe translation techniques. Foreignizing translations attempt to retain the cultural and historical provenance of the source text while domesticating translations work toward crafting a translated text that appears as if it is in fact an original target language text. A domesticating translation might replace details that are deemed too culturally specific to the source language with parallel materials more familiar to the target language reader— substituting slot machines for pachinko and dollars for yen as a text moves from Japanese to English, for example. A foreignizing translation would, of course, retain the pachinko and yen. Either technique entails compromise. Foreignizing translations may sacrifice much of the style, rhythm, and poetics of the source material and risk exoticizing and thereby drawing disproportionate attention to what may have been intended as mundane, routine, or otherwise innocuous details. Foreignizing translations are often more didactic and less accessible, further distancing the target language reader’s experience from the way a “native” reader would likely experience the text in its original source language. On the other hand, domesticating translations may sacrifice technical and “literal” aspects of the source material, or even the work’s overall atmosphere, similar to what happens when a film endeavors to “modernize” Shakespeare. Of course translators negotiate both foreignizing and domesticating decisions throughout the course of any project. As discussed earlier, localizers often insist that their work is fundamentally a domesticating endeavor: The brief of the localiser is to produce a version that will allow the players to experience the game as if it were originally developed in their own language and to provide enjoyment equivalent to that felt by the players of the original version.40

Despite the fact that this sentiment has become something of the game localization industry’s “mantra,” the reality is that localization is not so onesided. Koichi Iwabuchi speaks of a good’s “cultural odor,” or the association

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of (stereotypical) images or ideas of a “culture” with a product when it is consumed.41 Iwabuchi argues that while “the influence of cultural products on everyday life cannot be culturally neutral,”42 many goods that circulate globally are not identified as “foreign” or directly connected, in the minds of consumers, to—possibly distant—sites of production. Why is it, Iwabuchi asks, that a commodity like the Sony Walkman is considered “culturally odorless” when a video game like Pokémon—and all its associated media—is consumed in part precisely because it is perceived to be Japanese? Iwabuchi explains that he is “interested in the moment when the image of the lifestyle of the country of origin adds to the appeal of a product, the moment when ‘cultural odor’ becomes ‘cultural fragrance.’”43 When the international appeal of a video game, a video game franchise, or even the success of a particular developer is linked with perceptions of the product’s foreignness, as is increasingly often the case, localization can no longer be oversimplified as a purely domesticating endeavor. American consumers might be enchanted by the perceived “Japanese-ness” of a game’s animation, character design, or storytelling, but simultaneously affronted by the hyper-sexualization of the game’s adolescent protagonist. Describing a comparable example of the translation of American science fiction novels into French during the 1950s, Yves Gambier explains that French translators “considered that it was their task to import an exotic genre” and therefore explicitly “retained traces of foreignness”; “The translators were overtly rendering American science fiction, and they wanted this to be as patent as possible.”44 In contrast: In the process of localization we have seen repeated over and over again with Japanese cultural goods, American marketers were keen to neutralize the overt signs that Pokémon came from Japan.45

However, as Anne Allison later demonstrates, American localizers’ tendencies toward cultural swapping—typified with Pokémon by the blotting out of rice balls and the rotoscoping in of doughnut replacements46—eased with the rise in global popularity of Japanese mass culture goods. When markers of “foreign-ness” underlie or augment a global commodity’s international appeal, localization demands skillful maneuvering between fashion and function. Identifying the way globalizing processes are accompanied simultaneously by both cultural convergence and differentiation can contribute to an understanding of video game localization in another way as well. Chandler describes a phase of video game localization that she refers to as “internationalization.” During internationalization, the emphasis is on developing

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assets that are both flexible and organized. As an example, consider text files that will ultimately be displayed to the end-user in the form of on-screen instructions. Here, internationalization-phase flexibility means that, even if the initial files are in English, the programmers will enable a wide range of character sets in their programming code so that, when the time comes, it is as simple as possible to substitute the English language files with translated files that might include alternate character sets (non-Roman alphabet scripts). Making sure that these text files are well organized and easily accessible is obviously equally essential to making this transition as smooth as possible. And beyond these more technically oriented activities, during the “internationalization” phase of development writers and artists might be encouraged to generate materials with the widest possible appeal, and to avoid “culturally specific references such as the name of a popular movie star or well-known TV show.”47 These considerations are not limited to languagespecific assets like text or voice work. Perhaps the more interesting decisions are made when it comes to storytelling, visual assets, or even gameplay mechanics. Creating flexible assets often means assets that will not alienate potential international audiences. Describing her work on Ghost Recon 2 for example, Chandler, at the time one of the game’s producers, explained that her development team had worked to avoid problematic political issues by shaping storylines around personalities rather than regions (one developed antagonist instead of a homogenous “bad country”).48 (The game was ultimately banned in South Korea anyway.49) The Japanese word mukokuseki translates most literally to “statelessness” and is often used today to reference a particular aesthetic sensibility. With an eye toward the international marketplace, Japanese anime and video game artists often privilege mukokuseki character design, generating characters with ambiguous (flexible) phenotypes and national origins (characters with blue hair are one recurring convention of mukokuseki character design in Japanese mass-culture media). Iwabuchi50 emphasizes the relationship between mukokuseki design and the recent global appeal of made-in-Japan mass-culture media; however, mukokuseki and internationalization (as a phase of software localization) share the same basic principles—designing flexible or ambiguous assets (whether they are characters, stories, images, or even gameplay mechanics) in order to appeal to the broadest possible audience. In these ways, localizers must simultaneously manage both converging and differentiating tendencies; utilizing strategies that are themselves flexible, localizers adjust, or merely reframe, their localizations as more foreign or domestic depending on the situation. However, localizers and localization vendors—selling themselves as experts at navigating

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the unsteady and uncertain waters of international markets—play a role in producing these very contexts.

Protecting Sensibilities, Producing Expertise Just as national regulatory boards have an interest in protecting national borders and preserving “appropriate” national morals and values, game distributors and publishers occasionally act as cultural brokers, enacting and projecting perceptions about local audiences and communities. When Japanese game developer Hideo Kojima suggests that Japanese gamers don’t like play environments where they “are given very little instruction,”51 he contributes to the cultural material that localizers draw from when they modify games. This type of sweeping statement is often taken at face value, as it echoes thinking about divisions between nationally circumscribed audiences that already circulates in popular imaginaries. (Localizers, of course, don’t have to produce cultural checklists entirely on their own, they are provided for them in part from stereotypes that appear in popular media, video games included.) In his analysis of the cultural mythologies held by American fishermen about Japan, Bestor points out that their narratives or cultural imaginings are workable only because “contemporary North American life already provide[s] the cultural material out of which fishers can construct their own Japan.”52 But as Kojima and Namco managing director Keiji Tanaka demonstrate with their statements, cultural mythologies are also often produced and traded by regional game makers and distributors themselves, when, for example, they declare their own culture’s originality or uniqueness. While these statements may originate from concerns or observations tied to trends in profit making, cultural characteristics alone are often presented as root causes; in perhaps a rather self-fulfilling process, games are likely to do poorly in markets where regional distributors are already convinced that they won’t suit or appeal to local tastes and interests. (As discussed above, GTA III’s lack of success in Japan is blamed entirely on cultural divides rather than on a lack of a coordinated marketing campaign or quality localization.) Often localizers have to make changes as a result of pressures or suggestions from, for example, marketing groups and distributors in the target country. Describing changes made to the Ratchet and Clank series when localized for Japan, Roppyaku Tsurumi (Sony Computer Entertainment of Japan) explains: “Unlike Japanese designers, [American] level designers seem to want to make levels with toned-down color schemes, but in Japan we get requests from various offices asking us to please make the background

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more colorful.”53 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nintendo of America was well known for its intensive censorship policies; they regularly heavily localized (remade) games, particularly those from Nintendo Japan. Depictions of Christian crosses in Japanese games were consistently altered for U.S. release and representations of violence and nudity, or sexuality deemed “excessive,” were also toned down (nude characters clothed, blood turned to sweat). Nintendo of America’s guidelines for video game content describes their self-assigned role as cultural mediator: Nintendo is concerned that our products do not contain material that society as a whole deems unacceptable. . . . Although we realize that definitions of social, cultural and political views are highly subjective, we will continue to provide consumers with entertainment that reflects the acceptable norms of society.54

Localizers, then, must often contend with the dictates of the distributors in the region they are localizing for; distributors who, for one reason or another, have a stake in defining local tastes, contributing to national sentiments, or protecting the sensibilities of local citizens. The localization of Shiny Entertainment’s science-fiction platformer Wild 9 (1998) for release in Japan supplies a particularly rich example. Stuart Roch, at the time executive producer at Shiny Entertainment, writes that Wild 9 “inherently has a violent game mechanic stressing the use of [the main character’s] weapon to torture his enemies.”55 The original back cover describes Wild 9’s unique gameplay, its selling point: “Forget simple jumping and running. Wild 9 is the first game ever to let you torture your enemies! Use the Mangler or the Decapitator to finish them off.” As part of Wild 9’s localization for the Japanese market, the description on the back of the box was rewritten: “While solving the puzzle elements at each phase, find your group members in the first half who have been captured by your enemies. In the second half, use their special abilities and work together with them to escape!” The sound effects were also re-recorded to help soften the gameplay: the blood curdling screams of tortured enemies were substituted by overall shorter and more comical sounds. Roch explained that this allowed them “to create a different atmosphere for the game worlds.”56 Transformed, Wild 9 became Wildroid 9, screams became comic sound effects, and the main character Wex became Vex—changes implemented to reframe and soften the torture so important, so “inherent” in the Western version. Roch lectured on his experience localizing Wild 9 for Japan at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2000, explaining that during localization they

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had to redesign the game’s characters in what he described as the more Japanese-friendly anime style: Though the visual differences between the characters are obvious, it is difficult to come up with a standard style guide as to why Vex is more appealing to Japanese gamers than Wex. The Japanese gamer’s attraction to the anime style character is as much a cultural and historically conditioned affinity than anything else.57

Roch’s understanding of these “cultural affinities” emerges largely from the producer at Sony responsible for distributing Wild 9 in Japan; in fact, Roch explains that with the localization, Sony’s Japanese producer “pushed hard for the softer anime style versions of our characters to soften the gameplay a bit.”58 Wildroid 9’s resulting character design, renamed Vex, represents the Shiny team’s perception of a Japanese friendly character localization. “When you compare the two characters you will notice that by nature the anime style Vex does not have the kind of darkness and hardness that the Wex character has.”59 What is interesting is the way the original Wex sketch features a range of design sensibilities cultivated by contemporary Japanese animation. Roch explains that in adapting the character design “we were fortunate . . . having our designer Tom Tanaka on staff who already had a solid sense of anime character design,”60 though Roch does not mention that Tanaka’s background may have influenced the game’s original character animations and overall design aesthetic. The recursive maintenance of local identity becomes a vital investment for localization vendors, as the existence of local markets undergirds their currency as specialists; in other words, in the case of localization “experts,” livelihood is at stake. From his work on Trinidadian advertising agencies, Daniel Miller provides a comparable example that helps to illustrate some of the ways in which localizers may have a vested interest in maintaining notions of discrete categories of inherent cross-cultural difference.61 While local advertising agencies only profit slightly from placing international advertisements in local media, if “local agencies can persuade the transnationals that a product will not sell in Trinidad unless there is local advertising then the agency becomes responsible for actually creating adverts, which means a vastly larger budget.”62 Miller explains that local advertising “agencies happily ignore evidence that the more glamorous international adverts might be more effective in actually selling goods.”63 In this way: It is advertising including transnational agencies which have become the major investors in preserving and promoting images of local specificity, retaining if not creating the idea that Trinidad is different, and inculcating this belief within the population at large.64

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In an article titled “Lost in Translation—Japanese and American Gaming’s Culture Clash,”65 Simon Carless interviews John Ricciardi, (at the time) an editor with the Tokyo-based localization vendor Interone Inc. Daniel Miller explains that local advertisements may not be as effective as “glamourous international adverts,”66 and that it is in fact advertisers who are particularly invested in the preservation of local specificity. On a startlingly reflexive note, Ricciardi mentions: Sadly, poor translation and voice acting don’t seem to affect game sales as much as I wish they would. I can’t stand playing games that are littered with typos or nonsensical English, and for the most part, the quality of voice acting in video games is just terrible. I’d like to think that a good translation affects sales in a positive way, but unfortunately I don’t have any evidence of this.67

Mediating Circulations Appadurai has written that the transnational circulation of both people and electronic media shapes the way we imagine our social selves by providing a wider range of source materials—images, encounters, experiences—to imagine with.68 Most recently authors like Tsing,69 Eriksen,70 and Barrett71 have argued that power is an essential feature of circulation, that global flows encounter friction, that they are facilitated, channeled, and restricted. If media interactions provide people with the raw materials to craft particular understandings of the globe and of their place within it, then we argue that localization practices—as they mediate the transnational circulation of video games and filter the availability of particular images among particular audiences—are an important example of the kinds of structuring mechanisms that shape our social imaginations, our perceptions of cultural difference, and our imaginations of the other. Yves Gambier, probing the relationship between translation practices and the cross-cultural circulation of values and worldviews, argues that translators “take part in the creation of values and the circulation of certain aesthetic and intellectual options.”72 Localizers, then, are “fully implicated” agents in the translation process.73 Through the practices of video game localization, localizers operationalize particular understandings of globalization, culture, and cultural difference, and what it means to be “global” or “local.” As specific localization practices govern the transnational movement of video games, localizers often rely on essentialized (stereotyped) notions of “culture” and inherent cultural differences in their decision-making practices.74 Yet while localization rhetoric is implicitly tied to the belief that local audiences only

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desire local goods and that cultural differences fall neatly into circumscribed categories, the processes at work in the day-to-day practice of localization are infinitely more textured. Localizers, as Mazzarella argues of advertisers in India,75 form symbiotic relationships with the businesses that employ them, and are tasked with appeasing and appealing to corporate representatives’ perceptions of markets and cultures, while simultaneously producing and protecting the expertise that makes them valuable middlemen. In their negotiations with executives—promising that they have their fingers on the pulse of the regional markets they localize for—and national regulatory boards, localizers often move far afield from the audiences they stand to represent. If video game localization works—through self-conscious channeling—to mediate the transnational circulation of images, stories, and games, then at the same time localization mediates the images consumers’ use in the imagination of the possibilities of social life. What then are the consequences of this self-conscious reworking? What does it mean, for example, to read Japanese-ness—or to identify with a cultural other as Sophie does—in a media text that has been consciously modified and adapted to suit different geographically situated audiences?76 And what, in turn, are the implications for subjectivities that are fashioned from the narratives and images of these mediated texts? Understanding the complexities at work in the business of localizing video games—in order to trace the ways media, information, and even people are filtered and channeled as they move across borders and between zones—is especially valuable to the study of our increasingly interconnected social lives, in order to recognize the forces that shape how we are able to, in turn, experience and imagine those interconnections.

Notes Special thanks to Anne Allison and Mia Consalvo for their comments on drafts of this paper and to Nicole Constable and Gabriella Luka´cs for their continued support. A version of this chapter will appear in the January 2011 issue of Games and Culture, Sage Publications, as “Imagined Commodities: Video Game Localization and Mythologies of Cultural Difference.” 1. A pseudonym. 2. Toonami was a Cartoon Network block of animated shows that typically featured Japanese anime (for example, Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon). The segment ran from 1997 to 2008. Many of the college students we spoke with regarding their interest in Japanese mass culture credit Toonami with first introducing them to Japanese anime. This research was conducted with the approval of the Institutional Review Board of the University of Pittsburgh.

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3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991). 4. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4. 5. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 53. 6. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 4. 7. Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 8. Again, as Appadurai argues, mobility can be desired (as a possibility) in part because mass media expose a growing number of people to “a rich, ever-changing store of possible lives” (Modernity at Large, 53). 9. Allison, Millennial Monsters, 186. 10. Allison, Millennial Monsters, 187. 11. Anna Tsing, “The Global Situation,” Cultural Anthropology 15, no. 3 (2000): 327. 12. Christopher B. Steiner, “Rights of Passage: On the Liminal Identity of Art in the Border Zone,” in The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, eds. Fred R. Myers (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 2001), 207–31. 13. Video games, also sometimes called computer games, are a broad category of “interactive” media. Products may range from virtual pet simulators like tamagotchi, hand-held consoles like the popular Nintendo DS, console games for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and the Sony PlayStation, internet flash or web-based games, online MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, or PC-based games (categories between which there is considerable overlap). The question over what makes a game a “game” is currently under debate within the video game industry (for a brief discussion of this debate, see Rebecca Carlson, “‘Too Human’ Versus the Enthusiast Press: Video Game Journalists as Mediators of Commodity Value,” Transformative Works and Cultures no. 2 [2009], journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/98 .doi:10.3983/twc.2009.0098 [accessed April 1, 2009]. For the purpose of this article we are primarily concerned with the localization of console-based video games. 14. Allison, Millennial Monsters, 180. 15. In one memorable example, the box art for the Ratchet and Clank (Insomniac Games) series of games was drastically remade for its release in Japan: the original computer-generated image of the main characters was redrawn in a (somewhat cliché) anime style with a brighter color scheme, and Ratchet sprouted considerably larger, bushy eyebrows. 16. Louden quoted in Heather Maxwell Chandler, The Game Localization Handbook (Hingham, Mass.: Charles River Media, 2005) 86. 17. Chandler, The Game Localization Handbook, 29. 18. Michael Anobile, “Introduction Letter,” in The Localization Industry Primer, edited by Arle Lommel and Deborah Fry. hobbit.ict.griffith.edu.au/~davidt/cit3611/ LISAprimer.pdf (accessed September 1, 2009), 3.

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19. In a footnote, Dower lists the American characteristics compiled by Japanese intelligence: (1) Practical, business like; (2) Straightforwardness; (3) Speedy action; (4) Self-conceited mind; (5) Adventurous spirit; (6) Punctuality; and (7) Vulgarity. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World-War II (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999), 25. 20. Michael L. Maynard, “From Global to Glocal: How Gillette’s SensorExcel Accommodates to Japan,” in Keio Communication Review 25 (2003): 57–75, 68. 21. Anobile, “Introduction Letter,” 3. 22. Steven L. Kent, “Video Games That Get Lost in Translation: Why Most U.S. Titles Don’t Fare Well in Japan (and Vice Versa),” 2004, www.msnbc.msn.com/ id/4780423/ (accessed December 1, 2006), 3. 23. Kent, “Video Games That Get Lost in Translation,” 2. 24. Simon Carless, “Lost in Translation—Japanese and American Gaming’s Culture Clash,” 2004, www.gamasutra.com/features/20040121/carless_01.shtml (accessed December 1, 2005). 25. J. C. Herz, Joystick Nation: How Video games Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1997), 119. 26. Andrew Vestal, “Japantown,” The Official Playstation Magazine. no. 92 (May 2005). 27. Vestal, “Japantown.” 28. Vestal, “Japantown.” 29. Arle Lommel, “Is Localization a Mouse or a Rat? Review of Mouse or Rat?,” in Localization Industry Standards Association’s The Globalization Insider 1.2, February 2004, www.lisa.org/globalizationinsider/2004/02/is_localization.html (accessed November 22, 2009). 30. Theodore C. Bestor, “Supply-Side Sushi: Commodity, Market, and the Global City,” American Anthropologist 103, no. 1 (2001): 76–95, 77. 31. Bestor, “Supply-Side Sushi,” 85. 32. Marianne Elizabeth Lien, Marketing and Modernity (New York: Berg, 1997). 33. Steiner, “Rights of Passage,” 212. 34. Pitts quoted in Chandler, The Game Localization Handbook, 42. 35. Clune quoted in Chandler, The Game Localization Handbook, 129. 36. Michael Kearney, “The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 547–65, 548–50. 37. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 189. 38. Kearney, “The Local and the Global,” 549. 39. Stanley Barrett, Culture Meets Power (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2002). 40. Carmen Mangiron and Minako O’Hagan, “Game Localisation: Unleashing Imagination with ‘Restricted’ Translation,” The Journal of Specialised Translation 6 (2006):10–21, 15.

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41. Koichi Iwabuchi, “How ‘Japanese’ is Pokémon?,” in Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon, ed. Joseph Tobin (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 57. 42. Iwabuchi. “How ‘Japanese’ is Pokémon?,” 57. 43. Iwabuchi. “How ‘Japanese’ is Pokémon?,” 57. 44. Yves Gambier et al., “Translators and the Transmission of Cultural Values,” in Translators Through History, eds. Jean Delisle and Judith Woodsworth (Amsterdam: John Benyamins Publishing Company/UNESCO, 1995), 221. 45. Allison, Millennial Monsters, 245. 46. Allison, Millennial Monsters, 246. 47. Chandler, The Game Localization Handbook, 11. 48. Heather Maxwell Chandler, personal communication, 2005. 49. “Citing a plotline that goes ‘way too far,’ South Korea’s Media Rating Board has rejected approval of Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2, according to American military newspaper Stars and Stripes. This (obviously) forced the game’s Korean publisher to abandon its plans for a localization of the squad-based shooter.” Thorsen, Tor and Tim Surette, “South Korea bans Ghost Recon 2,” 2004. www.gamespot.com/ news/2004/11/24/news_6114004.htm (accessed December 1, 2005). 50. Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). 51. Kent, “Video Games That Get Lost in Translation,” 3. 52. Bestor, “Supply-Side Sushi,” 90. 53. Tsurumi quoted in Katherine Isbister, Better Game Characters By Design: A Psychological Approach (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2006), 87. 54. “Nintendo of America’s Video Game Content Guidelines,” www.filibustercartoons.com/Nintendo.php (accessed December 1, 2009). 55. Stuart Roch, “Localizing for Japan: Wildroid 9 Case Study,” Game Developer’s Conference Transcript, 2000. 56. Roch, “Localizing for Japan.” 57. Roch, “Localizing for Japan.” 58. Roch, “Localizing for Japan.” 59. Roch, “Localizing for Japan.” 60. Roch, “Localizing for Japan.” 61. Daniel Miller, “Introduction: Anthropology, Modernity, and Consumption,” in Worlds Apart: Modernity Through the Prism of the Local, ed. D. Miller (London: Routledge, 1995), 1–22. 62. Miller, “Introduction: Anthropology, Modernity, and Consumption,” 9. 63. Miller, “Introduction: Anthropology, Modernity, and Consumption,” 9. 64. Miller, “Introduction: Anthropology, Modernity, and Consumption,” 9. 65. Carless, “Lost in Translation.” 66. Miller, “Introduction: Anthropology, Modernity, and Consumption,” 9. 67. Riccardi quoted in Carless, “Lost in Translation.”

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68. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 53. 69. Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). 70. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, ed., Globalisation: Studies in Anthropology (London: Pluto Press, 2003). 71. Barrett, Culture Meets Power. 72. Gambier, “Translators and the Transmission of Cultural Values,” 223. 73. Myriam Salama-Carr et al., “Translators and the Dissemination of Knowledge,” in Translators Through History, eds. Jean Delisle and Judith Woodsworth (Amsterdam: John Benyamins Publishing Company/UNESCO, 1995), 101. 74. LISA, the Localization Industry Standards Association Web site, 2009. www .lisa.org/Homepage.8.0.html (accessed December 23, 2009). 75. William Mazzarella, “Very Bombay: Contending with the Global in an Indian Advertising Agency,” Cultural Anthropology 18 no. 1 (January 2003): 33–71. 76. Of course, many media texts do circulate with little or no direct localization and it is, of course, possible to watch and download (often illegally) un-edited or untranslated international material online (we would suggest though that even these media are in some way mediated or pass through mediating border zones). However, we are interested here in the sale of commodities—through more official channels— that have been consciously adapted for sale in regional markets, in order to draw attention to the work of agents who directly refashion goods for global consumption.

