While reading the Rickert and Salvo piece, and thinking on this concept of the contribution of the prosumer, I kept thinking: what a perfect thing to read when also focused on games, but especially for me, since I’ve been thinking a lot about what players bring to the table and add and how they create within worlds. But in particular, this piece made me think of the zombie game Left 4 Dead’s AI director: the system observes player interaction with the world and alters the world to create the experience, changing enemy spawns, item locations, and even closing/changing pathways in the sequel. But there’s a second director that isn’t spoken of as much, that only controls music. The regular AI director can insert cues of nuance, tone, and tension – sound effects and such – as well as music, and a second director controls music on a player scale (personal events, etc.). It’s a very complex system, and within that, there are the jukeboxes.

The jukeboxes scattered throughout the game in Left 4 Dead 2 can be trigged by players and will play different songs, and those songs may create events of their own. For instance, the chorus of a particular song triggers a horde event, in which the undead come pouring en masse onto the screen (though most of them just play, and may trigger hordes with nothing but the sound). You don’t have to trigger the jukeboxes, and you can’t predict what song will play when you do, but it’s interesting to think about alongside this article, because the game controls the songs, but the player controls the play, and the game then responds based on player interaction – it’s all feedback and distortion and incorporation, all the time. That’s what creates the experience.

I’d forgotten about CB radio, honestly; it’s not something I have much occasion to think about, unless it comes up in a movie. But while reading Levy’s article, I was suddenly reminded of hearing about the very uses he was talking about, back when I was a kid, but I was also reminded of growing up during those nascent stages of the contemporary Internet and how incredibly exciting it was to make a website. Join a chatroom. Find a forum. That desire to connect with others was so strong that it’s always surprised me that people still tend to fall back on the idea that digital connections aren’t real. That even though meeting people online for dates has become wildly common, there remains some lingering cultural pushback around the phenomenon. But then it occurred to me that it’s only been twenty years or so, forty since those days of the CB wilds, and as quickly as technology changes now, attitudes aren’t always quite as fast. Still, it’s fascinating to think about that desire for connection laid against all the ways we also try to deny (or decry) it.

I was also much interested in his short history of educational podcasts here. I was a big listener of iTunes U casts for a while, particularly creative writing lectures, because they expanded access to things like writers’ retreats and conferences that I’d never be able to afford. Sure, they lack the human component, but to have the recorded lectures there, available while I did dishes or cut the grass or whatever, was such a revelation to me before I came to grad school.

Small groups (see below) may want to watch these videos about protests in World of Warcraft (sorry, Patrick), and/or check out an explanatory piece, linked here: Gameplay protests in WoW

WoW players protest the ban of Swifty

• perspective one
• perspective two

Questions to consider in groups:

1. Kishonna Gray paints a fascinating picture of women breaking the rules of a system in order to resist a system that offers them no protection — but that rule-breaking often constituted griefing, sometimes to game-breaking levels. The title of Gray’s piece challenges readers to determine where the lines may be drawn between resistance and disruption. Are players who ignore/mute others to preserve a game experience in a shared space also demonstrating resistance, in the sense that it goes against a system that includes voice chat? Are players who continually talk, sing, or who are otherwise vocally disruptive resisting in a sense (passively or actively?)? (Obviously, we might want to discuss different motivations in these instances!). Are there student behaviors in the classroom we may be able to similarly classify?
2. Why do the kinds of protests Gray identifies, along with those in the WoW videos, consistently fail? Are they failing, or is empowerment of the protestors a victory in itself? Is there a way to effectively protest inside a game’s system in a way that brings about change?
3. An example of a protest that worked — but was it a protest? In Ultima Online, a player named Chrae forced a change in the game’s design when he crashed the server with an army of slimes. Slimes were low level enemies that split when struck, and Chrae trapped several slimes in a house, used purple potions (which functioned sort of like grenades), hit all the slimes until his computer was on the brink of collapse, and then opened the door to his house. Slimes poured out, slaughtered everyone, and crashed the server. The next day, he identified himself and said he’d do it again if he didn’t get a ransom. No one took it seriously, so he went forward, crashing the server again. On the third day, slimes were change via patch: they no longer split when hit. Was this trolling/griefing, or a (successful) act of resistance? Here is what is reportedly Chrae’s account of the event (old; broken images).
4. While I was not able to verify the removal of posts from Xbox Live about racism and harassment, I went through several forums, and the only place I saw any references were in the ban/suspension forums (under some reasons for action). How does systemic blockage of “unsavory” topics on official forums, as Gray’s interviewees describe it, impact communication and community? (Side question, related to linguistic profiling: on unofficial forums, such as reddit, women have frequently asked about voice-masking technology. What impact might mass/compulsory implementation of such tech have on online gaming systems, identity, and more?)
5. REAL question: What are the implications of games designed for particular genders? What might more inclusive environments for women offer the gaming communities instead? What are the implications of identity exploration in the current game climate, particularly the MMO climate, as you understand it/have experienced it?

