When we use the word game, what exactly do we mean by that, how do we define it? While I’m sure the standard dictionary definition might gives us a general idea, it also quickly becomes clear that most people typically have their own individual, if somewhat subjective, definition of what they consider a game. Some might view an activity as a game if it is fun, entertaining, or something that is done solely for personal pleasure with no “work” involved. However we want to look at it, everyone will typically have his or her own view on what should or should not be considered a game. This subjective definition of what constitutes a game raises another, in my opinion, equally important question: when does a game stop being a game? The answer to this will of course depend on the definition you are using in the first place. Does the game stop being a game when it stops being fun or entertaining or is it simply a case of the novelty wearing off. In my opinion, I think there are very few people who would ever deny that at some point they stopped thinking of a game they we playing as a game. Whether it is the wear of the daily grind, the strain of constant guild obligations, or the stress of game time impending on an already chaotic real life, at some point the game may start to feel at lot more like work and a lot less like a game. The fun and entertainment might slowly disappear, the pleasure fades away and the enjoyment becomes contempt, turning the game into just another thing in your life that you have to devote some time too. At what point does this happen? When does the game stop feeling like a game? When it does happen do you stop playing or not? Why? Do you ever go back to the game at some point after this happens? Please weigh in and share your own experiences.

Runescape is one of the most popular free online game, it is a MMOPRG released in 2001 and it’s a graphical brower game that runs Java. Players won’t have to install anything to play, all you need is an account and you are ready to go.

I use to have an account back in 2002 and I have played it for 2 years, but for some reason my account is deleted after the huge update in 2008 and  I will have to start all over again!

World Map of RuneScape : http://www.rshaven.com/images/runesacpe-world-map-2007.jpg

Day 1 : Mining and Smithing

Runescape offers a lot of character classes , players can also customize their own avatar. I picked slayer as my occupation and i customized my avatar.  BTW my player name is Neet120 if any of you guys are playing this game feel free to add me

After customizing the character, player will enter a dragon slaying quest which is a tutorial and you will learn some basic skills such as (battle, combining & using objects, mining, chopping trees…etc)

Runescape has a very unique or old school battle system, players will take turn hitting each other and players can only attack one target at a time.

Here is a video

After the tutorial players are free to do what ever they want.

Crafting plays an important role in Runescape and a lot of skills are related to each other for example:

Mining and Smithing

Fishing, Tree Chopping , Fire Making and cooking

Attack and defence

From the picture above we cans see that there are a lot of skills that plpayers can level up and specialized in,the the skills that are highlighted in blue are only for members are free members are not able to train or speicalize in them.

The level cap for the skills are lvl 99 and players will be rewarded a special cape when their skill reach lvl 99

Mining and Smithing are the skills that I wanted to lvl up first, because i can smith my own weapons , tools and chainmails  once i reach a certain lvl. There are different ores in runescape and new players are only able to mine clay, tin and copper. Clay is for crafting and players are able to craft bowls, pots …etc  Other ores are for smithing.

Mining ores will lvl up you mining skills and as you lvl up you will be able to mine faster, different pick axes can also increase the speed of mining.

After mining the ores, players will have to bring them to the nearest furnace to make metal bars, tin and copper will make a bronze bar. Here’s a picture of me smithing in front of the furnace and my inventory is on the right hand corner you can see that there are copper and tin ores , there are also a few bronze bars.

These are the items that players can smith, players can smith almost all the weapons and armour types in Runescape , after smithing players can sell the things they smith or give them to the noobs beside them, since money is actually useless when players are able to craft anything they want.

Mining is a slow and boring work to do, so players will have a lot random conversations. You can see players mining at the same place for hours and some players might think that they are bots but actually bots are strictly banned in Runescape, bots are also less efficient. Runescape has added in some new functions to prevent bots they are called the special events and they occurs randomly. Here are some pictures:

Players will encounter these special events easily when they are doing the same action continuouslyfor example mining, fishing, chopping wood…etc and they are require to do certain things according to finish the event, players will be rewarded when they finish the event .

That’s all my findings for now, I will continue to mine and smith until the next time I update my blog