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PART III

RESEARCHING VIDEO GAME PLAY

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CHAPTER TEN



Beyond “Sheeping the Moon”— Methodological Considerations for Critical Studies of Virtual Realms Andra´s Luka´cs

As Erving Goffman1 famously noted, social settings are bound by perceptions. The exquisite presentation of food, ambiance, impeccable service, adventurous taste palates, and the associated social performances at the finest restaurant cannot repudiate that this illusion and perception is being constructed backstage. Onions chopped, potatoes peeled, orders rushed: the secrets of the show and the methods to construct them are hidden from the guests. Just like fine dining, academic work has its own back region where polished reports, buffed and dressed for presentation are being prepared. And just like the kitchen in a restaurant, academic backstage is off limits for outsiders. For established fields and research objects, the trade of creating reports and studies can become so routinized and ossified that methodology is no longer considered problematic; it becomes a machine rather than a logic in use. For emerging fields or schools of thought in flux or transition, the back region and accompanying methodological reflections have increased in significance. New rules need to be established, illusions and perceptions invented or modified. Ethnography in virtual realms is one of these emerging fields. The aim of this chapter is to show what happens backstage during virtual fieldwork. If Malaby and Burke2 are correct and game studies is shifting toward academic compartmentalization and the establishment of competing research paradigms, virtual ethnographers must move beyond descriptive analysis3 and embed their scholarship within the existing economical, political, and cultural system that produced and in turn is being produced by

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online culture. This is a methodological issue in the broader sense, as a frame of reference or a theoretical perspective which obviously also encompasses research methods for studying digital culture. Critical ethnography must not pose as, or compete against, positivist scientific methodologies. As a selfreflective intellectual tradition, the craft must embrace the fact that, just like other forms of science, it is based on certain illusions. As Gary Alan Fine eloquently put it, “We ethnographers cannot help but lie, but in lying, we reveal truths that escape those who are not so bold.”4 Throughout this chapter, I will reflect on my experience as a participant observer on several U.S. servers of World of Warcraft. While I had considerable prior experience as a player of various video games, my entry to the research site was academic in nature; I was assisting a sociology course exploring digital culture at Loyola University Chicago. During my fieldwork I participated and observed various aspects of social life, constructing, revising, and discarding ideas. My dissertation project grew out of this initial investigation and it concentrates on intergenerational sociability and friendship patterns, and the cultural toolkits players use to transgress or ossify age-based distinctions. I am still collecting data as an observer, yet I believe that methodological reflections are never in vain.

Interdisciplinarity and Game Studies The network of academic disciplines interested in video games and virtual realms as an object of study has produced a considerable body of literature over the past two decades. This scholarship is often referred to and canonized as game studies, although a multitude of intellectual trajectories, methodologies, and interest converge under the label. The initial research in interactive entertainment was fuelled by commercial interests, as developers and publishers attempted to understand their audience and create a blueprint for successful products. Media effects literature soon followed suit in hopes to finally discover a causal relationship between media usage and audience behavior. As conducting research on the Internet became more and more accepted, in large part due to technological developments and the commercial success of a communication technology that demystified the field, various academic disciplines joined to map the social, legal, economical, cultural, political, and educational dimensions of this research object. Mutual research interest does not necessarily generate interdisciplinary conversations: partisanship is maintained through indoctrination with the help of various methodological and ideological orthodoxies. Game research is not immune to this common academic disease. Nonetheless, according to

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Malaby and Burke,5 the convergent field offered a relatively low barrier to interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration; it was characterized by the open spirit of methodological pragmatism. Students of virtual realms had to learn how to master three related, yet distinctively different, dimensions of their craft. First, operationalize the distinction between the biography of participants and the cultural forms they create through virtual embodiment. Second, master the technological architecture of virtual realms, some of them offering relatively difficult access and steep learning curves while maintaining their role as researchers. Last, attempt to stay loyal to their disciplinary tradition while conducting research in an unconventional, uncharted, and, for many departments, unwanted field. After all, search committees, grant applications, and advisors are bound by established bureaucratic procedures. Researchers can dare to be more flexible. If the field of virtual-world research is indeed poised to take off6 and claim more mainstream academic presence, the collaborative spirit will swiftly wane. Nonetheless, this interdisciplinary era established virtual realms and commercially available video games as valid research sites for social sciences7 and, more importantly for ethnographers, participant observation and in-depth interviewing got accepted as valid approaches to understanding digital8 culture. The trajectory toward specification within game studies can open up the intellectual space to move the descriptive ethnographic tradition into the broader field of social and historical practices and maintain the multidisciplinary logic. Talcott Parsons9 commented that the principal difference between American and continental European social science at the first part of the twentieth century was that while European sociology was rooted in the philosophical, historical, and economic traditions and attempted to understand the larger social and political context of human interactions, American sociology had a more pragmatic, focused, and empirical orientation. I hope that ethnographic research within game studies will follow the European model.

Adopting the Cultural Studies Model The intellectual tradition relating new media representations and subcultures to historical, political, and technological processes was made famous by the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. By rejecting the literary-scientific methodological divide, the cultural studies model fused various academic knowledge systems to produce a complex and nuanced understanding of media and culture. Stuart Hall and his colleagues were concerned about the power of media, production of subjectivity, hege-

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mony, and dominant representations, while closely examining audience reception. As Richard Johnson10 lamented, “We need to fight against the disconnection that occurs when cultural studies is inhabited for merely academic purposes or when enthusiasms for [sic] popular cultural forms is divorced from the analysis of power and of social possibilities.” The Birmingham School11 argued that media was a battleground rather than an agent of domination and rejected the methodological orthodoxy of looking at media as a single analytical category. The matrix of representation, production, and audience reception allowed practitioners of the tradition to formulate grounded conceptions of culture as an expressive totality and reflect upon the mediation between these processes.12 Ethnographers of game worlds and online culture need to make a similar epistemological leap to better contextualize their knowledge. Not subscribing to methodological orthodoxies, freely moving between textual analysis, philosophy, sociology, and audience studies, yet always emphasizing qualitative work,13 opponents of cultural studies deemed it either hopelessly unscientific or the product of the hegemony and ideology it aimed to understand. Academic traditions, like every profession, have to cope with certain stereotypes and stigma. “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out” is a commonly used wit to describe ice hockey. “Unscientific intellectual treason” is the stigma attached to cultural studies and its ethnographic orientation. This is especially true in intellectual spaces where positivism dominates the discourse or when researchers are willing to discard the cloak of positivism. Following the flexible approach of cultural studies, virtual ethnography cannot escape a similar stigma. Yet, as self-critical, self-conscious, and self-reflective approach it can easily dismiss subjectivist accusations; it can be rigorous yet open, specific yet theoretical, historical yet relevant, detailed yet broadly applicable.

Field Notes on Fieldwork As Herbert Blumer14 explained, the ethnographic method depends “on patient, careful and imaginative life study, not quick short cuts or technical instruments. While its progress remains slow and tedious, it has the virtue of remaining in close and continuing relations with the natural social order.” Regardless, shortcuts for field research always existed, although these were usually masterfully concealed in published reports or buried in the footnotes or appendices. For fieldworkers in a technologically produced research environments, these shortcuts might seem more charming than for ethnographers immersed in more traditional research settings.

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Technological tools can offer the illusion to record everything that is happening in a virtual realm. Data-mining software can monitor typed chat and voice channels, log activity, and reproduce interactions without the presence of the ethnographer. Technology can correct memory lapses, recall glossedover social situations, misinterpretations of researchers; no visible comment from participants can go unnoticed. The siren song of technology is alluring: this is the beginning of ethnography without the ethnographer. Nonetheless, I find data-mining applications in my own work highly problematic. Data-mining technology can produce more data that is manageable or understandable for the fieldworker. Good ethnography is not measured by the amount of field notes or data-mined texts the researcher can generate. While detailed, careful description and rich data is inevitable to produce strong ethnographic reports, data mining does not serve this purpose. While it can put a positivist spin on ethnography (randomizing times when data is actually recorded, asserting that nothing important goes unnoticed, etc.) these claims actually weaken the results.15 Fieldworkers are aware that no matter how skilled and careful they might be, certain communication channels and social performances remain hidden during observation. Data-mining software is just as likely to run up against this limitation. In virtual realms, private and alternative communication channels are always available and widely used by participants. Players might be in the same physical space and disregard or spuriously use in game communication. Nonetheless, the researcher can understand and interpret communication based on certain situational properties of the interaction, while logging applications only provide raw data. Qualitative social inquiry, especially ethnography, is essentially based on an imaginative, critical, and flexible approach and it requires that the researcher has an intimate understanding and familiarity with the research site and consequently with the field notes. I found that while technological tools helped me to quickly note important social situations (most importantly through screen shots), these documents had to be converted into field notes rather quickly to retain important details and account for the non-visible properties of the social setting. Technology acts as a filter and fieldworkers need to be aware of it. For instance, while using voice recordings, I had to be careful to reflect upon silences and breaks in the conversation. The push-to-talk technology required a strict sender-receiver distinction,16 yet quite often the conversation was rather irregular. Was it simply an issue with lag and Internet connections? Did participants use lags as cover to buy themselves time to respond when called out for doing something wrong in a raid setting? Or did some of them

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choose not to participate because they were self-conscious of their foreign accent? In one group setting, I befriended a veteran from Iraq who got injured and lost her ability to speak. Thus, while technological tools could assist the ethnographer, they do not replace expertise, judgment, and solid methodological foundations. The ethnographer is always part of the environment, and while the logic of the method mandates that the observer’s influence is limited and the integrity of the research site is maintained, virtual realms pose considerable technical and moral dilemmas. While most people in the observed guilds and persistent raiding groups were aware that I am a researcher, they did not know the exact goals of my presence (Gary Alan Fine17 coined this presence “Shallow Cover”). Nonetheless, my performance competency had to be reaffirmed from time to time. One does not have to be particularly skilled to access and observe social guilds. On the other hand, end-game content and competitive gaming requires the researcher to gain and maintain group membership based on gaming competencies. After two years of participant observation, I considered myself an experienced enough player to explore competitive gaming. Accessing guilds of my choice was easy: my avatars looked ready to push progression and as an academic, I had no trouble writing an application that impressed recruitment officers. The problems started when I noticed that I was not as skilled as I thought and mightily struggled to get by as a player, let alone maintain my ethnographic self and collect data. While I was allowed to stay in the guild and observe raiding, I often found myself sitting outside the raid instance as an alternate. With a different character, playing a role that better suited my playing style, I was able to maintain membership in a competitive environment. However, the harsh, often abusive, sexist and racist raid leader made every second of my observation miserable. I dreaded going to work every night and I noticed that the quality of my observations declined. Virtual ethnographers are not immune to emotional discomfort and spoiled relationships with other participants. While this phenomenon is not particular to online environments, the pressure to perform in virtual realms under these circumstances can influence access, membership, and the data collected. The dangers of allowing the participant self to dominate is real: the ethnographer becomes so immersed in the field that he barely pays attention. However, the opposite holds true as well. Fieldworkers always occupy a contradictory position as participants and academics at the same time; they are often called upon to use their authority and power to settle arguments. In World of Warcraft I was occasionally asked to resolve disputes between teenagers and adults. As one player put it, “Isn’t that your thesis anyways”? I

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found these situations especially alarming, since I did not want to shape the research field, yet I had to maintain my reputation as a researcher and group member. I usually attempted to be reserved, diplomatic, and non-partisan although I am sure that feelings got hurt and social relationships ruined during these disputes. No matter how hard we try to maintain the natural integrity of the research setting, we are bound to fail sometimes. An even greater danger is to influence the research setting to an extreme degree and turn the ethnographic inquiry into a field experiment. While there is a movement within virtual-world research which equates digital social spaces to petri dishes and use them to conduct natural experiments studying certain phenomena,18 ethnographers should refrain from such approaches. Nonetheless, the temptations and opportunities are present. I was asked to temporarily take leadership of the guild that provided me the opportunity to collect high quality field notes. The guild leader and her husband suffered carbon monoxide poisoning and had to vacate their home and consequently the virtual realm for ten weeks. Hoping that someone would fill the void I declined the request; however, after seeing that no one was going to step in and membership started to deteriorate, I reluctantly accepted the promotion. For two months I was in charge of guild operations and was enticed to recruit more teenagers to serve my selfish research interest. The temptations and ethical dilemmas were great; I had to delegate a senior member to handle recruitment. While carbon monoxide poisoning is a rather extreme example to show the interaction between the virtual realm and other lifeworlds, critical ethnography must not approach these spaces as disembedded practices. Tom Boellstorff’s19 phenomenal descriptive study of Second Life made the methodological choice to bracket the virtual realm and only consider the visible manifestations of other lifeworlds. Nonetheless, meaning and culture is just as much constructed around what is invisible, there is a complex interplay between presence and absence.20 I found this dimension of the fieldwork especially challenging, since it required constant theoretical reflection and conscious attempts to understand biographies and social characteristics not directly manifested within, yet influencing, the virtual realm. I needed to focus on the body of the player, not just on its virtual manifestation as the avatar.21 In numerous instances avatars were shared and while the in-game networks of the avatars (guild association, list of friends, etc.) did not necessarily change with different operators, players often made the distinction among “machinists.” In one guild, the raid leader was aware that Bob and Bobby, a father and son, both played the same character, and while Bobby was fun to have around, his skills playing the character were limited. Bob

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was an excellent player, and in numerous occasions Bobby was asked to let his father play the character when the raid encountered serious challenges. The focus of the body made me reflect upon the localized aspects of gameplay. It did make a difference whether players were in different countries, geographical locations, and time zones. Living in the Canadian Arctic offered me the possibility to talk to players and contemplate about the interaction between isolation and social presence in virtual realms. While this project is still in a developmental phase, it highlights the possibility to move the research outside the virtual realm. As a native Hungarian, I made the assumption that I can understand Hungarian World of Warcraft, nevertheless I soon discovered that my ethnographic experience in the United States did not translate across the Atlantic. While ethnography is most often practiced as an individualistic inquiry, comparative perspectives, collaborative work, and validation studies appear to have tremendous potential for further research.22

Informed Consent and Review Boards Ethnographers as narrators of social practices are perpetually confronted with moral dilemmas. Methodological appendices and reports are abundant for qualitative inquiry23 and the literature on ethical conduct for the virtual fieldworker is expanding.24 I will refrain from summarizing these arguments and observations, although no ethnographer should engage in data collection without firm grounding in ethical conduct. Instead, I will reflect upon the process of acquiring the blessing of Loyola University Chicago’s Institutional Review Board and gain legitimate access to the research site. Just as researching virtual realms are new to many academic departments, most IRBs have no procedural guidelines and established protocols to assist the researcher. After the initial conversations with the IRB, where I proposed to observe teenagers in a virtual realm, acquiring permission seemed almost impossible. The skeptical and cautious stance of the university was not surprising and boiled down to two factors: their lack of understanding of virtual realms in general and their unawareness of precedent ethnographic studies in particular. Even though ethnographical methods aim to maintain the “purity” of the research setting, the concerns of the IRB over informed consent were legitimate. The distinction between private and public sphere is unsettled when it comes to the Internet. While Hudson and Bruckman25 maintains a strict definition of privacy and shows that chat room participants had reasonable expectation of privacy, World of Warcraft’s terms of use allowed the operator to monitor communication. Legally, players acknowledge that their actions

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could be recorded by Blizzard Entertainment, yet how could we inform them that among the hundreds of players online, one avatar represents a social scientist? Could we look at these game environments as public spaces, similar to previously studied coffee houses, bookstores, and bars? How does technology mitigate this distinction? With my colleagues, we decided to engage in lengthy conversations and lunch meetings with board members in hopes that we could familiarize them with the virtual setting and secure permission to observe non-minors as the first step. We learned that taken for granted categories in game worlds needed to be explained in great detail. Throughout our correspondence “vent” conversation became labeled “push-to-talk conference calling,” while “guilds” were referred to as “persistent social groups.” It was a great exercise learning to converse with a non-specialized audience, to explore the regulatory practices and legal texts governing digital gaming, and demonstrate the importance of our proposed projects. The open, welcoming atmosphere and camaraderie of the game studies community helped us to understand how other universities handled the IRB procedure. Our e-mails were swiftly answered by various researchers and review board members. These insights proved important securing permission to observe and interview non-minors. The second stage of gaining access was removing the age restriction: excluding minors would have made it impossible to understand their intergenerational experiences as native, subjugated knowledge. The initial research plan waived parental consent for interviews and used a modified assent form for thirteen- to seventeen-year-old participants based on the Association of Internet Researchers Ethics Guide.26 Additionally, the plan waived both consent and assent for the participant observation segment, although participating guilds announced research intent in-game and on their Web sites, one guild even created a “Researcher” rank to help establish Shallow Cover. I found it ironical to study how teenagers could transgress age-based stigma and occupy authority positions in a virtual world, yet require parental permission to talk about it. I was invited to attend the full board review of the proposal to present the justification of my waiver request. While the final approved version required verbal parental permission to interview,27 it provided an opportunity to explore the lifeworld of teenagers deeper: access to parents helped contextualize the social experience of teenagers. The majority of institutional review boards, just like researchers, are still struggling to establish guidelines regarding Internet research. The currently used application forms and bureaucratic practices might not be refined enough to accommodate research protocols that appear to be “unconventional.” However, given how communication technology saturates the everyday life and

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the Internet can provide access to hard to reach populations, Internet based research is certain to grow. Thus, ethnographers of the Internet and virtual realms are doing tremendous service to future scholars by setting precedents and offering direction on how to navigate IRBs.

Conclusion Ethnographers of virtual realms must be mindful of the limitations of their craft. An ethnographic study is always a beginning, a new starting point to continue the scientific and humanistic discussion about society that started with the enlightenment. While virtual realms and video games are new in certain ways and represent a new media practice, the established methodological principles are still relevant. Just as ethnographic media research about television was able to move beyond simple understandings of texts and audiences, game studies needs to move beyond descriptive analysis and embed virtual culture into the larger social landscape. Fieldworkers exploring uncharted social phenomena or daring to take a second look at already documented cultures are bound to encounter difficulties. This chapter was a reflection about certain aspects of my journey as an ethnographer in World of Warcraft, offering backstage access to my research and emphasizing the possibility to move the descriptive ethnographic tradition into the broader field of social and historical practices while maintaining its multidisciplinary logic. I am certain that other researchers found some of my struggles unproblematic, encountered different challenges, and faced not-yet explained obstacles. I invite them to issue backstage passes and share their intellectual journey.

Notes 1. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959). 2. Thomas Malaby and Timothy Burke, “The Short and Happy Life of Interdisciplinarity in Game Studies,” Games and Culture 4 (2009): 323–30. 3. Researchers’ fascination with the uniqueness of cultural representations is understandable. For instance, players use language that sounds arcane for outsiders: “sheeping the moon” is a common task certain players have to perform in World of Warcraft. It requires them to control and disabilitate an enemy creature during battle. While researchers need to be aware of these unique systems of meaning, I believe the analysis must render the research setting “mundane” and move beyond simple descriptions of “sheeping the moon.”

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4. Gary Alan Fine, “Ten Lies of Ethnography: Moral Dilemmas of Field Research,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22 (1993): 290. 5. Malaby, “The Short,” 325. 6. Dmitri Williams, “The Mapping Principle, and a Research Framework for Virtual Worlds,” Communication Theory (2010, in press). Pre-press version available: dmitriwilliams.com/MappingFinal.pdf. 7. Among others, see the work of Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds. The Business and Culture of Online Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, eds. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 670–89. 8. For instance, Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); T. L. Taylor, Play between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); Thomas Malaby, Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009). 9. Talcott Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory (New York: Free Press, 1964). 10. Richard Johnson, “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?,” Social Text 16 (1987): 42. 11. For an excellent introduction, see Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some Problematics and Problems,” in Culture, Language, Media, eds. Stuart Hall et. al. (New York: Routledge, 1996), 15–47. 12. Douglas Kellner, “Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism and Media Culture,” in Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Text Reader, eds. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996), 5–17. 13. See Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (London: Saxton House, 1977); or Dorothy Hobson, Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera (London: Methuen, 1982). 14. Herbert Blumer, “What is Wrong with Social Theory,” American Sociological Review 18 (1954): 10. 15. For instance, players do not randomize their playing time. On the contrary, it is regimented by commitments both in and outside the game. 16. The technology allows players to use voice-activated or “open” voice chats, transgressing the sender-receiver distinction. Nonetheless, guilds were particular about keeping the voice channels clutter and noise free and enforcing push-to-talk communication. 17. Gary Alan Fine, “Cracking Diamonds: Observer Role in Little League Baseball Settings and the Acquisition of Social Competence,” in Fieldwork Experience, eds. W. B. Shariff, R. A. Stebbins, and A. Turowetz (New York: St Martin’s, 1980), 117–32. 18. See Edward Castronova, “On the Research Value of Large Games: Natural Experiments in Norrath and Camelot,” Games and Culture 1 (2006) 163–86. For a

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critique of this perspective, see Tom Boellstorff, “Method and the Virtual: Anecdote, Analogy and Culture,” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 1 (2009): 4–7. 19. Boellstorff, Coming, especially chapter 3. For an alternative take on bracketing, see Alex Golub, “Being in the World (of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game,” Anthropological Quarterly 83 (2010): 17–46. 20. Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation,” in Representation: Cultural Practices and Signifying Practices ed. Stuart Hall (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2000), 13–64. 21. While Edward Castronova believes that “a room, a bed, a computer, Internet, some food, a toilet” (Exodus to the Virtual World [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007], 13) is enough to support a human body to allow the mind to live virtually, his perspective disregards the exploitation and structural inequalities required to produce those necessities. Thus, while a powerful class might be able to live like “virtual vegetables,” this possibility is rather dystopic. 22. Collaborative, comparative work and sharing ethnographic data has been the subject of many discussions. For instance, see Luke Eric Lassiter, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 23. For example, Joan Cassell, “Ethnical Principles for Conducting Fieldwork,” American Anthropologist 82 (1980): 28–41; or D. Sovini Madison, Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2005). 24. See Boellstorff, Coming; or Dmitri Williams and Li Xiong “Herding Cats Online: Challenges in Deriving a Sample from Online Communities,” in Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have, ed E. Hargittai (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 122–40. 25. James Hudson and Amy Bruckman, “‘Go Away’: Participant Objection to Being Studied and the Ethics of Chatroom Research,” The Information Society 20 (2004): 127–39. 26. The Guide is available from AOIR’s Web site: aoir.org/documents/ethics-guide/. 27. Tom Boellstorff was able to use an in-game consent form for his study of Second Life. In World of Warcraft does not allow researchers to present documents in-game; we opted to use research Web site to provide information, consent, and assent forms for participants.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN



The Chorus of the Dead: Roles, Identity Formation, and Ritual Processes Inside an FPS Multiplayer Online Game Nicolas Ducheneaut Introduction Ever since the creation of MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) in 19781,2 people have been meeting online to interact and play in worlds of make-believe. Quite often, these worlds were a computerized version of the pen and paper fantasy role-playing games that were popular at the time.3 But despite the fact that these systems were purposefully built to encourage social interactions, it took a long time for research to start investigating them as full-fledged social milieus—perhaps because games are often seen as “frivolous” and unworthy of attention compared to more “productive” activities.4 For instance, after the creation of LambdaMOO at Xerox PARC, Curtis5 was one of the first to examine these systems as a valid area of mainstream research6—almost fifteen years after the creation of the first MUD. Now online computer games have become a central part of the fabric of cyberspace. The most visible of them, both in terms of subscriber numbers and academic attention, belong to the Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) genre. These games are almost direct descendents of the early MUDs: they retain from their predecessors the notion of a vast, persistent fantasy world (based on popular themes ranging from sword and sorcery to space opera) inhabited by other players, with whom one can interact via text chat (and, increasingly, using voice-over-IP), trade, form groups to undertake “quests,” and eventually become member of longer-lasting “guilds” organizing complex group activities in the world.7 MMOGs add richly detailed 3D graphics on top of this basic template, and a combination of the ever-increasing 199

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availability of both broadband Internet access and graphics-rendering capabilities on commodity computers has enabled them to attract more and more subscribers, starting with a few hundreds of thousands players in Ultima Online and Everquest in the 1990s, and now up to the 11 million registered accounts in World of Warcraft, current leader of this genre.8 Research has explored a wide array of issues emerging in these virtual worlds: their unique culture,9 the psychological impacts they have on their players,10 their economic importance,11 the social life of guilds,12 and their role as learning environments,13 to name but a few examples. It is important to note, however, that MMOGs are not the only form of online games supporting interaction and collaboration between players. In parallel to the meteoric rise of MMOGs, first-person shooters (FPS) also became increasingly popular, sometimes even reaching cult status with titles such as Doom14 and Counter-Strike.15 They have, however, received much less academic attention.16,17 These games look, at first sight, deceivingly simple: a heavily armed player roams buildings or open areas in search of enemies, trying to kill as many as possible before being killed. When they pit human players against one another, these games become tests of skill (particularly hand-eye coordination) and require the development of real expertise before becoming a proficient player.18 The “action-oriented” nature of these games, however, may lead one to wonder how such games could possibly be social milieus, which could explain the corresponding dearth of sociological research on FPS. In this chapter, however, I will argue that FPS have also become a culturally and socially significant form of online communication, a new social stage supporting thriving recreational communities. I will show that these particular types of online games, although not specifically built to foster a sense of community and rich player-to-player interactions, still end up being repurposed by their users as complex social worlds. This will allow me to examine the unique conventions and practices created and maintained by FPS players, to try and uncover the inner workings of these understudied social worlds. In this, I extend Wright and colleagues’19 recent attempt at understanding the social character of online FPS games. For these authors, FPS are also complex social worlds. In essence, these games are a platform for showing off human performances in a mock combat setting. But the game is not all combat or simply shooting a virtual enemy. Participants actively create the meaning of the game through their virtual talk and behavior borrowing heavily from popular and youth culture representations. As in MUDs, players interact through text chat using an idiom specific to this game’s culture.

