Seth Giddings: "Playing With Non-Humans: Digital Games as Technocultural Form"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Games as everyday technoculture (not just futuristic/cyborg content)
- Technological agency
- Sociology of Science and Technology, Actor-Network Theory: challenge social constructivism
- Problems with encoding/decoding model: limits analysis of materiality of technology (agency, effects, affordances)
- Production, physical form, capabilities are meaningful, have effects , constraints, facilitates certain uses and resists others
- Society and material reality are mutually constitutive
- World and artifacts are both physical and symbolic
- Humans are not the only agents in the world (reject the "object hypothesis")
- ANT: "reciprocal relationship between artifacts and social groups," "networks linking human beings and non-human entities"
- Scoieties are fundamentally technological
- Symmetry of agency between humans/non-humans -> no firm conceptual distinction
- Notion that games both aestheticize and realize the cyborg idea: blurred boundary between subject and object still privileges the human
- Rather, a cybernetic circuit (indissociable)
- Practical, pragmatic to undestand computers as intentional systems (rather than as designed artifacts, too difficult to anticipate: chess programs); side-step question of actual consciousness
- Gameplay as engagement with artificial intelligence (ie: an agent)
- Advance Wars 2 (GBA) example
- Code/simulation, not text/representation
- AI as simulation (automata) -> intentional system we play with/against
- Mundane, playful, everyday, ubiquitous example of relationships between human and non-human actors (technoculture)
- "distributions and delegations of agency between technologies and players in the act of playing"

Holin Lin and Chuen-Tsai Sun, "'White-Eyed' and 'Griefer' Player Culture: Deviance Construction in MMORPGs"

(In Worlds in Play)

- "White-eyed player" = Taiwanese griefer
- Deviancy in gaming societies
- Move beyond individual conception of grief play -> collective recognition/reaction
- Power in social interactions
- Technopower (code); administrative power (GMs); normative power (explored here)
- "Social control mechanisms"
- Labelling as an othering process
- Uncertain age/gender distinctions in online play
- Grief/white-eyed play associated with imagined youngage
- Players can have separate avatars for normative and deviant play (explorative?), transfer benefits (items, etc.) from one to the other
- Stigmatizer/other griefers in order to define/secure normative identity
- "Griefer roles as collective player reactions to a yet-to-be-normalized environment"
- Explicit (identifiable, deviant, self-aware) vs implicit (occasional, fluid, accidental) griefers
- Definition of griefer is ambiguous, changing, subjective
- Blame motivation/experience level; RW identity/characteristics
- Percieved helplessness against griefers (better to ignore, "don't feed a troll")
- Self-aware griefers "professionalize" grief play (clans, notoriety, etc.), while unconcsious, occasional griefers stigmatize along with everyone else, rationalize as mistakes (us/them, cannot be both a griefer and "normal")
- Anxieties about cross-age play enabled on a large scale by MMOs -> griefers are young, kids, immature
- MUDs: gender anxiety, MMOs: age anxiety
- Calling griefers kids is an attempt to define the "right" age to be playing (reject stigma that games are childish by othering percieved "childish" play)

Patrick Crogan, "Playing Through: The Future of Alternative and Critical Game Projects"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Interrogate the critical potential of games
- Relationship of games to their contexts
- Frasca opposes simulation vs narrative, theatrical forms - simulation as the form of the future
- Complicate notion that simulation stands alone/is uniquely suited to face the future (military past must be considered)
- Tekken Torture Tournament, Painstation (theatrical, public exhibition/performace)
- Relation to reality TV -> spectacle of pain and suffering (military training connection?)
- Real-world consequences
- Both made real/actual and theatricalized, made virtual, removed in the staging
- Defining, delimiting, controlling (military "theatre of operations")
- Undermines the suspension of the real/normal
- Games reproduce the "primal scene" of military cybernetics -> in doing so they can modify it, critically in some cases
- Framing/placing/situating, not representing
- Projective, not reflective (future, means of speculation?)
- Frasca: narrative = past, drama = present, simulation = future (projective, experimental, hypothetical)
- Aesthetic development of simulation also future-oriented in Frasca's conception
- Origins of simulation in military technoscience are ignored
- This refusal of the past is echoed in the presumed future-orientation of simulation
- Where is the past in simulation?
- September 12: subvert conventional forms, open critical reflection
- Donkey John: ironic "skinning," references real politics
- Under Ash: inversion/reproduction
- Frasca: simulation as a tool to promote critical thinking and highlight relationship between model and reality
- Narrative can also be future-oriented (produced to be read), tool for arranging/understanding experience
- Simulation reproduces this aspect of narrative, anticipating future
- War gaming, tension between historical record and complexity, unpredictability that created it and needs to be simulated
- Simulation (and narrative, and drama) as mnemotechnic: technologies for the retention of human experiences (Stiegler)
- "Draws on the past with a view to the future"
- Simulation emerges out of narrative, drama, inherits/reproduces them as a process of memorization for orienting the individual/culture in time and space, in the present and towards the future
- Pre-emptive force of simulation is a product of modern rationality
- Its heritage must be remembered as simulation is proliferated, and adopted in the name of different futures