feel free to make comments and Happy Thanks Giving Everyone

Cheers

N.E.E.T

So my day in a life in second life actually only lasted a couple of hours. Everything started out fine, the game downloaded no problem, a quick and easy install after already having registered by selecting my username, avatar appearance, and that basic start-up information. All that easy start-up stuff went fine and then I guess you could say that things went downhill from there. I opened the game, and you start in a basic walk through tutorial room which was straight forward and simple however there were serious, and I do mean serious, problems with loading and lag. I mean I was moving before my avatar even appeared on screen, I was phasing through walls and floors, and the instructions on the walls for the different steps of the tutorial took forever to load. One good thing I will say for Second Life after first blush is that it has an excellent user interface, which benefited me as I just skipped the slow loading tutorials in favor of figuring things out for myself. After finishing in the tutorial zone I teleported to a couple of different places, some quite literally were random while others were welcome zones for new players. The major problem at this point was the lag, lots and lots of lag. When it comes to these types of games or virtual worlds I am not really a patient person, so the fact that it took forever for the scenery and background of the regions to load meant that you didn’t actually get to see that much. For a virtual world that emphasizes the interaction with the surroundings I found it hard to appreciate in any way with all the lag. I ran into a few people at the welcome zones but other then that the place seemed relative deserted to me, although that to could have been a result of the lag and other avatars not loading properly. The lag also made avatar movement extremely choppy and it was hard to control your movement because there was always just a slight delay. Consequently I got to experience walking into a few walls and also fell into a river, ah good times *insert sarcasm here*. Aside from the lag problems, the other technical difficulty I had was with my chat log, which worked except that there was obviously so type of compatibility issue because the chat logs are pure gibberish (btw if anyone knows how to fix that I would appreciate the advice). Aside from these issue, it was an interesting first experience and I did manage to talk to one or two people just in the general chat. Based on what I’d heard from other people and what we’ve read and talked about in class I had very different expectations about what I would experience when I first logged in compared to what actually happened. In other words I was not surrounded by a mob of people trying to to hit on and/or proposition me and there were no furries (or anything else strange) anywhere to speak of. Just a couple of long-time players asking if we had any questions and a few other newbies hanging around. And that was pretty much it, a few general hi how are, are you new, where are you from conversations, a bit of solo exploring and that was it. The lag got worse (which up to that point I hadn’t thought that was possible) and even more annoying and I lost my patience for putting up with it so I signed off. I do plan to give it the benefit of the doubt and go back in for a second look (pun totally intended btw) but it’s going to take quite a change to sell me on this virtual world.

Tutorial Zone in Second Life.

Solo Exploring In Second Life.

A Day on Atys
After an hour of downloading the game, I was finally able to enter the world. Unfortunately, my extremely old laptop could not handle the graphics and so I was forced to put everything on low quality. Then we were talking! I had to get used to the navigator in the top right off my screen to figure out where I needed to go. I chose to be a magician I love my magicians. I always pick sorcs or wizards or magicians or mages So, I chose a wizard girl (Matis?).   I got a few quests done and this really iritating guy was crying and when I went to help him I got ambushed but they were pansies and I wooped them:) I saw some kool animals that looked kind of like pigs and deer. I wanted one But I can’t have them as pets! Only kill them or use them as mounts.  There’s tree roots in the sky which is really interesting! I love it. Over all an interesting experience.

I guess the first thing to do is talk about what I’m going to talk about.  Then I’ll talk about it, then I might talk about what I said.  So in this post I’m going to quickly talk about a few things that I’ve found online that are kind of cool and seem at least marginally linked to the course content.

This is a link to xkcd, a pretty popular comic (Someone added links to the image).  Today’s (it was today when I wrote this originally) coincidentally is a map of online communities, with size relating to activity.  It shows just how big certain things have gotten especially when compared to an older one from 2007.

Next we’ve got this image (I’ve seen it in dozens of places, and have no idea what the original source is.):

It’s posted mostly because it’s kind of amusing, but also because people need to be aware that just because most MMOs seem to be WoW clones, they aren’t always and are sometimes hard to pick up.

Lastly I want to spend some time talking about Dwarf Fortress and maybe a bit about Mine Craft which was partially inspired by it.

Read this first.  It’s an review of an older build of the game (which is still in Alpha and free to play) but is still relevant.

Now that you know approximately what I’m talking about, and someone who can write better than I can has (hopefully) gotten you interested, I’ll say why Dwarf Fortress is important.

Dwarf Fortress (henceforth DF) is an indie game created by one programmer, who manages to support himself on donations, despite still being in alpha.  This isn’t important to us though.  What is important, at least as far as people interested in worldness are concerned, is that DF is a procedural world builder.  Before you can play for the first time you need to create the world in which you will play (you already know this having read the review from earlier of course).  The world is built from the ground up.  Literally.  Starting with a slightly random topology and mineral composition (modeled after real world geologic processes) the base world is generated.  Then climate is generated (complete with ice caps at the poles), which creates natural rivers which erode the landscape and eventually fill the oceans.  Vegetation then grows based on water availability and temperature.  Now the starting civilizations can finally be placed.

There are four civilizations.  The Humans, who are standard and boring, the Elves, who live in the forest and eat the flesh of their enemies.   Goblins who steal children (this can result in a goblin civilization with no goblins alive in it), and finally the Dwarves, who are industrious and fond of drink.  Then the civilizations are allowed to grow and interact with each other and the (usually very hostile) wildlife for about a thousand years, trading, warring, building empires, toppling them.  Hundreds of thousands of creatures and people are generated and live out their lives to create huge family trees, and more importantly huge event lists.  This is where our meat lies.  DF turns out to be just about the best lore generator yet created (to say nothing of the game play, which none of you will be able to decipher (That’s not a challenge.  Ignore this.  Go away.))