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Mastering this “insider” language is necessary if one wishes to graduate from a novice (“newbie”) to an experienced player. Mastery of this language, along with strategic playing skill, is a passport to recognition as an adept insider. Wright and colleagues, however, only briefly touch on an important issue: how roles and status are created, negotiated, and maintained in FPS. Indeed, it has been widely reported in studies of MMOGs that online games are stratified, hierarchical societies that new players need to be socialized into.20 But the actual mechanics by which these roles and classes are defined and maintained have not been explored fully, especially in the context of FPS. The mediation of this process through the game technology is especially not well understood. To bridge this gap, I report on the findings of a four-month long “virtual ethnography”21 conducted among the players of the XYZ clan, a group of Internet users playing Counter-Strike. It appears that two important aspects of the game affect social interactions in Counter-Strike. First, the game embeds in its technical architecture a clear-cut distinction between audience and player. This aspect of the game is central to socialization in a community of players. By reifying Goffman’s dramaturgical view of social life,22 Counter-Strike provides a novel environment for roles to be negotiated and played within a game. There is a constant back and forth movement between performance and critique allowing the players to negotiate the appropriate norms of interaction. Second, Counter-Strike players do not form a homogenous group: they are stratified into classes, separated into in-groups and out-groups (for instance, “clan” members and non-clan members; “regulars” and “newbies”). By looking at the interaction patterns between these players it is possible to learn more about how one is socialized into a gaming community, and then how one transitions from one class of players to the other. I will describe these phenomena in more details later in this paper, focusing on Turner’s notion of liminality23 as well as the important role humor and jokes play in bonding the members of a class of players. I start below with a presentation of the methods I used to investigate social interaction among Counter-Strike players, followed by a short description of the main features of the game. I then discuss in more detail the issue of roles and status, focusing first on the mechanisms through which players negotiate their understanding of the game, then turning my attention to how the players define their social position among themselves, that is, the process of identity formation and the segregation of players into groups.

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Research Methods and Setting Virtual Ethnography To observe interactions among FPS players I chose to adopt an ethnographic stance. Ethnographic field research involves the study of groups and people as they go about their everyday lives. The term “participant observation” is often used to characterize this approach, since researchers seek to immerse themselves in others’ worlds in order to grasp what they experience as meaningful and important. Ethnography therefore entails “some amount of genuinely social interaction in the field with the subjects of the study, some direct observation of relevant events . . . and open-endedness in the direction the study takes.”24 It is particularly well adapted to the analysis of the issues I am interested in (roles, status differentiation, and power), since it helps the researcher progressively build up a grounded understanding of how these social constructs emerge out of the local, contextual interactions between social actors. However, virtual worlds such as the ones represented by online games pose a methodological challenge to the ethnographer. Indeed most of this approach is based on the ethnographer “being there” in the field to observe—but this “there” is nebulous at best in the case of online spaces.25 Still, a great number of researchers believe in the virtues of “virtual ethnography,”26 that is, an adaptation of traditional ethnography to the study of cyberspace. As Mason puts it: A virtual ethnography is one that fully immerses the ethnographer into the consensual reality experienced by groups of people who use computer-mediated communication as their primary, and often only, means of communication. As such, the online or virtual persona of the participants are the main focus of the ethnographer. Generally, researchers have wanted to focus on the person at the keyboard; a virtual ethnography reverses this and works instead with the persona that has been projected into cyberspace by the typist.27

A virtual ethnography is then, simply, an ethnography that treats cyberspace as the ethnographic reality. This remains a controversial step, but it is not the purpose of this paper to discuss this controversy in great depth. The interested reader is referred instead to work by Lyman and Wakeford,28 Hine,29 Miller and Slater,30 and Rutter and Smith31 to get an overview of the debate. Following the tenets of virtual ethnography, my research therefore progressed as follows. As an initial step, I had to select the field in which I would conduct “virtual fieldwork.” During the first week, I identified a Counter-

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Strike server with two characteristics important for my research. First, it had to host a “clan” if I wanted to observe the distinction between different classes of players. Clans are formal organizations of players who choose to play together, either as a team in tournaments or simply for the sake of playing with a semi-stable group of people instead of random adversaries (in this sense, they are similar to the guilds created in MMOGs32). Quite often a clan hosts games on its own server instead of the public machines available on the Internet. The demographics of the latter are much different from a clan’s machine: the turnover among the players is much higher (there are no or few “regulars”) and it is rare for players to belong to any kind of group. Second, the server had to have good network connectivity to my home, from where this research was conducted. Latency is a very important factor in this game. Selecting a server with a low “ping”33 was therefore a primary concern. The XYZ34 clan and its server fit these two characteristics. My second step was then to achieve immersion. Once I found this server, I connected to it for a period of almost four months, at a frequency of three days a week on average, sometimes more. I consciously tried to vary the days and times at which I connected to the server to see how it affected participation. By connecting regularly I started to identify “regulars,” composed of the clan’s members and visitors like myself who keep coming back to this specific machine because the connection is fast and the gaming enjoyable. Once I was logged in I engaged in participant observation, focusing on recurrent and unusual events to try and uncover the rules and norms of interaction in this environment. It is important to note here that clan servers remain publicly accessible most of the time and anyone can join games in progress. The administrators have the option of “locking” the server, which restricts access to users with a registered name and password. This allows the clan members to conduct private activities they do not want any outsider to observe. As such, it is legitimate to see activities conducted “in the open,” that is, outside of locked sessions, as analogous to activities in any publicly observable realm such as a plaza or a mall. Previous research on FPS supports this view35 and as such, I did not seek informed consent from the players being observed. As noted earlier however, I still replaced all user names with pseudonyms to preserve the players’ privacy as much as possible. At the end of the four-months study I had two sources of data. First, I logged the conversations taking place during the game in their entirety. Counter-Strike has a “console” generating text files containing the players’ utterances, and I saved these files at the end of each gaming session. Again, these interactions on game servers are public (anybody can log in and observe

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what is being said), and players and clans routinely save their text logs to check their kill/death ratios and to examine game action.36 Second, I actively wrote down notes each time an event of interest happened. These gave me a pointer to the most interesting episodes, which I could later recover from the log files for further analysis. These episodes were analyzed in two steps, first immediately after each gaming sessions while my memory of the interaction was still fresh, and finally after the study had ended in order to uncover repeated patterns and themes.37 Before discussing the results of these analyses, it is important for the reader to get a feeling for how the game is actually played and how people interact within it. The next section describes the main features of Counter-Strike. Counter-Strike Counter-Strike is a “mod” for Half-Life, that is, an extension to this already popular game. It reuses Half-Life’s 3D engine but changes the environment of the game. In Counter-Strike, players are divided into two teams: terrorists and counter-terrorists. Each camp has objectives to accomplish (for instance, in one of the three scenarios available, the counter-terrorists have to rescue hostages and the terrorists have to prevent them from doing so). Each player controls one character in one team, and has to collaborate with others to accomplish his/her team’s objectives. During my research there were between 20,000 to 30,000 players online at any moment, connecting to 5,000 to 10,000 dedicated Counter-Strike servers. Upon launching the game, the player is presented with a list of game servers currently available. Using the “sort” feature, it is easy to rearrange the list to find a specific server based on its name, or to list the servers based on the quality of one’s connection to them. Servers can also be added to one’s list of “favorites” for easy access. All of these are quite important in shaping who will be joining a particular server. Indeed, due to the fast-paced nature of the game, a low-latency connection to the server is almost mandatory (that is, a “ping” of 150ms or less). High latency translates into “lag,” and therefore into a miserable gaming experience: you could be shooting at someone while this someone is, in fact, already gone. But low-latency is also highly correlated to geographical proximity to the server. Therefore, players connected to a given server tend to be clustered in the same geographical area. This area can be quite large, however. For instance, the server that will be the focus of this study (XYZ) is located in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Many players therefore come from California because of the latency issue mentioned above, but not necessarily from the Bay Area itself: there were players from San Diego, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and other cities. An-

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other important point about the connection screen is the “favorites” function: once you have found servers with optimal connectivity, you can easily add them to a short list displayed instead of the full list of available servers. Consequently, players tend to visit the same servers repeatedly, rather than randomly select one from the full list. Right after joining a server the player can choose which camp (terrorists or counter-terrorists) he or she wants to play, if there are enough free slots available (otherwise the player is simply assigned to the camp with the last available slot). The game is usually organized in five-minute rounds (although it can be more or less time, depending on the will of the system administrator). During each round, each player has a first-person view of the action. Movement, change of equipment and firing are usually controlled via a combination of keyboard and mouse. One of the most interesting points about this game (and central to my investigation) is that it supports communication among the players via text chat. When playing a round, a player can send text messages to the other members of his team. However, the mechanism is quite different if you join and a round is already in progress, or if your player dies before the round is over. Indeed in both cases, you become a spectator. While a spectator you can watch the action, for instance by looking at a specific room or by following the moves of any of the remaining players. You cannot, however, take part in the round anymore: whatever you type is invisible to the remaining players. During this time you can therefore chat only with the other spectators, and this is when most of the social interaction occurs. Participants can discuss the previous round, organize their team’s strategy, or chat about pretty much anything. This technology-based distinction between spectator and player is central to the way people interact in this game. I will therefore start my discussion of how roles and status are negotiated by explaining why this feature is particularly interesting, and then describe what it can teach us about how norms of social interaction are negotiated and defined in online games. The Chorus of the Dead: Interplay Between Roles and Audience in FPS As I mentioned above, you are not always a player in Counter-Strike: a significant portion of the time is spent watching others playing from a spectator’s position, simply because your character died early in the round. Incidentally most of the interactions with other players happen during this time, since you are free to dedicate your attention to typing and chatting rather than playing the game (the latter being much too demanding for extensive typing).

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Below for instance, my character has just died and I witness a few comments exchanged by other dead players or spectators before the start of the next round (pseudonyms are used, but I attempted to preserve the “flavor” of each nickname whenever possible: for example, while “AznMastr” is a pseudonym, the actual nickname did contain “Azn,” which is important since it strongly signifies the player’s ethnicity as Asian): *DEAD*[XYZ]Kit: yuh huh *DEAD*[XYZ]AznMastr: i friggin died *DEAD*[XYZ]AznMastr: =[ *DEAD*[XYZ]Kit: lol *DEAD*[XYZ]Zed: LOL *DEAD*[XYZ]AznMastr: terrorist team is full mountaindew has left the game *DEAD*[XYZ]Kit: heya zed *DEAD*[XYZ]AznMastr: bleh Snake dropped *DEAD*[XYZ]Kit: lol look at Chicken what a moron *DEAD*[XYZ]AznMastr: yeah he sure sucks

Many things are happening in the short example above. AznMastr expresses his disappointment at his recent death (“I friggin died” and “=[”—an inverted smiley face), while Kit and Zed who were watching AznMastr play laugh at the circumstances in which he was killed (“lol” meaning “laugh out loud,” an abbreviation used very frequently). A few lines later Kit comments (unfavorably) on the actions of Chicken, one of the remaining players in this round, and AznMastr concurs with her observation. A consequence of this separation between audience and player becomes quickly apparent to anyone playing the game: while playing, there is always a feeling of being watched by a “chorus of the dead,” so to speak, commenting on the actions of the living players. Even though the comments of this chorus are not available to the living player while he plays, he knows they exist from the time he too spends as a spectator. To reuse Goffman’s terminology,38 the boundary between the “front region” and “back region” of the game is porous: in the space of a few minutes, one can quickly transition between the two, something that cannot usually be done in everyday life. For instance, Goffman uses the example of the waiters and waitresses in a restaurant, who often make derogatory comments about the customers they serve while they are in the kitchen. As soon as they re-enter the restaurant’s dining room, however, they immediately resume an attitude of respectful attention to the customer’s needs. In everyday life, the separation between the

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team performing its show and the audience is clear-cut: as a customer, one should not (and usually does not) know what is going on in the kitchen of the restaurant where one is being served. In fact, we usually go to great length to maintain this separation: Goffman again describes how a shop owner takes great care in not recruiting girls from his neighborhood as salespersons, since they may soon quit their job and become customers again, but this time know more about the owner’s commercial practices than he wants them to know. Consequently, becoming the member of a performing team and gaining access to the back region is usually granted after a long period, during which one is progressively transitioned from the audience to the team. Such a segregation is, however, impossible in Counter-Strike: one can move back and forth between the front and back region several times within the space of a few minutes. Being acutely conscious of the backstage activities, one therefore quickly starts playing differently: not for oneself, but also for the enjoyment and satisfaction of the spectators. To understand this phenomenon, imagine yourself as a restaurant’s customer knowing that the staff laughs backstage at clients tucking their napkin into their shirt collar: would you still do it, or consciously put your napkin on your lap instead? The same phenomenon applies to Counter-Strike. This game is, therefore, extremely interesting in that it reifies some of Goffman’s concepts by materially embedding them in technology (the spectator and player roles), while at the same time bending many of the rules of interaction that are part of this social system (the front and back regions are not separated). Just because there is a material distinction between audience and players in Counter-Strike does not necessarily imply that the meaning and duties of each role are fixed, however. Consider the example below: [XYZ]AznMastr: dont camp like that again -=[Heat]=- Truckish: not when im the last man [XYZ]AznMastr: no i dont care [SM]DKL: fagget truckish

Truckish was the last remaining member of the terrorist team during this round, and he has just been killed after a long hunt by the four remaining members of the counter-terrorist team. Rather than move around and probably to increase his chances of survival, Truckish chose a well-hidden spot and waited for his opponents, trying to kill them one by one as they went in front of his hiding place. This would seem like a sensible behavior, especially considering that Counter-Strike was designed as a realistic game by its creator, Ming Le.39 Yet in the exchange above Truckish is accused of camping. Here is

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another example in which this term was brought up (somewhat humorously) by another player during a subsequent round: *DEAD*[XYZ]Tempura: BORING! *DEAD*aK|King.wtf?: look at the cts what a bunch of idiots *DEAD*-]gI$[-*Puregaming*: yeah it’s campfest 2001! *DEAD*Styx: lol pass the marshmallows

“Camping” can be defined as not moving around, staying at a fixed position (generally hidden from view) and taking “easy” shots at the other players. On XYZ’s server, this behavior is frowned upon as the example above illustrates, or it is even explicitly forbidden as in the first example. As we can see above, this is probably because it is a waste of time for everybody: spectators are bored watching little action, and if there is only a small number of players left it could take them a fair amount of time to find the “camper,” thereby lengthening (unnecessarily) the time between rounds. Above, Styx and King. wtf make a direct analogy between the immobile players and campers sitting around a campfire, sharing marshmallows—something that could be enjoyable as participants in the physical world, but not as a virtual spectacle. Interestingly, in the first exchange above, Truckish shows that this definition of camping is not necessarily shared by everybody. For Truckish, if you are the last man standing, it is perfectly admissible to camp: he implies it would be foolish to face a bigger group alone and that stealth should be rewarded and authorized in those circumstances. AznMastr visibly doesn’t agree, and neither does DKL (who insults Truckish). This debate about camping illustrates that, despite the fact that there is a clear, technologically enforced separation between audience and players, the responsibilities of the participants in each of these roles are not immutable and have to be actively defined and enforced. Even though she was concerned with a much different environment, Orlikowski summarized this phenomenon quite well by saying that “technology is the product of, as well as the medium for, human actions.”40 De Sanctis and Poole,41 who have also adapted Giddens’ structuration framework to the study of information technologies in organizations,42,43 talked about the distinction between the “spirit” of a technology on the one hand, and “technology in use” on the other hand. Counter-Strike can be perfectly analyzed in these terms: the spirit of the game (realism; two distinct roles—audience and player) is reinterpreted in use via the social interactions of its participants (camping, although realistic, is bad; the audience affects the players, and vice-versa).

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Moreover, there is no fixed outcome to the process I have just described: it is possible that, in other contexts, the interaction between the spirit of the technology and the actions of the players would have had different results. During the first week of this study, when I tried different servers before settling on XYZ, I noticed different expectations, different definitions of what the game means. For instance on one server the players apparently wanted to play realistically no matter what the cost was, and camping was therefore accepted even if it lengthened the average waiting time between rounds. On another server there was very little exchange among the spectators and the feeling of an audience was, therefore, much less noticeable to the player. This, in turn, did not encourage one to play for others but rather for oneself. During a session of Counter-Strike, the roles a gamer plays are therefore constantly mediated and renegotiated through technology and interactions with other players. I now move to another related dimension: status, that is, how social positions are defined over time and across sessions.

Clan Members, Newbies, and Regulars: Bonding and Segregation in Counter-Strike In the section above, my focus has been mostly on roles embedded in technology and how the players renegotiate their meaning. I would now like to turn my attention to how the players define their social position among themselves, that is, the process of identity formation and the segregation of players into groups. Indeed, it becomes rapidly evident to the observer that all Counter-Strike players are not created equal: there are important asymmetries of power, manifest in who is allowed to say what and how. Nowhere is this more visible than in the way humor is used on this server. Laughing at vs. Laughing with As Lyman describes in his study of the fraternal bond as a joking relationship, social norms governing the expression of anger or humor generally replicate the power order of a group. More important, “It is when jokes fail that the social conflicts that the joke was to reconstruct or negotiate are uncovered, and the tensions and emotions that underlie the conventional order of everyday social relations are revealed. [. . .] the success or failure of a joke marks the boundary within which power and aggression may be used in a relationship.”44 And on the XYZ server, there is a clear distinction between “laughing at” versus “laughing with” someone. This distinction usually marks the boundary between dominant (who are allowed to laugh at people) and

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dominated players or signifies equality among players (who laugh with each other). There are two valid bases for laughing at people: being a clan member (and thus being a direct or indirect owner of the server, which gives the member administrative rights such as kicking people out), and demonstrating a high level of skills in the game. To illustrate this phenomenon, let us take the same exchange I used earlier as our starting point: *DEAD*[XYZ]Kit: yuh huh. *DEAD*[XYZ]AznMastr: i friggin died *DEAD*[XYZ]AznMastr: =[ *DEAD*[XYZ]Kit: lol *DEAD*[XYZ]Zed: LOL *DEAD*[XYZ]AznMastr: terrorist team is full mountaindew has left the game *DEAD*[XYZ]Kit: heya zed *DEAD*[XYZ]AznMastr: bleh

Notice the pattern of interaction above. As one of the players dies and joins the spectators, he first expresses his disappointment (“I friggin died, =[”). Using the universals “lol” (laugh out loud), two other players laugh with him: their laughs are not derogatory, but instead feel much more like three people sharing a good joke. The fact that only XYZ members participate in this exchange is value-laden: no outsider laughs after AznMastr’s mishap. In the round immediately following this one, however, the tone of the exchange changes dramatically: *DEAD*[K.T.S]paRaNoid: and you pussies, fire a whole clip at me 60 rounds and dont kill me *DEAD*[XYZ]AWP_Whore: lol *DEAD*[C.R.O]Zax: ya at you *DEAD*[K.T.S]paRaNoid: then you RUN AWAY to reload *DEAD*[C.R.O]Zax: right into you *DEAD*[C.R.O]Zax: and you dont die *DEAD*[C.R.O]Zax: kinda makes you wonder *DEAD*[K.T.S]paRaNoid: while im coming at you with a knife *DEAD*[XYZ]Kit: lol damn *DEAD*[XYZ]AWP_Whore: lol yup he has a god mode hack! *DEAD*[K.T.S]paRaNoid: i had 3 hps left *DEAD*[K.T.S]paRaNoid: you guys just suck cock *DEAD*[XYZ]Kit: shut up paranoid *DEAD*[K.T.S]paRaNoid: You ran from me and i had a KNIFE!

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*DEAD*[XYZ]AznMastr: omg *DEAD*[XYZ]Kit: you suck even more *DEAD*[XYZ]AznMastr: i cant do anything with this lag *DEAD*[XYZ]AznMastr: wtf is this lag so crazy? *DEAD*[XYZ]AznMastr: friggin pacbell *DEAD*[K.T.S]paRaNoid: kit, you will know when im talking to you cause i will address you

paRaNoid survived a situation in which the odds were really against him (he had no weapon except a knife, the most basic of all, and had to face three other players alone). He takes this as an opportunity to express his contempt at the other players. The feeling one gets from the exchange, however, is noticeably different from the previous one. Whereas the members of XYZ laughed together at one of their members’ mishap, including the unlucky dead player, paRaNoid is very antagonistic and scornful. AWP_Whore tries to lighten the tone by joking (“he has a god mode hack,” that is, some software modification allowing him to be invincible—which is not normally possible). Kit is more affected by the change of tone, however, and replies in kind, asking paRaNoid to shut up and criticizing him too (“you suck even more”). The kind of joking identified above is not unheard of in other contexts: it is a kind of “signifying” or “dozens,” a ritual exchange of insults that usually functions to create group solidarity.45 In the process of male group bonding ignoring a joke, even though it makes you feel hurt or angry, is to show strength and coolness, two important masculine ideals. It is interesting to note that, above, the player offended by paRaNoid’s insulting joke is Kit, a female46 player. But the most important point is probably to note that, in the bonding process Lyman outlines, aggression must be calculated, not angry. More precisely, it must be consistent with the power hierarchy of the organization, serving authority and not challenging it. By asking paRaNoid to shut up, Kit is essentially contesting his place in the group’s hierarchy. In short, she denies him the right to be aggressive because his aggression is challenging the hierarchy of the group, and not reinforcing it. This becomes explicit as a new round starts and the exchange continues: DiveMan: CTS ARE FUCKING RETARDS! AzNlIYoN: omg [K.T.S]???OwnU???: sorry (Terrorist) [SM]DKL: thx [XYZ]Kit: i don’t care who you’re talking to, you just suck too [K.T.S]paRaNoid: please

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[XYZ]Kit: please what? [K.T.S]paRaNoid: you dont know, me, i know they fired 60 rounds with me 5 feet away [K.T.S]paRaNoid: and didnt kill me [XYZ]Kit: don’t say other people suck when you yourself has a pretty bad score.

Here paRaNoid steps back a little, and tries to re-contextualize the situation, seemingly saying “you did not see what happened, so don’t judge me.” Indeed when you are a spectator you can choose which player to follow, and there is no guarantee that Kit really saw what happened. But Kit refuses to give paRaNoid the right to criticize others because paRaNoid himself has “a pretty bad score.” Each player’s score is publicly visible in a table everybody can superimpose over the screen with the “tab” key. This is an important part of one’s online identity, and good players are given more rights than others. In arguments of authority, the number of kills one has is a powerful status symbol. Aggression coming from the top of the group’s hierarchy (the skilled players) is tolerated as it reinforces the existing social order; outsiders and low-skill players, however, are denied this right. In fact, to preserve one’s status as a skilled player it is common for gamers to change their name when they are practicing or just “playing out of character.” This change of identity is visible to everybody: system messages appear on each player’s screen notifying them of the name change, as in: [XYZ]AznMastr changed name to Deagle_practice

Everybody now knows that AznMastr and Deagle_practice47 are the same, and yet any action done by AznMastr while he is under this new name won’t be attributed to his main identity. With this practice, skilled players are allowed to preserve their face and yet to keep on experimenting with new tactics and weapons. Skill is, therefore, an important boundary between classes of player, and status is actively managed and preserved through temporary masking of one’s “true” or “main” name. Aggressive group processes are governed by rules, and skills gives a player the right to calculated aggression, whereas other players in the same situation are seen simply as angry and rude. A second type of boundary is visible in the rest of the exchange below, which includes the same protagonists from the heated discussion that started earlier: [XYZ]AznMastr: its fine to dispute somethin [K.T.S]paRaNoid: how am i out of line?

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[XYZ]AznMastr: but dont abuse ur leeway [XYZ]AznMastr: aka dont insult kit [K.T.S]paRaNoid: i tell them they suck because im 5 feet away and they miss with 60bullets [K.T.S]paRaNoid: and she jumps in Lateralus is joining the Counter-Terrorist force [XYZ]AznMastr: i dont care [XYZ]AznMastr: whos server is this? [K.T.S]paRaNoid: and talks about score and i suck for saying blah blah blah [XYZ]AznMastr: KTS or XYZ?