1. This was the original, incorrect question: Paul Taylor (wrong Taylor!) writes that all software must exist with a theoretical focus and inside a theoretical framework. How does that apply to some of the games we’ve played together this semester? Does “game” constitute its own framework, or do games like Submerged and Brothers exist within another frame? What about Super Mario Maker? Zork? How can we apply Taylor’s thoughts on flexibility, simplicity, etc. to using games in the classroom, particularly when students are faced with unfamiliar interfaces?

Groups and questions:

• Dr. Sam/Sherri/John 3, 4, 5
• Tony/Sam/Amelia/Jen 2, 3, 5
• Bianca/Ashley/Patrick 1, 2, 4

MMO Ethnography sounds fantastic. I love reading interviews with gamers about how and why they do certain things, and the choices they make, and the idea of combining that with a study on MMO players takes me back to my long-ago days of MMOing when I would ask people endless questions and read all the forums and study everything. The practices that develop are quite fascinating. I now want to look up similar studies and see who else has worked in this sphere. There’s a lot to unpack. Fascinating here that’s it’s done as classes with new players. I wonder about other ways in.

As for the Leonard, I’m grateful to have such a long list of games here, Sam! I feel like he made my life easier for the Men of Color video. Seriously, though, the end is chilling. Quoting Stormfront – what a way to demonstrate the impact of games. Still, I very much enjoy his different reasonings for studying games and their position in culture and what all that can reveal.

After what feels like ages, I was finally able to identify my discomfort with parts of this book as I read Larry Beason’s “Grammar Interventions in Gaming Forums”: it comes down to a matter of ethos, I think, or can at least partly be categorized in that way. I was excited to read this chapter, having been an active member of dozens of communities over the past few decades, both as editor/writer/moderator and forum user, and the setup for the chapter made me think I might see more comparison between the way errors are perceived in writing in the classroom and in online forums (a connection that is made here, but thinly). But I was immediately distracted by some things, such as the reference to the comment sections of Joystiq and other sites as forums (they are not), and comments such as the rarity of locking threads (where? Some forums have heavy mod hands and there are locked threads, multiple, daily). These loose generalizations seem to have been made for an academic audience, one who may not be as familiar with the intricacies of gaming forums, but there doesn’t seem to be enough explanation here for an audience completely unfamiliar, and there’s too much generalization and in fact incorrect information for anyone who is familiar. I also felt like there was little difference between what he considered a “moderate” intervention (which was insulting but not directly so) and a more severe intervention (which was more directly insulting), and that seemed to derail the spectrum of his argument for me, as there was no real range presented (as I read it). This could also be due to the fact that I have seen and even participated in hundreds of these interactions over the years.  In the end, I found myself questioning then nearly everything Beason said; I could not concentrate on his conclusions or opinions because I did not find him particularly credible. How well did he know forums? Gaming communities? Did he only use the examples listed? Because Gamespot’s forums are notoriously terrible examples of community, which would really skew results, I fear.

I wonder now, thinking back over this book, if I’ve felt that way about many of the chapters, if they exist in some gray space that isn’t quite deep enough to really talk about gaming, and isn’t quite presentation of solid scholarship. It feels odd for me to critique something in the latter sense, as I am so early in my career, but when compared to many of the other pieces I’ve read even in this class, not to mention others, this seems very thin in places, with research that often doesn’t cut broadly or deeply. But could it be that I’m in that place “gamers” so often occupy, where slight errors or misrepresentations or disagreements are used to upend an entire argument that is otherwise well-researched? Can I just not get past Beason’s reference to a comment section as a forum? Was it indeed a forum in which every article served as the first post? As a former contributor and editor for Joystiq, I can say that in my time there, we never referred to them as such (though there was discussion at one point of developing forums). But does my own background too heavily influence the way I read these pieces?

Like Patrick, I’m afraid I may have a litany of negativity here…. I’m also very frustrated with so many people returning to Bogost. Why? Is he literally just the first person they turn up when they start doing research? Where’s the solid reason to rely on Bogost for anything?

Mark Mullen’s lamentation of a master critic (to rely on Klosterman! really!) really got this off to a cracking poor start. Sure, if you’re looking at mainstream gaming media, there are fewer name reviewers… but only at the very limited time Mullen was surveying. Yahtzee Croshaw was the central name only for a span of a few years; before then, there were some Name Reviewers at IGN (before they scattered to the winds), and find me a mainstream “gamer” who doesn’t know Jeff Gerstmann and I’ll eat the hat of your choosing. But the rise of YouTube and video reviews birthed a lot of personalities who exist solely on their names, and with the spread of Let’s Plays, we are getting “feelings” about the games, even if they’re performative and sometimes ridiculous.

But the consumerist breakdowns is what many gamers want. Those who don’t, or who want different games, go to people like Brendan Keogh, Cara Ellison, Leigh Alexander — also big names in different spheres of gamers. So I have a hard time accepting what Mullen is saying here because I feel his early arguments fall apart before they even begin. There are so many models for what he wants (and better models than Klosterman, egads).