Examples speak better than words, so here are two of the more interesting stories generated randomly by the emergent behavior of the game:

Tholtig, Dwarf Queen:  From the Author/discoverer: “To work out her story, and the story of her family, required me to painstakingly search for the entry of each of the dwarves whose names appeared in the conflict – otherwise such connections as the identities of Tholtig’s children would have been lost. [Filter on string] is your friend. Also, the fact that the heroes in the war not directly related to Tholtig by blood were actually members of the original royal family, and that therefore that everyone in the war was a member of one last great Dwarven clan, was lost to me until recently due to the obscurity of Legends mode.”

Cacame Awemedinade.  Elf King of the Dwarves.  Who became the king of the player’s civilization because an elf city had been taken over before the game started.

I could talk for ages about this, but it’s only vaguely relevant, and Minecraft hasn’t even been mentioned yet.  In fact, Minecraft will get it’s own post because I can.

I started out playing on MUDS, MUSHes and even a MOO or two. I used to co-host something called the Hallowe’en Ball about, oh, 16 years ago, which was a MUSH that I and a friend designed, consisting of a big space dome on Bradbury, Luna (i.e. the moon) with beautiful and creepy rooms, and interesting objects to pick up and examine. Of course this was all text-based, but designing and creating these spaces consumed a lot of my free time, and indeed there was a certain art to it, trying to convey a sense of vast space using a couple sentences, or hiding a little easter egg in a simple vase standing in the corner. I know this probably seems obvious, or even trivial to people today, but it was amazing how real it seemed, in that it was an event that we could talk about years later (and indeed this even ocurred pre-computer as sometimes events from pen and paper roleplaying game sessions get mentioned also!).

I had spent a year or so playing Asheron’s Call, which at the time was a direct competitor to EverQuest. Then after getting sucked into offline RPGs such as The Longest Journey and Planetscape:Torment and Baldur’s Gate, I got into World of Warcraft (played 2004-2007).

When we bought the game, it was ostensibly for me, and my husband just thought he would make a character to check it out. Well, he ended up with 6 maxed out toons, from each major class. We got other rl friends to play as well, and for a while since we were all in grad school or working it was the perfect venue to meet up, rl interaction substituted 1:1 for virtual.

Anyhow, I was thinking the other day and talking with Paul about shared virtual experiences and how real they seem, and one really stuck out in my mind. This is probably the most classic “you had to be there” moments, but me and my friends still bring it up infrequently and laugh our asses off about it.

Ok this was pre-expansion of WoW, probably mid-2005, and there were four of us, a rogue (me), a hunter (let’s call him D), a warrior (S), and a paladin (my husband). We were tooling around in-queue waiting for the battlegrounds at Arathi Basin. Now, at the time you had to be in the area to join a Battleground so while we were waiting we were just hanging around talking. Occasionally we would encounter a group of horde and amuse ourselves collectively by making obscene gestures to them. Then we came up with the perfect plan to bait horde.

We all flagged as PvP and then our pally “went afk” and knelt in a clearing. I stealthed and stayed close by him. Our hunter shadowmelded in the woods with his cat, and the tank hid further away in the trees. Then we waited. Would someone take the bait?

A tauren shaman and warrior ran by on their way to the instance, and then looped back and stopped. You could see them talking to each other, and running around in loops to figure out what was happening and try and provoke a response. Finally, after discussing it for a while, they decided to bite. By this point I was directly behind the shaman and just as they flagged PvP and attacked our pally I backstabbed. Our hunter sent his cat out of the woods and then started shooting, and our tank charged out of the trees. It was a glorious massacre.

Of course, after that, the same two horde kept coming back with their friends to try and pwn us to get back at us, but eventually they got tired of losing. We set up our gambit in three spots and actually had more fun than if we were playing in battlegrounds that day.

Even though that experience was not actual, it definitely was real.

The opposition between these two can be compared to some other traditional oppositions, like the opposition between the ‘real’ rules of the game and what we used to call ‘chrome’ elements (stuff which adds ‘feel’ but doesn’t change how the game ‘works’), or the opposition between the ‘real’ stuff (the stuff that affords or is obdurate to player intention) and the ‘lore’ (‘Lore, what is it good for? absolutely nothing…’).  Here’s some excerpted stuff from this article

“This disagreement has been called the ludology vs. narratology debates. The narratological view is that games should be understood as novel forms of narrative and can thus be studied using theories of narrative (Murray, 1997; Atkins, 2003). The ludological position is that games should be understood on their own terms. Ludologists have proposed that the study of games should concern the analysis of the abstract and formal systems they describe. In other words, the focus of game studies should be on the rules of a game, not on the representational elements which are only incidental (Aarseth, 2001; Eskelinen, 2001; Eskelinen, 2004).”