AznMastr now plays the role of a mediator, and spells out the rule of the place explicitly: criticism is tolerated, but should not be abused—especially if it is directed at one of the clan members. paRaNoid tries to contest, but it does not go very far: AznMastr ends the exchange abruptly with a hidden menace. By saying “who’s server is this?” he makes it very clear that he and the other clan members define the rules and that they have the power to exclude players who step out of line. The example above is rather long, but extremely rich and informative. Indeed, it contains instances of successful and unsuccessful jokes and taunting; the latter represents a breakdown of the social order, and members of the community therefore have to spell out the rule of the place explicitly. Asymmetries of power are obvious during this exchange, and two classes of players can be identified. First the clan members, as owners of the machine on which the game takes place, have the right to define who is allowed to say what to whom and how. Their power stems principally from the technical ease with which they can exclude people: a simple command will “kick out” the offending player (this is reminiscent of the role of “wizards” in MUDs48). Second, skilled players are given more rights than others, even if they are not members of the clan. It is clear above that if paRaNoid had had a better score, he would have been given more bragging rights. It is interesting to note that the social processes outlined above differ very little from those analyzed in settings different from online games. Lyman, for instance, was studying bonding within a fraternity at a large university but almost everything he describes applies well to the game environment. This could be interpreted in two ways: first, if the demographics of the XYZ players mirrors those of Lyman’s fraternity, then we are witnessing mechanisms of bonding and social segregation that are dependent on the profile of the participants and hold across different environments. And, looking at the information provided on the clan’s Web page, it is true that about half of

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the players on this server are young (between fifteen- and twenty-years-old) White males, similar to Lyman’s fraternity men. Yet the other half (a significant number of players) does not fit this description: they are either older (some are in their thirties), of a different ethnicity (with a great number of Asian-Americans, who put their ethnicity forward by adding the “Azn” tag to their nickame), or of a different gender (there are about five females listed on the clan’s Web page, among a total of about forty members). It seems, therefore, that demographics could be an explanation but is not enough to cover these processes fully. The second interpretation then would be to say that is the nature of the game (a paramilitary simulation) that fosters the attitudes I have just described above. Only comparative studies of other games, either off-line (e.g., paintball) or online (e.g., Quake, Unreal), would allow us to see if this hypothesis is true. Becoming a Member: The Clan’s Ritual Process I described above how clan members are invested with a higher status than other players. As such, becoming a clan member is the pinnacle of a gamer’s online life: it is the recognition of one’s skills and familiarity with the game, in that members are given law enforcement powers (they can kick people out) and are trusted to perform well during matches against other clans (there are several worldwide Counter-Strike tournaments each year, some with fairly large amounts of money given to the winners—but the biggest prize remains the bragging rights associated with a title of champion). A clan membership, therefore, is not given out lightly. There are rites of passage or transitions one has to go through before being allowed to attach the clan’s tag (e.g., [XYZ]) to one’s name. In fact, nothing is a more serious offense than pretending to be a clan member without really being one: [XYZ]The_Machine is joining the Terrorist force *DEAD*[XYZ]Robocat: machine who the fuck are u? *DEAD*[XYZ]The_Machine: new recruit *DEAD*[XYZ]Robocat: who recruited u? *DEAD*[-CnA-]Konami: lol did us see that *DEAD*[XYZ]Robocat: who recruited u???? *DEAD*[XYZ]WkWire: kick this bozo out *DEAD*historymaker: yeah was funny as hell [XYZ]The_Machine has been kicked by console

Above, The_Machine was identified as a potential usurper as soon as he entered the server. After he failed to answer two of the administrator’s que-

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ries, another member of the clan asked for the offender to be kicked out. On top of illustrating the law enforcement powers I described above, this also shows how tightly connected clan members can be. Despite the fairly large number of people in a clan, and a certain turnover (new recruits are added, others leave to join other clans or stop playing the game), clan members have a fairly good idea of who is a member and who is not. And there are simple ways to test membership, if in doubt: only a few members in the clan (usually the most senior ones) are given the right to recruit. Being unable to provide the name of one’s recruiter is a sure sign of usurpation. Before being recruited, however, there are a certain number of steps a player has to go through. The first one is to become visible and known by at least some members of the clan. Indeed one could play very well and yet not be known. As I mentioned earlier, the current49 number of kills and deaths for each player is available by pressing the “tab” key. This information, however, is accessed only when there is a reason to look at it and is rarely aggregated over time. One could go to XYZ’s server each day, get the best kills/deaths ratio of the week, and yet be completely unknown if one doesn’t make explicit steps to interact with the clan members: when a player stays silent, nobody ever looks at his statistics. Consequently, greetings usually form the first step through which one tries to be noticed. Very few people greet each other on XYZ’s server. The only players who do are the clan members and aspiring recruits: *DEAD*[XYZ]Kit: heya zed *DEAD*[XYZ]AznMastr: bleh *DEAD*[XYZ]Zed: hey *DEAD*[XYZ]Zed: I’m fucking around until I get an AK *DEAD*[XYZ]Zed: when I get my AK, everyone on the CT side is going to be fucked *DEAD*[K.T.S]Cha0$: hehe i need to start tryin..im fuckin with the cameras too much tryin to h4x tha r00f [A new round starts] DiveMan: lol [XYZ]AznMastr: ill DiveMan: hey kit [XYZ]Kit: heya * alright, i really suck changed name to chillin [XYZ]AznMastr: i cant join terr team =[

Zed has just entered the game and he has been noticed by one of his fellow clan members, Kit. They both exchange greetings and, a few seconds later,

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DiveMan (not one of the clan members, but a player I have seen often on this server—he is a “regular”) takes this opportunity to greet Kit also. Notice how DiveMan takes the initiative and inserts himself into an exchange of greetings already in progress. If done well, and if the player is not completely unknown to the clan members, this is a good way of gaining more visibility. I talked earlier about how jokes and patterns of joking are powerful markers of social status on this server. Later the same day, DiveMan reuses the same tactic he used with his greetings to insert himself into a joking relationship: *DEAD*[XYZ]Chromium: that was shitty *DEAD*[XYZ]Tempura: lol dude you suck:-) *DEAD*[XYZ]Chromium: well I was reloading… *DEAD* [XYZ]Kit: yeah, reload kills more people a year than drug and alcohol combined *DEAD*[XYZ]Tempura: lol! *DEAD*[XYZ]Chromium: LOL *DEAD*DiveMan: rofl!

Kit makes fun of Chromium’s unlucky death (a player does not have an infinite stock of ammunition in this game and needs to reload—this was fatal to Chromium). Other clan members laugh with Kit at her joke, and DiveMan inserts himself at the end (he is “rolling on the floor laughing”—rofl). By doing this and respecting the local norms of interaction (he is laughing with the clan members, not at them—timing and tone are both important), he increases his chances of being noticed later. A third tactic frequently used to gain visibility is to congratulate the clan members. To avoid looking like a “nose-browner,” however, the timing and tone of the congratulation again have to be right. Inserting oneself toward the end of an interaction among clan members is, as before, the safest way to do this: *DEAD*[XYZ]Kit: whoa *DEAD*[XYZ]Kit: bad move [XYZ]JL is joining the Counter-Terrorist force *DEAD*[K.T.S]???OwnU???: damn head shot *DEAD*[XYZ]Zed: oh god *DEAD*[XYZ]Kit: nice try zed *DEAD*[XYZ]Zed: thanks *DEAD*DiveMan: yeah gj

“Gj” means “good job,” and it is an abbreviation used frequently to congratulate a player.

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It would be possible to argue, however, that DiveMan’s behavior was purely disinterested and that he was simply being polite and cheerful in all the examples above. However, I later learned from the clan’s Web page that DiveMan was applying for membership in the clan. By following the social conventions of the clan’s members, DiveMan was apparently trying to get accepted by them and move from the shadows of anonymity to the status of a possible recruit. In doing so, he showed a great deal of social skills: he gained his visibility by learning and applying XYZ’s rules of interaction rather than challenging them. From a theoretical standpoint, it is interesting to remark that this process of gaining visibility as early as possible does not match what Turner describes as a typical rite of passage. Indeed, Turner proposes that individuals moving from one social condition to another have to go through a liminal stage, during which they are stripped of their earlier attributes. During this stage “their behavior is normally passive or humble; they must obey their instructors implicitly, and accept arbitrary punishment without complaint. . . . Among themselves, neophytes tend to develop an intense comradeship and egalitarianism.”50 This description definitely fits what happens to “newbies,” people who are just starting to play the game. But these players are not the ones interested in joining the clan, however: they are transitioning from a non-player condition to a player condition. So in the end, if there are indeed liminal phases in this gaming environment, the process of gaining membership in a clan does not seem to include one. The absence of a liminal phase does not mean that there are no ritual elements to this process, far to the contrary. Indeed if visibility allows a player to apply for membership, it does not guarantee it. After petitioning for membership and finding a clan member to sponsor him, the aspiring recruit is usually invited for a game against or with the clan members only. During this time the server is closed to outsiders, and short of applying for membership myself I can only guess at what happens behind these closed doors. Perhaps at this time the recruit is stripped of his attributes and has to go through a short, but intense liminal phase; perhaps only his skills as a player are evaluated. Most probably, the balance between these two elements and others will vary depending on the culture of the clan one is applying to. The fact that one’s acceptance or refusal is determined behind closed doors, however, is very reminiscent of secret societies and religious movements: the opacity of the process allows the group to define and preserve its own notion of membership without much chance of challenge from the outside.

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Conclusions The convergence of computer networks and gaming has powerful effects: there is now little doubt that online games are culturally and socially significant milieus, a social stage with unique conventions and investments by players. Among the various genres of games first-person shooters, despite their apparently simplistic premises (they mostly revolve around a basic “hunt and kill” scenario), have also become complex social worlds in their own right. With this chapter, I have tried to demonstrate that it is therefore worthwhile to analyze not only the recreational communities built around purposefully social environments (namely, MMOGs) but also other forms of networked games. The particular game that was the focus of my attention and the community of players I participated in all exhibit interesting characteristics. In particular, interactions between the players follow norms inherited from earlier, text-based environments (i.e., MUDs) but also more innovative patterns. Regarding the earlier environments, it is clear that mastering the local idioms peculiar to the game and each clan is an essential ingredient of a player’s socialization.51 But the game’s interface also offers new and as yet unexplored communication possibilities. In particular, it literally reifies Goffman’s concepts of front and back regions into technology. It has been proposed that the design of computer interfaces should be inspired by theater performances52 and that they should support a “spectator experience”53: interestingly, Counter-Strike takes this notion quite literally by making the interface a stage. The game therefore allows us to explore how such an interface affects social interactions among the players. First, it seems this decoupling of the front and back region encourages conversation. There is a distinction between instrumental, in-game talk (the short messages exchanged during a round) and more sociable, around the game chat (interactions in the spectator mode). Interactions are encouraged since there is always something to talk about: the active players are providing a show that can be constantly commented upon. In this the game differs from other text-based, computer-mediated environments like Internet Relay Chat (IRC), where conversations are frequently incoherent and drifting in unrelated directions.54 But most important perhaps, the constant feeling of being observed by a “chorus of the dead” for those who are “on stage” transforms the game into a performance, where each player must learn which role to play. Backstage talk is used as an opportunity to experiment with the boundaries of appropriate behavior and learn the social norms of the particular community of gamers one is playing with. These norms are

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then enacted during the next round, and feedback can be obtained during the next transition to the “spectator” mode. The porous boundaries between in-game and out-game talk, unlike social interaction in the physical world, allow for a quick assimilation of a gaming community’s culture. This interface, therefore, encourages socialization—albeit in a different way than other game genres, such as MMOGs.55 Moreover, this communication interface is flexible enough that roles can be locally defined—they are not constrained by technology, they emerge instead out of the interaction between the players and technology and the interactions of the players through the technology. The meaning of “player” and “spectator” are not fixed, despite the labels attached to each part of the interface: they are constantly renegotiated and differ across servers and players. Roles are, however, only one piece of the complex interaction puzzle present in Counter-Strike. Indeed, the community of gamers I observed also developed a series of rich and complex processes by which social order is maintained. Far from being loose associations of individuals sharing a good game, players form a very stratified society in which evolution is strictly controlled. Jokes and insults play an extremely important role in the maintenance of social hierarchy, in the physical world as well as the virtual56: they codify who is able to say what to whom and how, and their breakdown is an opportunity for the group to explicitly articulate each player’s position and rights. Players who have internalized these rules can then turn them to their advantage and gain visibility. This gives them the opportunity to apply for a membership in the clan, a prestigious marker of skills and an occasion to gain more power over others. Overall, it is quite clear that computer games are not simply about playing. As they have become social environments it is important to support playerto-player interaction in novel ways and, in particular, to allow new players to assimilate each game’s norms of interaction. Indeed, even in simple games like FPS, there is more to learn than the commands listed in the manual: players also need to be socialized into a game’s community, to understand which role(s) to perform, and eventually how to evolve and change their status. And as Bryce and Rutter have it, this is “a serious practice”57 that requires a good deal of communication abilities. It is my hope that, by documenting the interplay between the players’ conversations and the game’s communication infrastructure, we can learn how to support the social structures that gamers will inevitably create. As this chapter illustrates, we have much to learn from games constructed around new interaction metaphors like Counter-Strike: in the end, the purpose of the game has very little to do with the richness of the social activity it supports.

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Notes 1. Lynn Cherny, Conversation and Community: Chat in a Virtual World (Palo Alto, Calif.: CSLI Publications, 1999). 2. David Cuciz, “The History of MUDs,” GameSpy, 2001, www.gamespy.com/ articles/january01/muds1/index4.shtm (accessed June 9, 2009). 3. Gary Alan Fine, Shared Fantasy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 4. Paul Dourish, “The State of Play,” Computer Supported Cooperative Work 7 (1998): 1–7. 5. Pavel Curtis, “Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities,” in Proceedings of the Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing Symposium, ed. D. Schuler (Palo Alto, Calif.: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, 1992). 6. Dourish, “State of Play.” 7. Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nicholas Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert J. Moore, “Building a MMO with Mass Appeal: A Look at Gameplay in World of Warcraft,” Games and Culture 1, no. 4 (2006): 1–38. 8. Bruce Woodcock, “An Analysis of MMOG Subscription Growth—Version 23.0,” www.mmogchart.com (accessed June 9, 2009). 9. T. L. Taylor, Play Between Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006). 10. Nicholas Yee (2001), “The Norrathian Scrolls: A Study of EverQuest (version 2.5),” www.nickyee.com/eqt/report.html (accessed June 9, 2009). 11. Edward Castronova, “On Virtual Economies,” Game Studies 3, no. 2 (2003), www.gamestudies.org/0302/castronova/. 12. Dmitri Williams, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Li Xiong, Yuanyuan Zhang, Nicholas Yee, and Eric Nickell, “From Treehouse to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft,” Games and Culture 1, no. 4 (2006): 338–61. 13. Constance Steinkuehler, “Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games,” in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of the Learning Sciences, eds. Y. B. Kafai, W. A. Sandoval, N. Enyedy, A. S. Nixon, and F. Herrera (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2004), 521–28. 14. David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (New York: Random House, 2003). 15. Ryan McDonald, “The Greatest Online Tactical Shooter Ever: CounterStrike,” GameSpot, 2003, www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/greatestgames/ counterstrike.html (accessed June 9, 2009). 16. Talmadge Wright, Eric Boria, and Paul Breidenbach, “Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games: Playing Counter-Strike,” Game Studies 2, no. 2 (2002). gamestudies.org/0202/wright/ (accessed July 6, 2010). 17. Stuart Reeves, Barry Brown, and Eric Laurier, “Experts at Play: Understanding Skilled Expertise,” Games and Culture (in press). 18. Reeves, Brown, and Laurier, “Experts at Play.” 19. Wright, Boria, and Breidenbach, “Creative Player Actions.”

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20. Mikael Jakobson and T. L. Taylor, “The Sopranos Meets EverQuest: Social Networking in Massively Multiplayer Online Games,” in Proceedings of the 2003 Digital Arts and Culture conference (Melbourne, Australia: 2003), 81–90. 21. Bruce Mason, “Issues in Virtual Ethnography,” in Ethnographic Studies in Real and Virtual Environments: Inhabited Information Spaces and Connected Communities, ed. K. Buckner (Edinburgh: Queen Margaret College, 1999), 61–69. 22. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959). 23. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1969). 24. George McCall and J. L. Simmons, Issues in Participant Observation (New York: Addison Wesley, 1969). 25. Jason Rutter and Greg Smith, “Ethnographic Presence in Nebulous Settings: A Case Study” (paper presented at the ESRC virtual methods seminar series, research relationships and online relationships, CRICT, Brunel University, April 19, 2002). 26. Christine Hine, Virtual Ethnography (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2000). 27. Mason, “Issues in Virtual Ethnography.” 28. Peter Lyman and Nina Wakeford, Analyzing Virtual Societies: New Directions in Methodology (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1999). 29. Hine, Virtual Ethnography. 30. Daniel Miller and Don Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2000). 31. Rutter and Smith, “Ethnographic Presence.” 32. Williams, Ducheneaut, Xiong, Zhang, Yee, and Nickell, “The Social Life of Guilds.” 33. “Ping” is a measure of the time it takes for a data packet to travel from the sender’s machine to a given destination and back. At 150 milliseconds and above, a noticeable “lag” makes playing any real-time game difficult. 34. I will use XYZ as a placeholder to disguise the clan’s identity and preserve its members’ privacy. It is worth noting, however, than clans are frequently identified by a three-letter acronym attached to a player’s nickname—as in [XYZ]nicolas, for instance. This identity marker is quite important, as we will see later in the chapter. 35. Wright, Boria, and Breidenbach, “Creative Player Actions.” 36. Wright, Boria, and Breidenbach, “Creative Player Actions.” 37. Robert Emerson, Rachel Fretz, and Linda Shaw, Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 38. Goffman, Presentation of Self. 39. For an interview with Ming Le (also known as Gooseman) about the realism of the game see www.firingsquad.com/features/gooseint/. 40. Wanda Orlikowski, “The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations,” Organizational Science 3, no. 3 (1992): 398–427.

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41. Gerardine DeSanctis and Marshall Scott Poole, “Capturing the Complexity in Advanced Technology Use: Adaptive Structuration Theory,” Organization Science 5, no. 2 (1994): 121–47. 42. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 43. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 44. Peter Lyman, “The Fraternal Bond as a Joking Relationship,” in Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity, ed. M. Kimmel (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1987), 148–63. 45. Lyman, “Fraternal bond.” 46. Identifying gender based on purely textual indicators is, of course, extremely difficult. By looking at the clan’s Web page, however, I was able to get a feel for the demographics of this group of players. Indeed a short bio is available for each player on the clan’s Web site, frequently mentioning age and gender among other things. Therefore, and unless specified otherwise, my use of he or she is intended to reflect the real gender of the player and is not random. 47. The Desert Eagle (“deagle”) is a powerful but hard to master handgun in Counter-Strike (it is accurate only at very short ranges). 48. Cherny, Conversation and Community. 49. That is, for this map—usually a thirty-minutes/six-round long period during which a certain level is played. After this time a new map is loaded, the players’ statistics are reset, and the same process repeats itself. 50. Turner, Ritual Process. 51. Cherny, Conversation and Community. 52. Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre (Reading, Pa.: Addison-Wesley, 1991). 53. Stuart Reeves, Steve Benford, Claire O’Malley, and Mike Fraser, “Designing the Spectator Experience,” in Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2005) (New York: ACM, 2005), 741–50. 54. Susan Herring, “Interactional Coherence in CMC,” Journal of ComputerMediated Communication 4, no. 4 (1999). 55. Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nicholas Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert J. Moore, “Alone Together? Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Games,” in Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2006) (New York: ACM, 2006), 407–16. 56. Nancy Baym, “The Performance of Humor in Computer-Mediated Communication,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 1, no. 2 (1995). 57. Jo Bryce and Jason Rutter, “The Serious Practice of Being a Computer Gamer: The Practice of Being a Member of a Computer Gamer Community,” in Cultural Change and Urban Contexts (Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University, 2000).

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CHAPTER TWELVE



The Quantitative-Qualitative Antinomy in Virtual World Studies Samuel Coavoux

In a 2006 article, Alan Bryman surveyed hundreds of social science journal articles that used mixed methodologies.1 Doing that, he found a great discrepancy between the rationales employed to justify a particular choice of methodology and their actual uses. He concluded that researchers lacked a reflexive view on their research: rationales for mixing methodologies were not given enough thought. This chapter is an attempt to fill this gap in the field of virtual-world studies. It takes a resolutely reflexive look, such as advocated by Pierre Bourdieu,2 at research that has been carried out from 2007 to 2009 on the video game World of Warcraft. It aims at making explicit the reasons why, in this research, qualitative and quantitative methodologies were conjointly used. Consequently, it will make visible the scientific practice that is usually left out of articles and reports, the trials and errors that influence the conduct of a research project. An empirical perspective, grounded on actual field research practices rather than a priori ideas on the quantitative-qualitative divide, reveals how difficult it is to make sense of this gap. More specifically, I will argue against the “two methodology” thesis3 that downsizes this divide to a simple theoretical opposition between objectivism and subjectivism.4 There are many similarities between the two methods. Furthermore, their differences cannot be accounted for only with their respective theoretical grounds. This counterproductive opposition can thus be replaced, with much profit, by a set or methodological guidelines much closer to the practice of conducting a research. The real question, then, is not so much “which one is better?” as “what can each method show, and under what conditions?”

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A Research Story In his famous 1957 novel, La modification (Second Thoughts), Michel Butor describes with the utmost precision the changing thoughts of a man traveling from Paris to Rome.5 As he climbs on board, the hero intends his trip to enact a life-changing decision: he will announce to his expatriate mistress that he wants to take her back to Paris and plans to leave his wife and family for her. His mind wanders during the one-day long train ride, until he realizes he feels more intimately bound to the Italian city than to his mistress. The exoticism of the place is what he fell in love with. When the train reaches Rome, he decides not to stick with his initial plan. He will not contact her, but only spend a few days in Rome before quietly going back to Paris. Social science research is very similar to the journey Butor describes. A researcher may hop on the train with a very clear picture of what they intend to find, but very likely these findings will raise issues that were not apparent at first sight. At the end of the journey, the question addressed might be far from the initial one. This “modification” usually disappears from the researcher’s report. They will simply state that the question they answer is precisely the last one they raised.6 However, this chapter does not aim at presenting the findings of a research so much as showing how qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis can be usefully mixed in a game-studies research. To better understand how and why qualitative and quantitative methods can be mixed, it seems necessary to narrate how this research began and how the questions asked gradually evolved. The research I will rely on in this text was conducted between 2007 and 2009 at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. We studied socialization in online games using a mixed methodology, including ethnography (participant observation and a series of in-depths interviews with long-time players and former players, n = 13), textual analysis and statistics (through an original online survey, n = 1,289), and focused on World of Warcraft, a popular MMORPG in both Europe and North America. During this research, the question asked gradually shifted from “how does one become a player?” to “how can we explain social differentiation in playing an online game?” Climbing onboard, the first question raised is a sociological classic. Socialization, the internalization of the social world, is the process that makes us who we are, including the different and sometimes contradictory aspects of our social being.7 Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann distinguished primary (mostly education, family socialization, etc.) and secondary socialization (professional, leisure, etc.).8 The learning of the

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rules and techniques of the game, as well as the social norms and the identity attached, that is, the socialization to the game, is an instance of secondary socialization. Then, what does this specific socialization process looks like? How can we describe the series of steps through which a player has to go before he can become a player?9 Addressing such a research question calls for ethnographic methods. Socialization is a process more easily grasped through a qualitative approach. It requires a precise biographical inquiry on the interviewees, as well as knowledge of their subjective view on who they are, how they are playing, and how their practice evolves, information that can only be gathered through in-depths interviews. The work started with this first research question in mind, “how does one become a player?,” and we thus decided to use ethnographic methods. However, analysis of the first wave of interviews amended this question. As opposed to many other types of games, there is not a single meaning to the word “playing” in MMORPGs.10 “To play” can refer to very different types of practices: high-level raiding, role-playing, machinima production, and “social play” (where players focus on their community—usually a real-life group of friends using the game as a way to stay in touch) to name but a few. Consequently, the starting question could not be answered in a single fashion and had to be rephrased as follows: “how does one become this or that kind of player?” Rephrasing our research question was the first incentive to try quantitative methods. Admittedly, it was still possible to understand the differentiated socialization process from interviews. However, the use of statistics could greatly improve the results by mapping out effectively the actual types of play. Calling in correspondence analysis could give solid grounds to a typology of ways of playing the game. It would help underline the distance, or proximity, between two playing modalities, and thus defines groups of characteristics that tend to cluster in the players’ practices. For instance, correspondence analysis proved that possession of high-level equipment correlates with raiding experiences,11 a result that may seem obvious, but also that it has very few links with any cultural activity, like fan fiction reading or machinima producing. Mapping out these practices thus suggested that competitive and “fan” (i.e., culturally productive)12 players form two distinct groups.13 This first shift in the research question triggered a second one. Once different types of playing were spotted, we had to address the reasons why they differed. It meant not only to understand how players became players, or what kind of player they would become, but why would they evolve into one type rather than another. Again, such an analysis could not only rely on

