Further to our discussion on gendered environments, here is a link to a piece of machinima made for the sole purpose it seems to pay tribute to the sublime nature of the environments in EVE. I have to admit, they do appeal to me. Although I am a guy so that’s probably not very surprising.

I found this site early on in the semester, and I feel it should be shared.

It is regularly updated, and includes descriptions, screen shots, reviews, videos, etc, etc, on most games they have listed. Its pretty much guaranteed that they have a game that will appeal to everyone.

Not only that, but the site links you to articles and news, events, and even beta key give-aways. It really has everything you need to get into gaming. There is even a forum.

I personally had thought that MMO genres were rather limited. Mostly Sci-fi/Fantasy, and that I might prefer a game that was zombie-apocalypse based (The walking dead, anyone?) and I never thought I’d find one. Amazingly, through this site, I found 3! So really, it seems you can find any kind of MMO here.

I was shown this on youtube the other day, it seems to fit with machinima and it’s slightly festive.  It made all of us laugh, so hope everyone enjoys it.

Tate – there is no link on this post, can you post the link in the comments please?

It’s been a week since I have last updated and it’s time for me to dump some random chat logs!

Chat Log #1:  Chatting with other Noobs

I give out free shrimps to my interviewees

Chat Log #2 Talking about real life fishing while fishing in Runescape

Chat Log# 3 : SOme Rnadom Dudes saying that they love each other after a trade

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtbNCTYcWAU&feature=relate

I saw this clip on Youtube and I think this video is kind of fake but this is actually a good example of how a Noob should look like. People always call me a noob in Runescape , especially when I trying to interview other players….they call me a noob mainly because I ask too much questions and I blocked their views or their fishing / mining spot….The word “Noob” is really hard to define and it is hard to prevent someone from calling me a Noob…so tell me guys how do you define the word Noob?

Monster Hunter Frontier is an online MMORPG on the PC  with a great amount of new weapons, quests, armor, and monsters. The purpose of the game is to gang up (MAX 4 Players in one gang) and fight against giant monsters, kill them, peel their skins, take their parts and craft own armors and weapons.

Monster in this game is definitely the  boss, you can find may kinds of creatures.  There are 10 categorizes of creatures appear in this game, you will find creatures from Herbivore to Hugh Dragon.

Quests is available in the quests board in the village (only one village in game).  There are approximately 100 – 150 quests in total, the difficulty of the quests can be identified by Hunter star, the more hunter star the quests required, the harder and tougher the monster in the quests.

Weapons and Armors customization is critical, players can upgrade  weapons from bottom to top or craft deadly weapons with rare raw materials. Players can get raw materials from all the monster, the harder the monsters, the better the loots.

Usually 1 full set of armor (Head – Body – Arms – Legs) required about 10 piece of raw materials from the monster while each loot only give player 2 -3 raw materials. It is because the dragon in this game is extremely  tough to kill and  many players were gang up to fight big monsters several times to get suitable loots.

Weapons selection, creation and customization is one of the popular features in game, the are 13 types of weapons available, each has its advantages and disadvantage and are required to collect raw materials from dragon to craft.  Players can choose from sword and shield, hammer, lance, arrow, crossbow, cannon………..etc.

This game is tough, the only way a players can learn is from trial and error in their huntings. Monster Hunter is designed to be played with other people. Finding friends to play the game with offsets the intimidating difficulty level and gives you the opportunity to swap items.  Large numbers of quests, weapons and armors customization made the game incredibly durable which made this game a best seller in Asia.

“If you love MMO’s you’re going to want to check out Guild Wars 2, if you hate MMO’s you’re going to want to check out Guild Wars 2”

The above statement is the motto of Arenanet, the developers of the anticipated sequel to the popular MMORPG, Guild Wars. Set to release in 2011, Arenanet has made a series of promises said to revolutionize the way MMO’s are played. Most notably, this game is said to mark the end of the infamous “Grind”.

In order to do this, the developers have made some significant changes to generic template with which most MMO’s have been created. A brief description of these changes can be seen in the following Manifesto Trailer the company has released.

For me, the only thing that turned me off of the MMO I am playing is the grind. If Arenanet delivers on these promises, I may consider purchasing a new computer simply to play this game.

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.