And as usual, Greg Costikyan, who has been a designer of every known kind of game and is an unusually observant parrticipant, discusses this again in this article (excerpt):

“The Clash of Games and Stories

Almost from the inception of “games with stories,” there has been an ongoing culture clash between those who view story as perhaps important but tangential to understanding the nature of games, and those who view it as essential. In 1977, the Game Manufacturer’s Association (GAMA), a group of publishers of board wargames, tabletop RPGs, and other non-digital games aimed at an enthusiast audience, officially decided to name their industry the “adventure gaming industry” (something that later caused confusion for fans of text and graphic adventures). This decision was bitterly contested by some members of GAMA, including those companies whose main business was the publication of wargames; they did not see how Third Reich or Napoleon at Waterloo could remotely be called “adventure games.” Redmond Simonsen,
Not incidentally, the man who coined the term “game designer.”3 then art director for SPI, a major wargame publisher, proposed “simulation games” as an alternative – but this proposition was soundly defeated.

The clash between those who viewed games as formal systems and those who viewed them as storytelling media persisted with the rise of digital games; if you view the program of any Game Developers Conference (or before it, the Computer Game Developers Conference), you will find panels or presentations debating the role of stories in games. You can even identify the proponents of opposing views clearly: Chris Crawford
Paradoxically, since Crawford is now embarked on a quixotic attempt to develop what he views as true interactive fiction – which he nonetheless insists must be distinct from and quite different from “games.”4 and Dan Bunten in the “games as systems” camp, and Hal Barwood and Mark Barrett on the “games as story” side.”

And here is what Greg Costikyan has to say specifically about MMOs (is he right?) Note how the ‘real stuff’ versus the irrelevant ‘chrome’ or ‘lore’ keeps cropping up as an opposition.

MMOs

The line of descent from tabletop RPGs to massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) is clear – both have character design systems, elaborate variations in equipment, skills, and spells, and in both cases most games in these genres are built around killing monsters and taking their treasure, with a consequent advance in character power.

While tabletop RPGs have, over time, evolved more toward true role-playing and the telling of stories, MMOs are almost devoid of story. That’s because these are “never-ending games”: story ultimately depends on change, and players cannot be permitted to make real and meaningful changes to the game world.

Why is that? Imagine that an MMO comes to some sort of story climax, which could go either way, depending on the actions of the players. The live team must develop content to handle both outcomes. And on some servers, the event will go one way, and on others, the other. Suddenly, you have a fork in the game world – and your new content development problem is now compounded by the need to develop different new content for the two different worlds on an ongoing basis.

MMOs often claim to have stories: the manual might have badly written sword-and-sorcery at the front, and each new content update is supposed to “advance the story” in some fashion. But by and large, players don’t give a crap about this; they’re interested in the new content, new monsters, new areas to explore – but whatever supposed connection to an ongoing story is involved is irrelevant to the way they play. That there’s a story is a conceit of the developers; it has no impact on actual play.

Interestingly, however, MMOs intersect with story in another fashion – via quests, which I’ll discuss later.

In essence, MMOs are “story settings” – but have almost lost the connection to story in exchange for becoming good social environments as well as good games.”

But these MMO games do have stories ‘embedded‘  within them: quests, according to GC:

“Embedded Stories

One way is to embed stories in the game, rather than the game in a story. We saw this with Tales of the Arabian Nights: mini-stories told in the course of an encompassing board game. But we can see it today also in the quests of MMOs. A player encounters an NPC, is told the background of a story, is given a task to accomplish, does so, and returns for a reward (and quite often the next step in a story consisting of several quests). In the course of a character’s career in an MMO, he may play through dozens, even hundreds of these mini-stories – and at least when they are well-written and implemented, they can be entertaining and greatly increase the appeal of playing. Indeed, the excellence of its quest system is one of World of Warcraft’s greatest strengths.

Each of these mini-stories may itself be linear, but they are encountered by different players in different orders, so each player’s experience is different. Moreover, since these stories are small, their individual development cost is also small, and there’s no need to ensure that all players are exposed to all content – increasing repeat playability, something you basically don’t get with any linear game.

It’s a technique that can clearly be taken to game styles other than MMOs and board games – and an obvious area for designers to explore.

In another post, I (Paul Manning) been arguing that we do see distinctive narrative patterns emergent from what you could call the ‘core design’ which affords kinds of narratives or stories that are different for each game (these are often memorialized in machinima, another kind of narrative genre), and this is not quite the same as the putative stories (‘lore’) that Roleplayers love but no one else cares about because ‘they don’t have impact on the game’.   In Tabletop RPGs, this hard distinction between ‘game’ and ‘chrome’/'lore’ is not in evidence because the game master can make lore ‘real in its consequences.  But anything that doesn’t produce real consequences, affordances or obduracies, for players in an MMO can be relegated to the ‘lore’ category.   This binary distinction is real for a lot of players, but for some players, aesthetic things, like a cool power whose animations look stupid, for example, have real consequences.  Anyway, this opposition between kinds of stories seems like one worth attending to, it is part of the endogenous meanings produced by the game setting.  Each player is sometimes more of a ludologist (a power gamer, for example, is an indigenous ludologist), and more of a narrativist (roleplayers, for example, are more of indigenous narrativists), and usually a mix.  But the opposition here is what we call an ‘antinomy’, an antinomy is a pair of views which logically exclude each other, but for either of which you can construct an entirely valid and logical argument.  It’s not a matter of ‘who is right’, but that game play, game practice, is generated in the space of this antinomy, at any given moment, a player may be more instrumentally attending to the rules, or more aesthetically attending to the lore.  It’s something to explore.