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endogenous factors, but had to take into account the pertinent social properties of the players. Namely, being a male or a female, fifteen or forty-five years old, a college educated professional or a middle school graduate, could greatly affect the type of player one would become. A recent survey found, for instance, that among young teenagers, boys were more than three times more likely than girls to play video games every day.14 As before, qualitative methods can help raise hypothesis as of which properties have the greatest impact on the players, but they may also have a hard time actually distinguishing between them. Does age have a greater impact than gender, or income, or the level of education? These questions can be more easily answered through quantitative analysis and especially through regression analysis. It showed, for instance, that most of the effect gender seems to have on the choice of a type of playing disappears when the concentration of the last degree obtained is added to the model.15 Hence, it seemed that women play differently mostly because they study different topics. Recent works in the sociology of culture showed how important it is to take into account not only vertical (the level of education) but also horizontal differences when studying cultural consumptions.16 In this case, competitive players with a degree in humanities were three times more likely than those who obtained their last degree in hard science to engage in a culturally productive practice, that is, to be “fans.” Qualitative methods are useful when it comes to the sociological interpretation of those results. How does the quality of education affect the way one plays World of Warcraft? Interviews with players with various educational backgrounds showed that they display similar behaviors in different spheres of cultural consumption.17 A foreign language graduate from one of the top French grande école (a highly selective, prestigious research university), a PhD candidate at the time of the interview, said she started playing her first MMORPG, Dark Age of Camelot, because the world reminded her of the medieval literature she had been familiar with since she was a kid (both her parents are history teachers), and she studied in college. She played other games inspired by literature, like a browser-based MMORPG based on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation science-fiction series, and found the latter more interesting than World of Warcraft because of its emphasis on role-playing rather than performance. Her own practice of World of Warcraft was quite far from the dominant, competitive model. She was not especially looking to improve her character, nor engaging in group playing (she said she did not like talking to other people in the game). She thus developed a culturally productive, non-competitive, and non-sociable practice of video games, expressed mostly in her attraction for role-playing. Her practice is coherent

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with her educational background in humanities. On the opposite pole, some of the players with a hard science background would talk at length about the mathematics of, say, talent repartition (a feature of the game that allows one to customize their character within certain limits). Similar situations have been documented in the same game by Constance Steinkuehler.18 In the process of conducting interviews, the initial research question had undergone a double shift from singular to plural. It started with “How does one become a player?” We soon realized that there was not a single player, but several very different types, so that the question became: “What kind of player does one become, and how?” Then, it appeared that there was not one pool of undifferentiated individuals that could become players, but people with various backgrounds. The link between players’ backgrounds and their playing of an online game became central to the research and the question took its final shape: “How can we explain the social differentiation of playing practices?” Nonetheless, there are other dimensions to this shift than the mere refinement of a research question. One of these is the mix of paradigms associated with the two methods. The initial research question is closely tied to the tradition of symbolic interactionism. The key concept here is that of career as a patterned sequence of stages. We relied mostly on Howard Becker’s work on marijuana smokers.19 Such a perspective is a powerful tool for the sociological apprehension of a socialization process. In fact, as Muriel Darmon puts it, career can play the same role of objectivation as concepts like “field” or “habitus” play in bourdieusian sociology.20 It allows the researcher to focus on the activity of the actors, rather than on their identity. The study of deviant careers, for instance, helps deconstruct the idea that deviance is a characteristic of the individual. On the contrary, it lies in the interactions between individuals: it is the result of a labeling process aimed at the “deviant.”21 Researchers of this tradition usually prefer qualitative methods, as they need to find numerous, precise information on an individual’s past to reconstruct their career pattern. Most of the time, this can only be achieved through in-depth interviews.22 With the shift in the research question came a need to mix paradigms as well as methods. Since it does not consider individuals socialized, but only actors in an interaction, symbolic interaction has yet to explain why people with different backgrounds have different practices, and thus different careers. Field theory developed adequate tools to answer this question. It situates individuals in a system of relative positions, a field, where positions are determined by the (social, economic, cultural, etc.) capital they hold. These forms of capital are usually specific to a field, although they can

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produce related forms of capital in other fields. For instance, the symbolic capital associated with the field of literature is specific to this field, but can sometimes be used in the “field of power,” when a writer uses his fame (i.e., his symbolic capital) to take a political stand. One’s position within a specific field depends, at least in part, on one’s position in other fields, and especially in the broader social space, a field encompassing others and determined by cultural and economic capital. An online game such as World of Warcraft can be seen as a field, a system of relative positions occupied by the players and determined by their possession of game-specific capital.23 What, then, is the relation between this field and the broader social space? How does the position one holds in this social space affect the one they will hold in the field of the game?24 Interestingly, this perspective on the social world inspired by field theory has affinities with quantitative methods and in particular with correspondence analysis, since it has the capacity to map out effectively a large social space with a few indicators on the specific practices in the field. Adding to the methodological and the theoretical ones, there is a third level to this shift: the observational scale. There was an upward movement, from the micro-sociologic scale of interactions to a macro-sociologic view of the structure of the social space of the game. This might explain why the paradigm mix is useful: both perspectives are pertinent, but they work at different levels. They both contributed to explain a side of the situation rather than compete for a scientific monopole. This idea is well documented by Muriel Darmon in her work on anorexia, where she combined a study of a deviant career with a focus on the social conditions of eating disorder. She opposed the division of labor between disciplines imposed by the psychological construction of anorexia and argued that sociology had something to say not only about the social context, but also the process through which one becomes an anorexic.25 Similarly, Bernard Lahire used the notion of “context” to account for the variations of observational scale and remarked that it has effects on methodology, as well as concepts. The micro- and macro approaches are not incompatible, but “they do not give access to the same social realities.”26

Mixing Methodologies How, then, can we mix methods in virtual-world studies? There are many ways in which quantitative and qualitative methods can interact. Several authors elaborated typologies of the uses of mixed methods.27 In our research, the quantitative step was preceded and followed by qualitative steps. Although there was no prearranged plan, the sequence appeared logical.

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Qualitative research raised questions that could only be answered through quantitative research; it in turn raised questions that had us return to qualitative methods. The first step allowed us to understand the socialization of “hardcore gamers,” as well as to draw hypothesis on the social differentiation of players; the second, to verify these hypotheses; the third, to go back to the mechanisms that ensured the transfer from the social world to the space of the game. Among the last step’s research was, for instance, the study of the recruitment of new members by high-end raiding guilds.28 Guilds, indeed, have in the production and reproduction of the space of the game a function similar to that of higher education in the social world. The educational system has become in modern societies a powerful tool for the reproduction of social inequalities.29 The school’s function is to sort pupils on the grounds of their success; however, success and failure are largely determined by the possession of a series of dispositions toward legitimate culture that are very unequally spread between social classes. They include such competencies as mastering written languages.30 Given that top-level schools pave the way for power positions in almost every field of society, the educational system acts as a filter that separates those who display the culture and behavior of the dominant class (and who are likely to belong to the upper and upper-middle classes themselves) and those who do not. Such a class-based reproduction appears legitimate as it is assumed to be grounded on objective abilities. Similarly, high-end raiding guilds usually have a very selective recruitment policy. It includes, of course, performance requirements: a candidate has to prove that they have mastered the control of their character, possess sufficient know-how to efficiently equip them, and display some knowledge of high-end gaming. The “presentation of self”31 matters greatly. Written language skills are almost often a prerequisite: an application too short, containing too many mistakes, or written in a phonetic language will most likely be rejected or at best ignored by the guild. A candidate should not only prove his technical abilities, but also show that he has a behavior, a set of dispositions, similar to the guild members who recruit him. In this sense, guilds have a great influence on the determination of game norms. They play a similar role as the educational system in controlling who can access dominant positions and how. The norms they set up are then diffused across the whole social space, whether because high-end guild members are active members of the community and often act as “moral entrepreneurs”32 or through “anticipatory socialization” of high-end guild candidates.33 In short, the quantitative research revealed a need to focus on the institutions of the game, for which mixed methodologies are adapted. The quantitative

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and qualitative analyses of guild applications enlighten both the influence of some characteristics of the applicants and guilds on the outcome of the recruitment and the rhetoric of applications. There are other ways to combine quantitative and qualitative methods. Conducting research using quantitative methods, in virtual-world studies, is rather inexpensive. A researcher can easily design and distribute a survey on his own. That is probably one of the main reasons why such methods are so common. Conducting our own research, once we had designed and tested the survey, we started looking for respondents, mostly on forums. Our primary goal, of course, was to find enough people to answer the survey. However, a log of this phase of the research was kept, as we would have done using ethnographic methods. The log data collected was useful not only in that it allowed a reflexive outlook on the methodology, but also because it enlightened one of the hypothesis of our study, although not a central one. We were interested in the way the discourse on video games produced and diffused in the media by psychologists could be interiorized by gamers. A first review of the social science literature on video games revealed that games were almost exclusively studied by psychologists and psychiatrists until at least the mid-1990s. The discourse these approaches used was usually very critical of the games, blaming them for violent behaviors and addictions to the virtual.34 Moreover, they had strong links with the broader discourse on “public problems”35: there seemed to be a strong public concern about the effects television, video games, the Internet, and so on, could have on children. There are many ways these debates can affect players. First of all, players live in a society that is ambivalent about using video games for legitimate leisure, and, although this is changing, one still hears stories evoking the negative impact of gaming. Players, experts, and politicians hear such things on TV, in the newspapers, and probably in their own families. One interviewee, whose parents were divorced, said only his father knew he was playing World of Warcraft: he would never want his mother to think of him as a “freak.” Moreover, social scientists themselves keep reminding video game players of the questionable nature of their play activity. There are many social science researchers browsing forums in search for survey respondents. One particular forum even had a special thread for researchers. In the ten months preceding our own survey, thirty-seven surveys were announced, almost one every week. For half of the surveys where the main topic could be determined (n = 24) game addiction or a related question dominated the narrative. It is not surprising, then, that the initial answers players gave to our announcement were very negative. They insisted on the fact that there were too many of us studying games (“yet another survey”) and that they

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were fed up with objectifying approaches (“We, geeks, are no lab rats! Get out, you noob!”). It often took a few days of discussions to convince forum goers that our survey was legitimate,36 had no interest in the issues of addiction and violence, and mostly asked what could be seen as casual questions. In this sense, the short ethnographic research that took place within the recruitment phase of the quantitative research proved very useful in showing how players feel objectified by some social researchers. This “resistance to objectification”37 also revealed, however, that many of the players had interiorized the low status society had assigned to them. A forum participant, for instance, advised the researcher to do “real research,” pick “a real topic,” revealing how little he thought of his own hobby, and others, in the survey or in interviews, insisted on justifying their practice, saying, for instance, that playing was always better than watching TV. Overall, many spontaneously brought up the theme of addiction in the survey, comparing, for instance, the game to a drug.

Theory and Methodology As explained before, the mix in methods corresponds to a threefold shift, in the object, the theory, and the scale, or more precisely to the combination of two objects, two theories, and two scales, although it took various forms. The cases of interactions between quantitative and qualitative methods that were presented in the last section raise questions as to what actually distinguishes qualitative and quantitative methods. In virtual-world studies, for instance, Dmitri Williams argued that the difference is above all theoretical. There are, he wrote, two opposite sides among game studies: on the one hand, social scientists are concerned with the media effects on players, and on the other hand, humanists focus on the meaning players give to the games they play. The former rely mostly on quantitative methods; the latter, on ethnography. The divisions in the unit of analysis (i.e., the scale of observation) and the object further add to this opposition.38 Williams called for a bridging of “the methodological divide,” an idea that has been advocated by scholars in many fields of social science.39 Most of them agree that this divide is founded on an opposition between a positivist, objectivist, realist approach on the one side, and a phenomenological, constructivist, interpretive, subjectivist approach on the other side. Another expression of this opposition can be found in the understanding vs. explaining debate, positivists stating that social science should explain reality the same way natural sciences explain nature, and qualitativists arguing that there is a radical difference between nature and society.

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However, it is not certain whether this portrayal of the methodology gap makes things any clearer. On the contrary, it seems like a caricature, whose primary goal is to enhance the interest of a third way that, in practice, already exists. First of all, this caricature tends to reproduce the objectivismsubjectivism opposition, by taking for granted the theoretical fundamentals of both methods. However, to invoke an argument Bourdieu has often used, such an opposition is a false one, for if social sciences are meant to explain objective reality, the subjective view of social actors is also part of that reality. Therefore, opposing structures and representations is a fallacy.40 Moreover, the link between theories and methodologies is far from evident: if quantitative methods have indeed been introduced in social science in an attempt to mimic natural sciences, the constructivists have since been using it as often as the positivists. Quantitative methods can be used in a subjectivist perspective (for instance, in opinion polls). Qualitative methods might as well be used in an objectivist perspective, where interviews are seen as a means to gather precise data on an actor’s past, without thorough attention toward their view on the world.41 Alvaro Pires, for one, pointed out the diversity of approaches that used qualitative methods: marxist, feminist, interactionist, weberian, and so forth.42 When we compare sociology to other disciplines of the social sciences, like history, the “two methodologies” thesis43 does not hold. A more comprehensive, multi-sided approach to video game research can be outlined here. Instead of focusing on the one theory, it would take into account the many factors that may influence the choice of a qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methodology. Theory, of course, has a role to play in such a choice; the philosophy and sociology of science remind us of the links between theory and empirical apparatus.44 However, this link is not so much a correspondence than it is an affinity. Some theories get along better with some methodologies than others, but this is in no way systematic. Let us consider, for example, the relation between Bourdieu’s idea of a “social space” and Jean-Paul Benzecri’s statistical technique, correspondence analysis. Bourdieu explained his taste for this technique in the foreword to the German edition of The Craft of Sociology: I use Correspondence Analysis very much, because I think that it is essentially a relational procedure whose philosophy fully expresses what in my view constitutes social reality. It is a procedure that “thinks” in relations, as I try to do it with the concept of field.45

The association, or “elective affinities” (Bourdieu) between a quantitative technique and a theory seems clear. However, when we take a look at the

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sociologist’s actual practice, it appears that it is the representational mode of correspondence analysis rather than the technique itself that matters. When correspondence analysis was not possible, or not adequate, Bourdieu used other techniques, including qualitative analysis; to draw social spaces quite similar to those statistical analysis would have given. He warns us, for instance, that although figures 5 and 6 in Distinction strongly resemble correspondence analysis diagrams, they have, in fact, been reconstructed on the basis of several types of analysis.46 Moreover, he adopted the same spatial representation for other topics, such as the analysis of Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, using a similar qualitative method.47 Quantitative methods are difficult to use on populations that are by definition hard to reach widely. This is the case, for instance, of individuals engaged in deviant activity (i.e., labeled as deviant)48 like prostitution or drug use49; or of population defined by their lack of a social attribute, for example, housing (people without homes). Such populations call almost automatically for a qualitative approach. This is also the case for historical objects for which available data allows little quantitative analysis. Finally, the context deemed pertinent to the study, that is, the scale at which the object is apprehended, influences largely the choice of methodology. Cultural hierarchies, for instance, can be studied from a very broad macro-sociological perspective, that will emphasizes the different types of cultural consumption among social groups,50 or from a micro-sociological perspective focused on the way individuals deal with such hierarchies.51

Strengths and Weaknesses Methodologies, then, should not be chosen for the affinities they have with a paradigm, but for their own internal characteristics. A researcher should first think about the pluses and minuses of the two sides, and then choose whether they will stick to quantitative or qualitative methodology, or use a mixed method. Naturally, since the two methods characteristics are complementary, this reasoning often concludes with the adoption of mixed methods. Writing about the field of game studies, Williams makes such a claim. The two symmetrical problems of quantitative and qualitative studies are, he argued, generalization and context. Quantitative methods are able to study vast populations and thus to generalize their results, providing they were obtained through the study of a representative sample. However, they cannot render the context in which the actions take place. In short, they fail to understand the meaning the actors give to their actions and to the world around them. On the other hand, qualitative methods are very good at

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providing such a context. They can situate precisely a social situation within a broader frame, and grasp the complexity of those situations. But they are incapable of generalizing their findings, since their results are too closely tied to a precisely situated context.52 It should be reminded that the use of quantitative methods does not guarantee the generalizability of their results.53 Very few quantitative studies overtaken in the field of game studies actually have a representative sample. We can only think of one study, led by Dmitri Williams, that fulfills this condition: the sample had been provided to the research team by the owners of the game Everquest 2.54 In our research, the sample we worked on was not representative of the population of World of Warcraft players, nor did it claim to be. We never pretended to describe statistically the general population using the results of our survey. However, some researchers, using equally biased samples have made such claims. Griffiths and others, for instance, used polls posted on two online gaming fan sites, and yet claimed that their study could provide a better knowledge of who video game players really were. They aimed at “breaking the stereotype,” especially by showing that players were older than might have been expected.55 In a similar article, Yee relied on a series of surveys he designed, recruiting his participants on game-related Web sites and forums, to evoke the demographics of players.56 Such a reliance on game-related forum recruitment faces one major issue: we have to assume that the population of players who visit these sites is representative of all players. It would if these forums were the place where the game is played. This is clearly not the case. Our own research mixed several types of recruitment. We relied not only on game-related forums, but also on social networks (Facebook and Skyrock Blog, a blogging platform and social network quite popular among working- and lower-middle classes French teenagers) and on blogs. It gave us an opportunity to test the hypothesis of Griffiths and Yee, among others. Table 12.1 shows the weekly game time of players recruited on forums and by other means. It appears clearly that players recruited outside the forums are overrepresented in the lowest bracket (less than fourteen hours a week), suggesting that there is a high concentration of intensive players on these forums. How, then, could one deduce, from answers given by a sample where the so-called hardcore gamers are obviously overrepresented, an average gaming time for all players? Then, what good are these surveys? Why bother building them if we cannot generalize about their results? The fact is that we can—only, not the kind of generalization we usually think about. There is no way we could describe the general population of players with them. Griffiths and Yee’s attempts failed in this regard. But we can still say a lot of things about the

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Table 12.1. Weekly Game Time, by Origin of Recruitment (Numbers are Percentages) P=0.034

Game-Related Forums 1

0 to 14 hours 15 to 30 hours 31 hours and more Total

28.3 42.8 28.9 100

Other Origins 38.3 37.8 23.9 100

Total 30.5 41.7 27.8 100

1. Weekly game time has been computed with answers to the questions “How many hours did you play the last seven days?” and “How many hours did you play yesterday?” People who declared they had stopped playing were asked the question, “How much time did you play on average, when you were playing?” instead.

differences we can spot among players. For instance, nothing assures us that the proportion of men and women found in the sample matches the actual proportion in the mother population. But when we relate this attribute to answers that describe the type of practice, we can see how there are gendered ways of playing. These differences can be generalized, for there is no hint that recruitment was so gender biased that it picked radically different men and women. Furthermore, we can ask whether qualitative approaches are really incapable of generalization. Admittedly, sample size matters, and drawing conclusions solely on a few cases is a risky business. But as for non-representative but generalizable quantitative samples, the population ethnographically studied might be chosen as to allow a more general analysis. We can, for instance, try and find individuals who differ greatly in a few key variables, the influence of which the survey has to measure, and build a sample with enough male and female, hard science or IT and other educational backgrounds, working-class and middle-class individuals, and so forth. But more important, we can always rely on the cumulative nature of social science research. The sociologist and epistemologist Jean-Claude Passeron wrote about the importance of analogy in “historical sciences.” It is true that every situation these disciplines study is uniquely linked to a time and space, and that it is, in this sense, specific. Thus, concepts are designed with regard to empirical situations, and stay indexed to the situations they designate even when they are used in other fields. He takes the example of medieval society: the characteristic features of Japanese medieval society do not match those of European medieval societies. However, the analogy between these situations helps us understand both of them better.57 Similarly, research in sociology holds little interest on its own, but has to be analyzed with regard to other researches.58 There are many examples of such generalizations in the history of social sciences. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s classical

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book The Elementary Structures of Kinship, for one, relies on a wide array of monographic works to draw more general laws about societies, namely that the incest taboo is at their root, since marriage outside the family is the first form of exchange between social groups.59 It is often difficult, to say the least, to take into account situations outside one’s field. Moreover, a perspective that would analyze a lot of various situations might lose some of its pertinence. One of the main criticisms of Le´vi-Strauss’s structuralism concerns the scale of his model. Generalization, thus, should always be cautious. But the amount of works in various fields of the social sciences allows a researcher to draw parallels between what they are looking at and what others discovered before them. Of course, that would mean, in the field of game studies, that we should not postulate that games are a completely new medium, but rather try to see empirically what is new and what is old about it. That is why we tried to relate the career of World of Warcraft players to a series of work on professional and deviant careers60 and found many similarities: the construction of a status through a necessary succession of steps, the possibility of a fork in the career, the necessity of personal efforts, the importance of the peer group, and so forth. Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field also helped a lot when we had to describe what the social space of the game looked like.61 Here, too, there are many resemblances. Like the literary field, the social space of the game is relatively autonomous. Huizinga defended a similar idea of autonomy with his concept of the “magic circle.”62 However, in Huizinga’s perspective, the autonomy of the game is absolute: the game is a space radically cut from other social spheres, like economy. By applying a theory that has been built on a totally different object, the production of culture, the concept of “field” allows us to see that this autonomy is actually very fragile. It is not an ontological property of the game, but rather a never-ending social construction. The actors of this representation, the players and the producers of the game, have to continually strive to maintain their autonomy. Forbidding real-money trade is one of the ways to do it: outside world economic capital should not be convertible into specific economic capital.63 Other means include the definition of allowed topics for discussion (no politics, no religion, said one interviewee, the administrator of a private server).64 Furthermore, field theory describes social spaces in terms of the unequal distribution of the different forms of capital. It thus makes visible the heterogeneity of the players, as well as the specific hierarchies of the game, as for instance the dominant position competitive players hold. The major flaw of quantitative studies is, for Williams, their lack of contextualization. He gave one illustration: since the social scientists usually

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limit their analysis to a few factors (“school achievement, intelligence, and introversion”), predictions of an individual’s behavior are impossible. We could object that qualitative studies cannot predict behaviors either. Social sciences do not produce natural laws that would apply in every situation. Rather, they rely on probability. For instance, the sociology of education can only pinpoint the more influential factors of school achievement, and thus, knowing an individual’s attributes, predict their probability of success, but the outcome is far from certain. It can only draw the skyline of possible and probable futures, and say which one is most likely to happen. Furthermore, qualitative studies, be they ethnography or textual analysis, may present the same “contextual flaw.” The “scholastic point of view” is a concept Bourdieu termed after an expression by John Austin. It describes a situation when the researcher gives to the actors they study their own point of view on the world: for instance, the formalized and experimental situations game theory refers to.65 Some ethnographic works in game studies show the same scholastic bias. A recent and otherwise interesting edited book, Digital Culture, Play and Identity, A World of Warcraft Reader, has several of its contributors rely as much, if not more, on their personal experience of the game, than empirical research.66 The emphasis they place on role-playing67 or the history of Azeroth,68 for instance, is characteristic of scholars being primarily interested in players playing the same way they do. Although the editors initially insist on the variety of potential practices,69 the diverse types of players barely appear in the book. In this sense, qualitative studies may not always be the best way to contextualize social action, since contextualization requires the acknowledgement of differences between the actors. Some qualitative methods, especially textual analysis, reproduce what Foucault called the “juridico-discursive conception of power.”70 He warned us, in a preamble on his genealogical method, against the risks of taking written texts for granted. We should not only analyze what the law says (norms and rules), but also the actual practices, for there may be a gap between these two. The many works on the ideology of video games, or games in general, usually limit their study to the texts, in this case the code or the rules of the game, and let slip their reception and appropriation by the players.71 Some approaches studying online identities show the same bias. They assume that the Internet grants anonymity arguing that users can chose new identities online.72 Yet they forget that social identities are deeply embodied in individuals. One of the major tensions between players in the virtual worlds, for instance, is the level of language. Many players complain that the virtual world is crowded with people who do not know how to write properly, use many abbreviations, and a phonetic language. They usually associate such a

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use of language with youth: it is, they think, how young teenagers talk. But the fact is that it is not only about age, but also about social class. Mastering of the written word is a very unequally distributed skill. The symbolic violence of the interactions about language reassesses the distinctions between social groups. They act as a sign of offline identity and limit the ability to freely build a different online representation of the self.