Ian Bogost, "Frame and Metaphor in Political Games"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Political success comes from representation of issues
- Metaphor/cultural construction as an "active conceptual framework that is central to how we understand the world." (Lakoff and Johnson)
- Framing (in Luntz's terms, "context") of the world is central to political discourse
- Words that reflect ideas
- 2004 - first endorsed political games
- Analyze political rhetoric, metaphor and frame as procedural
- Three kinds of ideological frame: reinforcement, contestation and exposition
- Reinforcement: explicitly draw attention to the frame (verbally, outside the game), demonstrate how to think about an issue (Tax Invaders)
- Contestation: rule systems also create frames, challenge apparent ideological frame (Vigilance 1.0) -> satire
- Exposition: expose underlying ideological frame created by the interaction between rules and content (socio-economic disadvantage in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is ignored -> crime as decadence/depravity)
- Exposition is the work of the critic, not the designer
- GTA: SA less stylized than previous GTA games, engaging directly with a cultural-historical moment? I disagree - where GTA: Vice City invokes Scarface and Miami Vice, GTA: SA invokes Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society, and the now-iconic, highly mediated television news coverage of 1990s race riots, etc. As with other games in the series, the game is engaging with popular culture, not "real" history

Ulrike Spierling, "Interactive Digital Storytelling: Towards a Hybrid Approach"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Approaches to interactive storytelling from film production, HCI, game design, AI
- Virtual autonomous characters vs interactive stories
- Accessibility of authoring tools to actual authors
- Author must take responsibility for outcome/effect of interactive narrative (anticipate?)
- Author must maintain control over autonomous agents?
- "Humans are the storytellers, not 'the computer.'"
- Incomprehensible diagrams
- "Having a conversation" with a computer-based artifact ("agent-based conversation")
- Where exactly is the hybrid approach promised in the title?

Renata Gomes, "The Design of Narrative as an Immersive Simulation"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Attempt to generate cinema-style narrative in games has caused a new form/concept of narrative to emerge: immersive simulation
- Agency allows player to be part of the story universe
- Story is more than just a theme
- Two kinds of narrative game: character-oriented and simulation games
- Presence = greater potential for agency? (Why?)
- Affordances: surface is "stand-on-able," for example (Gibson)
- Character-oriented games have a clear journey/goal, sims do not
- "System history" as narrative in sim games
- "Poetic potential of simulation games"
- Narrative as an index of emergence in a complex system? (Personal narratives/narrativization)
- Eisensteinian ideal of pure formal discourse/communication/rhetoric could be achieved through simulation?

Laura Ermi and Frans Mäyrä, "Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Complement game definition/ontology with the player/act of gameplay
- Experience emerges in the "unique interaction process between the game and the player"
- Player and context, take part in the construction of the experience
- Elusive concept of "gameplay"
- Different games, different experiences
- Playing a game as a goal in itself
- Active vs passive (participation), absorption vs immersion (connection)
- Digital games as active, immersive (escapism)
- Immersion as one of the key components of the gameplay experience (is it really? Or is it just desirable?)
- Important aspects for interviewed children: audiovisual quality/style, level of challenge, imaginary world/fantasy
- Gameplay experience/immersion as a multidimensional phenomenon (well, yeah.)
- Sensory immersion, challenge-based immersion, and imaginative immersion (some games combine all three)
- Meaning-making contexts
- Survey to determine levels of immersion, all quite high (people choose favourite games, which tend to be more immersive?)
- Is immersion being confused/conflated with enjoyment, appreciation or aesthetic value? Ermi and Mäyrä say no, but in spite of their efforts to divest it of that value it seems like those connotations remain
- Modality of gameplay experience?