As I was saying in class the other day, Machinima (a contraction of ‘machine’ and ‘cinema’ which as far as I know no one knows how to pronounce) as found, for example, on Youtube, represents a really useful resource for representations of online environments, and is part of the ‘media ecology’ of what Mimi Ito et al (2009) call ‘augmented play’ (and they also discuss Machinima in detail).  Basically augmented play is a form of participation (an intensive one, what Ito et al would say is characteristic of the participation mode of ‘geeking out’ as opposed to more casual or social forms of engagement (‘hanging out’, ‘messing around’).   Machinima making, which creates hybrid forms using found in-game footage (sampled using a  third party program like Fraps), is a pretty involved technical practice. In my experience, in any given guild there might be at most one dedicated frapper or machinima maker.  So, on one level, the machinima we find posted about in game life is going to seem suspect, because it is surely not representative of the ‘typical’ or ‘representative’ gamer.  But these same more casual gamers form part of the public for machinima, so, it is clear that if people are watching these things, they are representations a broader audience can relate to.  They also show the features I was talking about in class, that online games are part of complex media ecologies including other new genres like machinima, that they represent a representation of the online world which exhibits player reflexivity, allowing them to make out of game representations of their online experience that accentuates their own perspectives about what is important about in game life.  These representations are selective and idealized in all kinds of ways, but that is precisely what makes them interesting, they show what players in given games think are important, noteworthy, etc.  Certainly the very fact of machinima about in game events shows that in game life exhibits a lot of intertextuality. And so on.

Affordances. So, what are some things we should look for when we look in youtube for machinima about a specific game?   For the moment I’ll put aside the funny videos and the music videos.  And the videos of specific in game play.  All of those are interesting, but I want to go over the videos I talked about in class the other day and talk about how they reveal the different kinds of  narratives that different games afford. ‘Afford’ in this sense is a technical term, I’ll just use the Wikipedia definition:

An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform an action.

So basically an affordance in game terms is a way of talking about how aspects of a game setting, initially created by the developers based on what the designers have done (see Costikyan on why you shouldn’t conflate developers with designers) shapes the range of possibilities of player action.  These aren’t just restrictions or possibilities intended by the designers and developers, however. Players are remarkably creative in exploring emergent possibilities, using the affordances of the game in unintended ways (for example, the devs of city of Heroes intended, and still intend, for a ‘Blaster’ character to stay well clear of melee because they are squishy and deal damage from a distance, leaving melee to tanks and scrappers, and only using their melee powers as a last resort, but the players devised a new use of a blaster called a ‘blapper’, basically a fast hit and run melee scrapper who hits first, shoots later, rather than vice versa.  This is something I hope to talk about in another post).

Obduracy. There are other ways to talk about the way a setting incorporates a kind of developer’s eye view of what the players ought to do and in what order and for what goals.  We can talk about the nonhuman setting presenting obduracy (resistance) to human intention, using concepts like this we can talk about how nonhuman actors (the setting of the game) ‘have a voice’ in the human social world of the game.  The point ehre is that the ‘social’ environment isn’t just the intentional  actions of players or even the intentions of the developers, it is an assemblage of ‘voices’ of different actors, only some of which are human.  Part of what you are studying when doing an ethnography can include the non-human actors.

The ‘setting’ of a game (the world) will be in part a bunch of affordances and obduracies.  But not only that, there are a bunch of other things in the setting  that are less obviously consequential, the aesthetic experience Nardi talks about, and the whole category of ‘lore’, basically, stuff you don’t need to know because it doesn’t have any affordances or obduracies associated with it.  Obduracy is in large part the aspect of the world that offers resistance (travel distances, dangerous mobs, walls you can’t jump over, whatever), it’s how the game setting is experienceable as ‘real’, real because it resists your actions. To paraphrase John Law’s discussion of Obduracy (1987:131), if you are forced to attend to a human or non-human aspect of the setting, then that element is real within the system.  If you are not, it is not.

Scripts. We can also talk about how developers ‘inscribe’ their view of what players ought to be doing into the setting itself, producing ‘scripts’ or ‘scenarios’ that afford certain kinds of player action, and are obdurate to others.  I’ll borrow from Madeline Akrich’s (1992) classic discussion and short version:

[208] {inscription, invention, inventor, technology, vision, script, scenario} A large part of the work of innovators is that of “inscribing” this vision of (or prediction about) the world in the technical content of the new object. I will call the end product of this work a “script” or a “scenario.”