Conclusion The distinction between quantitative and qualitative methodologies cannot be taken for granted. As we saw, it is much less simple than it appears, and even an approach of the risks and benefits of each method fails to strictly separate them, since they may both show the same weakness, depending on their uses. Therefore, the choice of a method should not be made a priori, but negotiated in the field with regard to their capacities and to the questions asked. The two methods should not be opposed, but rather combined. Instead of “which one should I use?” one could ask, “What can I prove using them?” The reasons why we should mix methodologies are quite obvious once we take a critical look, even one as short as this chapter, at their weaknesses. Complementarities of methods are the main reason, even though other uses of mixed methods are common.73 To ensure this complementary use, it is important to think about what both methods can achieve in the specific context of the study, and given a specific research question. In other words, this means that the problem with the choice of a methodology is above all epistemological. It is a matter of the “sociological reasoning,”74 of the conditions under which a scientific proposition can be held as true. Howard Becker named his clever collection of tips for social scientists Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While You’re Doing It.75 Reflexivity, thinking about one’s research, is essential in every research, and especially when mixed methods are used, at every stage of the research. Whatever the method used, we must make sure not to say more than we can say with the data produced. Then, mixing methodologies appears as a good way to produce a more comprehensive knowledge about a given object: “The social sciences must take benefit of every method and every way of scientifically constructing social reality.”76 To some extent, the lasting opposition between quantitative social science and qualitative humanities research resembles an opposition studied by Jean-Claude Passeron and Claude Grignon. Literature and sociology usually fall, they say, in one of two theoretical traps, misérabilisme (sordid realism

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emphasizing the complete lack of control lower classes have on culture, including popular culture) and populism (glorification of popular culture as an autonomous, coherent set). The former is embodied by the Frankfurt school’s perspective on cultural industries; the latter, by the parts of the cultural studies approach that ignores cultural domination.77 The social sciences and humanities sides of games studies show the same opposition. Passeron and Grignon saw in the methodological divide one of the many factors that contributed to the reproduction of the status quo. Since then, many sociologists have worked on a refined definition of culture, which would acknowledge both the creativity and resistance of popular culture and its objective lower status in cultural hierarchies. Such a work is necessary in contemporary game studies. Video games should neither be seen as yet another product of cultural industries that oppresses and alienates players, nor as a fabulous new medium freeing players from the outside world’s norms. Researchers should display neither fear, nor fascination in their analysis, but only ask questions and answer them as best as they can.78

Notes The author wishes to thank Juliette Abbes and Talmadge Wright for their comments on an earlier draft. 1. Alan Bryman, “Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Research: How Is It Done?,” Qualitative Research 6, no. 1 (2006), 97–113. 2. Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). 3. Alvaro Pires, “Deux thèses erronées sur les lettres et les chiffres,” Cahiers de recherche sociologique 5, no. 2 (1987), 85–105. 4. Objectivism, or realism, is a thesis stating that reality is independent of the mind. In sociology, it is often said to originate in the work of Emile Durkheim, and especially in his proposition to “treat social facts as things” (The Rules of Sociological Method [Glencoe, N.Y.: Free Press, 1982]). Subjectivism, on the other hand, states that reality is constructed by human perception: social reality, in this perspective, is what social actors think it is. 5. Michel Butor, Second Thoughts [La modification] (London: Faber and Faber, 1958). 6. Howard Becker, Writing for Social Scientists. How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 7. Bernard Lahire, L’homme pluriel: Les ressorts de l’action (Paris: Nathan, 1998). 8. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966).

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9. This is also a classic topic in social science research. See for instance David Snudow’s account of learning how to improvise jazz on the piano, Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001); Loïc Wacquant’s ethnography of a boxing gym, Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); or Sylvia Faure’s work on the socialization of dancers, Apprendre par corps: Socio-anthropologie des techniques de danse (Paris: La Dispute, 2000). 10. This is one of the reasons why a critical review of classical essentialist definitions of games such as Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1944); and Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961) is much needed in the field of game studies. 11. “Equipment” consists in virtual objects owned by the players’ characters and allowing them to perform certain actions (fighting, casting a spell, etc.). Raids are usually difficult missions that have to be carried out by a team of players. High-level raids are where the best objects can be found. 12. John Fiske, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom,” in The Adoring Audience. Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa Lewis (Londres: Routledge, 1992), 32–49. 13. Although it should be noted that a group of players who are at the same time competitive and fans also exists. They spend more time playing the game than every other group, only engage in cooperative competition (Player vs. Environment, as opposed to oppositional competition, Player vs. Player), and are a minority among competitive players. 14. Sylvie Octobre and Yves Jauneau, “Tels parents, tels enfants? Une approche de la transmission culturelle,” Revue Française de Sociologie 49, no. 4 (2008): 703. 15. Concentration of the last degree obtained was roughly divided into humanities, hard sciences or technology, and law-economics-services. However, gender has been shown to have a proper influence on other aspects of social differentiation of video game play. For instance, it effectively explains the use vs. non-use of video games among young teenagers, as well as the genre of video game played. See Kristen Lucas and John L. Sherry, “Sex Differences in Video Game Play,” Communication Research 31, no. 5 (2004), 499–523. 16. Bernard Lahire, “Formes de la lecture étudiante et catégories scolaires de l’entendement lectoral,” Sociétés Contemporaines 48 (2002), 87–107. 17. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). 18. Constance Steinkuehler, “Cognition and Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games: A Critical Approach” (University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2005), quoted in Constance Steinkuehler and Sean Duncan, “Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds,” Journal of Science Education and Technology 17, no. 6 (2008), 530–43. 19. Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963).

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20. Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron, and Jean-Claude Chamboredon, The Craft of Sociology: Epistemological Preliminaries (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991); Muriel Darmon, “La notion de carrière: Un instrument interactionniste d’objectivation,” Politix 82, no. 2 (2008), 149–67. 21. Becker, Outsiders. 22. Archives may show the same display of details a researcher would need. See for instance the classical analysis of Mozart’s biography by Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 23. Game-specific capital, in this case, is composed of a specific economic capital (the number and level of characters owned; their equipment and their in-game money), cultural capital (the knowledge of the game and the game universe history, of the game mechanics, etc.), symbolic capital (affiliation to a prestigious guild, PvP awards, etc.), and social capital (links with other players). 24. For a more developed argument in favor of field theory in virtual-world studies, see Samuel Coavoux, “L’espace social des pratiques de World of Warcraft,” in Les jeux vidéo comme objet de recherche, eds. Hovig Ter Minassian and Samuel Rufat (Paris: Questions Théoriques, 2010, forthcoming). 25. Muriel Darmon, Devenir anorexique: Une approche sociologique (Paris: La Découverte, 2003). 26. Bernard Lahire, “La variation des contextes dans les sciences sociales. Remarques épistémologiques,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 51, no. 2 (1996): 382. 27. Bryman, “Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Research”; Jennifer C. Greene, Valerie J. Caracelli, and Wendy F. Graham, “Toward a Conceptual Framework for Mixed-Method Evaluation Designs,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 11, no. 3 (1989), 255–74. 28. Guilds are organized groups of players or, more precisely, of characters. Their primary goal is to gather players so they can find gaming partners. Most of the endgame content being collaborative, guilds are essential in allowing access to this content. 29. Pierre Bourdieu, Luc Boltanski, and Monique de Saint Martin, “Les stratégies de reconversion. Les classes sociales et le système d’enseignement,” Informations sur les Sciences Sociales 12, no. 5 (1973), 61–113; Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (London and Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1977). 30. Bernard Lahire, Culture écrite et inégalités scolaires. Sociologie de l’ “échec scolaire” à l’école primaire (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1993). 31. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1959). 32. Becker, Outsiders. 33. Robert King Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968), 265. 34. Rob Cover, “Gaming (Ad)Diction: Discourse, Identity, Time and Play in the Production of the Gamer Addiction Myth,” Game Studies 6, no. 1 (2006),

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http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/cover; Craig A. Anderson and B. J. Bushman, “Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behaviors, Aggressive Cognition, Aggressive Affect, Psychological Arousal and Prosocial Behavior: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Science 12 (2001), 353–59. 35. Joseph R. Gusfield, The Culture of Public Problems. Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 36. Incidentally, the bad reception of the survey also had to do with the fear for malevolent programs (the survey was hosted on a French academic Web site, with a .fr, domain name instead of a .edu, and it seemed to have raised some suspicion). 37. Pierre Bourdieu, The Weight of the World. Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Oxford, Stanford: Polity Press, Stanford University Press, 1999). 38. Dmitri Williams, “Bridging the Methodological Divide in Game Research,” Simulation & Gaming 36, no. 4 (2005), 447–63. 39. R. Burke Johnson and Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie, “Mixed Methods Research: A Research Paradigm Whose Time Has Come,” Educational Researcher 33, no. 7 (2004), 14–26; Abbas Tashakkori and Charles Teddlie, Mixed Methodology: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1998); Abbas Tashakkori and Charles Teddlie, Foundations of Mixed Methods Research: Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Techniques in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (London: Sage, 2008). 40. See Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (1989), 14–25; Pierre Bourdieu, “La double vérité du travail,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 114 (1996), 89–90. This is not an unusual standpoint, however. See for instance Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966) for a similar point. 41. It can of course be argued that such a use of “qualitative” methods of data gathering cannot actually be called qualitative, and the way data is analyzed rather than collected is where the difference between quantitative and qualitative methodologies lie. However, this argument ignores the differences the methodological implications of a “qualitative” use of quantitative methods or a “quantitative” use of qualitative methods. An interview conducted in an objectivist fashion still differs greatly from a quantitative survey. 42. Pires, “Deux Thèses Erronées.” 43. Ibid. 44. Ian Hacking, “The Seld-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences,” in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 29–64. 45. Pierre Bourdieu, quoted by Henry Rouanet, Werner Ackermann, and Brigitte Le Roux, “The Geometric Analysis of Questionnaires. The Lessons of Bourdieu’s La Distinction,” Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique 65 (2000), 5–15. On a somewhat anecdotal level, Bourdieu also said he liked correspondence analysis because it was “nice and funny” (“joli et drôle,” quoted in Michel Gollac, “La rigueur et la rigolade. A propos de l’usage des méthodes quantitatives par Pierre Bourdieu,” Courrier des statistiques 112 [2004], 31.) The adjective “nice” also refers to the heuristic qualities of the method: it makes clear structures that may otherwise be hard to grasp. 46. Bourdieu, Distinction.

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47. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Cambridge, UK; Stanford: Polity Press; Stanford University Press, 1996). 48. Becker, Outsiders. 49. For an example, see the approach of the social space of prostitution using ethnography as its main method developed by Lilian Mathieu, “L’espace de la prostitution. Éléments empiriques et perspectives en sociologie de la déviance,” Sociétés Contemporaines 38 (2000), 99–116. 50. Bourdieu, Distinction; Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern, “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996), 900–7. 51. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special References to Publications and Entertainments (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957); Bernard Lahire, La Culture Des Individus. Disonnances Culturelles Et Distinction De Soi (Paris: La Découverte, 2004). For an analysis of the relation between the two scales in the case of the sociology of culture, see Lahire, “La variation des contextes dans les sciences sociales.” 52. Williams, “Bridging the Methodological Divide in Game Research.” 53. Generalization is conditioned by a series of methodological precautions, or at least should be. Sampling is especially important in descriptive statistics. A representative sample can be built either at random (when every single individual in the mother population has the exact same chance of being part of the sample) or through quotas (the researcher, knowing the structure of the mother population thanks to previous survey, makes sure that the sample has the same structure). The study of cultural activities seldom has the opportunity to use one of those two sampling methods. It often settles for an alternative: individuals are surveyed on the place where they perform the activity (for instance in a museum). 54. Dmitri Williams, Nick Yee, and Scott E. Caplan, “Who Plays, How Much, and Why? Debunking the Stereotypical Gamer Profile,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 4 (2008), 993–1018. 55. Mark Griffiths, Mark Davies, and Darren Chappell, “Breaking the Stereotype: The Case of Online Gaming,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 6, no. 1 (2003), 81–91. 56. Nick Yee, “The Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively-Multiuser Online Graphical Environments,” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 15 (2006), 309–29. 57. Passeron’s argument can be better understood with a reference to Wittgestein’s concept of “family resemblance”: the objects we call “games,” the philosopher wrote, do not all share a common feature, but rather show a series of similarities, that is, “family resemblances.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Boston: Blackwell, 2009), §66 ff. 58. Jean-Claude Passeron, Le raisonnement sociologique: Un espace non poppérien de l’argumentaton (Paris: Albin Michel, 2006). 59. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 60. Howard Becker and Anselm Strauss, “Careers, Personality and Adult Socialization,” American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 3 (1956), 253-63; Becker,

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Outsiders; Howard Becker et al., Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School (New Brunswick, London: Transaction Books, 1965); Darmon, Devenir anorexique; Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1961); Everett Hughes, The Sociological Eye. Selected Papers (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971). 61. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art. 62. Huizinga, Homo Ludens. 63. By specific economic capital, we mean the series of virtual possessions of players that can produce a value in the world of the game (characters, items, gold, etc.). 64. A server that is not run by the editor of the game, Blizzard Entertainment. 65. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Scholastic Point of View,” Cultural Anthropology 5, no. 4 (1990), 380–91. 66. Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg, eds., Digital Culture, Play and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008). 67. Esther MacCallum-Stewart and Justin Parsler, “Role-Play Vs. Gameplay: The Difficulties of Playing a Role in World of Warcraft,” in Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 225–46. 68. Esther MacCallum-Stewart, ““Never Such Innocence Again”: War and History in World of Warcraft,” in Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 39–62. 69. Corneliussen and Rettberg, Digital Culture, Play and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, 5. 70. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin Books, 1990). 71. Laurent Trémel, “Jeux, éducation et socialisation politique: Contribution au rappel de la permanence d’un processus,” Géographie, économie, société 9, no. 1 (2007), 83–99. 72. Miroslaw Filiciak, “Hyperidentities: Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games,” in The Video Game Theory Reader, eds. Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf (London: Routledge, 2003), 87–102. 73. Bryman, “Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Research: How Is It Done?” 74. Passeron, Le raisonnement sociologique. 75. Howard Becker, Tricks of the Trade. How to Think About Your Research While You’re Doing It (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998). 76. Lahire, “La variation des contextes dans les sciences sociales,” 384. 77. Jean-Claude Passeron and Claude Grignon, Le savant et le populaire. Misérabilisme et populisme en sociologie et en littérature (Paris: Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1989). 78. This is a classical precaution, first advocated by Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1949). In media studies, a similar has been made by David Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood. Growing up in the Age of Electronic Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

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PART IV

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN



Virtual Today, Reality Tomorrow: Taking Our Sociological Understanding of Virtual Gameplay to the Next Level Andra´s Luka´cs, J. Talmadge Wright, and David G. Embrick James Cameron’s 2009 Avatar was the highest-grossing film production ever. It was radical in its use of 3D, and special South Korean movie houses even offered a 4D experience, with various sensate effects (wind, slight shakes, etc.). The technological sophistication, mystical lighting, and flawless use of animation technology can only partially explain its widespread popularity; after all, many contemporary productions use similar tools. A larger part of Avatar’s success, and the more interesting idea from our standpoint, was its ability to generate a cathartic experience, summon emotions, and give movie goers a sense of transcendence. People all over the world, from urban Americans to indigenous populations displaced by the Belo Monte Dam project in Brazil, displayed strong emotional responses while watching the struggle between an exploitative technological dystopia and a spiritual utopia. In the wake of its success, Palestinians—dressed as the Na’vi—protested Israeli settlements, and James Cameron traveled to meet with the indigenous people of the Volta Grande region before appearing in front of UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York. Avatar showed once again that despite technological advancements and the continued disenchantment of the world, humans have a deep connection to transcendence and fantasy. Cutting-edge technology is also the foundation of modern digital play and while contemporary video games are more controversial, less celebrated, and do not necessarily generate political mobilization and dissent comparable to Avatar, their success is based on the same principle.

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Play and fantasy as a basic form of human sociability and culture has been transformed considerably since the capitalist mode of production emerged as a dominant practice and ideology. It has became more restricted, rationalized, commercialized, supervised, and coordinated by external bodies. As Huizinga and others have discussed play has been reduced to sport. This is not surprising: play as a realm of social activity is embedded into and shaped by other social institutions. Nonetheless, while bureaucracies and modern rationality disenchanted the everyday social world and altered the manifestations of play, it nevertheless has remained a constant central element of human life. The popularity of contemporary virtual realms and video games is rooted precisely in their ability to transgress the restrictions and limitations of everyday life and often evoke reactive, repressed, or hidden fantasies. While this magic may be short lived and participation routinized, the possibility of re-enchanting and re-imagining the world must not be overlooked. Social scientists are in a contradictory position when it comes to the study of the social and cultural dimensions of modern play. They bring their tools, methods, and theories to understand, deconstruct, and in fact disenchant modern play once more. While some vein of research, most notably the tradition labeled media effects, would not be bothered by dismissing the meaning people attach to their virtual presentations of self, critical research must embrace the dialectic of consumer entertainment. The meanings people make of their play and the pleasures of their fantasies cannot be dismissed simply as consequences of social structure or technology. Interactive media represents complex social worlds and its study from a social science perspective requires a nuanced approach. While understanding the meaning and significance of these media spaces for their participants and designers, researchers also have to be mindful of their relationship to contemporary capitalist tendencies. Social structure is important, but not completely determinate. The goal of this volume, and the next one soon to be published, was to give voice to a variety of researchers embracing the above mentioned dialectical approach to virtual realms. Social scientists are perpetually troubled by the fact that their specialized knowledge and the structure of contemporary academic paradigms force their work to fit into narrow academic cubicles. In this environment, only collaborative work and multidisciplinary discussion can explore complex and emerging social phenomena. Given the pace of technological innovations, it is impossible to create a complete account of digital play, nonetheless our goal was to embrace a multidimensional perspective for the two volumes. Following the intellectual tradition of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, we divided our treatise of virtual realms into six subcategories: con-

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temporary theories of leisure and play, the political economy and marketing of digital realms, methodology, social, and psychological implications, social inequalities of modern gaming, and fandom. While these categories change constantly, inevitably none of them is able to address the complex relationship between technology, representation, and fantasy alone. However, they gave us an intellectual compass to explore important dimensions and to organize our project. As soon as we started talking to possible contributors, we realized that a single book can only scratch the surface of the current debates. Thankfully, our publisher, Lexington Books, agreed to expand the project into a two-volume set: the first volume dealing with the theoretical, business, and methodological issues, while the second volume will address questions revolving around social psychology, stratification, and fandom. While this division was logical and practical, we maintain that the two volumes used together provide a more balanced perspective on critical issues revolving around digital play. Even though a short summary of the previous arguments might be appropriate at this juncture, our project and the work of critical researchers are far from complete. Every historical epoch generates its particular forms of social structures including manifestations of play and fantasy. The social performances of play can never be reduced to ideal types or pure elements, nonetheless different societies experience play differently. This is the starting point of our first section, where Thomas Henricks explores the contemporary implications of Johan Huizinga’s scholarship. The meaning and cultural implications of play in the twenty-first century are shaped by the same forces that transformed feudalism into capitalism, in particular industrialization, bureaucratization, and the hegemony of bourgeois ideology. Not surprisingly the joyful exploration of human possibility, the idealized feudal form, morphed into instrumental and serious play. While the extent of playfulness of contemporary play is often questioned, Henricks reminds us that ludic realms are not only structured by social forces, but they are also structuring forces themselves. Thus, despite celebratory accounts of the social character of contemporary interactive media, “contestative” play is more individualistic in orientation that many would like to admit. This notion questions some of the underlying assumptions of Csikszentmihalyi’s flow—in particular that optimal experience is based on a sense of consensus. This is no reason to underestimate the importance of modern play and its fundamental role in human development. Judd Ruggill and Ken McAllister’s chapter carried the discussion forward by highlighting the dialectic of contemporary digital play. Through their examination of Ernest Bloch’s scholarship, they maintained that while contemporary play resembles work-like,

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rationalized practices, it still provides a dimension of fun that other social activities lack. Thus, our understanding of play must dismiss it as useless and yet embrace it as transformative, utopian at the same time. “Anamnesis,” the “loss of forgetting” is their proposed term to incorporate this dialectic into contemporary game studies to move beyond the spirited celebration of virtual realms as a defense mechanism against simple and trivializing scholarly perspectives. The first two chapters then highlighted the contradictory nature of modern play as “commodified fantasy.” Langman and Luka´cs expand on this theme by providing a sociohistorical perspective of modernity and the process that morphed the medieval participatory carnivals into commodified pleasures. While the survival of bourgeois capitalism is predicated upon alienation and cheap labor, consumption and the realization of profit is equally important. Historically the ludic domain was outside the economic realm during feudalism, modern capitalism “desublimated” repressed pleasures and turned them into commodities. Nonetheless, the meaning of participatory carnivals, fun, and transgression cannot be reduced to simple terms. The meaning people attach to various contemporary festivals, including but not limited to virtual realms, calls for careful inspection. Derek Noon and Nick Dyer-Witheford provide a further example, detailing the narrative structure of the Metal Gear Solid video game series. While the saga is predicated upon fantasies of futuristic weapons, globalized politics with a single superpower, and individualistic militarist masculinity, Noon and Dyer-Witheford maintain that the game is able to subscribe and transgress these categories at the same time. Thus, the meaning of play is not reducible to a clear-cut simple narrative analysis or subjected to ideological determinism that is reflective of capitalist domination. While the audience’s reading of complex media texts is not detached from the ideology embedded in the narrative, meaning is more dependent on already existing subjective positions. Whether audiences use virtual realms to reaffirm the status quo or engage in transgressive play will be dealt with in our second volume in more detail. Questions regarding subjective positions and the presentation of the virtual self wraps-up the chapter on nature of modern play and technology. Alanna R. Miller directs our attention away from the previous historical, economical, and political thinking to examine one of the most distinguishing features of modern play: virtual embodiment. The virtual and physical dichotomy seemingly suggests that there is a separation between these realms of social activity. Miller argues that nothing could be further from the truth. While the materialist doctrine is correct to locate the center of self in the

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body, virtual representations provide dramaturgical tools to construct and signify new identities. This dialectical relationship is explored by Miller as virtual embodiement. Through virtual embodiement humans transgress the desires, limitations, and merits of the physical body, yet they can only situate and realize virtual selves, as mode of communication, in the physical body. While technological affordances allow people to construct and interact with a wider variety of virtual selves, Paul Ketchum and Mitch Peck’s analysis is quick to point out, that gender and race representations in video games did not change dramatically since the 1980s. This might not be necessarily an ideological choice from the producer standpoint, but rather a manifestation of the industry’s knowledge of their consumer demographics. Thus, familiar representations and stereotypes, as shortcuts, serve to cater to a specific gamer taste culture. With the growing popularity, widening and diversifying user base of virtual realms, it is worth paying attention to how these gender and race representations might change. Far from an indicator of the progressive nature of video game industry, changing representations will be a consequence of market forces and marketing choices. Hence the lack of changes in these stereotypes point more to the difficulty of changing established social hierarchies within the general population more than they do actual game content. The meanings of representations are negotiated within particular social and cultural contexts. And increasingly these contexts are global in nature. While the game industry is interested in reaching a transnational user base, national regulations and cultural boundaries represent a significant barrier to “localize” games. William Kelly’s contribution explores the cultural boundary work regulatory institutions do. In particular, Kelly looks at issues of censorship, ratings, and the understanding of what constitutes violent representations, in both permissible and non-permissible forms. The difference in how diverse cultures come to understand what is considered taboo speaks to deeper questions of human identity and culture. Hence game development and game fantasy cannot simply rely upon a standard Western model, but increasingly must take into account the subjective positions of global users. The complex issues and forces shaping game localization was further explored by Rebecca Carlson and Jonathan Corliss. They argued that the decision to decide what images and representations are appropriate within a given national context is not a simple marketing decision. While localization involves the navigation of cross-cultural regulatory practices and it is often based on convenient characterizations of audiences (claims that certain nations are “better players”), game publishers and distributors also act as moral entrepreneurs, protecting national audiences from inappropriate content. Interestingly,

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digital media circulation does not necessarily involve local agents and while representations might be filtered, given the interactive and social nature of digital play, player experience is just as much shaped by in-game sociability as it is by pure representation. The discussions about the complex and ambiguous understanding of play and the political economy of interactive media business provide a good foundation for social scientists to study and investigate particular instances of digital play. While studying virtual realms is not that different from other areas of research from a methodological standpoint, researchers face challenges unique to digital gaming. Our methodological section offered insight into the process of researching virtual realms. Andra´s Luka´cs maintained that the study of digital culture must follow the tradition set forth by critical media research, in particular the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, and refrain from methodological orthodoxies. Luka´cs provided a detailed account of his challenges as an ethnographic researcher in World of Warcraft. While the temptations of allowing technology to govern research are appealing, we must not succumb indulgently. Further, researchers must be mindful and self-reflective of the ethnical dimensions of research and how their presence influence the social setting and understand that their competencies—or lack of them—greatly shape the outcome of their projects. While bracketing the virtual world and approaching it as a separate social space might be tempting as a data collection method, Luka´cs reminds us that these media practices are embedded in everyday life and should not be conceptualized as distinct. Erving Goffman’s use of the front-backstage distinction connects Luka´cs’s chapter to Ducheneaut’s contribution. A virtual ethnographer of the video game Counter Strike, Ducheneaut’s dataset is a collection of field notes and recorded conversations. By using a dramaturgical perspective on virtual sociability, his work shows the complexity of social performances and language in a game environment revolving around the basic “hunt and kill” scenario. From a methodological perspective, this chapter demonstrated how the researcher must integrate the technological affordances of game infrastructure with the communicative practices used by players. Another important—and often overlooked—methodological concern is the theme of Samuel Coavoux’s contribution, namely how methodology drives theory. Different research methods are simply tools to answer questions in a systematic matter; nonetheless too many scholars are unable or incapable of switching between tools when confronted with the limitations of a given method. Coavoux shows how methodological flexibility forces us to switch perspectives and reveal the latent dimensions of something that we thought was known. This shift is feared by researchers because we stub-

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bornly cling to our perceived notion of the research problematic and we are reluctant to broaden and alter our protocols. Coavoux’s courage to expand a qualitative inquiry about player socialization in World of Warcraft into a quantitative investigation about stratification and differentiation within the player population was rewarded by a unique and strong dataset. While Coavoux’s methodological flexibility might not be suitable for all research projects, his case study provided as excellent reminder that methodology should never be taken for granted. Conclusions are often not the result of finished research projects, but necessarily interruptions in ongoing discussions. While we are satisfied with the wide variety of intellectual traditions our contributors represent and convinced that this volume provides a multi-perspective discussion on the main topics (the theory, political economy, and methodology of virtual play research), we cannot help but be excited about the second volume of this set. It is designed to raise new concerns and further explore some of the issues addressed here. The section on the social and physiological implications of virtual play aims to move beyond simplistic media-effects literature and explore the virtual realms from a more personal perspective. The section on the social inequalities of modern play investigates how traditional stratification mechanisms and distinctions manifest themselves within virtual realms. We are concerned with race, class, and gender representation and how digital communities embrace or reject these ideologies. We pay particular attention to hardships disabled players encounter during game play. Our third focus is to provide a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between digital gaming and audience studies, particularly highlighting fandom and the fascinating social worlds of modding, user-generated content, and machinima. Our hope is that these two volumes will generate further interest and dialogue among social scientists interested in understanding the matrix of technology, power, representation, games, and audiences.