As for Johnson and Colby, I get their early anecdote — I know games studies can feel overwhelming to people not involved in them. I’ve talked to folks about it! But that’s also because games themselves are overwhelming and I think it’s ludicrous to ignore a media and cultural powerhouse in the classroom. Otherwise, this feels like an extended argument with someone who just wants to preserve the teaching of writing for writing’s sake, as though the field (and writing itself!) isn’t constantly changing. And once they start talking about games and teachers making assumptions? The writing felt so empty, as though “games” could be replaced with, I don’t know, goats, and the chapter would be the same. Meh.

Miller’s Zelda piece was fascinating, but Zelda also feels interchangeable here, chosen because the author felt like choosing Zelda over another fantasy experience. I’m not sure it actually does the job it sets out to do. The premise, absence “yay, Zelda!” is rather thin.

The chapter on WoW as class-focus was by far the most interesting to me here, not least because we discussed that earlier in this semester with Neverwinter as a possibility and it was fascinating to see it play out, but I am disheartened by the assumptions made in designing the class in regard to female students. The study, limited as it is, is very useful, but what are we going to do about these things, as teachers? The end of this chapter seems to lead to more assumptions, rather than solutions, with the idea of who has what gaming literacies and that women’s and men’s will always be different.

See here.

Several things immediately excited me about this text: the definition of game introduced up front, and the discussion of Facebook as a learning tool, and these ideas of avatars and representation. These are all things I’m into lately, and to see them all in a single chapter was really exciting.

I wanted to speak to Alberti’s notions of Facebook as learning tool just on the face, because I talk about this kind of thing a lot with my students from semester to semester, particularly in addressing the common idea that “people don’t read these days,” which of course means they don’t write. We’re reading and writing all the time, and even if it’s Yik Yak or text messages or reddit or whatever, we’re still participating in these discourse communities, and they all require some construction of identity as well as approach to a rhetorical situation. What I hadn’t thought about, though, was social media as play, and I’m fascinated by the way Alberti fits that in here. While I don’t think I’d use Facebook, I have been thinking more and more about addressing social media through exercises in the 106 classroom (I’ve done it in 420), and this really cements my desire to do so.

Bianca, I was thinking about that same article, because as with so many moments of Ian Bogost and his beard, I find myself nodding in agreement until a moment when I’m suddenly not. It always happens the same way, and I’m not sure why. I love how he talks about visualizing the simulating in that Atlantic article when talking about Sim City; we are seeing exactly what’s happening, but it’s rendered in a different visual mode, not only in terms of the computing simulation, but all the weird baggage that comes with it, that Bogost tags as uniquely American. But then he begins to veer off, into problems with games — that I agree with; games are wonderful, games are terrible — and comes to the conclusion that games are at their best when there are only systems and not characters. Too many issues, he says. Makes games like books. Give us just the systems. Break away from identity.

Except there’s plenty of research that shows we crave story. We want narrative and understanding, yes, even of those systems — and those systems include people. People who aren’t always predictable. Who don’t follow rules, who are often more interesting when they don’t. Why remove character from all games, Bogost? What do we lose as people when we think only in if-then statements?

As I was reading Gee this week, I kept thinking about building worlds. I appreciated the care with which he framed the Pikmin example in particular — and the paths he took in explaining everything necessary to come back to it — as I am still very new to learning about how to view games as learning mechanisms and I appreciate these very clear breakdowns. It’s sometimes hard for me to see beyond 1:1 ratios, because that’s how I learn a lot of things (math, for example: I have a very hard time deviating from examples): through repetition and mimicry, so instead seeing how something can be practiced and modeled in one world (and then leaping to how it could be translated in another) is helping me see past my own inherent limitations. But I have been replaying some State of Decay lately, and thinking about the Sims and Civ, all games in which we build in various ways. In SoD, we construct survival; in the Sims, homes, neighborhoods, and more; in Civ, whole populations. In each case, different knowledge is necessary for the most basic methods of play, but then they branch based on player-created scenarios. We’re not just building the worlds, but building approaches to them within those worlds. I don’t like to play the Sims, so I only build for purity of design; on the occasions when I do decided to “play” for a while, my houses are much different, designed to allow my Sims to meet their needs efficiently, but the houses I prefer to build are elaborate and beautiful, and I don’t care if it takes my Sim three hours of gametime just to get outside. I’ve set different conditions that required reading the situations differently. Just as Gee moves through contextual definitions of words, the game context changes for me as I play in various ways.

I’m very fascinated by all the ways in which we create our experiences, from those intended (as above) to those that are not particularly essential (assigning personal narrative importance to arbitrary things in order to beef up a lacking story, for instance), and I’m often frustrated with games that impose a lot of limitations because there’s so little of that flexibility. But I’m getting off track; what I wanted to say was that I appreciate that Gee spends so much time thinking about all these different ways we operate in the game space, and what it can mean for us.

p.s. man, does Gee have a knack for picking some occasionally eyebrow-raising examples.