[208-209] {technology, objects, artifacts, designer, inventor, user, consumer, projected user, real user, worldview, displacement} Thus, if we are interested in technical objects and not in chimerae, we cannot be satisfied methodologically with the designer’s or user’s point of view alone. Instead we have to go back and forth continually between the designer and the user, between the designer’s projected user and the real user, between the world inscribed in the object and the world described by its displacement. (emphasis added)

Here’s the full quote on Inscription:  Designers…define actors with specific tastes, competences, motives, aspirations, political prejudices, and the rest, and they assume that morality, technology, science, and economy will evolve in particular ways.  A large part of the work of innovators is that of “inscribing” this vision (or prediction about) the world in the technical content of a new object.  I will call the end product of this work a “script” or “scenario”

The technical realization of the innovator’s beliefs about the relationships between an object and its surrounding actors is thus an attempt to predetermine the settings that users are asked to imagine for a particular piece of technology and the pre-inscriptions (notices, contracts, advice, etc.) that accompany it.  To be sure, it may be that no actors will come forward to play the roles envisaged by the designers.  Or users may define quite different roles of their own.  (Akrich 1992 (The de-scription of technical objects): 208

Okay, those are some terms I have drawn into the discussion from Science and Technology Studies (STS).  There is nothing novel about me using these terms, the term affordance is well established and you’ll notice authors using it.   My usage is pretty vulgar and I’m not claiming any orthodoxy in my usage either.

Narratives.   I’m going to borrow the term ‘narrative’ for the scripts that a game affords or presents obduracy to, and while I could borrow this from a huge raging debate between narratology and ludology in game studies (which, it strikes me, both sides are half right and therefore all wrong, although I haven’t digested it yet, but this IS a blog), I’m just going to go ahead and borrow it from game designer Greg Costikyan’s critical vocabulary article.  If you read this quote you can see that he’s talking in the same general terms as STS researchers, it wouldn’t be hard to translate his view into their terms.

The point here, however, is that a small change in structure breeds a big change in player behavior.

Literary criticism often speaks of the “structure” of a novel, but storystructure is very different from game structure. The literary concept of structure has to do with viewpoint; the treatment of time (whether the story is told in a single, forward-moving narrative, or as fl ashbacks, or from viewpoints wandering in time); and the way in which the story builds and releases tension. The structure of the story, however, creates a single, unchanging narrative that the reader cannot alter. Narrative structure is one dimensional, because you can follow only a single path through a story. Game structure has to do with the means by which a game shapes player behavior. But a game shapes player behavior; it does not determine it. Indeed, a good game provides considerable freedom for the player to experiment with alternate strategies and approaches; a game structure is multi-dimensional, because it allows players to take many possible paths through the “game space.”

It is important, however, to understand how and why game structures do shape player behavior; indeed, understanding this is fundamental to mastering the craft of game design. You cannot simply throw together a bunch of different game elements, and expect them to cohere; you must consciously set out to decide what kind of experiences you want to impart to your players, and create systems that enable those experiences.

Game Narrative and Machinima Narrative.

But we can use ‘narrative’ as a term for the kinds of scripts that a game encourages either because that’s the way the devs designed it or because the players found a way to make it work.   But machinima videos are also narrative representations of this kind of ‘script’ narrative.  So if we compare the kinds of narratives found in different machinima from different games, we can get a sense of what kinds of endogenous meanings (Costikyan’s phrase) and narratives there are there, the out of game machinima narratives can show us the in-game scripted narratives that have been ‘picked up’.

City of Heroes: the Hero narrative

The game City of Heroes (COH), for example, doesn’t really allow players to interact with or change the persistent setting very much: Paragon city will have more or less the same mobs and bosses respawning, the same story arcs, for each new player whether you play it or not.   The narrative of this game is primarily one of individual character advancement along a series of different linked trajectories.  One of these is simply levelling your character and slotting new enhancements to perfect your powers, as well as picking up some other powers along the way.  Another of these is progression through story arcs, as well as badge collecting and other things like that.  But when all is said and done any given 27^th level katana/regen scrapper is going to be pretty much like any other.   But still, the fact that the main narrative of the game is levelling and otherwise developing a character is an important fact about the game.

The game does, however, allow an immense amount of aesthetic differentiation between characters in the costume area, compared to any other game I know.  These are superheroes and they need their costumes.  Also, it allows players to create individual origin stories, which we know all superheroes need, which strictly speaking are just ‘private’ lore, but both the name, the costume and the origin story (bio) can be given public appreciation from people passing by but also in in-game events like costume contests, which are a kind of social event afforded by the costume system.  And machinima are made of these in turn:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N17s79yS-DE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReRqvTB1toI&feature=related

So the costumes and bios are ‘real’ in that sense.   A lot of players also choose powers based on their costume value, and since powers come with customizable costume options, deciding where to draw the line here between ‘real’ power and ‘aesthetic’ frill is hard to draw.