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Index

accommodation, 32 ActRaiser, 154 actual self, 108 addictions, 230–31 administered society, 63 Adorno, Theodor, 48 AdultFriendFinder, 100 advertisements: glocalization in, 167–68; localization and, 178–79; in magazines, 125–38, 130, 133, 136– 37; stereotypes and, 7–8, 125–38, 130, 133, 137; television, 132 aerial drones, 89 age: censorship and, 166; parental consent and, 195; stereotypes and, 135 agency panic, 84–85 Age of Conan, 135 aggression, 209, 211–12 agon. See social contest agonistic model of social relating, 38 Aion, 135 algorithms, 49 alienated labor, 61–62, 64, 70, 250 Allison, Anne, 75, 163–65, 174

America’s Army, 89 American characteristics, 167, 182n19 Amos, Diane, 132 anamnesis, 55–56, 250 Anderson, Benedict, 162 anger, 209, 211 animal characters, 135 anime, 161, 175, 177–78, 180n2, 181n15 Anobile, Michael, 166–67, 168 anonymity, and new identity, 237 anorexia, 228 apocalypse, virtual play, utopia and hope, 46–52 apocalyptic fantasies, 1–2, 3, 11n1 Appadurai, Arjun, 162–64, 172 appearance, presentation and, 104–6 Arden: The World of William Shakespeare, 46, 56n6 Arma 2, 135 artificial intelligence, 82, 88, 90 ascending meaning, 4, 16, 31 Asimov, Isaac: Foundation series, 226 Assassin’s Creed, 77 assets, 175

255

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256 

Index

assimilation, 32 associationist style, 23 Association of Internet Researchers Ethics Guide, 195 athletics, professional, 24 atomic bombs, 153 audience: in FPS games, 201, 205–9; players vs., 201, 206–9 autonomy, 92, 236 Avatar (movie), 98, 247 avatars, 97–98, 143; body language and, 100; shared, 193–94; violent virtual crime involving, 111 AznMastr (Counter-Strike player), 206– 8, 210–13, 215 back region, 206–7, 252 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 60, 64–65, 70 Barrett, Stanley, 179 Battlefield Heroes, 131 bawdy tales, 65 Beavers, Louise, 132 Becker, Howard, 3, 238 behavior: in Counter-Strike, 9; media usage and, 188; predictions of, 237 Benzecri, Jean-Paul, 232 Berger, Peter, 224 Bestor, Theodore, 170, 176 billingsgate, 65 Biohazard, 147, 168 Bionic Commando, 153 Bioshock, 3 Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, 72n14, 189–90, 248, 252 Black Plague, 2 Blacks, 126–27, 132–33. See also ethnicity and race Blizzard Entertainment, 59, 195 Bloch, Ernest, 45–49, 51–55, 57n13 blogs, 99, 114, 234 blood, 151–52, 167 Blumer, Herbert, 190

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body: dismemberment, 151–52; language, 100; as machine, 112; male body types, 135; self and, 97, 101–4, 108–9. See also dead bodies; mind and body; virtual embodiment body idiom, 104 Boellstorff, Tom, 9, 100, 193, 198n27 Bogost, Ian, 85 bonding and segregation, in CounterStrike, 209–17 border patrol, 172 border zones, 163–64, 171 Borderlands, 135 the Boss (Metal Gear character), 81 Bourdieu, Pierre, 154, 159n21, 223, 232–33, 236, 242n45 boxes, in Metal Gear games, 86–87 Brechtian Verfremdungseffektor (“alienation effect”), 87 Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway, 152 Bruckman, Amy, 194 Bryce, Jo, 219 Bryman, Alan, 223 Buddhism, 153 bureaucratization, 16, 249 Burke, Timothy, 187, 189 Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld regime, 83 Butor, Michel, 224 Caillois, Roger, 5, 30–31 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, 3 Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, 131 Cameron, James, 247 camping, 207–8, 209 Capcom, 152, 158n4, 159n18, 168 capital, 227–28, 236, 241n23, 244n63 capitalism, 59–64, 67, 69–71, 248, 249, 250; consumer, 2, 10, 64, 70; localization and, 167; Marx on, 6, 60–62, 70 carbon monoxide poisoning, 193 careers, 227, 236 Carless, Simon, 179

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Index 

Carlson, Rebecca, 8, 251 the carnivalesque, 60, 67–68 carnivalization, 64–68, 71 carnivals, 2, 6, 60, 64–71, 250; elements of, 65–66; virtual, 69–70 Carter, Nell, 132 Cartesian dualism, 110–11 Castronova, Edward, 46, 56n6, 198n21 Celestial Steed, 59, 71 censorship: Nintendo and, 146, 147–48, 176–77; of sexuality, 145; United States and, 148, 149–50, 153–54, 177 censorship of violence, 8, 143–60; crime and, 145, 149, 158n7; culture and, 143–44, 157; issues, 149; in Japan, 8, 143–60, 167; localization and, 143–44, 145, 148, 150–51, 153, 157, 158n2, 160n21, 166, 172, 251 CERO. See Computer Entertainment Rating Organization CESA. See Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association Chandler, Heather Maxwell, 166, 174, 175 characters: emotions of, 35; faux sociality of, 34; human, 128; humanoid, 128; mammy, 132; mukokuseki, 175; non-human, 129, 131, 135; sexualized, 106, 127–30, 130, 133, 133–38, 137. See also roles; stereotypes; specific characters chat rooms, 163, 194 children, media effects on, 230 Chomsky, Noam, 85 circulations, mediating, 179–80, 184n76 clans: Counter-Strike, 203, 209–17, 221n34; members, 201, 209–17; newbies, 201, 209–17; recruitment and, 214–15, 217; regulars, 201, 203, 209–17; ritual process for, 214–17; rules and, 213; Web page, 213–14, 217, 222n46

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classes: in FPS games, 201, 212–13; stereotypes and, 132, 138 clothing, for women, 135 clubs, 22 Clune, 172 Coavoux, Samuel, 10, 252–53 Coca-Cola commercial, 97, 115 codec (implanted radio), 88 coded data, 10 cognitive mapping, 85, 89 Cold War, 74, 81, 83 collective memory-making, 20 Coltrane, S., 132 commodity chains, 170 communitas, ritual and, 5, 32 the complex, 74 Computer Entertainment Rating Organization (CERO), 144–51, 158n2, 158n4 Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association (CESA), 145, 147, 158n2 computer game studies, 44–46, 50–52, 54–56 computer games, 181n13; development and sales of, 50, 125; pedagogical possibilities of, 44. See also marketing; specific games Computer Gaming World, 127, 136, 136, 137, 138 computers, 25, 26; Deep Blue and Deep Green, 90; interaction with, 49–50 Conan, 152 connectivity, 203, 205 consent. See informed consent; parental consent console games: characters in, 134; sales of, 125 conspiracy narratives, 82, 84 conspiracy theory, 80–85, 87, 91 constructivists, 231–32 consumer capitalism, 2, 10, 64, 70 consumerism, 60–62, 64, 70

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258 

Index

consuming player, 5, 28–29 consummatory play, 31 consumption, 6, 60, 61–64, 70 content analysis approach, 128 content descriptors, 166 contestative style of play, 4, 16, 32 contexts: of play, 16, 33–36; research and, 228, 233–34, 236–37, 238 Cooley, Charles H., 101–2, 103 co-presence, 111 Corliss, Jonathan, 8, 251 correspondence analysis, 225, 228, 233, 242n45 Counter-Strike, 200–219; behavior in, 9; bonding and segregation in, 209–17; clans, 203, 209–17, 221n34; humor and jokes in, 201; kill/death ratios, 204, 212, 215; main features of, 204– 5; power in, 209, 211, 213, 214–15, 219; research methods and setting, 202–9, 252; score and “tab” key in, 212, 215; servers, 203–5, 208–9; terrorists and counter-terrorists in, 204, 205, 207; text chats in, 205–16, 218; tournaments, 214 The Craft of Sociology, 232 crime: censorship of violence and, 145, 149, 158n7; seductions of, 67; violent virtual crime involving avatars, 111 critical theory, 59, 62–63 critical-militant optimism, 47 Croft, Lara, 134 Csikszentmihalyi’s flow, 249 cultural artifacts, 29, 47, 51–52 cultural capital, 228, 241n23 cultural change, play, media and, 18–19, 29–30 cultural differences, 4, 8 cultural mythologies, 162, 167, 170, 176 cultural odor, 173–74 cultural studies model, 64, 189–90 cultural swapping, 174

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culture, 239; censoring violence and, 143–44, 157; early modern, 21–23; education and, 229; global marketing, game playing and, 4, 8; late modern, 23–24; localization and, 143–44, 157, 161–84; mass, 60, 63, 71, 161, 174, 175, 180n2; popular, 68, 145–46, 239; postmodern, 24–29; pre-modern, 19–21; productivist view of, 23 Curtis, Pavel, 199 cut scenes, 79–80, 86, 91 Cybernator, 153 cyberspace, 98, 103, 202 cybertexts, 28 cybertyping, 108 Damnation, 135 dances, 53–54 Dark Age of Camelot, 226 Darmon, Muriel, 228 data mining software, 191 dating, online, 107–8 de facto discrimination, 125, 139n4 de jure discrimination, 125, 139n4 De Sanctis, Gerardine, 208 dead bodies, 151–52, 155–57, 160n26 Dead Rising, 152 “deagle” (Desert Eagle), 212, 222n47 death: censorship and, 155–57; kill/ death ratios, 204, 212, 215; of players, 57n21; symbolic, 28 deception, 109 Defense Advanced Research Project, 90 Defense Department, U.S., 74, 89 Demigod, 135 demystification of the world, 63 Densha Otoko, 159n8 Der Derian, James, 74 Descartes, René, 110, 112 descending meaning, 32 designed interaction, 37 despair, struggle against, 5, 6

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Index 

deviance, 107, 227, 228, 233, 236 dialectic, 53–54 Digital Culture, Play and Identity, A World of Warcraft Reader, 237 Dionysian rites, 67 Dirge of Cerberus, 166 disabilities, 108–9 discrimination, de facto and de jure, 125, 139n4 disembodiment, 113 dismemberment, 151–52 Distinction (Bourdieu), 233 distractions, 33 DiveMan (Counter-Strike character), 216 domesticating translations, 173 domination, 9, 59, 64, 209–10 Doom, 78, 200 dozens, 211 drama, 104–5, 161–62 Driver: Parallel Lines, 150, 152 Ducheneaut, Nicolas, 9, 252 Dunning, Eric, 22 Durkheim, Emile, 149, 239n4 Dyer-Witheford, Nick, 6, 250 early modern culture, 21–23 Earthbound, 154 École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France, 224 Economic and Political Manuscript of 1844 (Marx), 63 economic capital, 228, 236, 241n23, 244n63 economic-reductionism, 62 education, 226–27, 229, 237, 240n15 ego/Ego, 32, 102 The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Lévi-Strauss), 235–36 Elias, Norbert, 22 Elven Legacy, 135 elves, 130–31 embedded player, 20

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259

embodiment, 99, 100. See also virtual embodiment emotions: of characters, 35; emotional attachment to things listed, 101; virtual embodiment and, 111–12 Engels, Friedrich, 47 Enlightenment, 1, 196 Entertainment Rating Software Board (ESRB), 144, 145, 148, 154, 166 equipment, 225, 240n11 ergodic games, 35 ergodic texts, 80 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, 179 erotic games, 69 ESRB. See Entertainment Rating Software Board ethnicity and race, 7; censorship and, 154; FPS games and, 214; stereotypes and, 125–38, 251; virtual embodiment and, 106–8 ethnographic research, 225, 230–31 Everquest, 5, 200, 234 everyday environment games, 69 Exoskeleton Human Performance Augmentation Program, 83–84 experience: authenticity of, 98; Hegelian philosophy on, 112; mediated, 44, 100, 112 exploration, 32 Extras (TV series), 43 Facebook, 99, 100 Fallout 3, 3, 131–32, 151–52, 153, 157 false play, 36–37 family resemblance, 243n57 fans, 225, 240n13 fantasy, 248–49 fascism, 11n1 faux sociality, 34 feminist hero, 134 feminist movement, 68 festival of transgression, 64. See also carnivals

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260 

Index

feudalism, 65, 66, 249, 250 field research, 190, 209, 223 field theory, 227–28, 236 fieldwork, 187, 190–94, 196, 202 films. See movies Final Fantasy IV, 154, 169 Fine, Gary Alan, 188, 192 first-person shooter (FPS) games, 6, 199–222; audience in, 201, 205–9; classes in, 201, 212–13; ethnicity and, 214; gender and, 211, 214, 222n46; idiom/language in, 200–201; roles in, 69, 201, 205–9, 219; skill in, 167, 201, 210, 212–13, 217; social interaction in, 9, 200–201, 205–19; stealth game vs., 78, 79. See also specific games Flash games, 74 Flaubert, Gustave, 233 flexible assets, 175 flow, 55 foreignizing translations, 173–74 forums, 230–31, 234 Foucault, Michel, 237 FPS. See first-person shooter (FPS) games Frankfurt School, 63, 239 fraternity, 213 freedom, 3, 37, 71 Freud, Sigmund, 63 front region, 206–7, 252 Full Spectrum Warrior, 89 fun, 5, 43–58, 250 Future Force Warrior Program, 83 Gambier, Yves, 174, 179 gambling, 22, 24 Game Developer’s Conference, 177 game research. See research game studies, 3, 4–10; computer, 44–46, 50–52, 54–56; interdisciplinarity and, 188–89; narratologists v. ludologists on, 74; utopia of, 54–56.

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See also research; virtual realm studies; virtual world studies game work, 50–51 games, 69; definitions of, 30–31, 181n13, 240n10; design, 6, 7, 8; hierarchies in, 236, 239; meaning of, 4, 9, 45; negative impact of, 230; outside world vs., 5; psychological dimensions of, 34–35; rating of, 143–49, 156, 158n2, 158n5; reality of, 33, 35; responses to, 6–7; as simulation, 74; sports and, 22, 23–24, 35; structure of, 6; as texts, 31, 74. See also computer games; play; playing; video games; specific games gamester, 22 gaming skills, 27–28, 35, 167, 169, 193; in FPS games, 167, 201, 210, 212–13, 217 Gard, Toby, 134 Gears of War, 152 Gee, James Paul, 34, 45 Gekko (Metal Gear character), 82 gender: FPS games and, 211, 214, 222n46; Metal Gear games and, 91; research and, 226, 235, 240n15; stereotypes and, 125–38, 251; virtual embodiment and, 106–8 generalizations, 233–36, 243n53 Geoghegan, Vincent, 47 Germany, 152, 153, 155, 167, 172 Giddens, Anthony, 208 global society, concept of, 25 globalization, 68, 172–74, 179 glocalization, 167–68 Godard, Jean-Luc, 92 The Godfather: The Game, 150 God of War, 150 Goffman, Erving, 28, 33, 36; on front and back region, 206–7, 252; on interaction as drama, 104; on perceptions, 187; on social life, 201;

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Index 

on virtual embodiment, 107, 109, 111, 113, 114 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, 150 Grand Theft Auto III, 150, 158n4, 168, 176 Grand Theft Auto IV, 131, 135, 157 graphical embodiment, 100 Griffiths, Mark, 234 Grignon, Claude, 238–39 guilds, 195, 199, 203; function of, 229, 241n28; recruitment and, 192, 193, 229–30 Gulf War, 82, 89, 93 Half-Life, 204 Hall, Stuart, 72n14, 189 hardcore gamers, 229, 234 hedonism, 64 Hegelian philosophy on experience, 112 hegemony, 62, 91, 249 Henricks, Thomas, 4–5, 249 heroes: feminist, 134; role of, 69, 126– 27; war, 11n1, 93 Herz, J. C., 169 Hevern, Vincent W., 114 hierarchies: in games, 236, 239; in groups, 125, 211–12; in society, 2, 65–66, 201, 219, 233, 251 Hine, Christine, 202 Hiroshima, 75 History and Class Consciousness (Lukacs), 62 Hitler, Adolf, 153 Hitman, 150–51, 152 Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Huizinga), 15– 17, 20, 23, 30, 36 hope, virtual play, utopia, apocalypse and, 46–52 horror games, early, 69 House of Dead, 150 Hudson, James, 194

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261

Hudson, Wayne, 53 Huizinga, Johan: Henricks and, 4–5, 249; on ludic festivals, 6, 60; on the magic circle, 49, 236; on play, 4–5, 15–38, 49, 64, 70, 248; thesis of, 16–18 human agency, 112 humor, 85–88. See also jokes; laughter hunt and kill scenario, 218, 252 hyperembodiment, 113 ideal self, 7, 105, 108 identification, processes of, 102–3 identifiers for ethnicity, 127 identity: anonymity and new, 237; change of, 212; formation of, 7, 201, 209; imagination and, 162–63; public, 22; self and, 101–2, 105–6; virtual environment and, 103–4 identity experimentation, 107–8 identity marker, 221n34 identity threading, 114 identity tourism, 107 identity-work, 103, 113, 115 id Studios, 78 illusions, 187, 188 imagination, mediated, 161–63 imperialism, 6, 62 impulse buying, 64 Inafune, Keiji, 159n18 industrialism/industrialization, 16, 18, 23–24, 25, 68, 70, 249 information control, 104–5 informed consent, 9, 194–96, 198n27, 203 Innocent Sin, 153 Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt School), 63, 239 Institute of Creative Technologies, 89 Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), 9, 194–96 insults, 211, 219 interactive media, 164, 181n13, 248, 249, 252

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262 

Index

interactive relations, 163 internationalization, 174–75 Internet, 26–27; chat rooms, 163, 194; relationships formed over, 109; research on, 188, 194–96 Internet Relay Chat (IRC), 218 interviews, 225, 226–27, 231, 242n41 inventions, 23, 25 IO Interactive, 150–51 Iran-Contra affair, 84 IRBs. See Institutional Review Boards IRC. See Internet Relay Chat IRL (In Real Life), 74 iron cages, 60, 63; escape from, 64–66, 69 Itagaki, Tomonobu, 169 Iwabuchi, Koichi, 173–74, 175 James, William, 101, 102, 110–11, 113, 114 Jameson, Fredric, 82, 84–85 Japan: on American characteristics, 167, 182n19; censorship in, 8, 143– 60, 167; localization and, 143–44, 145, 148, 150–51, 153, 165–70, 175– 79; mass culture of, 161, 174, 175, 180n2; television dramas, 161–62; video games in, 8, 75–77, 92 Jenkins, Henry, 3, 45 Jim Crow era, 132, 138 Johnson, Richard, 190 Johnson, Robin, 91 jokes, 201, 210–11, 219 Jûsô kihei valuken (Assault Suits Valken), 153 Katz, Jack, 67 Kearney, Michael, 172 Kelly, William, 8, 251 Kent, Steven, 168 Ketchum, Paul, 7, 251 kill/death ratios, 204, 212, 215 killing, 150–51

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Kingdom of Hearts II, 153 Kit (Counter-Strike player), 206, 211– 12, 215–16 Klevjer, Rune, 69 Kline, Stephen, 75 Kojima, Hideo, 73–77, 82–84, 86, 91–92, 168, 176 Kojima Studios, 76–77 Konami company, 76–77, 87, 148 Korsch, Karl, 62 Krüger, Horst, 48 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 154 La modification (Second Thoughts) (Butor), 224 lag, 204, 221n33 Lahire, Bernard, 228 Lahti, Marti, 37 LambdaMOO, 199 Langman, Lauren, 2, 6, 250 languages: body, 100; level and use of, 237–38. See also translations and languages late modern culture, 23–24 latency, 203, 204 laughter, 65, 206, 207, 209–14, 216 Left 4 Dead, 151, 152 Left for Dead 2, 131, 133 Les Enfant Terribles project, 81 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 235–36 Lien, Marianne, 170 Life on the Screen (Turkle), 103–4 Lifton, Robert Jay, 114 liminal phase, 217 liminality, 66–67, 201 Lipton, Mark, 103 localization, 161–84, 194, 251; advertisements and, 178–79; censorship of violence and, 143–44, 145, 148, 150–51, 153, 157, 158n2, 160n21, 166, 172, 251; channeling and, 163–65, 180; culture and, 143–44, 157, 161–84; defined, 165;

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Index 

Japan and, 143–44, 145, 148, 150– 51, 153, 165–70, 175–79; languages and translation with, 165, 166, 167, 171, 173–75, 179; localizing play and, 165–68; managing uncertainty with, 170; marketing and, 164, 170; mediated imagination and, 161–63; mediating circulations and, 179–80, 184n76; negotiating nations and, 171–72; sensibilities and expertise with, 176–79 The Localization Industry Primer, 166–67 localizers, 165, 168, 174–76 logics, 34 looking-glass self, 101, 103 “Lost in Translation—Japanese and American Gaming’s Culture Clash” (Carless), 179 Loudon, Erik, 165 Loyola University Chicago, 188, 194 Luckmann, Thomas, 224 ludic and non-ludic space, 57n19 ludic festivals, 6, 60. See also carnivals ludic quality of events, 30 ludologists, 74 ludology, 3 Lukács, András, 2, 6, 8, 9, 250, 252 Lukacs, George, 62, 63 Lyman, Peter, 202, 209, 211, 213 machines, 25; body as, 112; interaction with, 35, 37–38 magazines: advertisements in, 125–38, 130, 133, 136–37; reviews in, 125, 126, 131, 132. See also specific magazines the magic circle, 2, 5, 49, 74, 236 Malaby, Thomas, 187, 189 male body types, 135 mammy character, 132 managed player, 24 manga arts traditions, 75, 76, 146 manipulation, 32

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263

mapping, cognitive, 85, 89 Marcuse, Herbert, 6, 63, 64 Mario, 75 marketing, 4, 8, 125–41; localization and, 164, 170; stereotypes and, 125–41, 251 Marx, Karl: on alienated labor and capitalism, 6, 60–62, 70; Economic and Political Manuscript of 1844, 63; eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, 47–48 Marxism, 55 Mason, Bruce, 202 mass culture, 60, 63, 71, 161; Japanese, 161, 174, 175, 180n2 massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), 199–201 massively multiple online role playing game (MMORPG), 98, 100, 113, 143, 181n13, 224–26 material self, 102 Maynard, Michael, 167–68 Mazzarella, William, 180 McAllister, Ken S., 55, 249 McDaniel, Hattie, 132 McLuhan, Marshall, 25 Mead, George H., 102, 114 media: behavior and usage of, 188; changes in, 16; gender and racial imagery in, 126; interactive, 164, 181n13, 248, 249, 252; play, cultural change and, 18–19, 29–30; popular culture and, 145–46 media effects, 3, 9, 74, 188, 230, 231, 248 mediated experiences, 44, 100, 112 medieval fantasy games, 69 medieval society, 235 Melley, Timothy, 84–85 Messineo, M., 132 Metal Gear games, 73–95, 250; humor, simulation and, 85–90; plot of, 79, 80–85, 86, 90, 91 Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (MGS2), 77, 78–81, 86, 87–90