But people do identify with certain ‘toons’ or characters over others.  People talk about this identification as being a reason why they decided to ‘take the toon to 50’, so some characters start out as ‘alts’ and become ‘mains’ because of this aspect: ‘This toon started out as a joke toon and but then I decided to take him/her to fifty because I liked him/her so much’.  So this stuff is consequential and real because anything that has real consequences is real by virtue of those consequences. Making a machinima of a COH character grinding their way to level 50 would be super long and super boring, but making a machinima of your favourite hero and narrating their backstory, along with an exhibition of their powers, starts making a lot of sense: it’s a tribute to a toon you have played a lot and come to love, you didn’t just make the toon to make the machinima, after all.   So one kind of machinima video we get in this case is one like that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTSQ8Q7X8Co&p=72A691342FE98470&playnext=1&index=11

People will sometimes display all their heroes one after the other:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riksHElcEVg&feature=related

Eve Online: Historical Narrative

The game Eve Online is rather different.  Players do advance their characters in skill and stats in various ways, but there is no real ‘avatar’ of the character: the character is experienced in motion only through the largely disposable ships that the player pilots.  Players don’t really seem to identify with their character emotionally, the character is far more instrumental, perhaps.  But players are members of corporations and alliances which can end up controlling real persistent resources, outposts, and have sovereignty over real sections of space.   PVP wars between these corporations and alliances is for real stakes, real territory exchanges hands, real skulduggery happens with real consequences.

One reason I decided to play Eve is when I read this article about an actual in game case of infiltration and assassination for hire.  This was a game I definitely had to try.   As I became casually involved in an alliance (Hydra), I became aware too that the alliances of player owned space were generating a persistent ‘real’ history as an aggregate result of player actions.  Certain alliances and corporations (like Band of Brothers or BoB) were aggressively taking over huge swatches of this space, while other alliances, like Goonswarm, were experimenting with new tactics to confront these existing large empires.  Note that all alliances in Eve wiki have a ‘history’ section, and that simple fact is what is important in what I say here.  Nothing I say here is news to Eve players, and I’ve undoubtedly made a lot of errors.

One element of the innovative Goonswarm tactics was their use of huge numbers of newbies to defeat the elite pvpers of alliances like BoB, partly by ignoring the kill:death ratio fetishized by elite gamers but absolute nonsense from a tactical perspective (a general who is afraid of losses, or has troops afraid of losses, isn’t going to win a lot of battles) .  From their wiki page:

GoonSwarm was (in)famous for utilizing “zerg-like” tactics against their enemies with smaller ships such as T1 cruisers and frigates, willingly sacrificing a dozen or more small cheap ships to destroy a single Heavy Assault Cruiser or T2 fitted Battleship. This is partially due to the fact that they have a constant influx of new, inexperienced players without the skills or resources to buy and fit Tech 2 ship or modules, but also due to their rejection of ‘kill:death ratio’ statistics as a worthwhile marker of alliance strength. GoonSwarm members commonly argue that whilst tracking numbers of ships killed and lost is useful for forum posturing and self-congratulation, it has little bearing on 0.0 warfare where what matters more is the ability to take and control territory, harass hostile industrial and economic operations, and to break the morale of enemy pilots. This was most graphically demonstrated during the war against Lotka Volterra in early 2007, where despite maintaining a very positive kill:death ratio Lotka Volterra lost every one of their stations over a period of seven weeks, disbanding shortly afterward. However, whilst Goonswarm still encourage their newbie playerbase to fly very cheap and easily replaceable frigates, they have a strong force of high-SP pilots able to deploy T2-fit battleships, carriers and dreads for fleet operations if required.

But where to get all these cannon-fodder newbs, the ‘little bees’ that make up the ‘swarm’?   Here Goonswarm pioneered a metagame approach of deploying the out of game media ecology to influence the in game one.  In short, they recruited from their own non-Eve forum:

Two member corporations within Goonswarm, Goonfleet and The Greater Goon (Now no longer part of the alliance), recruited the majority of their members from the SomethingAwful.com forums, where they hold regular ‘newbie drives’ where they encourage non-players to try out EVE Online and join their corporation – members of the Something Awful forums are referred to as “goons” even outside of EVE, and ‘Goonsquad’ organisations exist in other MMORPGs such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, although for the most part these guilds are made up of different players than those in Goonswarm. Goonfleet and The Greater Goon have no minimum skill point requirements, although other member corporations within the alliance have varying criteria for accepting or rejecting applicants.

But interestingly, for me, they also used machinima videos propagated on Youtube and God Knows Where Else as a propaganda arm and also a recruitment device.  Obviously the aesthetics and the way these videos use other media (music) is worthy of comment too and tells you quite a bit about the game and its players, compare the music in these to the Ryzom videos below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F4Rx3hkWys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5puGFPq3Sc

Even though I was a casual gamer rarely actually flying alliance patrols or alliance gate camps, I became fascinated by the immense amount of history that was being generated, there were real wars that became part of the historical narrative (e.g. Great Northern War) and when Goonswarm finally took BoB down by an act of infiltration and treachery similar to the original assassination mentioned above, I started realizing that these games were generating a historical narrative that was real ‘news’, though it was reported ‘in character’ alongside the ‘lore’ news about stuff supposedly happening in empire space that had no actual consequences that I could detect.  So one could read a story about it like a newspaper story, something like this

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/89219-More-EVE-Online-Shenanigans-GoonSwarm-Ganks-Band-Of-Brothers

But because of the sense of ‘real history’, ‘real news’ and the existing tendencies of goonswarm to use machinima as a propaganda/recruitment device, you could find propaganda videos that narrate their historical victory over BoB as a whole, alongside videos of individual fleet actions and Titan kills.

So with Goonswarm we have a couple of different uses of machinima, almost all of it related to proganda or persuasion, but also embodying a sense of a real historical narrative.

Ryzom: Travel Narratives and Treks

Lastly, a world I am particularly fond of, Ryzom, which takes place on the strange alien world of Atys.  I’l have a lot more to say about this world, but even though other games, like WoW or COH, have comparably immersive worlds in aesthetic terms, for Ryzom players the ‘exploration’ or ‘travel’ narrative seems like the one that is most compelling, over the character narrative or the historical narrative (though these exist and are represented in machinima production).  The world of Atys, with its changing seasons, weather (all with real consequences, foragers and hunters know where to find their dig spots and their prey based on weather and seasonal changes), the varied animals each with their different habits and mutual predator-prey relations (herbivores, predators, social and antisocial animals, all with their different characteristics embedded in different AIs, the swift Mektoub herbivores coexisting with predators that cannot outrun them, the slow Yelks and Armas constantly being eaten…).  All of this adds up to what is to my mind an unparalleled experience of what T.L. Taylor calls ‘worldness’.

On Atys, there is no way to contract the difference between points until you have actually walked the distance between those points physically, each player will have to become familiar with the landscape, both as obduracy (distance and danger) and aesthetically,  unlike COH, where there are all kinds of ways of teleporting or rapid movement between points without experiencing the intervening landscape both in terms of its obduracy and its aesthetic beauty.  As a result, players will have to ‘trek’ at least once to each area on foot to get the teleport tokens which allow swift return, and will frequently engage in further ‘treks’ across the same landscapes to help newbies acquire these tokens and also to move player owned mounts and packers (which can never teleport) to hunting and digging spots.   Travelling across the landscape, ‘trekking’, is a major solo and communal activity that defines the experience of the worldness of atys, as both an activity involving different aspects of obduracy (distance, obstacles and danger) and also as an aesthetic experience of various ‘natural’ landscapes and ecosystems replete with their ever changing seasonal populations of animals.

So, for Ryzom, one major way this key narrative type, the travel narrative of a wandering homin, or ‘trek’ is represented is in machinimas that give a ‘virtual trek’ through the landscapes of Atys (as in these ‘wanderer’ and ‘wayfarer’ machinimas made by EmaArtan:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYOw3BiCoSU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2dULqFwWpo&feature=related

or this one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8XgqwDvsf8

or commemorate actual treks taken by large groups.

But because Atys disappeared when the game servers closed down for a time a couple of years ago (Atys has since reappeared), these machinima also afforded a permanent diaspora of Atysian homins a way of re-experiencing their lost world, the lost landscapes and animals.  Some of these machinima were created precisely in this period precisely with this melancholy sense of loss of worldness (‘Remember Atys in all its Glory!).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbFJK68UjrA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWhfSiTlDdU&feature=related

Lastly, and this is something I hope to talk about separately, and have done so in my published essay (Can the Avatar Speak? Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2009, there is an earlier longer and more detailed version of it on my weblog ‘Eat Electric Death!’), about a separate set of narratives about the lost world of Atys, now embedded within an emancipator framework, the Free Ryzom Campaign, which sought to both return the experienceable landscapes of Atys to the players, as well as free the ‘hidden narrative’ of  ‘code’ of Atys into an open source system (which has now happened, which is an MMO first, but here is the original archived project).  In this campaign, machinima was used as a video presentation that seamlessly wove together the visible narrative,  ‘experienceable’ world of atys and the ‘hidden narrative’ of the developers and code (I borrow the opposition from Azuma’s discussion of Otaku aesthetics, see Manning 2009 Can the Avatar Speak? where I make the connection explicitly) into a single hybrid, with a metagame narrative of loss and revival comparable to those above.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_naflL_xzVo

So that is three ways that the ‘affordances’ of the games in question produce scripts or narratives that are in turn narrated in machinima of different kinds that seem to respond to, and illuminate, these different ‘settings’ ethnographically.   I think I have only barely scratched the surface here, of even the machinima narratives of these games, but this strikes me as a productive avenue of approach.  Like everything else on this site, develop it as you will, as long as you attribute whatever you take from this to Overlord at this site (the usual CC license is below explaining the fine print).

I haven’t put proper citations in here, and I’m not sure if I used Youtube linkages correctly (if not, I’ll come back and change that) but obviously I am indebted to the work of the ethnographers we are reading, Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce and Artemesia and T.L. Taylor. As well as the really interesting work done on the place of machinima within new media ecologies by Mimi Ito and the people in that group.  I’m also indebted to my friend and colleague Zaza Shatirishvili for helping me make ‘narrative’ an integral part of how I look at anything, although I’m not much of a narratologist.  Oh, and naturally, especially the homins of Ryzom and the developers.

Some notes on Machinima and Narrative as Ethnographic Resources for Online Ethnography by Paul Manning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada License.