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264 

Index

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (MGS3), 77, 78–80, 86, 90–91 Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (MGS4), 73–74, 77, 80–86, 90, 92 Metal Gear Solid (MGS) series, 6, 73, 77 methodologies. See research methods MGS. See Metal Gear Solid series MGS2. See Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty MGS3. See Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater MGS4. See Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots Middle Ages, 17, 19 militarist masculinity, 6, 75, 92, 250 military training, 88–90 military-industrial complex, U.S., 74, 92 military-industrial-entertainmentnetwork, 74 Miller, Alanna, 7, 250–51 Miller, Daniel, 178–79, 202 Miller, Pat, 78–79 mind and body, 110–13 Ming Le, 207 minorities. See ethnicity and race mise en abysm, 89 misérabilisme, 238–39 Miyazaki, Tsutomu, 145, 158n7 MMOGs. See massively multiplayer online games MMORPG. See massively multiple online role playing game modernity, 21, 63, 67, 250 monstrous empire, 93 moral entrepreneurs, 3, 229, 251 morality, 68 More, Thomas, 1 motion sickness, game-induced, 166 Mountain Dew commercial, 97 movies, 3, 10, 54, 86; avatars in, 97–98; mammy character in, 132; rating of games vs., 145, 156, 158n5

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MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), 69, 199, 200, 213, 218 muenbotoke (wandering spirits), 156–57 mukokuseki characters, 175 multiple online role playing game (MMORPG), 98 Müntzer, Thomas, 48 music, 68 MySpace, 99, 107 9/11 Truth Movement, 84 Nakamori, Akio, 159n8 Nakamura, Lisa, 107–8, 114, 127 Naked Snake (Metal Gear character), 81 narratologists, 74 narratology, 3 nationalism, 60, 62, 172 natural sciences, 231–32 Nazis/Nazism, 36–37, 63, 153, 155 NBA 2K9, 131 Neverwinter Nights, 130–31 New World Order, 82 Newman, James, 79 Nintendo, 75, 77, 181n13; censorship and, 146, 147–48, 176–77 “Nintendo Wars,” 89 non-players, role of, 16, 36 Noon, Derek, 6, 250 Norway, 170 Not-Yet-Become, 47, 48, 49 Not-Yet-Conscious, 47, 49, 51 Novum, 48, 51 objectification, resistance to, 231 objectivism, 223, 231–32, 239n4 observational scale, 228 “official” line-of-action, 33 Okuribito (Departures), 160n26 oral tradition, 19 organized assets, 175 Orlikowski, Wanda, 208 otaku, 145–46, 159n8

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Index 

“others,” 125 ought self, 108 paRaNoid (Counter-Strike player), 211–13 paranormal military research programs, 84 paratexts, 31 parental consent, 195 Parsons, Talcott, 189 partial enlightenment, 48, 52, 57n13 participant observation, 9–10, 189, 192, 195, 202–3, 224 Passeron, Jean-Claude, 235, 238–39, 243n57 passing, 107–8 The Patriots, 81–85 PC Gamer, 7, 127, 130, 131–38, 133, 136–37 Peak Soldier Performance Program, 83 Peck, B. Mitch, 7, 251 perfect worlds, 1 performance principle, 64 “pet” tamagotchi, 163, 181n13 The Philosophers, 81, 82, 83 physicality, 35, 101–3 Piaget, Jean, 5, 32 ping, 203, 221n33 Pires, Alvaro, 232 Pitts, 172 platform holders, 146 play: attitudes toward, 16; benefits of, 15; Caillois on, 5, 30–31; character of, 10, 16–17, 18; characteristics of, 16; contexts of, 16, 33–36; contradictory elements of, 70; definition of, 4–5, 225; early modern culture and, 21–23; endangered, 36–38; everyday life vs., 5; fantasy and, 248–49; games vs., 30–31; in historical periods, 4, 16–19; Huizinga on, 4–5, 15–38, 49, 64, 70, 248; late modern culture and, 23–24;

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265

localizing, 165–68; meaning of, 250; media, cultural change and, 18–19, 29–30; as mimectic, 20–21; nature of, 4, 31–33; as playful, 16, 18, 33, 249; postmodern culture and, 24–29; pre-industrial, 20; premodern culture and, 19–21; problem of, 52–54; public, 20, 22; purpose/ role of, 2, 18, 36; rebellious, 32; rules for, 22, 219; seven points of, 4; transformative, 31; types of, 225; utopia of game studies and, 54–56; work vs., 32, 36, 44, 55, 59, 71, 249. See also virtual play; virtual play studies play-festival-rite complex, 20 players: audience vs., 201, 206–9; competitive, 225, 226, 240n13; consuming, 5, 28–29; death of, 57n21; embedded, 20; fans, 225, 240n13; managed, 24; productive, 23; relationships between, 34, 192; social differentiation of, 224, 227, 229, 240n15; social properties of, 226; spectators vs., 205–9, 210, 219; teams of, 10, 205; types of, 225–27, 237–38. See also roles playing: culture, global marketing and, 4, 8; effects of, 3; mechanics, localization and, 166, 175; style, 4, 16, 23, 32, 192; time, 191, 197n15, 234–35, 235; types of, 225–27 Playstation, 77, 90, 147, 181n13 pleasure, 4, 5, 6, 10 pleasure principle, 63 PMCs. See Private Military Companies Pokémon, 75, 160n22, 174 polls, 234 Poole, Marshall Scott, 208 popular culture, 68, 145–46, 239 popular entertainment, 53–54 populism, 239 positivists, 231–32

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266 

Index

postmodern culture, 24–29 power: in Counter-Strike, 209, 211, 213, 214–15, 219; domination and, 9, 59, 64; and ideology, in virtual embodiment, 106–9; juridicodiscursive conception of, 237; male body types and, 135; programming, 106 praxis, 47 pre-industrial play, 20 pre-modern culture, 19–21 pre-modern play, 5, 17 presentation: appearance and, 104–6; of self, 229, 248, 250–51 The Principle of Hope (Bloch), 47–48 printing press, 21–22 privacy, 194, 203, 221n34 Private Military Companies (PMCs), 82, 84, 90 productive player, 23 programming code, 175 programming power, 106 Project for a New American Century, 83 prostitution, 233, 243n49 protean self, 114 Prototype, 135 Psycho Mantis (Metal Gear character), 87, 90 public identity, 22 public play, 20, 22 puerilism, 37 push-to-talk communication, 191, 195, 197n16 qualitative approach, 10, 190, 191, 194, 223–44, 253 qualitative descriptions, 129 quantitative analysis, 129 quantitative approach, 10, 223–44, 253 quests, 199 race. See ethnicity and race radio, 10, 23

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Raiden (Metal Gear character), 81, 86–89 raids, 192, 225, 229, 240n11 Rand, Ann, 3, 11n5 Ratchet and Clank, 176, 181n15 rating boards, 144, 148–50, 171–72. See also regulatory boards rating of games, 143–49, 156, 158n2, 158n5 reading, 21–22 reality principle, 63 rebellious play, 32 recruitment: clans and, 214–15, 217; guilds and, 192, 193, 229–30; research and, 234 redemption, 2, 11n1 regimes of information control and military conditioning, 6 regression analysis, 226 regulatory boards, 164, 166, 171–72, 176, 180 Reich, Wilhelm, 63 reification, 63 relationships: between players, 34, 192; cultural, 33–34; formed over Internet, 109; romantic, 86; social, 9–10, 33–34 religion, 153–54, 155, 177 representations, 8; stereotypes and, 7, 126, 127, 129, 130, 135, 138, 251; technologies of, 2–3, 10 repressive desublimation, 6, 64 research, 8–11, 188, 248–53; contexts and, 228, 233–34, 236–37, 238; ethnographic, 225, 230–31; field, 190, 209, 223; gender and, 226, 235, 240n15; on Internet, 188, 194–96; recruitment and, 234; stereotypes and, 234; technology and, 191–92, 197n16, 252; on violence, 230–31. See also computer game studies; game studies; virtual play studies; virtual realm studies; virtual world studies; specific games

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Index 

research methods, 252–53; CounterStrike, 202–4, 252; ethnographic, 225, 230–31; interviews and, 225, 226–27, 231, 242n41; mixed, 223–24, 228–31, 238; qualitative approach, 10, 190, 191, 194, 223–44, 253; quantitative approach, 10, 223– 44, 253; research questions and, 10, 127, 225, 227, 238; statistics, 224, 225; surveys, 230–31, 234–35, 235, 242n36, 242n41; textual analysis, 10, 224, 237; theory and, 231–33, 248, 252 restaurants, 187, 206–7 review boards, 194–96 reviews, in magazines, 125, 126, 131, 132 Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), 89 revolutionary utopianism, 46 Ricciardi, John, 179 “Rights of Passage: On the Liminal Identity of Art in the Border Zone” (Steiner), 171 ritual and communitas, 5, 32 ritual process, for clans, 214–17 ritual spectacles, 65 RMA. See Revolution in Military Affairs Roch, Stuart, 177–78 role-distance, 28 role-play, 103 role-playing games (RPGs), 143, 199 roles: in FPS games, 69, 201, 205–9, 219; of heroes, 69, 126–27; of nonplayers, 16, 36; playing style and, 192; race, gender and stereotyped, 126–27, 132–34, 136–38; of villains, 126–27. See also characters romantic relationships, 86 Romero, George, 152, 159n18 ronin tradition of samurai warriors, 76 RPGs. See role-playing games

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267

Ruggill, Judd Ethan, 5, 249 rules: clans and, 213; for play, 22, 219; violations against, 70 Rutter, Jason, 202, 219 Sacred 2, 135 sacred realm, 20 Saints Row 2, 151, 152 Salen, Katie, 29 sampling, 233–35, 243n53 Saudi Arabia, 160n22 scholastic point of view, 10, 237 schools, 23–24 science fiction games, 69 Scott, Peter Dale, 84 Second Life, 97, 193, 198n27 Second World War, 153 SEGA, 75, 145 segregation, 201; and bonding, in Counter-Strike, 209–17 self: actual, 108; gender, race, ethnicity and, 7; ideal, 7, 105, 108; identity and, 101–2, 105–6; looking-glass, 101, 103; material, 102; multiplicity of, 113–14; ought, 108; physical body and, 97, 101–4, 108–9; presentation of, 229, 248, 250–51; protean, 114; social, 98, 102; spiritual, 102; technological, 103, 109, 111, 115; true, 7, 109; virtual, 98; virtual embodiment and, 97–121 self-presentation, 104–5, 108 Sennett, Richard, 26 sensation-producing devices, 35 Sentimental Education (Flaubert), 233 serious game movement, 5 servers: Counter-Strike, 203–5, 208–9; locking, 203 sexuality: carnivals and, 66, 67–68; censorship of, 145; Marcuse on, 64; transgressive, 68, 72n22 sexualized characters, 106, 127–30, 130, 133, 133–38, 137

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268 

Index

Shallow Cover, 192, 195 sheeping the moon, 196n3 Shinitani, 155 Shiny Entertainment, 177–78 signifying, 211 The Sims 3, 135 simulation, 74, 85–90 simulation gap, 85–86 Slater, Don, 202 Smith, Greg, 202 Snake (Metal Gear character), 76, 78–80, 84–89, 91–93 the Sneaker, 77–80 social contest (agon), 17, 20, 30 social contract theories, 23, 44 social exclusion and inclusion, 10 social fears, 3 social inequality, 107, 125, 249, 253 social interaction, 9, 30, 100, 104, 106, 108–11, 113, 200–201, 205–19 social networking sites, 99, 100, 113, 234 social order, 11n5, 25, 103, 212–13, 219 social relationships, 9–10, 33–34 social science: American vs. European, 189; history of, 235–36 social self, 98, 102 social space, 61, 69, 228, 229, 232–33, 236 socialization, 70; in Counter-Strike, 201, 218–19; of hardcore gamers, 229; primary and secondary, 224–25; in World of Warcraft, 253 sociological reasoning, 238 Solid Snake (Metal Gear character), 74, 81, 82 Sony, 75, 77, 146, 147, 174, 178 Sorrow (Metal Gear character), 79 South Korea, 175, 183n49 spatial narratives, 3 Special Forces, U.S., 78–79, 84 spectators, 205–9, 210, 219

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spirits: censorship, death and, 155–57; of technology, 208–9 spiritual self, 102 Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, 77 sports, 22, 23–24, 35, 248 sportsmen, 22, 23 Star of David, 153, 160n22 Star Wars: The Old Republic, 135 statistics, 224, 225 status, 20, 27, 201, 209, 212, 214 Stealth missions, 77–80 Steiner, Christopher B., 163–64, 171 Steinkuehler, Constance, 227 stereotypes, 125–41; advertisements and, 7–8, 125–38, 130, 133, 137; age and, 135; classes and, 132, 138; ethnicity and race and, 125–38, 251; gender and, 125–38, 251; marketing and, 125–41, 251; “others” and, 125; representations and, 7, 126, 127, 129, 130, 135, 138, 251; research and, 234; trends in, 127, 135–38 Stone, Allucquere, 99 Stone, Gregory, 102, 104, 113 strategic choice-making, process of, 33 Streetfighter II, 134 studies. See research; research methods; specific studies subjectivism, 223, 231–32, 239n4 subjectivities, 163, 165, 180 suicide, 152–53, 155, 159n20 Supreme Commander 2, 135 surveys, 230–31, 234–35, 235, 242n36, 242n41 Sutton-Smith, Brian, 5, 15, 49 Suzuki, Hikaru, 155–56 swastika, 153 symbolic capital, 228, 241n23 symbolic death, 28 symbolic interactionism, 7, 101–4, 107, 113, 115, 227 symbolic violence, 153–55, 159n21, 238 symbolism, 153–54, 165

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Index 

taboo, 150, 236, 251 Tactical Espionage Action, 77 talent repartition, 227 Tanaka, Keiji, 168, 176 Tanaka, Tom, 178 Taylor, T. L., 5 Team Fortress 2, 49 teams: multi-disciplinary, 50; organization of, 24; of players, 10, 205 technological self, 103, 109, 111, 115 technology(ies): interaction and relationship with, 100–101, 112, 114; of representation, 2–3, 10; research and, 191–92, 197n16, 252; spirit of, 208–9 television, 10, 25–26, 43, 196; advertisements, 132; Japanese dramas, 161–62 text chats, in Counter-Strike, 205–16, 218 text files, console generating, 203–4 texts: ergodic, 80; games as, 31, 74 textual analysis, 10, 224, 237 textual embodiment, 100 The_Machine (Counter-Strike player), 214–15 theory: conspiracy, 80–85, 87, 91; critical, 59, 62–63; field, 227–28, 236; research methods and, 231–33, 248, 252 Theweleit, Klaus, 91 Thief: The Dark Project, 77 Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2, 183n49 Toonami, 161, 180n2 Top Secret: Hitler’s Revival, 153 totalitarianism, 1, 17 training software, 132, 133 transformations, 49–52 transformative play, 31 transgression, joys of, 6, 61, 64, 66–67, 71 transgressive play, 70, 71, 250 transgressive sexuality, 68, 72n22

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269

translations and languages: French translation of American novels, 174; localization and, 165, 166, 167, 171, 173–75, 179 Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While You’re Doing It (Becker), 3, 238 Trinidad, 178–79 Truckish (Counter-Strike player), 207–8 True Crime: New York City, 152 true self, 7, 109 Tsing, Anna, 179 Tsurumi, Toppyaku, 176 Turkle, Sherry, 103–4, 108 Turner, Bryan, 109 Turner, Victor, 67, 201 Turse, Nick, 74 Ultima Online, 200 unconscious gestures, 105 Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, 135 United States: censorship and, 148, 149–50, 153–54, 177; localization and, 148, 153, 166, 168–69 university human-subjects committees, 9 UnJammer, 154 utopia: of game studies, 54–56; hope, virtual play, apocalypse and, 46–52 Utopia (More), 1 utopian dreams, 1–2, 3 vanity mount, 59 Vestal, Andrew, 169 video games: as cybertexts, 28; designed interaction with, 37; physical environments of, 35; as playful, 30–31, 36; rental of, 169; symbolic meaning and, 34–35; as technology of representation, 2–3, 10; types of, 181n13; as virtual carnivals, 69–70. See also virtual play; specific countries/ games

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270 

Index

“Video Games That Get Lost in Translation: Why Most U.S. Titles Don’t Fare Well in Japan (and Vice Versa)” (Kent), 168 villains, 126–27 violence, 149–50; in Metal Gear games, 78–79, 91; research on, 230–31; symbolic, 153–55, 159n21, 238. See also censorship of violence violence mark, 147 virtual bodies, as sign systems, 98 virtual carnivals, 69–70 virtual communities: formation of, 2; social relationships in, 9–10 virtual embodiment, 7, 97–121, 189, 250–51; definition of, 98–101; mind, body and, 110–13; power and ideology in, 106–9 virtual environment, 103–4 virtual ethnography, 9, 190, 192, 201, 202–4, 252 virtual play: hope, utopia, apocalypse and, 46–52; as utopic and dystopic, 45–46, 143 virtual play studies, 43–58 Virtual Reality (VR) training, 87–89 virtual realm studies, 187–98, 248–49, 252. See also research virtual realms: carnivals and, 60, 69–70; interaction with other lifeworlds, 193; isolation and social presence in, 194 virtual self, 98 virtual spaces, 49 virtual world studies: mixed methodologies in, 223–24, 228–31; qualitative and quantitative methodologies in, 223–44; strengths and weaknesses in, 233–38. See also research virtual worlds, physical worlds and, 7, 97–98, 100–101, 108–9, 115 voice recordings, 191–192, 197n16

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Wakeford, Nina, 202 wandering spirits, 156–57 war games, 74 war heroes, 11n1, 93 war on terror, 75, 84 warriors, 18 weapons, 78–83, 153 Weber, Max, 63 Wex/Vex (character), 177–78 When the Whistle Blows (TV comedy), 43 Wild 9/Wildroid 9, 177–78 Williams, Dmitri, 231, 233–34, 236–37 Winter Soldier, 93 Wolfenstein, 78 women: Black, 126, 132–33; clothing for, 135. See also gender work, play vs., 32, 36, 44, 55, 59, 71, 249 workers, 60–64, 70–71 World of Warcraft, 3, 10, 59, 99, 181n13; registered accounts in, 200; research and, 192–96, 198n27, 223–27, 230, 234, 236–37, 252, 253; resolving disputes in, 192–93; sheeping the moon in, 196n3; socialization in, 253; Terms of Use, 194–95 world order, in decay, 6 Wright, Talmadge, 160n21, 200–201 Wright, Will, 77 Xbox, 147, 151, 152, 181n13 Yee, Nick, 234 Zed (Counter-Strike player), 206, 215 Zelda: A Link to the Past, 154 zero kill theme, 79, 91 Zimmerman, Eric, 29 Zipes, Jack, 51 zombies, 152, 159n18

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About the Contributors

J. Talmadge Wright is an associate professor of sociology at Loyola University Chicago. He received his PhD in social science from the University of California–Irvine in 1985 and has researched topics as diverse as homeless social movements and urban social policy, urban design and architecture, mass media and popular culture. His current work centers on the symbolic meanings game players create in playing computer games, the social formation of gender roles, and the pleasures and anxieties of virtual violence. In addition, he has actively researched how social communities form in roleplaying games, like World of Warcraft, via guild structures, and the types of social interactions which have emerged in the “leveling” process of game accomplishment. He is also examining the way in which virtual play reproduces the world of work both by the creation of status distinctions between players and task-oriented behavior in game performance. David G. Embrick is an assistant professor in the sociology department at Loyola University Chicago. He received his PhD from Texas A&M University in 2006. He is a former American Sociological Association MFP Fellow and the chair-elect of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Race and Ethnic Minorities. David has published in a number of journals including Sociological Forum, Race and Society, and the Journal of Intergroup Relations, and is the author of an anthology, Globalization and America: Race, Human Rights & Inequality (with Angela Hattery and Earl Smith). He is currently finishing a book project that examines the discrepancies between

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corporations’ public views and statements on diversity and their implementation of diversity as a policy. Andra´s Luka´cs is a doctoral candidate in the department of sociology at Loyola University Chicago. His research interests include social stratification, media sociology, social theory, and qualitative methodology. His dissertation project is an ethnographic exploration of intergenerational sociability, friendship patterns, and the management of age-based stigma in World of Warcraft. A native of Hungary, he currently resides in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. *** Rebecca Carlson is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, having received an MFA in film and media arts and an MA in anthropology from Temple University. Her area of research is foreign labor in the Japanese video game industry. Samuel Coavoux lives in Paris, where he works as a researcher at Orange Labs in the Sociology and Economics of Networks and Services department. He is also a member of the research center Jeux video: Pratiques, Contenus, Discours (ENS Lyon), one of the first associations of young scholars of video games in France. He holds a BA in political science from Sciences Po Lyon and an MA in sociology from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. His research interests include the sociology of cultural practices, popular culture, ICT uses, and the literary field. Jonathan Corliss is currently a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh studying global media trade and video games. Nicolas Ducheneaut is a senior member of the research staff in the Socio-Technical Interaction Research group at PARC. He uses a combination of methods (including data mining and ethnography) to study social interactions online, with a recent focus on 3D virtual worlds and massively multiplayer games. He conducted the largest and longest (to date) study of social dynamics in World of Warcraft, collecting and analyzing data on the interactions between more than five hundred thousand characters over two years to uncover fundamental properties of digital social networks. He recently received funding from IARPA to expand this research and investigate the relationship between online social behavior and the socio-psychological characteristics of virtual world users. Nicolas obtained his PhD in 2003 from the University of California–Berkeley.

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Nick Dyer-Witheford is associate professor and associate dean of the faculty of information and media studies at University of Western Ontario. He is author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism, and coauthor, with Stephen Kline and Greig de Peuter, of Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing, and with Greig de Peuter of Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video. Thomas S. Henricks is Danieley Professor of Sociology at Elon University. In recent years, his scholarly interests have centered on the nature of human play, particularly as that activity can be contrasted to other possibilities for human expression. More broadly, he studies how subjective experience is socially and culturally constructed in societies. He is the author of many writings on play, most of which have appeared in The American Journal of Play and in Play and Culture Studies. His 2006 book, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression, develops some of these themes. William H. Kelly is an anthropologist of Japan with research interests in leisure, entertainment, popular culture, and popular culture industries. He is currently professor at the School of Global Studies, Tama University (Tokyo). He has also held research and teaching posts at the University of Manchester, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, University of Oxford. Paul R. Ketchum is assistant professor in the college of liberal studies at the University of Oklahoma. His research focuses on race in the media and race and crime. Lauren Langman is professor of sociology at Loyola University Chicago. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago from the Committee on Human Development and Psychoanalytic Training at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. He has long worked in the tradition of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, especially relationships between culture, identity, politics and political movements, and the psychosocial in a global world. He was a cofounder of the Global Studies Association–North America. He is the current president of Alienation Research and Theory, Research Committee 36, of the International Sociological Association. He is the current Illinois director for Midwest Sociological Society, on the board of the Globalization and Transnational Studies Section of the ASA, and on the board of the Social Movements Research Committee of ISA. He served a five-year term on the editorial board of Sociological Theory, and remains on boards of Current Perspectives in Social Theory and Critical Sociology. Recent publications include a number of articles

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and book chapters on globalization and alienation, social movements, Islamic fundamentalism, the body, nationalism, and national character. His most recent book is Trauma Promise and Millennium: The Evolution of Alienation with Devorah Kalekin. His forthcoming book, The Carnivalization of America, looks at the role of the alienation of youth and their embrace of transgressive life styles, identities, and moments of popular culture. Ken S. McAllister is interim associate dean of the College of Humanities and associate professor of English at the University of Arizona. He is author of Game Work: Language Power and Computer Game Culture, coauthor of Fluency in Play: Computer Game Design for Less Commonly Taught Language Pedagogy, and coeditor of The Computer Culture Reader. He also codirects the Learning Games Initiative (lgi.mesmernet.org). Alanna R. Miller is a doctoral student in mass media and communications at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She primarily studies communication as ritual, religious representations in popular media, and how communication reflects, expresses, and creates identity in popular media. She is currently working on a study on avatar production in gaming and its relationship to telepresence and identity formation. Her dissertation will concentrate on representations of religion and religious identity in sciencefiction television and their relevance to social identity. Derek Noon is a PhD candidate in communications at Carleton University. He received his MA in media studies at the University of Western Ontario in 2008. B. Mitchell Peck is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma. His research focuses on inequality with a particular focus on how interactions between individuals and institutions create and maintain inequalities. Judd Ethan Ruggill is assistant professor of communication studies at Arizona State University and codirector of the Learning Games Initiative (lgi. mesmernet.org), a transdisciplinary, inter-institutional research group that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games. He is coauthor of Fluency in Play: Computer Game Design for Less Commonly Taught Language Pedagogy, coeditor of The Computer Culture Reader, and his essays have appeared in periodicals such as Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Cinema Journal, American Journal of Play, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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